Very loosely based on the "Booby Trap" chapter from Masamune Shirow's Black Magic series, the mangaka's debut work in the comics field, Black Magic M-66 dispenses with the self-published story's interest in Venusian political intrigue, preferring instead to transplant an interlude regarding doll-faced robots into a more familiar, near future setting. As well, and unlike other concurrently produced adaptations of Shirow's work, Black Magic has the writer-illustrator's fingerprints all over it. He wrote, storyboarded (these delightful scribbles later released in their own right by Shirow's Japanese publisher, Seishinsha), and co-directed the OVA with Hiroyuki Kitabuko, ensuring that this video cassette release captures a career at a specific moment - when his interests where attractively drafted women in tense cyberpunk environments; long before pornographic art books with overly expressive names like Greaseberries became the totality of his output.
Although Shirow's original work prefigures the release of James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd's The Terminator by a year, the malfunctioning and much more easily defeated androids of his amateur work didn't have any specific targets programmed into their circuit brains, instead driven by a petty vindictiveness planted via psychic suggestion. For this breathless, rental tape feature the M-66 cyborgs are redesigned as armoured marionettes, capable of moving their human-like bodies in impossibly fluid ways, and tasked with eliminating a helpless damsel who is introduced in her underwear. Essentially one long chase sequence, with an investigative reporter named Sybel as the protector character, Black Magic represents something of an ideal in OVA releases: it lifts liberally from big screen sources - Aliens, Blade Runner and First Blood are all in the mix - but this material is explored in ways that would be almost impossible for live action filmmaking of that period to portray. So not only do implacable cyborgs toss around soldiers (and their armoured transport) with wild abandon but futuristic buildings contort and collapse around our hapless heroines, leaving them dangling on scaffolding above a neon-lit abyss while a glitching Machinenmensch closes in.
