Makaitoshi Shinjuku (TV Movie 1988)

Makaitoshi Shinjuku: Directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri. With Hideyuki Hori, Hiromi Tsuru, Kiyoshi Kobayashi, Kyôko Tongû. A young swordsman ventures into a disaster stricken Shinjuku, Tokyo, to try and stop a powerful man, who has made a deal with the demon realm, from opening a portal that will allow demons to cross over to the human world.

“This is an anime that used to come on the Scifi channel back when it was known as the Scifi channel and not SyFy. It mainly came on when they had anime week and that is when I saw it and a few others. I recently saw an uncut version of this film and there are a few things that were not on the cut version, but for the most part all the scenes were there, just a lot of sex references. I always enjoyed this one, though it seems as if it should have been part of a series or something to explain some of the stuff that is going on, but a lot of anime films are like that; essentially, setting up a world with little explanation and really jumping right into the action.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eThe story has a man dueling with another. One has been blessed with the powers of the underworld and he soon dispatches the other man. Years later, this man makes his move to open the portal to hell fully and it is up to the son of the man killed to try and stop him. The younger man is a master of an art where he fights with only a kendo stick, but with the help of the presidentu0026#39;s daughter, a dude on mechanical roller skates and the mysterious Mephisto he just may have a shot at defeating the man the underworld chose as their champion!u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eI wish I had seen this with subtitles as the dub is not the worst, but there are a couple of characters that were just dubbed poorly. Mainly that small dude on roller skates they for reasons unknown gave a Spanish accent to. The character of Mephisto is cool as you never really ascertain his intentions and it is cool watching evil dispatched with a stick!u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eThe film was good and enjoyable, it could have been a bit longer to allow more character development, but then sometimes that can slow down the pace and the pace of this one is rather good. Our hero must battle a giant spider demon, a strange hairball thing that almost is like a sloth and get by the villainu0026#39;s magic to get by. Totally enjoyable and wish there were more films like this instead of the over saturation of series that is prevalent in anime today.”