‘Legend of The Overfiend’ or — Love Is a Many Phallically-Tentacled Thing?
Let’s face it — it was only a matter of time before I reviewed some hentai.
(Contains very strong language and horrible imagery. Warning — not safe for work… or on the bus… or in public in any way… or in the privacy of your own home for that matter)
It was 1993 and I’d been an anime fan for a few years although, at that point, that consisted purely of Miyazaki movies and ‘Akira’ (1988) as that’s all I’d seen. I was keen for more so I was excited when video label Manga Entertainment started releasing anime OVA’s in the UK that year and so rushed out to buy one of their first releases as a blind buy — ‘Legend of The Overfiend’ (1989), or to give it its original Japanese title — ‘Urotsukidoji’. I had no idea what to expect but hoping for more fun frolics of good-natured high jinks along the lines of ‘Laputa’ or ‘Nausicaa’ my jaw hit the floor when I popped the video into the player and witnessed the insanity that is this movie. I’m not sure what precise moment in the film it was when I realise that this wasn’t going to be quite like a Miyazaki movie, possibly the moment when the someone explodes in a shower of semen and guts as a demon has sex with them or when someone else has demon semen shooting out of their eyes with the destructive intensity of a laser beam as a demon fucks them (there’s a lot of semen and people being fucked by demons in this film in case you haven’t guessed), although what I did know was that I had never seen anything like it. I was both appalled and intrigued. This wasn’t like ‘My Neighbour Totoro’ at all!
The story? Amano Jyaku (a Jyujinkai — half man, half beast) has come to Earth from his man/beast realm to find the Chojin, the legendary Overfiend who will unite the three realms of the Universe: the realm of the Jyujinkai, the Makai (demons) and the human world. Amano believes the Chojin will build a better world by uniting these co-existing dimensions. His investigations lead him to a high school in Osaka and his prime suspect — the popular, muscular high school jock. He must be the Chojin and when this jock turns into a violent demon after shagging three young fans and brutally ripping them apart it seems Amano’s hunch is correct. Except that this demon jock then explodes in a blaze of fire, unable to handle the demonic energy coursing through him. He’s not the Chojin! He must have come into contact with the real Chojin and taken on some of its powers either by having been exposed to its saliva, blood or semen (warning — there is a lot of semen in this movie and, ultimately, everybody will be exposed to the Chojin’s demonic load).
No, it turns out the true candidate is school pervert and masturbation enthusiast Nagumo, yet before this can be confirmed Nagumo is hit by a car and killed. Oh well, that’s that then. Only Nagumo isn’t dead and soon rises up in the hospital morgue in his true form — the demonic, oversexed Chojin and immediately starts… er… fucking everything? It seems sex gives Nagumo his power so you should be warned that there is a lot of fucking in this movie, and I mean a lot of fucking. When Nagumo fucks an entire hospital I don’t mean that he fucks everyone in the hospital but that Nagumo grows into an eighty-foot demon and literally fucks a hospital to pieces with his massive, writhing cocks until it is nothing left but sticky rubble. He also has explosive semen. It’s quite something to behold.
And we’re only thirty minutes in and even Amano is gradually coming to the realisation that the coming of the Chojin might not, exactly, be a good thing. Could it be that this massive multi-cocked, spunk-spraying, rapist Overfiend isn’t a good guy after all?
I’m not going to go over the plot nuances of the rest of the movie or how it delicately balances and alternates the two themes of demons fucking everything and everything being fucked by demons but let’s just say that if this isn’t the movie for you then you’ll have most certainly have turned it off by now.
Yet what makes ‘Legend of The Overfiend’ more than just puerile, perverted nonsense… no, exactly that’s a lie — it’s EXPLICITLY puerile, perverted nonsense — but what makes it puerile, perverted nonsense that works (and this makes a difference) is the combination of a ferocious imagination, apocalyptic scale and balls to the wall pacing. If we judge if a film works or not according to Joe Dante’s maxim that it simply needs to be not boring then ‘Overfiend’ is a massive success and if the idea of a Saturday morning kid’s cartoon made by Clive Barker sounds like your idea of a good time then you’ll have a blast with this. There’s even a Lovecraftian influence when the Chojin, at the peak of his powers, battles a giant, Cthulhu type sea monster that is called from the depths to stop the sexually voracious demon. When you know Cthulhu is being called on to help humans you know we must really be in trouble.
‘Legend of The Overfiend’ is a hard film to criticise for lack of morals, not because it isn’t ridiculously transgressive and deliberately problematic but because it’s so extreme that applying any moral code to it at all would be utterly futile. Where would you even begin with a film like this?
I get a kick out of ‘Legend of The Overfiend’: I enjoy how bonkers it is; I laugh at its insane dialogue; I dig its barely containable energy. If any of this sounds up your street then you’ll get a blast out of ‘Legend of The Overfiend’, although if the idea of ultra-violent, pornographic, multi-cocked tentacle demon porn isn’t your kinda thing then why are you even reading this in the first place?
