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While manga collective Clamp’s Tokyo Babylon (1990 -1993) ended in something of a cliffhanger later resolved in X (1992 – 2003), George Iida’s live-action adaptation, Tokyo Babylon/1999 – The Movie (1993) instead functions as a direct sequel, taking place five years after the events of the original story. Anyone familiar with the landscape of Japanese horror films of the time will hardly be surprised to see Iida in the director’s chair. Iida had emerged from the intersections of Japanese cinema and punk culture, directing self-made films (自習映画), appearing as the “Oxygen Cylinder Man” in Gakuryu Ishii’s no-holds barred musical take on Mad Max, Burst City (1982), and like his peers, cutting his teeth in Japan’s pink industry before ultimately being rewarded with the opportunity to direct gross-out films with a budget larger than the meager scraps punks had survived on. The first result being Cyclops (1987), a sci-fi horror flick about a group of scientists and their mutant cyclops prowling the streets for the next victim of their bio-experiments. Two years later, Iida followed up with Battle Heater. Released four months after Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), the eccentricities of Battle Heater pale in comparison, although the story regarding a kotatsu heater cannibalizing anything and everything in sight will still offer a few belly laughs to Japanese B-movie aficionados.
In the ensuing years, Iida would be recruited by Fuji TV to first work on the horror anthology, Tales of the Strange, and then Night Head, a BL-tinged, late-night drama about two psychic brothers on the run from their traumatic past. Night Head in particular allowed Iida to refine his style, demonstrating that his best material dealt with both the innocent and damned finding themselves in hellish circumstances which Iida renders by overwhelming the senses, sapping or saturating an image’s color, cranking the noise music a few decibels too loud, and writing out a scene as a series of grunts and cries. Sure, this aired on television, but it was the post-midnight time slot so Iida had a bit more creative leeway. These were the sensibilities that he brought forth to Tokyo Babylon.
Tokyo Babylon/1999 – The Movie sees Subaru Sumeragi (Toshihide Tonesaku) continuing to work as an onmyōji, and his latest case centers on a group of high school girls who have begun using black magic to punish those who have wronged them. Readers of the original Tokyo Babylon will recognize this as being the same overall plot of the third chapter in which a group of socially outcasted teenage girls get in over their heads imagining themselves as arbiters of justice and practicing black magic via phone calls.