| The Wicked City (1992): Don't bother trying to follow the plot. Seriously, you'll just hurt your brain. If you regard this movie as a series of wonderfully insane set-pieces, you'll have a much easier time of it. I mean sure, you could try to pay attention to what the characters are saying while they transform into liquids, levitate and hurl airplanes at each other, but you'll just wind up baffled and punchy.
This Hong Kong-produced oddity is a live action adaptation of a Japanese manga, previously filmed as an animated feature in 1987 (released in North America in the early ’90s and entitled simply Wicked City). Fans of the anime version are doubtlessly wondering how the heck such a sex-and-violence drenched spectacle could possibly be translated into a non-animated film. Well, the results are much different from the original – head-throbbingly strange, but curiously enjoyable.
The premise is that "Reptoids," a race of shape-changing monsters from another dimension, have been living secretly, but more or less peacefully, among us for many years. Most of these beasts bear no malice to humanity, but there are always a few bad apples who ruin it for everybody. These "radicals" prey on unsuspecting humans, and see the then-upcoming 1997 restitution of Hong Kong to mainland China as an opportunity to invade and destroy the human race. (Why? Beats me.)
To combat this menace, humanity has a secret organization known as the Anti-Reptoid Bureau, filled with undercover agents standing by to arrest or destroy these miscreants. The bureau identifies a Japanese billionaire as being a possible non-human (the fact that he's 150 years old was their first clue) and closes in for the kill. (Actually, the tycoon is a good guy, but try telling that to the hotheads at the bureau.) Meanwhile, a strength-enhancing but deadly narcotic known as "Happiness" is spreading havoc throughout the human and reptoid communities.
There, that's enough of the plot out of the way. Now I'll attempt to describe a few of the film's manic set-pieces, which throb with squishy psychosis and are the real reason to watch:
·In the opening scene, a night of casual sex is interrupted when the woman transforms into a long-limbed arachnid.
· Two bureau agents get trapped in their car by a giant blob. One of them blows up an adjacent vehicle by shooting its gas tank, and the flames drive the reptoid away. The agents race out of the parkade in their burning car, stopping near a fireplug (gee, that’s handy – it’s open, too) that douses the flames before the agents get broiled.
· A human-headed pinball machine makes orgasm noises when you play it.
· A punchbowl turns out to contain a killer reptoid in liquid form. Everybody who had a drink suddenly explodes.
· Just like in the cartoon, there's a hot babe with light-sabre fingernails. She uses them to slash cars in half, while her opponent leaps around from vehicle to vehicle.
· The bureau uses its combined telekinetic powers to halt a crashing Boeing 747 in mid-flight and park it safely on top of a skyscraper. (A reptoid had been using the plane as a flying surfboard.)
· An elevator comes to life and attempts to squish the two ARB agents within. The Japanese billionaire comes to the rescue, yanking machine parts out of the walls and apparently rebuilding the evil reptoid into a motorcycle in just a few seconds! The reptoid doesn't like this one bit, and she yells and curses at the tycoon, her torso thrashing around from atop the handlebars as she shoots sparks, kicks and tries to buck him off. Finally, the tycoon rides her straight off the top of a skyscraper, leaps off and scurries up the wall into his own shadow, disappearing from sight.
I'm just scratching the surface here – there's loads of crazy stuff like this. The film is shot in a deliberately stylized manner, with enough Dutch tilts and blue light filters to give Battlefield Earth a run for its money. Some of the special effects are hilariously cheesy, while others are breathtakingly effective – at the end of the picture, you won't be able to tell which is which.
I can picture the props department going into Zellers or Loonie Plus the night before filming, and buying up anything that vaguely resembles monster parts. ("If we fill this cling wrap with petroleum jelly, it'll make a perfect giant blob! Hey, this rubber tubing is only $1.98 a metre! There's enough money in the tentacle budget for two-and-a-half kilometres of it! It even glows in the dark! Woohoo!") |
