Change Your Image
siboz2005
Reviews
DRAMAtical Murder (2014)
It isn't great, but the english dub makes it so much worse.
I almost feel bad saying this, because I am normally pro-dubbing. I love the english dubs of most anime. But this... honest to god... it feels like half the voice actors are reading the scripts for the first time. It makes everything so boring.
The only english dub that I have come across that is worse is Gravitation... because bloody hell that one is awful. But yeah... if you do watch this then watch the subtitled version.
That being said... I still wouldn't recommend this anime... even the subbed version. You need to get to about six episodes in before it starts to make much sense. At that point it becomes rather formulaic. And most of the episodes from then on are just badly orchestrated action with massive exposition dumps.
So basically... my recommendation would be that you skip this. But if you must watch it, then do yourself a favour and watch the subtitled version.
Dungeon ni Deai wo Motomeru no wa Machigatteiru Darou ka (2015)
Gets better as it goes along.
Going by the name and a lot of the early interactions within this series you would think this was just a dungeon exploration anime with plenty of over the top breasts and a whole host of girls in love with an adorably clueless and well meaning adventurer.
But the latter does subside and the side characters are actually interesting rather than just pointless harem bimbos.
The plot becomes way more complex and interesting and the world building is actually quite expansive.
My biggest issue really (having watched seasons 1 - 4 and the film) is the level of plot armour that is going on. Is completely removes any sense of threat because you pretty much know who is going to survive all the time.
Given how people are ripped to shredds, limbs and body parts can go flying, etc, I would have expected this anime to be more willing to remove the plot armour on occasion and if it did then I would certainly give it a higher rating.
The Demon Headmaster (2019)
A pretty good sequel series.
When I heard that they were rebooting this I was rather sceptical. I loved the original series and have recently read all of the books to my son.
I was pleased to discover when watching this that it is less of a reboot and more an outright sequel.
This series makes some changes to the book that it was based on. Some I enjoyed... some did irritate me a tad.
On the positive side... I liked that they added more links to the previous series. Bringing back a couple of the original kids was a nice touch... although it is a shame that they couldn't get the original actors back. This gave the series much more of a sequel feel and just made it feel a bit more complete than the book did.
I also quite like the alterations they made to the headmaster. In the book he is rarely seen in person and uses holograms to hypnotise people at the start of the book. His presence becomes much more felt later. This series instead gives us a different headmaster who acts much the same as the original... but who isn't quite the same. Which allows for another link to the previous series, which I thought was good.
I have to give points to the actor who plays Blake... because he pulls off being completely unhinged very well. They made Blake's character much better than he was in the books. In the books he was just kind of there until the last few chapters. With this, his presence is much more signnificant and he actually has a backstory, instead of basically just being an arse for no reason.
I also enjoyed the changes that they made to Angelika's background. Instead of simply being a rather spoild bratt (prior to the headmaster) like she was in the books... she was formerly a green peace freedom fighter type individual. Which makes the headmaster turning her into a ruthless businesswoman much more significant.
In the book the skills that the children get chosen to excel at are diameteically opposed to who they are. The idea being for the headmaster to show how he can make anybody good at anything. Which is what I like avout the changes that they made to Angelika, but it also brings me to my negatives.
In the book Ethan is a tiny weed of a child... it is commented on multiple times that he looks incredibly out of place when surrounded by the athletic lads on the football team. He is made to be good at football because he looks lile he shouldn't be. I know that he is still a former computer geek turned football star... so the contrast is still there... but I would have prefered it if they kept him smaller stature from the book.
In the book Lizzie becomes an expert in Shakespeare's use of language. Which is not what you would expect from a girl who recently had to be dragged before the head for assaulting another child (even if she did do so to protect her brother). The fact that it isn't what people would expect it from her is precisely why the headmaster chose it for her.
In this series however, Ethan absolutely looks like a footballer. He doesn't look out of place om the football team at all and is in fact taller than many of his team mates. The actor does a great job... he just should have been small and weedy.
Lizzie's special skill is changed from Shakespeare to martial arts. Which is a sensible way to chanel aggression and absolutely what I would recommend for a real child with anger management issues. But the headmaster is meant to be highlighting how he can make any child an expert at anything... so I think sticking with Shakespeare would have been better. Although I imagine it was changed because watching her do matial arts is more entertaining than watching her read books and write essays.
My only other negative is the amount of fluff that they have in this series. The original series took three half hour episodes to do book one. This is ten half hour episodes to do book seven.
The books are a pretty similar length... but the series is seven episodes longer. So obviously, they have had to add a lot of stuff in to fill that extra time. Not all of the added stuff is bad... some of it was actually well done. But I do feel they probably could have shaved it down to seven episodes by removing much of the fluff.
Other than those things I think the series does well. The acting is pretty good. I was highly amused by Blake's accent, because when reading this book to my son, that is exactly the accent that I used for Ethan. Not really relevent, but I found it an amusing coincidence.
The one thing that I like about this series over the original series is that nobody is safe in this one. In the original series and the earlier books the members of SPLAT are all immune to the headmaster (except for Dinah). So they have a level of protection. In this book... nobody is. Which means any mistakes can seriously screw the heroes over. It adds en extra layer of threat that I think is good.
I still prefer the original series. But this is a solid sequel.
Supernatural: Wayward Sisters (2018)
Mediocre
I was quite excited to see this episode because I love Donna & Jody. They are my favourite side characters in supernatural.
Unfortunately, this was trying to set up a spin off in which the main character would clearly be Claire... because she is young and god forbid we have the lead female characters being women above the age of 30.
If Claire was written well and wasn't such a cringeworthy character it may have been ok... but her dialogue and personality are awful.
"Who are you?"
"I kill monsters... that's who I am."
Like... what the hell? Who wrote that comeback? It is so bad that they should be fired.
Angsty, damaged, yet bewilderingly overconfident teen characters are irritating at the best of times... yet for some reason they are one of the most popular types of character to include on TV these days. No wonder this spin off never got picked up.
If they had made it more about Donna and Jodie and didn't focus on Claire quite so much then this episode could have been a thousand times better.
That being said... it definitely wasn't the worst thing I've seen. I have definitely seen worse attempts at making tv shows about teens V monsters. So yeah... mediocre really.
Supernatural: The Man Who Would Be King (2011)
Rediculous overconfident posturing from Dean... again...
My problem with this show... and a lot of shows like this... is the ridiculous dismissal of logic in favour of the "we're friends... we can do anything together" nonsense.
So Castiel is basically given 24hrs to submit to Raphael of Raphael will kill him... reopen the cage and restart the apocalypse... rendering all the work of the Winchesters pointless and killing everyone on the planet.
Crowley offers a solution... granted a one with drawbacks... but it gets Castiel the power he needs to fight off Raphael and avoid the apocalypse.
Unfortunately, he needs more power to finish the war that he started and the hunt for souls with Crowley must continue. People get hurt, lots of people in fact. But still, nowhere near the entire population of the earth. So if we are being logical here... Castiel's choice was still the correct one.
When Dean finds out we get the usual moral highground stupidity. If you boil down what Dean is saying he basically thinks the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many. Whining that he shouldn't have accepted Crowley's deal and instead asked him for help.
Right... and Dean would have done what exactly? How would Dean get Castiel 50,000 souls worth of power in 24hrs?
Answer... he wouldn't. Result... Cas would have died... apocalypse restarted... whole world destoyed.
Yet the show clearly thinks you should agree with Dean. It is just like when Dean was whining to soulless Sam about letting Cas painfully examine a young boy in an earlier episode in order to allow them to track down the angel that had posession of the boy's soul. Dean whined about how it was wrong to put the boy through the pain & how horrid it was of Sam not to back him up. Umm... no. It was an unpleasant necessity. Yes the boy went through brief pain. But as a result they were able to get the deal the boy made abolished and thus save his eternal soul.
I know a lot of people like to think that the standpoint of "the ends justify the means" is always a morally wrong standpoint. But they are incorrect. Letting billions die to avoid hurting the feelings of one is clearly the morally wrong option. Yet this show seems to think that it isn't.
I just can't get past the utter dismissal of logic that this episode has. Then again... that's tv shows like this in general for you really.
Bones: The Death in the Defense (2016)
Recovery time is important!
Doctors do not just make up that people need time to recover from serious injuries and to rehabilitate.
If TV shows could stop acting like recovery time is optional and that everybody can just ignore medical recommendations because going to work is apparently more important it would be very helpful.
Yeah, everyone likes Hodgins, he's a nice guy, but can we not act like absolutely nobody else in their entire professional network would be able to check the pocket of a corpse and find a necklace.
He is easy to temporarily replace while he recovers. I have not watched any further episodes at the time of writing this review... but if he ends up magically recovering from his paralysis after a while... like Wendal magically did from his incredibly rare and fatal cancer... then I honestly give up with this show. This show has become increasingly unbelievable and unrealistic over time but when the show is supposed to be all about science, suggesting that whether or not he jas hope is what will decide whether he can walk again rather than the fact that his nerve endings have been destroyed is just beyond stupid.
Edit... I have now completed the entire series and well done to the show for not having Hodgins recover from his paralysis.
Butterfly (2018)
Poorly written but with a nice message.
The weird thing about this series is the way it manages to make everything overly dramatic whilst also overly simplifying so much.
Various characters are stereotypes, others change their stances randomly and out of nowhere and bountiful highly questionable decisions are made.
The reason this gets so many high scoring reviews is simply for the positive message about people going through these transitions needing to be taken seriously and understood better... it certainly isn't for the realism. The most accurate thing in the entire series is it taking them 5 months to get an appointment through NHS channels.
Doctor Who: Arachnids in the UK (2018)
The hypocrisy grows stronger.
The Doctor has always been a hypocrite... shaming people for using guns and knives whilst causing a ridiculous amount of death by a variety of much worse means.
The writing however has previously made this significantly less obvious. I stress, this was already getting silly in the first episode of this series when she shames a man for kicking an alien off a crane... after she implanted five bombs in the alien and tricked them into setting them off. It seems that she is the only one who is allowed to inflict grevious bodily harm.
In this episode it is outright idiotic. Having a fit at the suggestion that the spiders simply be exterminated with guns and instead locking them all in a panic room where they will canibalise each other before the last one eventually starves to death. Yes... obviously a slow torturous death is much more dignified... all hail the Doctor holding the moral high ground on that one.
Similar to her standing and watching a spider slowly and painfully suffocate to death and then complaining that the bad guy shoots it. I mean the bad guy is an arse... that is clear... and he shoots it without knowing it is suffocating... he just wanted it dead. I am not debating that the guy was an arse... but again... watching a creature slowly and painfully stop being able to breathe is not better than it being quickly killed by a gun shot.
I still like Doctor Who and will continue to watch it, but good god does the writing need to improve. The current level of hypocrisey from the Doctor is painful.