OH, isn’t it a grand thing to rewatch a film you haven’t seen in over a quarter of a century and discover that, not only is it as berserk as you remember it being, but even more so? That was the somewhat astounding position I found myself in tonight… I believe I’ve only seen The Wicked City once, back in the late 90s when I was first exploring Hong Kong cinema; it was on SBS and for some reason I don’t think I taped it in the way I did with pretty much all the other HK stuff SBS showed back then, so I haven’t had an opportunity to see it since then (and if I did tape it, I don’t have a VCR to play it)… I did watch the anime on which this was based a long time ago too, but I haven’t seen this live-action version of it since way back when. And I mostly remembered it being, as I said, berserk. Our story is laid in Hong Kong which is kind of connected to the world of demon-like creatures called Rapters; a drug from the latter’s world that makes humans evaporate has started to appear in ours, and the anti-Rapter agents must find the source and stop it. How this story is told, though, is what matters, it’s the bizarre details and the way some things just… happen, for want of a better word, especially in rhe second half. And, as I said, it was even MORE berserk than I remembered it being, cos I’d somehow forgotten some of those details, like the agents suddenly manifesting their own unexplained telekinetic and magnetic powers, the astounding wirework battle, the, er, pinball machine… I was terrified it wouldn’t live up to my increasingly dim memories of something I saw once in the late ’90s, but it actually exceeded them and I can’t complain about that. Really should rewatch the anime some time, too…
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