Anime 18 Review Link: Alien From The Darkness (1996)

From http://www.themanime.org/images/reviews/alienfromthedarknessbox.jpg

Dir. Norio Takanami

Japan

Well, to not seem like a hypocrite when I put in the website page's tagline that "everything will be covered", it seems befitting to have covered this.  I feel that I come off as defensive in the review, despite the fact I shouldn't care about what the content I covered was, and I think that happened because, brutally, the work was bad even if compelling. There's no way of circling around the low quality of mid-nineties pornographic anime with a tasteless premise which, censored in the version viewed, makes it even more scuzzball in presentation. But this is what most motion works - film, one-off animations etc. - are, tasteless, pornographic in various, ridiculous and found in second hand stores on DVD, and its quantity over everything else cannot be ignored. When you know what you are getting into buying it, let alone watching it or reviewing it, you are letting yourself into this material and there's a clearly reveling in the content even if you find yourself off-putted by some of it or embarrassed. The more rarer ones, like this kind of hentai anime, which get Western releases, especially in Britain, become fascinating looking glasses into what was going on in someone's head making it. Entire pieces of human culture could probably be extracted from such miscreant works, and unlike trying to watch something like a bad parody film like Disaster Movie (2008), or really gross porn, something like Alien From The Darkness - despite being really queasy sexual fantasies, tacky and scatterbrained in tone even for its short length - goes so over the top with its tone that, knowing how indefeasible it is, it engages you even in the worst of ways. And its just forty minutes long and I'm a sucker for anything animated to the point it'll give something an extra point unless its truly painful for me to sit through.

Let's be honest too, sex is a commodity in culture, and the more eyebrow raising ones like this anime plays with, along side the sapphic softcore that one would find in live action porn, is something that has existed in many forms back in painting and literature. Its better to prod it with a stick, to paraphrase the words of someone I knew in secondary school, than to leave it as it is and get embarrassed by it. The censorship of the version I covered show as well how something can be drastically changed, even if a single second was removed, in how you react to it especially if a censor gets at it. I cannot say anything truly profound beyond this because, as much I confess to finding a perverse pleasure in the car crash, I still was reviewing a bad anime called Alien From The Darkness.

Review Link - http://www.videotapeswapshop.co.uk/14865/alien-from-the-darkness-%E2%80%93-1996-director-norio-takanami/

From http://i.ytimg.com/vi/MhNQPi0f7T0/0.jpg