Samurai Gun #1: Cocked and Loaded ADV 60 minutes English/Japanese English Subtitles Released: 12/28/2004 Reviewed: 11/22/2005

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Listen to Dave and Joel talk about this show! (right click, save as)

I'm a tricky dude, readers. Have I told you that before? The way my mind works is not easy to detail to the common-types. While in Best Buy the other night, post-Office Christmas party, I tore Samurai Gun from the shelves with the specific intention of lambasting it beyond belief. In just a few scant hours, I imagined, Joel and I would be pasting its filth all over the internet for everyone in the world to see (or hear). Sometimes I figure that it's worth $20 to just hate on something so fully and completely that even little baby Jesus up in the heavens would cry over the thrashing that a show received. But I think Samurai Gun broke me. It could've been the hubris of a dozen carefully blended Black and Tan brews in my stomach that led me to such heights of bravado, so maybe my actions are not entirely the fault of my own, but the results are the same. I seriously need to sign up for one of these rental services. Because paying $20 to the "privilege" of ripping something a new rear passage isn't really working out for me anymore.

Reader, I have plenty of stress in my life. Gobs of stress, hordes of stress. But not so much that there isn't something out there like Samurai Gun that could push it right over the edge just one more time. I submit myself (and occasionally Joel) to such deep pits of despair for reasons I could not explain to you. Sadistic fun? Masochistic intentions? If there's a perverse pleasure in watching bad anime then surely I am one who participates in it. Before you start, let me interrupt you to say that my perverse pleasure is the kind that doesn't require a bottle of hand lotion and a box of Kleenex. I'm the old fashioned, take-home-to-momma, clean-as-a-whistle kind of perverse pleasure. I think Joel and I finally hit the summit, though. So depressed were we after this show that it was like wandering through a haze. We were so confused confused and enraged after two episodes of filth and rubbish, just another one in the long line of crap that ADV so frequently enjoys shotgunning at us, that we had to turn it off. There was no way I could stand even another microsecond of this detritus. I'm not gonna blame the people over at ADV, they have kids to feed and if the way they have to do it is by unleashing budget-rate crap anime onto American shores... there are worse things they could do.

 

Like super saturate the water in Houston with Anthrax... they're certainly not doing that! Where to even start with Samurai Gun? It takes place in some sort of feudal-era Japan, I guess, but instead of being a cool and semi-sorta-kinda-accurate period piece like the Rurouni Kenshin OVAs it just goes off on this tangent where a whole bunch of people have guns and stuff like electric torture devices (run off girl's boobies, I seriously wish I had a screencap) and superspeed trains and jetpacks. I'm severely reminded of another piece of crap. Samurai Gun is slightly better. But you have to realize that's not really a stunning accolade considering the only thing that really separates to the two is Samurai Gun's lack of "Evil Jesus" characters and rape-murders at the hands of tentacle-backed monkey men. I do imagine being forced to watch the brutal murder of six family members is somewhat worse than having to watch the brutal murder of four family members, but I don't think anyone would really bother trying to quantify the two.

I guess the "samurai guns" are a crew of vigilantes who assassinate servants of the emperor/feudal lord/corporate businessman because said servants are unashamedly wiping out of the population of 13 year old girls in the country with a vengeance. Be it by bow or crossbow or harpoon gun, no teenage, big breasted sex slave is safe from the machinations of a nameless herd of bandits and thugs! Fortunately the SAMURAI GUNS are on the case, with their bizarrely anachronistic weaponry and their ability to mete out nonsensical justice at the drop of a hat. The Samurai Guns will alternatively shoot first, shoot last, and shoot their allies! It's stupid, like nobody reading the script treatment for this show realized that there was no plot and no coherent ANYTHING. But even if none of this was the case there would still be no way this should would be worth watching. I mean, come on, guns versus guys with swords? What's the sequel gonna be? Samurai Gun versus the Horde of Retarded Bunny Rabbits? No thank you. Pass.