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First, the important information: Sonny Chiba is Team Jacob.

There are so few actually obscure movies left these days. Nearly every movie of any cult interest has now been released on DVD, reviewed on a zillion websites (sometimes by me), and probably lined up for a remake somewhere in the world. Wolfguy: Enraged Lycanthrope is the exception, a movie that has made an admirable attempt to fall down the memory hole despite an instantly exploitable premise: Sonny Chiba as a werewolf.

Wolfguy was made in the midst of the Japanese exploitation boom, and features all the blood, boobs, and karate fights the genre required. The plot, such as it is, was made by taking all the conventions of Japanese detective/yakuza movies and putting them in a blender, then spreading the chunky results over 90 minutes. It doesn’t really make sense. It’s possible the version I saw was missing some scenes, but then again, it’s entirely possible it wasn’t.

Chiba plays a man called Inugami. He’s the last survivor of a hidden werewolf clan that was wiped out by Japanese villagers when he was a boy. Inugami doesn’t change into a wolf or anything so gauche. On the fifteenth day of the lunar cycle (full moon?) he gains Wolverine-level healing powers and perhaps some extra strength and agility. The rest of them time he still seems to be pretty hardy, and he may have enhanced senses. But we don’t find any of this out until well into the movie, and it doesn’t have much do with how the plot is set in motion.

In the movie’s first scene we see man in a fancy white suit running for his life throughout the streets of a Japanese city. Inugami happens on the scene, and follows the man dawn an alley. There he witnesses the man in the white suit get torn apart by an unseen tiger! Inugami discusses this bizarre event with his only friend, Arai. Arai is a reporter (one line of dialogue suggests Inugami may be one too, but he never acts like it), and he quickly determines that the dead man was a member of rock band called The Mob. Moreover, two other members of the band have already died under similarly bizarre circumstances.

Inugami and Arai track down the last member of The Mob, who is living on the streets. He’s terrified, and he spills that The Mob was ordered by someone to rape an up-and-coming singer named Miki Ogata. Miki got syphilis and is now working at two-bit strip clubs. The last Mob member is sure that Miki has somehow cursed him. The interrogation is interrupted, however, when local yakuza thugs show up.

Inugami fights the thugs, but is shot in the process. He’s rescued by a woman on motorcycle, who takes Inagumi to her apartment. The apartment features a bedroom with mirrored walls and a heart-shaped rotating bed, and Inugami and the woman, Katie, stare into each other’s eyes for minutes on end and talk about the importance of being married before they have sex.

Just kidding! Katie talks about how much she wants to have sex with a man who smells like an animal, licks blood from Inugami’s gunshot wound, and then they have hot monkey sex.

The movie then cuts to Inugami in a restaurant, eating meatloaf. Arai joins him at the table and tell Inugami that it was the head of Manabe music group who ordered Miki raped, but he’s not sure why.

Inugami dons his best green velvet suit jacket (and if you think that’s his only green velvet suit jacket, you don’t know Sonny Chiba circa 1975) and heads out to the two-bit strip club where Miki is performing songs about tigers to an audience that throws stuff at her because she keeps her clothes on. He tries to talk to Miki backstage, but he’s interrupted by more yakuza thugs. The thugs take Inugami and Miki to a hideout, where they have Arai prisoner as well. We find out that the yakuza have addicted Miki with heroin, and when the thugs try to kill Inagumi he retaliates by throwing coins at them, with deadly results. Then Miki’s phantom tiger kills the last member of The Mob (who the yakuza also brought along), and the rest of the yakuza flee. Inugami is so into karate chopping fleeing yakuza that he barely noticed that Arai was killed. Luckily Arai left behind a notebook which explains that Miki was engaged to a politician’s son, so the Manabe music group and the yakuza were acting on the politician’s behalf to make sure his son didn’t marry someone too far beneath him. Ah, the music-political complex, that unbreakable cabal ruling Japan.

Inugami takes Miki to her apartment and watches over her. She tries to seduce him, then passes out. Later Inugami visits the head of the Manabe Music Group and tells him to watch out. That night Inugami is attacked in his apartment and captured by the “JCIA,” a secret organization looking for ways to make paranormal assassins. Katie, it turns out, is a member. The JCIA also kidnaps Miki, so every character in the movie is back in one place. Eventually the JCIA’s surgeons cut Inagumi open for some reason and leaves his guts hanging out, but they do that on the night of the full moon, so his entrails pull back into his body and he escapes his cell. On his way out Inugami is attacked by a JCIA agent who has been enhanced to Wolfguy status with transfusions of Inugsmi’s own blood. The fight isn’t very long, however, because Inugsmi’s blood is poisonous to humans, so… that all led nowhere. Oh, and Katie helped Inugami escape for no particular reason other than he’s a good lay, and she gets shot to death for her trouble.

Free, Inugami returns to the one place the JCIA would probably look for him (wait, what?), the rural village where the wolf people used to live before being wiped out by the local humans. There Inugami meets a young woman named Taka, which just happened to be Inugami’s mother’s name. Taka explains that her mother idolized the wolf people, and that’s why she’s named after Inugami’s mother. Now that any relationship they might have is tainted with weird incest overtones, Inagumi and Taka have sex with each other. Their happiness is short-lived, though, because some time later the JCIA shows up looking for Inugami, and they have the brain-washed Miki and her phantom tiger in tow. So long as they don’t attack Inugami on the 15th day of the lunar cycle they have a chance… so of course they attack on the 15th day of the lunar cycle despite every indication that they know doing so would be very bad idea.

I’m led to believe this movie was based on a comic book, which may be why the movie is so episodic and Inugami’s wolfiness is played down early on. I can’t seem to find anything about the original manga, but I did find a remake of it from a few years ago where Inugami is a high school student. In the new manga Inugami explicitly turns into a hulking wolfman on the nights of the full moon, assuming he takes enough damage, which I guess he always does because he’s constantly being beaten up by rape gangs. I’m curious as to whether the original manga features Inagumi as a wolfman, or if the movie is accurate in having Inugami just be kind of macho. It’s more than a little disappointing, though, to keep talking about how Sonny Chiba is a werewolf and never getting to see him transform, or do anything more exciting than heal. Just some claws would have been nice, and added a little more similarity to a certain comic book character.