Psychic Wars has been on my radar for a long time.  It consistently gets brought up during discussions of the worst anime of all time.  Honestly, I often get confused between Psychic Wars and Vampire Wars (though I’m fairly certain they’re both pretty terrible).  I actually did watch Vampire Wars a long time ago but don’t quite remember anything about it.  Since I’m already digressing, I also watched an anime called Big Wars, which I also don’t remember all that much about, but it was surprisingly good.  Moving on…

Psychic Wars is a typical Manga Entertainment release.   Now, Manga did release a good number of anime with actual quality, but outside of their hits they had a thing for licensing obscure titles with… a certain style.  Thus, when I think of Manga, I generally think of terrible, lifeless dubbing, dark, washed-out visuals, and the trading of plot cohesion for mindless action and “more realistic” character designs.

That all said, Psychic Wars is a certain breed of terrible.  Too stupid to consider mediocre, but not so painful to watch that I feel disgusted.  In a way, I actually find it intriguing.  It’s like someone attempted to make a movie out of a storyboard, then neglected to bother with pesky things like fleshing out the details in between.

Well, enough prattling.  Here’s Psychic Wars.

The film begins insultingly enough with a blatant attempt to present the film as artistic.  Wow, two weeks in a row…

The camera focuses on a red balloon that is released and pops.  Meanwhile, I’m already bored to death by the narration.  Something about demons, I think.

Oh wait, now I remember.  The “narrator” talks about how a battle between demons and humans has been going on for ages, and now a threat is about to emerge, and she needs to pass on her powers to a chosen one.

That chosen one is Dr. Ukyo Retsu, a surgeon called in to perform a surgery on an old woman with “a kind of cancer you have never encountered.”  So, the doc starts operating, and something strange happens… The tumor is in fact a demon!  Quick, cut to something completely different!

For no apparent reason, we see Dr. Ukyo exploring a shrine with a glowing idol.  He notices the idol bears a resemblance to the old woman… which I guess I’ll take his word for.  Then he gets buried under the shrine/cave and rises from the rubble while glowing gold.

Now imbued with the power of the old woman (which apparently wasn’t strong enough to fight against a demonic tumor), Dr. Ukyo… returns to the hospital to flirt with Nurse Fuyuko.  Oh, and learns that the tumor is acting up and doing demonic things.  So he has to take care of it.

So now Dr. Ukyo realizes his newfound powers are for a purpose: to exterminate all the demons.
He immediately sets off with Fuyuko to a shrine for no particular reason, pray I guess… and then get attacked by a giant demon.

Ukyo manages to defeat the demon using his amazing psychic powers such as glowing gold and hitting.  Then Ukyo and Fuyuko go visit Ukyo’s old college friend because why not?  Apparently, they were both in the boxing club, which I guess explains why the doctor is so good at punching… but not so much anything else.  The teacher tells them about some data that suggests there is an ancient city nearby, which, if true, could mean a complete revolution in the history of Japan.

So, naturally, it’s time for Dr. Ukyo to go there.

Ukyo apparently senses the danger in the area and tells Fuyuko to stay behind while he explores the ruins.  By the way, do these two still have their regular jobs?

There’s this whole dramatic scene where Ukyo tells Fuyuko to stay behind because it’s dangerous… and the chick surprises him by showing up anyway.

So, they enter the forest and make camp, then Ukyo hears a noise and tells Fuyuko to stay put while he checks it out.  Because, y’know, that always turns out great.

Turns out it was a deer.  Then Fuyuko screams.  Yep, she’s been taken.  Presumably by demons, but we can’t rule out kidnapping deer.

Ukyo pursues Fuyuko into the nearby cave and stumbles upon that long-lost ancient city his friend was talking about.  Apparently, archeologists were too lazy to explore large, obvious caves.

Oh, and like all old ruins, it starts to go crazy as soon as someone enters.

So, Ukyo doesn’t really have any clue where to go aside from forward, and he gets swallowed up by water… which for some reason transports him to what appears to be the Doctor Who intro.

And for some reason, nuns are here.  Okay, technically they’re priestesses (I assume) but just look at how they’re dressed!

The floating nuns tell Ukyo not to resist, and he lands safely in a land of sepia.

Apparently he’s gone into the past.  But never mind figuring out what the hell is going on; DEMONS!  Use your psychic powers to kill them!

Ukyo fends off the demons and realizes he’s in the past.  That’s when the color returns to normal.

Ukyo meets up with some raggedy humans, who think he is a god sent from the future to save them.  Also, the elder delivers the most hilarious line of the film.

Hilarious.  Oh, and Fuyuko’s in trouble.  Y’know, assuming she actually went into the ruins and got sucked into the past ahead of Ukyo and had the same guidance from the nuns or whatever.

So Ukyo finds Fuyuko and rescues her by jumping at her and not cutting the rope behind her because apparently just ramming at her will suffice.

And once they’re in the water, Fuyuko attacks.  Whoops, looks like it was a demon trap all along!

Ukyo and the demon struggle for a while until Ukyo psychically uppercuts the demon in the balls in what is quite possibly the most out-of-place scene in the entire film.

After a more legitimate killing stroke, the demon seems to die… but not before releasing one last attack!

So yeah, the demon tumors are a pathetic little minor distraction.  Ukyo returns to the village and is told to exterminate the entire demon race at their capital.  Guess where they live?

Turns out the ancient city did belong to a long-lost civilization… of demons, not humans.

Ukyo shows up just as the leader is holding an important speech about how they are destined to be extinct unless they follow the Dark Queen’s portal into the future.  Oh, and for some reason, they have a stockpile of explosives under the city, so it takes little effort for Ukyo to set the whole place to explode from one match.

Although a majority of the demon civilization is destroyed, a scant few manage to escape into the portal.  Ukyo pursues and arrives back in his own time, then kills all but the leader.

The demon lord proves to be rather tough, so Ukyo gets into an oil tanker and drives it into the demon lord and off a highway ramp.  Y’know, psychically.

After finally making the demon civilization extinct in the past and future, Ukyo sees Fuyuko standing nearby.  Time for badly-drawn love scene!

But all is not well.  The nuns appear and interrupt what appears to be the ending to Roots Search to tell Ukyo that his mission is not yet complete.

 

So, Ukyo decides to completely ignore the warnings of the nuns and proceed with his and Fuyuko’s marriage plans.  Before meeting with Fuyuko’s parents, she has Ukyo stop by a family shrine.  There, she talks about how the demon civilization was wiped out despite being the smarter and superior civilization.  Then she asks Ukyo to follow through with a suicide pact.  Here we go…

Is it another demon trap?  No; as it turns out, Fuyuko is in fact the Dark Queen.  She has been mating with other human males and sending her offspring into the past to rebuild the demon civilization, but they always end up getting killed.  Oh, and she wanted to mate with Ukyo to create a powerful demon, but then she fell in love with him.  S’okay, you didn’t need that slut anyway.  Besides, she really looks like this:

Imagine that; she’s been wearing that under her clothes the whole time.

Oh, and she summons the Demon of the Winds, who I think is just a big pink cloud that looks like a face.  The nuns appear to fight it off, and it’s at this point I realize they’re an actual force and not just the spirits of departed psychics meant to guide Ukyo.  They can actually DO things.  So why were they just floating around until now when they could be killing demons?

During Ukyo’s battle with the Dark Queen, he psychically materializes the weapons of demons he’s defeated into his hands, and… wait, WHAT?! He has actual powers?!

Fuyuko returns to human form and again tells Ukyo she really did love him… then dies.  The nuns take her body and say her body needs to be cremated.  Then they tell Ukyo to go to Fuyuko’s family, as that is where he will find his happiness.  And that “she” is waiting for him.

“She” who?  Is Fuyuko reborn as a human?  Is there another Fuyuko?  Does she have a hot sister?  This is what we’re left with – that somehow, things will turn out okay for Ukyo if he goes to Fuyuko’s family.  Did she even have a family?  She was secretly a demon posing as a human!  What was the extent of her disguise?  But fuck the details, it’s not like we needed them for the rest of this movie!

The best part of this film then happens: the ending credits.  The ending credit song is generic karaoke bait, but it sounds pretty damn good and felt like a reward for sticking through to the end.  It’s like the singer, Masatoshi Nakamura, was the only person involved in this film who gave a damn.

Cheez: 0
Some B-movies have at least one quality that makes them fun.  They might be completely over-the-top, they might so objectively terrible that it’s fun to make fun of it, or they might just have sexy love scene injected into it to make it all go down smoother.  This film was below average in every conceivable avenue.

Pleasure Rating: Must’ve Been High
Without a doubt, this was a bad, bad movie.  But it never physically hurt.  It moved too fast to really dwell on any flaws for long, and it was only an hour long.

Rewatchability: 1
There’s just no reason to ever watch this movie in the first place except out of some morbid curiosity.

Music: Forgettable

Marketability: 0
The characters are all generic forgettables, the demons are just large colored ogre-types, and the psychic powers consist of a thin glow.  The plot sucks, the characters suck (and it’s especially laughable that we’re apparently expected to care about Fuyuko at all), the designs suck, the animation sucks, and the music sucks except for the ending song.  I dunno, maybe someone would get a kick out of owning PVC models of five generic nuns with marbles.

This film is a waste of everyone’s time, especially for the people who made it, and Masatoshi Nakamura deserves better than to be associated with it.  I couldn’t find the specific song on Youtube, so I decided to risk it and upload.

Seriously, you can’t watch and hear that and not think “KARAOKE!”

Not sure what my next post will be.  It’ll either be a new build of VG Lucia, a new Bardass! chapter, or a review of Detonator II: Night Watch (starring a moustachioed Pierce Brosnan).