To anyone who was actually shocked, or scandalized even, when they saw for example a guy's head explode into a bloody mess in Fist of the North Star (some of you had to be born before the new millennium, right?)--Apocalypse Zero should feel like a time capsule back to that exaggerated first adolescent impression of the vaguely pornographic otherness of the most pulpy, trashy 80s japanimation (that's what it was called back then). It's so cartoonishly morbid that it finds sort of an uncanny valley-esque middle ground where the ghoulishness is strangely uncomfortable and oppressive. If this OVA was just a little more ridiculous, or just a little less, the effect would be lost; but as it is, it has all the decrepit contours and mystique of some made up show you and your friends (whose dads all worked at Nintendo or Sega, somehow) might've whispered rumors about during recess in gradeschool. When an anime captures something so fleeting and abstract about the pre-internet era, well, that's magical! Apocalypse Zero may actually contain the meaning of life.
There's this great scene where this giant fat mutant lady jealously kills some guy's girlfriend, and then she drags him back to her fat lady lair where she does indecent things to him before eating him. Anyway, later on the main character slays the fat lady, and she pukes up the bones of all her victims--as well as the still-digesting skinless body of the guy she just ate, and he's still alive! He has this "oh god I have no skin! Please kill me and end my suffering!" look on his face (his skull, anyway), and you expect the characters to put him out of his misery, right! NO! The main girl character painfully hugs the guy and goes "hang in there! You'll be okay!" It took horse tranquilizers to get me to stop laughing. As an accidental black comedy, it doesn't get much better than this.
It comes off almost like a parody of anime, but it's not! It's blissfully unaware. You'd think this would turn into a cult classic in the post-The Room world, but in a weird way anime is like the last frontier of naive schlock where hipster irony (and by extension, an unspoken sense of political correctness) cannot penetrate--that's exactly why the conditions are perfect for weird shit like this, and why it languishes in disapproval instead of being celebrated for its absurdity. For B movie appeal, it gets all my recommendation! See it!
