Anime Meta-Review
Legend of the Overfiend: Legend of the Demon Womb
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Title Info
- type: movie
- grade: flawed
- Other elements of this title:
- This title has been commercially released in Australia.
- This title may offend the sensitive.
- Contains explicit sexual content.
- genre: hentai
- made: 1991
- Review created: Recently, but I didn't record the date.
- mod: none
Here's a riddle. What do you get if you remove the `epic' scope and super-perversion from Legend of the Overfiend? The answer is you get a grubby and unimpressive little video nasty with very little to recommend it. It could even be said that the main problem with LOTOF is the number of bad sequels and copy-cats it spawned. This particular sample isn't a sequel. This is the dubbed, edited, movie made from the later episodes of the original OAV set. Judging by the length this is probably from OAV 3-5 of the original, although the Anime Movie guide seems to suggest OAV 4-5. If so this movie lost about 15 minutes of OAV footage.
Which is strange, because the story doesn't follow the continuity of the first movie. Instead the chojin has not yet awakened and we are introduced to a new villain. This guy is the son of a Nazi lunatic scientist who made a death rape machine to summon evil to this world. He thinks killing the chojin is both possible and a good thing for his advancement to being a fully certified evil `overlord of the world' (tm).
The differences between this and the first movie are sizable. The action here is on a much less epic scale, I mean they can't even manage to destroy the world. The number of women exploded and people killed is tiny compared to the first, and the methods are not nearly as perverse as in the first movie. This isn't actually meant to identify positives in the first movie, merely to state that without the epic horror and cruel perversion of the first this movie has no value or interest at all. Certainly story and character do not expand to take up the slack. This movie manages to acheive nasty, but not interesting.
In addition, given that this is produced later than the original, the animation seems to have taken a backward step. It is not as fluid or as interesting as the original. The smaller scope may have restricted the possibilities. I think the central problem, however, is that the imagination and originality is lacking. Thus even while the animation might be technically up to par (I don't think it is) it still doesn't arouse any interest. Certainly the age of the anime is obvious, reducing the possibility of this anime being rescued as an `effects' movie.
Words by Andrew Shelton, Web by Ticti, Last Compile: Wed Aug 5 12:39:20 WST 2009