Shin Karate Jigoku-hen

This is pretty dire.

Watching the protagonist slip from one group of horrible people to another, witnessing brutal acts of sick violence and desperate vengeance, starts to feel a little nihilistic. Suicide, murder, torture, sexual assault, racism—this OVA plumbs the depths of the worst things humans can do to each other, so much so that our karate champ often wonders why humans can be so depraved. As a viewer, I started to wonder what the moviemakers were trying to get at. Why tell this story in this way? It's certainly not subtle. In some ways the OVA seemed to bump against the edge of exploitation, ... as if the viewer should get some perverse thrill from watching a naked, screaming woman roast inside a cage perched on a burning tree.

Story and themes aside, the animation is pretty crude. The characters are dully designed and the animators did not work too hard to maintain any faithfulness to the style sheet. Music is forgettable and the sound effects are from the standard anime bank of sound effects heard a thousand times over. There were several false brand names and logos to avoid copyright infringement (e.g. PanNam airlines), but the novelty of spotting those did not make up for the OVA's other shortcomings.

Honestly, I only finished it so I could feel legitimate when writing this negative review.