Blind Date (1984)

The first thing to be noted here is that this review concerns the 1984 Nico Mastorakis-directed Blind Date, not the 1987 Blake Edwards movie with the same title.

Mastorakis has made movies in both his native country, Greece, and in the United States. Blind Date was shot in Greece.

Mastorakis was one of those guys who figured out early on that the secret to making money out of modestly-budgeted movies was to get involved in the production side so he set up his own production company. On most of his movies he’s the producer, director and screenwriter.

In Blind Date we are introduced to Jonathon Ratcliff (Joseph Bottoms), a young American now working for an advertising agency in Athens. At the office he meets Claire (Kirstie Alley). They sleep together. Everything seeks to go fine in the bedroom. Jonathon seems like a fairly regular guy with no particular hang-ups.

Except that there was that girl at the photo shoot. He thought he knew her. Or at least he thought she was a girl he knew in the past.

Something terrible happened to that girl in his past. But it wasn’t his fault. That’s what he was told.

And then we see Jonathon with a pair of binoculars, watching people through their windows. He appears to be a Peeping Tom. Which is a bit odd. He has a hot girlfriend. And she apparently has no complaints about his performance in bed. Guys with hot girlfriends and normal sex lives are not usually peepers.

Then we find him watching a young couple making out in a car. The guy spots him and chases him. That’s when the accident happens. The bizarre and unlikely accident that leaves him blind. So we have a Peeping Tom who is now blind. I think they call that irony.

And there has been a brutal murder, of a woman.

There are some hints that things may not be as straightforward as they appear. We’re not sure what is really going on with Jonathon. Maybe it’s not simple voyeurism but something to do with his obsession with the woman from his past. We have no idea if Jonathon is actually involved in anything genuinely disturbing or violent. Or if he ever has been. All we have are hints that could point in those directions but we’re aware that perhaps we’re being led up the garden path.

Another murder takes place. We still have no clear indication that this has any connection whatsoever with Jonathon.

What we have here is a setup for an erotic thriller, or perhaps a slasher movie. And then the cyberpunk elements kick in. Jonathon is given bionic vision. It’s like very crude 80s video game graphics. He cannot see any details at all. He cannot identify individual people. But he can now get around. The problem is that he will find himself in dangerous situations where he needs to see details. He needs to be able to identify people’s faces. It’s a nifty thriller plot mechanic.

It’s incredibly interesting that Mastorakis was playing around with cyberpunk concepts in 1984, at a time when cyberpunk was in its infancy. The movie Blade Runner had established the cyberpunk aesthetic but content-wise it was not full-blown cyberpunk. Wililam Gibson’s short story Burning Chrome had been published in 1982 but it was not until 1984 that his novel Neuromancer put cyberpunk on the map. But here we have Mastorakis dealing with at least some of the themes of full-blown cyberpunk in a movie released early in 1984, a movie that was presumably already in production before Mastorakis could have had any opportunity to read Neuromancer.

Mastorakis did something similar a few years later, in his excellent In the Cold of the Night (1990). That movie starts out as an erotic thriller with neo-noir overtones and then veers into cyberpunk territory.

Mastorakis was very good at choosing locations that provided production value without spending much money. He uses Athens rather well. This is not tourist Athens. There are no shots of the Parthenon. This is the Athens of the wealthy middle class but it’s still clear that this is a movie that is not set in LA or London or Rome or any other familiar thriller locations. There’s just that very subtle hint of the exotic.

Joseph Bottoms is an adequate lead. He is ambiguous, which is what was needed. It’s not a demanding role for Kirstie Alley but she is very good.

There’s decent suspense and the action scenes are made interesting by the fact that at times we’re seeing things through Jonathon’s primitive video game graphic vision.

Blind Date is an enjoyable thriller made much more interesting by the proto-cyberpunk touches. Highly recommended.

Ergo Proxy (TV series, 2006)

Ergo Proxy is a 2006 Japanese cyberpunk anime TV series. 

This is cyberpunk with quite a few other added flavourings.

This is a complex intelligent puzzling fascinating grown-up anime with multiple layers of meaning and lots of narrative uncertainty. And lots of ambiguity.

You can find my full review at Cult TV Lounge.

Demon City Shinjuku (1988)

Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s supernatural anime Demon City Shinjuku (AKA Hell City Shinjuku AKA Monster City) is a follow-up of sorts to his superb 1987 Wicked City. It deals with very similar themes - a confrontation between the demon world and the human world - but does so in slightly different ways.

It begins with an epic fight between two master swordsmen, Genichiro and Rebi Ra. Both have learned to harness the life energies of the universe who gives them almost supernatural powers. Genichiro is on the side of good. Rebi Ra has sold his soul to the forces of darkness in order to gain unlimited power. Rebi Ra plans to turn the human world into another version of the demon world. He doesn’t quite succeed but he unleashes a massive localised earthquake which devastates the Shinjuku district.

Shinjuku is now a wasteland dominated by demons.

Flash forward ten years and Rebi Ra is ready to try again. Only Genichiro’s high school student son Kyoya might possibly be able to stop him.

Rebi Ra had tried to assassinate the world President. Kyoya hooks up with the president’s daughter Sayaka. Together they enter Shinjuku, with the aim of stopping Rebi Ra.

They get some assistance from a lively cynical streetwise kid.

They also encounter Mephisto. Mephisto is an ambiguous figure. He is human but so disillusioned that he figures things can’t be any worse if the demons win. But Mephisto does offer some aid to Kyoya and Sayaka. Whether he will become an ally or a foe remains to be seen.

There are lots of terrifying monsters to be defeated. Kyoya has also still not fully developed his powers and he’s running out of time to do so. He also has to defend Sayaka with whom he is slowly falling in love.

The biggest problem with this movie is that you are inevitably going to compare it to Wicked City and Wicked City is much the better movie, with ideas that are more fully developed and complex and with more complex characters. Demon City Shinjuku is just a bit too straightforward in plot terms. Kyoya doesn’t have to work hard enough to harness his full powers. Sayaka is cute and likeable but there’s not much depth to her.

We also never really feel that Sayaka is in great danger. That would have added a bit more bite to the suspense and it would have given Kyoya more of a chance to show us some emotional depth.

Mephisto is the most interesting character and perhaps the movie should have focused on him a bit more.

Demon City Shinjuku also lacks the kinky eroticism of Wicked City. Wicked City is full-blown erotic horror done superbly. The lack of eroticism in Demon City Shinjuku makes it seems a little bland.

There are no love scenes between Kyoya and Sayaka which make their romance seem a bit too much like two high school kids experiencing puppy love.

Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s involvement would lead you to expect something visually spectacular and that’s what he delivers. Demon City Shinjuku might be a slight disappoint in other ways but the animation is excellent and there are plenty of very very cool images.

The fire monster is not just visually interesting - it provides the movie’s most effectively chilling and emotionally wrenching moments. This is where we see what evil really entails. This movie needed more moments like this.

Demon City Shinjuku looks impressive and it offers action and excitement. It just doesn’t have quite enough substance to back up its unquestioned style. I’d still recommend it.

Demon City Shinjuku has been paired with Wicked City in a two-disc Blu-Ray set which I recommend.

I’ve reviewed Wicked City (1987) which really is superlative.

Angel Cop (1989-94)

Angel Cop is a 1989-94 Japanese anime OVA. It comprises six 30-minute segments.

There is some slight cyberpunk flavouring but this does not have the feel of fully-fledged cyberpunk.

It has a near-future setting. Terrorists are trying to destroy the Japanese economy. An elite anti-terrorist unit, the Special Security Force (SSF), has been set up. They have a licence to kill. In fact they have a licence to do anything at all they consider to be necessary. They’re a law unto themselves.

Their latest recruit is a sexy girl cop known as Angel. Even by SSF standards she’s ruthless. When asked if she would shoot a terrorist who was using a hostage as a human shield, even if it meant killing the hostage, she replies that she wouldn’t like doing it but she’d do it anyway. We’ve already seen her in action. We know she isn’t kidding.

The SSF has captured a terrorist leader and they need to keep him alive. There are lots of people from various groups who want him dead.

The SSF’s approach to anti-terrorist operations is ruthless to say the least. It soon becomes apparent there are other groups out to kill terrorists. There are the Hunters, and both their nature and motivations are obscure.

As the six linked episodes progress more and more conspiracies come to light, and each revelation has the effect of making the entire situation even murkier.

The Hunters are simply trying to exterminate all terrorists. There seems to be another group hunting the Hunters. There is infighting among the terrorists. There is infighting on the government side. The SSF is a government agency but there are other government agencies trying to destroy the SSF. And when I say destroy I mean they intend to kill every single member of the SSF. There’s also a possibly unstable scientist with access to very high technology who seems to have his own agenda.

These factions are all extremely well-funded with access to advanced weaponry. They have powerful shadowy backers. Some of these backers may be domestic, some may originate outside Japan. Some of these backers may be pro-Japanese while others are anti-Japanese. There are factions within the Japanese government. The motivations of all of these factions and groups might be ideological, they might simply be motivated by greed or they might be out for power for its own sake. There’s no way of knowing just how many conspiracies there are.

The paranoia levels are off the scale.

While this OVA can be considered as a kind of political thriller don’t let that put you off. It’s not obsessed with ideological preaching. Angel Cop is more focused on the nature of political power games considered purely as power games. The truth is that none of the players are actually motivated by ideals.

There’s also a considerable interest in the corrupting effects of power. The SSF routinely employs hideous methods of torture. There’s one chilling scene in which a suspect is being horrifically tortured while in the office next door the female SSF operatives calmly catch up on their paperwork, oblivious to the screaming.

Another theme of Angel Cop is loyalty. Angel is a loyal Japanese. She has always assumed that loyalty to the Japanese government and loyalty to Japan are perfectly compatible and indeed almost synonymous. Unfortunately that assumption might prove to be incorrect.

There are lots of other things going on in Angel Cop. The nature of the Hunters is mysterious. They have just be the products of ultra high technology. They might be supernatural entities. They might have psychic or paranormal powers and if so those powers might be enhanced by technology. Their powers look like magic but it would be a mistake to jump to conclusions.

Angel is an interesting heroine. She’s tough, brave and very competent but she’s no super-woman. She also has some serious character flaws. As far as she is concerned she’s a cop. A cop does her duty. Angel has never thought beyond this. She lacks empathy. She has repressed her emotions entirely. She is breathtakingly ruthless and callous. She will have to learn to be a human being as well as a cop. The question is whether she will be capable of doing this.

She has been partnered with Raiden. It’s an uneasy partnership. Raiden doesn’t trust her. You can’t blame him. Their relationship will evolve but not in the way you would expect in a non-Japanese story.

There’s an immense amount of carnage and it’s extremely graphic. There are epic battles involving both conventional and psychic weapons.

The tone is generally dark and often very dark. It gets steadily darker and more paranoid.

The ending has lost none of its power to shock. It is deeply Japanese, reflecting distinctly Japanese cultural attitudes such as bushido, the code of the samurai. To understand the ending I think you have to assume that Angel does indeed see herself as a samurai, and not in a superficial way. And that Raiden comes to see himself as a samurai as well. They have chosen the way of the samurai and they are prepared to accept everything that that entails. I don’t see any other way of making sense of the ending.

The Discotek Blu-Ray looks terrific. It includes the Japanese language version with uncensored English subtitles. For hyper-sensitive souls there’s also the option for censored subtitles or there’s the censored English dub. The censorship has nothing to do with bad language or sexual references. The original version would have been considered antisemitic and would have been totally unacceptable to American distributors. It’s unfortunate that many people have been so distracted by this element that they have overlooked two other far more interesting elements that reflect an uncompromisingly Japanese point of view that would have been deeply disorienting to American audiences.

Angel Cop is fast-moving and action-packed with an enormous amount of very graphic violence. It’s a bleak paranoid vision of the future. It’s not for the faint-hearted but I highly recommend it.

Cyber City Oedo 808 (anime OVA, 1990)

Yoshiaki Kawajiri's Cyber City Oedo 808 is top-tier cyberpunk anime.

Criminals recruited as cyber-cops. Lots of paranoia and violent action in a high-tech dystopia. And there are also vampires! Of a sort. And a love story. Of a sort.

Lots of style, tragedy, mystery and weirdness.

Read my full review at Cult TV Lounge.

Armitage III: Poly-Matrix (1996)

Several things need to be cleared up in regard to Armitage III: Poly-Matrix right from the start. Firstly, despite the title, this is not the third film in a series. In fact it’s the first film in a two-movie series. It’s called Armitage III because the heroine, Armitage, is a Third. I’ll explain that later.

Secondly, it started life as an OVA (original animation video) with a total running time of 120 minutes. In 1996 it was edited down to 90 minutes as a feature film. The editing required some dialogue changes which made it impossible to use the Japanese language track from the OVA. As a result there is no Japanese language version of the Armitage III: Poly-Matrix feature film. Since the feature film was clearly aimed at English-speaking markets such as the United States and Australia that was no problem. And while so many 1980s/1990s animes were given truly atrocious English dubs by American and British distributors this one has a perfectly acceptable English dub. Armitage is voiced by Elizabeth Berkeley and her partner Ross Sylibus is voiced by Kiefer Sutherland. They’re both fine, and Berkeley is actually rather good - she sounds like an anime heroine.

It also seems likely that the OVA was shot in the 1.37:1 aspect ratio and cropped to 1.85:1 for the feature film release. Some shots certainly look like they might be cropped.

Armitage III: Poly-Matrix is very much in the cyberpunk mode. The setting is Mars at some future date. Mars now has huge cities and a large population. A significant segment of the population comprises robots. These are mostly Seconds (second-generation robots). They’re quite suitable for undemanding routine work and there’s a lot of tension as a result - the humans on Mars resent the robots for taking jobs away from them.

There are also Thirds (third-generation robots). They are almost indistinguishable from humans and are regarded with enormous suspicion.

Chicago cop Ross Sylibus has just arrived on Mars to join the Martian PD. He has personal reasons for not liking robots.

He is partnered with Naomi Armitage, a tiny but formidable female described by one of the other cops as a terror in hot pants. Armitage doesn’t wear too much in the way of clothing. Too much clothing cramps her style.

On arrival on Mars Ross finds himself in the middle of a pitched gun battle. Left behind is the corpse of a famous female country singer, except that it’s not a corpse but the remains of a robot.

Someone seems to be trying to destroy all the Thirds. That’s a crime problem that needs to be solved but there are other puzzles as well. Why are all Thirds female? And Why exactly were they created? The Seconds were quite adequate when it came to performing most of the functions required of robots. There was no obvious need for robots that were indistinguishable from humans.

The audience will be pretty aware from the start that Armitage is in fact a Third. Ross however does not know this and when he finds out it comes as something of a shock. He has to figure out exactly how he feels about the fact that he has been partnered with a non-human.

Armitage has always known that she was a machine but she has never quite come to terms with it. She feels like a woman. She has emotions. She has a woman’s emotions. She wants to be accepted as a cop but she’d like Ross to accept her as a woman as well. That’s not to say that she fell instantly in love with him or had an overwhelming urge to sleep with him but being female is important to her. It becomes more important to her. Ross becomes more important to her.

The plot is quite complex. There are all kinds of secrets and conspiracies and there are important things that Armitage needs to discover about herself. She needs to know these things for her own sake, and for the sake of Mars.

One of the things Armitage doesn’t know is why she even has emotions. A robot doesn’t need emotions. A cop doesn’t need emotions. This seems like a design flaw. She is definitely a robot but she is definitely a woman as well, and she was deliberately designed that way.

This is anime so you won’t be surprised to find out that Armitage’s learning experiences involve a huge amount of mayhem and a lot of explosions. The Japanese have no problems whatsoever with the idea of combining mayhem with intelligent provocative themes. Armitage III is typical cyberpunk anime in the sense that it combines rollercoaster action sequences, extreme violence and sexiness with big ideas and complex emotions.

Japanese cyberpunk was heavily influenced by Blade Runner both aesthetically and thematically. Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell and Armitage III all deal with similar questions - what makes us human? And all three movies deal with female characters having to grapple with the question of whether they are women or machines, and having to grapple with what this means in terms of their emotional lives. All three movies tackle these questions in slightly different ways. Armitage III has never attracted the same degree of critical adulation as those other two films and that may perhaps be a little unfair.

All three movies also deal to some extent with the Uncanny Valley phenomenon - the idea of a robot that is almost totally physically indistinguishable from a human is inherently disturbing and if the resemblance is total it becomes even more disturbing. Anyone who has encountered AI-generated art knows just how disturbing the Uncanny Valley effect can be.

The great thing about this movie is that it’s Japanese. An American movie would have handled the subject matter in a much more predictable and safe way.

Oddly enough the makers of this film claimed to have been influenced by Lovecraft and there are a couple of Lovecraft references that are fun to spot.

Having been made as an OVA this production did not have a feature film budget but on the whole the visuals are quite satisfactory.

Armitage III: Poly-Matrix is a pretty good cyberpunk anime that does not deserve to languish in obscurity. Highly recommended.

The Madman Australian DVD release dates back a few years. It’s letterboxed but the transfer is fine.

Goku Midnight Eye (1989)

Goku Midnight Eye is a 1989 anime OVA directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri and written by Buichi Terasawa (who also wrote the manga).

An OVA was similar to a TV mini-series but intended for direct-to-video or later direct-to-DVD release. Goku Midnight Eye comprises two roughly hour-long episodes. Despite being intended for direct-to-video release the OVA was a perfectly respectable format in Japan and they were made on reasonably generous budgets. Compared to a TV series they were much less constrained by censorship and could be a lot more daring. Because the budgets were lower than feature film budgets they allowed a bit of risk-taking when it came to subject matter.

Goku Midnight Eye is definitely cyberpunk. And it’s real cyberpunk. The digital technology is not just there to add coolness - it’s integral to the story. The influence of William Gibson is fairly obvious. As in Kawajiri’s Cyber City Oedo 808 we’re dealing with a society that is perhaps a bit too dependent on computers. The danger of over-reliance on computer technology is a common theme in 80s cyberpunk. Of course we now know that those dangers are worse than anyone in the 80s could have imagined.

There’s usually a touch of film noir cynicism and pessimism in cyberpunk. In this case there are slight hints of a fiIm noir aesthetic as well.

Midnight Eye I introduces us to our hero Goku, a private eye (adding to the hardboiled/noir flavour) who used to be a cop. He worked for the S.I.U., a specialised elite unit. 

Various members of Goku’s old squad have recently committed suicide. Too many. Clearly there’s something sinister going on. Goku isn’t a cop any longer so it’s none of his business so naturally he gets himself involved in the case. He teams up with another S.I.U. squad member, a sexy lady named Yoko.

Goku always wears a jacket and tie but never bothers with a shirt. Yes, there is a touch of bad boy rebel to him as well as a definite maverick cop turned lone wolf vibe.

All the cops who killed themselves were investigating a man named Hakuryo, a rich businessman who is probably involved in some very shady dealings.

It doesn’t take long for Goku to encounter the feather lady. She’s very pretty, almost naked and there are these peacock feathers that seem to surround her. The wisest thing is not to look at her but it’s impossible not to. If you do look at her you’re in big trouble.

In an indirect way that’s how Goku loses his left eye. He is given a new one although he has no idea who gave it to him or how or why. It’s not an ordinary eye. It’s not just a bionic eye - it’s much much more than that. Goku is now at least partially a cyborg and he has access to just about every computer in the world.

There’s plenty of action and plenty of impressive visuals.

Midnight Eye II is a rollercoaster action ride. A young woman, Ryoku, hires Goku to save her brother Ryu. Goku has the feeling that she is not telling him the whole truth and is possibly not telling him any truth at all. He soon discovers major holes in her story.

Ryu and Ryoku had been adopted years earlier by a senior military figure. Her brother was supposedly taking part in some top-secret military experiments. It seems that the idea was to turn him into a perfect killing machine. Ryoku believes that Ryu is about to embark on an orgy of violence and destruction.

There’s obviously a lot more to the relationships between these people than meets the eye.

Goku’s problem is that Ryu really is just about unstoppable. Goku has formidable abilities of his own thanks to his computer implant but he’s going to have to find something really special to take on Ryu.

And of course Goku is by no means certain that Ryu truly is evil.

Given that this is a Yoshiaki Kawajiri anime you might be wondering if it’s going to be sleazy, if there will be nudity and sexual kinkiness and if it’s going to cross the boundaries of good taste. You need have no fears. It is indeed sleazy, there is nudity, there’s sexual weirdness and it doesn’t just cross the boundaries of good taste, it rides roughshod over those boundaries.

The motorcycle girl is a highlight. I’m not talking about a girl who rides a motorcycle. She is a motorcycle. She’s a cyborg and she’s part motorcycle.

Goku is a hero with some definite film noir flavouring, and definite affinities with classic Hollywood private eyes of the 40s. He has a fatalistic almost existentialist streak. He’s a romantic and a cynic. He thinks he should keep away from women but he can’t, and they always lead him into trouble. He sticks his nose into things that aren’t his business. He keeps getting knocked down. He keeps getting up again but sometimes he thinks it just isn’t worth it. Given the choice he’d rather save the woman he loves than save the world. Sometimes he thinks that whichever way he jumps he’ll end up losing. He’s an interesting character with a bit of complexity.

The women give off a slight film noir vibe as well. They don’t exactly fit the femme fatale mould but they’re still dangerous dames.

Goku Midnight Eye is very very stylish, very violent, very sexy and very exciting. What more could you want? Highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s Cyber City Oedo 808 and Wicked City.

Goku Midnight Eye is available on Blu-Ray and it looks great

Wicked City (1987)

Wicked City is an anime feature from my favourite anime director, Yoshiaki Kawajiri.

It has a definite cyberpunk feel but this is not straightforward cyberpunk. It’s cyberpunk combined with supernatural horror. This is a movie about the confrontation of the human world and the demon world.

Renzaburō Taki is a sales manger for an electronics company but that’s just his cover. He’s actually a secret agent, a Black Guard. His latest assignment is to keep a diplomat alive long enough for a peace treaty to be signed. He’s been given a very pretty female partner. Her name is Makie. She’s from the other side. In other words she’s a demon.

This peace treaty is a peace treaty between the human world and the demon world.

Makie is a Black Guard as well. There are both human and demon Black Guards. Their job is to keep the peace between the two worlds. They’re on the same side.

Anime of this period was certainly influenced by western pop culture, and science fiction anime was definitely influenced by movies like Alien and Blade Runner. This influence however should not be exaggerated. Wicked City is very very Japanese. It reflects a Japanese view of the supernatural. In Japanese folklore for example ghosts are not necessarily evil.

A western movie, especially a British or American movie, dealing with the demon world would reflect Christian concepts of evil and sin. That is not the case with Wicked City. There are good humans and bad humans. There are good demons and bad demons. Most humans and most demons are not simplistically good or evil. Sometimes they just have conflicting agendas. The demon world is strange and alien, but not inherently evil.

In this case there are humans and demons working towards a lasting peace between the two worlds, and there are those who are working against that aim. Those working against it believe they have valid reasons for opposing the peace treaty.

The diplomat requiring protection is a demon, Giuseppe Mayart. Keeping him alive will be a challenge. He’s not very coöperative. He just wants to party. He wants to get drunk and get laid. He’s cheerful but lecherous.

The faction within the demon world that wants to destroy him is very formidable and very determined. And shape-shifting demons are very nasty enemies to tangle with. Their powers are terrifying.

Humans are by no means defenceless. The two worlds have been in contact for many centuries. That contact has been sometimes peaceful, sometimes hostile. For 500 years there has been, mostly, peace. Demons are however a potential threat and humans have developed technologies to counter that threat. That includes high-tech gadgets but it also includes what might be called spiritual technologies.

This movie has quite a few clever plot twists. Things, and people (and demons), are not necessarily as they seem.

There are those who associate 1980s/90s anime with extreme violence and sexual kinkiness, and in some cases that’s quite accurate. Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s animes in particular are often viewed in this light. When viewing Wicked City it’s easy to focus on the outrageous and outré elements, on the graphic violence, the nudity and the kinky demon sex. All those things are there, but this is also a very romantic movie. It’s sometimes horrifying and grim but it’s never nihilistic and there’s no sense of despair.

This is a love story, and that doesn’t mean it has a romance sub-plot tacked on. The love story is the core of the movie.

This is an adult anime but that doesn’t just mean nudity and sex. It means a grown-up complex approach to emotional issues and it means complex characters who learn things about themselves. Taki comes to accept that he really is an incurable romantic and he will put love ahead of duty, which inevitably leads him to question his line of work. He also has to learn to cope with a sexual and emotional attraction to a demon woman.

Makie is a demon woman but she’s as much a woman as a demon. Right from the start she is a very female character. She has a woman’s sexual desires and a woman’s emotional needs. What she has to do is figure out how to deal with the fact that she may have fallen in love with a human man. Taki and Makie both have to adapt to a situation that they find strange and bewildering.

There’s also a spiritual dimension to this movie. This becomes more and more obvious towards the end but I won’t say more for fear of revealing spoilers.

Mercifully this movie avoids politics altogether. It has much more important and interesting themes to deal with.

Like all of Kawajiri’s animes Wicked City is visually impressive. It has an aesthetic that combines some cyberpunk elements with some urban thriller elements and a touch of the gothic.

Wicked City looks great on Blu-Ray. Incidentally the 1.37:1 aspect ratio is indeed the correct aspect ratio.

Wicked City is exciting and action-packed, visually stunning, intelligent and provocative and emotionally nuanced. This is a great movie. Very highly recommended.

RoboCop (1987)

RoboCop was not technically Paul Verhoeven’s first U.S. film (and he’d been directing features for years in the Netherlands) but it was the movie that put him on the map in a big way.

This is a dystopian cyberpunk science fiction thriller but in tone it’s a million miles away from the most famous dystopian cyberpunk science fiction thriller of the 80s, Blade Runner. RoboCop, disturbingly but interestingly, adds a lot of comic touches to an otherwise rather dark tale.

Alex Murphy (Peter Weller) is a Detroit cop who has just been assigned to the toughest precinct in a city in which violent crime is totally out of control. What he doesn’t know is that he has been set up to be killed. The Detroit Police Department is now controlled by a private corporation, Omni Consumer Products (OCP). The corporation is about to demolish the entire city and build a brand new high-tech city (to be called Delta City) on the site. To carry out their plan they need total control, including total control of law enforcement. The potential profits are enormous.

They intend to reduce the costs of policing to a bare minimum. Their initial idea was to build law enforcement robots but the prototype developed a very unfortunate glitch. Just a minor bug in the system - it blew away a OCP executive for no reason at all. It put about two hundred bullets into the guy.

An ambitious mid-level exec has a better idea - cyborg cops. To build a cyborg cop you first need a real cop who is as close to being dead as possible. They’ve selected some promising candidates, like Alex Murphy, and assigned them to duties where the possibility of being killed becomes practically a certainty. Much to OCP’s joy Alex Murphy is soon blown apart by criminals. Now there’s not much left that’s salvageable, but enough for their purposes. Alex Murphy will become the prototype RoboCop.

RoboCop’s brain is part human and part electronic. His personal memories have been erased but his policing expertise and experience is still there because those things are useful. His personality has been all but destroyed because it’s not useful to OCP. At least in theory Alex’s personality has been destroyed but whether that’s true in practice remains to be seen.

We, the audience, know who shot Murphy. It was a very nasty crime lord named Clarence Boddicker (Kurtwood Smith). Boddicker and his goons tortured Murphy first, in a scene in which Verhoeven portrays Murphy as a kind of Christ figure (Verhoeven states this in the audio commentary so it’s not speculation on my part).

RoboCop is not supposed to have any memories but he does have some incoherent images in his mind of his catastrophic encounter with Clarence Boddicker. RoboCop is not supposed to have any personal feelings but he develops an obsession with these disjointed memories.

Murphy’s partner on that fatal night had been Officer Anne Lewis (Nancy Allen). She doesn’t know that RoboCop is Murphy but she suspects that maybe he could be.

When it comes to cleaning up crime RoboCop is a huge success.

There are power struggles within OCP, with ambitious executives happy to stab each other in the back to get to the top. RoboCop’s success or failure can mean the difference between success and failure for some very ruthless men. For Bob Morton (Miguel Ferrer) there’s a great deal at stake - his entire career. It would be a disaster if RoboCop developed any glitches. Glitches like remembering what happened on that fateful night. RoboCop might then embark on a campaign of revenge.

This is an exciting adrenalin-rush action movie but there’s a lot more going on. There’s a lot of black humour. There’s satire here as well. Now it has to be said that Verhoeven’s approach to satire is subtle in the way being hit by a baseball bat is subtle. On the other hand it is undeniably effective. It works because, like any good satire, it’s accurate. It’s just an exaggeration of things that we feel to be true.

There’s also a surprising amount of emotion. Machines don’t feel emotions but men do and while OCP thinks of RoboCop as a machine that’s not quite the case. RoboCop doesn’t quite understand his emotions because his memories are so fragmentary but he does have emotions, as we discover in one extremely powerful and effective scene in what was once Murphy’s house.

This is a dystopian future with an unsettling degree of plausibility. In 1987 a society under the boot heel of advanced digital technology really was science fiction. Today it’s everyday reality.

It’s all done with old school special effects - things like matte paintings and miniatures and stop-motion animation. RoboCop isn’t a CGI effect - he’s actor Peter Weller in a very elaborate rubber suit. This gives the movie a feeling of solidity, of reality, that you just don’t get with modern CGI. We really do understand that RoboCop is still to some degree a man rather than a mere machine. The problem is that RoboCop doesn’t know to what extent he’s still human.

A very similar idea would be developed in a slightly different way a few years later in the superb Japanese sci-fi anime movie Ghost in the Shell (1995).

RoboCop is an intelligent science fiction action movie with some interesting emotional nuance. Highly recommended.

The edition I saw was the Director’s Cut Blu-Ray which looks great and is packed with extras.

Starship Troopers (1997)

Starship Troopers, dating from 1997, has been (like most of Paul Verhoeven’s movies) widely misunderstood. There’s so much action and violence and noise and so many special effects that a lot of viewers (and unfortunately some reviewers) end up not noticing the satire.

At some point in the future humanity becomes involved in a war to the death with an alien species. The aliens are bugs. Gigantic very mean bugs. The war consumes millions of lives, of both people and bugs.

A bunch of high school kids in Buenos Aires decide that they want to join the military. They do so, but it turns out to be less fun than they’d anticipated. Contrary to expectations, defeating the bugs turns out to be awesomely difficult. Finally it penetrates even the military mind that the bugs are intelligent. Maybe not intelligent in a human way, but definitely intelligent. The bugs can not only out-fight us, they seem to have a distressing ability to out-think us.

Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien) joins the military because Carmen joins up and he’s hopelessly in love with Carmen and he thinks he’ll lose her if he doesn’t enlist. Dizzy Flores (Dina Meyer) joins up because she’s hopelessly in love with Johnny and she wants to be near him. Carl (Neil Patrick Harris) joins up because he’s ambitious and super-intelligent and he knows he’s not going to end up in the infantry. He’ll have a nice safe job in military intelligence. Johnny is as dumb as a rock so he was always going to end up in the infantry.

They go to boot camp and their experiences there follow the pattern set in countless previous movies. Their drill sergeant is merciless but that’s because he has to weed out the losers.

Then the war starts and Johnny, Dizzy and Carmen are caught in the middle of it.

I hate getting into political discussions in connection with movies (I have no interest in political ideologies myself) but this is such a political movie, based on a very very political novel, that it’s unavoidable in this case.

What’s interesting is the way this future society is portrayed but first we have make a detour and consider the source material, Robert A. Heinlein’s 1959 novel of the same name. It’s regarded as one of the classics of the genre. It’s widely regarded as a fascist novel although Heinlein’s politics were in fact somewhat complicated. The key political point in the novel is that you can only become a full citizen in Heinlein’s imagined future society by undertaking military service. And only citizens have political rights. Only citizens can vote. If you want to be able to vote you have to join the military. It sounds like a recipe for a fascist military dictatorship but Heinlein thought it was a swell idea.

And in the movie military service is also necessary if you want political rights. It’s a society entirely run by ex-military types. It seems to be some sort of global government known as the Federation. As you can imagine Paul Verhoeven is much more sceptical about this idea than Heinlein was. In the movie the totalitarian nature of society is pretty obvious, with the population being fed an endless stream of propaganda by the military government, most of this propaganda being of course of a very gung-ho militarist nature.

There’s also a suggestion (it’s just mentioned briefly but it is there) that the bugs may not see themselves as the aggressors, that they may be acting defensively in response to human invasions of their sector of the galaxy.

Verhoeven’s movie is also much less admiring of the military. The war is an endless series of bungles caused by arrogance and a persistent tendency to assume that humans must be superior to bugs so therefore the bugs must be destined to lose. As a result of human military incompetence millions of lives are thrown away in ill-considered attempt to conquer the bugs’ home planet.

We only see one general, and he’s not only a blithering idiot he’s also a coward, hiding in a cupboard in terror of the bugs.

There are other aspects of the movie that are more complex. It’s hard to say exactly how Verhoeven expects us to react to a military ethos in which the highest expression of duty is blowing out a comrade’s brains rather than let him fall into the hands of the bugs. Sure, maybe it’s kinder in a way but it does capture the dehumanising nature of war.

One thing that a lot of people don’t seem to have noticed is that the Federation uniforms are vaguely reminiscent of Second World War Nazi uniforms. In fact there’s a lot of Nazi iconography associated with the Federation.

I don’t know how much more obvious Verhoeven could have made it that he was making an anti-fascist film but lots of mainstream critics at the time missed the point entirely and attacked it as a fascist movie. Mainstream critics really are pretty useless when confronted with a movie that takes an unconventional or non-mainstream approach. It’s also odd that so many people missed the fact that the movie is showing us that a society run by ex-military types will inevitably be a militaristic society engaged in endless wars.

The acting is less than dazzling but I suspect that the performances were exactly what Verhoeven wanted. These are people so heavily indoctrinated ands media-saturated that they’re incapable of independent thought. They’re content to be obedient cogs in the machine. Their emotions are also extremely shallow. They think and feel simplistically. They’ve been dehumanised.

A weakness is that the level of violence eventually desensitises the viewer. But than I guess that was also deliberate on Verhoeven’s part

The studio promoted the movie as another big dumb action movie blockbuster which it clearly isn’t so it’s not surprising that Starship Troopers did mediocre business at the box office. Its cult reputation has grown steadily since then.

Starship Troopers is an outlier among big-budget Hollywood science fiction epics. It really has more in common with Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove (1964) than with the average Hollywood sci-fi movie.

Starship Troopers is intelligent provocative science fiction. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed three other Verhoeven movies from the 90s, movies which also seemed to perplex critics - Total Recall (1990), Basic Instinct (1992) and Showgirls (1995).

Total Recall (1990)

Paul Verhoeven’s 1990 science fiction film Total Recall is based on a short story (We Can Remember It For You Wholesale) by Philip K. Dick with a screenplay by Ronald Shusett and Dan O’Bannon. And of course it stars Arnold Schwarzenegger, a big box office draw at the time.

Philip K. Dick also wrote the novel on which Blade Runner was based. Dick’s science fiction was noted for its disturbing and disorienting blurring of the boundaries between reality and illusion.

Doug Quaid (Schwarzenegger) works on a building site. He’s been having very troubling dreams about Mars. He’s never been to Mars but he’s become obsessed with the idea of moving to the Martian colony. His wife Lori (Sharon Stone) is determined to talk him out of the idea.

Then he finds what seems like a good compromise. He sees a TV commercial for Rekall, a company that offers what are in effect virtual vacations. You go to their office and they implant incredibly realistic memories of a fun-filled exciting vacation which never really happened. But the memories are so real that (so they claim) it’s just as good as a real vacation. 

In fact it’s better. They offer the perfect vacation. A vacation with none of the irritations of real vacations (such as the spaceline losing your luggage). And during this perfect location you get to have a steamy sexy holiday romance with a gorgeous member of the opposite sex. And as they point out to Doug, she will be absolutely his perfect fantasy woman.

You can also choose to spend your vacation playing a fantasy role. Doug chooses the secret agent option. You get to kill the bad guys, bed a gorgeous lady spy and return a hero.

Doug can’t wait. But it all goes horribly wrong. There’s something about Doug that Rekall didn’t know about. Something about Doug’s actual memories.

This is the point at which the movie starts to get really interesting. Doug isn’t sure where his dreams end and reality begins. The audience isn’t sure either. There’s the possibility of dreams within dreams. Doug’s dreams might be more real than his reality. His memories might be real or they might be faked, or he might be dreaming that his memories have been faked. At various points in the movie these questions are answered for us, or are they? Is Doug being presented with reality or more faked reality? Doug can’t be sure and nor can we. Everything is open to question.

This is also the point at which the action kicks in and from now on the movie will be almost non-stop hyper-violent action. With plenty of humour as well.

So this is a very cerebral piece of high concept science fiction and it’s a big dumb action adventure movie. It’s not that it switches between these two poles. Both strands of the movie are interwoven. It’s an adrenaline-charged roller coaster ride that keeps challenging our perceptions.

Paul Verhoeven makes this strange mixture work.

At various points in the movie we get revelations which suddenly make things clearer, and then we discover that they haven’t actually made things clearer at call. The revelations have just raised new questions and new doubts. It’s not that the movie is working on two levels, dream and reality. It’s working on multiple levels of dream and reality. The dreams might be real. The reality might be fake. It’s possible to interpret the movie in several different ways, depending on the point at which you think the movie has cut through the final level of falsehood and reached truth and reality. And depending on whether you think it ever reaches that point at all. All the possible interpretations of the movie work. You choose your interpretation and then you watch the movie again and you’ll decide on a different interpretation.

I like Schwarzenegger a lot in this movie. He could be very charming and very likeable with an engaging ordinariness about him. Quaid is a nice guy but he’s a hyper-violent nice guy and he’s confused and he’s emotionally torn. He has a beautiful blonde loving wife and a beautiful brunette girlfriend and he loves them both but they’re in different realities, or different dreams. This was probably the most challenging and complex rôle Schwarzenegger had played up to this point and he carries it off surprisingly successfully.

The brunette is Melinda (Rachel Ticotin), who was Quaid’s girlfriend only he wasn’t Quaid then.

Ronny Cox as Cohaagen, the virtual dictator of Mars, is nicely chilling. Michael Ironside is great fun as his chief henchman, the obsessed Richter.

Sharon Stone has to switch back and forth between two personalities, or two personas, and she does a superb job. It was this performance that convinced Verhoeven that she could handle her rôle in Basic Instinct.

Digital effects were very much in their infancy at the time. There are a few here but most of the special effects are done the old-fashioned way. And they look great. The Martian colony looks terrific - kind of high-tech but run-down and squalid at the same time, and very sleazy. There’s some amazing puppeteering and makeup work and miniatures work. Much of the movie was shot in Mexico City where Verhoeven found some wonderful New Brutalist architecture for his location shooting.

Schwarzenegger and Verhoeven share an entertaining and informative audio commentary. I get the feeling that Schwarzenegger is very proud of this movie, and with good reason. Verhoeven makes it clear that there’s no definitive interpretation of the events of the movie.

Total Recall had a very interesting production history. The idea of filming Dick’s short story had been kicking around for years. Schwarzenegger had wanted to do the movie for years. Dino De Laurentiis ended up owning the rights and he was adamant that he didn’t want Schwarzenegger. At various times at least half a dozen directors were in line to make the movie. Production had actually started in Australia, with Bruce Beresford as director, when De Laurentiis’s production company went bankrupt. Schwarzenegger heard about it, got on the phone to the guys at Carolco and within hours a deal was made. It was now to be a Carolco production with Schwarzenegger as star. Schwarzenegger had no doubts at all as to who the director was going to be. He desperately wanted to work with Paul Verhoeven. Verhoeven was keen. Within another day or so Rachel Ticotin and Sharon Stone had been cast. The movie was now to be shot in Mexico.

You can enjoy Total Recall as an action extravaganza and as an arty philosophical science fiction movie and you do both at the same time. Very highly recommended.