For more info: www.advfilms.com Rating: out of five for anyone who is not a Go Nagai fan, and for a fan.

Go Nagai is an icon in the anime industry. He is reviled and idolized, adored and abhorred. Well, you get the idea. The latest release of Nagai's to hit the states is Devil Lady by ADV. A spin off of the older Devil Man previously released by Manga Entertainment, Devil Lady presents two problems to its format. One it is a full length series with many episodes as opposed to Devil Man's two OVAs. Two is that Nagai's reputation is such that either people will pick this up because it is Nagai, or they will ignore it for the same reason. It will not likely draw new fans in.

The story concerns the model Jun Fudo who after work one day finds herself accosted by a rather striking woman who takes her to a warehouse. There is a man chained up and when he sees Jun, he goes crazy, and turns into a wolf creature. Jun gets the stuffing beat, or rather torn, out of her when a transformation takes hold, and she becomes a Devilman. That is, a Beast which has retained its human soul. Jun is then told she is now helping the government to hunt down Beasts and kill them using her powers. Jun does not want to. Her teenage friend is then threatened, and the family killed, by a Beast who is out to hurt Jun, and Jun agrees.

This takes about five episodes to happen. There is much hemming and hawing about Jun wanting to stay human, wanting to lead a normal life, and so much melodrama it could be spread like peanut butter. The biggest failing of Devil Lady is that for a show claiming to be horror oriented it has surprisingly little that is horrific. The episode where Jun friend's family is murdered is really stand-alone in the first five episodes because it is actually creepy. The girl opens the door to find her father, who by the by was lasciviously fingering her skirt a few moments earlier, being held by an unseen hand about an inch off the floor. The realization is slow on her, and when she figures it out, the creature steps from the shadow. She runs downstairs only to find her mother's face overrun with centipedes. The pacing and everything in the scene denotes good horror direction, but then it is dropped into the middle of this tripe about what it means to have a soul, evolution, and the stagnation of the human race. When Jun bursts in and goes Devilman, it becomes giant freak of the week anime, there is little to no actual horror or even suspense involved. Jun is so overwhelmingly powerful that she just blows everything up once the change is upon her.

The voice acting is terrible, but with the pitiful script it is hard to blame the actors entirely. There are attempts to build up the story with long winded talk, but really nothing is ever made of it. Some of the secondary characters are mildly interesting, but there is little else save focus on Jun. The translation is severely inconsistent as well. In most anime where the direct translation differs from what looks good to the dub or American mindset, there is an obvious give and take with the dialogue. There are outright deletions between the subtitles and the dubbing. No attempt is made to recover lost elements of the story. The scene where the father fondles his daughter's school skirt while she is in another room is made all the creepier in the Japanese, but the American dialogue leaves the viewer thinking 'Huh? Is it paternal love, concern, what?'

Devil Man was a fun anime, it was not good, but it did not try to be anything but a knock down drag out slug fest between monsters. Go Nagai has a tendency, that I dislike, of trying to inject cosmic meaning into all of his work. Devil Man pulled this off by virtue of simply fighting the bad guys and keeping one's soul intact. Devil Lady seems to be trying to do the same thing, but stretch it out and add deeper conflicts and then talking about them at length. I am not a personal fan of the body of Nagai's work, though I do admit to liking Devil Man, and I have grudging respect for Getter Robo. However, like any artist, he has his off moments, and Devil Lady is certainly one of these. Even for a fan of Nagai, I cannot really recommend this one unless you want to sit through several episodes of nothing special for a few worthwhile minutes.

Email Matt, our resident anime guru, here.

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