Review of High School of the Dead
This review will contain spoilers, because let's be real: you aren't going to watch this for the story. This is a show about a sudden, unexplainable zombie apocalypse and surrounds a bunch of kids "trying to survive". The first episode isn't too bad: the production is top notch so they are able to create the proper tension. There's people dying left and right. You think this is going to be serious business and keep you on the edge of your seat for the whole series. But unless you're 13 years old, that isn't going to happen. It quickly just turns intoa sequence of absolute contrived non-sense. The obvious thing to do for our group of protagonists would be to find a place with plenty of food (such as a grocery store) and barricade themselves inside for as long as possible, safe from zombies. But if the characters acted rationally, we would have to actually use our heads to create an interesting story. Get that smart shit out of my anime.
No, instead, let's have the characters actively seek out trouble as often as possible. Whenever they appear to be safe, they should just decide to move to a new location, for no reason in particular. Other than to run into zombies for our 12 year old viewers' enjoyment. Now you got a plot i can get behind!
The biggest problem the show has is that there is absolutely no sense of danger after the first 10 minutes. If a 16 year old girl with a wooden stick can bulldoze through dozens of slow, *blind* zombies with no difficulty what-so-ever, then how in the world is the situation not immediately put under control by the military and law enforcement? Due to this, it's abundantly clear that none of our characters are ever going to be at risk of death, so these perpetual forced action scenes don't trigger any hype.
However, in the later half of the show, the writing becomes earth-shatteringly stupid, and this really improves the experience. We descend into pure hilarity as the author piles on the nonsense. And there's so many cliches it starts to feel like every single line of dialog has been said before in another show. When watched ironically, this is actually excellent.
The other thing that the show does pretty well is the fan-service. It's so contrived and plentiful that you can only laugh about it. Sometimes though it goes all out with actual sexuality (including nipples!) which can give us some good eye candy. The girls, in any casual situation, are adopting really lewd postures with lots of lordosis and that can be quite pleasant to look at.
Oh yeah, all the characters are shit, in case you were wondering. Normally i would leave it at that, but we need to give out a special mention to the twin-tail girl. Usually i have a thing for bitchy girls in anime, but this one, they just turned it up to 11. She is so insufferable that absolutely nobody in the real world would ever put up with her for more than 5 minutes. But of course, this is anime, and girls can behave however they want and the good cucks will just sit there and take it. But if you, as a viewer, are not annoyed by her, you should stop watching right now since you probably have a bull to prep and he's losing patience.
As it's a mad-house show, the production is excellent as always, in spite of the horrendous source material. Complex and often way over-the-top animations help to keep us "visually" entertained until the next fan-service scene. They did what they could, but nobody on earth could make this decent.
Watch at your own risk, but please god, don't try to take it seriously.