To resurrect their Blood franchise, Production I.G. enlisted the help of CLAMP to spawn the latest entry, Blood-C. Beginning like a relic of the past with stereotypical do-gooder Saya, candy-sweet twins, a mysterious café owner and flowery nonsense spouted by an unseen narrator, the opening episodes settle into a comfy monster-of-the-week format with a dash of playground idealism. Then people start to die. A lot of people. Starting with innocent bystanders then progressing to, what was assumed to be, main cast members, the carnage is relentless - the final episode a murderous orgy of violence and bloody slaughter set to a grand orchestral score.
It's certainly unexpected.
only the sword-wielding school-girl core is retained with the bat-like chiropterans banished to grainy flashbacks
The first time the show springs a meaningful death - not overall-wearing red-shirts - it is brutal, unequivocal and has all the trademarks of a hideous dream sequence. Amazingly, it's to the series' credit that this discord is maintained. Even the denouement, a clever in-context breaking of the fourth wall, feels like protagonist Saya is should wake with a gasp and clutch at a fevered brow. The ribbing of so many tropes is elegantly done, whether it's the ethereal dog's comment on Saya's lack of prudishness or the hardened father's love of sweets.
Back before I can coherently remember I watched a lot of the anime that made it on to British television. The mid nineties was before DVDs were widely available and the internet was squeezed through telephone lines. I was clueless but took what I could get which at the time was Manga Entertainment's (UK) catalogue of the time. Beyond the obvious Akira and Ghost in the Shell, this consisted mostly of late eighties and early nineties OVAs. Still aeons away from mainstream television, analogue satellite was the only way to watch them. The Sci-Fi channel was just starting out so it was late night on Bravo the majority of these were shown, and it was blind luck if I managed to know they were on prior to airing.
Genocyber was not the first one I saw and certainly not the most memorable, but individual scenes stuck in my head, mostly thanks to my then very squeamish nature. In the interests of exploring both my and anime's past, I decided to rewatch a lot of the shows which, subconsciously at least, formed the foundations for my current viewing preferences.
There's definitely a space between "High" and "School" so why High School of the Dead dropped it for the canonical abbreviation H.O.T.D. is unknown but this is just one of many oddities the first three episodes of the zombies-invade-Japan series contains. It plunders recent genre movies with gay abandon but still feels unique; it lays on the gratuitous - blood, breasts and banter - but never feels protracted or beyond the pale; it has a punk rock opening and ending themes but steers clear of banshee-strangling or ALI PROJECT dirge. What the series so ably does is nail the necessities and leave everything else to sort themselves out: characters are stereotypical and bland, the storyline hackneyed, but damned if it doesn't fire full bore with the action while keeping the pace quick and letting the tension build.
carnage, combat and cleavage blend together into a heady cocktail that stimulates all the right areas of the lizard brain
It is another uneventful day at Fumiji High School: Takashi is loafing about, Saya is berating him, Rei is in class, and no one has any idea of the apocalypse unfolding around them. A single zombie inadvertently bites and kills a teacher at the school gate and from there, panic and terror spread until the entire school is either the walking dead or in hiding. Takashi and Rei meet up with other survivors including the kendo club's champion, a firearms enthusiast and the ditsy school nurse; together they manage to procure a bus and escape from the school, but with the city in ruins and discontent brewing in the group there is the important question of whether they will ever see their families again. If they want to survive they'll need to put aside whatever quibbles they have with each other and find a way to exist in the now ruined world.
Intentional or not, medieval fantasy series always fall under the shadow of Berserk. Densetsu no Yuusha no Densetsu doesn't do itself any favours by featuring an effeminate, silver haired leader or an desirable, unusually powerful ally. There are certainly other parallels to be drawn but the first three episodes prove wholeheartedly that the series has its priorities straight by focusing first on characters, then on narrative and some way down the list on the mythos-specific idiosyncrasies. In short, it's forging its own path and being thoroughly entertaining while doing it. Its title may be outlandish but the strength of the cast and its willingness not to cower before gore or tragedy means it is a promising start to an intriguing full-length series.
The opening episodes don't pull any punches [...], capturing that dark fantasy vibe bubbling under a façade of sky blue and sunset amber
In the kingdom of Roland, ravaged by war and rotten with corrupt nobles, a magical academy that takes in orphans and the children of criminals has two particularly special students. One is Ryner, a slovenly and unmotivated boy who has cursed eyes known as Alpha Stigma which give him immense magical power. The other is the charismatic Sion who was subjected to ferocious bullying while young due to his birth as a bastard child of a noble father and common mother. Now though, he has the support of a shadowy and lethal family of bodyguards as well as the conviction to ascend to the throne with the aim of purging the country of its ruinous ills. Both will be instrumental in the upcoming turmoil - war and civil unrest - and the old legends of powerful demons and heroes may yet play a part in that.
High School of the Dead recently began airing and has brought the irrepressible zombie to a media which has peculiarly ignored their archetypes in favour of more culturally relevant afflictions such as demonic possession and the like. Based on the manga of the same name, in only two episodes the series has shown a remarkably sympathetic hand for including genre sensitive elements - is that the signature tune for 28 Days Later at the end of the first episode?
it says volumes that the only females to survive are curvaceous and beautiful
Widely credited with the creation of the zombie movie genre, George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead is one of his earliest and most widely known movies and champions a lot of the situations and scenarios that High School of the Dead apes. More interestingly though, Dawn of the Dead and its mall setting is a scathing commentary on the decadent consumerism and hedonism of the period which is still just as relevant today. Like the best fantasy and sci-fi its fiction was a critique of society and culture, a relevance which very few zombie movies have managed to achieve since.
