Iron Virgin Jun

Muscle mommy's misadventures in mandated marriage and mauling malicious miscreants.

Every time I so much as mention an anime penned by Go Nagai anywhere online, someone in the replies snickers awkwardly, like his name is some kind of dirty curse word, and a major can of worms is just begging to be opened by daring to even speak his name like the Beetlejuice he is. It probably has something to do with his penchant for depicting horny teenagers or whatever, but that's honestly pretty commonplace and not unique to him, so it still strikes me as weird. Hell, have you ever BEEN to a high school?

Anyway, this will be the third and shortest Nagai anime I've reviewed, so let's take a look!

Fuck "realistic" body proportions, this is an example of "correct" body proportions.

Iron Virgin Jun is a short one-off OVA that barely runs about 45 minutes in length and more or less ticks all the boxes for a standard Nagai outing. Cool female lead? Check. Drooling horny men? Check. Weird kinks and comical displays of sexual frustration? Check. Strange dealings with demons and evil spirits? Check. Yep, this is his handiwork alright. Research shows that the source manga is significantly fuckier and far more explicit than this anime, which doesn't surprise me, but will almost certainly leave me wanting more.

When characters like this are the special of the day, you bet your ASS I'll be a returning customer.

Our main character (Jun) is a young girl on the run from her overbearing mother - in both the parenting sense AND the physical sense - refusing to take part in any arranged marriages. Her mother sends a gaggle of horny soldiers after her, emphatic that because it's her 18th birthday she MUST get married and carry on the family traditions. Jun insists she's not "running away", just hiding out until the whole birthday party blows over so she doesn't have to get married to some dickhead rando she doesn't even know. Just when the goon squad catches up and surrounds her, backup arrives in the form of her buddy Kurata. But it turns out his assistance won't even be necessary, because underneath that cute party dress, Jun is absolutely fucking ripped, and she proceeds to bring the pain to her pursuers with her big meaty hams.

Missed opportunity not adding her to any fighting games. Just imagine the endless wave of fan art she would have gotten!

The bulk of the movie focuses on Jun and Kurata continuing to "not run away" as they are chased by an increasingly deviant assortment of mugs and thugs into the city and out toward the sea. Said thugs mention to Jun that her mother sent them to take away her virginity, in a desperate bid to "force" her into marriage. And though they try to pin her down for a gangbang, they're no match for her sheer un-bridal strength. Eventually, the two are caught by Jun's mother at helicopter-gunpoint and forcibly marched back to the family estate, where Jun is shackled up and left to the henchmen to do with as they please. Naturally though, Jun's massive biceps are once again underestimated, and she continues to wreak havoc among her pervert captors, beating their asses one by one.

If it seems like I'm showing an awful lot of fight scenes for such a short movie it's literally because most of the movie is one long sequence of Jun trying not to get drilled.

Mom finally decides it's time to deal with her personally, and Jun challenges her to a mano-a-mano fight to settle this nonsense once and for all. This is the point at which all the cryptic clues about the importance of this marriage finally start coming to light. It's at the behest of her supposedly-dead grandmother that Jun must be married and made to carry on the family legacy. The details are left somewhat vague, but the reason Mom and Jun are so absurdly buff apparently stems from a genetic curse that gives them the ability to drain the power out of men, especially those they marry (and/or fuck, I guess?). Grandma's spirit has apparently somehow been pulling all the strings that keep the family rich and in power, and she's been badgering Mom to do everything in her power to get Jun in on the curse to keep the tradition moving.

The whole encounter finally ends when Grandma's mummified corpse is staked by Kurata and Jun's Dad (a frail older man who would've broken like a twig under his wife's massive thumb), whereupon Jun and Kurata then ride off into the sunset and make plans to go visit Jun's aunt on her weird private magic island paradise.

What teenager HASN'T had this exact fight with her mom before?

As far as adaptations go, it's an incredibly slimmed-down and sanded-off version of the manga that removes almost all of the actual saucy parts (and the bizarre Devilman cameo) and compresses it into a singular bite-sized chunk. If animation weren't so absurdly expensive, I'd call it nothing more than a glorified 45-minute trailer for the manga, or at the very least a promising pilot for a full-fledged series. From what I read, the manga is not only very different but absolutely batshit nuts in comparison.

But, as always, we're not here to review things for what they AREN'T, so let's at least talk about the OVA for what it IS.

Hold my purse honey, I have to go reply to a bad YouTube comment.

I honestly love the buff-underneath-the-fluff premise of Jun's character. Doubly so because she's still allowed to also be bubbly and cute when not in danger, and her occasional airheaded rich-kid behavior makes her quite a charming character. I was also pleasantly surprised to see her portrayed as a tomboy action girl with MOMMY issues rather than the ever-more-popular daddy issues. The whole movie essentially hinges on a teenage girl getting in a fight with her Mom about her relationship status, and the desire to marry for love rather than money (which of course is what Mom was REALLY after all along).

On the other hand though, the majority of the movie is a big tangled mess of - admittedly cool - chase and fight scenes, leaving the backstory components light and sometimes completely unexplained. It can make sense with some extrapolation, or cross-examination with the source manga, but as a whole it doesn't really gel into anything coherent.

Then again, with scenes like these, who needs plot?

The sexual debauchery is also pretty tame. If you're into muscle girls, there's plenty of bare arms and powerful shoulders on display - though halfway through, the art style kind of shifts a bit and Jun looks more like a standard 90s anime girl with little to no definition at all - but there's nary a nipple nor bared booty to be found here. The closest thing you'll get to nudity is the goon squad's goofy suggestive codpieces shaped like random phallic animals and power tools.

Unequivocally, the best use of a chastity belt gag since Robin Hood: Men In Tights.

All in all, Iron Virgin Jun was just so-so for me. I had some good laughs, Nagai is an absolute master of bawdy visual comedy, but I walked away from it wanting more, which I guess means digging up the manga. Still, not a bad watch. It might even be tame enough for movie night if you and your guests like softcore porn comedy. Some scenes get a bit rape-y, but rest assured that Jun always gets the last hit in before anything happens on that front. Good if you like gimmicky sex comedies like Kekko Kamen (also by Nagai) or obscure not-quite-porn titles like Butt Attack Punisher Girl Gautaman. Less good if you want cohesion or closure from your would-be hentai, though.

Is that a thing people want, ever? No? Just me? Okay.