he first words out of the mouth of Angel Cop's unpleasant protagonist are "The name's Angel, but don't let that fool you. I can be a bitch when I want to." She's not kidding, and she usually wants to. Angel is a member of the elite Special Security Forces in charge of protecting Japan from terrorist activity. She's fast, vicious, superlatively self-righteous, and has no compunctions about slaughtering everyone who might be a terrorist.
Nor does she have any interest in the lives of anyone around her. When her partner gets his spine snapped, she figures it's his own problem, and cruises on without a glance back. When a terrorist takes a child hostage, she shrugs the innocent life off--if she has to let the kid die to get at her target, she figures, it's the terrorist's fault, not hers.
Compared to Angel, the actual terrorists--Communist agitators trying to free the world markets from Japanese control--look downright gentle. At least they mostly blow up buildings, not people. But they're doomed from the start. As if the brutal SSF wasn't bad enough, the Commies are also being chased by a pack of strange "enhanced" people with the power to shred or ignite a human body with a thought. And the trail of increasingly ghastly Communist corpses leads to a conspiracy far more dangerous than some agents provocateurs with a few puny rocket launchers.
Wait, who are the good guys?
This re-release of the Angel Cop series (six installments, economically repackaged on one tape) makes it easier to wade through the mundane early episodes and get to the real excitement, which has little to do with Angel and her attitude problems. Even the psychic Hunters and their bloody mayhem aren't the series' real core--what makes it stand out is the full-blown conflict between three separate factions, each fully convinced that the other two are evil and must die in the name of justice. The exploding bodies and grisly tortures are constantly off-putting, but the groups' psychological justifications for murder--all similar, but all self-righteously excluding the others' beliefs--remain tensely fascinating throughout.
Which is good, because Angel Cop has a series of execution problems to live down. The principal irritation is the amateurish soundtrack. It not only features the flat, expressionless voices typical of dubbed anime, but also suffers from a repetitive synth score vaguely reminiscent of a Sonic the Hedgehog game. The animation is nauseatingly gory and physiologically inaccurate (surely no human body contains that much blood).
But the plot intricacies make this more than the bloodbath it tries so hard to be. The massive psychic combats, reminiscent of Akira, are exciting (and messy), and the one-upmanship between mad scientists is grimly funny (and messy), but it all pales in comparison with the unwinding of the political and emotional character conflicts.
