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OK. Lately I've just been doing the whole CS thing with any old garbage I watch, but that wasn't the original spirit behind this. Back before I got all fancy with the screen-capping and such, I was just sitting down here to relate all the details of horrible things to spare others from giving into their morbid curiosity and seeing them firsthand. Specifically horrible old animated things. Really specifically, sleazy old Go Nagai anime. And what's pretty much the height of sleazy old Go Nagai anime? No, not Cutey Honey. Only one of the 4 or 5 remakes of Cutey Honey was sleazy and the original serious was actually just total awesomeness. No. What I'm about to do is sit down and actually voluntarily watch frelling Kekko Kamen. A series I've been actively avoiding since someone I didn't trust so carefully described it as being about someone who dons a red hood/gloves/boots ensemble to fight crime. The sleaze factor coming from how that is a COMPLETE description of her superhero costume. Someone darn well better put a high bid on that ad banner for this one.
Oh and boobs by DVD menu by the way. And then some more in the opening credits. And then, you know, all the time. Because this is frelling Kekko Kamen. We start off with some cops in the forest heading towards what a sign tells us is "Toenail of Satan's Spartan Institute of Higher Education." Which is apparently a high school in the middle of the forest run by nazis. I'm dead serious. They're nazis. Snazzy hats and jackets and swastika armbands and everything. One of the teachers is named Gestapoko. Now see, this is why I have such conflicted emotions when it comes to Go Nagai. He makes all these horribly depraved things, but there's always this baseline current of goofy insanity running through it all. Plus some of his stuff ISN'T pervy. Or at least, it's within acceptable tolerance levels. I mean, Mazinger-Z had the whole "breast missiles" thing going on but that's too hilarious to be offensive.
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Anyway, Gestapoko just tore off her regular nazi uniform to reveal her special dominatrix super villain outfit with shoulder spikes and "S" and "M" written on it and starts whipping all the cloths off some random girl who fell asleep during the outdoor midnight mandatory cram session. After we get some proper official highly focused on boobs-by-paragraph-3, Kekko Kammen appears to rescue her and throw wadded up panties with the message "Here comes the great hero!" at the assembled badguys. Anyway, the next day things are returned to a more mundane state, and victim girl gets a pep talk from Senpai-Senpai here, who is a dead ringer for every other older mentor girl from anything ever and is clearly our main character because she was surrounded by sparklies when first introduced. And dear gods. The bad guys know this too because Dr. Teacher can identify every girl in the school by the scent of their underwear. Dear gods. By the way, did I mention that Principle Toenail of Satan (Actual name!) wears this crazy ridiculous clown costume and gold mask?
And now in order to force her to officially reveal herself, they have called an assembly, strapped a Victim Girl topless to a giant slowly spinning swastika, and are throwing knives to slice her skirt up more and somehow cause her underwear to fall off. How does that even work? Anyway, just before crotch shot another knife is tossed to maintain some semblance of dignity, and Senpai-Senpai leaps in to the rescue. Turns out though that while those were indeed her underwear the night before and she is the heroic type, she actually isn't Kekko Kamen. Because she also shows up and we get a really horrible intro speech explaining her vague rationalization for the costume and DEAR GODS! SERIOUSLY? YOU'RE GOING THAT LOWBROW IN THE FIRST EPISODE? Yeah. She just suffocated the principle with her crotch. This involved 2 attack call-outs which I refuse to repeat here. Of course, distracting/smothering nudity isn't going to work on Gestapoko, being a girl. But the secret weakness of... dominatrices? Like how the plural of matrix is matrices? Huh, my spellcheck agrees! Anyway, it's apparently that they enjoy being smacked around themselves. So she spanks her with her nunchuks until her clothes completely disintegrate. Then Senpai-Senpai actively breaks the fourth wall to tease the next episode and ask how Kekko Kamen got her hands on her underwear anyway.
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Episode 2 starts with the principle having a dream about being whipped in the crotch by KK, then Senpai-Senpai breaking the fourth wall some more. Apparently that's her thing. Anyway, episode 2's -nazi-teacher-of-the-week is the hot buff gym teacher it seems. Who the principle says is clearly gay, but that won't prevent him from counter-seducing KK. Victim Girl sure digs him anyway. To the point of fainting and needing medical attention. Then he comes and brings her roses. By the way, have I mentioned that KK's mask has inexplicable big floppy dog ears on it? Also a big huge scarf. Because the whole nudity thing isn't weird enough on its own. Anyway yeah, Gym Teacher brings her some flowers, then pushes a button on the wall of, again, the nurse's office, which makes manacles shoot out of the walls, followed by robot hands that rip her clothes off and start giving her massages. And when I say robot hands I mean white Mickey Mouse gloves on the ends of metal tentacles. They wonder why KK hasn't shown up yet, then when she points out that she's there already, the Principle asks why her theme song didn't play this time. It's because she only queues it up when there's an audience around. But then... Gym Teacher uses Flex! Kekko Kamen is Stunned! This show is weird and creepy and I don't want to be watching it. Have I mentioned that? Anyway, this strategy totally works, and KK is forced to flee and masturbate off camera. Dear gods. After she gets a pep talk from Senpai-Senpai, who gives her her hair ribbon to use as a blindfold. You know, she could probably have just used her ridiculously huge scarf for that.
So now we have Victim Girl chained up in the basement, totally naked, and are piping live TV footage to all the dorms. And now we're using a computer console to manipulate the chains like puppet strings forcing her to do aerobics. OK, KK? Are you seriously going to give your Sailor Moon style "I hide my face and expose all else for Love and Justice" speech every episode? Because really that's just horrible. So now we have a proper fight scene between naked girl and topless bodybuilder guy. Then we have an astoundingly elaborate blindfold tying sequence. And really, they aren't so much dog ears as lop-eared-rabbit ears. Like one of the NPCs from Cave Story. And the crotch suffocation deal is your official finishing move? Seriously? That's awful. By the way, what exactly is the motivation of the bad guys here? I mean, you specifically said you were repeatedly torturing/humiliating Victim Girl here to lure KK out, but your secret weapon was some guy too hot for her to fight, forcing her to retreat, and then you just... went to torture and humiliate Victim Girl more. Is there no phase two to move on to?
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And now here's some end credits which have a translation of the theme song... which is pretty amusingly accurate in describing the show. It'd be downright hilarious if I didn't have actual hideously depraved images to match up with it. And the translation is made to rhyme... which makes me wonder if these are actually at all an accurate translation. Particularly when they're randomly tossing in "Dude!" to fit the rhyme scheme. By the way, the reason we have the end credits after episode 2 is that this is ADV rereleasing this on DVD, by just lazily slapping in the contents of the two separate VHS tapes they compiled it from together, where they cut the credits out in the middle to try and make it not feel like they're only giving you 2 episodes on a $30 VHS tape. I hear they went under recently by the way. Also their TV channel they went and bought flopped horribly. I can really see why too. My cable company went and started carrying that for a grand total of like, a week. I was inviting people over and making it a test of endurance. How long can we stand to watch this without changing the channel. Anything over 5 minutes was considered darn impressive.
I'm not done here yet though, episode 3 involves a swimming class it would seem. And Victim Girl has a new crush on Lemon-lime haired diving girl. As does everyone else. What is with girls in anime high schools all having crushes on the coolest seeming girl in the room anyway? It's in, like, everything. At least Azumanga applied some logic by only having one girl doing it and eventually calling her out on it... and I think Diving Girl may be a secret evil robot, because her pupils were just flickering red. Anyway yeah. Our format seems to be the Principle and his comical right-hand man Dr. Teacher pulling out a different teacher of the week every episode. So... Gestapoko and her nazi bodyguards is apparently just a one time thing. Which is a shame because Gestapoko is such a hilarious name I want more excuse to keep typing it. And yeah, Divebot. Her power button is her right nipple. I'm sure this will factor into the resolution of the episode. And... OK. The motivation of the bad guys is to encourage students to get better grades by punishing them for poor performance. Well, I guess it's nice to know that their hearts are in the right place. I mean, more one-on-one time with students and tutoring programs would probably be cheaper and more efficient than building experimental S&M robots, but hey.
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Anyway, they realized that her being all hot and giving everyone lesbian crushes was doing more harm than good, so they reprogrammed her to be more of a bitch. I realize at this point I could pretty much say anything about this show's plot and you'd believe me, but seriously, there was a big long exposition scene explaining this. Despite Bitch Mode Activated, she actually IS helping Victim Girl with her homework, so, that's something. They have a chat about boob size and whether Divebot is secretly KK. Turns out Victim Girl has the wrong answer on every single homework problem though, so Divebot sprouts clothing destroying back tentacles, which destroy both her own clothes AND VG's and gets to whipping. Also boob fiddling and face slapping. And COME ON! Why am I watching this dubbed? This is not dialog I want to have shouted to anyone within earshot of my TV. In fact, "Get your tentacles off my titties!" is not something that should ever be said by anyone. I mean, even if you find yourself in a situation where this is a sentiment you find yourself needing to express, a simple "Get off!" should suffice. Also, the main characters constant crotch shots being censored is just weird. Don't give me a full screen crotch shot and give it creepy burn victim barbie treatment or mosaicing, it looks really creepy. Actually, can I just request you not give me full screen crotch shots at all? So yeah, we're into the proper fight scene of the episode now, and I guess it's a plus that we're content with boob squeezing and nipple flicking rather than full on tentacle rape? Anyway, this treatment causes her to to intuit where the power button is, as expected. Then she gives a speech to Victim Girl and Senpai-Senpai about how that was an embarrassing fight even by her standards.
And now for episode 4. Today's teacher is a full on samurai it seems. Who of course immediately on showing up uses his sword to slash the clothes off, oh, Senpai-Senpai for a change! Victim girl just gets to look on in horror as he takes about 100 polaroids after. Well, at least we're mixing up the formula a little here. Oh dude! Secret blink and you'll miss it cameo from the creepy girl with the mustache from Cutey Honey! And... OK, apparently that wasn't even Senpai-Senpai, it was some nameless NPC girl who also had long dark hair. Lots of nameless NPC girls are getting cloths shredded off via sword. By the way, have I stressed that all clothing damage in this show makes no sense? I mean, someone gets repeatedly smacked in the butt with a wooden stick and eventually their shirt completely disintegrates. It's like we're using some kind of HP system here. The more damage you take, regardless of context, the more your clothes evaporate. It's like, they're going out of their way to establish this as a rule of how the series works. Once in the first episode, whipping clothes off seemed to actually make some sort of sense. Once. And our Ronin-teacher here just accidentally cut through a main support beam while showing off his clothes slashing technique. While waiting around, Senpai-Senpai notes to Victim girl that they can't just wait around for Kekko Kamen to save the day all the time, which is a good sentiment but it also strikes me as wrong.
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"I do this purely in the spirit of dignified education!" After cutting off everything but Victim Girl's underwear, Senpai-Senpai comes rushing out and does the whole blade grasp thing, further confusing how she's not the main character. And then they realize that KK is coming because they hear her theme music starting up. I love how that's officially a thing. "I cannot forgive you. You have strayed from the path of bushido. Also you cut little girls' clothes off you jerk!" And... wow. Just wow. OK, KK did the whole crotch face jump. The semi-stock animation for this involves glowing golden crotch light which I thought until now was just mild censorship, but it was actually apparently so bright that he was being blinded by it, so he pulled out his umbrella, which... totally works as a counter to that attack. It'd be a darn painful one too if she wasn't able to apparently change direction in mid-air and cancel it. Anyway, he points out that since she doesn't have any clothes to cut off, he'll have to just, you know, cut her up. The principle objects to this because I mean, if he kills her, they don't get to hide in the bushes and watch that crotch based finisher again. By the way, Senpai-Senpai looks @#$%ing weird. It's like they accidentally put her eyes where her eyebrows should be. I thought it was just a one-time off-model thing at first but no, she just looks like that.
And that's it for this DVD. There's more to the series of course... let's just see how much on the ol' wikipedia... oh. No, it's just the 4 episode OAV. I DON'T have to bring myself to watch more of this. The only way I can do more Kekko Kamen Consciousness Streams is if I were to actually hunt down the 10 LIVE ACTION MOVIES and no. That is not happening. This was pretty much the outer limits of my tolerance for things this blatantly sleazy. I'm not going to sit here watching some actual physical flesh and blood person crotch-tackle people in the face for an hour. Heck, I was going to hold off on watching any more of the anime unless actually paid to do otherwise.
