I really wanted to like this movie. I heard how it was named the worst movie of the year in some Japanese awards show, but a few positive online reviews convinced me to pick it up. I am a big fan of Japanese live-action movies and anime; I even imported Cutie Honey before it came to America. But man, Devilman has problems.

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It starts out fairly promising, with the two male leads and best friends (played by actual pretty boy twins) attending high school. They are so skinny (virtually anorexic) that it’s hard to take them seriously in some of the action sequences, but the dudes handle their acting requirements quite well. Anyway, we establish that Akira is good natured and Ryo is cold and creepy but get along well.

It’s not long before people start getting possessed by demons, which cause them to run amuck and kill others. The demons are CG and mostly look cool, with inventive creature designs. However, the way the story handles them is poor. Initially demons just run amock and kill humans, but then the movie starts treating them as a persecuted minority. When the military find a nest of demons and start gunning them down, we’re supposed to feel sorry for them.

Sorry for these bloodthirsty monsters… Nope, it doesn’t work. Then you have some sympathetic demons – people who can turn into monsters at will but try to live on as human beings. It’s never explained why some are evil and others are not. The demon thing ultimately feels schizophrenic and unsatisfying.

My next major complaint is the film’s message. After establishing that people are afraid of anything different from them, by hunting down and killing these good/bad demons, the movie devolves into a biting criticism of human nature. People start accusing each other of being demons without justification. Civil war erupts.

Innocents are treated extremely cruelly. I don’t disagree that paranoia would ensue in such a scenario, but the movie takes it too far. It just assumes that 99% of everyone would just take on a mob mentality and kill each other. Only a few of the main characters are portrayed with any integrity.

The movie makes sure to tell us in no uncertain terms that the demons could not win their war on humans unless people turned on each other. As a result, the last third of the film is extremely depressing. Not sad in a good way, just completely bleak and heavy-handed.

I haven’t mentioned Devilman himself up to now, and that’s because he’s hardly in the movie! I suspect that is because he is computer-generated and a greater presence would have strained the budget. He does look really cool when fully transformed.

In the end, I can only recommend this movie to diehard Devilman fans and fans of depressing Japanese movies. If you like the original Urotsukidoji, Devilman is quite similar in tone (but not as good). You can’t buy this film for the demon-fighting action because there just isn’t enough of it.

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