Customer Reviews

Devilman

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I had read nothing but negative reviews over this film & that it even won an award for worst film of the year in Japan. I'd have to agree to an extent. Being a longtime fan of the classic anime I took a chance, & thankfully it's not too disappointing. While certainly not the best acting, pretty silly dubbed dialogue, an unbalanced storyline, & tepid cgi that rivals any of the movies coming out of the Sci Fi channel, Devilman rolls along like a guilty pleasure with the brakes stripped. Like Black Mask, Guyver Dark Hero, or Spawn, imagery & action rules over substance.

this is pretty good for live action a little cheesy and i think they should of stuck to CG for the whole movie but after all i really liked it. The arrival was on time, in good condition and had a cover sleeve. Great Job!

[...]

this movie is, in a word, stunning. the acting is a tour de force not seen out of japan in at least 20 years. ryo feels so real it's like you can literally feel him. feel his delicious luciferian "assets." akira is realistic as a the dumb piece of s--- he normally is in the manga, so kudos for that. however the main attraction in terms of acting for this movie is bill jackson, aka lord zenon. he brings so much depth and subtle emotion to the plot that it's impossible to not tear up a little as he reveals his true allegiance. there are also cool females but i don't remember them as much but who cares. they're cool. the plot is also completely shocking, you will laugh, cry, and never be able to see what's coming next despite the film excerpt above literally spoiling all of the main components of the story. the cg is so life like and realistic, you might be tricked into thinking it's actually happening! this is seriously the best movie ever. i give devilman the live action 5 psycho jennys out of 5

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.

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. Unfortunately, much like Venom's depiction in Spider-Man 3, Devilman has a half-transformed version that does not use computer graphics. The makeup looks pretty silly. I have never seen the actual Devilman anime, but I expected the movie to involve Devilman saving humanity from the demon plague. There are a few such moments, but this version of Devilman has to be the most ineffectual superhero, American or Japanese, that I have ever seen. He is just never there to help the people he cares about, or he will be present when things are going bad but refuse to transform. Still, Devilman's few action sequences are extremely stylish and exciting.

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.

As far is anime heroes go, Devilman is by far one of my favorites. A short time back I bought the two part OVA series on DVD and I determined, "yes this is supremely awesome" That said, this was a pair of OVA's from the interval between the eighties and ninties, an era which I've always felt was a bit of an anime renesance, thus they were already pretty high quality anyway. But the fact that this pair of eighties era OVA was far better than a millenium era film version of the same story, makes me feel very uneasy.

Granted, I haven't watched the Tokyo Shock edition of the film and only watched a raw version on the net. But even then, I could tell this movie was disappointing. While the quality of the CG animated demons was pretty cool, they were allowed no time of actual fighting in the film. Only two battles, Devilman VS Siren and Devilman VS Satan are filled with any level of actual action. The film focused more on the witchhunt of demons which inevitably leads to the end of the world.

For the record, the world did end in Nagai's original manga, so this was meant to happen. But, if had been executed better than it was in this movie, I'd have been more pleased with it. Also, if the time of the film had been filled less with lame drama and more with high grade demon battles, that would have greatly improved this film.

My final note is this, the movie version Nagai's Cutie Honey was better than this, and that in itself is insult enough. This is one of Nagai's greatest story concepts and these jerks totally destroyed it. If I were you, I would not waste my money, you'll only be disappointed.

Right now, Amon is plotting in hell on how best to get back at these punks for ruining his one chance at blockbuster fame.

I think the only way I could dislike this film more is if I had seen the source material it must be mutilating. Devilman tells the story of a teenager who has become infused with a jelly-fish like demon inside of him and his quest to um. Well, I imagine he was on a quest to stop the demons taking over the world, but the main character took a backseat to all of that and when he returned he was more interested in the girl he liked and after that he was just upset that his best friend was the devil.

The story feels like a conglomeration of subplots more than an actual story. We follow the main character Akira/Devilman for the majority of it, but there's also heavy focus on the general decay of the world following the demon outbreak, and a pair of outcast children, one of whom has a demon inside her, trying not to be killed. Devilman plays out as if it thinks it's an epic film, but there isn't any depth to it and certainly no epic proportions.

Now, bad movies get made all the time, and there's no use questioning why. It just happens. But what I do have to question is why make a live-action film of an animated one if EVERY SINGLE effect is going to be poorly CGI animated. When Akira turns into Devilman he becomes a giant, winged gargoyle with little texture and fights other animated monsters with animated backdrops and terrible, animated explosions. The last fifteen minutes of the movie I forgot I was watching a movie. I thought I had just beaten a game on Playstation 2 and was watching the final cutscene. If your effects are going to be so pathetically animated, why not make the entire movie animated so they aren't as abrasive when they show up? There's some mediocre action scenes in here too, but they're overshadowed by that awful animation so I hated them.

So it's very frustrating trying to figure out why this was done. If your CGI effects are animated so badly that the entire film should have just been animated, and the film you're making is based on an already animated film, somewhere down the line someone should have pulled the plug on this debacle.

Don't watch it. It's all infuriating and pointless.

this is a nice movie if you are a devilman fan this good movie . not bad for the price the picture qulity is good storie line is good a little cgi if no what I mean .

Devilman is a live action movie based on Go Nagai, who also created Cutie Honey and Kekko Kamen. It starts off with a cool scene of young boys wanting to grow up and become monsters. You see the boys playing around with monsters masks and having fun. I thought I was the only one who wanted to grow up to be a monster. But it happens in Japan too.
Anyway, Akira and Ryo are best friends who take care of each other in high school. Akira has a super cute girlfriend, Miki, who has a cool scene where she spikes a volleyball, hitting some mean girls who are bullying her friend. That scene may be the best one in the entire film. The movie just lags. Director Hiroyuki Nasu should have paced this movie better. It would have benefitted from a better editing job. There is a lot of talk about demons being hunted and killed by humans in the middle. The only thing that kept me from turning it off, was the Bob Sapp humorous newscasts throughout. Sapp can be funny, especially when he has three separate heads. But Sapp couldn't save this film.
The ending reminded me too much of the Devil May Cry games.
Overall, this is a slow, painful, poorly paced movie, that drawns on and on when it should have finished earlier.