Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend

Originally issued as three separate video cassettes by JAVN, a distributor of pornographic films operating under the umbrella of Bob Guccione's Penthouse brand, director Hideki Takayama's Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend gained notice internationally as a re-edited theatrical presentation. This pruning, in which much of the more overtly gynaecological material was either aggressively reframed or excised entirely, was something of an attempt to tidy up this sexually violent, disreputable animation into something, in this case a feature, that could be sold around the world. Picked up and released by Manga Video in the UK, after the BBFC had approved their cut, Urotsukidoji broadly fits an acquisition brief (presumably) put in place by the crossover success of Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira with readers of comic anthologies like Deadline, Crisis, or Judge Dredd The Megazine - this is a teen-focused story in which impuissant bodies deform and distend against an apocalyptic backdrop. 

Although furnished with an 18 certificate in Britain (and an NC-17 in the United States), Urotsukidoji has clearly been designed to cater to a much more adolescent perspective than the live action films it was initially released alongside in Japan. Whereas The Devil in Miss Jones or Behind the Green Door at least allude to an idea of female empowerment, if for no other reason than either film is sunk without their subjects Georgina Spelvin and Marilyn Chambers, Urotsukidoji largely reduces its female cast to malleable, and frequently pulverised meat. Really, the only point of connection with Akemi, the weeping female lead, is an acknowledgment that even consensual sex requires a physical vulnerability that can be taken advantage of in the moment. That beloved partners can, quite literally here, transform into something repellent without warning. Instead of an adventurous woman then, attention largely rests with teenage boy Nagumo, an onanistic insert for socially awkward virgins everywhere who, somehow, houses the spirit of a reality-bending super God. 

For a significant portion of the film's running time the realm-crushing power plays that encroach from the metaphysical periphery are illustrated through situations familiar to an arrested audience: bullying, familial abuse, sexual inadequacy, and failing attempts to action personal fantasy. The execution of these themes is, naturally, catastrophically exaggerated. Bodies, usually female, are battered and torn apart by the demonic energies that these young men submit themselves to. In Urotsukidoji the assumption of manhood transforms boys into unfeeling, muscled brutes happy to exert their newfound power over weaker bodies. The film's overt concession to splatter violence plays especially nasty in a piece designed purely as visual stimulation then. As with most other pornography, there is no attempt to depict a realistic interpersonal framework; set-pieces exist within a nightmarishly permissive society in which adults, here most vividly represented by a monstrous, rapist teacher, are basically absent. Therefore (even before Nagumo mutates into a demon that can fell skyscrapers with its explosive ejaculate) dozens of people are dismembered without even notional alarm or repercussion. Rather than work against the whole, this pitiless approach to human suffering ends up foreshadowing the film's conclusion - a particularly despairing, and spectacularly animated, denouement in which a long-heralded messiah fails to deliver paradise, instead reveling in city warping destruction.