I love coming across an obscure OVA from anime's golden era that's different from the pack and good to boot, and this certainly fits the bill. Not only is it well done, but it's quite unique in that it's a rather serious crime noir, something you don't often see in the genre. There's not a whole lot of ha-ha or goofiness on display here, which is a hallmark of a lot of crime anime from the period, such as City Hunter or Lupin III. This makes it all the more odd that as far as I can tell, it's never been officially licensed for anEnglish language release, as I feel like this would have stood out as something very different amongst the samey stuff that would get licensed and translated for English speaking audiences. It could have been another Blackjack, an anime about a surgeon that sat side by side on the same video shelves with Ninja Scroll, Vampire Hunter D, and Akira back in '90s video stores and always intrigued me because of it. Ah well, guess you gotta stick with what you know will sell.

The director uses some cool camera tricks that I've rarely seen in the medium, such as a scene where two guys lock eyes from across a room, and then we get a top-and-bottom split-screen, one guy's eyes in the top screen, the other guy's in the bottom screen as they stare intensely at each other. The main character being a screenwriter and not a cop or some sort of professional felt fresh too. Hell, a couple of things he says throughout about chance and coincidence might make you think we're just watching a script he wrote and inserted himself in as the protagonist, but it's never blatantly put out there, just sort of a nod and a wink to the attentive viewer that catches it.

My only two complaints would be as much as I liked the story, I thought the characters could have been more fleshed out and developed as I never felt connected to any of them nor do any have standout personalities. I know it's an OVA, but it's an hour-long one, and being a single OVA never stopped a bunch of other sub-60 minute releases being able to create compelling characters, such as Riding Bean or Kite. My second complaint is that on more than one occasion I confused one character with another. You see, the main cop and the main bad guy both have the same haircut and the same luscious Tom Selleck moustache, with the only defining difference between the two being the villain is slightly wider and a bit fatter. But with some of the camera angles and long-distance shots, it makes them hard to distinguish from one another, at least for me, and I had to rewind a scene more than once due to a little confusion.

Oh yeah, and does anyone know where I can get that movie they were playing in the theatre? You know, the one with a guy wearing a Jason mask attempting to murder a guy on a boat with Leatherface's chainsaw while fucking JAWS rises up, ready to eat everything? All I know, is these five seconds are hands-down the best cinematic footage ever released of a guy wearing a white hockey mask killing people on a boat.