Reviewed by W. McQuade and E. Nagy
McQuade here. First, allow me to say that those of you who miss Guns N’ Roses and their imitators will probably spend a fair bit of time on the title page, just listening to the METAL. We both found Beast City 1 to be quite entertaining. It’s got a very Inuyasha feel to it, rife with demons and vampires and monsters.
The film features a classic struggle between two rival sets of characters, the “Draculons” (three vampire sisters, Mina, Aine and Annie) fighting against demons. The big bad demon sex king “Lord Karma” apparently feeds off endorphins, and requires his demons to have forceful sex with humans in order to get those endorphins, which the vampires object to for some reason. There was plenty of setup, and a fair amount of sex, and some actually pretty funny scenes featuring Mina’s two sisters going to college.
Although Anime HotShots voice actors are usually pretty bad, Mina (credited as “Tuesday Knight”) Aine (“Ruby Seedless”) and Tatsuo (Rex Davenport) were all quite good, despite the eye-roll-inducing stage names. Tatsuo even pronounces “Kaori” correctly. The translations are better than average, and the English dialogue was generally not forced or awkward, which we’ve found to be rare for these productions. As usual, neither the original Japanese track isn’t available nor are subtitles. Not that either of us are those annoying anime traditionalists who insist on watching everything in the original Japanese and refuse to pronounce the letter “L,” but this is beginning to be a pet peeve of ours.
I really enjoyed this one from an animation standpoint. It definitely looks handdrawn, the characters and backgrounds look fantastic, and despite the dark tone and plot, the style in many of the scenes is actually awfully cute. The sex is fairly realistic, especially for a cel production, and the fight scenes are very enjoyable. Nagy didn’t like it as much, but she doesn’t enjoy the dark and detailed 80s anime the way I do.
For a 40-minute production, there wasn’t a great deal of sex. The sex there was, was very varied in tone, though as usual, a lot of it focused on women being taken advantage of. As evidenced by the name, this one’s good for people who enjoy the Beast City series, but I thought many of the scenes with the three vampire sisters were actually pretty hot. We both went into this one anticipating 40 minutes of constant drippy tentacles in orifices they don’t belong in, but I was looking forward to seeing the chick on the cover, who I thought was pretty hot. Turned out we were wrong on both parts. There was a fair amount of beasties and tentacles, but it wasn’t disgusting or omnipresent, and the demon-monster-drippy-tentacle sex was quite tolerable. And the chick on the cover was nowhere to be found.
Overall, I liked it a little more than the girl did, but it was a pretty quick and painless experience for both of us, and I wouldn’t mind seeing Beast City 2. Not for the sex, but because I liked the style and (believe it or not) the voice acting. BeastCity1
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