After spending the better part of a decade doing very little with your life but watching movies, you eventually check out of life. You also lose all your interest in film as an artistic or storytelling medium, and shift your focus towards ever more cheap and schlocky bottom-shelf B-movies. Eventually, you arrive at Wolf Guy: Enraged Lycanthrope.
For those who would rather nothing more than to stare, braindead, at a screen through 90 minutes of gratuitous nudity, violence, martial arts, and random surgery, loosely held together by the most senseless werewolf narrative imaginable, this is the place.
The story goes that Shin'ichi Chiba one night witnesses a man apparently mauled to death by an invisible tiger after running through the street rambling incoherently about a tiger and a curse and a woman named Miki. A very non-threatening-looking tiger is superimposed on the screen briefly to suggest that Shin'ichi Chiba can see the tiger too, I guess.
Upon investigating the case further, he discovers that the woman, Miki, who cursed that guy with being mauled by said tiger, is actually a stripper who got syphilis, and the yakuza boss responsible for arranging her infection with syphilis is intentionally directing her tiger curses against his enemies by telling her they're the ones who gave her syphilis.
I'm not sure what any of this has to do with Chiba's character. Is he supposed to be a police detective investigating the maulings? I don't even know. Half way through the movie, we're informed that he's a werewolf. Presumably you knew that from reading the title, but it's easy to forget by that point. We're told on the 15th day of the lunar cycle, he will transform into a werewolf.
Well, "transform" is a stretch. No attempt is made to make him look like a werewolf. In the final climax, well, he just kind of jumps high and a funny sound effect plays when he jumps so you know he's changed. Also he's impervious to bullets. The two defining attributes of a werewolf: invulnerability and jumping!
It's hilarious to hear the director and producer interviewed on the blu-ray edition, basically trashing the film, amused and bemused that it's being sold in the West now. Basically, the studio wanted an adaptation of the Wolf Guy manga, but wouldn't put up any money to do it properly, so neither the producer nor the director took the project seriously at all. The writer of the manga walked out of a private screening after 15 minutes, swearing never to let Toei adapt one of his properties again.
Most people viewing Wolf Guy I expect, will react to it like the director says: "What the hell is this?". But perhaps, if you're coming to Wolf Guy following the natural progression I described in my first paragraph, you will be in a state to take in the film's convoluted plot uncritically, at which point, I believe you will have achieved a kind of film-viewer's nirvana.
For those who would rather nothing more than to stare, braindead, at a screen through 90 minutes of gratuitous nudity, violence, martial arts, and random surgery, loosely held together by the most senseless werewolf narrative imaginable, this is the place.
The story goes that Shin'ichi Chiba one night witnesses a man apparently mauled to death by an invisible tiger after running through the street rambling incoherently about a tiger and a curse and a woman named Miki. A very non-threatening-looking tiger is superimposed on the screen briefly to suggest that Shin'ichi Chiba can see the tiger too, I guess.
Upon investigating the case further, he discovers that the woman, Miki, who cursed that guy with being mauled by said tiger, is actually a stripper who got syphilis, and the yakuza boss responsible for arranging her infection with syphilis is intentionally directing her tiger curses against his enemies by telling her they're the ones who gave her syphilis.
I'm not sure what any of this has to do with Chiba's character. Is he supposed to be a police detective investigating the maulings? I don't even know. Half way through the movie, we're informed that he's a werewolf. Presumably you knew that from reading the title, but it's easy to forget by that point. We're told on the 15th day of the lunar cycle, he will transform into a werewolf.
Well, "transform" is a stretch. No attempt is made to make him look like a werewolf. In the final climax, well, he just kind of jumps high and a funny sound effect plays when he jumps so you know he's changed. Also he's impervious to bullets. The two defining attributes of a werewolf: invulnerability and jumping!
It's hilarious to hear the director and producer interviewed on the blu-ray edition, basically trashing the film, amused and bemused that it's being sold in the West now. Basically, the studio wanted an adaptation of the Wolf Guy manga, but wouldn't put up any money to do it properly, so neither the producer nor the director took the project seriously at all. The writer of the manga walked out of a private screening after 15 minutes, swearing never to let Toei adapt one of his properties again.
Most people viewing Wolf Guy I expect, will react to it like the director says: "What the hell is this?". But perhaps, if you're coming to Wolf Guy following the natural progression I described in my first paragraph, you will be in a state to take in the film's convoluted plot uncritically, at which point, I believe you will have achieved a kind of film-viewer's nirvana.