High School of the Dead

Highschool of the Dead is a show that knows a very, very base demographic and knows exactly how to pander to it. It aims to please simple-minded, uniformly male teenagers with base level action and lots and lots of large, jiggling breasts. Highschool of the Dead has quickly entered into the ranks of shows extremely popular, not for being well-written or emotive, but simply for being a barrel of big, dumb fun. The problem is... it's not very good at it. As the name would suggest, Highschool of the Dead involves a highschool and dead things. More specifically, the series begins in a highschool and revolves arounda bunch of highschool students, who happen to have walked into a George A. Romero film. In other words, they're surrounded by undead, bloodthirsty corpses... zombies. From here, the plot is about as simple as can be. The cast has to try and not die. So all in all, it really speaks volumes that Highschool of the Dead manages to fuck up such a simple task, for a wide variety of reasons. But let's start with the most glaringly obvious one... the fanservice. OK, so considering the demographic the show is aiming for, it's hardly surprising that HotD uses a lot of fanservice. But Highschool of the Dead crosses the line of what an acceptable amount of fanservice would be repeatedly. Any scene that was otherwise good had an irritating tendency to shove some schoolgirl's underwear into the camera. And don't even get me started on the infamous "Boob Matrix" scene. Of course, no matter how much fanservice is in a show, it would not destroy an otherwise good show. So let's get to the next reason HotD is an incredibly poor anime - the characters. Let's summarize the cast very quickly. The everyman, the ditz, the needy girl, the bitch, the action chick, and the nerd. Not one of these characters has any more depth than that. I have literally told you everything you need to know about the characters in the space of one sentence. Takashi is completely unremarkable, Shizuka is dopey and annoying, Rei is irritatingly helpless and inconsistent in her character, and Saya (probably the worst member of the cast) is a self-righteous bitch who has no consideration for anybody else and considers the rest of the cast below her. The only passable members of the cast are Kouta Hirano (named and designed after the creator of Hellsing, a MUCH better take on the same style), who manages to make his military obsessions at least entertaining, and Saeko, who manages to not be annoying. The worst thing about Highschool of the Dead, though, is that for a show that tries to be simple and fun... it's very boring. All in all, a survival horror really needs you to care about whether the characters live or die to work. At first, after a seemingly significant character is killed off, it seems quite possible that major characters will be killed off, and that the series will be a struggle to survive. And yet, after that, not one character we care about dies. It becomes quite clear that the entire cast is in no real danger, due to having that strange immunity from danger that being a main character grants you. This means that we are simply stuck watching these unlikeable characters do things we don't care about. It would have at least been passable if the action had been well-directed, but it really isn't. There are no fight scenes that really stick out (barring the aforementioned Boob Matrix, which sticks out for all the wrong reasons). The action is mediocre at best. All of this leaves it up to a plot that really doesn't exist. So what does this leave us with? A show that really doesn't have any positive points at all, really. It's watchable, I'll give it that much, and the first episode was quite good. But it really doesn't follow through on any of the potential it has. The themes in this show have been done before many times, and almost always better. Final Words: Just watch a George A. Romero film instead. Seriously. Animation/Graphics: 4/10 Story/Plot: 3/10 Music/Background: 6/10 Characters: 2/10 Overall: 3/10 For Fans Of: Hellsing, Elfen Lied.

Warning: the following review contains spoilers and gratuitous amounts of pure, seething rage. Please don't be offended or take this review too seriously. I don't actually want to kill zombie fans. I just REALLY hate zombie media. Overview: Highschool of the Dead represents the latest in an endless string of attempts to cash in on Zombiemania. If there is one thing that makes me go blind with rage it is zombie media and the brainless IDIOTS that keep this cash train rolling. Shows, games, and movies that are decent or mediocre become "OMG da best thing EVAR!" thanks to moron zombie fans. Walking Dead is a mediocreshow, but zombie fans think it is Godlike. The Last of Us was a decent 3rd person shooter that stole some puzzle elements and escort missions from the vastly superior game Ico. Zombietards voted it game of the year and say it is the best game on the PS3! I own The Last of Us and enjoyed it somewhat, but I could name 20 better games for the PS3 off the top of my head without even breaking a sweat. These rabid, conformist fans are the only real zombies and I feel like one of the few lone survivors to not get infected by the zombietard virus! Story and characters: 1/10 Zombies randomly start attacking and some bland Gary Stu and his harem of poorly drawn, badly proportioned, G cup babes must fight the zombies. Japan is quickly overrun and the world's governments decide to nuke each other with ICBMs. The US is able to shoot down all but one ICBM from China and Russia while completely destroying both countries with thousands of ICBMs. Yet, the blanket of radiation from the hundreds of missiles used to wipe out China has no effect on Japan, less than 100 miles away! Only the 1 missile that hit Japan has the minor effect of taking out the electric grid. The radiation is simply ignored. I am not even going to bother explaining why the US isn't capable of shooting down thousands of incoming hypersonic missiles with our current technology. I am thinking WAY too hard considering the average IQ of this fandom. Sadly, the only reason this series isn't rated an 8.5 out of 10 is that the fanservice angered Western female viewers. If this series had ditched its piss poor attempts at humor, toned down the fanservice, and taken itself seriously it would be called...Attack on Titan. Which Zombietards also think is "da best show Evar". They are so conditioned like Pavlov's dogs to have a kneejerk positive response to zombie BULLSHIT, that you can replace the zombies with drooling, stumbling giants and the positive response is the same. As long as everything else in the formula is left unchanged. Art: 2/10 You fail human anatomy FOR EVER! Soundtrack 3/10 The soundtrack is very lacking. At least a horror series should have a creepty OST, but this one sucks shit through a straw. Entertainment 1/10 I want to use a baseball bat and brain the production staff and everyone who worked on this lazy, mockbuster! Overall: 2/10 The massive production budget barely saves this one from the lowest rating, despite my overwhelming hatred of this series! Now if you will excuse me, I'm going to go read something good like The Brothers Karamazov. Then I will use the book's tremendous size to beat some zombie fans to death with it!

Highschool of the Dead is one of those shows that I find myself having to show all of my friends, but not for the reasons the creators would probably like. Simply put, this show is bad. It is bad on a rather insulting level too. What could have been an enjoyable zombie romp had to be castrated with annoying characters, stupid plot moments, inconsistent logic (even within the realm of it's own universe), unbelievable amounts of fan service, and moments that just make you scratch your head and wonder how this ever made it into production. Because it didn't just makeit into a TV series, it somehow got some of the best animation you'll find in an anime. The series focuses on lead shounen teen Takashi, who contains every example of a Mary-Sue character. For those who don't know, a Mary-Sue is a character who is perfect at just about everything of value, is loved by everybody unconditionally, and is always right. Out of all the characters in this show he can be the most annoying because he turns out to always be right, even when his decisions are clearly bad. He is perfect at everything we see him do, going so far as to render the only positive input the only other male in his group provides (shooting guns) simply by receiving the instruction to 'shoot slightly above what you want to hit'. He immediately becomes a marksman. The only thing he's bad at is school, but guess what gets destroyed in the first episode? Other characters consist of Rei, one of the whiniest characters I've ever seen, who starts off the series telling Takashi he'll never be as good as her boyfriend, telling him her boyfriend is always right, and as soon as the boyfriend dies (fist-fighting a zombie is a bad idea? SHOCK!) she begins to immediately alternate between 'you wanted him to die, how could you?' and 'please make love to me, I've always wanted you'. There's also a kendo girl who starts off being the only cool one in the series until a completely arbitrary revelation into her backstory turns her more into a dangerous psychopath (or it would, if they ever bothered dealing with it again). They have the 'smart' girl, who in this case simply quotes common sense and the occasional piece of relevant information she read in a textbook somewhere (which on at least one occasion I double checked and found it was wrong). There's a gun nut who I actually kind of like, in that unlike Mr. Perfect Takashi this guy only has one GOOD quality, and that is his skill with guns. Until, again, Takashi gets one piece of advice from him and immediately becomes a sniper. Finally, we have Boobs Mcenzy, a nurse who doesn't know medicine, can't seem to understand anything that's happening around her, and whose very existence seems to be justified entirely by 'well, she has even BIGGER boobs than the rest of the cast'. Later on there is a kid and a dog, but I honestly can't remember anything she does other than go to the bathroom on Takashi's shoulders (yes, this happens). Oh, and there's the completely insane, psychotic teacher who nobody in their right mind would trust, yet somehow everybody looks up to him simply because he's a teacher. He oggles the girls while licking his lips, contorts his body into insane poses while detailing why they should relent to his authority (for their own good, of course!) and has some inexplicable desire to... keep the main girls as his slaves? I'm not really sure. It's never really explained, or at least not in any satisfactory way. One element that confuses me about this series is how it jumps about seemingly at random between 'let's analyze this situation using logic and real world physics' and 'batshit insane anime logic'. For example, at one point Boobs McKenzy tells them that she cannot drive the bus over a small group of zombies because it would flip the bus. Then, as soon as the plot calls for it, she hits the gas, runs over about 30 zombies, then plows through a METAL GATE and drives down the road like nothing is wrong. This might be salvageable if the zombies were remotely scary, but in this case they go out of their way to make them seem as non-threatening as possible. "How do they do this?" you ask, unaware that not only am I clearly about to tell you anyways, but that I can't hear you and you are just wasting your time. It's simple: in this world, zombies...sorry, NOT zombies... according to this show's logic, 'they cannot be zombies, because zombies only exist in movies, therefore despite sharing almost all the characteristics with movie zombies we cannot use that name as an easy reference point because LOOK HOW ORIGINAL WE'RE BEING YOU GUYS'. Anyways, zombies in this show apparently CANNOT SEE OR FEEL THINGS. I don't mean 'cannot feel' as in 'cannot feel pain'. No, they cannot feel things like a wet cloth hitting the back of their head. Logically one could assume that if they cannot see or feel anything, they would have no way of knowing when they had someone in their grasp, yet that never stops them from doing so. Maybe this is because everybody ignores the fact that they can only hear, and starts screaming as soon as they see even a single zombie come down the road. I believe the author came up with this idea for one scene and one scene only: Takashi walking slowly and silently through a herd of zombies. It's actually a really good scene, and one that gave me hope for the future of the series. It's immediately ruined because someone hits a pipe against a railing and, instead of saying 'make a noise somewhere else to distract them' or 'just keep moving silently so they don't know where you are' Takashi just begins screaming bloody murder and alerting all zombies everywhere to their presence. The smart girl (whose name I cannot remember) points out that, yeah, that was a stupid f**king move, but we are lead to believe that Takashi is right somehow because then a zombie tries to attack her, which somehow invalidates her point... I think? I mean, she's right, and the zombie only attacked her because she was talking which ACTUALLY PROVES HER POINT YOU GUYS but anyways they just keep screaming and running which gets a lot of people killed. Our heroes! Probably the funniest use of this new 'zombie logic' comes 3/4 of the way through the series. Some of the characters leave a building to find the yard empty. Then suddenly, Zombies come pouring up the stairs after them! Takashi, in a moment of brilliance that I could not make up if I tried, exclaims 'But how did they find us? DID THEY HEAR THE LEAVES RUSTLING IN THE TREES?' I'm not making that up. Zombies are attracted to leaves now. Apparently, ANY sound is enough to alert them to your presence, unless the plot demands otherwise (like the previous episode where no amount of sound from another direction would deter them from attacking them). Then, the Kendo girl goes into a killing frenzy against the zombies and declares that the combat has 'made her wet'. Ick. Oh, and there's a subplot about America wanting to nuke everybody because come on, what else are you going to do? We spent good money on these bombs and they aren't just gonna launch THEMSELVES! I very nearly stopped watching this show at episode 6, where the fan service was turned up to 11. They found a safehouse and, while the guys were doing things like plan their next move, maintain their weapons, keep an eye out for zombies, etc., the girls got drunk, took a group bath and fondled each other before attempting to get it on with Takashi (and only Takashi, for he is the ONLY man they could go for.. other than the other guy in the group, but he's fat and nerdy so it's completely understandable since looks DO apparently matter). There is clearly so much wrong with this series that it almost hurts just how good it looks. That is the only saving grace to this show: it is GORGEOUS to behold, and the theme song can get stuck in your head quite easily. In fact, the opening theme made me think this show would be great simply because of the tone and atmosphere it set up. It's a shame the show itself couldn't live up to it's own opening. I once sat some friends of mine down and we had a drinking game to this show. The rules were simple: Any time we saw fan service we'd take a shot. We quickly ruled out the opening theme because there's about 4 or 5 different shots in too rapid succession to drink and pour a new glass. After that, we had to limit it to 'just scenes of up-close boob and ass jiggles' because we were on a dangerous road to alcohol poisoning already. We quit after 4 or 5 episodes, because I knew the safe-house episode would kill them. So yeah, that's Highschool of the Dead. If you have friends over and want to watch something mind-bogglingly bad, then grab some bottles of alcohol and watch away. If you are looking for something DECENT, however, then try watching something better. It wouldn't be hard to find.