Iron Virgin Jun

Original Title: 鉄の処女 JUN (アイアンバージン)
Romanized: Tetsu no Shojo Jun (Aian Baajin)
Literal: Iron Virgin Jun

Plot Synopsis

Jun Asakura is the daughter of one of the most powerful families in Japan. A family known for the strength--both physical and mental--of its women. When Jun's mom plans a "bride auction" for her 18th birthday, she flees the party before she gets married off to some random creepy rich kid. But even though Jun is no ordinary girl, she's going to have a heck of a time escaping the veritable army her mom has out to haul her back and make a woman out of her.

Review

Rating: 1 / 5
Reviewer: Marc
Review Date: 2006-10-24

If nothing else, you have to admire Go Nagai's ability to come up with absolutely insane ideas, write stories around them with something resembling a straight face, and not only get them published, but animated as well. Sometimes the result is a sort of tasteless mad genius. Other times... well, it's just sorta crazy. Iron Virgin Jun is one of those other times.

Maybe the scenario makes more sense if you've read the comics, but I somehow doubt it. The story ostensibly takes place in present-day Japan, except for no readily apparent reason there are teams of superpowered rapists-for-hire, magical islands, undead grandparents, and the musclebound, crown-wearing women of the powerful Asuka family. There isn't even a passing effort to explain the "logic" of this setting, not that it would have helped.

As usual, Nagai's strength (other than sheer insanity) is his ability to give characters that seem like a joke oddly likable personalities. Here, we have a scrawny servant, Kratta, who does his best to help Jun avoid her mother's plans, Jun's meek but concerned father (a reserved, traditionally-dressed Japanese man in the shadow of his mountain of a wife), and Jun herself.

Jun certainly gets credit for being a unique heroine. She may wear a tiara and a frilly pink dress and spends most of the flick fleeing raving monsters, but she is not your average damsel in distress. No, she's got a meaty physique that would impress characters from Fist of the North Star, Hoganesque wrestling moves on tap, and the only fight she loses is one against three helicopters full of snipers. It's practically worth the price of admission to see the heroine flex her huge muscles and come bursting out of her party dress, or to watch as her "savior" valiantly tries to help only to be tossed out of the way every time. Plus, she's kind of a sweet girl on top of it. How Nagai does it, I have no idea.

That's the "good." As for the bad, there's pretty much everything else. Topping the list is the Golden Cherry Boys, a quartet of villainous lechers who wear various phallic animal-shaped robotics as codpieces and have been hired by Jun's mother to violate the poor girl. Yes, she ends up beating the living tar out of them all, but it's still wrong on so many levels it's impressive--I wasn't sure if I should laugh in disbelief or gouge my eyes out. There's also some sort of indecipherable symbolism about a magical island that her waifish aunt lives on. Apparently, you can only get there after... I don't know, after you've been enlightened to the plight of others or something. And no, I'm not kidding.

It doesn't even have any little self-conscious winks to the audience--the whole thing is remarkably straight faced. I admit there's a sort of mesmerizing appeal to the insanity of it all, but the entire premise is so outrageously tasteless that I felt like I needed a shower when it was over. Plus, the end is simultaneously conclusive, oddly melancholy, and rather unsatisfying--at the very least, I was hoping for some sort of explanation about what the heck was up with that island, but nope.

The visuals are sort of good and bad at the same time. There are all the Nagai standbys--girl chained to wall in spotlight, flagrant displays of ridiculous aristocratic wealth, big, ugly women, and even uglier men. The coloring is garish and the character designs are largely unpleasant and rather inconsistent. On the other hand, it's pretty darned funny to see Jun's cute face paired with her burly physique (even if her musculature seems to vary between merely beefy and totally ripped depending on the scene). There's also all manner of half-decent action--wild fisticuffs galore, a car chase in a pink microvan, and a massive, brutal, pro-wrestling-style brawl with her towering beast of a mother at the climax. Mom's a heck of a character, by the way--she looks like Violence Jack in drag duded up in some sort of futuristic opera signer armor. She wears a crown that looks a little like Galactus' head, too. The action also has a better sense of space than most Nagai anime--not great, but good enough not to bug me.

The music is just sort of there--barely noticeable and totally forgettable. At least the end theme is a passable, mildly edgy rock song. I do have one question: Who decided that in all Go Nagai anime "skritchy-skritchy-skritch" is the sound of an evil person forming a plan? Really, listen during that "knowing, menacing glare" close-up--it's always there.

The Japanese voice acting is surprisingly not bad. Chisa Yokoyama (yes, Sasami) voices Jun, and pulls off the somewhat beleaguered nice girl well even if she's a little shrill as a grunting brawler. Her hapless, desperate servant is also pretty funny. The only other role that doesn't involve a lot of stock screaming and drooling is mom, and she's... well, impressively gruff--her voice certainly fits. I didn't watch Anime Works' dub, but their subtitle translation is rather sloppy.

In all, Iron Virgin Jun may well have some guilty appeal to folks who dig Nagai's quality limbo, but for me at least it seemed to bend so far backward it hit the ground. I wanted to like it, but it's so outrageously tasteless I just couldn't. If you're going to watch it, definitely don't do it alone--Iron Virgin Jun practically demands to be heckled with friends, and make sure they're friends with really bad taste.

Related Recommendations

The closest of Nagai's works is definitely the sleazy but slightly more fun Kekko Kamen, or, on the serious (and even worse) end, maybe The Abashiri Family. Cutey Honey is also along the same general lines. Finally, if you like the burly women theme, check out the Project A-ko series; Mari is the punchline in the first movie, and there are similar jokes throughout.

US DVD Review

Anime Works' DVD is basic but gets the job done. The video is reasonably good looking (or at least as good-looking as the garish original material allows), and it has stereo audio in Japanese and English plus soft subtitles (which aren't terribly accurate, unfortunately). Oddly the credits (which have a bit of story to go with them) are left completely in Japanese, followed by the English credits with no soundtrack at all. There are no special features at all.

Content Guide

Anime Works puts 13-up on the box, which would be fine--it's shockingly modest--except for the entire concept (rapists for hire?) and one short scene with the Cherry Boys doing bad things to the household staff just for show. That easily bumps it up to 16-up.

Violence: 2 - A lot of wrestling-style brawls, but it's not terribly graphic.

Nudity: 1 - Shockingly, absolutely no exposed flesh, although those phallic codpieces should count for something.

Sex/Mature Themes: 3 - The entire concept is tasteless, and there's a brief, undetailed scene with the baddies ravishing the maids--whether it's consensual or not isn't clear.

Language: 1 - Again, shockingly clean, at least in the subtitles.

Notes and Trivia

Based on a short comic series of the same name by Go Nagai. As usual, it's not available in English. The original comic version ran during 1983 in the monthly "Big Comic Sprits," and was published as a single-volume compilation in 1984. It was reprinted in 1992, and again in 2000.

The Japanese characters used in the title literally translate as Iron Virgin. It's a play on words, since that is how "iron maiden" (the torture device) is written in Japanese. However, to make the difference clear, the title of this OAV (and the comic version) is captioned with phonetic characters for the English "Iron Virgin" instead of "Iron Maiden," implying that it's intended to be read that way and that the meaning is a bit different. It may well also be intended as a play on the name of the heavy metal band (which is written phonetically as Iron Maiden in Japanese, not using the literal characters); they were relatively popular at the time the comic was originally written.

Three random cultural side notes: The rewards for Jun on the TV screen are mistranslated; the reward for information is listed as 10,000,000 yen (roughly US$100,000) and the reward for her capture is 100,000,000 yen (roughly US$1,000,000). For some reason Anime Works' subtitles say 1 million yen and 10 million yen respectively, which isn't correct either literally or as a rough translation to US dollars.

It's noted that although his name is actually Kurata (a real Japanese family name), Jun nicknames her servant Kratta (or, more accurately, Kuratta, though it sounds more like the former). I'm not positive about this, but I'd guess this is because "kuratta" can mean roughly "ate it" (as in "took a punch" or "wiped out") so it might be a joke on his rather scrawny physique and tendency to get knocked unconscious every time he tries to help in a fight.

Finally, the pink microbus that they commandeer and spend half the show tooling around in is actually a real type of vehicle in Japan; called a "K" wagon, they're a cheap alternative to a minivan or full-sized car. They're not built very solidly and have a very small engine, but make for decent, inexpensive transportation in Japan's cramped city streets. They're not, however, often seen in bright pink--usually white.

Availability

Available in the US from Anime Works on bilingual DVD. Was previously available on subtitled or dubbed VHS. (RightStuf has the DVD on clearance for $6 while supplies last.)

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