Starring: Sonney Weil, Bick Balse, Herb Hummel

For a long time, Japanese animation had a bad rep in America: “those freaky violent cartoons with the schoolgirls and the tentacle monsters.” UROTSUKIDŌJI: THE LEGEND OF OVERFIEND is the film that’s largely responsible for this reputation. A video store staple in America, Hideki Takayama’s gruesome adaptation of Toshio Maeda’s erotic horror comic had a brief stint in U.S. theaters rocking a well-earned NC-17 rating.

Grim-faced and grotesque, Urotsukidōji is a hellish Freudian vision of torn bodies, sexual depravity and bitter pessimism.  The apocalyptic film picks up just before the prophesied rise of the demon-god The Overfiend, whose re-birth would merge the worlds of men and demons. As time of prophecy draws closer, demons flood into the dimension of men, throwing the Earth into a chaotic storm of sex and violence.