Gantz #3:
Aftershocks

50 minutes
English/Japanese
English Subtitles
Released: 04/05/2005
Reviewed: 07/05/2005

Gantz fans are just about as superbly irritating as anyone of this kind of show can be. Half of them are drawn to a fever pitch by either the gratuitous violence or the gratuitous nudity, shaking their fists to the sky as they post their love on anime forums and messageboards all over the globe. "OMG LOL!!" They exclaim in their Internet babble, "Kishimoto has teh biggast titays!!" Their compatriots are quick to reply in ten or twenty fold with their resounding accessions, amounting to little more than frenzied gluts of what could barely be considered the English language, most of which is too embarrassing to repeat. Usually it just involves their sexual fantasies, and what they'd do with a girl with a rack quite as big as our young lady friend.

Myself, I'd buy her a back brace.

So I'm starting to get a little tired of this whole 2 episode format, but that's only because I'm at a point in my life where even $8-10 for a DVD is the height of excessive spending. With no income in my foreseeable future I have to curtail everything that isn't rent, utilities, or beer to an absolute minimum. As such, the only reason I bought the third volume of Gantz is because I was cajoled into going to see the weird, but semi-excellent (in that campy way) Land of The Dead. With a Best Buy adjacent I just couldn't say no! I am not likely to see Gantz #4 in anything resembling a prompt time frame. And it's making me mad as hell. I want that disc!!

For you see these two episodes of Gantz are simply dangling the excitement right in front of our faces. They use cheesy tricks like jumping back and forth in the character's pasts and presents to show their difficult situations, which only serves to further excite me because I'm an easy sell with ditsy, cheap tricks like that. Kato telling his little brother a Fist of the Northstar bed time story (complete with "Ya-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta!" and "You're already dead") basically gave me an instant erection, which is certainly a weird thing to say about a scene involving two boys, one of whom is prepubescent.

The creators of Gantz aren't all that great in their subtlety, but their ideas are effective enough to not be muddled down by it. Sort of like the ending sequence, the script is so pretty that you don't care how it's moving like a herky-jerky marionette. From the very moment that the asinine know-it-all Nishi relates a story of a man returning home from the "game" to find his original copy there waiting for him we know that one of the characters never actually died. Since Kei and Kato were pretty soundly thrashed by that high-speed train I'm left with only one guess. You've got eyes, don'tcha? I'm sure you can figure it out.

This leads to a rather impacting phone scene that concretes the central idea of these two episodes like a delicious lime gelatin. I think we're all aware of the fact that the Japanese are quite good at repressing things, so good, in fact, that the country of Japan might as well be renamed the country of "Repression" (or vice-versa). Turns out Kishimoto didn't die in the bathtub when she slit her wrists. So now the double returns from a long night killing aliens to find out her mother is grieving over her hospital bed, and has explained to the little sister that her big sis "fell in the bathroom" ... aaaaaaaand accidentally sliced her wrists open? How does one cover up a botched suicide?

This repression continues when Kishimoto (the double) bunks up with Kei. Kei seems to think that this means it's a free pass for him to get laid. Hence the rather distasteful picture when last we met. I thanked my lucky stars that it was just a perverted young body's fantasies and not... well no it was still pretty bad, just not as bad as it could've been. Despite the motives of the rest of the world, I don't watch anime to see impossibly giant jugs. They've had this thing around for awhile, maybe you've heard of it, porn. It gets the job done a lot quicker and with slightly less debasement!

In the end, what's most irritating about Gantz is that these two episodes are just preludes to the action that follows when the game resumes again. This fills me with a surging sense of excitement, but at this rate the whole show is going to be out before I get to buy volume four. I guess that's okay, though, it'll jut save me from watching any more of these damn cliffhangers!