Lady Death: mediocre anime

Well it was like 2 years in the making and been a year since it was released direct to video... I'll be up front, I've never been much of a Chaos! fan. In my view they were somewhat imaginative but more or less fluff in terms of story ideas. In fact, I've never even read a whole Lady Death comic from start to end. Even the concept of a hot woman in a revealing leather bikini outfit ruling over hell wasn't enough of a visual catch for me to stick around.

That said, I'm not a total idiot about it. Lady Death's character design is among the comics pantheon of classic designs and started the "bad girls are sexy" trend of the early 90's. I'd just settle for looking at an occasional pin-up than to sit thru reading a mediocre comic.

I suppose that would explain why I felt the way I do about last year's Lady Death: The Motion Picture. It's not like it was a budget production or anything. Behind the script adaptation was Carl Macek - an icon in the anime industry. Whether you appreciate what he did to Macross or not, one cannot argue against the fact that Robotech was a serious world-wide hit that did wonders for Japanese anime awareness at large. That said, the man's been pretty much behind the curtains since 1985 managing a small-time animation importing business and desperately trying to revive Robotech as a franchise.

Lady Death was Macek's attempt at another hit. The concept: bring on the R-rated violence to the screen via the anime format. Sounds okay: especially since anime has hit it big-time State-side in the last couple of years. One problem... Lady Death has been out of the lime-light for about 10 frickin' years! And old-school fans of Chaos! have more or less moved on since that company restructured its line of comics a few years ago.

So the movie isn't coming out under the best circumstances. Was it good? In a word, not really. It was by no means bad. If they were going for the anime-inspired look and feel, then yes, they succeeded in that respect. But what for? I got the feeling the whole time that they did so only because they felt this was the only way they could get away with the blood and gore. And unfortunately for anime, this projects a bad image... since we all know nowadays that there's anime of all sorts for all tastes - not just the violent imports that arrived in the late 80's.

It was okay... for a Lady Death movie. But I think we're allowed a right to demand better of the industry.

Seems to me that old Carl is stuck in the 80's.