Okay, so here’s the set-up. One day, a young boy with the very feminine name of Sakura receives a visit from an angel. The angel, whose name is Dokuro, warns him that God is sending other angels to kill him. Why? Well, in the future, because he is so turned on by little girls, he will find a way to freeze all women’s aging once they turn twelve, thus inadvertently discovering the secret to eternal life. God cannot allow this upstart to encroach on his territory, so is sending his angels to prevent the invention from ever being created by targeting Sakura while he is still a child himself. Dokuro-chan, however, thinks there must be another way, only wanting to help the poor innocent boy.Except that...every time she loses her temper or gets embarrassed by being seen naked (which happens with alarming frequency), she kills Sakura, along with anyone else in the vicinity, with lethal swings of her massive magical club Excaliborg. This results in lots and lots of blood and gristle, but fortunately Dokuro-chan can use her magical powers to restore any damage she does. This is where the title comes from – Bokusatsu Tenshi translates to ‘Club-to-death Angel’.
This is a very Japanese plotline, it must be said, but most of the series settles into a very typical puppy-love-between-a-mismatched-couple idiom very much in the same mould as Rizelmine. But while Rizel inadvertently causes carnage with her explosive tears, Dokoro-chan just bludgeons people to death. It’s a whole lot less cute.
Plus angels’ magic leads to some very bizarre circumstances. Boys get transformed into animals, their heads just replaced by nature photographs with one or two frames of animation. Angels battle one another with wet towels which can contort their victims into perverted poses. Remove an angel’s halo and they get explosive diarrhoea. Yup, this series stoops to the kind of toilet humour people seem to think Americans have monopolised.
Honestly, it could have been quite cute. The character designs are generic but very sweet and the animation and art are both fairly high-quality. Colours are vibrant, voice actors give it their best (bizarrely, moé-loli Dokuro-chan is voiced by the seiyuu who also plays cool, deep-voiced Natsuki from Mai-HiME) and some people seem to find extremely contorted wrinkled faces (to show the suffering of, say, badly needing the toilet) quite funny, even though I’m not one of them. There were some sweet moments, and the obligatory separation angst in the last episode was handled quite well. But this show is simply not funny. And that makes it very, very bad.
Honestly, I downloaded it because I had it confused with Bakuretsu Tenshi, and watched it because a friend said it was one of the worst things he’d ever seen, which sounded amusing. But he was right, it just is really bad. The poo jokes, the stupid cartoon gore that gets old very quickly, the endless stupid ways to get Dokoro and other female cast members naked, the repetitive jokes and the total lack of plot end up really grating. Rizelmine just about managed to get the right balance, and ended up more fun than annoying, but the violence and the non-cuteness of the title character pushed this title waaaay back over the line, and past further lines no-one even knew were there until this anime discovered them.
I laughed twice in the entire 8 episodes (only 15 minutes each: this was a short OVA, thank goodness), both times unexpected references to other, much funnier shows – once when the main characters were doing a test of courage and Sakura listed things he was scared might really exist, like Nurse Witches, Moving Castles and best of all, reindeer who are actually doctors. These are all references to other anime, the reindeer being Chopper from One Piece, accompanied by a very demonic lookalike lurking in the bushes. A surprising and hilarious little side-reference. The other time I laughed was when Sakura claimed that in order to stop himself creating his pervy invention in the future and thus to get Dokoro to stay with him a little longer, he would even go gay – HAADO GEI. I’d just been watching Razor Ramon Hard Gay himself infiltrating The Television magazine’s cover shoot in some very funny ways, so that one made me laugh too.
But that didn’t make up for the amount of times I cringed, shrugged or rolled my eyes. This anime is tripe, and at that, tripe from a cow that’s been fed on a diet of pants.
(originally written 1.6.06)
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