Nightwalker #1: Midnight Detective CPM 150 minutes English/Japanese English Subtitles 04/10/2001

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I know it might be hard to believe, but these two women are actually the same person. Now, should a woman decide wants to dye her hair she'll certainly find no complaint from me, but such is not the case here. If I have one problem with Nightwalker it's the drastic animation change between episodes four and five. Also at this time the eyecatches in the middle of the episode suddenly start to appear. This leads me to believe that maybe the first four episodes were OVAs and the last eight, or whatever, were a TV broadcast. Not knowing the background of the show, and not particularly caring to, I can't be entirely certain about this but I think it's about as good a guess as any. Of course, mutable hair colors is not the only problem I've got with Nightwalker. It's just fortunate that as far as problems go they're relatively minor. One is that of the "alternate angles" prevalent throughout the entire show. I'm sure there's one person out there that believes the ability to look at the storyboards while watching the show is a pretty good thing, but I am not that man. Crap like this just reduces the bit rate on the disc, and if there's one thing that pisses off anime fans (besides lack of catgirl nudity) it's screwing around with the video quality of something. A TRUE anime fan would rather kill his family than see the billboard advertising Diesel jeans in episode thirteen of Terracatta Blitz overlaid into English text. If you're not willing to slaughter a couple blood relatives, maybe you should reevaluate your position in anime fandom.

Other problems stem from a more content-wise stance. What the hell is up with half the demons in this thing attacking people with this hair? Your standard bad hair can be tamed with a liberal amount of conditioner and a good comb. This stuff grows, gets mad, tries to strangle someone, maybe decapitates or disembowels an angry dog. As far as hair goes, that's just too much for my tastes. Disregard the woman's expression to the right, as I'm pretty certainly that a hair strangulation is a fairly less than pleasant thing to experience. Yayoi, the woman referred to earlier, is a member of the NOS, a department whose acronym we are never let in on. My guess is that it stands for "No Olive Salsa" which, if you think about it, is a very depressing name for anything, secret service related or not. Her job is to hunt down these demons who go around possessing everyone called nightbreeds, poor Yayoi though is not very good at it. Much like Mulder in the earlier seasons of The X-Files she has a serious habit of dropping her gun right when she really needs it, sometimes its through the machinations of the aforementioned evil hair. Yayoi also has a serious problem with blushing about everything, and getting into pseudo-lesbian vampire situations.

She's just lucky that she's got Shido the vampire to watch her back. Shido's purple haired and is basically your standard anime sexy bitch that could cut cheese with his nose. Normally this would be strikes one through three for any show, but Nightwalker manages to pull it off with a relatively good amount of panache. I think it might have something to do with Shido's occupation. See, Shido's a detective and we all know how much I love stuff like that. More than that, he's a man of action. Much like Shaft I don't think Shido would have any qualms about throwing a man out of his second story window. That's why I like him. It's that, or it might have something to do with his top hat. Sucks for us that the top hat plain disappears after the first episode and Shido's sidekick Guni doesn't. Would someone please explain to me directly what the hell a Guni is anyway? She looks like a little naked green gargoyle. There's so many words I find distasteful in that description I wouldn't know where to start. Guni's one of those "small on stature, big on attitude" sidekicks that also has a crush on Shido. This motif is so tired that I'm more often surprised when the sidekick DOESN'T love the main character.

And in THIS show it seems like just about everyone loves Shido. Yayoi lets him drink her blood on a regular basis, Guni is... well, annoying all the time, and little Riho, his secretary, really wants to be turned into a vampire. Eventually this happens in a very gross way.** I don't get what everyone's obsession with vampires is. The person who referred this to me was one of those "Vampires are like, so cool, y'know?" freaks that I really don't like being around. While this is leagues past most other vampire glorifying things I've seen it still ain't great. Anyone knows me knows that there's only one reason that vampires should be around, and that's for future killing. Blade is like my freakin' bible. In the end though, Nightwalker manages to be very watchable (despite uncomfortable vampire homosexuality with both sexes). This is largely in part to two things. The action scenes are really cool, but I think that might be because I'm really drawn to evil creatures who have a graceful way of moving around. When you see a demon possessed hospital patient tear into one police officer's throat and then jump onto another's back and break his neck in one swift motion, well... I'm not gonna lie. I felt that I could die a happy man at that moment. Also, episode six is awesome. Involving Shido and a nightbreed called "Bait" trapped at the bottom of the well, I knew this was going to be cool from the moment I saw it. Bait goes all psychological on our vampire buddy and it's definitely worth the price of admission. If you love vampires, you were probably going to buy Nightwalker anyway so I guess my admiration of it isn't required... but please, don't give me any of that weird fan fiction to proofread.

**Be warned, you probably really don't want to look at that picture.