I may have the odd grumble about distributor Eastern Star / Discotek, if only because I'm never quite sure what to call them, but still, thank goodness they're out there and keeping up a steady flow of rereleases and remasters of classic anime, not to mention the occasional new release, which is ridiculously exciting if you're anything like me and have long ago exhausted most of the era's classics. And while the Project A-ko blu-rays aren't quite that, it's still a thrill to get them when, in the UK at least, the only alternative until now was shoddy dub-only versions.
And for the purposes of this here post, Discotek and A-ko are all that's saving us from the deepest depths of obscurity, as we dig into some truly bizarre and long-buried corners. Up this time: Roots Search, Project A-Ko 3: Cinderella Rhapsody, Wild 7: Biker Knights, and Mystery of the Necronomicon...
Roots Search, 1986, dir: Hisashi Sugai
I'm not about to suggest that seminal nineties sci-fi horror movie Event Horizon ripped off a mediocre anime OVA, but if I was, Roots Search is the mediocre anime OVA I'd point to. It did, at least, land on some of the same ideas and imagery a decade earlier, and if it deserves credit for anything, it's that: there's the seed of something here, and ten years later, a similar seed would grow into a minor classic rather than a stunted weed of a tale that barely has time to wave its saggy leaves at the sun before it's starting to wilt.
But I was trying to praise Roots Search for what little it does right, rather than condemn it for all the stuff it gets wrong! Because the core is decent, and could have worked, and intermittently does, especially in the first half. Our setting is the Tolmeckius Research Institute and our lead is said institute's apparently sole test subject, Moira, whose psychic powers are enough to get everyone terribly excited. But that convenient plot thread gets quickly sidelined until it becomes useful again much later, as the scientific fun and games are interrupted by the arrival and near-impact of a much larger vessel, one that happens to look like something H R Giger might have dreamed about after scoffing too much brie before bed. And wouldn't you know it but all the crew bar one are mysteriously dead, and also there's an apparently comatose alien aboard, which the Tolmeckius gang almost immediately decide to dump into space, having come to the sensible conclusion that dead crew plus unidentified alien is unlikely to bode well.
It's a good call, but not quite good enough, for it turns out the alien is... Well, I'm not certain the makers of Roots Search quite knew what was going on with their alien, and if they did, they weren't prepared to let us in on all their secrets, but we can comfortably say that it somehow survives being jettisoned and promptly sets about tormenting the crew with visions of their guiltiest secrets before disposing of them in exceedingly gory ways - this being the part that feels awfully like Event Horizon, even down to a particular death scene involving an airlock and the manner in which human bodies don't cope terribly well with the vacuum of space.
Had this been the sum of Roots Search, I think I'd feel more kindly towards it, since the horror is mildly ingenious and the "death by dark secrets" stuff quite entertaining. So it's a disappointment when, past the midpoint, the psychological aspect gets largely binned in favour of more traditional tentacle monster shenanigans. But even that isn't really what hobbles Roots Search. While I hate to criticise something for having too many ideas, that's part of the problem, though even then I'd be more forgiving if any of those ideas went somewhere, say to a satisfying climax that made a shred of sense. In particular, the fact that the alien declares itself to be acting in the name of God definitely seems like the sort of notion you might want to develop rather than trotting out only to leave hanging, and while I kind of liked the conclusion for its brazen "What the hell?" gambit, I'd still have preferred a bit of clarity.
Perhaps needless to say of a totally forgotten OVA from three and a half decades ago that its less-than-choosy US distributor never felt the need to give a DVD release, none of this is salvaged by its technical aspects. The end theme is quite nice in a dopily inappropriate fashion, and the animation has its moments, most of them in the intermittently effective horror sequences, but it goes wrong as often as it goes right and the character designs are particularly disastrous: there's the strong impression that a different artist was responsible for every one, none of whom did a good job or spoke to each other. More effort went into the mechanical designs and the alien, which is actually quite interesting to look at, until it turns into a bunch of writhing genitals made of spam, anyway. Oh, but that cover art is nice, isn't it? And it appears beneath the end credits, which feels like a thank you for putting up with Roots Search's bad choices for three quarters of an hour.
I was beginning to worry that reviewing these Project A-ko sequel OVAs separately was a wasted effort, having responded to the first entry, Plot of the Daitokuji Financial Group, much as I did back in the day when I covered them under their original release as one collection. So I was pleased to discover that my main objection to Cinderella Rhapsody, on a rewatch, barely bothered me at all.
I know I wasn't alone - if only because Discotek's excellent liner notes touch upon the subject - in being put off by a story that relied on two characters who thus far had been strongly implied to be gay suddenly lusting after a guy rather than delightfully awful moppet C-Ko, and it seemed to me another example of the dearth of ideas that happens when creators sequel something that really ought to have been left alone. What I perhaps failed to notice is that Cinderella Rhapsody takes its straight romance even less seriously than it did its gay romance, and indeed seems to be actively mocking the conventions of the genre - particularly as they're relayed through anime and manga - and possibly even the distressing tendency in Japanese culture of the time toward presenting intimate female relationships as a fad to be grown out of. The object of A-Ko's affections, who inevitably becomes the object of her rival B-Ko's affections, would fail the sexy lamp test and then some, barely says two words throughout the forty-some minute running time, and is ultimately shown to be even less of a catch than C-Ko, who somehow winds up both more humanised and precisely as dreadful as ever.
You might still argue that a romance pastiche was hardly the way to take a property so anarchic as Project A-ko, and I wouldn't suggest there weren't better alternatives out there, but it certainly feels fresher than Plot of the Daitokuji Financial Group's attempt to extend a narrative that had nowhere useful to go. Indeed, if there had ever been a model by which Project A-ko might have kept going longer than it did, this feels like a step in that direction, larking about with a genre that's a fairly rubbish fit until it becomes funnier to hurl all that out the window for a ridiculous action climax that sees half the city dragged into the fight.
One thing's for sure, director Moriyama seems considerably more enthused than he did last time around, bringing some genuine ingenuity to the table and an eye for imaginative shots that I noticed barely anywhere in Plot of the Daitokuji Financial Group. Then again, it may simply be that there was more time and money floating about, for this is a much more polished effort, not so far off the level of the original Project A-Ko and on occasions - as in the baffling dream-sequence opening that adopts an entirely different art style - maybe a little bolder and better. Hiromoto Tobisawa's note-perfect parody score is a step up, too, from Mariya Takeuchi's perfectly adequate efforts, and feels like a worthwhile stand-in for the irreplaceable work Carbone and Zito did to give A-Ko its singular vibe.
All in all, then, I liked Cinderella Rhapsody quite a bit, and if that's partly a case of coming to the material with a more forgiving attitude, I think this one also gained from Discotek's slightly mercenary approach of putting out these short OVA sequels one by one: as a standalone sequel, it fares better than it did crammed in the middle of a trilogy, and the superior animation gains considerably from the move to HD and Blu-ray. Having previously only seen the dub, I wonder, too, if that somehow managed to miss the joke with the mock-romance, because it's hard to imagine coming away from the original Japanese version with the impression that it was meant to be taken remotely seriously. Whatever the case, Cinderella Rhapsody's enough of a success that I'm now a little sad that there's only one more "proper" A-Ko sequel left to go.
It was obviously a lot to hope that this second Wild 7 OVA would be as good as the first when the first largely felt as if it fluked its way to success. Still, the specific ways in which Biker Knights fails to reach the same modest heights are irritating in their own right, since it really only needed to be more of the same to get itself a modest pass.
Granted, somebody in the production possibly came to a similar conclusion, given that, in one crucial fashion, Biker Knights is absolutely that, picking up as it does almost directly from the end of the original. Unfortunately, that ending left little in the way of interesting loose threads, and so this turns out to be merely the first of a bunch of bad decisions, though it's one that could have easily been recovered from, since Biker Knights almost immediately resets itself anyway, introducing new villains with a new dastardly plot. At least, I think it was meant to be dastardly; it's so convoluted and self-evidently dumb that it was hard to be certain. And by then we're into the realm of bad decisions that weren't recoverable, because if you're telling a tale in which your bad guys are trying to take over Japan via the medium of a TV show that makes popular idols battle each other, you'd better be damned sure to keep tongue firmly in cheek. Yet somehow, despite an obviously more absurd plot, Biker Knights takes itself very seriously indeed and thus manages to make the most bonkers of criminal conspiracies seem dull and workmanlike.
Speaking of taking things seriously, the one thing that categorically couldn't survive that treatment, as I pointed out at probably too much length in my review of the original Wild 7, is the core concept of our heroes being criminals made cops who can get the job done where the regular police can't because they're not bound by all those dumb rules about proving people guilty with actual evidence and are free to shoot and explode and generally molest whoever they please. Wild 7 got away with it by largely ignoring it; Biker Knights has its characters sit down for a scene that kills any momentum the show has gathered to lengthily debate the relative merits of summary execution versus due process.
That scene's symptomatic of a title that's generally come to the conclusion that what Wild 7 needed was more talking and less action. There is, indeed, barely any of the latter until the third act, and none of what we get until that point is any good at all. Really, neither is the main setpiece, which suffers partly from not being the climax of the film that it seems like it ought to be, but more so for how the animation is markedly worse this time around, with all the flaws of the first OVA and none of the virtues. And that's the one failure that's truly unsurvivable, since some imaginative action brought to live with ambitious animation would have stood a chance of making the other flaws fade from memory, whereas wading through scene after scene of tedious plotting only to be rewarded with sequences that should be awesome and aren't is quite the slap in the face.
It's not as if Biker Knights is terrible; if I was never especially absorbed, I was never bored either. But in a way, that was actually worse, since I'd much rather have had a Wild 7 sequel that self-destructed in outrageous fashion than one that flopped about limply the way this does, imagining we'd prefer to watch ridiculous villains setting out incoherent schemes than crooks-turned-cops firing missiles from their souped-up motorbikes. As it is, if it has any value at all, it's to make the original seem better than it was by illustrating just how badly wrong a setup like this can go if everyone involved fails to realise how essentially dumb and trashy it is.
I'll spare us the usual excuses for when I review hentai here: the truth is, I went into Mystery of the Necronomicon with my eyes open and a measure of genuine curiosity. The influence of weird fiction writer H P Lovecraft is all over nineties anime, yet I can't think of a single other title off the top of my head that actually adapts his work or does more than obliquely acknowledge the connection with the odd sly reference. So when I discovered that there was an actual Lovecraft-adapting nineties anime out there, my interest was sparked, hentai or no.
As it turns out, however, Mystery of the Necronomicon isn't precisely that. There are enough familiar names and figures that it's certainly a lot more open about the connection than is usually the case, and there's one work in particular that it draws from heavily in its latter portion, though saying which would constitute a massive spoiler. The plot, though, is its own thing, and given that the majority of Lovecraft's boil down to variations of "man encounters something horrible and inexplicable, goes mad," that's probably for the best. Which isn't to say that isn't what Mystery of the Necronomicon is up to, just that there are a lot more wheels spinning along the way to keep its two-and-a-bit hour running time occupied.
Our hero, for want of a more suitable word, is private detective Satoshi Suzuhara, who's differentiated from your usual cynical private detective in a supernatural mystery who comes to realise the case he's investigating is connected with his own shadowy past mainly by how he has way more sex - this being hentai, let's not forget! - and by how his attractive assistant is also his adopted daughter, a detail that will end up feeling awfully gross before the credits roll for reasons I probably don't need to spell out - hint, still hentai! The first two of four episodes find Suzuhara at a remote ski lodge hotel in which the tiny handful of guests are being bumped off at a rate of knots in ritualist fashion, a thread that largely plays out by the midpoint, though oddly the third episode then opts for more or less the same setup but in a hotel in the north-eastern US. It's the sort of narrative that feels quite complicated until you learn where it was heading, at which point it seems awfully straightforward in retrospect, but there are enough bumps in the road, along with a couple of neat twists, that it manages to stay largely satisfying.
Certainly there's a whole lot more story here than I would have expected from a hentai title, and if, like me, you're cool on that particular subgenre, it definitely helps that the various sex scenes feel of a piece with that story rather than being crowbarred in wherever they can possibly fit. That's not to say they're not both frequently nasty and surprisingly graphic - there's stuff here I was confident you couldn't show, in animation or elsewhere, in Japan at the time - but while it's often unpleasant, it's at least unpleasant in a way that fits with the wider horrors. Then again, when Mystery of the Necronomicon is actually doing horror, it trips over itself as often as not, and proves an excellent exemplar of the rule that simply showing gross stuff is rarely scary and even stops being alarming quite quickly: in particular, you can only see so many skinned faces before the shock wears off.
Or rather, maybe the issue is more that you can only see so many skinned faces that look quite rubbish - for Mystery of the Necronomicon has the grave misfortune of hailing from 1999, the year where anime went to die, and thus is ugly and shoddy in all manner of ways it can't afford to be. Objectively, the animation is probably relatively competent, and Takayama does enough to instil a bit of much-needed mood and tension into the proceedings, but nothing can do away with that painful impression of computer-aided animation made by people who are far from figuring out how the "aided" part works. It's a shame, really, because on the whole I quite liked Mystery of the Necronomicon, which sets itself some unenviable challenges and manages, on the whole, to make the results work, by the very specific definition of working that Lovecraftian hentai could hope to accomplish.
-oOo-
That... could have gone worse? Perhaps not a lot worse, granted, but there was nothing here I didn't snatch at least a dash of enjoyment from, though Wild 7: Biker Knights came perilously close. It has to be said that only Cinderella Rhapsody could be called a nice surprise rather than a disappointment, but realistically that's on me for having any expectations whatsoever for Lovecraft hentai, a Wild 7 sequel, and a long-since-vanished, VHS-only OVA that I bought entirely because I thought the cover art was cool.
[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating]
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