High School of the Dead #12 — “Zombies, What a Pain”
September 20th, 2010
Great line to basically end the show on, Madhoue.
Impressions:
To this episode’s credit, it would have been decent just about anywhere else in the show. Yeah, the EMP thing was beyond stupid and I cannot think of a way that they could have ended it worse short of all the zombies just suddenly crumbling into piles of cookies and My Little Ponies, but it was about as good as some of the early episodes. It had action, uncomfortable fanservice, and slapping a whiny little spoiled brat, and while the godawful stills were omnipresent as usual, at least they were much briefer and fewer than usual. That’s better than the last month and a half, at least. This episode should have really come immediately after they arrived at the mansion… and not involved EMPs in any way, shape or form.
Regardless though, I seriously cannot believe that Madhouse thought it was appropriate that after Saya’s family sacrificed themselves to save her ass and everybody they spent the last couple days with was killed, they decided to end it with the entire cast smiling and going "Man, zombies… So annoying, brosef!" –cut to ED– I also question their use of that quote about the world ending with a whimper after an episode about roaring zombie swarms and nuclear weapons. Oh well, it’s not like I suspected the writing to suddenly not suck. The humvee side-wheelie was the least of the problems. I think the EMP also turned the entire small army worth of defenders that the tent city had into dust too. They had an entire swarm of guards and weaponry a couple episodes back, and yet, the only people left to protect the mansion were the kids. And nobody noticed the zombies attacking the refugee camp until they were inside too. You’d think the EMP would have caused panic, but apparently everybody was taking their siesta and couldn’t be arsed to be awake in the middle of the day.
Final thoughts at the bottom.
Final Thoughts:
A generic zombie thriller seems impossible to screw up, but Madhouse found a way. It took sloppy, uneven production, oppressive flashbacks and recap, woefully bad writing and pacing, and a thick helping of angst in its twilight hours, but Madhouse cocked this up something fierce. It could have been an easy show to turn off your brain, look at some pretty images, and doze off in a tryptophan (or your controlled substance of choice) daze, but they couldn’t even manage that. The vast majority of the show was talking heads or stills. Sometimes both. The most ‘interesting’ parts of the whole show were the otherworldly breast physics and the terrifying fanservice. Zombie panty shots are a largely unexplored market for a reason.
The biggest issue is that it failed to even live up to its premise. After the first couple episodes, the zombies simply evaporated from the main characters lives at all times except when they decided to go somewhere, most of the time in an armored vehicle. No tension, no thrill. That’s what it boils down to. It handled that okay at the start and the last episode of the show, but the great wide expanse of the middle, the zombies were just missing until it was time to avoid them. When was it time to avoid them? When the characters decided to go fight them. In the second half of the show, they were little more than a background detail to give the characters an excuse to whine about how life’s not fair for teens.
If you want to watch it, just skip to all the action scenes and maybe look through some screencaps of the episode where everybody’s naked and groping each other. You can probably wring about 40 minutes worth of enjoyment out of that and another few out of laughing over Saeko’s sonic bullet-dodging breasts, but that’s about the start and end of what you might be able to squeeze out of it.
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Well, pretty true to the manga, a few improvements, a few more screw-ups. Overall, it’s done and I’m glad. They even left it in a place they could pick it up again without going away from the manga, and gods help us all if they do a season 2…