Blood Reign: Curse of the Yoma (1989)

directed by Takashi Anno
Japan
80 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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This has nothing to do with BloodRayne. It's an anime set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where a lone warrior searches for the man who was once his companion, but also tried to kill him as well. There are horrible creatures called Yoma wandering around and occasionally some ninjas. That's the best I can do for a synopsis, because this thing is really confusing and I couldn't tell what the plot was doing most of the time. I think this had to have been a manga adaptation because it feels very strongly like it was trying to pack 10 books' worth of plot into 80 minutes.

Since this is so plotless, you're basically watching it for the cool monsters and fun body horror animation. Maybe if you pay closer attention, you could get something more out of it, but I didn't find it to have many redeeming qualities outside of super neat-looking gore and ridiculous fight scenes and creatures, which often come entirely out of left field. At one point a giant flaming horse emerges from the ocean and tramples a girl and I was just like "Okay. Sure." There's a scene where the bad guy rides said horse and then transforms into a pile of brown goop, which then transforms into a werewolf centaur. His upper half is a werewolf and his bottom half is a furry horse. That's one of the best monster designs I've ever seen.

As is often the case with Japanese sci-fi about war and destruction, there are implicit echoes of real life in this: when the main character is able to briefly talk to one of the Yoma, it tells him how the villagers it's preying on are broken, hopeless, lost people who are going nowhere in life, so what's the big tragedy in eating them? That sounds like the rhetoric used often to justify the machinery of war, that casualties taking place in some rundown poverty-stricken village with no electricity or technology are somehow either sad but inevitable, or just not too devastating in the first place.

It was also fun seeing a world reverted to a kind of feudal ruling system, with people wearing clothes and doing things that harken back to "traditional" rural Japanese lifestyles, because the whole Wild West Apocalypse trope is a big thing in American post-apoc movies and it's nice to see another country doing their take on it. I doubt the resources to have actual bands of roving samurai and ninja would exist in a world with this much scarcity, but let's not get into criticizing the realism of a movie with a werewolf centaur.

The characters are all exceptionally bland, even the protagonist and his desire to reunite with his childhood friend even if the friend is well past redeemability, but like I said, it's much easier to watch this for the cool animation style than because you're looking for something with emotional depth. I personally enjoy a lot of this specific kind of anime from the 80s and 90s where the goal was to be as over-the-top as physically possible with your monster designs and not care too much about the story. I don't want to make it out like this has no story, but it's just not the most important thing about it. It's basically a fluff piece with lots of good aesthetics.