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[consciousnessstreams]

Fear of the Dark

OK. We've go a strobe light flashing at a baseball that was lost in someone's basement by some kids, who are yammering on about who's going to get it. Eventually this leads to locking this kid in the basement, which, honestly, strikes me as pretty darn well lit and with a lower monster population than most. Of course, from the sound of things, it does have The Noid living in it, and apparently a big murderous shadow of some kind.

Moving along, we suddenly have a kid skateboarding to the accompaniment of some yodeling. Kid wanders into a house which may or may not be his, and slowly starts creeping up on a medieval peasant doing some spot-welding in the basement. OK, fine, it's his mom. Also, this kid is apparently so much of a wimp that he won't walk into his own basement, in the middle of the day, where his mom is working and talking to him, because it's slightly dark. OK, I mean, granted, this is a horror movie, and we've already had a murderous basement monster see an introduction, but it's not like he knows that! Anyway, there's a bit of a brownout, adding to the already overwhelming orange look to things, he's going to hang out with his dad... and I'm getting the impression this kid has two stay-at-home parents here... also the words Screener Copy Only just appeared along the bottom of the screen, which is somewhat odd for something I got off Netflix. Anyway, dad is now officially calling kid out on being such a wimp about darkness. He's also allergic to dogs and just generally a huge dork. Meanwhile, here's Older Brother hanging out in his room with his girlfriend. This is another one of these movies that starts off REAL slow. The last time I had one of these though, it eventually lead up to half an hour of solid action with bug swarms, and a monkey knife fight, so let's stick with things! So anyway, girlfriend flirts with Little Brother to mess with Older Brother's head a bit... and seriously, these people constantly keep every room in their house lit with the sort of crazy dim lighting that gives you severe eyestrain. Apparently they do this for the benefit of their total loser son, and also because they're crazy cheapskates about their electric bill. Oh hey, Little Brother is checking out the nasty claw marks on his shoulder. I guess it was him that was attacked by The Noid earlier, but he had his wimpiness going on full-blast beforehand, so you can't blame in on post traumatic stress. Anyway, the parents (who really do stay home all the time it seems) are finally going out to dinner like they've been preparing to do for the last 15 minutes, while Little Brother legitimately plays uh... the Gamecube Wave Race it seems. And here's that Screener Copy Only popping up again. Meanwhile Older Brother gives some really mixed messages on smoking, and further proves what tightwads everyone in this family seem to be. Also, man, I really can't stress enough what a whiny little baby of a main character we have here. It's heavily implied that there is, in fact, a hideous monster plotting to kill him this very night, somewhere in his house, and I still say he's unjustified in his panicky nature. A lot of it is casting really, he's about 4 or 5 years too old to be sympathetic I say.

Anyway, as much as a wimp as he is about the dark, he IS willing to watch Evil Dead it seems. Or at least, he's willing to flip back and forth between Evil Dead and Tom and Jerry, which is weirdly appropriate honestly. Also, how is this kid watching Evil Dead? It is NOT the sort of thing you ever have on TV, especially what with the tree rape scene, and this whole family seems too lame to rent it. Oh, OK. Apparently the TV is possessed, and is periodically turning itself on and switching to Evil Dead. So far the TV is my favorite character in the movie. Yeah yeah, Screener Copy Only. It'd be interesting if this turned out to be an intentional part of my movie experience that really paid off down the road. So anyway, little brother, who, again, is like 13 or 14 minimum, is having his older brother look under beds and in closets for monsters. OK, again, he's legitimately been attacked by- oh OK. There apparently legitimately WAS a monster in his closet, which jumped out and dashed through the room before it could really register for the characters... and we also just got treated to a nice little subliminal glimpse of some demon think looking in through the window. We've also got some weird evil folk art all around the house, and things are getting all warpy and freaky as the power goes out. So yeah, you're surrounded by pure evil, but I still say you could be a LITTLE more adult about it. Anyway, it's established that Little Brother is specifically afraid of "the dark." As in, according to him, concentrated darkness itself is a malevolent sentience that means him ill. He also seems to be demonstrably correct in this regard. Kind of an interesting concept. Anyway, Older Brother, who is totally reasonable and calm, heads up into the attic to find some emergency lights dad bought because of Little Brother's wimpy outbursts. They're apparently right up next to the evil ventriloquist's dummy. OK. I can dig the evil looking folk art, but anyone who brings a ventriloquist's dummy into their home clearly WANTS their family dead. I'm going to toss out the theory that the parents in this movie are evil cultists and MAYBE Little Brother's just tweaking out because he's heard the sounds of human sacrifice one too many times. Anyway, yeah, it's an evil living dummy (like ALL dummies), and Older Brother is now locked in the attic with it.

Meanwhile, Little Brother is running around grabbing every battery powered light he can find, and fashioning himself this set of flashlight covered armor that, seriously, makes him look like he's cosplaying as a Warhammer Space Marine, to confront his closet monster. Ooh, and we've also got some of those wall faces. You know, the faces that bulge out from behind the wall paper? We've also got all kinds of evil public domain sound effects going off, and basically, the whole house is flipping out to the sort of degree you'd see in some of the freakier moments of, well, House. Anyway, the two brothers bump into each other, and Older Brother starts chewing Little Brother out for being a wimp. OK, dude? At any other time, I'd totally be on board, but surely you must have noticed by now that your house has dropped the veil and is going full-on blatantly evil all around you by now. LB's behavior is currently fully justified. You on the other hand are in some kind of freaky denial. OB notices LB's crazy light suit.. and LB is mentioning a new fear. Of ladders. "They can grab your feet through the holes and pull you through, and eat you. It's what they do." Man, ladders must be from the same category of monsters as gazebos or something. LB has been pretty spot on so far though, so I'm open to the possibility that by the end of this movie someone may, in fact, be eaten by a ladder. Anyway, the evil has gone into remission for the moment, Girlfriend calls for some idle chitchat where LB roves around and inspects the seriously evil looking folk art collection. An undead predator fetish slices his fingers open with a spear when he gets all up in its grill. OB gets the band-aids out because again, he's totally in denial here.

Now, I have to point out that while we do, clearly, have evil malevolent forces here, they set the bar really low on their hijinks. Periodically they give this one kid a little scratch. That seems to be the full extent of their malevolence. Oh, and we are now going into flashback mode, explaining that when LB was young enough to have an excuse, he had a basement monster attack apparently. Not the one that started the movie, an unrelated incident... and not even while it was particularly dark. Anyway, while this is being exposited, the the brothers here some freaky devil dog clawing on the floorboards sounds from the living room, and look inside to see that the evil forces of darkness have REARRANGED THEIR FURNITURE! That's uh... that's pretty profoundly non-scary, really. Especially when they blink and it reverts. Apparently though THIS is what makes Older Brother accept what's up here. Being locked in the attic by an evil dummy, all the horrible sounds, having a closet monster run past him, none of these are registering for him, but feng shui? We're all gonna die man! Or maybe not, because now he's chewing little brother out over the massive claw scratch on the newly painted wall, about 8 feet up. OB has a really inconsistent relationship with reality, which I think really hurts the movie honestly. Anyway, OB goes to answer a knock at the door, baseball bat and flashlight in hand, but, nobody's there. Also, LB has no excuse for leaving OB's side, because the freakiness really seems to be leaving both of them alone when they're together, plus it'd kill his whole "you must have done that!" excuse parade. Anyway, LB's sitting around with zerglings breathing heavily in the background, while LB wanders into the totally out of focus kitchen, the lights almost flicker back on, and the hallway does this crazy stretchy thing again. Also, some high energy music kicks in, as... 3 guys in nice clothes start walking up the extended hallway. OK, presumably they're demons, but they'll like, really stylish demons. LB apparently has a total breakdown, because the lights briefly come back on BEFORE the Demons In Black charge out to grab him and go all Jacob's-ladder-twitchy-head. Then he comes to to see his brother, they talk a bit, and the two eventually decide to weather things out through sure-fire kid safety protocol. By which I mean they hide under the covers of the nearest bed with a couple flashlights. LB describes the DIBs as "like a Dracula, dressed like a cowboy."

OK, so, at this point we are flat out accepting Little Kid Irrational Fears and Countermeasures as abject reality. Of course, the Cowboy Dracula whose footsteps can be heard creeping up on them turns out to just be Girlfriend arbitrarily breaking in. We are back down to terror level 0 while chatting with her. Anyway, Girlfriend decides to totally patronize LB and his monster countermeasures, which is a good idea both if we're accepting that yes, there are monsters, as the kid clearly has his act together in dealing with them, or if we're denying them, since showing off calms him down. Somehow they get into this weird conversation though where Girlfriend starts expressing her deep-rooted fear of packs of wild dogs. She also puts forth the theory, presumably still humoring him, that this might be one of those deals where the monsters draw power off your fear generating a feedback loop of evil, like the boogieman in that episode of the Ghostbusters cartoon, or the Republicans. I was thinking that that might be the case already here myself for some time now. But anyway, things stay pretty calm for a while, LB falls asleep, and Girlfriend comes out to talk to OB. So, are you two feeling makey-outy tonight? Huh. No. They're seriously discussing the possibility of evil stuff around. Well, OB does. Girlfriend is in full on psychoanalyst mode. Now she's getting into how crazy dark all fairy tales and children's stories are, and how that whole "if I should die before I wake" prayer is just plain #$%^ed Up. Incidentally, how late is the restaurant their parents went to open for? There's been a crazy storm going on, it's gotta be at LEAST 10 or 11 by now, the sun was still out when they left. You'd figure they'd at least call to check in on their little wimp of a kid who, from the persistent blackout, they must be aware is losing it. Anyway, while the big kids discuss Jungian psychology or whatever, Cowboy Dracula comes in to rip LB's bed to pieces while he's hiding under it. So, I guess the blankets only grant protection from evil when you're actually IN the bed. Also, seriously? Hiding under your bed? Under beds are such dens of evil that the most intellectual superior nation on the planet (Japan) had them publicly outlawed, forcing citizens to just keep their mattresses right on the floor. You NEVER crawl under a bed when evil is afoot. You don't even look under there. You only hide under the bed as a last ditch defense against mobsters, on the hope that they're too scared of the pure evil to look, but they never are. Aren't you supposed to be crazy genre savvy?

So yeah, Cowboy Dracula is throttling the kid, while OB is tripping down the stairs to get to the generator he really should have cranked up hours ago. See, had he gone down there forever ago, the forces of darkness wouldn't have had time to build up to be a real threat. They'd probably freak him the heck out and sabotage the generator, but at least we'd know it was off the table. Now it's peak hours, so you've got a death wish trying. LB scares off Cowboy Dracula with an annoying toy truck that lights up at least, forcing him to turn into a shadow and slide into the closet to regroup. LB sets up a battery powered net-light trap to capture and kill Cowboy Dracula, while OB is literally attacking the darkness with Mom's blowtorch, Girlfriend is trying to get the door to LB's room open, and the attic dummy has apparently turned into this ghoulish hag-zombie, which, seriously, is SO much less creepy than its original dummy form. Oh, I stand corrected, it's The Darkness that became a zombie, meanwhile Girlfriend is menaced by dogs, confirming that yes, we are officially dealing with one or more Fear-Feedback monsters. OB apparently loses it around cockroaches thusly, LB has to confront a deadly ladder to get down and save him... and dude, 2 dobermans is so not a pack of wild dogs. Even if they can teleport. Anyway, LB starts up the generator and all outstanding monsters evaporate. So anyway, crisis averted, parents come home, Screener Copy Only does too, chitchat occurs... we're still do a final scare though. Especially since LB has officially passed his wimpiness on to his older brother via this whole ordeal. So, more bugs, or the zombie, or the dummy, taking bets... and it's... huh! Cowboy Dracula! You know, I have to say, Cowboy Dracula was honestly the single least scary thing in the entire movie. Especially after I was given the excuse to start calling him that. So.. yeah. I'm not really sure what to make of this overall. It's pretty darn intense for being clearly a Horror For Kids movie, it actually has some pretty good visuals here and there, particularly the whole hallway perspective distortion bit, but ultimately, I'm bothered a ton by how shallow the whole thing is. Here's a bunch of stuff that freaks little kids out. The end. They toy with a really weird premise, then they throw it out for the fairly old-hat Fear Feedback Monster deal, and then they make no real attempt to resolve that. Just, ignore'em and they can't bother you. Good night. I was kind of hoping that would yield an interesting plot twist.

[consciousnessstreams]

Phenomena (AKA Creepers)

OK! Here's a nice little two-for-one on movies you'd figure I'd have seen! Phenomena is a movie by Dario Argento, creator of the very ODD Phantasm series [Ed: No, that was Don Coscarelli what was I thinking?], which in fairly nerdy fashion follow the progress of a little bishonen kid and a sleazy ice cream truck driver, as they attempt to get to the bottom of an old guy's scheme to steal corpses from funeral homes and transform them into zombie jawas, to act as a labor force on a high-gravity, high-temperature planet, over the course of 20 years. The main character is played by Jennifer Connelly, the actress the vast majority of movie nerds seem to have a huge crush on, possibly attributable to a form of imprinting, having watched Labyrinth entirely too many times in their formative years. And as an added bonus, we also have Donald Pleasence in there, best known for being the doctor in Halloween, and just generally being one of the largest hams the world has to offer. Incidentally, it is darn hard to find a copy of this, because, like most Dario Argento movies, the only time it was released in this country on DVD was as part of an odd boxed set. This lends it the disturbing quality of just starting when you turn on the DVD player, no menus, FBI warnings, previews, or anything. So, as I pause the opening credits here to give the above opening paragraph, I find myself looking at a fairly long list of "musical special guests" which is... strange. The obvious interpretation is that we're actually half-crediting the music in the opening credits, but that's an awful lot of different metal bands.

Anyway, having escaped from the labyrinth of the goblin king, and partying with potentially hallucinatory muppets for a bit, our heroine seems to have been sent off to a swiss boarding school. Before we get into that though, here's some other girl poking around some big fancy house in the middle of nowhere, where someone or something is chained to the wall inside... er, was chained to the wall. Random girl wanders in as the chains are ripped free, so I'm figuring she's going to be killed in about 5, 4, 3, 2, 1... nailed it on the dot! Go me! Well, time of attack anyway. She survives being choked with the chain and stabbed with a giant pair of scissors long enough to have a pretty cool surreal non-gory slow-mo death through a window into a waterfall. Now we cut to another big house, at night, around which is sneaking a knife wielding... monkey in a diaper! Seriously. Apparently, this is the research lab of Donald Pleasence, and the monkey is his research assistant. I am dead serious. He uses a laser pointer to indicate what he needs, and his monkey goes and gets it for'em. Awesome. Anyway, he's rambling on to a reporter about how you can work out the exact date on which someone was killed by taking census info on the maggots hatching out of it. Yum. So yeah, here's our main character (Jennifer, that's convenient) being driven to boarding school, and explaining, as a bee gets into the car, that she "loves all insects" and they never hurt her. This is, presumably, a Huge Plot Point. Anyway, only one building of the boarding school is used, the rest being FORBIDDEN. Anyway, her first night kinda sucks because all that's around is her chain-smoking french roommate's baby food collection (which has SOME rationalization but is still odd), and the headmistress confiscates a poster of her famous movie star father, of whom it turns out Frenchie is an obsessive enough fan that she starts rattling off all the trivia she's picked up regarding family. This honestly just leads into a really weird dialog exchange that's just made of a weird mix of extreme exposition and incidental small talk. I'm guessing there won't be a quiz later.

And now here's some other girl, running through the cool ruined condemned spare boarding school buildings, presumably fleeing the scissor-wielding serial killer who has been established to be out there by now. This is accompanied by some cool 80s metal. Meanwhile, our hero is having a funky nightmare and sleepwalking out into the hallway... and I feel the need to point out that this movie has a pretty darn awesome soundtrack all around, which so isn't horror flavored. So anyway, she's walking along what's honestly a pretty dangerously open ledge with no railing on the second floor, before being shocked awake by victim girl running screaming at a nearby window, before being... stabbed through the back of the neck with a big ol' lance. Good, apparently I'm NOT going to be tempted into making constant Clock Tower jokes nobody will get after all. [Ed: Actually, the original Super Famicom Clock Tower is unofficially based on this move.] Anyway, our somnambulatory heroine is now falling through rotting floorboards. Seriously, this walkway is SO not up to code. Fortunately, her sleeve catches a corner and slows her fall. She's still sleepwalking though, wanders into the road, and is almost killed by a pair of German punks. They pick her up, try to make small talk for a while, and eventually she freaks out, rolls out of their convertible, and into the woods. Again, this is a pretty lousy first day here. So around now she does seem to be fully awake, and is rescued by the monkey as a pair of ladybugs look on. Dr. Pleasence, Forensic Etymologist checks her out, and hey, she really was packed off from America possibly due to mental problems. I thought I was kidding when I said that. Dr. Pleasence is wheelchair bound, so he's got cool elevators all over his place. So the two of them spend a while talking shop about bugs. Dr. Pleasence explains how weird it is that this here spitting beetle is so into her. Like, out of season mating call into her. It's also established that this is, officially, the creepiest part of Switzerland, and that this particular time of year the insect pheromones in the wind tend to drive people crazy. The next day, the authorities at the school do something you'd think would be way more common in these sorts of things, and give her a thorough psych exam EEG, and drug screening. That night, as more crazy music starts up, Frenchie sneaks out to meet with her boyfriend, and brag about having a famous movie star's daughter for a room mate. He's not particularly impressed, and goes home. This of course leaves Frenchie another potential victim for Lancy Boy, and while that's going on, Jennifer does some more awesome-soundtrack sleepwalking, or starts to at least, but wakes up. You'd think by now this school would have some decent night security, but nope, someone gets to wander around stabbing their students, kids can just wander out into the surrounding wilderness...

And now for no particular reason, Jennifer is slowly following a lightning bug around while we are treated to some RPG final boss music. Apparently her insect friends are leading her to a valuable clue to the mystery in the form of a glove, but seriously, I am astounded by how awesome this soundtrack is here. No wonder it gets opening credits treatment. Sadly, it starts to rain, which chases off the orchestral proggy synthery. Anyway, the important clue glove turns out to be full of maggots. "They're larvae." OK fine Dr. Pleasence, full of larvae. Anyway, at this point we're just laying it right out there that Jennifer here is indeed friend to all arthropods. Dr. Pleasence says it's not all that weird. Insects are totally telepathic dude. Anyway, the various teachers at the school are reading all the letters Jennifer is sending to her father about how apparently she's the Bugmaster and a random reclusive scientist is even corroborating that. The teachers don't have any sense of privacy at all, so they go ahead and tell this to the students and they start teasing her like crazy. So she gets rather obviously annoyed at this, and immediately summons every insect within a pretty huge radius to come coat the school completely and shut'em all up, and passes out. Good news is, yeah, you can control bugs. Bad news is, the headmistress figures she's a demon or something, and while a stake burning would be a bit much, they should at least pack her off to the loony bin when she comes to. This leads into a darn funny sneaking out of the room while the teacher on guard duty is asleep, silencing clocks, knitting needles happening to land in yarn balls, etc. So she sneaks out to Dr. Pleasence's house, he's all "Dude, that's lame. Having mental control over insects rocks!" albeit in much more respectful wording. Anyway, it turns out the glove larvae are from this really obscure insect species that feeds exclusively off corpses, so them being in what's apparently the killer's gloves would suggest he really spends a crazy amount of time handling corpses. Further, he says that in order to solve this case, it's time to bring in the two greatest detectives in the world! So yeah, he runs off to call L and Sherlock Holmes- oh. OK, he's actually referring to the crime fighting duo of Bug-Control Girl and Obscure Corpse-Loving Fly. Which is apparently called The Great Sarcophagus, so at least one of them gets a fittingly heroic name.

So, Hive Queen and Sarcophagus head out to the general vicinity of where the killings first started by bus to start corpse-hunting. The working theory being that aside from severed heads, he takes the bodies of his victims home to eat or sleep with or play dress up or whatever. Also on the bus is a Really Conspicuous Guy in a Trench Coat. Anyway, Sarcophagus starts flipping out, so she asks to get out in the middle of nowhere. The same middle of nowhere with a big house from the beginning of the movie in fact! But, bum bum bum! A car pulls up while she's inside checking it out. While she's exploring, the soundtrack starts up with something that's actually fairly horror-appropriate, at least in a Diablo 2 town music sorta sense. Presumably the bodies are up in the attic, but the stairs collapse when she tries to climb up. Wow, her two powers are bug-control and causing wood to collapse underfoot. Anyway, the realtor trying to sell the officially abandoned house, who, refreshingly, DOESN'T seem to be the killer catches her snooping around and chases her off. So he's the one who has to deal with it when a cop shows up to investigate it. A cop with the awesome name of Inspector Giger. Meanwhile, the killer goes after Dr. Pleasence, but oh no! His monkey assistant gets locked out of the house while chasing what's either a HUGE freaking moth, or a weirdly styled kite. Realizing the danger, monkey tries to bust n through the window, but has a pretty hard time with it. Dr. Pleasence attempts to identify the killer with his laser pointer, but is killed before he can. The monkey is very sad and swears vengeance. Seriously, she gets this look of determination, chases the killer back to his car, and starts pounding on the windshield as he drives off, but is eventually shaken off. As Jennifer comes to see the crime scene getting examined, we have some more inappropriate metal. Jennifer makes another surprisingly sensible call, and gets on the phone with her dad's agent to demand to be yanked the heck out of Swiss-Murder Land. Meanwhile, Inspector Giger is checking out the creepy local asylum, and monkey is digging through a trash can to find evidence against the murderer in the form of those scissors he used to stab the first girl before getting his big ol' lance. Now, I realize how everything I describe this monkey doing comes off sounding absolutely ridiculous, but this is seriously the sort of thing this monkey does! Sadly, it seems dad's agent is a huge jerk, and is not sending along cash for a plane ticket. Instead, he sets her up to be nabbed an employee to trick her back to the school with promises of a plane ticket home. Or so I'm assuming. She claims she's flying her out at noon, but in the meantime she gets to stay with creepy agent-agent lady, who apparently has an insane son that insists she cover all the mirrors in the house. OK, seriously, I know Dad's off filming a movie and can't be contacted, but he's a really bad judge of who he lets take care of his kid.

Anyway, Jennifer starts prowling around, finds a kid sitting there, accidentally kicks a toy train into him, causing him to fall over. Oh #@$%, this is one of those psychos taking order from their mummified dead kids isn't it. Oh no. It turns out that she just has a life-sized kid-doll sitting there. That's still pretty frelling creepy. She tries to push a sleeping pill on Jennifer, also creepy. She just goes off to the bathroom to get a drink to wash it down with and wash her hands... and the bathroom is full of maggots "Larvae!" Fine, larvae. So she induces vomiting to get the pill back up (really stupid to have taken it to begin with), runs off to call the cops, gets knocked out before she can, and psycho lady activates her emergency security shutters. Inspector Giger gets on the scene weirdly fast considering nobody had a chance to pick up, apparently he was already coincidentally coming this way to check things out. Lot of good that does though, because we cut back to Jennifer coming to just in time to hear him being killed off camera. So, Jennifer is now stuck inside a house so serial-killer friendly that there's a control panel to slam metal plates over all the exits. Frell. But hey, speaking of metal! The soundtrack goes all awesome again! So she goes all MacGuyver pulling down curtain rods to try and pull the phone out of the next room through an air vent... but fails, knocking it down the corpse hole. So, plan B, just crawl through that air vent... and down the corpse hole after the phone. The corpse hole is actually more of a long tunnel. Eventually she finds the phone and starts dialing, only to be grabbed by the mutilated arms of... oh, Inspector Giger. Apparently he wasn't killed so much as seriously bashed up and chained up down in the corpse hole. Still, she freaks out and falls into a septic tank full of disintegrated bodies. Yeah, that's not pleasant. Psycho lady comes down to gloat, Giger dislocates his thumbs to get free of his chains and take her out, and Jennifer, quite reasonably, decides to run for it. On the way out though, she hears a crying kid. Huh, he really does exist. OK, don't investigate, just frelling run. You don't want to know why the kid hates mirrors... see, told you. He's got this really freaky mutant face. See? You should listen when I say things. So, she continues to run for it, finds a motorboat out back, and while she's starting it up, out comes running mutant-boy (who's like, 8 or so I feel I should stress), lance in hand, who hops on board and tries to kill her. He is pretty astoundingly freaky looking. Fortunately though, we are now outside. And who has the upper hand outside? That's right! The girl who commands huge swarms of insects! That's who!

Unfortunately, during the fight, the gas tank gets ruptured, and catches fire when attempting to start the engine for good measure, so after freak-boy dives overboard to escape the insects, bug girl has to dive out and swim for shore. Underwater since there's flaming gas up top. At least he lost his lance, presumably. Also, not really knowing about the fire situation, after a brief freaky encounter underwater, it seems he surfaces in the flames, so we're spared the effort of running away from a severely injured unarmed 8 year old. Anyway, upon reaching the shore, here's dad's agent actually showing up in person, to drive her to safety! No wait, to have his head lopped off by Psycho Lady with... dang, I think that's just a broad sharpened square of metal. Presumably salvaged from the emergency shutters. She is understandably upset about her son being killed here. But hey, you're on dry land now, so "Why don't you call your insects?" Yeah, that's just what I was about to ask psycho-lady! Oh, but it turns out that isn't necessary, because I think we're all forgetting a very important character who hasn't been seen in a while. You realize of course who it is I'm talking about right? Not Inspector Giger, it's pretty safe to assume he's dead now. No, not Dr. Pleasence, he's definitely dead. Not Famous Movie Star Dad either. So who does that leave? MONKEY RIGHT OF VENGEANCE! Yes, the amazing research assistant monkey comes leaping out of the darkness, scissors in hand (actually, on closer inspection, it's more like a set of pruning sheers), and totally goes to town on her face! Go monkey! I was hoping you'd be the big hero! Monkey and girl hug, the nightmare finally being over, and the credits start, with more of this totally totally awesome RPG final boss music kicking in. Seriously, I want the soundtrack to this movie. Oh yes, and the credits end up listing stuff like "assistant etymologist" because... yeah, we just had real bug swarms here. And real Swiss wilderness too it seems. Anyway, yeah. This is what's awesome about Dario Argento movies. You've got the BASIC structure of a standard horror movie, almost no gore, no nudity, and then you've got all kinds of crazy out of genre stuff in there like the good guy commanding swarms of insects via telepathy and ridiculously awesome monkey heroics. Or in the case of Phantasm, zombie jawas and a word for word ripoff of the gom jabar scene from Dune. Plus, again, totally awesome inappropriate soundtrack here. And of course, weirdly enough, that plot was actually really consistent and surprising. And yet, these are really really obscure movies, while EVERYONE has heard enough about, say, the Friday the 13th series to accurately describe any given one of them. It's a real shame that.

[consciousnessstreams]

The Humanoid

OK, what we have here is an OAV from 1991 called The Humanoid, which ended up on my Netflix queue while attempting to find a much weirder thing of similar vintage and title. So essentially at this point I am just grabbing things absolutely at random and watching them. Let's see if I make any interesting Discoveries!

OK, we've got a Star Wars text scroll, we've got an alien race called Megalos, they may or may not suffer from Megalomania... and now we have someone trying to be all deep about being in space... and wow. We have the thick lined art of the 80s and early 90s, combined with the disgustingly bad animation quality of today! It's ALMOST the worst of both worlds, but I like this sort of art. Now we have the crazy upbeat theme song as Clearly A Badguy is getting into his limo and driving across the countryside. Meanwhile, a pink bird lands on the shoulder of oh man the eyes! Female characters in this thing have huge freaking eyes even in the context of bad anime. Like, they go all the way out to the edges of their faces huge. That's Not Right. Anyway, while I've been freaking out about eyes, the opening theme song has ended, and I guess the actual plot started up and I should be paying attention. Seriously though, the eyes are freaky. Mainly just due to the contrast of the much much much smaller eyes on all male characters. So anyway, this generic main character type named Eric is apparently going to visit his girlfriend on this here jungley planet, and for totally arbitrary reasons, his sucky spaceship starts to crash, so him and his token black guy partner have to bail out into an escape pod... which is then attacked by a pair of little fighter drone things, causing them to abandon THAT and dive into the river. Yeesh, SOMEONE evidently has overprotective parents.

Cut to Evil Badguy, whose name is apparently Libero, being pleased that these totally random people were shot down and presumably killed. His adviser has a pretty awesomely huge bald noggin and a beard, and is saying what gives? Apparently, the local ruins have a lost technology awesome spaceship which apparently he just wants so he can salvage the power source on it... which really doesn't strike me as very good justification for killing anyone who wanders by the area. The second part of his evil plan is to bring back the Megalomaniacal princess to their home world, which again, doesn't really justify KILL EVERYONE YOU SEE as a policy. Meanwhile, Eric and associate find the robot girl a bird was landing on the shoulder of during the intro when I got all freaked out by the eyes. Apparently Eric's girlfriend's dad decided to build an android out of sheer boredom or something, which is probably important what with being on the box art and being the titular character and all. Anyway, eventually Eric meets up with his girlfriend, who is EXTREMELY ANNOYING and they take their hover-80s-sportscar down to the beach. Robogirl tags along to perform a scientific analysis on what makes for an a romantic getaway spot, apparently. OK, Robogirl is one of THOSE robots. "Doesn't your databank contain detailed records about your wife?" "Are [the people getting all lovey-dovey on the balcony] performing astrological observations?" This is going to get old fast. She's also go blue-on-blue eyes, which is giving me Dune flashbacks, and a metal skullcap instead of hair, which is random. Anyway, Eric gets bored of hanging out with his girlfriend and goes all "oh hey, remember when people were trying to kill us the other day? I'm going to poke around the ruins and see what's up with that." Now see, this is EXACTLY why it's a bad idea to try and kill everyone who happens to fly over your secret archeological site, especially since they didn't even really fly over it, or anywhere in the vicinity even.

Anyway yeah, dig site. OK, we've basically got a bunch of boring normal forklifts tearing up the ground around the temple they keep the green Voltron lion under... with some patrolling robot guards. One goes over to Eric to, presumably, gently escort him from the premises (or squish his head like a grape) so he unloads 6 rounds from his laser gun point blank into it's face, gets in his bulky green hovercar, and tries (unsuccessfully) to flee, as some really awesome 80s-tastic chase music starts up... which then gets all distorted and grinds to a stop as the other 50 or so robot guards shoot him down. Meanwhile, Libero is negotiating with the local human authorities, AKA Eric's Girlfriend's Dad, whose name is Watson (apparently, the deal is that this planet was colonized by both humans and Megalomaniacs, the only noticeable difference being that unlike Libero here, humans MIGHT not have blue as a potential hair color), and Watson addresses him as Governor Proud. OK, your name is Libero Proud. That's pretty amazingly lame. Anyway, he wants the keys to, I guess, the spaceship he's digging up, which the human governor apparently has... I suppose plan B is to hot wire it or something. Meanwhile Robogirl is busting into the Evil Fortress of Evil because she uh... somehow knew Eric was being dragged in via helicopter, or was just getting bored waiting in the car during the meeting here. Upon seeing a robot guard, her eyes go all glowy, potentially commandeering it. Meanwhile Libero is all "Give me the key to the godly spaceship or the random dork who wants to marry your daughter gets it! OK, now, the execution setup here is pretty darn Noteworthy. We've got a robot guard facing him with a big ol' laser cannon, while he is... restrained... by a big black metal column, with robo-arms, that are hugging him. Rope is for pansies! So dorky girlfriend goes Robogirl has the key!

Then Robogirl busts into the room, having stolen one of the guns from the roboguards, turns out they're actually machine guns that just look like big ol' laser rifles, and goes on a robot killing spree. Not even column-with-arms is spared! Libero defuses the situation by pulling a gun on girlfriend who, let's face it, makes a better hostage anyway. So they take the key out of the hidden pocket in Robogirl's shoulder, hand it over, and are met with some good ol' fashioned maniacal laughter. Libero leaves via big bulky helicopter to do his thing. Apparently the remaining 3 roboguards are supposed to be some sort of threat, but not for long, because oh yeah, we have another character! Alan, the token black guy from earlier! He comes in with a big ol' spaceship, kills more robots, and rescues people. Girlfriend gets all whiny, so Robogirl just kinda gets this "oh @#$% this @#$%" look, grabs a nearby hover-bike, and heads out to stop the evil bad guy. You know when your own robot thinks you're a bunch of whiny losers, it's pretty sad. Eric goes all me-too and uses the exact same plan, but Libero kinda has enough of a head start that the ruins are already exploding with spaceship emergence by the time they show up. Turns out this is really for the best though, because the whole sequence of sticking the key in the magic box in the temple there? Yeah, that totally vaporizes everything above the ship. Including, you know, the temple... and Libero. This strikes me as uh... something of a design flaw. Anyway, Robogirl gets a semi-sappy hard rock song kicking in as she flies into the clothes disintegrating heat (which is in no way sleazy because she's essentially C-3PO with a sorta-human face glued on), jumps through the window, stares for a bit, and yanks the key out. Apparently it's stuck in there pretty good, so it takes a bit of effort. This causes what's left of the ruins to uh... explode more. Again, design flaw. Eventually she's left standing atop uh... ruins with a totally different architectural style. I'm guessing this is actually the protruding bridge of the big ol' spaceship because that's the sanest option available.

Anyway, Robogirl hops off, lands bad, and sheds a tear. Eric, watching this, starts crying, and it also starts raining, just for good measure. I don't particularly see why he cares though, I mean, he's got a girlfriend, it's just a robot, and not even one that really has a personality either. Then the top of the ruins/spaceship sends up a big green light. Then everyone leaves. Eric, Alan, annoying girlfriend, and possibly Watson, get on their spaceship (which I guess was easily fixed off camera at some point) and leave... and the big green light shooting up is clearly visible from space... and I guess uh... nobody really cares. Anyone who wants to can, presumably, wander on over, and help themselves to the most powerful spaceship in existence, because it's just sitting there with a big neon sign pointing at it. Even weirder though is uh... that's the ending. We have a big evil dude who wants to find this ship and presumably be all evil with it, he accidentally kills himself, everyone leaves. All that business with bringing his princess back to their homeworld, that just kinda got dropped, the good guys honestly didn't really do much of anything at all. The situation resolved itself, pretty much immediately. It's like, they came up with ideas for a couple basic scenes, to be inserted into a proper movie, animated those, and then got bored and just went "eh, good enough" without getting around to an actual plot. Go figure. Oh yeah, and here's a fun last minute discovery. The special features include something called "Fun Fact Video." It turns out this is watching the whole thing (with the better than you'd think dub), while along the bottom of the screen is a constant stream of random information, none of which has anything to do with The Humanoid, but is vaguely related to what's on screen. Frequently it'll just start listing off, say, "famous people with mustaches" and the like. So yeah, even the publisher seems to admit the plot here is... less than gripping.

[consciousnessstreams]

Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity

[consciousnessstreams]

Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone

[consciousnessstreams]

Devilman Woman (Part 6 of 6)

This final DVD of this hideous series finally features a token good preview. I wasn't aware of a Mazinkaiser remake in recent years. It's odd to see a real properly cheesy rocket punch and not have thick grainy lines everywhere. Also in here, but less amusing looking is something which is apparently about 3 ultra slutty looking shamans using their magical girl powers to summon their ancient aztec giant robot. It looks awful. It also reminds me of one of the characters from the 4th (4th I say!) Shadow Hearts game. Not the one you want to be associated with. The drunken mob boss kung-fu old lady cat would be cool, the dubious "ninja" from Brazil would be cool, even the vampire with the metabolic dysfunction causing her to sometimes be a morbidly obese magical girl. Reminding me of Sleazy McInjun though is meh. Oh, and thank you so much other previews for reminding me that Kekko Kamen exists. Anyway though, on with the proper torture.

Our episode starts out, naturally, with Kazumi totally flipping out. Also with military dudes trying to intervene and getting killed for their troubles, and a lot of Jun screaming and getting beaten up. Then Kazumi transforms into her brand new Devilman form (looking even less different from normal than Jun, because her hair, I guess, it too short to properly rearrange itself into stupid wing shaped hair). Then we arbitrarily flashback to how these two met for no good reason, and both of them waking up the next morning in their post-monster fight reversion to normal form on the beach. So.. sappy naked girls moment real quick like. Then it's back to the military rounding people up. And here's Random 70s Dude being all chivalrous as they smack around the Magical Girls. Is he the main character from regular Devilman maybe? Asuka and Dr. Girlfriend talk about the situation a bit. Butterfly Boy has a similar conversation with his goons. Kazumi freaks out some about her catgirl friend getting gunned down, and how her shoes are the wrong size. Dream sequence of Butterfly Boy being all pro-monster at Jun. Then Asuka wanders in to treat Jun like dirt, because she really hasn't had a chance to in a while, and to say "keep your nose out of the upcoming massive fight scene." The government kinda goes "hey, you know how we've kinda ended up with Monster Island here? We should probably bomb it into oblivion. Kazumi decides she's rather pro--monster, at least for the cute not-eating-people ones. It's really kind of a horribly botched attempt at tacking on a "maybe humanity is the REAL monsters" sorta message. I mean, up until these last couple episodes, it was pretty clearly established that monstering out makes you a mindless killing machine, so it's kinda hard to play for sympathy later. Also, inconsistent as heck. She runs out to show solidarity with all the people turning into monsters, but well, see killing machine comment on the reception. Jun meanwhile goes and finds Butterfly Boy to tell him the whole Monster Island thing is most likely a trap. And... here apparently is undead Jason saving Kazumi... OK. Butterfly Boy goes Asuka isn't the big bad guy, I have dibs! Now let's have us a fight scene with my goons! But uh, before that can happen, the aforementioned bombing starts. Silly Butterfly Boy. Asuka basically says "Anyone important to the plot obviously won't die here." And of course, they don't. Anyway, Jun fights some zombies for a bit, then Kazumi comes and stabs Ikagi there in the eye to eliminate those, gets killed for her trouble by Ikami, who is in turn killed by Jun. This all takes like, 3 seconds total. What is it with the fight scenes in this show being eyeblink length? It's not like there's plot eating the rest of the time. Anyway, teary death scene. With audio overlays from that flashback to how they first met, naturally. End of episode. Man. This show really likes to start potential major plot twists and then IMMEDIATELY nip'em in the bud. Kazumi has superpowers too! But she's dead now! Oh no! There's a whole island full of monsters! Oh, they blew it up, nevermind. So... 4 episodes left and there's no real plot driving things. Niiiice.

Episode 23-

The Magical Girls are getting carted into a concentration camp, Jun's burning a bonfire (or maybe funeral pyre) on the beach. The army's getting blown up by huge elemental columns while disposing of corpses. Butterfly Boy it seems is on the attack. I have explained that he doesn't turn into some sort of butterfly monster right? He just turns into a butterfly, or grows wings? It's silly. Asuka meanwhile is at some fancy dinner party treating government officials like dirt. Jason comes by and visits Jun on the beach. Seriously, aren't you supposed to be dead? And more of a jerk than this? He suggests they join forces and "Fighto! Fighto!" the bad guys. He also officially says "Devilman Lady!" which I suppose is a funny enough mix of this show's proper title and how they translated it. Anyway, stuff blows up. Butterfly Boy springs various monsters from the concentration camp. Asuka arrives to blow more stuff up. Maeda sneaks up behind her because it's time for a serious talk. The Magical Girls get out, with the help of 70s Man. More boring conversation, more general purpose carnage. One of the Magical Girls freaks out at the military dudes. More Maeda explaining to Asuka how she's the evil manipulative bad guy in our series. Magical Girls seem to be getting bumped off one by one. Jun decides she probably really should go join the big fight scene already. She saves the magical girls by deflecting flamethrower fire... OK. The theory is put forth half-heartedly that Asuka is the second coming of Jesus. Butterfly Boy comes to taunt Jun more (see? It's confusing when I don't bother with meanwhile). And... I just had to rewind it to confirm what I just saw, but Butterfly Boy and his All Bird Elite Goon Squad seem to have just formed Voltron here. Yup. They did. You know what that means, right? GIANT MONSTER FIGHT! "So Asuka, why pick Japan to be the country that gets filled with horrible monsters anyway?" "The person I hate most was born here." "That's it? That's kinda lame." Maeda shoots Asuka. Buttertron impales Jun. Asuka shoots Maeda back. He's the only one to die from any of this. Buttertron is quite silly looking, but that should be a given at this point. Giant Jason comes to aid Jun... which is like 5 kinds of plot inconsistency. Angst reaches critical mass and the whole giant monster fight just kinda spontaneously explodes (I'm serious). Then we have normal naked Jun talking to normal Butterfly Boy afterwards (why does he always get to keep his clothes anyway?) He explains his motives, sorta, for extra sympathy, then melts. Jun goes "OK, I'm going home now." Some cop forgets to use non-violent means to capture fleeing refugees, gets reprimanded, then gets his head bitten off when the guy he shoots monsterfies. Oh boy! This whole incident made the Engrish News! Asuka's talking to some U.S. government guy while they're watching this, then he looks up and notices she has little cherubs over her shoulders for a second. He chalks it up as drunken hallucination... as well he should, there's such a thing as being TOO silly and stupid. Blah blah blah, political chaos. Jun goes to visit her grandfather... but passes out en route and just dreams a visit, I guess. Totally abrupt and odd place to end the episode.

Episode 24-

OK, so, evidently, Jun's been living in some little rural town now for like half a year, having decided that the plot isn't her problem anymore. Just found some kindly old family to take care of her and babysits their adopted kid. Eventually though, a big military truck comes in to town, and Jun has a sudden flashback to various monsters guilt-tripping her about her killing them. The truck is full of military dudes, so she also flashes back to all the times military dudes have rather arbitrarily opened fire on her. Then they leave, and Kindly Old Couple says "like there'd ever be monsters up here in the mountains." So she has a flashback to all the times people called her a monster. So, is this episode officially a clip show now? Now it's everyone who was sappy at her. Now it's everyone who was actively not a jerk... "Hey, you all right?" says Gramma, "You look like you're flashing back to stuff over here." Now it's killing monsters. Oh yes, thank you for making me watch the penis explode again. Anyway, we've now pretty much run out of significant events to flash back - oh, no wait. I forgot the giant monster fights. Sorry, carry on flashbacks. We done now, or are you going to do all the times Asuka said you suck? Because that'd easily fill the next 20 minutes of episode we have here and then some. Evidently we're done flashbacking though, and Jun's wandering off to find the military truck is now full of dead military dudes... and presumably, the little girl she's been babysitting is the monster of the week. Naturally. They head down to the swimming hole (swim team leader ep flashback! Naked beach sappiness flashback! Girls confessing love in general flashbacks!) Don't worry though Jun, the 8 year old kid PROBABLY isn't hitting on you. Them dying after doing so flashbacks... Yeah, I'm going to have to call it now. This is officially a flashback episode. Anyway, then some half-dead military dude comes along and unceremoniously shoots the little girl in the head. Evidently he's sick of all the obvious setups. Doesn't much matter though, because, well, she IS the monster of the week, and she kist kinda fires the bullet back out of her skull and kills him with it. "What are you so upset about, I thought you hated these soldiers? I'm going to stop specifically listing these flashback cues now, you get the idea I'm sure. Anyway, little girl here is also psycho, and promises not to kill more people if she stays in happy farmland and doesn't go hunt down Asuka. So yeah, let's see just how long the montage of Asuka being a total jerk lasts. Ah, just a minute or so. They kinda did a greatest hits thing with it. Here's some cops. "Jun, you're under arrest on suspicion of making a bunch of soldiers explode!" Little Girl: "Hey, you said you'd stay here! Stuff goes boom now!" Jun: "Well, if you're going to be like that, I really AM leaving. Transform and roll out!" In the middle of a crowd. Later, back at the ranch. "Seriously kid, quit killing people." "But you do it all the time!" "Yeah, but I'm a Devilman, I'm allowed to. You're a cute kid, so just pretend to be normal." "No way! You're a total hypocrite!" "Please?" "OK..." Asuka, elsewhere: "OK Jun, come on, time to come kill me." Gratuitous but detail free in the form of showering in the swimming hole's waterfall to end the episode, because hey, she's already shredded the only set of clothes she brought on this trip. You really would think by this point she'd at the very list keep some changes of clothes stashed in various places for these situations. Maybe she's just hit the point of apathy by now. I mean, between having a "monster" form that doesn't really do anything but change her hair cut, and having a few giant monster fights in the middle of Tokyo, she's kinda been seen naked by a significant percentage of the population.

Episode 25-

Taking a cue from Kazumi, Jun cuts her hair before heading off to the big showdown. Maybe that'll keep it from looking like stupid wings. Oddly enough, she melodramatically says "I'll never be human again." while doing this thing that'll make her look more human. Evidently, 70s Man is named Takeshi, him and the Magical Girls are still in a concentration camp. Jun talks about being all martyry. Asuka takes another shower that makes a good point of showing off her nipples, but an active point of stopping the slow scroll down before showing us if she's had bottom surgery. Nipples of Masculinity strikes me as a really horrible but possibly existent D&D item. Then she stares out the window naked while her shoulder angles appear and be significantly more modest. Then it's back to 70s Man and the Magical Girls as they plan their big escape. Evidently security's weakest by the gas chambers. Asuka evidently hasn't given up respected secret agency leader status yet when going all "I'm god and a total bad guy here" but she's way less into the meetings. Random Ambassador sees the angels for a second, but like most people, refuses to believe anything that stupid to be in this show. MORE RANDOM ENGRISH! WOO! Anyway, while the Magical Girls are getting ready for their breakout, they get picked to be executed next. Not a good sign that. Elsewhere, Jun's having a fight with Engrish speaking jet pilots. The Magical Girls decide, @#$% the plan, let's just punch out these guards, take their guns, and run. Meanwhile, 70s Man finally reveals that yes, he evidently IS in fact Devilman from the original series. As was, honestly, evident the whole time from his lack of updated character design. Man, he's way worse off with hair. His tries to look like wings too, but it's short, so it has to leave the top of his head to do so, and, basically, the end result is pretty much chrome dome with feathered hair. And sideburns. Feathered sideburns. Jun thinks about how she really should have treated Kazumi less like dirt, and then encounters Asuka's shoulder angles flying around. Suddenly, she's underwater. Anyway, all the plothole-tastic non-evil monstery refugees decide to make their escape by cutting through the gas chamber... which seems, shall we say, unwise. Anyway, Jun wakes up, swims out of being underwater, and is in a nice happy field with a ruined gazebo. I believe this is the setting of various bad dreams she's had throughout the series, but it's hard to tell when it isn't tinged red. Asuka's also there in white robes. Anyway, it turns out the gas chamber isn't the gas chamber at all. It's a portal to hell, or something. We jump back to boring Asuka and Jun talkery. Oh, and she still does have the hair wings despite the trim. Anyway, when asked why she hates humanity so much, Asuka strips. Once again, the audience is spared from having to stare at her penis while she explains how, evidently, she's a hermaphrodite, and generally ticked off about it. OK... show? If you're going where I think you are with this scene, please don't. Evidently they are though. "Hey Jun, did you ever wonder why it is you always do exactly what I say?" says Asuka while getting all huggy... mercifully, here's a meanwhile with the Magical Girls and 70s Devilman. They all get locked in the gas chamber that might be a portal to hell, and a bunch of white robed dudes advance on them. Meanwhile, Asuka's going on with this whole love at first sight bit. Jun half-faints from the level of WRONG in this scene. Asuka meanwhile starts spouting lines so wrong and horrible that if I have to read these subtitles, so do you! "Have you been so impatient to receive my body?" "This day I will violate you as the last Beast and become the Child of God." And uh... yeeaahhh...... let's check back in with the Magical Girls now? Please? Thanks. 70s Devilman shoots some robed dudes because they keep slowly advancing while refusing to say anything. They respond by slowly advancing without saying anything (well, with the exception of the ones he shoots, they fall down). Meanwhile, "Jun, arigatou." Followed by a shot of Jun's face which so PERFECTLY conveys the level of shock and that-was-just-WRONG-itude this episode invokes. I'll have to do a screengrab later. Then Jun screams and falls through the floor. 70s Man: "Everyone was killed over something this stupid!?!" I think that one line might make him my favorite character now. But, you know, Mr. Two-T-Rexes is hard to beat. Anyway, jun falls through the ceiling... so, I guess the happy ruin filled grassy field was on top of the gas chamber, and there's a big water filled tube leading up to it, or we're playing fast and loose with terrain here. She falls straight on through the giant hole in the floor though. Meanwhile, back outside, a glorious column of light comes down from heaven, making Asuka's clothes disappear, she grows wings and stupid hair, gets giant and glowy, and kinda starts serenely hovering over he city. End of episode.

I'm going to take a break before the next one so I can watch The Daily Show and get a bonus to my next sanity check.

The Daily Show-

Oh, I missed who was giving this speech, but at some Republican gathering, someone said: "... If we ever lose our goodness, we will lose our greatness." Later, after listing off all the democratic presidential candidates as "The first ____ president." we get "Now, obviously, I've left out Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd. Moving on..." and... I think I'm going to stop trying to do the joke of summarizing the Daily Show because I'm still in summary mode, because Daily Show doesn't translate to text (at least without illustrations backing it up).

Episode 26-

I might not have mentioned this earlier, but every episode has a one-word minimalist title that kinda spoils the monster of the week. Like, the episode with the lesbian catgirl? "Cat." The swim team episode? "Shark." Episode 25? "God." It doesn't always hold true that well, for instance, there isn't an episode called "Twodinosaursgluedtogether." but yeah, simple one word titles. This episode is called "Man." I can see where they're likely going with that in what passes for the artistic sense, but I much prefer to think of it as a general reaction to the series at this point, you know, like "... man." Possibly followed with "This is some @#$%ed up #@$% right here." Anyway, time to watch it now. So... we pick up where we were, which is pretty darn messed up. Jun fell down a big red rune encircled toilet bowl or something, and Asuka became god (as a result of sleeping with her). Here's a bunch of different shots of Asuka simultaneously floating over every city in the world. And here's the President of the United States delivering a speech (in surprisingly well pronounced and southern accented Engrish) about it being the second coming of Jesus. And here's me laughing my head off. Meanwhile, yeah, I guess there really was a portal to hell in the fake gas chamber. Because that seems to be where Jun finally landed. She says sorry to the big pillar made of corpses of everyone she's killed. Butterfly Boy's face sticking out of it says not to beat herself up over it, she did what she was supposed to do... and then starts being a jerk about it, so she punchers his face into goo, and thus winds up stuck on the pillar herself. The news back on earth is all really positive. Everyone's just kinda staring out the window a their new living god and saying there's no wars and stuff. Meanwhile, the Magical Girls and associates are wondering why they haven't been killed off yet. The de facto leader of the Magical Girls gives this nice touching speech to 70s Devilman about how she still wants the reason she was born to be valid and won't just quietly resign herself to her fate. Which is, I suppose, all very touching and moving and all, but unless I missed something, the reason in question would be uh... wiping out all of humanity and having a world filled with murderous monsters. Granted, I'm for that too at this point. The monsters are all way less angsty and they look just plain hilarious 9 times out of 10. Meanwhile, Jun's all "I suppose I do kinda deserve to be crucified on this gory column for all eternity, and Kazumi's hunk of it is trying to cheer her up. She says to close her eyes and imagine her how she used to be, so the rest of this conversation takes place in vague imaginary modeling photo shoot land. Anyway, she stays stuck in martyr land for a while, and then has the epiphany that if she really had some sort of ambiguous pseudo-crush on anyone, it was Kazumi, not Asuka, so she gets all determined. Some of what she actually says: "If Asuka has become God, then so be it, but then I will become the Devil and destroy Asuka!" The overall tone of this little speech though is, in all seriousness, more along the lines of "In the name of the Hell! I will punish you!" Oh Japan, your general attitude towards Christianity is just plain hilarious sometimes. So yeah, in a moment that reminds me way too much of Sailor Moon, she absorbs all the love and friendship (OK, they say hatred and power, but it's all too sappy and philanthropic for me to buy that), along with, you know, all the corpses, to become great big super-giant Satan-form Jun (which, really, looks just like her regular giant form). Meanwhile, the white robed guys, in their infinite Christian mercy, start feeding the remaining semi-monstery refugees here. 70s Devilman goes "Hey, what's your angle?" more or less, and they explain how it's the will of God's Child that they take pity on them and be nice to'em and stuff. So, apparently, when we get to the big final showdown between the main character and the evil manipulative bad guy, the latter really is coming into it representing the pure altruistic embodiment of serene love and happiness that genuinely is making the world a better place. That's almost funny enough to have been worth sitting through this whole show. Around now though, everyone but the kinda-crazy Magical Girl leader runs for their lives, because Jun's exploding out of the ground in a huge pillar of flame. Asuka's nice enough to have all the versions of her floating over non-Tokyo cities disappear to make it a fair fight. "What could the Devil possibly have left to do in this world, Jun?" "To take you to hell with me, Asuka!" (Our hero, ladies and gentlemen.) So they get all ready to fighty, and Asuka kicks things off by having her 4 little cherubs floating around here (I can't possibly convey how weirdly not weird looking these are) shoot big ropes of light to tie her up. Which doesn't really do anything, she breaks out immediately. So then Asuka's transforms, her hair becomes a second set of wings, her hands become bird claws, basically she just goes full-on silly looking. "Eww, you absorbed a bunch of dead monsters, that's so grody." (Not a direct quote, not that most of these are). Anyway, at this point I'm pretty much sitting here watching the last boss from a 16-bit RPG fighting the last boss from a 32-bit RPG. That is to say, a big naked blue girl and some silly angelish thing with too many wings and multiple forms. Oh, and it's so great to see the shots of the Magical Girl in the background all happy about her hero Satan fighting on despite getting beaten up so much. Seriously. Laser laser laser, bleed bleed bleed. They do the whole thing where they both run at each other and you can't tell who wins. Then Jun coughs up blood and falls over, and Asuka sneers... but then gets an uh-oh look and bloodily splits in half along the waist. And then explodes. But don't worry little magical girl! Jun's not dead! Her arms got ripped off, but she's otherwise fine! We see the back of the president's head as he's watching this on TV. Then we see an exterior shot of the White House and hear a gunshot... this series isn't recent enough for the president in question to actually represent George Bush is it? Because it sure does seem like it right now. So then Jun's standing there in regular human form, while it's raining dead-god fallout-feathers going "Asuka, I may have cared for you after all. Even though we were complete opposites, we were very alike. That's why I couldn't love you. Because you can never fall in love with yourself." That really was pretty much word for word mind you. So anyway, the magical girls are all "So, what do we do now? Just try and go back to how everything used to be?" "Why don't you pray for that to happen?" "Pray to what, exactly?" "Who knows?" Again, all the real quotes here. Oh, and it seems Magical Girl leader is pregnant with 70s Devilman's baby or something, but he's all 70sy flabbergasted and sillyly runs off. Vaguely reminds me of Ataru or something here. And then we see Jun wandering down the street while a couple schoolgirls with tails laugh and play. "The End" ED song goes back to what it was for all but the last however many episodes. So uh... yeah. I have to ask here. Exactly how badly did Christian missionaries treat the general populace of Japan how recently to provoke reactions like this? I mean, it's one thing when you use a thinly veiled metaphor to imply that, say, the Catholic Church is some horrible conspiratorial group with evil plans for the world, or even that Jesus was actually Satan in disguise come to trick humanity to their doom, but this show here? OK, this is saying, with no metaphor wrapped around it at all, that even if we totally accept Christianity at face value, and Jesus really is going to come back, and end all war, and make life happy and wonderful and conflict free for everyone... @#$% that! Let's kill it and go back to normal! And we aren't even showing some sort of example here of how this is going to work out for the best, it's just kinda presented as a given here. Call me crazy, but I think that may be taking your hatred for a religion just a LITTLE too far. In any event, I am now done watching this. It has left me mildly curious just how regular Devilman's plot unfolds, but really, I'm not nearly curious enough to go find out. I do still have to get screen grabs of some of the funnier monsters and that one face that really sums up episode 25. I'll let you know when I've gotten around to doing that. [Note: This is in reference to the original pure text incarnation. The images you've seen thus far are all you're getting. I'm not going back for screengrabs of the wangaconda any time soon.]

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[consciousnessstreams]

Devilman Woman (Part 5 of 6)

Episode 18-

Episode 19-

Random girl somewhere talking to her dad on the phone about evacuating. Didn't we already start like 3 episodes with that sort of random scene? Anyway, the gist of what's up right now is, Jun's on the lamb, and Asuka's heading off to America to score more heroin or something, and being all "mwahaha, everything is going according to my evil plan" to Maeda here, before firing him. Meanwhile, Kazumi seems to have escaped from the underground catgirl hovel while off camera, making me wonder what the point of any of that was, and is crashing with some gay guy for now. And Jun is crashing in a drainage ditch. Oh, the random kid from earlier's dad is Jun's modeling boss. Suddenly, TOTALLY SILLY SEA TURTLE MAN IN THE MIDDLE OF THE STREET gets blown away with a bazooka. What a hilariously random thing to abruptly cut to. Meanwhile, Butterfly Boy is amassing an army of elite goons, like this guy here who can evidently smell when someone is capable of monstering out. Meanwhile, Kazumi is lured into the sewer again by her new catgirl friend (to hang with her fang having friend, and her antennae having friend). They're evidently harmless monstery people whose forms don't really do much or anything or revert. Or something. Meanwhile, Jun calls her grandmother. Meanwhile, boss-man's wife and kid are skipping town, because, well, town's full of monsters and stuff. He's staying behind because he's a workaholic. Meanwhile, here's another really silly looking monster. Meanwhile, Jun comes in to work, having heard about it from her grandmother. Yeah, that's totally how to keep a low profile. On the plus side, she did kinda have to run away from the HA because they were sick of all the property damage, and at least doing modeling work gets you a decent new set of clothes instead of a randomly picked up trench coat (possibly Jason's actually, him being sensible like that). Oh, but apparently she doesn't get to keep those. Meanwhile, on a train, some fat guy turns into a giant tick or something, and Butterfly Boy's goons, in monster form, hover overhead, in various different silly birdish forms. Oh, and the train had boss-man's wife and kid on it. Oh, and boss man wants to sneak off with Jun and ditch'em, which I guess won't be a big deal because wifey went splat, and the kid seems to be the sole survivor... and the kid is evidently- oh... the kid is evidently on the box cover, and the fat guy didn't turn into a tick, but rather a centipede man. Lovely. Not only is this box cover pseudo-pornish, it's pseudo-porn involving a girl who's like, maybe 12. Once again, gift from my grandmother here! Anyway though, Jun tries to say to boss-man, "you don't wanna sneak off with me, I'm a monster" and goes to demonstrate by slowly transforming. This is honestly pretty hilarious because the first 90% of the transformation sequence is just her hair forming into the Retarded Devilman Haircut, and she gets cut off halfway through with an "I love you anyway!" and a kiss. Anyway, back at the train, Little Girl runs, steals a corpses cell phone, and interrupts the sappiness with a "there's a monster trying to kill me!" message. Maeda comes in conveniently to say where the trouble is (which would be contrived, but he was kinda in charge of tracking her down. So she goes and finishes with that demonstration of transformation sequence (ripping her trench coat to shreds) and goes to be all superhero-y. In the ensuing fight scene, we totally don't get the cover art picture, which is a Good Thing. Little girl runs from her savior for some reason. Best I can figure, she's scared away by the stupid haircut.

Episode 20-

Starting things off today in the lab in America Jason there owned... Maeda (I think) is trying to look up info on Asuka in the computer, when he's caught by a local Big Fat Black Doctor (because, again, this lab is in America, and they have those there). Meanwhile, Asuka is talking to/hitting on her new secretary, who I'm going to call Dr. Girlfriend, because she's a doctor of some sort, and I need to make a reference to a good show about now for sanity's sake. Big Black Doctor makes arrangements to secretly meet with Maeda and plot exposition somewhere in New Jersey. And naturally, the next shot opens with a Tori gate somewhere, because the directly has ADD or something. Jun's in a park, and gets confronted by a cop, who's killed by some kinda harpy thing that also confronts her, and looks just like the one that helped kill Kazumi's parents. Asuka's off being manipulatey at some general. Oh, now it Jun's being attacked by a whole gaggle of previously killed monsters! She's confused by this, but it makes perfect sense to me. It's pretty much the standard to make you fight all the old bosses again when you get towards the end of the game after all. Evidently Dr. Girlfriend is actually a spy for the U.S. Government to keep tabs on Asuka, but Mr. Smell Out Monster People has her phone, presumably having killed her like, 5 seconds after she was introduced. Ah well. These things happen. Meanwhile, Kazumi and the lame monster girls (hereafter, the magical girls) are doing things. Now back to the fight scene. "As you say, we've already died once. Therefore, we can never die again." Time to run then. Oh no! The path is blocked by Mr. 2 T-Rexes! Ah, the magical girls are just looting a department since the city is kinda deserted. Meanwhile, two cops almost crash into the fight scene, which has spilled out into the road. They take a potshot at Jun, because obviously you should always shoot at the not scary looking monster all the others are trying to kill... actually, I can see a lot of contexts where that really would be good advice, but still. Evidently, one of the sillier bird people is the necromancer here, so we have one single monster to kill and end our big complex problem. Now the fight crashes through the floor into the magical girl's sewer, allowing our hero and our annoying moe character to wave at each other real quick before getting back to their respective tasks. Oh, and the necromantic bird girl is named Izumi, which I suppose is way easier to type. Anyway, the fight ends with everyone running off in different directions, and Asuka finding Jun collapsed somewhere random. Meanwhile, in New Jersey (hehehe), Big Black Doctor is named Todd Kimball, and seriously is crazily huge and racistly drawn. Like, it's really really dark in this scene here, so all you can really see is his eyes and lips. It's not nearly as bad as at least a dozen other things, but still. Oh, and yes, it is Maeda he's talking to. "And this is also where Lan Asuka killed her father." Meanwhile, back in Japan, Asuka is taking a shower while Jun is sleeping in the other room, when she notices there's someone on the other side of the shower curtain. Surprise! It's Butterfly Boy come to kill you. Also, Asuka has nipples right now. I kinda feel the need to mention this because, for instance, two episodes ago, there was a grand total of like, 5 minutes or so of Jun naked and lying on an examining room table and stuff like that, plus various people in showers and bath scattered around other episodes with the relatively TV-friendly nippleless boobs. I can deal with it if you always have'em, I can deal with it if you never have'em, I can even deal with it when it's conditional, like shower scene=no, rape scene=yes (but I'd REALLY rather not watch anything where that's a rule that I can establish). Here though it's just totally arbitrary, and that's weird. Mr. Unflattering Stereotype is, meanwhile, explaining how apparently, Asuka is actually the first person ever to have monstered out. Butterfly Boy, on the other side of the world, confirms... incidentally, I can't see a window in the Japan scene, but as best as I can figure, they seriously screwed up and made it the middle of the night in both Japan and New Jersey here. Oh, correction. Asuka's DAD was the first person ever to monster out, she just shot him after he killed her mom. Much like she just shot Butterfly Boy now to shut him up. That is to say, several times, because in both the flashback, and in now, they keep getting back up. Past dad's monster form is kind of a big monkey with horns. Asuka says something all crazy sounding to Butterfly Boy about how "humans are just stepping stones on her way to evolution, they just turn into beasts, while I'll turn into a god!" Jun: "Huh?" Then Butterfly Boy goes all Legato and telekineses her arm to stick the gun in her own mouth. In the flashback, Asuka blows her monster-dad's brains all over the wall (where the stain still is 4 years later for Maeda and friend to stare at while talking), while in the present, evidently blowing her own brains out. Maeda: "But that doesn't mean Asuka's a Beast too. Devil Beast Progress isn't supposed to be inheritable." Then why have you been calling it evolution all this time people? "Yeah, she's not a human OR a Devil Beast, but oh, the CIA's here, so I'll have to give you the rest of this exposition on a CD-ROM." And then turns into one of those Japanese Bib Bears so he can shield Maeda from the CIA's hail of bullets. "Oh, and when you get back to Japan, tell Jun she's the true hope of Devilmen!" Well, aside from you, apparently, the only other one there's been died last episode, and I'm assuming the main character from regular Devilman is dead or something, because I've yet to see any sort of attempt at a tie-in (unless I totally missed it, but this show SUCKS at doing anything subtly except concealing monster appearance, so I doubt it). Oh, and Asuka didn't kill herself, she shot the mirror at the last minute. Butterfly Boy leaves, Asuka says "sic'em Jun!" Jun says "woah woah woah, before I go do that, what was that bit about all of humanity being stepping stones in your path to godhood?" Meanwhile, Kazumi's having a sleepover with the magical girls, and they ask if she's like them, and get a yeah... and now you're saying "Beast gene" in the same episode you said it wasn't inheritable. Maybe the translators suck and they meant to say it was recessive, or maybe Go Nagai knows jack squat about what any of these terms mean. Anyway, the context of "Beast gene" is Maeda looking at what's on the CD-ROM. It has this spiel about there being the beast gene, and then also this "lotus gene" that only one person has. And here's that person's stats: RUN ASUKA (Way to give the blond American girl there such a not English name, and way to frell it up in all the fansubs when you mention it despite it being written in English at this point) tall: 175cm hair color: blond blood type: B sex: male Yes, that's right boys and girls. It seems our evil abusive bisexual boss-lady is, in fact, not only evidently some sorta mutant god-monster, but also, for good measure, trans. You know what's REALLY sad? I now totally see the logic behind the arbitrary nipple showing earlier. A small part of it is "ah, but this is technically a guy, we're allowed to draw THEIR nipples!" and a much bigger part of it is that weird habit anime/manga creators have of trying to make make the male audience drool over someone, and then go "haha! That's really a dude you're fantasizing about!" As far as I can tell, it's such a popular trend because all these people hate their fans and want to make them suffer. That or it's some sorta crazy Secret Gay Agenda like crazy people are always talking about. Nonono, it's not pro-gay sitcoms they're trying to use to turn our children gay! It's anime fan service! We must warn the people quickly! Anyway, back to watching the awful show now. I think I have one episode left. Seriously though, you know it's a horrible show when in retrospect you can go "Aha! That girl has nipples! She must really be a guy!"

Episode 21-

One month later, an anti-turning into a monster vaccine is developed and distributed. Gee, what do you suppose the odds are that that'll actually make there be more monsters? 100% sound about right? Let's watch and see. Now we've got a confusing montage of Maeda going around and Jun running around, and technobabble about evil monster RNA, and the city has people in it, but it doesn't seem to have hurt the Magical Girls' foraging abilities. Before the technobabble is even up, yeah, the drug makes people monsters. They evidently tested it though before making it available to the general population, so... great. We have a done to death plot device, and then at the last minute, we decide not to even use it. Meanwhile, the magical girls are expositing too, about how first one of them went all cat-girl, and then all her friends became similar, and none of them went on killing sprees or anything, but still they're persecuted. Or should I say FURsecuted? The correct answer is, I should not. Because there is no context where that pun isn't infuriatingly awful. Oh, and yes, it seems Dr. Girlfriend has been replaced with a monster that disguises itself as her, or always was one. Not important which really.,, and Asuka's evidently on to her. This show has so many TOTALLY POINTLESS plot twists they throw away immediately! Anyway though, they're rounding up all the people carrying the monster gene and sticking them in a concentration camp, and giving them injections of either defective anti-monster serum, or poison, probably the latter. This is bad for the Magical Girls. Fortunately, Izumi shows up to take them all off to safety. Oh hey, she has no nipples when she reverts to human form here. She must really be a girl! And here's someone from the 70s riding into the city on his motorcycle, and here's someone monstering out in the street, and here's a hundred other people doing so. OK. Guess it wasn't poison. Maeda explains the deal with the drug to Jun elsewhere. I'm glad I stopped calling him "random goon" a while back, because he's kinda become like the 3rd most important character. The Magical Girls figure they're better off living on Monster Island (where the monster concentration camp turned hideout is) than with paranoid army dudes trying to kill'em. I'd just hide in a fangirl wad myself. Anyway, Maeda's all "I know Asuka sucks, but could you please go kill all these monsters for, you know, general principle's sake?" Anyway, army dudes are beating up the magical girls, so their leader transforms into Cheetara from Thundercats and... gets shot like 2000 times immediately after. Well, that was another pointless scene. Anyway, Jun comes to save the day, and Izumi comes to also save the day, and/or kidnap Kazumi, again, and lure Jun into a trap. Mainly the second one. OK, seriously, the crazy ADD editing in this episode is way way worse than normal. We're like,arbitrarily skipping over every other period of 15 seconds or something. Butterfly Boy says Kazumi really is a carrier of the monster gene, making that episode where "We've secretly replaced Jun's ward with an evil catgirl, let's see if she notices" episode that much more arbitrary and confusing. He then makes Kazumi watch while his all star bird people team pins Jun to the wall and beats the heck out of her. There's some blood being coughed up on Jun's side of things, and some Butterfly Boy telling Kazumi "Come on! Monster out and try to stop us! You know you wanna!" And then the episode ends, all 2 parter-y. So yeah. This show's living up to my expectations better now. We've got a couple more That's Not Right moments, and we've got a coma-inducingly formulaic plot totally unraveling into incoherent (yet still somehow generic) mess where they pretty much decided to say "OK, the bad guys are bad guys still, the good guys are also bad guys, the government are bad guys, I guess the good guys are just these 6 girls and Maeda there." It's also dramatically upping the number of random silly monster designs per episode, and that's just super. They're hilarious. The really good news though is, just one disc left and I am DONE with this sleazy boring badness.

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[consciousnessstreams]

Devilman Woman (Part 4 of 6)

OK, we're at the halfway point now, just 3 more DVDs and I can say I have watched all of this wonderful gift from my grandmother. On with torturing myself. Let's see, first, do we have any decent previews here? No, we do not. Although we DO have a preview for a potentially watchable series: Southern Cross. It's the hunk of Robotech where they have transforming motorcycle/power armor and fight big bulky bugs in a post-apocalyptic foresty wasteland! And the best part is, despite the monsters being big bulky bugs, I'm pretty sure they still managed to rationalize one falling in love with the main character. Scratch that, it's the third one, where they have tanks that turn into tanks with legs. Still, yay for cheesy old mecha anime! Boo to awful new Eva clones (which is what these other previews mainly seem to be for)! Oh, and this one seems to be for a bad anime based on an obscure fighting game. Incidentally, the other "extras" on these DVDs, all of them? The op and ed with no credits on'em, and an "original preview trailer" which is uh... the op with no credits laid over it. The best anime DVD feature I have seen remains Utena's language options menus, all of which just loop different a clip of Chuchu. Rock on. So yeah, enough stalling, on to the awful show.

We start with a montage of someone taking pictures of a 5 year old girl as she engages in various activities like relay racing (OK...) which ends, to show her opening the door because her dad shout be home on her birthday, suddenly cutting to the bloody corpses of her and her mother on the floor. Well, that wasn't particularly expected. Then we have her dad looking at pictures and news clippings later, and grumbling about how monsters suck. Meanwhile, Kazumi seems to have run off somewhere. Possibly to find someone who is more sympathetic to the fact that her parents were killed and filled with bugs like, 2 weeks ago. It turns out Mr. Reporter has her, and is more or less holding her ransom. He's also apparently living across the street watching her through a telescope these days. So far, I don't really see any follow-through from last episode. That's a very good thing. Oh, aha! Mr. Reporter is dead 5 year old's dad! He uses a bunch of hidden cameras to take a bunch of pictures of Jun when she arrives. See, if I haven't mentioned it, they keep making a big deal of how you can tell Jun has monster powers because of how her eyes flash when she gets her picture taken... she's a professional model though, so I guess most people just really aren't that observant, plus there's no real special effect, it's just something of a stated fact. Mr. Reporter has some weirdo bum chained to a pole in his back yard. A quick montage from the first episode reminds us, any guys chained to poles are monsters. This guy has a big mouth on his stomach. Anyway, Mr. Detective is using this monstrobum to try and get Jun to reveal her true monsterous form and confess to the killing of all the various people other monsters killed when she was in the general area... and various people who turned into monsters that she really did kill, which is harder to deny. He's then distracted by some random monster kid (oh hey, the one from episode 3 who turned into a butterfly) sneaking up to give his whole superiority speech. Oh, and it turns out Mr. Bum has a HUUUUUUUUUUGE mouth on his stomach He's real goofy looking. Meanwhile, HA agents are off trying to kill a straight-up purple amorphous octo-tentacle monster. Quick glimpse of random goons getting dropped, then back to Stomach Bum and Butterfly Boy menacing Jun and Mr. Reporter. Evidently Butterfly Boy killed Mr. Reporter's daughter because she complained about how creepy he was. And MAN Stomach bum is great. I really wish it were easier to convey how absolutely silly looking most of these monsters are. So anyway, we keep cutting back and forth between Jason (fighting Tentake elsewhere) and Butterfly Boy both grumbling about how Jun's such a big insecure baby about turning into a monster and killing stuff, and I totally agree. What's the big freakin' deal ya wimp? You don't even look silly like everyone else (well, except the hair). I say just buy baggier clothes, and monster out willy-nilly! Anyway, eventually Mr. Reporter realizes that Jun's more of a superhero than a murderous monster, and politely turns his back so she can get on with the monster killing without having to worry about her secret identity being exposed. She kills Stomach bum by ripping his biggest upper jaw off, which is weird, because it's not actually attached to the rest of him to begin with. The top half of him just floats above the bottom half with teeth all around, and yet, yanking it upwards killed it anyway. OK... Mr. Reporter has second thoughts and goes to take her picture after, but notices she's crying, like she always does after killing monsters. Butterfly Boy summons a couple more monsters to drag things out, but Mr. Reporter wants to get this episode over with, so he throws a bucket of gasoline on him, grabs him, and sets all non-Jun monsters, and the house (and uh, himself) on fire. The fight scene across town is just boring. Butterfly Boy doesn't die, because he's now an official recurring villain. He grows butterfly wings and flies off, and summons another dozen or so monsters as backup so he can properly slink into the night. Asuka calls Jun a wimp later, because she hasn't had a chance to this episode.

Episode 15-

Kazumi is chained to a column in the desert. Why? Because she got into modeling. "Hey, did they ever solve your parents' murder case?" "No." "Do you remember what the guy looked like?" "..." Later, some random person is impaled on a giant spear in the middle of the street. The girl asking the earlier question sees this, and runs into a back alley to puke/monster out. This is probably a bad sign for our token moe character (ooh, look at me, using my new Japanese buzzword! LOL BAKA NAAAA-NIIII! Ahem). A bit later, Kazumi looks out the window and sees a crow in the distance, silhouetted against the sun, and carrying a human corpse. I should probably have mentioned by now that crows are this episodes Big Theme Animal, and what Butterfly Boy's backup monsters kinda looked like, but a quick glance earlier in this paragraph shows how on the game I am. Kazumi flashbacks to the day her parents were killed. This flashback includes her hopping into the bathtub and adding the powder that makes the water orange. Huh. I always thought orange bath water was some sort of visual shorthand for "no, this girl isn't naked for you to ogle, just coincidentally naked, like the whole nippleless boobs bit (which we also have featured in this flashback). Evidently though, it's a real thing. Anyway, she then goes to check out her house, sees Butterfly Boy and a crow monster, freaks out. Also, it's evidently traffic lights the crow monsters are into impaling people on, not big spears. My mistake. Anyway, Jun's cruising around town with Maeda, because Asuka's in America treating Jason like dirt for a change I guess, or maybe being nice to him, they aren't shown, so take your pick. There's no sappiness or sleaziness on display, which really doesn't speak well for this show continuity wise. Anyway, more crows killing people, more freaking out, Kazumi has more flashbacks/a total nervous breakdown. Not a small percentage of this episode is recycled from earlier. Anyway, outside her head, Kazumi is surrounded by something like 50 werecrows, and passes out. Butterfly Boy finds Jun and taunts her, then encourages her to come fly off to a more suitable fight scene location by dragging catatonic Kazumi around. When they get there, Kazumi puts 1 and 1 together and realizes that the naked girl who looks just like her roommate but maybe 10 cm taller and with a retarded haircut is her roommate. Then Jun gets KOed by crows, has a chain net dropped on her with a junkyard magnet, pecked at by crows a bit, makes the crows explode through sheer power of righteous indignation (seriously) and Butterfly Boy takes his hostage and runs. I think we can officially call Butterfly Boy and the crows a plot arc at this point. It's not much, but I'll take what I can get at this point.

Episode 16-

Episode 13 there is definitely looking like an isolated incident of Wrong, so the show's settling back into boring land now. The op song is some Latin chanty thing. At a stretch, it sounds at one point like it says "Sell a MONGOOSE! With LASERRRRRS!" Anyway, episode. I don't think I'm really getting across in these summaries how much of the average episode is dead air in the form of random background HA goons muttering about nothing in particular, Jun moping, and random people being shown puttering around town, and silently sitting around in cars. That percentage is Most. There's like 5 minutes worth of actual episode content per episode, much of which is in 3 second flashes between stretches of dead air. For instance, this guy drooling over a girl's corpse in an alley is all that happened of note while I typed as I typed out that long aside. Butterfly Boy encourages him to eat her. Jun flashes back YET AGAIN to the Dead Kazumi's Parents ep. We have seriously gone over this footage more than enough in this little arc. Anyway, she finds Kazumi at her house, and the two of them finally show some freakin' emotion over the whole dead parents bit. Read: They cry until a random HA goon comes along to take Jun off to kill a monster (so, they cry for like 5 seconds). This monster looks kinda like Godzilla, and like a frog, and has two Thrakazog tongues. Most monsters seem to have at least 1 Thrakazog tongue. Frogzilla here also has acidic drool, and the corners of his mouth seem to be somewhere around his ankles. Way less silly looking than most honestly, but there's always hope of more crazy details when we get a better viewing angle. Oh, OK, the frog face isn't on its head, it's on or near at least one foot. That's pretty silly. Godzilla with frogs for feet (or maybe just one frog). Still, not a top 10 contender by any means. Meanwhile, Kazumi suggests to Jun that she give up the business of monstering out and killing monsters, because it's kinda freaky, and cuts into their hugging and crying time. On a related note, Frogzilla is officially rampaging through town and has been for some time, why HASN'T she been called out to monster hunt yet? Eventually a news helicopter shows up to film it, and people worry about the public becoming aware of uh... the giant frog/lizard thing stomping through the Shinjuku district. OK, can we drop the pretense of this whole monster thing being kept a secret from the public already? I mean, come on people, plausibility. Meanwhile, Kazumi somehow paralyzes Jun, grows a big long purple tail, and turns out to be a monster in disguise. A random HA dude, or maybe it's Maeda, shows up to shoot her, snapping Jun out of it so we can have a proper fight. The monster is a big pink Salamander with Kazumi's face on its forehead. Also not really a contender. She skips fighting it for now (huh? She just leaves it in her apartment for HA dude to deal with?) and flies off to fight Frogzilla, because military helicopters aren't doing the trick. She gets scolded some for not coming to the fight when it started, probably a couple hours ago, when there wasn't a reporter present, but meh. Giant Monster Fight! I don't know why I always type that so enthusiastically because they tend to be over in like 3 anticlimactic seconds, but still, on general principle. Butterfly Boy taunts her real quick afterwards, then she goes back to her apartment to find a beat up conciliatory Maeda and... seriously, did we just monstrify and kill off a major character out of the blue, off screen, with no real followup, or did we kill a shapeshifter disguised as her. If it's the former, what the heck? If it's the latter, you really should have indicated thus somewhere. Guess I'll have to go by the presence or lack of emotional fallout next episode.

Episode 17-

We start with a crazy montage of a helicopter gunning down an amusingly varied collection of monsters who were evidently hiding in a church, followed by the people inside (random HA goon and Asuka) having a brief exchange in wonderfully mis-inflected Engrish. Finally, some decent payoff for watching all this subbed. There was Engrish earlier too, but not as funny. Anyway, time for another photo shoot, or more likely, dream sequence, because halfway through it Jun monsters out and kills everyone else present, then has Butterfly Boy appear and taunt, and all the corpses turn into various people she knew before they monstered out and were killed. So yeah, evidently last episode we arbitrarily had the 2nd or 3rd most important character arbitrarily turn into a monster and get killed. Wow. That's pretty frelling random! She decides to quit her day job, because, well, she just had a dream about killing all of'em, and let's face it, this show is cliched enough that they all COULD turn out to be monsters and need a good killing. Apparently though, Butterfly Boy and his crows are going around killing modeling agency people to mess with her anyway, so she really should have gone in that day. She decides it's probably not a good day to go to her night job either (or possibly Japanese FBI (what's it called again?)) questioning, but either way, she immediately changes her mind and gets in the gov'ment goon car anyway. Other goons tell her modeling boss not to expect to see her again in either case. Elsewhere, a zombieish (attitude wise) looking shmoe is puttering his way home to his total trash heap of a home to talk to the rotting corpses of his parents about how his day sucked. They're starting to stink up the place, so he opens a window to air it out, and sees Butterfly Boy hovering around upside down. Butterfly Boy has him ride the elevator to the basement and talk about his psychological problems says generic bad guy leader things to him. Asuka apparently sent word back to the home office to toss Jun into her padded room for a while, which I'd say is honestly pretty prudent at this point. Way harder for Butterfly Boy to show up and taunt her there, and although he could turn into a butterfly and sneak in, no way he could bring goons. Oh, and hey, it turns out it WAS a shapeshifter after all, because here's Kazumi back at the apt. grumbling at how Jun's off somewhere. Meanwhile, they decorate the padded room with a giant poster of Jun. They also dope her up, because she's evidently jonesing for some monster killing. Zombie-Otaku-Dead-Parents (who I will call ZODP until I see what sort of silly monster he turns into) is sitting around with Butterfly Boy saying "See? Isn't it wonderful to unleash your powers?" which I find hilarious, because what he's doing at that exact moment is painting a Mazinger-Z model. Anyway, Jun's freaking out some more and being haunted by visions of the two lesbian stalker monsters she had to kill back to back oddly enough taunting her about how she seemed to enjoy killing them. Then she wakes up, all crazy like, hallucinates that her nurse is a monster when she comes to see what's wrong (just like my Silent Hill theory!) and slashes at her in a clothes-ripping off way (presented in creepy fanservice vision, read, you see nipples), then gets distracted by her poster on the wall, and just starts uh... savagely beating the wall until she starts bleeding. Yeah, she's kinda crazy today. HA goons burst in to shoot her some (although the nurse is fine besides mental trauma) and she flies out into the night for some general carnage and mayhem and being chased by the military. Then finally, Asuka comes back from her trip to America to calm her the @#$% down. She's actually fairly nice about it for a change of pace too. "Jun, I won't let you die. ... Not yet." Well, passes as nice for her. A bunch of crows are hovering around Jun's apartment, but Kazumi's hanging out with her new modeling boss, and Jun's off freakin' out, so, really, who cares? Anyway, episode over. I'm going to go ahead and count episode 17 as echi episode #3, on the really thin basis of a brief nipple flash or two. Basically, I just want to do this because episode 13 has to count as at LEAST 1.9 episodes for wrongness, and thus any crumbs will up the total when part of that surplus gets added in. Really though, aside from that brief foray into Full On $#@%ed Up Land, and being way too vague on whether or not you killed a major character, still on track thus far for a totally boring and predictable angsty fight of the week show. If I'd been so inclined, I probably could have guessed after 2 or 3 episodes when they'd have the main-character-totally-freaks-out-about-all-the-monster-killing episode. I'd love to make a 26 episode series and just totally frell with the standards of pacing established by everything else some time. Shark jump in like episode 2, kill off a major character in the middle of what looks like an ep 13 clipshow, end the main plot in like, ep 21 and have a ton of aftermath...

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Devilman Woman (Part 3 of 6)

Episode 10-

Hey, see this cute little girl who was horribly disfigured in a fire? Well, she's recovering surprisingly fast, so uh... she's probably a monster, and you're probably going to have to kill her. But don't worry, she's a horribly crippled orphan with no vocal chords, so turning into a monster and getting killed will almost be a lateral move! Also, her monsterification readings are going up every time she looks at fire (gee, do you think she's perhaps going to end up turning into some sort of fire themed monster? I mean, we've already had the peeping tom eye monster, the cat monster with the pet cat, the swim team champion shark monster, there's a pretty obvious pattern going on (oh, and as a side note to this side note, I had a very brief Heroes campaign where I made a bunch of supervillains along the lines of Dr. Ivan Frost, who, as a result of a bizarre accident, was granted superpowers that in absolutely no way reflected any sort of ice theme)). Anyway, to make a long boring episode short, yes. She turns into a big fire monster, sets various people on fire, and then uh... burns to death, because she apparently turned into the sort of fire monster that doesn't have the good sense to be non-flammable. So then the main character cries, boss-lady makes some overly callous comment, Harumi evidently calls Mr. Investigative reporter as the episode's ending, presumably to say "hey, I don't know if this is just a coincidence or what, but every time there's a horrifying disaster in this city, it seems to happen within an hour of my roommate getting a phone call and leaving in a mysterious hurry.

Oho! This seems to be a Christmas episode! Perhaps the monster will look like 3 Santas glued together, with a girl growing out of their primary back, with extra eyes on big silly eyestalks! Or not. Some sort of betentacled bald salaryman department store owner. Today Asuka gives Jun her mission briefing while watching some cheesy monster movie. Jun gripes about having to go kill it before she gets to see how the movie ends. Asuka says the girl kills her boyfriend turned hideous monster, because that's how stupid movies like this one always end. I have now decided that Asuka is the physical representation of my disdain for the series, and Jun the series itself. "You suck!" "You're a whiny piece of garbage who always does what everyone expects you to!" "The plot is formulaic and boring and I already know how it's going to turn out!" Yeah, you tell her! Before heading off to kill the monster, Jun goes home (wasn't she supposed to be in a huge rush here?) evidently just to annoy Harumi by running out to kill monsters again. See, these two scenes would make way way more sense in the other order... oh, sorry, Kazumi. Not Harumi. Watch me mess up names that only get mentioned in like 2 episodes. Anyway, Jun gets chewed out by her boss for apparently just going to the department store to buy her a Christmas present, as opposed to hunting down and killing the owner of said store. On the way home, Mr. Reporter, who at this point is full on stalking her, starts trailing her car, but is run off the road by HA agents. Anyway, eventually Jun and Asuka sneak into the store's elevator shaft at night to handle their monster whacking... then think it'd probably be better to just go to the elevator control room, where Mr. Store Owner has all his victims set up around a table with a Christmas present on it in an honestly not particularly nasty display, because this show is amazingly low on gore. Oh, and as it turns out, he's basically a giant chameleon. Ah, here's some funny dialog, word for word: "Hurry up and become your real self and counterattack!" "I'm the real me now!" "Are you going to bring up stupid emotions again?" Asuka then threatens to shoot her if she doesn't get the lead out, because it's not like that'll kill her. Funny as this exchange is though, it's rather uh... out of context. I mean, this is the least sympathetic monster of the week in a fair bit here, why bother with angst? Oh, and as this is the one place where this show does a decent job, he's a very FUNNY looking chameleon when you finally get a good look... and then he starts a stereo playing Jingle Bells while they fight to lighten the mood some, but really, his silly face did that already. Then he starts telling his life story. He doesn't revery to non-chameleon form for this, so it's just hilarious. The man character reverts out of sympathy though, and hives him the present from the corpse table. Then Asuka goes Enough with this sappy garbage, shoots him in the face, which makes him angry and grow to city destroying sized. Oh, and let me explain how silly he looks: Take a giant purple chameleon with red polka dots, then have a salaryman's face and arms growing out of where its nose would be if chameleons had noses, so the arms kinda look like an Old Timey Villain mustache. We actually don't get a giant monster fight, because the main character's still too busy being moved by his sob story, so a helicopter full of HA goons just kinda shoot him down King Kong style. His last words are "Merry... Christmas!" which are just plain funny last words no matter how you slice it. Then Jun tells Asuka the cheesy monster movie actually ended with the guy turning back to a human, which I suppose she was trying to use as pacifistic rationalization, but I can't help but think how lame and anticlimactic that must have been. But anyway, Merry Christmas to you too Mr. Silly Salaryman Chameleon With Thrakazog's tongue.

Episode 12-

Jun has a nightmare about some sorta gargoyle dude ripping apart some sorta evil looking satyr lady. It's like a brief glimpse of what this would look like if it dropped all the boring angst and had more normal monster designs. Then comes another photo shoot of, dressing really conservatively and sitting around in a chair... again. Seriously, what kind of modeling jobs are these? Covers for Cold Melancholic Woman Monthly or what? Then comes a brief dream flashback, followed by Dr. Also A Devilman (whose name is Jason) flagging her down. Gee, foreshadowing much here? So they go out to dinner at Heaven and Hell! Woo! I've been to the restaurant the bad anime characters are in! Perhaps this week's monster will look like that urinal they have there! Anyway though, he hits on her evilly, because that's kind of his deal, then calls her a wimp when she runs away crying. She dream flashbacks a little more. Anyway, today's monster is evidently hiding out i the park. Jun goes off to reluctantly kill it, and Jason winds up tagging along, because who doesn't like to watch a good ol' monster fight? Plus he's all sleazy and evilly, so he gets to respectively see her naked and taunt her afterwards I'm sure. Speaking of the whole growing just big enough to rip out of her clothes thing, seeing how they've got an agency making sure to get rid of any bystanders for these fights, and there's plenty of prep time, you'd figure she'd eventually think to strip beforehand and not keep trashing all her clothes. I mean, that's just being practical, and it'd let'em cram in more of that fan service you'd really figure they'd be pushing as the angle for this series. Anyway, today's monster is covered in faces (darn, no urinal monster, fun fact though Google image search for Heaven and Hell urinal and it's the only result), Jun arbitrarily freaks out and gets smacked around, Jason in his more devilly looking devilman form saves her, asks why she's such a wimp in a relatively polite fashion, and then we switch over to a Giant Monster Fight. Meanwhile, Jun lectures random bridge crew guy not to leer at the giant naked blue girl, because she's not really human and all. Random guy disagrees. With the not human part I mean, not the no leering part. So anyway, monster dies, random bridge crew guy (whose name is Maeda in case it's going to come up again brings her a jacket. Jason evidently had the good sense to strip before transforming because he's not stuck walking around naked (well naked safe for strategically placed hair and shadows anyway). So yeah, we're clearly going for a love triangle sorta situation here between Bridge Dork Whiny Girl and Evil Lech. That's uh... not really a very interesting love triangle. Incidentally, it'd be so refreshing to have something where someone had the ability to turn into a hideous super-powered monster and had absolutely no problem with it. Actually, there's some lame syndicated kids action series these days that does that, but it's lame for other reasons, mainly, disparity of style content and audience... but, getting back to the show I'm supposed to be bashing now...

Episode 13-

Bla bla foreshadowing, bla bla modeling, bla bla extremely formulaic series. Jun spontaneously starts making out with some kid who's modeling but still in high school in the elevator, uh, OK, that was totally random and out of character. Ah, OK, gotcha, pushing the desperately lonely because I'm surrounded by jerks and traumatized lesbians angle here. Gotcha. Meanwhile, some other person in the modeling agency is evidently doing his elevator make out sessions with this random Japanese school girl, who's now going to his house, where his sister-in-law has a big collection of creepy dolls and Noh masks, and is probably this week's monster. Ho hum. And yes, she is. Or at least, she's a psycho, because she drugs the schoolgirl's tea, ties her up, explains how she must be one of those evil girls trying to seduce her brother-in-law (or whatever the relation was) then pulls a hope which opens a trap door and evidently hangs her by the rope that she was tied up with. What a senselessly elaborate execution. It also seems to auto-dump the bodies in the river... and the schoolgirl was evidently 20 and I guess just dug the style. OK. Whatever. In go Mulder and Scully. Meanwhile, in a mineshaft, I was wrong, the elaborate setup just dumps tied up people into a mineshaft so psycho girl can tie'em up, turn into some sorta snaky thing, and lick them inappropriately with her long slimy forked tongue, while her brother-in-law (or husband? Or brother? I wasn't paying enough attention) is tied up across the room being forced to watch. So uh, OK. Go Nagai moment #2 there. Jun goes in undercover to see what's what, and gets this fairly odd explanation of this crazy S&M blackmail painting deal this girl and this pair of brothers have going on as she's being drugged. OK... Oh, and it's the brother/husband who turns into the big snake monster evidently. I'd be less vague and confusing here, but this show REALLY likes obscuring things in shadows... and uh... OK, can we please go back to obscuring the monster in shadows, and me not knowing what the deal was with it, and this show being way less sick and messed up that one would reasonably expect it to be, because you just went and totally destroyed all that in the span of about 1 second. OK, so. Here's the story with this episode. Crazy lady finds people who her (I'm fairly sure) husband hits on, invites them over, drugs them, and dumps them in her basement to be molested by the monster while her (I'm fairly sure) brother is chained to the wall being forced to watch. Now, get ready for this. What the monster apparently actually is, is that from the waist down, the (I'm fairly sure) brother's is this room spanning penis/snake monster over which he has no control. It licks the various drugged and tied up girls, and then excretes some sort of super-aphrodisiac which psycho lady harvests and which makes all the victims sit around licking the main bulk of it... and it also drinks their blood somewhere in there it seems. So uh... yeah. Now that we've established THAT, it's time for our fight scene. Jun starts wrestling with the giant snake/wang, and notices chained up guy is wincing, so she almost stops, but he says, and I quote "Don't mind me." and explains some more of just how @#$%ed up the premise here is to her. So, she temporarily chokes out the giant penis (and other phrases I really never saw myself having to type but let's face it, the only way to get through the rest of this episode is to write about it with an air of clinical detachment) and proceeds to chase after psycho lady. She starts giving some speech about how she has to sympathize some, because after getting slobbered on, she's sure to get addicted to it too. This, shockingly enough, causes her to stay her face punching in arm at least long enough for the wangaconda to burst throw the floorboards and swallow psycho lady whole, then spit her out almost immediately as a shapeless purple loogie, and swallow the main character... and now that it's out in the open, it's looking marginally more snake-like, what with the purple very vaguely cobraish head, but seeing how the rest of it is still flesh colored with lots of varicose veins, it's too little too late. Anyway, Jun whips her wings out from inside causing the whole thing to explode in a big cloud of the purple monster blood we've all come to know and love... which she then licks off her fingers. Oh, and it's a happy ending I guess, because all the addict girls get to go home, and now the main character is acting all sleazy, and this episode is mercifully over. WOW. OK, if this were the first or second episode of this show, this episode here would go only slightly over my expectations of depravity and just plain wrongitude, but no. They had to lull me into a false sense of security and mindless boredom by first feeding me 12 episodes of extremely conservative and angst-ridden formulaic fight of the week filler that's tamer in terms of mature content than Escaflowne if you can believe it (and I'm serious, there's way way more blood in Escaflowne, and nothing sleazy really exceeds the catgirl twins), and then you give me the mind control incest penis snake episode halfway through the series. That is one HELL of a shark jump you SICK SICK TWISTED FREAK Go Nagai. At least now I'll watch the rest of this dreading more episodes like this one instead of just trying not to fall asleep. And this was a Christmas present from my grandmother. P.S. What sort of ads are you seeing on the sides of THIS e-mail?

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Devilman Woman (Part 2 of 6)

On with the not being sufficiently traumatized. Actually first, we have some previews here... I remember when ADV used to be crazy good at doing previews. They'd take some funky upbeat song and splice together the most neat looking clips they could find to it, and make even total garbage look at least halfway interesting. They've uh... stopped doing that. And evidently a whole lot of other things. Apparently at some point in the last few years they actually kinda flat out said in a press release that they can't stand anime fans and no longer intend to cater to their desires... which is kinda odd for a company that kinda exists just to do that. In any case though, really bland and uninteresting previews here, which is impressive, because one of them is for Excel Saga. You have to work hard to make Excel Saga look boring, unless you cheat and use stills, but they didn't.

Episode 6-

We start off with, of course, yet another photo shoot. You know, if this were the sort of totally perved out show you'd expect it to be, these would be a good place to squeeze in more gratuitous fanservice. Unless you have a thing for girls dressed conservatively sitting in chairs, they take the bafflingly high road. And now we seem to have a Rival Model. This was written before the whole Rival fad really got annoying though, so I just mean some random other model who tries out for the same jobs, doesn't get them, and is very polite about it. So, she's going to turn out to be a monster, and the main character will have more to angst about. Why does this show have to be boring instead of offensive in the way you'd expect? At least when I'm disgusted, I have something to scream about. And here comes Boss Lady Asuka to confirm the obvious and treat the main character like dirt some more. That's by far the most amusing thing about this show. ALL THIS PERSON DOES is tell the main character that she sucks and she hates her and she's a pathetic worthless sack of dren, and she does it at LEAST once an episode. The next most amusing of course is how the main character gives NO emotional support to her ward whose parents were JUST killed by a hideous monster. So now Polite Rival Girl is inviting the main character over, drugging her, confessing that she's a creepy stalker, strapping her to a bed, and apparently about to rape her in her sleep... as a giant funky looking cat monster. OK, NOW it's the Go Nagai frelled-uppery we've all come to know and fear! This of course proceeds to turn into a fight scene, because this IS a fight of the week series after all.

This episode shakes p the formula a little. We start with a recap of what's happened so far, that really doesn't take long, then cut to the main character being chewed out for letting this episode's monster get away after an initial fight. THEN we have a whole bunch of dead air, followed by another Giant monster fight, which are always more interesting just on general principle. This monster has big scythes for arms, and while fighting it, the main character realizes that the time she thought she saw the grim reaper on a foggy night, it was probably just this guy, so that's comforting I guess, "oh, and here, have this picture of his wife and kids we found on his corpse" which is less comforting. Also, various random people look up at the giant monsters fighting, including various minor background characters, which might be foreshadowing at some sort of actual plot advancement.

Episode 8-

Someone records himself monstering out and sends it to various TV stations to try and get the word out, but the HA keep anyone from broadcasting it, throwing out a perfectly good chance to make the show more interesting. Then it's time for a mysterious American scientist, who looks related to Asuka, wants to study how the main character goes all giant roboty, and says "You're beautiful, even as a Devilman." I suppose this is supposed to sound all freaky, but really, she looks pretty much the same, just with the incredibly stupid hair. So anyway, Dr. Blondy here asks the main character out and goes all creepy and monster sympathetic and lecherous on her. Then the sports announcer for some news channel monsters out live on camera, so uh... what the heck was the point in the first 5 minutes or so of this episode? Oh man, I love some of these monster designs. This guy looks like 2 T-Rexes glued together with a guy's face in the seam. In the ensuing fight scene, Mr. Double-Dino almost kills Jun, but she's rescued by Dr. Monster Lover, who it turns out is also a Devilman. OK, uh, can I have a less cliched and boring plot twist? Also, he has actual big ol' horns and red skin, and doesn't even have the stupid hair. Lucky him. Asuka says "There's going to be more monsters now, so you'd better toughen up." "I'm going to toughen up, but not because of you!" So once again, the main character decides to rebel against her evil boss by doing exactly what she's asked to.

Episode 9-

Jun's getting all paranoid because she figures hey, when you turn into a monster and fight other monsters, it's probably not a good idea to constantly be having your picture taken... except in context, this is a way way angstier situation that eats up half the episode time being explained. Also, some newspaper reporter, who's one of the people who was going "huh" at that earlier giant monster fight, is questioning Trauma Girl (Harumi was it?) about stuff. Anyway, back in stuff we might care about land, someone's been going around gouging people's eyes out. Meanwhile, Jun's taking a shower and Harumi is watching her... and man, Harumi has unbelievably bad fashion sense. Every time she's around, she's wearing a lamer looking outfit. Oh, and while she's getting chewed out for being a peeping tom, it turns out there's a whole bunch of eyes with wings also watching all this from outside the window. So... today's monster rips people's eyes out, attaches wings, and uses them to be a peeping tom... and thinks the main character is ugly in her stupid hair wings monster form. She goes all self-conscious, then a bunch of HA agents come along and unceremoniously flamethrower the floating eyes, followed by the humanoid wad of eyes also watching all this, and he runs off screaming about how he hates being looked at. Unfortunately, he runs into a house of mirrors, freaks out, and starts gouging his eyes out before they run in and finish him off. If all that sounded really rushed and arbitrary, that's because it was. There wasn't even any sort of fight scene in there. Then Asuka says "hey, I thought you were said you were going to get stronger?" It is pretty pathetic when you're a superhero and you don't have the will to fight because the monster is looking at you funny, even if it is doing so from like 100 different angles. And... that's the end of disc 2. Really boring and formulaic still, with silly monster designs as the only real saving grace. Also, in the first 9 episodes, we've only had 1 truly out and out example of echiness, which, as such things go, was fairly tame.

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Devilman Woman (Part 1 of 6)

Episode 1-

Episode 2-

Giant Monster Fight! The next morning, Jun wakes up all freaked out about being able to turn into a monster, and is about to eat a shard of broken glass, but then the phone rings, so she goes to work instead. So we've got a lot of boring mundane stuff for a while, then eventually Asuka shows up again and just kinda nags and taunts her until she comes along to take out the current fight of the week (and mentions that Secret Agency is called the "Human Agency" or HA). Along the way there's some more exposition about how Beasts are the next stage of human evolution and as a Devilman, she's basically one of them, just stuck with a pesky ol' human conscience still. Anyway, today's monster is some sort of bug man, who killed a bunch of people in a nightclub called Dagon. So we get some more screaming and bleeding and refusing to transform, then she eventually does and kills it, and as Bug Man is dying, he basically calls her an Uncle Tom, cause she's someone who can turn into a big monster too!

Episode 3-

More of Asuka pestering and strong arming Jun, and pointing out you can tell who caries the Beast hene because they have extra shiny eyes (seriously, they say this), then she just kinda walks away on her to wander down an old train tunnel. In this train tunnel she meets some 10 year old boy who tells her how horrible she is for killing all us Beasts. He says he's going to kill "her lover" to teach her a lesson. She points out that she doesn't have one, and the kid more or less goes "Ah, but you DO have one of those 16 year old girls who stalk you and call you 'Onee-Sama!' and that's close enough!" then he turns into a butterfly (wow, he really got gipped on the transformation front) and flies away. Cut to said girl (Kazumi)'s house, were a couple of weirdo monsters kill her parents and stuff their corpses full of bugs while she's taking a bath (and I don't wanna say "finally" here, but it's freaky to have a Go Nagai show where we don't really see any boobs, nippleless though they may be, until the third episode, even then, quick flash sorta deal). Kazumi screams like crazy for a while. Anyway, Jun finally arrives on the scene in time to kill a really amusing laughing skeleton stuck to the back of a giant rat, and harpy sorta thing, and they're really laying the Uncle Tom talk on pretty thick.

Episode 4-

HA at this point just has Jun locked up in a padded room when she's not on duty because she's being such a whiny little wimp about turning into a monster and ripping other monsters limb from limb. Eventually they let her go home because she agrees to be good, and Kazumi shows up to move in with her, seeing how her parents are now festering corpses and all. She's starting to go on about how she isn't that sad about them being dead because they were jerks, but she's still pretty darn upset. Then the phone rings though, and it seems there's no time to console the emotionally distraught girl now, it's time for another fight of the week! So yeah, on the way we have more of Asuka being a complete jerk, along the lines of "Why do you always do what I tell you to you stupid piece of garbage? You just like killing monsters that much I bet!" "Do not!" "Well, here's the monster, now transform and roll out!" "You're not the boss of me! I'll transform when I'm good and ready! [she transforms]" then for a nice change of pace she doesn't freak out and whine after killing today's big goopy absorbed a bunch of people monster, quite anticlimactically. And I have to stress by the way the fact that the transformation sequence here is pretty much just- hair becomes INCREDIBLY SILLY LOOKING, grows just enough to burst out of clothes.

Episode 5-

Kazumi is no longer all stressed out, which is odd honestly, drops some pretty heavy handed gay innuendo, then it's once again time to make the donut- er, monsters dead. We're pretty clearly settling into a formulaic rut here, so today we're shaking things up a bit. It's not time to go kill a monster after all, it's time to go talk to your old friend from highschool who also has the Beast gene to try and find out if she's more inclined to help you kill monsters, or get killed by you upon becoming a monster. Oh, and here's a flashback to when they were in highschool and yon friend tries to kiss Jun causing her to freak out. Then they start discussing that incident, and Highschool Friend spontaneously turns into a Totally Ridiculous Shark Monster (she was on the swim team you see). So we get an Extra Angsty Giant Monster Fight. Then Jun goes home and basically says to Kazumi "I know you have a crush on me, and I'm not gay, but I'm going to give you a great big hug so you don't become a bitter old shark monster like my last gay friend." End of Disc 1 So yeah, overall, I have to say, I'm severely disappointed with how much taste and restraint is involved in this show. I was expecting laughable amounts of gratuitous violence and nudity, but there's honestly more of that stuff to be found in a lot of actually good shows! Instead what we seem to have here is a fairly mundane fight of the week show with tons of angst and some amusingly deranged monster designs. Here's hoping it jumps the shark soon and sheds all this dignity. Also of interest is when this was made. It mentions e-mail at one point, but still has actual detail in characters. So, I suppose it must have come out RIGHT before BGC2040 came along and established the ultra-shiny low detail look of the late 90s/oughts.

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Starchaser: The Legend of Orin

[consciousnessstreams]

Fritz the Cat