As i already mentioned before, my Vita is still in the shop for repairs, meaning one of the planned reviews won’t be ready in time, but it is my birthday, and they announced a 4K remaster of Angel’s Egg supervised by Oshii himself…
So you know what it means? Time to review In The Aftermath (also known as In The Aftermath: Angels Never Sleep), in its Blu-Ray release from Arrow Video, of course i got this release as soon as i knew it existed.
And yes, i started planning this earlier this month only to read some days later of Corman’s passing, so this was not meant to be a tribute…. but it now is because Roger Corman was a true fuckin cinema legend in so many ways it’s unbelievable, either if you were a fan of his B-movies production or knew how he basically kickstarted the career of so many future movie stars like Jack Nicholson and directors like James Cameron, to say the obvious.
Maybe an odd choice of movie to cover as a tribute, but the timing has been so weirdly apt i can’t ignore it, and this is indeed an interesting piece of cinema history, of when Corman indirectly met Mamoru Oshii… but didn’t know what to do with his vision, to put it politely.
So, what is Into The Aftermath?
A relic from the time Roger Corman (or more accuratly, his company, New Horizons Pictures) somehow got the distribution rights for Angel’s Egg, really didn’t really knew what to do with it, until he commissioned a weird live action with repurposed footage from the animated film, so they could actually sell it since it was the rise of VHS and home video as a market.
I know this may sound all sorts of unholy in retrospect, especially if you love Oshii’s melanchonic, profoundly sad masterpiece like i do, like a sucker punch to know it was actually localized in english speaking territories when it released…. in a bastardized, absurd way, that ALMOST makes it reach the “cut n paste” territory of ninja yore.
But i don’t envy New Horizons Pictures either, because it’s was part of a distribution deal and so they paid little for the rights to the movie, but then it was clearly a big “Now what?!” situation, remember, it was 1988, and this was a niche anime film for an adult audience… as in, actual adults, not the way companies would later try to brand anime releases in the western markets in order to push the narrative of “not for kids”.
Or so would the discourse go if this wasn’t a DECADE before distributors would try to sell anime also aimed at adults that wasn’t actual exploitation porn or edgy teen aimed shows.
So yeah, in 1988 there was absolutely no real market in the “western grounds” for a religion – christianity too – themed anime film with barely any dialogue, violence or action, not for something animated coming from Japan in the 80s, anyway, so i kinda pity the people at New Horizons being stuck with a license with virtually no audience or appeal.
Then again before the 2K restoration done by Arrow Video in 2018, it never released outside of the UK and barely on DVD, so it’s no wonder it has been incredibly obscure and unknown for decades, and why even today is barely even covered by anime or animation focused outlets.
What they did is basically wrote a different movie around stock footage from Angel’s Egg… and even that isn’t quite correct, because they kept some elements, more for necessity than choice, but they did.
For the reasons discussed before, this isn’t an animated movie, but a live action film… mostly, since the main bulk is made of newly shot footage of people in hazmat suits wandering about what i can only describe as “Chernobyl, Auckland”, even though it was actually shot in an abandoned Kaiser Steel mill in Fontana, California.
There you see, lies the ingenuity of Corman’ enterprises and his mastery for making the most out of very little, though it’s also very Corman, as it is known the actors in this were given little direction and had absolutely no idea of what footage they were reacting/opposed to, it reminds me of the production mess of The Terror, when Corman made a movie… because they finished shooting 3 days earlier, so why not, let’s shoot footage with some of the actors (including a young Jack Nicholson and Francis Ford Coppola) writing whatever they wanted and then try to eek out a story of some sort out of it by smashing the scripts together.
Both the director and the producer founding the original movie “incomprehensible” (which is the kind of sincerity you don’t see often with these projects) obviously didn’t help, but it is so very perfect to the making of this “mess”.
And obvious when you watch it after having seen Angel’s Egg, which is i recommend doing anyway, sure as hell before actually watching In The Aftermath.
The first impression is that the movie looks like if Bruno Mattei’s Rats had stock footage from Belladonna Of Sadness, so they used it, regardless if it made sense, BUT i’ll say that they didn’t just smosh things together completely at random here.
A least the title is actually fitting for both this new movie and Angel’s Egg, in terms of setting and tone, and it’s actually surprising how many similarities survived, despite this being a very loose adaptation/reworking of a movie that the director and producer straight up admitted they didn’t get. And you can tell their understanding of it never got beyond “looks amazing, no clue what’s it about”, but they did understand they could have/had to use the beatiful animation by studio DEEN in some way, though mostly to have less footage to shot from scratch.
It’s still about an apocalypse, it involves angels and Old Testament capital G christian deity related things, an egg is at the center of the plot, there is a dream-like approach,and technically there is very little in terms of “action” happening, but that’s about where the similarities end.
The new plot centers about an angel girl is tasked by the other angel (the soldier with the crucifix-rifle that was the antagonistic force in Angel’s Egg, her brother in the redub) to find a life form worth of salvation via the egg as she’s 9 years old, enough to become training as an angel, and as she goes through the city from Angel’s Egg, she links with the “human world”, which has a couple of guys, Frank and Goose (i dunno why this is not a Top Gun reference, it isn’t, but should), two ex-soldiers or military men of some fashion that wander the live action post-apocalypse in search of resources to avoid breathing the contaminated air, and survive in general.
The angel girl first appears to Frank, but she isn’t sure if to trust him, until she sees him mourn the loss of his friend Goose, killed by a scavenger dude they stumble upon, his piety moves her, so she delivers humanity the egg she was carrying, which basically plays “undo” on the apocalypse.
Yeah, the surprisingly positive ending is another sign they really didn’t understand the movie they were using as stock footage shish kebab, but it adds to the weird factor and is kinda unexpected when the VHS cover arts had a dude in hazmat suit holding an egg with a nuclear symbol on it.
And “weird” is actually the keyword, especially when they straight up “plant” the cut image of the girl from the anime footage to transiction to the live-action little girl playing the same character, and not even try to edit it like the character seeing her is blinking. It’s just there on the same shot, repeated, then it fades into the live action counterpart. Weird.
Weird and honestly just…… kinda there, honestly, it’s not really exciting or that involving, the ending is anticlimactic, the low budget becomes notable with the wonky weapons and the cheap digital effects (especially in the first act and the finale), it’s hard to care too much about the live action characters or the attempts at atmosphere since it’s also very short, 82 minutes, especially with that kind of ending it pulls, maybe out of necessity to wrap it up fast.
It is funny them having so much dialogue for the girl when the original movie’s lines of spoken dialogue could be counted on 2 human hands…. so much that they basically have to reuse one of the very few shots when she moves her lips to verbally comunicate in Angel’s Egg, and her thoughts and opinions are mostly, largely told via voice over, not that it could have been any other way.
I will admit it’s fascinating them trying to fashion a new story from the footage alone, again, even though i’m not really surprised it completely flew over their heads, so it’s like them imagining what the plot of Angel’s Egg could have been… despite them having seen Angel’s Egg. XD
I think the movie it’s aptly summed up perfectly when the redubbed voiceover for the angelic girls says “and i had to do something out of it”.
Quality is not really a concern or a major issue, oddly enough, as it’s a marvel a movie like this even exists due to a particular set of circumstances that couldn’t really be replicated a decade later or nowadays, but in all honesty it’s kind of a middling experience, not too bad, not really awful, and its short runtime makes it easier to forgive and/or digest, depending on how you feel about it.
As a curiosity it’s incredible, though, and the Arrow Edition, aside from the basic 2K restoration, does includes some nice extras (i would say there could be more, but i’m just glad this release even exists to begin with, to be honest), especially the interviews with the lead actor, Tony Markes, and the director, Carl Colpaert, alongside a feature about the influence of Oshii’s original film.
Speaking of which, i do hope Arrow Video can get their hands on this new 4K restoration, but regardles of which company will bring it westward (i’m positive someone will this time, come on), we’re long overdue to see an english – and hopefully lavish – Blu-Ray edition of Angel’s Egg.
Wise Cafe (International) 