Angel Cop

Sometime in the future, terrorism in Japan has become commonplace, and the police have become almost as brutal as criminals. A member of the Special Security Force known as Angel, is the best of the best, stopping at nothing in her fight for justice.

Things get interesting for Angel and her partner, Raiden, when they begin investigating a series of murders in which the victims were known criminals, killed in very unpleasant ways. This trio of killers known as Hunters, is a group of psychics that have banded together to hunt down the lowest scum in the city and bring them to justice.

After a couple of encounters between the cops and the psychics, two of the psychics begin to think that maybe they're not the good guys after all; but the third prefers killing to morality. Augmented by cybernetics from a mysterious source, this third hunter heads out on a killing spree, with the Special Security Force as the first target.

Even with help from the other two psychics and her newly cyborged partner (after an unfortunate accident), Angel is going to have her work cut out trying to find the rogue psychic and the organization behind the Hunters.

Mikawa, Angel Main

Doi, Mika Japanese

Sakada, Isamu Main

Ebara, Masashi Japanese

Lucifer Supporting

Hironaka, Kumiko Japanese

Asura Supporting

Sasaki, Nozomu Japanese

Freya Supporting

Mizutani, Yuuko Japanese

Haishyo, Taki Supporting

Utsumi, Kenji Japanese

Ichihara Supporting

Kitamura, Kouichi Japanese

Yogawa, Reika Supporting

Sakuma, Rei Japanese

Tachihara Supporting

Seki, Toshihiko Japanese

Togawa Supporting

Genda, Tesshou Japanese

Itano, Ichirou Director, Episode Director, Script, Storyboard, Screenplay, Animation Director, Original Creator

Aikawa, Shou Script

Wolskel, John Script

Kitakubo, Hiroyuki Storyboard

Reviews

Jan 12, 2020

Voivodian

Recommended

Angel Cop at a surface level is in extremely poor taste; snuff p*rn of fanatical communists, mind r*ping, not so subtle Japanese nationalism, muscle woman tiddy and an infamous rant that would bring down the full wrath of a certain anti defamation group. Beyond all the crazy rants and nihilistic shock value however, are clearly the creative minds of very politically conscious and well informed people.

Sure the conspiracy thriller is ridiculous and utterly overshadowed by any Oshii political thriller. Like Oshii however, it is all tied to very very relevant and to use a meme; 'redpilled' geo/political discourse. No better example of this is seen ... in the closing monologue about Japan's true status in the world and relating it to 'being another Kuwait'. Genuinely intelligent and deep, far moreso than many acclaimed philisophical/art anime out there.
This is indeed the type of message too dangerous for societal elites and the commercial mainstream; the only way it could of slipped past the censors? You guessed it: by also being a hyperviolent retro anime ova. Angel Cop delivers amazingly on this front. In addition to the things already mentioned, we get:
- The infamous Angel Cop headshot
- Cool helicopter and powersuit designs, true staples of a cyberpunk diet
- Enough firepower to fill out a sweet IMFDB page
- Golgo 13 expy with even broader shoulders and somehow even less emotions (see:personality)
- Glam rock psykers
- The handcannon that breaks your arm and calls you banana
- The absolutely beautiful MangaUK dub.
- Last and not least, Angel is one SASSY action heroine!

Yes, Angel Cop is easily up there with 'terrible' ovas like MD Geist, Apocalypse Zero and Battle Royale Highschool as an unapologetic, absolutely badass and awesome action anime. Essential MANime viewing. Also a much more intelligent anime than it looks; quite a biting critique of the potential neo imperialist mechanisms of foreign investment capital and strong themes on state sponsored terrorism/destabilisations.

Reviewer’s Rating: 9

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Jun 23, 2024

literaturenerd

Mixed Feelings

This is my 10th year anniversary re-review! Back in 2014, I joined MAL to communicate with other anime fans and to write short, comedic reviews as a means to vent stress. I was attending medical school at the time and during practical exams you must think fast and write fast, so writing 30-minute blitz reviews was good writing practice for me. One of the first anime that I ever reviewed for this site was Angel Cop. Since the 1990s, Angel Cop has had an infamous reputation among older anime fans. This is due to its astoundingly awful dub and for embodying the spirit of ultra-violent, ... schlock OVAs from the height of the video rental boom in Japan. Flash forward 10 years and I’ve ended up on a completely different career path. Fortunately, I found something that I really love doing and it just so happens that I have a job where I can typically relax on the weekends. This means that I now have more than 30 minutes when I want to write a new review. It’s definitely going to take a wee bit longer than that to adequately summarize my feelings towards this anime and provide background information explaining it. Angel Cop is very much a product of its time and it’s important to understand the context in which it was made to fully appreciate this lump of insanity. Strap yourselves in folks, if you’ve not heard of this anime then you’re in for a ride!

I’m not even sure where to begin with this series. I’m someone who passionately loves terrible anime, so Angel Cop is special to me. I own it on Bluray and I’ve seen it 6 times now. I’ve watched it 3 times dubbed, twice with the original uncensored subs, and once with both the dub and subs at the same time so I could directly compare the two. There are plenty of anime where I initially disliked it either because I was in a foul mood, or I didn’t really appreciate what it was trying to do. Then I watch it again a few years later and it’s amazing. This list includes shows like Kuchuu Buranko, Samurai Champloo, Gurren Lagann, Princess Tutu, Kaiji, Evangelion, and Lain. Angel Cop is not on this list. This anime is still terrible no matter how many times I rewatch it. However, it is compellingly terrible in a way that I feel I must share with others. They certainly don’t make them like this anymore!

Angel Cop was not based on a manga, novel or anything else. It was a completely original IP created by legendary animator Ichiro Itano, who you may remember for creating the “Itano Missile Circus”. That thing in every mecha anime where a thousand missiles are fired at once and spiral all over the place. Trust me, you’ve seen it before. Angel Cop had a very troubled production history. It began in 1989 and didn’t finish until 1994 despite only being 6 episodes long. The manga that was supposed to accompany the OVA got canned after a single volume in 1989. Veteran script writer Sho Aikawa was originally attached to the project but left after the first couple episodes. Yasuomi Umetsu, who would go on to found Studio Arms, was the key animator on episode 1 but also bailed. The last 3 episodes were written, directed, and mostly animated entirely by Itano with everyone else of note having abandoned the project. Angel Cop began its life as a Judge Dredd inspired gorefest that’s violent, gritty, and consistently mean-spirited and nasty. Sort of a love letter to the schlockiest of bad 80s action movies. Bakemonogatari gets endlessly praised online for lifting shots directly from French New Wave films like “Breathless” and Cleo from 5 to 7”. Angel Cop directly lifts a scene from "Invasion USA" by Cannon Films. It’s the shot where Angel casually looks over her shoulder while firing a missile from the back of her motorcycle. It’s kind of ironic as you’ll later realize that Angel Cop would shamelessly rip-off an Israeli action film, but Itano did it for whatever reason.

Everything changed for Angel Cop from its writing to its production cycle with the Japanese economic crash that started in late 1990 and continued throughout the 90s decade. A lot of people lost a lot of money, including Mr. Itano himself. Whenever unforeseen disaster strikes, everyone looks to place the blame on someone. In reality, it was a complex issue caused by decades of monetary easing by the Japanese government and reckless speculation by Japanese banks and credit companies who thought the good times would never end. However, conspiracy authors were quick to blame the United States for sabotaging the Japanese economy in order to prevent Japan from overtaking America. Anti-Semitic conspiracy novels including the 9001st reprinting of Protocols of the Elders of Zion quickly reached the top of the Japanese bestseller list. So, if you’re wondering why the animation quality nosedives in the 2nd half and the plot goes completely off the rails to instead focus on delivering a 7-minute racist diatribe…that’s why. Itano was not exactly in a healthy mental space during the last half of this OVA. Dude was hauled up in an animation studio with empty bottles of whiskey, piss jars, and Protocols finishing this piece of shit mostly out of pure spite. You have to love the crazy old bastard. Against all the odds, he somehow got this shit made.

Angel Cop was not a successful OVA in Japan by any means. So how did it even reach the West? Why isn’t it stuck on Japanese VHS and doomed to utmost obscurity? The answer to those questions is a little company called Manga UK. During the 1990s, the British saw an opportunity to market anime as violent, sexy cartoons for adults. They would license the cheapest, shittiest OVAs that no Japanese companies wanted and sell them to British audiences with highly “spiced up” scripts that feature swear words in virtually every sentence. Enter John Wolskel, who is secretly the hero of this whole story. As a young college graduate, Wolskel was trying to break into television and film writing. Some of his first projects were for Manga UK. After the disastrous failures of “The Dark Myth” and “Sword for Truth”, his boss threatened to fire him if the next anime he was assigned to didn’t fly off the shelves. Wolskel stopped even remotely trying to follow the Japanese scripts and completely threw caution to the wind. This led to such AMAZING dubs as Mad Bull 34, Devil Man, Cyber City Oedo, and of course Angel Cop. Wolskel’s script manages to transform Angel Cop into a profanity laden dark comedy in which an elite team of utterly unlikeable asshole cops must crush a plot by American communists. Oddly enough, the joke dub even manages to fix some plot holes from the original, such as the Japanese government allowing Jews to somehow buy the entire island of Hokkaido and turn it into the world’s nuclear waste dump to sterilize the entire Japanese population. The dub explains that they don’t intend to keep this a secret for long, but the sterilization will happen quickly and by the time the rest of Japan finds out, they’ll all be on a beach overseas using new identities. The original script literally never explains what the motives of the Japanese government are to go along with this plan or how they intend to keep it hidden. They just say that if they don’t do it, the Jews will force Japan to become the 51st state, which is a fate somehow worse than sterilizing the entire population. Then it goes on a tangent about how America lost over 500,000 soldiers in the Vietnam War which was entirely orchestrated by American Jews in order to test out chemical weapons on Vietnamese civilians. Yeah…even the most unhinged of terminally online /pol/ lurkers look at the Angel Cop script and think…what?!! Anyways, back to my man John. The dude made a heroic effort to salvage this project and is the only reason that anyone outside of Japan knows about this anime.

Angel Cop’s reputation in the 90s made it out to be one of the single worst anime of all time, but is it really that bad? The answer to this is…not really. Of the scant selection of anime that Americans could purchase dubbed in 1995, it was definitely among the worst. However, America wasn’t getting the type of shit that people like Kenny Lauderdale cover. We weren’t getting Chargeman Ken, Twinkle Nora Rock Me, Kentoushi, Kennel Tokorozawa, and shit like that. I can personally list over 100 anime that are worse than Angel Cop. Ichiro Itano may not be the greatest script writer, but he’s an animation genius. Even flying solo while drunk off his ass, Itano insured that Angel Cop has a few scenes that look good even in the last couple episodes. Angel’s brutal execution of a communist terrorist in the first episode looks spectacular and is possibly the best-looking gore that Umetsu has ever done. What I can’t say anything nice about is the OST. Angel Cop’s soundtrack has never been released even in Japan and there is a good reason for this. It was composed entirely using a Casio synthesizer and just sounds like garbage. Combined with one of the worst ending themes in the history of anime, Angel Cop’s soundtrack is just the drizzling shits.

So, if I love this anime and keep making my friends and family watch it, then why am I only giving it a 2? While the dub does its absolute best, Angel Cop doesn’t work as a “so bad it’s hilarious” comedy in the way that something like Mad Bull 34 does. Angel Cop probably has around 6-7 minutes of gut busting comedy spread over a 3-hour run time. Even if you’re an edgelord and are looking for the anti-PC shock value, it doesn’t really do that consistently either. That’s pretty much all in the last 2 episodes. If you're a gorehound, you'll also be disappointed. The majority of Angel Cop’s run time is actually just boring as FUCK. My girlfriend almost fell asleep watching this. There are long gaps of utterly unenjoyable downtime between the peaks of gleeful ultra violence, hilarious dub lines, and deranged conspiracy theories. Instead of being “so bad it’s good”, Angel Cop at the end of the day is just…bad. Really fucking bad. However, it’s such a time capsule of OVA insanity that I find it endlessly fascinating. Despite my morbid fascination though, I can’t earnestly give this a higher rating.

Reviewer’s Rating: 2

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Jun 4, 2024

EverySportsAnime

Not Recommended

Funny

I finished it for clarity, and I never got it.

As a Jewish person, this is by far the worst anime I’ve seen. The entire anime is just absolutely racist abt heavily anti-Semitic. It reads as if the plot was taken directly from Mein Kampf; “the Jews run the world, the Jews are out to get us, the Jews have the power to destroy us, the Jews are terrorists.” It’s honestly disgusting.

To the people that have recommended this film- have you never met a Jewish person? Do you feel as if this would be something to recommend them? If you haven’t met a Jewish person, ... I implore you to, and then please never show them this. Never watch it again.

Reviewer’s Rating: 1

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