chiaki

After having a quiet (yet secluded) Friday night full of countless hours of playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution and the occasional Panzer Dragoon Saga, it was time for me to take my binge drinking feat to the next level, watching yet another old school OVA from the day. After popping in the one of many random tapes I encounter on my near endless VHS shelf, I parked myself on the couch and the world began to spin around me. When I came too, I found myself face to face with quite a catch when it came to the female species. She had a lovely mane of pink 80’s metal hair, lushes lips and a half naked body to die for. This of course wasn’t all perfect, as she was fitted with motorcycle handlebars on her back as… an accessory? She gave me the most lustful of looks as her mouth began to slowly open up, which I know what your thinking guys, I was going to get some right? Well, I was going to get something, as I noticed a pink light began to grow the more her mouth opened. This freaked me out and I quickly kicked her away, which to my luck was a good thing or I would have been BLASTED BY A MOUTH LASER AT THAT MOMENT!!!! Scared out of my wits in the predicament I found myself in, a figure from behind her appeared and a silver rod stabbed her in the back. As I looked up at the shadowy figure, I saw a small red light lit up where the figures eyes would be, which made the sound of a bird cawing. He told me his name was Goku, an regular dick you could say (ie. Private Investigator) and he needed my assistance. Oh good, its another one of these Jack Daniels fueled adventures again I thought to myself, as I was now in the world of Goku: Midnight Eye.

Let me make this as perfectly clear as I can, I. Love. Yoshiaki. Kawajiri. Anime!!! And when it comes to everything this man makes, I have about all of them in my collection. There are somethings you can expect when watching a Yoshiaki Kawajiri anime, things like creatures (human or animals) having the ability of shooting lasers from there mouths, the main protagonist female companion dying or getting raped, women in the most awesome and ridiculous 80’s outfits, some women naked, a really cool weapon of choice that the main character uses, stuff blowing up like everywhere, an insanely crazy story plot, a “bad-ass” main character, some vampires, and more stuff that doesn’t make a lick of sense but you don’t care to analyze it further. This is all the key components that goes into a Kawajiri flick past 1986. It is because of these components that I will always add one or all of them if I was to make my own animation anything, or these are things I look at in any anime I want to watch period. Goku Midnight Eye is no exception to anything that I listed, because its is literally a tsunami of everything coming at you, which is why I chose to talk about it in this review.

Goku: Midnight Eye is a two part OVA that takes place in the future year of 2014 in Tokyo (and by God, everything that happens in these animes better come into view, especially the fashion sense of having girls with motorcycle handlebars on there backs, YEAH!!!). The first OVA starts out with a man on the run from our protagonist Goku, all because he has a key to the mob bosses mistress which he’s having an affair with (because he is their accountant). The man tries to fight back using a “mechanical robot Mazinger Z style” hand to fight Goku, which back fires on the guy. After Goku drops the key off to the mistress of the mob boss and turns her advances down, we see him give his intro about how bad Tokyo of the future has become corrupt by the the people who run the place and how they are destroying the city, one small earthquake at a time. We then cut to a night club where the main attraction is the only kind of girl I want to know (but no way in hell it would ever work out) who is grinding up the dance floor on all fours as her body moves rhythmically with the generic 80’s dance synth techno music blaring in the background. We see a man monitor another man in the corner of the night club who goes by the name of Genji Hakuryu. The man monitoring Genji is in a trance when he sees many eyes glow behind Genji, and pulls out his pistol and blows his brains out. This is met with Genji giving a toast to the dead man. Goku decides to see his old boss at the police station because of the recent suicides of Goku old partners through the police station and gets himself dragged in to the case, with the help of an old friend, Yoko.

Yoko explains that the business man is an arms dealer and known as the merchant of death, and the police are trying to get a case against him to put him behind bars. After two more officers decide to take there lives thanks to the naked women in peacock feathers (yes, a naked woman in peacock feathers is the cause of these suicides) Goku and Yoko decide to investigate the tower of Genji and figure out what is going on. Once inside, Goku meets the biker girl who is sleeping on the dance floor in the club (from earlier) and shows him she is more than what she appears, by SHOOTING LASERS AT HIM FROM HER MOUTH!! Almost getting roasted by the exotic woman, he gets knock out by a burly security officer and gets to meet Genji on his knees. After Genji explains his plans to Goku of how bad of a guy he is while petting the (PINK HAIR, CYBERNETIC, MOUTH SHOOTING LASER EXOTIC DANCER!! SPOILERS!!!!) exotic dancer like a domesticated pet cat, he lets Goku be stung by wasp who have been genetically altered to sting people with a sleeping toxin (not kidding) and leaves Goku on the side of the road in his awesome Chevy Corvette. Goku is then collected and drives along when the peacock woman decides to use her hypnotic powers while standing on a moving semi-truck tanker. The only way Goku can resist the powers is by stabbing out his left eye with a knife and drives off the bridge into the water.

We then cut to Goku on an operating table where a mysterious man inserts a cybernetic left eye into Goku, which grants Goku the ability to access ANY COMPUTER IN THE ENTIRE WORLD!! After waking up on a park bench and playing around with his eye to take out two street punks who are armed with machine guns, we find out Goku has a new weapon, an extended silver staff (like the one Goku uses in DBZ, just not silver). Goku then realizes that Yoko might be in danger and rushes to get to her place. Can Goku defeat Genji and put his reign of exotic laser shooting dancers to an end, and will he be able to save Yoko? You know what I am going to tell you, so go find this and watch the rest. You still got a scene where Genji half Mexican midget assistant rides on the dancer to attack Goku and, by God, just see the darn thing already! I haven’t even explained the second OVA to you guys, where its full of cybernetic flying robot Pterodactyls, a rapist/pedophile M. Bison clone and inter-dimensional rockets that come from a flying space car. I cannot ruin the rest of this for you, even though I went on a pretty long rant regardless.

The OVA’s is actually an adaptation of the manga done by Buichi Terasawa, who is more well known for doing the Space Adventure Cobra series and a few other things too (I have the Goku Midnight Eye manga that was released by Comics One, which I have not read the whole manga series as of yet, yea shame on me) to add to his long list of things Terasawa wants to do. The fact that these two entities of Japanese creative genius didn’t make the world explode when they shook hands is something I am grateful for, and Kawajiri decided to put his own spin of things on the adaptation of the manga when he took on the project. Kawajiri also did the character designs for this (as most of his stuff) which the faces seem very unique and almost non traditional anime/comic book looking way you could say. Terasawa style is to have hot, half naked chicks everywhere, who either fight against or side with the macho main protagonist. You may call it mind numbing 80’s anime trash, but I see it as pure great, macho-ish, anime story telling nostalgia. It’s content like this is my answer to why I just cant get into current anime, because it has none of these things in it. And if it does, its very few and far between. If Kawajiri decides to adapt the rest of the manga (trust me, there is SOOO MUCH more to cover), I will be on board, waiting to see the day of the next OVA. Bottom line, why are you still reading this!

If you enjoyed this review, head on over to my personal blog over at Anime of Yesteryear. See you next time!!

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