Darkside Blues

CPM

83 minutes
English/Japanese
English Subtitles
Released:10/26/1999
Reviewed: 08/16/2005

Taking a week off from anime is always a strange experience for me. In just seven short days all the big breasted bouncing and shrill shrieking and a whole host of other annoying (and alliterative!) things evaporate from my consciousness and they worry me no more. I soon forget that there's crap like Dear S and He is My Master out there, stories about girls who are robots and maids (and sometimes slaves) and the milquetoast fourteen year old guys that bang them. Needles to say that this is a dangerous trend and, I worry that if I let myself go for too long I'll lose all the bile and ire that I've spent six long years building up. And if something like that were to occur then I'm not convinced that I'd be able to live with myself.
So, with the idea of preventing my own self-inflicted demise, I went back to the grind. However, I knew that I couldn't force myself to sit through a hundred minutes of something like Doki-Doki Super Ass Grabber!! I would have to use all my instincts and past abilities to tread a delicate line: The line between suicide over enjoyment of crappy anime and suicide over actually having to watch crappy anime. I wasn't ready for Mahoromatic, but I thought I could handle this. And if we were really lucky, something entertaining would come from my desperate attempts!

I vaguely remember watching Darkside Blues five years ago. There wasn't much to remember, beyond the fact that it struck me as a lame, bootleg copy of the delectable (but lowbrow) Demon City Shinjuku. Well... that... and the other thing.
I remember being astounded that this thing had a 5.1 soundtrack, those being sorta rare in anime DVDs at the time. So astounded I was, that I had no choice but to flip my stereo receiver in that direction -- I've always been sort of an audiophile -- the impressively positioned soundtrack immediately catches the ear because the first thing the alert viewer hears is a combination of bluesy harmonica and a woman moaning in pain. Already, my younger self was taken aback. It got even BETTER when I realized that there was a naked woman chained to a pipe while a dominatrix with an owl (yes, an owl) whipped her. At this point I started started wondering if I'd mistakenly received the F3 Titbang Dickgirl Hentai Special DVD instead of Darkside Blues. The 'climax' of the scene involves the dominatrix sticking two needles into the chest of the tortured lady. These needles, as she exposits to us, will (read this slowly) TURN... HER... INTO... GOLD.

I guess that's probably the most overtly insane/crazy/irritating thing that happens in Darkside Blues, but I wouldn't necessarily take that as a good sign. The other 80 minutes aren't anything good, they're just not quite as insane. The whole "gold thing" is so amazingly infuriating that it allows Darkside builds up a buffer to include whatever BS it wants and still make it sound somewhat sane. I'm sure this tactic works for them to some extent, as most normal viewers would be in a state of shock after watching the first four and a half minutes. Unable to even close their gaping mouths, the standard anime fan is forced to whittle away more than an hour of his precious time on this all-too-common tripe while he's glued to his chair.

Darkside Blues is something about a section of Tokyo, now named Darkside, controlled by a company, named Persona, inhabited by people who form what I think is a youth gang called Messiah. I've read a sociology journal or two in my life and I think I can say with absolute surety that no youth gang spends its days building fully functional rocket launchers out of cardboard boxes. They usually just steal cars or try to break into the crack market.

Aside from their Macgyver-type escapades the gang doesn't seem to have much of an agenda. They putter around the city aiding anti-persona guerillas and watching strange men in dark suits ride horses and buggies that emerge from the ground and fly in the air. No reason is given for any this, but that doesn't particularly surprise me. Darkside Blues is just another in a long trend of movies and OVAs that shotguns nonsense terms like "Enhanced Human" and "Quantum Cannon" in your general direction and kind of just bank on you liking it because it's so "out there" that there just has to be something behind it. Obviously you just don't include a flying carriage in a movie for no reason. You only do that if you've got a good thing on your hands! And why shouldn't you like it? It's got two foppish men who battle each other while referencing heaven and and obliqe terms like "Renewal" that never get explained, or even manage more than a second of screen time. By the halfway point Darkside Blues has introduced more characters than most movies normally contain and quite a few get no more than one or two scenes. I'm sure out there is someone who thinks this is good for all the reasons that make me mad.

Well I'm not buying it. This movie sucks, but at least it makes me feel good about disliking stuff again. It's offensive not because of nudity or profanity, but because it's such an irritating snake pit of loose ends just for the purpose of appearing complex. In actuality, the movie is as simple as my one sentence summary up top. I'd call everything else useless fluff, but that might give too much credit to the rest of the movie.

**It's kind of sad that I know all those terms.