Wow it's been a year already!

Incidentally, I was in Tokyo this summer, and while there witnessed a city wide marketing campaign for one of this year's selections!

Guess which one?!

More saturated than Naruto or Death Note, Bleach... but not Gundam... not yet anyway... was DMC!

Now imagine this poster 400 times bigger, hung over a large crowd.

No, not Devil May Cry for fellow gamers-- but Detroit Metal City which will explode on screen at MM in the next few days.

I'm talking action figures. Not happy meal accessories either, but fully articulated boxed figurines, box sets, bobble heads, DMC blankets, manga DVDS, CD compilations, singles-- bags at HMV plastered with images from the movie.

This guy's the drummer...

This movie is no small deal. You could compare this sort of attention for a clearly subversive movie to the marketing of Fight Club-- my favorite American studio film ever.

You know, when I leafed right to left through the DMC reprint of issue no.1, not really understanding anything going on in the dialogue bubbles-- I could still quickly piece together that this movie is going to be pretty... well, er, let's just say unconventional. Liberal, maybe? Who knows, maybe they were talking about educational stuff, but the things these characters were doing weren't very PG 13.

They look so cute when they bite the heads off of small animals!

Now, I'm not sure if we're talking Miike level weirdness; but the images I saw put a smile on my face, and after sharing it with my fiancee (who's Japanese)-- she refused to read it openly on the subway. Claiming it was WEIRD. These are the kind of red flags that I look for when seeking out quality product.
That aside, let me indulge myself by commenting on the bizarre duality I witnessed in Japan. Mass Marketed by HMV (love it) Too weird to be accepted in public.

And this just doesn't apply to my fiancee-- but many of the people I met over there. No one had heard of Miike Takashi (Audition, Ichi the Killer) !
The Machine Girl played in only two grassroots theatres, one with only one show a day.

I watched a pretty insane horror movie called Tamami: the Baby's Curse on only it's second day... and the theatre was practically empty.
Now I'm not going to say that the HMV marketing machine is also behind Tamami-- it's not! But it became clear to me that these movies are made for US. They're exports!

I don't intend to generalize, but the the niche audience was visibly smaller there-- and my fiancee has been telling me this all along. Unless, of course, there is a clandestine underground movement where they screen truly depraved exploitation movies, and I just wasn't invited.
So support HMV Tokyo, the Japanese cult film export industry and see DMC!

A literal cog in HMV Tokyo's marketing machine... Coin dispensable DMC!

...Just so you know it appeals to the underground too; they were also selling DMC t-shirts in basement punk rock stores in Harajuku (Tokyo's Kensington Market meets Queen street but with crepe stands, goth dolls, and 50's style greaser biker dudes everywhere rockin out)