It's actually just a dream, though one not far removed from reality. Five years earlier, Special Mobile Investigation Force Inspector Ranmaru Shindo and his cop sister Saya lost their parents when virtually the entire population of their apartment complex was slaughtered. Weirdly, Ranmaru talks about having become an inspector in order to investigate the situation and apprehend "the murderer," as if one particularly ambitious killer could have gutted 382 people in a night. Then again, as the series begins, Ranmaru doesn't know about the supernatural, even though he lives in a Tokyo where such things happen so often that TV news anchors speak in utterly blasé tones about "another 25 victims" being found in pieces.

But he wises up when he witnesses several cops being shredded by staggering zombies with faces embedded in their flesh. Guns prove ineffectual against them, but before he and his partners get added to the body count, that girl from his dream arrives to save the day, along with other members of his organization's secret elite Tokkô subdivision. Before leaving, his dream girl gives him a few clues about what's going on. She adds another one when they next meet over corpses, and another one the next time, and so on until the audience is likely to be as blasé about the killings as that TV news crew. Even when a weird tattoo appears on his arm and he starts to manifest powers, Ranmaru seems relatively mellow about the huge upheaval in his life. He's far more easily unsettled by his sister's habit of walking around their apartment in her underwear, claiming she's just trying to comfort him in his dateless misery.

Comedy or drama, this one isn't much fun

The relationship between Ranmaru and Saya forms the "comedy" part of Tokkô, which is phenomenally grating: When she isn't being wide-eyed and sad about their parents, she's sexually humiliating Ranmaru with blithely inappropriate behavior, from suggesting they should bathe together as they did as children to yelling, "Stop dreaming about naked women, you pervert!" in front of his colleagues. The series' dramatic side is less shrill, but it rapidly falls into a predictable pattern in which monsters show up, Ranmaru's group (particularly his obsessive division chief, who resents Tokkô's interference) fails to deal with them, Tokkô's members hack everything in sight into bits and Ranmaru exchanges a few words with his dream girl. But when the pattern finally breaks, it's so Ranmaru can go on a long, dull blind date. That eventually leads to some interesting new plot threads, but as with so many elements in this series, the entire thing could be managed better in half the time.

And the animation doesn't offer a great deal of distraction, except to fans of copious bloodletting. With monsters and victims alike constantly getting diced up, there's certainly plenty of that: Strikingly huge blood-fireworks tend to paint any area where action takes place. The character design, on the other hand, is flat, and the drawings tend to be inconsistent and somewhat simple. At least the music is diverse and exciting, though it can get a little headachy when it runs toward unsettling buzzing rather than rock or techno.

As for the story, it's relatively standard horror fare. It's at its best when it's at its weirdest, as when Ranmaru meets one of the Tokkô warriors, who licks his face and burbles, "I knew you'd taste like that, just the way I like it!" But for every such moment of inspired strangeness, there's an annoying scene of Saya embarrassing Ranmaru with unbelievable behavior and obliviously shrugging off his protests, or yet another scene in which the exact same grotesque monsters get mulched by sword-wielding badasses. It's enough to make you wish the monsters would win one just for variety's sake.