When I started AA back in the summer of '03 several people asked me if I'd be reviewing hentai... to which I replied with a resounding, "Hmm, I dunno." I'm not opposed to hentai. It's very good at what it's for (a subject I won't touch upon on an anime review site) but I don't think I'd ever give any hentai a "good" review. The goal of AA is to help people discern what anime is good and what is not in the eyes of a non-fan; since all hentai is notoriously bad, there's really no reason to delve into that barrel.
This is AA's thirtieth review. Lord only knows how long it took me to get here with my ramshackle update schedule, but here I am and here you are. I figure now is as good a time as any to go ahead and draw a line in the sand at Legend of the Overfiend. And thus, the official Anime Anonymous definition of hentai:
So anything more naked and wet than
LotO
is assuredly hentai, whereas anything more innocent is most assuredly not.
LotO
itself exists in a kind of mutual hentai/nonhentai state, a kind of
transcendent flux where orgasms are important but not the stars of the show.
Unfortunately, that still doesn't make it any good.
Characters:
The first category is for high school boys who spontaneously turn into giant sex demons. Here we have the "hero" Nagumo, his horny rival Niki, and the all-star jock Ozaki. The second category is reserved for the holes those giant sex demons stick their giant sex demon penises into; notably Nagumo's girlfriend Akemi, the "heroine", but also dozens and dozens of nameless, naked girls who are poked and prodded like pincushions.
The fourth category is for Jyaku's sister Megumi, who doesn't do a darn thing in the whole movie but flash her panties at us and say "Hey, bro," over and over. Basically, character interaction is thus: characters from category one spend the entire movie violently raping characters from category two. Meanwhile, characters from category three blow each other up. And category four just sits back and watches the whole thing in a drowsy, detached state. Really, I could go into the characters a bit more than this, but if I did I'd be in danger of giving them more development than they get in the movie... so I'll just move on.
Story:
Once every three thousand years a being called the Chojin is born in the human world who will unite the three worlds in a fantastic utopia of peace, love, happiness, and violent sex. Jyaku and Megumi have come to Earth to find the Chojin, and think they've got their man in a young boy named Nagumo. Like all young Japanese girls at that magical age, Nagumo's girlfriend Akema is raped violently by a tentacle demon. Jyaku dispatches the monster, then instead of taking her to a hospital or a crisis center Nagumo takes Akemi out for
Meanwhile, Jyaku has a fight with some demon guy named Suikakujyu (and I'll be honest; I cut/pasted that name from IMDB because I'll be jiggered if I'm going to try typing it out), who doesn't want the Chojin to be found. Jyaku, who is indestructible, murders Suikodenjulius (or whatever his stupid name is), and thinks everything is hunky-dory. Just to make sure, Jyaku takes Nagumo and Akemi to his home dimension and shows them around. Unfortunately, Jyaku's master (an old wrinkly dude who lives in a bubble) doesn't want anything to do with the Chojin, and kicks them out. While they're on their field trip, some horndog named Niki, who despises Nagumo and lusts after Akemi, murders his parents so he can become a demon. (Oh yeah, he also has to * hack off his own wiener and replace it with a black alien schlong five times as big for the transformation to take effect *.) So one thing leads to another, Niki kidnaps Akemi and starts raping her... Nagumo shows up to rescue Akemi... Niki * kills Nagumo by dropping some construction girders on him *... Akemi pleads for Nagumo's life... Niki rapes Akemi again... and so on. (Jyaku is nowhere to be seen because he's gone to the future to see what will happen to the world if the Chojin is fully grown. Here's a hint: death, desolation and * violent sex *. Whoops, did I really need spoiler text for that?) Anyway, * Nagumo eventually kills Niki * and then Nagumo and Akemi go off to have some normal, non-violent, run-of-the-mill human sex. At least, until Nagumo turns into a huge demon (Akemi doesn't seem to mind; she's too busy screaming with a bittersweet mixture of pleasure and pain). This is about the halfway point in the movie. The second half of the movie is Jyaku trying to * stop Nagumo, and obviously being unable to do so, since Nagumo is the Overfiend. * There are several long, drawn-out scenes of Jyaku flying around complaining, viewing the same world he saw in his future-vision, etc. etc. etc... and then * Nagumo/Chojin/Overfiend destroys the world *. The end. In a nutshell, the first half of the movie is full of demonic combat, horrible bloody violent rape, time travel, multiple dimensions, and other stuff that would be really fun in a better context. And the second half of the movie is a gigantic unstoppable demon * very slowly destroying the world *. You can see how this could lead to a mild imbalance in pacing.
Animation:
Then you have those gory movies that aren't really gory at all, like the Nightmare on Elm Street series. These movies are more or less "let's see how much red gook we can get to pour out of the kids onscreen at any given time". The shock here is blood, blood and more blood. Lakes of blood. Geysers of blood. Blood shooting out of every pore. LotO is that second kind of gory. Right up front, you'd better like black, red and orange. Once you get past the thirteenth or fourteenth violent demon rape scene those are the only colors in the movie. A demon apparently cannot do anything without some part of its body exploding messily, and demon rape always ends with the human girl exploding in a spray of gooey chunks and ecstasy. There's no time to be shocked or sickened while watching LotO , but you might start to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all after a while. The overabundance of flames and guts tends to make the movie pretty ugly already, so the animators didn't much pay attention to the characters, backgrounds or settings. LotO rates somewhere between "atrociously bad" and "mediocre blah" on the scale of animation quality. Then from there I just knocked off ham after ham for each and every messy meat shower I was subjected to. LotO is visually unappealing on a level unrivaled by just about anything; there comes a point where you want to shut the TV off just so you don't have to look at it anymore.
Culture Shock:
First off, LotO suffers from BCS (Blank Crotch Syndrome), in which any and all female characters are completely devoid of genitalia. They have breasts, sure enough (or rather they have balls of flesh stuck to their chests with pink spikes in the middle of them), but downstairs they're as smooth as Barbie dolls. And that's if the camera bothers to pan down low; most of the sex scenes take place from the
On the violence side of things, as I've said, the gore is so over the top as to loop back around again and be boring. If a guy gets his hand caught in a garbage disposal in a typical movie it's pretty cringe-worthy. Maybe the dude screams bloody murder as his hand gets chewed up, then rolls around on the floor with a bloody stump. That same scene in LotO would show a guy getting his hand caught in the disposal, then the disposal turning into a demon and blowing the guy to smithereens. The key factor here is recognition; if the goopy red chunks I'm looking at don't resemble anything close to human, chances are they're not going to register in my head as such. How does this fall into the realm of Culture Shock? Because here in the west we like our porn naked and we like our violence humanized. LotO does neither of these things. You get to see a nipple once in a while, and maybe a dead guy laying in a pool of blood/acid here and there... but this isn't the "king of erotic horror" I was expecting.
So now's the part in the review where we look back to the original question: will AA ever review hentai?
Overall Rating:
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You don't say.
My guess is she's allergic to pants.
Spoiler warning: this is the Overfiend.
![[ insert your favorite Jeffrey Dahmer
joke
here ]](images/overfiend_ss2.jpg)
[ insert your favorite Jeffrey Dahmer joke here ]
"What I love best about my boyfriend is the way he lights up a room when he
walks in..."
