The Da Vinci Virus (2005)

 

a.k.a. Cup of My Blood

Director: Lance Catania

Screenplay: Lance Catania and Kenneth Nilsson

Cast: Daniel Patrick Sullivan as Jack Fender; Janina Gavankar as Iona; Allie Smith as Tina; Roger Anderson as Sparky; Lance Mulvaney as Alex; Circus-Szalewski as Nibbles; John Turk as Memoli

Ephemeral Waves

 

The Da Vinci Virus is a film you the reader may have never heard of before. In reality, its real title is Cup of My Blood, a low budget religious suspense film with horror tropes, but I came to this when it was under an entirely different title to ride the coattails of another bigger film, something its director/co-writer Lance Catania probably did not know about for its British release. This is a tradition that has managed to last even into the streaming era, for better and for worse, in that in the past, of taking grindhouse/drive-in films and selling them under new names on the back of big Hollywood films, something which also found its way into the 2000s DVD era here, clearly distributed under a different name for British supermarket sells on DVD to sell off the back of The Da Vinci Code, the 2006 film adaptation of the big Dan Brown novel. With hindsight, there is remotely no connection to Brown's success, controversial and divisive 2003 novel at all, making the act of having read The Da Vinci Code and rewatching the 2006 adaptation starring Tom Hanks pointless. The context is important as, whilst an unofficial "mockbuster" title, this is the context of how I came to this film, and how it once came to be among the "worst I had ever seen", so it is worth establishing my history before returning to this.

For those who do not know, Brown's fiction novel became a huge seller but a controversial one, about a symbologist named Robert Langdon who finds himself in a conspiracy about the truth of Jesus Christ's legacy. It was accused for being blasphemous; it was challenged for the theories it was based on in premise; it was sued for "borrowing" said theories from the non-fiction book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982); and was challenged as being badly written. It however became a cultural zeitgeist that helped put Dan Brown on the map, and the decision to rename Cup of My Blood into the title I came to it as, when my parents bought it, was likely in mind to the hype behind the 2006 film, directed by Ron Howard and with Tom Hanks playing Langdon. Reading the book, it is fun if you take a pinch of salt every time Brown brings in facts of history and art, pulpy hokum in its page and adapted form. Truthfully, none of it connects at all to Virus, baring the likelihood to albino henchman briefly seen is connected to one from the book tentatively. Whether you think of the Da Vinci Code - love it, loath it, think it is the work of Satan - it does deserve to be canon in pop culture, and I have no shame in enjoying the thing with no expectations, as this pop culture phenomenon that blew up in my adolescence, never reading the tome until for this review, has the pace and tone of naive eyed silliness to it I could appreciate. With mind this segment was meant to be a prologue to the film I covered, only for them to be entirely foreign to each other in premise and tone, The Da Vinci Virus is a film which could have been something interesting as a low budget oddity, and is instead a curious schism of ideas of its own which awkwardly mismatch.

There is, before anyone asks, no references to Leonardo Da Vinci whatsoever in this film, the Italian polymath a huge part to the Da Vinci Code's premise, and the only connection to religion in its apocalyptic premise, which touches on a Book of Revelations style scenario, is the Holy Grail, the cup Christ drank at the Last Supper before his crucifixion. It is turned into a MacGuffin here in a curious mix of the profane, religious iconography, discussion about photography clearly of interest to Lance Catania, who beyond this film is primarily a cinematographer, and what he likely brought to the script on a personal level, cheesy horror tropes and a surprising level of sexual explicitness, with a pronounced level of green hue to everything in the DVD version we got in supermarkets.

The Grail is there to heed the apocalypse; with a touch of the Ark of the Covenant from the Indiana Jones films there is the issue when handling this sacred object as, if the person not chosen to protect it opens the box it is housed in, everyone who does is turned into a (CGI assisted) skeletal husk by the spectres of former protectors. The one chosen to protect this box is Jack (Daniel Patrick Sullivan), a former art gallery/art book photographer who has fallen into being the photographer for a porn website "2nd Cumming", which will later be revealed to be a (not so) secret cover for a religious conspiracy group. This was the aspect I remembered as the most idiosyncratic and likely to still be the most memorable thing of all this film, as that does raise an eyebrow as an idiosyncratic plot choice alongside naming a side character of importance "Nibbles". Jack's career choice, even if he will argue about the virtues of photo film over digital, is trauma over the murder of his girlfriend Tina, who died three years prior to the start of the film and is clearly a more suspect event from the get-go to its cause. Neither helping is that ghosts who have clearly been inspired by the 2000s boom in J-horror, terrified by images of black eyed spooky children and grey undead figures, are haunting him.

The religious may not appreciate the premise, including the mix of sexuality into this, although I should be frank in saying that this is not really a religious film with its apocalypse threat and talk of a chosen, more a secular pulp plot tone that could have changed the Christian iconography to high fantasy tropes and not changed much in the plot, which is one of the huge issues with this. When the double-double crosses and abrupt crucifixions with guts disembowelled out the body transpiring, it would have been appreciated if this had really taken the esoteric route further in referencing real dogma, even if in a profane direction, to make the plot more than the boiler plate one it does become. When it is proclaiming that the Second Coming will actually be by way of binary code, you see what a weird and interesting film this could have been, even as a low budget pulp one, but it feels instead a film which "could have" been this. This feels lost in all the plot it wants to get into, the reason likely I hated this back in the day alongside my dismissive attitude to low budget cinema, when the low budget cinema aesthetic and the clear idiosyncrasies, the sexuality and the obsession with photography, are the more compelling touches. Honestly its interest in sexuality is the one aspect to the film which could have sold it for luridness but actually becomes the most compelling aspect, especially as this is riffing on eroticism as found in photography art books, something distinct as a subject to touch on. Contrasting the porn site's blatantness with the erotic art of Jack, which does evoke real art book productions, even when being blasphemous with the melding of sensuality with Christian iconography you see that, in another world, Lance Catania and Kenneth Nilsson with the script could have jettisoned the apocalypse plot as this is clearly more interesting to the pair of them. Horror plot themes could have still been in this, of the figure named Iona (Janina Gavankar) who inspires Jack romantically and creatively, with the horror being that she is not who she may seem as the ideal. Even the starkness of the porn shots, actresses bluntly asking which dildo to use, as a nice contrast, whilst keeping the philosophical porn producer with shady criminal edges to him, is a more compelling idea than the conspiracy plot is wrapped within.

The plot itself is ambitious and convoluted, but also with the sense, even if you only had access to some locations including an indoor swimming pool, it feels far less interesting than being in this world of a photographer trying to find himself. In general, whatever budget, I find that the plot structures are less inteteresting than the tropes meant to sell a film, and here you have such a vague religious end of the world scenario, as you might find in a big Hollywood film, that is not interest, which means the Holy Grail or the ghosts to loomed around are of far less interest than the quirks. The gore that is split, some lower budget CGI and some fake guts, feels with a sense that if this had let its hair done and been more indulgent, embracing the absurd tone with its green hued corridors and apartments feeling like liminal spaces, I might have been able to appreciate this more. [Huge Spoiler] When it even pulls the twist Jack killed his own girlfriend by accident, but hid the body and had traumatising amnesia, it cements the curse this decided to put upon itself with trying to follow what is expected as compelling genre thriller tropes than just being indulgent. [Spoilers End]

The irony is that, whilst with little connection to each other, The Da Vinci Code managed to be compelling because for all the controversies about it showing real theories of the true nature of Christ, it was far more interesting as the adventures of the least conventional hero and his quirks, Robert Langdon, in a very over-the-top adventure where the clues and suspense where in the least conventional ways possible, by looking at all paintings and trying to find clues. All pretensions of its real theories was lost to pure old school storytelling when, whether tasteful or not, a Catholic albino monk assassin was brought in, and even Dan Brown's shoehorned attempts at profoundness in the cultural references in the novel had an eccentric charm. With hindsight, it became for me that weird and eccentric work which inexplicably caught fire, rather than stay an obscure work as an idiosyncratic author, and become a megahit. The Da Vinci Virus as I learnt of it as is as brazen in its own way, which I have to admire, part of an era of straight-to-DVD pulp cinema that will eventually get interest for how it led to curiosities like this, but with this one unfortunately a title which took too many clichés from bigger films than ride its own idiosyncrasies.

2001 Maniacs (2005) / 2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams (2010)

 

Director: Tim Sullivan

Screenplay: Tim Sullivan and Chris Kobin [and Christopher Tuffin for 2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams]

Cast:

2001 Maniacs:

Robert Englund as Mayor George W. Buckman, Lin Shaye as Granny Boone, Giuseppe Andrews as Harper Alexander, Jay Gillespie as Anderson Lee, Matthew Carey as Cory Jones, Peter Stormare as Professor Ackerman, Marla Malcolm as Joey, Gina Marie Heekin as Kat, Brian Gross as Ricky, Mushond Lee as Malcolm

2001 Maniacs - Field of Screams:

Bill Moseley as Mayor George W. Buckman, Trevor Wright as Falcon, Lin Shaye as Granny Boone, Christa Campbell as Milk Maiden, Ahmed Best as Crow, Adam Robitel as Lester, Nivek Ogre as Harper Alexander, Andrea Leon as Val Turner

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

You’re boning your cousin, and I’m a pig?

Full Spoilers Ahead

I want to return to a lot of films I once hated with a more positive outlook on them, but the 2000s remakes of Herschell Gordon Lewis’ Two Thousand Maniacs (1964) sadly belongs to that category of those where I had my initial issues with grow, cultivating into a clear and understood view of why I cannot vibe with them. More so as this time I saw the 2010 sequel, which also establishes that these films belonging to an era of cinema I grew up with which is now old, not inherently a criticism in itself, but with these unfortunately belonging to the side I glad is less common nowadays. The edgy opening of the original, splicing real Civil War photos with creepy music and slashes in the soundtrack, alongside immediately raising the concerns of how the remake series tackles the Civil War, fully shows the mid-2000s aesthetic of horror is now old after I grew up with it. The first film was produced by Raw Nerve, Eli Roth's company with Scott Spiegel, and Boaz Yakin which produced his two Hostel films, marking this particular aesthetical era, even in a more overtly comedic case here, of a grungy and more explicit type of American horror. There are also, unfortunately, obnoxious frat boys as the leads, who after being very bad in their Civil War classes thus end up ironically in the past whilst trying to get to a party Florida. They end up, as in Lewis’ version, in Pleasant Valley, a Southern Confederate throwback which openly wants to get revenge on the North for the Civil War by luring and killing Northern Yankees.

The obnoxiousness is there, as no one is likable even if you are eventually meant to sympathize with them, to the point I cared more for Eli Roth in a cameo as a guy who throws dead armadillos at passing cars, claims they ran over his pet, and guilts them into free car rides with his dog Dr. Mambo. The sequel has the same issue, even if parodying the Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie reality TV show, The Simple Life, which lasted from 2003 to 2007 with its obnoxious reality TV blonde stand ins and its small crew. Only the two films having male characters who are gay or embrace it is a nickel of empathy, and this tellingly comes from Tim Sullivan, as a LGBTQ horror filmmaker, whose entry for the anthology film Chillarama (2011) having the evocatively named I was a Teenage Werebear which plays to the slang version of “bear”, not just the mythological idea of bear men. I wish this was the direction we went more with, alongside the streaks of camp as these are horror comedies, as all my problems with both films begin and end with them attempting to play to taboos with these Southern hick stereotypes, with racism and various taboos, which comes off as a terrible strain of ironically nudging to these for discomfort humour whilst still having the stereotypes and racism.

The Pleasant Valley locals are evil, indiscriminating killing and eating Northerners, but they are mean to be anti-heroes which you whoop for despite the fact the first film plays to their more overt racism unlike the original film, especially as Robert Englund as Mayor George W. Buckman, the head of the community, is a really good casting choice as a lead. Herschell Gordon Lewis’ original film never addressed the uncomfortable issues of how the Southern Confederacy, whilst only lasting from 1861 to 1865, fought the Civil War for an idealized view of the South based on plantations and slavery, yet he managed to find the right balance and even melancholia for the film made after Blood Feast (1963), where he invented the splatter genre, that had a great high concept premise. It had a playful goofiness which undercut the premise's moral implications, but fully took advantage of the themes as it was set hundred years after the Civil War with the literal ghosts of the South against the North. Whilst out of context the song he wrote is a problematic earworm, and becomes more so in the grungy metalish version in the remake films, The South's Gonna Rise Again, in context it is a perfect opening song for the tone in context and fully informed the themes of his lurid little drive-in production with the right sick humored tone. That being a Southern town in the past, random bystanders in the war, who were destroyed and had become the hate driven killers against a cast, including Blood Feast’s William Kerwin, who are actual adults and actually sympathetic. Whilst never dealing with the truly problematic nature of the Confederate, even for a wacky sixties gore film which is deeply silly and made by a filmmaker who even laughed at the notion of artist pretense of artistry in cinema, the film managed somehow to get the idea that these Southerners, once tragic side casualties in a war which killed both sides, became these gleeful limb lopping psychopathic ghosts but with the Northern Yankees figures you want to see survive. You can challenge that sentence, and the film, for glossing over the South's history of plantations and slavery, and you are absolutely right too dear reader, but there is no sense of the film being pro-Confederate either, or worse smudging the tone, just an exploitation film perfectly tapping into a history moment like an old wound in a good example of bad taste.

Here, playing these Southern stereotypes’ more overt racism in the 2005 film, with an African American character with his Asian girlfriend the stick of this, the ironic humour around tackling this becomes as problematic for me for that attempted irony, which gets worse in the sequel and is attempting a detachment which cannot past muster when it falls into an un-PC attitude we challenge nowadays. This is not just even morally but, with respect for Tim Sullivan and the co-screenwriters for both films, that for me, trying to be edgy deliberately in ways like this comes off as the wet fart of humour. There is a scene of Englund, part of a group of cannibalistic ghosts, with a pair of chopsticks talking about having Chinese food which, as a British lad with awareness of his culture, evokes the worse of the lame British comedies of the seventies and so. Forgetting just the political correctness, this type of un-PC humour, for deliberately provocation nowadays against the "woke" or here in irony, is a deuce chill culturally evoking a lame uncle ruining the mood with an off-colour joke, or a bad comedian in an old English pub. This especially amplifies for the sequel, but it is found in the prequel to, which is juggling this with gory set pieces undercut by the humour.

The stereotyping of the Southerners is an issue too, as there is a precise difference in criticizing the Confederacy, with the Confederate flags on display in these films more uncomfortable for me as time passes, as a viewer not even from the United States, to falling to a stereotype as bad as the racist lines played for ironic humour. There is a sheep shagging joke that continues into the sequel, where they probably could not afford an actual sheep, and it felt like the obvious joke to have whilst we have these stereotypes. The ones in the original sixties film were stereotypes, but not as heavy handed, and they were even felt to have more period accurate costumes; whilst the sequel has a shift in budget, to the point they decide to move and have a touring Pleasant Valley, rather than using a set, the costumes especially on the women of the town, who tempt the men folk from the North, feels like sexy Southern belle costumes from a party shop. This is neither a criticism as I do not punch down on budgets and production design, especially for the sequel, but it unfortunately emphasizes the sarcasm and broadness for the first film, with a larger budget, to exaggerate in questionable ways, that this is a horror comedy in how broad and eye rolling it is on the premise, than with Lewis' entire career even with his more nastier films where the premise is taken seriously, but the one liners and pity sense of dialogue made them funny.

The aesthetic has aged in funny ways – there is music from what sounds like Smash Mouth and I wish was, and there is a 2000s horniness which, whilst with copious nudity and that interesting subplot with a gay male character, never really gets sexy in the truest sense. There is all that nudity, a lot of gore, and acid moonshine that burns through a bed used, alongside a guy getting a poker through the arse, but what is meant with a sick humour as the original film becomes broader than Herschell Gordon Lewis’ original, which is said loving his films as a viewer but admitting they were never subtle. That ironic detachment, alongside the ending where the melancholic epilogue of the original is rushed and the survivors die, letting the Southerners win, really was what I was not a fan of this film originally, and stuck out now as a much older guy. The same set up happens in the second film, with the villains winning and even less an attempt at sympathetic leads as a pretense, and magnifies the issues of the previous film more greatly.

2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams opens with a comic book prologue, but raises the issue that this is more overt in tackling the maniacs’ origins even as a horror comedy, the details that Herschell Gordon Lewis avoided where, yes, the Civil War likely led to innocents on both sides dying, but the Confederates becoming a problematic lynchpin that ignores slavery as a concept. Even if you ignore this, I have with Field of Screams a film that even with brief moments, and someone like Bill Moseley replacing Englund as Major Buckman doing his hardest to raise my spirits, a charismatic actor even in the most dire of viewing experiences, where I found myself miserable viewing the film. This is considerably rare nowadays as my concept of taste and pleasure with cinema is sometimes likely to baffle others.

There is a definite shift in the tone just in terms of the cameras used. We have gone from the 2000s to the straight to video late 2000s/early 2010s, a huge shift in horror cinema where, as mentioned, the Maniacs have completed disregarded being ghosts tied to one locations and go on tour, by bus, to a new location to get to more Northerners. A huge shift is felt too in how, whilst both of them are horror comedies, the prequel has a foot in the time of Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005) and other extremer horror films, whilst the sequel even with its own gore, with a buzz saw going through a woman in a deliberately ghoulish way, is at a time when the post-Grindhouse (2007) and more pastiche nature of gore movies came to be. Repo: The Genetic Opera (2008) is notable to name check from this period, as Moseley came from that film, as did Nivek Ogre, member of the industrial band Skinny Puppy. This is parodying the then-finished reality TV show as two stereotypes of blonde airheads filming a reality show only to end up at the new travelling Pleasant Valley, one of them in the one weird joke that vaguely worked for me having a pet dog named Biscuit who already died and is kept taxidermied, talked to by the owner as if still alive. By this point, this is not even trying to have serious moments, with the leads all deliberately obnoxious, the sheep one of the maniacs is having a relationship fake, and shenanigans with Mayor George W. Buckman more of a horny old dog than a threat.

And yet there is also a Jewish stereotype, and whilst the maniacs have a more diverse cast, with a Chinese woman and African American proudly among their cannibalistic peers, it leads to the former, China Rose, speaking with a stereotypical voice, and an ongoing joke about a returning maniac, Granny Boone (Lin Shaye), having a relationship with the latter, alongside a fantasy sequence of Buckman's with a black female Northerner, which play off uncomfortable themes of plantation sexual relationships with an obvious end credits punch line that has aged like a fine murder. The post-ironic humour had aged badly from the 2000s onwards, and arguably it is worse as this is trying to be sarcastic and edgy on these types of stereotypes, but slipped into a pretense to even have. This even starts to slip into being wacky in a way that does not work, like an abrupt Southern aerobics joke, and at that point I realize that I find ways to appreciate most films but I have my limited. Even those with wavering acting performances, lack of budget or production quality, tangents away from plots or lack of plots, and all the half marks seen as "bad" cinema are things I now do not care for, and can love films for, but I still find both questionable jokes and forced wackiness like this are a toxic combination for me.

I can now enjoy silly, messy horror films many would dismiss as terrible or even the worst films, but Field of Screams, even with some fun and Bill Moseley on top of his game, was pointless and painful in the way I used to hate films of the past. There is no hate nowadays, only numbness, and it is not the curse of wokeness, but feeling like this type of humour is the equivalent of smearing your own feces on yourself as a protest, next to the fact that next to the original film, there is none of the camp fun, only this sense of sarcasm which I cannot vibe with well. Even as lurid horror comedies, the first has a generic plot pace for me as a viewer, and the latter is neither a plot with a point nor a weird tangent fest like horror cinema at its weirdest, so I find myself a fan of neither for countless reasons.

Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-Chan (2005/2007)

Director: Tsutomu Mizushima

Screenplay: Tsutomu Mizushima

Based on a light novel by Masaki Okayu

(Voice) Cast: Reiko Takagi as Sakura Kusakabe; Saeko Chiba as Dokuro-chan; Ayako Kawasumi as Shizuki Minagami; Rie Kugimiya as Sabato-chan; Akeno Watanabe as Zakuro-chan; Atsushi Imaruoka as Umezawa; Ayako Kawasumi as Shizuki Minagami; Daisuke Kirii as Seargent/Zamuza; Fumitoshi Miyajima as Nishida; Reiko Takagi as Minami-san

 

"It can't be helped that the class representative has been turned into a monkey, so Dokuro-chan may sit next to Sakura-kun."

Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-Chan, to use its full name, could be seen as a true stereotype of anime. A young teen male has a guiding angel, a cute girl, protecting over him, with wacky sex comedy hijinks ensuring. Even if a parody of these tropes, it might prove an eyebrow rising take on them for an outsider to the medium, so this title does come with a caveat that it is an acquired taste. However, considering immediately into the first episode she kills her charge with her giant spiked club the first moment she is introduced, caught getting changed in his room, only to resurrect him as she will do at least two more times that same episode, we are dealing with something more openly twisted in its humour than other anime parodies or sex comedies. It really works as a parody for people who have actually seen anime tropes it is parodying, but as much of my interest in this straight-to-video production, whilst slight in length is seeing it take the stereotypical love-hate romantic relationship found in many stories, not just animated, and take it seriously whilst with its macabre sense of humour, as if there could have been a version of this with a regular of romantic comedies, Jennifer Aniston, could constantly bash her love interest's brains out everywhere only to oops, resurrect and apologise for this over and over. 

The story of this production, and this theme of love even if the female lead will kill the lead, is also as much to do with its director Tsutomu Mizushima for me, who I fully believe has always approached his career as an animation director with a macabre sense of humour, which is more implicit as he is the screenwriter for this two series straight-to-video production too rather than just their director, adding a greater connection potentially to the material. Mizushima has fascinated me for a while. Arguably, as much of this may be for the wrong reasons, as his stints in horror after Dokuro-Chan have been divisive to say the least. This is where the question of what is intentional or not gets confusing, but also compelling, as there is a title like Another (2010), a supernatural mystery series, which violently contrasts its serious tone with over-the-top deaths that you could call comedic, such as the first being an unfortunate encounter with an umbrella and a staircase. The Lost Village (2016) really comes in as the production which raises this concern. With its main composition by the acclaimed screenwriter Mari Okada, a huge figure in anime, let alone a significant and prolific female screenwriter in the industry, who has even directed a theatrical work named Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms (2018), it was a very divisive television series, one which many would argue was terrible, but has been argued to have been a satire of the genre which took people by surprise. Between a character who has forever stayed with me and could have been a character here in Dokuro-Chan, Lovepon, a young woman even a tragic back story whose obsession with execution becomes delightfully absurd, and material that even for horror would be balked at, like a giant monstrous silicon breast implant, it emphasised the really unpredictable nature of the director Mizushima.

Because of how many tangents there are in his career, I have always been wary of dismissive some of these projects even if they were failures. Even for the work of his that is more wholesome, like the Girls und Panzer franchise¹, Tsutomu Mizushima has also had a streak of misanthropy found in his career, especially in the comedies from his earlier productions in the straight-to-video format. These are the points, including how gory he could get with his horror work to a hyper-exaggerated form, which raised this question of deliberateness for me as an anime fan. An obscure set of shorts less than thirty minutes long for online viewing, Plastic Neesan (2011), is an absurdist comedy about a group of model making schoolgirls which never got to model making, and was instead about characters who could be really spiteful or just weird. There was also Magical Witch Punie-chan (2006-7), which envisioned a magical girl if she was the evil despot heir of a magical kingdom, an inspired and dark premise which went as far as a comedy as having her cute animal mascot as an indentured slave constantly trying to murder her. The infamous one of this trio is Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-Chan itself, as whilst the USA also got Magical Witch Punie-chan, Dokuro-Chan was the one which gained a wider attention when it was released in the United States by Media Blasters back in the day, a straight-to-video work which is brazen with its tone despite juxtaposing it against its fluffy presentation.

This, including its source material, a light novel series, is clearly a parody of a couple of works. Ah My Goddess, originally started as a 1988-2014 manga by Kōsuke Fujishima, was about a young man who accidentally summons a titular goddess to his world as a new roommate; famously, as nodded to in a joke here, is Rumiko Takahashi‘s Urusei Yatsura, a legendary manga (including its animated adaptations) where a young teen male finds himself with a female alien named Lum living with him on Earth. Dokuro-Chan herself is an angel from the future with a halo and a giant spiked kanabō club called Excalibolg,  which she can use to both resurrect the dead unscathed as well as splatter a torso into chunks with one swing. The tone of the straight-to-video series, and why it may raise an eyebrow from anime fans as much as non-anime viewers, is that the initial set-up is legitimately twisted despite most of the story in these episodic episodes being more a sex comedy in the traditional sense from anime. In context to the fan base, even some of the lewder jokes are normal, but the cutesy tone occasionally gives way to jokes which with hindsight are quite transgressive, softened yet paradoxically heightened by the tone.

Dokuro-Chan was originally assigned to the past to bump off the male lead, the young teenager Sakura Kusakabe, as he was foretold to accidentally defy God by giving people immortality despite being the typical horny male lead, one whose hormones make it impossible to get past a girl he takes interest in without embarrassment. Where the joke might be more shocking nowadays, casually used as part of the humour, is that for the price of immortality, it meant finding immortality by accident by permanently stunting women from growing biologically from twelve years old. With very casual jokes of people calling Sakura a paedophile much to his horror, it never gets any further in terms of transgression, but is causally brought up to torment him quite a few times and emphasises that, whilst portrayed as a light hearted comedy, this is for the first "season", not conventional in episode number or length, it taps occasionally on bleaker humour whether it has all aged well or not multiple times. This is the kind of joke that occasionally appears within this, which means I would not recommend this series for most. It also falls back into a type of sex comedy which is common in Japanese animation, including a potential issue for anyone outside anime fandom that many sex comedies involve teen leads in general, as here, that will also not be for everyone either. A lot of this in this case, as per the genre's tropes, is usually the gag of embarrassment and the male lead being tormented for a mistaken comment or being in the wrong place of mind (or actual location) at the wrong time, and ending up being called a pervert, which is not for everyone even for anime fans. That idea of male sexual neurosis, whether intentional or not, is found in a lot of anime, and befits this story with hindsight. The difference here is that this has an outlier tone which affects this too, that a lot of it is very light and fluffy sex comedy, with the bright colours and tone of early 2000s anime, but contrasted by the twists of dark humour. The most prominent is that, even if played for light hearted chuckles in tone, we will be seeing a lot of Sakura’s intestines and guts being split over and over, lovingly animated in his repeated dismemberment by Dokuro.

The tone is perfectly set up in the opening credits song, redone with newer lyrics for the second set of episodes released in 2007, a charming ditty from Dokuro's perspective where even if she will maim, disembowel and mutilate her crush, it is out of pure love, infectious and completely setting up the cutesy misanthropic tone. Dokuro-Chan does not play safe with its humour when it wants to, its eight fifteen minute episodes for the first series placing itself in regular slapstick with added gory violence, and deeply weird one-off gags which are strange with clear knowledge that is the intended result. Dokuro decides, rather than kill him as assigned, that she will try to change Sakura whilst becoming smitten with him, but that this pretext is more that he is stuck with an impulsive id of an angel who likes him but also indulges her pure obsessions whether beneficial for him or not. Sakura will die a lot at her hands and the Excalibolg despite the initial promise to protect and change him, usually because of her reactions to his lewdness (or accidentally seeing her undressed), or even trying to get a mosquito off him at one point with the club. It is to the point permanent psychological trauma is likely from the many deaths and resurrections he has had.  The lack of consequence, or anyone else reacting badly to this even among his classmates, who at times do witness this carnage, is part of the joke, even if eventually there is the current that he is crushing on her despite being attracted more to other classmates.

The resulting work for the first "series", eight fifteen minute episodes compiled into four full ones, is to be honest one you would not show a person if they are new to anime unless you knew their sense of humour or taste in the perverse was strong. A lot of it inherently would baffle or even make someone uncomfortable, particularly many of the sex gag are about near nudity or perceived sexual innuendo with its teen cast, despite never showing anything actually explicit unlike some sex comedies have. It is the kind of work, out of context, which supports all the clichés that give anime a bad name, and one has to remember that Reiko Takagi, who voices Sakura, is actually an adult voice actress who however manages to make Sakura sound like he is actually voiced by a young teen boy, one who will be battered and smashed into chunks of meat repeatedly by Dokuro. Within context however, the really misanthropic humour actually softens the discomfort and a lot of it feels like it is playing up to clichés only to twist the knife into them. Dokuro is the lovable heroine if you can get into her headspace. Alongside the cliché of the female lead beating up the male lead for a perceived (even accidental) slight of perverseness being taken to an extreme, she is very much an anti-heroine, someone who can destroy for the sake of it, as much as lovable in her earnestness for Sakura and her growing crush for him.

It is, however, a relationship has its difficulties, whenever she will eventually even say very random and illogically things, and is suggested to have tortured a teacher to start a club entirely devoted to the sport of watching woodwork glue dry. In the wrong frame of mind, these characters including Sakura may put you off, but the clichés they are as characters meant to be add to the dark humour. Such as the fact, when his class is informed he will eventually cause the entire female gender to be stuck at the age of twelve, they do not defend him in the slightest, and were already going to beat him up or ostracise him beforehand. The sole exception is Shizuki, whose crush on him is countered by his to her, undercut by Dokuro blundering through, and their own chemistry as the leads who clearly have fondness for each other, playing to the cliché of a love triangle with actual seriousness. This does emphasis, at the end of the day, this was always going to play in the source as a conventional teen romantic comedy, but that the set-up is deeply surreal. Then there is another angel (with horns) called Sabato, who with an electric cattle prod powerful enough to kill a sperm whale is there to murder Sakura but you feel sorry for, as the joke is how to torment her over and over, forced to live in the streets, and under a bridge cold and miserable, to the point the end credits song is from her perspective as she is miserable and cold.

All these characters exhibit the tropes of their archetypes - Sakura is the typical "potato-kun" generic male lead, a term I am using from online slag as many male protagonists have a passiveness with a sense of being stand-ins for viewers, to the point they have the danger of being blander than a raw potato, contrasted by fighting against his puberty badly as a teenager whilst trying to be a good person. Dokuro is mostly depicted as a bright, light voiced ditz who happens to have a giant spiked club. The clichés of some anime and manga, the sex comedy, is contrasted by the hyper violence or the perverseness of some of the gags, even cruder ones like the fact that, in this series' dogma, if you remove an angel's halo (as razor sharp as a sword) it causes one to have continuous and life draining diarrhoea. For all its crassness, there are moments which are deliciously peculiar. Surreal anime comedy is distinct from surreal comedy in other mediums and other animation from other countries, and a production will win me over if it manages to use its visual style, the writing and/or pure strange ideas to least get a memorable highlight or two. No series, in one episode, is just dumb when it inexplicably references Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, only with the protagonist Gregor Samsa waking up to discover, in a surreal dreamscape of a bedroom, he has grown a bug in terms of morning wood with the sexual anxiety metaphor apt for Kafka, as well as be a good joke when half of these sex comedies in anime, as alluded too, do end up being the existential nightmares of teen males when they reach and pass puberty.

There is, even for a work which clearly does not have a high budget, also moments of real experimentation too. The class rep, in the first episode when Dokuro is introduced to class as a student, is turned into a monkey, with a real stock image of a howler monkey used for his head in jerky stop motion. It is a joke paid off in further episodes on when she turns someone into a dog, or when the second series, just four more additional episodes, there is now a giraffe and a few others in their class from incidents we do not see. Little oddball flourishes, such as cutting to two wild bears looking nervously briefly watching at the carnage of Dokuro playing on Sakura in a river (with sweat drops signifiers for this), show even if the humour is crude and playing to vulgarity at times, it does so with a wink. Even those cruder jokes are helped by one of the huge advantages animation has, that you can exaggerate to an extreme, make even your female characters, no matter how cute and colourful, distort and even look corpse-like when the halos are unfortunately removed, including the strength of the voice performances from the cast.

This explains so much about its director Tsutomu Mizushima for me, even if all his productions are animation made by staffs of various collaborators. Working in comedy greatly, he likes broad and heightened extremes. When this applies to horror, even a goreless work like The Lost Village, the exaggeration is there and a dichotomy can arise in what was intentional or not with any work I will see of his in what was a success, what was not, and what was deliberately done as a joke or deliberately cutting the legs under expectations. Certainly as well, he does eventually lean further to absurd comedy through the first season, something to bear in mind even if still with the twisted logic of the original premise. The one crux for this production thought is that, for better and for worse, whilst this does have an ending in the first season, it really does not conclude the story. How you would conclude this premise I have no idea, and it would be compelling to know how the source material did so. Two years later, a sequel of four episodes (leading up to an hour's length) was created. It is, in honesty, bonus material. Set after the first series, with new characters fully introduced like Zakuro, Dokuro's nine year old sister who is yet in voice and appearance like an older sibling remotely not of that age, it is more a series of one-off scenarios with the cast even next to the first season, which was a set of one-off stories itself like Sakura being invited to the cinema by Shizuki on a date. Like the original, it is bright and cheerful in a good way in terms of appearance, but there is also clearly a sense of the series moving more to its sex comedy, lightly humoured tone than the first series, jettisoning most of the more twisted jokes entirely.

The first series had some weirder jokes, like explicitly referencing North Korea multiple times, and whilst the second series has its moments, including Dokuro trying to get Sakura is eat living chocolate versions of himself for Valentine's Day, there is a clear change in tone even if aspects, like dismembering Sakura at least once per episode, remain.  One of the things which does work in those later episodes favour is that they just emphasis some of the weird jokes from the first season, which feel weird even in context then from cultural differences, and let them be expanded upon. The entirety of the “Sensitive Salaryman” running joke grows thanks to these two series, a one off gag about a TV series (with a film spin-off) starring a man who emotionally and physically cannot live a day without his body riddled in hyper-sensation; I still do not get the joke in its full meaning, and the figure really only crops up in the background as a TV series character who got a film adaptation, but it works as a strange gag. More as it allows as well the multiple times the tie-in “Sensitive Sausage” branded food to be unfortunately in Sakura’s vicinity for ingestion for the second season, a tie-in probably requiring health warnings unless you want to be curled up in the foetal position with your body writhing in hyper-sensitivity, and hear that melancholic moaning that cues up in the score when the salaryman is evoked, which is what ultimately made the joke funny for me. And this feels deeply weird on purpose for any audience regardless of their native language and culture, and is one of the moments where the second series does have highlights to appreciate. For the most part, it feels like bonus material in the truest sense.

The original, even if the sequel still has Sakura being smashed to bits by Dokuro constantly, is in itself enough, especially if there was a sense of losing its misanthropic attitude. It feels too short as a fully fleshed out story, but the most subversive moment where the show there ends is trying for a dramatic conclusion, the cliché of the magical figure being forced to leave for her world which the show plays straight and has had enough time to have built up to. Knowing the premise is based on clichés eventually works in its favour as it is mixing the cute with the lurid and the serious. (More so, in the least expected scene, when the final episode even has a sombre and strangely ill-eased sequence of Sakura without memories of before and feeling he has lost something whilst spending time with Shizuki at a cafe). The entire running gag that this is effectively a male protagonist who is a submissive among more stronger and openly sadistic female figures, with the women in their twisted ways lovable and he the butt of the jokes, is pretty striking too from the first season, a trope that I have found finds itself in these sex comedies even if they still raise concerns for sexualising the female leads and, especially with the "harem" genre, the idea of all these female characters in a variety of romantic shapes all vying for the conventional male lead's affections. A lot of them end up, even if by accident, being about the male being entirely out of his comfort zone to confident figures, and here it is more obvious, so much so that whilst the episodes have grow stronger with hindsight, I do see the danger with the second series, if this had continued, of losing the female cast’s original tones in favour of more submissive fan service figures, which is no way near as entertaining. I see with the second series, when it spends an episode about the cast taking a bath together, that this even if you are a fan of the medium that can get past the sex comedy could have dangerously lost its initial spark if we got more from this narrative.

Whether you could have actually gotten this on to a further longer work, in mind to it likely needing to be censored for the television screenings for even the gore, is merely a guessing game. A title like this however presents, even in its own ballpark, the idea that you can parody the clichés of your genres but still be earnest in them. One joke far less palatable as the show aged, that Dokuro wishes to change Sakura because his older self would have lead half the world's population to being permanently twelve years old, has not helped, but most of this is a timeless joke which has aged well and allows one to still like these characters, the oddball couple who, even if one is not attracted to the other, will realise in the end he loves her as dearly even if he has yet to say "I love you" beyond friends. The reference to romantic comedies early on was a nod to this, as it is a joke as old as a screwball comedy from thirties Hollywood like Bringing Up Baby (1938), without Katharine Hepburn repeatedly bashing Cary Grant in the face with a club, but the exasperated male lead dragged along by the firecracker of a personality still found in many stories across mediums, and gender swapped, into the modern day. The idea of people who work together despite one being as much a frustration to the other is universal, and with Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-Chan, the joke comes with a very sick sense of humour too in this case.

Abstract Spectrum: Cute/Dark Humoured/Wacky

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

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1) Girls und Panzer might seem surreal still for outsiders to anime as a franchise about an all-high school female team of World War II tank drivers, in a world where they are kept and used for non-violent public activity, and it is considered a martial arts commonly practiced by women. To an anime fan, this is just Tuesday night viewing, so the bar for surrealism in premises is different.