Thought I'd check this out because of ufotable and expected another Katsugeki/Touken Ranbu but somehow ended up with a popular shonen jump adaptation :laughing:... dropped out about midway during it's airing and only now finished the show.
While there is some of the expected visual glamour including very stylized combat techniques to elevate this but the format is safe and the writing not really great. Still, there is a decent amount of action and interesting demon powers to overcome so that should be cool..? It's just that they main trio(quartet) kinda sucks. Not only are they extremely one note but two of them are just played for comedy 80% of the time - and it's the kind of comedy that makes me want to blow my brains out. The fourth wheel Nezuko that should drive the story is mostly stashed away in her basket and can be used conveniently to save the day when required.
Could have been decent if it wasn't for those distracting issues...
Despite the season preview at the end of the pilot previewing some intriguing "witchy" scenes ahead I think I'm going to pass. Wasn't certain beforehand how YA oriented this will be but from what I've seen that is certainly the target audience (if I had known it would air on Freeform I wouldn't have bothered - just thought that this being at SXSW would mean something different..).
Lots of stuff gets skipped over or is handled superficially which is weird for a show declaring sisterhood/their squad to be something crucial.
As lowbrow as this is I actually found myself enjoying this quite a bit from the second episode on.
I wasn't aware of many of those supposed "curses" surrounding the movies so while that info was somewhat interesting there wasn't enough for it there to fill a streaming services desire for multiple episodes - so what do you do? Pad them with often times irrelevant stuff to make them longer...
The Twilight Zone Movie episode also highlighted the more exploitative side of the subject mater but it's also the first time a horror doc actually did not idolize John Landis as an icon which was unexpected to see on Shudder of all places.
Edit: Updated my overall rating to a 6 since the second season is actually a lot better with less focus on "cursed" aspects and instead more interviews about the filming itself.
While usually in an anthology you have your good and bad segments here they felt quite even being created by the same staff but still dabbling in different kinds of "horror" each time. Problem is that there really wasn't anything that would make them stand out. The premises are not bad per se but with 30 minutes episodes being told in a straight forward narrative they can't seem to hit a sweet spot in addition to making almost all "twists" predictable.
I'm not sure why I even watched four episodes but this is it for me... It's a super generic MMORPG fantasy show which only selling point is the girls playing it (being as moe-blobbey as possible). It offers no plot to care about and the protagonists are not only clueless about the game but also just happen to be overpowered^2.
I have never really watched Star Trek (except the odd episode of DS9 and Voyager) but having watched every RLM episode about it I can only feel sorry for the die hard fans...
Yeah this is terrible. Nauseating concept (which makes hardly any sense nor is consistent), unfunny humor, lame ecchi and certainly the worst main duo I've seen in a long time... and somehow this gets 2 cours?!
I give this show one thing, it's ambitious in it's production but content wise it's terribly lackluster. Feels like Watanabe is on it's way to joining the ranks of eccentric elderly Japanese directors :rolling_eyes:...
Set in the future one of it's early themes is the idea of AI song production VS that of humans but really it doesn't do much besides raising that question. Even more so the duo of "Carole & Tuesday" felt inhuman as even towards the end they felt like blank slates which magically create new songs over night... I mean it's not like they already overproduce popular music without AI and here they champion a duo which exist as singer/songwriter in the thousands today...
After you get through what is basically the anime equivalent of a real world talent show it branches out to immigration topics (people of Mars vs. Earth) but everything t here feels forced and superficial (even stupid at times).
And really that superficiality can be found everywhere, be it an unrequited love interest (which has 0 impact on the character) or a guy basically saying he is doing his last performance for them and that they carry his hopes only to not ever come up again (???) (heck - we have TWO stalkers)...
Recommended if you like talent shows I guess..?
Run off the mill chunibyo show that starts out high-energy but is overall quite uneven in entertainment.
Seems kinda silly but dropped after Episode 9... At this point it's just a melodramatic slog where everyone's parents are abusive in some way or another. But thank god there is Maki to fix things who is apparently also an empath in addition to already being the "gifted" tennis ace of the show. Kanako also is handled very weirdly making her mainly a fujoshi insert...
Dropped at three episodes. It's not the worst show you can pick but it hardly feels original... it's like a mashup of anime which were popular in the US in the 2000s coupled with some other stuff he did. Go back and watch those instead as they have a lot more character.
So far this contains a lot of quirky/oh-so-random segments without much of a hook alongside some recurring bits - out of those Quarter Life Poetry is the highlight for me (which you might as well just watch on other platforms, eg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELTRkamduIc).
Update 2021: (not a lot of people watching huh ;)) Now in Season 4 the show lost decent recurring segments with S3 so it's mostly mediocre or worse in quality with only occasional standouts in episodes. I think it's still great to give a platform for all these different creators but the writing seems to be more self-indulgent these days?
I like horror, I like anthologies... but I don't like this show.
So this show wrote "diversity" on it's blurp thus forcing me to touch upon that. This translates into either female directed and written episodes or otherwise black/hispanic/asian guys. Similar things applies to the cast... And thereby makes a strong case against the diversity hire (note: this is not me saying skin color or ethnicity is an indication either way but this project certainly seems to be based around this).
Anyways; I know none of this "viral" fiction they are based on but they are pretty much irrelevant since what do you even make of two sentences (typically connecting a statement to something eerie/bad)... Petty really is that most of these do not work well with the 20 minute episode format. I often got the feeling that they're trying to imitate horror films they've seen but just have no clue what made them work. Budget is low with often unfitting music, lots of weird edits and acting all over the place. The cap on the length also means bland stories and very few surprises. I'd say two of them are passing at best, while others like "Little Monster" are so horrifically bad that they turn into comedy.
Not recommended...
Despite having been hesitant to watch this (bc superheroes :rolling_eyes:) I gave it a try anyways in hopes for subversion or spoofs of the genre (hello https://trakt.tv/movies/super-2010). Unfortunately this was just very bland and slow with some seriously lacking characterizations and world building just for the sake of being able to do an otherwise generic but raunchy "thriller/heist-ey" type of deal vs the hot current :superhero: everyone seems to crave...
I'm rating this after only watching the first episode. It's 2019 and I'm not ready for a Gonzo shitshow:
No thank you Netflix. If you know how long the source material is why don't you actually bother doing a proper adaptation... Not interested in continuing this.
You know, I thought I'd give this a shot given it's "horror" roots and provided that it is already canceled (and possibly cannot go too superheroish) but I cannot get into a story when I have to scratch my head every few minutes; this plays out too illogical. Be it terrible scene flow or the fact that no one reacts or handles this setting in a believable way. Dropped.
I guess this was OKish but very skipable.
The only thing this got going for it is the weirdness of the inventions... everything else is the same "joke" beaten like a dead horse.
Sorry but this is just trash... There are no jokes in the show and the scenarios are stretched out despite being only three minute long. They also decided this should be a SILENT comedy but somehow found it a good idea to include grunts instead. :exploding_head:
I have never seen the old "Twilight Zone" but heard a lot about it so my expectations of a "modern" adaptation were quite high... and apparently way off. None of the episodes had a particularly interesting gimmick or explored that in any meaningful way. Instead the episodes end up being quite boring, sometimes goofy and just not very good... this also partly because in 2019 you have to include an important message in each episode, regardless of cost.
I'm just watching this on the side (dubbed even) but dang, it's worse and more clichéd than I expected. Hard to believe someone would actually produce this.
This show had a compromised production and was supposed to air quite some time ago... and while it doesn't look like anything is wrong with, there are noticeable gaps given it's shortened runtime. I'm not sure if I would have enjoyed this more if it was released as planned but as it stands there is a lot of focus on yuri and dragon tails which I frankly don't really care about.
This show has definitely lost it's charm. I was really hoping to find some of the spirit of the first iteration but as the "CW" logo in the corner would already tell you... it's just a generic/cheesy fantasy show now with nothing to show for it. The new sisters have a dynamic I just don't care much about and where as the Halliwell's had a lot to work on, including their powers these ladies already decide after the first episode that they have to science the heck out of magic (which hardly ever comes up anymore). No one really cares about the "Book of Shadows" anymore (which was turned into a voice activated search device) or exploring witchcraft since their power level is just too convenient (and that is not even relying on the power of three). Heck, they even added in Phoebe's premonition power in form of a device now... Maybe it's because I'm bored at this point but they really cram a lot into the episodes but it's all moot story threads. There have been multiple episodes now with major mood whiplashes too so yeah... it's bad; and this is not even mentioning the "woke" writing which can be in a league of it's own. I should have dropped this way sooner...
Apparently it is required to have one jailbait anime in each season now...
I wasn't sure what to expect from a Shonen Jump adaptation airing in NoitaminA's programming block but I got pleasantly surprised. Doing this kind of story with kids is a very easy hook and while mainly twist based it works quite well for the most part. Really loved the conclusion of the arc in regards to Mama too. I'd imagine further seasons to be more in line with regular shounen fare so we'll see how this goes.
At somepoint I put SYFY on my blacklist for potential interesting TV shows so I only started this after it was already canceled... in hindsight that was maybe not exactly fair since I got a lot of enjoyement out of this. All of the seasons had some interesting concepts going on and somewhat decent FX for TV so as a horror fan I don't need much else ;)....
I have no idea what I hoped for (and my expectations were looow) but this show is offensively boring and generic at best... I don't think I will finish this. It feels very un-animeish (just the OP alone will let you know that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YheFQ6y0xlA) and is more akin to procedurals aka very exposition heavy and frankly boring since they forgot to add interesting characters into the cast (if they are even worthy of being recognized as a human being). Many of the action scenes are also done quite poorly and suffer from sometimes atrocious editing so nothing to see there either. The mask as pretty much the only sci-fi element of but didn't add any excitement either.
Eff me, this is a 2 cour show... going to drop this then. Really hoped for this to be an above average isekai but it really isn't. Any promise of individuality in the first episode was not touched upon and it instead went the boring Gary Stue-lets-be-friends-with-everyone route without a hint of an interesting story to be found.
(If you haven't seen a few of these enjoy yourself, be my guest but I'm too old for this now ;))
I'm really liking this second season. Watched most of the first one without any strong feelings to it but it really improved all around with fun guest stars and ever creative animation work. Mårten Tedin joining as a cinematographer is also a perfect fit.
