Hey, see this cute little girl who was horribly disfigured in a fire? Well, she's recovering surprisingly fast, so uh... she's probably a monster, and you're probably going to have to kill her. But don't worry, she's a horribly crippled orphan with no vocal chords, so turning into a monster and getting killed will almost be a lateral move! Also, her monsterification readings are going up every time she looks at fire (gee, do you think she's perhaps going to end up turning into some sort of fire themed monster? I mean, we've already had the peeping tom eye monster, the cat monster with the pet cat, the swim team champion shark monster, there's a pretty obvious pattern going on (oh, and as a side note to this side note, I had a very brief Heroes campaign where I made a bunch of supervillains along the lines of Dr. Ivan Frost, who, as a result of a bizarre accident, was granted superpowers that in absolutely no way reflected any sort of ice theme)). Anyway, to make a long boring episode short, yes. She turns into a big fire monster, sets various people on fire, and then uh... burns to death, because she apparently turned into the sort of fire monster that doesn't have the good sense to be non-flammable. So then the main character cries, boss-lady makes some overly callous comment, Harumi evidently calls Mr. Investigative reporter as the episode's ending, presumably to say "hey, I don't know if this is just a coincidence or what, but every time there's a horrifying disaster in this city, it seems to happen within an hour of my roommate getting a phone call and leaving in a mysterious hurry.
Oho! This seems to be a Christmas episode! Perhaps the monster will look like 3 Santas glued together, with a girl growing out of their primary back, with extra eyes on big silly eyestalks! Or not. Some sort of betentacled bald salaryman department store owner. Today Asuka gives Jun her mission briefing while watching some cheesy monster movie. Jun gripes about having to go kill it before she gets to see how the movie ends. Asuka says the girl kills her boyfriend turned hideous monster, because that's how stupid movies like this one always end. I have now decided that Asuka is the physical representation of my disdain for the series, and Jun the series itself. "You suck!" "You're a whiny piece of garbage who always does what everyone expects you to!" "The plot is formulaic and boring and I already know how it's going to turn out!" Yeah, you tell her! Before heading off to kill the monster, Jun goes home (wasn't she supposed to be in a huge rush here?) evidently just to annoy Harumi by running out to kill monsters again. See, these two scenes would make way way more sense in the other order... oh, sorry, Kazumi. Not Harumi. Watch me mess up names that only get mentioned in like 2 episodes. Anyway, Jun gets chewed out by her boss for apparently just going to the department store to buy her a Christmas present, as opposed to hunting down and killing the owner of said store. On the way home, Mr. Reporter, who at this point is full on stalking her, starts trailing her car, but is run off the road by HA agents. Anyway, eventually Jun and Asuka sneak into the store's elevator shaft at night to handle their monster whacking... then think it'd probably be better to just go to the elevator control room, where Mr. Store Owner has all his victims set up around a table with a Christmas present on it in an honestly not particularly nasty display, because this show is amazingly low on gore. Oh, and as it turns out, he's basically a giant chameleon. Ah, here's some funny dialog, word for word: "Hurry up and become your real self and counterattack!" "I'm the real me now!" "Are you going to bring up stupid emotions again?" Asuka then threatens to shoot her if she doesn't get the lead out, because it's not like that'll kill her. Funny as this exchange is though, it's rather uh... out of context. I mean, this is the least sympathetic monster of the week in a fair bit here, why bother with angst? Oh, and as this is the one place where this show does a decent job, he's a very FUNNY looking chameleon when you finally get a good look... and then he starts a stereo playing Jingle Bells while they fight to lighten the mood some, but really, his silly face did that already. Then he starts telling his life story. He doesn't revery to non-chameleon form for this, so it's just hilarious. The man character reverts out of sympathy though, and hives him the present from the corpse table. Then Asuka goes Enough with this sappy garbage, shoots him in the face, which makes him angry and grow to city destroying sized. Oh, and let me explain how silly he looks: Take a giant purple chameleon with red polka dots, then have a salaryman's face and arms growing out of where its nose would be if chameleons had noses, so the arms kinda look like an Old Timey Villain mustache. We actually don't get a giant monster fight, because the main character's still too busy being moved by his sob story, so a helicopter full of HA goons just kinda shoot him down King Kong style. His last words are "Merry... Christmas!" which are just plain funny last words no matter how you slice it. Then Jun tells Asuka the cheesy monster movie actually ended with the guy turning back to a human, which I suppose she was trying to use as pacifistic rationalization, but I can't help but think how lame and anticlimactic that must have been. But anyway, Merry Christmas to you too Mr. Silly Salaryman Chameleon With Thrakazog's tongue.
Jun has a nightmare about some sorta gargoyle dude ripping apart some sorta evil looking satyr lady. It's like a brief glimpse of what this would look like if it dropped all the boring angst and had more normal monster designs. Then comes another photo shoot of, dressing really conservatively and sitting around in a chair... again. Seriously, what kind of modeling jobs are these? Covers for Cold Melancholic Woman Monthly or what? Then comes a brief dream flashback, followed by Dr. Also A Devilman (whose name is Jason) flagging her down. Gee, foreshadowing much here? So they go out to dinner at Heaven and Hell! Woo! I've been to the restaurant the bad anime characters are in! Perhaps this week's monster will look like that urinal they have there! Anyway though, he hits on her evilly, because that's kind of his deal, then calls her a wimp when she runs away crying. She dream flashbacks a little more. Anyway, today's monster is evidently hiding out i the park. Jun goes off to reluctantly kill it, and Jason winds up tagging along, because who doesn't like to watch a good ol' monster fight? Plus he's all sleazy and evilly, so he gets to respectively see her naked and taunt her afterwards I'm sure. Speaking of the whole growing just big enough to rip out of her clothes thing, seeing how they've got an agency making sure to get rid of any bystanders for these fights, and there's plenty of prep time, you'd figure she'd eventually think to strip beforehand and not keep trashing all her clothes. I mean, that's just being practical, and it'd let'em cram in more of that fanservice you'd really figure they'd be pushing as the angle for this series. Anyway, today's monster is covered in faces (darn, no urinal monster, fun fact though Google image search for Heaven and Hell urinal and it's the only result), Jun arbitrarily freaks out and gets smacked around, Jason in his more devilly looking devilman form saves her, asks why she's such a wimp in a relatively polite fashion, and then we switch over to a Giant Monster Fight. Meanwhile, Jun lectures random bridge crew guy not to leer at the giant naked blue girl, because she's not really human and all. Random guy disagrees. With the not human part I mean, not the no leering part. So anyway, monster dies, random bridge crew guy (whose name is Maeda in case it's going to come up again brings her a jacket. Jason evidently had the good sense to strip before transforming because he's not stuck walking around naked (well naked safe for strategically placed hair and shadows anyway). So yeah, we're clearly going for a love triangle sorta situation here between Bridge Dork Whiny Girl and Evil Lech. That's uh... not really a very interesting love triangle. Incidentally, it'd be so refreshing to have something where someone had the ability to turn into a hideous superpowered monster and had absolutely no problem with it. Actually, there's some lame syndicated kids action series these days that does that, but it's lame for other reasons, mainly, disparity of style content and audience... but, getting back to the show I'm supposed to be bashing now...
Bla bla foreshadowing, blabla modeling, blabla extremely formulaic series. Jun spontaneously starts making out with some kid who's modeling but still in highschool in the elevator, uh, OK, that was totally random and out of character. Ah, OK, gotcha, pushing the desperately lonely because I'm surrounded by jerks and traumatized lesbians angle here. Gotcha. Meanwhile, some other person in the modeling agency is evidently doing his elevator makeout sessions with this random Japanese school girl, who's now going to his house, where his sister-in-law has a big collection of creepy dolls and noh masks, and is probably this week's monster. Ho hum. And yes, she is. Or at least, she's a psycho, because she drugs the schoolgirl's tea, ties her up, explains how she must be one of those evil girls trying to seduce her brother-in-law (or whatever the relation was) then pulls a hope which opens a trap door and evidently hangs her by the rope that she was tied up with. What a senselessly elaborate execution. It also seems to auto-dump the bodies in the river... and the schoolgirl was evidently 20 and I guess just dug the style. OK. Whatever. In go Mulder and Scully. Meanwhile, in a mineshaft, I was wrong, the elaborate setup just dumps tied up people into a mineshaft so psycho girl can tie'em up, turn into some sorta snaky thing, and lick them inappropriately with her long slimy forked tongue, while her brother-in-law (or husband? Or brother? I wasn't paying enough attention) is tied up across the room being forced to watch. So uh, OK. Go Nagai moment #2 there. Jun goes in undercover to see what's what, and gets this fairly odd explanation of this crazy S&M blackmail painting deal this girl and this pair of brothers have going on as she's being drugged. OK... Oh, and it's the brother/husband who turns into the big snake monster evidently. I'd be less vague and confusing here, but this show REALLY likes obscuring things in shadows... and uh... OK, can we please go back to obscuring the monster in shadows, and me not knowing what the deal was with it, and this show being way less sick and messed up that one would reasonably expect it to be, because you just went and totally destroyed all that in the span of about 1 second.
OK, so. Here's the story with this episode. Crazy lady finds people who her (I'm fairly sure) husband hits on, invites them over, drugs them, and dumps them in her basement to be molested by the monster while her (I'm fairly sure) brother is chained to the wall being forced to watch. Now, get ready for this. What the monster apparently actually is, is that from the waist down, the (I'm fairly sure) brother's is this room spanning penis/snake monster over which he has no control. It licks the various drugged and tied up girls, and then excretes some sort of super-aphrodisiac which psycho lady harvests and which makes all the victims sit around licking the main bulk of it... and it also drinks their blood somewhere in there it seems.
So uh... yeah. Now that we've established THAT, it's time for our fight scene. Jun starts wrestling with the giant snake/wang, and notices chained up guy is wincing, so she almost stops, but he says, and I quote "Don't mind me." and explains some more of just how @#$%ed up the premise here is to her. So, she temporarily chokes out the giant penis (and other phrases I really never saw myself having to type but let's face it, the only way to get through the rest of this episode is to write about it with an air of clinical detachment) and proceeds to chase after psycho lady. She starts giving some speech about how she has to sympathize some, because after getting slobbered on, she's sure to get addicted to it too. This, shockingly enough, causes her to stay her face punching in arm at least long enough for the wangaconda to burst throw the floorboards and swallow psycho lady whole, then spit her out almost immediately as a shapeless purple loogie, and swallow the main character... and now that it's out in the open, it's looking marginally more snake-like, what with the purple very vaguely cobraish head, but seeing how the rest of it is still flesh colored with lots of veracose veins, it's too little too late. Anyway, Jun whips her wings out from inside causing the whole thing to explode in a big cloud of the purple monster blood we've all come to know and love... which she then licks off her fingers. Oh, and it's a happy ending I guess, because all the addict girls get to go home, and now the main character is acting all sleazy, and this episode is mercifully over.
WOW. OK, if this were the first or second episode of this show, this episode here would go only slightly over my expectations of depravity and just plain wrongitude, but no. They had to lull me into a false sense of security and mindless boredom by first feeding me 12 episodes of extremely conservative and angst-ridden formulaic fight of the week filler that's tamer in terms of mature content than Escaflowne if you can believe it (and I'm serious, there's way way more blood in Escaflowne, and nothing sleazy really exceeds the catgirl twins), and then you give me the mind control incest penis snake episode halfway through the series. That is one HELL of a shark jump you SICK SICK TWISTED FREAK Go Nagai. At least now I'll watch the rest of this dreading more episodes like this one instead of just trying not to fall asleep.
And this was a Christmas present from my grandmother.
P.S. What sort of ads are you seeing on the sides of THIS e-mail?