skysenshi (09.01.2001)
Welcome to Bedlam...
I swear this anime is definitely for true-blooded bedlamites! Though the artwork is certainly pretty enough for me to capture, I have only words of annoyance for this anime. All the women here are such wimps. The fact that there's a situation here where wimps are bullying other wusses is certainly laughable. The ones I hate most are Aya (the one with the glasses) and her sick-in-the-head bleached blonde ex-bestfriend whose name escapes me. They turn everything into one big crazy hentai kingdom!

Another girl that irritates me is the green-haired beauty who has all the power of a wealthy businessman's daughter but has no idea of how to use it. She's probably the toughest in the group of "martyred" women who were raped for the enjoyment of an embittered bleached blonde. However, she shrinks for the most inappropriate reason. Talk about being an airhead! What kind of girl allows herself to be sexually abused just because a classmate requests it in order to protect that classmate's shredded reputation? If I were in her place I would've kicked my would-be rapist's groin and go straight to my parents for help. Sheesh!

Like I said, all the women here are airheads who are easily manipulated, including a particular mother who struts around her house naked. Oh, I almost forgot to mention an equally pathetic college boy who tries to rescue the girl of his dreams but ends up being part of the sex freak show with her! The only reason I'm giving this a 7 is because it doesn't scrimp on the h scenes and the art is nothing less than beautiful.

The Shape (07.14.2002)
Tomorrow never ends?
A group of girls finds themselves victim to an old friend, who comes back to take revenge on her rape. One by one, they will be violently raped and humiliated, until they "feel sorry to be born as women". Blackmail is one title that packs a punch story-wise, but still has a few problems.

While I watched, I had to took notes about the characters names, since there's a LOT of female characters, and a few of them look pretty similar. It's hard to know who's who at first.

That being said, I enjoyed it much more the second time I watched it. The script is kind of confusing, which is sad, since the story is very powerful, and could end up as a perfect hentai. There are a lot of flashbacks to the rapes, but some of them are actually quite confusing, especially when you enter a rape flashback during a present-time rape.

Some of the stuff presented really makes you feel for the characters, since the story is pretty realistic, with no tentacles or anything supernatural. The girls cry and beg during the rapes, and most of them being virgins, the creators even chose to make them bleed vaginally in a couple scenes (most of the scenes are anal sex, though).

This anime really succeeds in showing the pain of the situations, with two of the characters (mother and daughter, who are raped side by side) starting to go kind of crazy.

The Japanese dub is good (specially on the younger girls) and the video quality is pretty cool too. But, like I said before, the script makes the (good) story hard to follow... And worst of all, there's very few below the belt shots of even details on the penises and vaginas. Get it if you like perversion (lot of anal, one DP, a couple golden showers, and even water torture...), but don't expect much on the detail-level.