Reviews

May 13, 2015
Overview:

After reviewing the original Transformers Movie from 1986, I decided to look at the next movie animated and directed by the same man that gave Transformers its legendary animation. Transformers was the first movie animated by the now rather infamous Satoshi Urushihara. Never again would he work on ANYTHING kid friendly, and devoted the rest of his career to drawing complete smut. That descent into total perversion began with his directorial debut in 1987: Legend of Lemnear. Urushihara had just left high school and worked on the Transformers movie instead of going to college. Fortunately for him, it was a huge success and his artwork won enough praise to land him the job of animating and co-directing this low budget OVA the next year. It was here that he found his life's passion: drawing tits.

Story and characters: 2/10

SPOILERS! Yeah right! As if you actually care!

The story is very minimalist, and the OVA's total run time even uncut is only 40 minutes! What little story Lemnear does have, was completely ripped off from other popular 80s movies! The protagonist is a female barbarian warrior who is attempting to use a magic sword to get revenge on a wizard for destroying her village and slaying her parents. Basically, the plot is copy/pasted from Conan the Barbarian from 1982. In addition, Lemnear flies around on a Pterodactyl like creature taken straight out of the movie Heavy Metal from 1981. In fact, Lemnear's character appearance was also stolen from the main character of Heavy Metal! Lemnear begins by having our title heroine walk into a saloon and order a drink, which soon leads to an absurdly cliche bar fight against some bounty hunter thugs that come in after her and start trouble. Unfortunately, this is Lemnear we're watching, so there isn't any cool dialogue like: Thug 1 "I didn't hear what the bet was" Lemnear (spits) "Your Life!" (shoots bad guys). That's what the bar fight would sound like if you were actually watching a GOOD movie! Instead, Lemnear just throws some kicks, threatens the bad guys with her sword, and they all leave. After talking to an old man, Lemnear leaves the saloon and 2 minutes later is knocked out by the evil wizard she was searching for and taken to the sex dungeon of some fat guy with hypnosis powers. I guess because the bad guy in Conan also had hypnosis powers. Lemnear gets hypnotized, stripped, and felt up by the fat guy, but then the evil wizard shows up and helps Lemnear! He frees her from her hypnosis, which allows her to stab the fat guy in his large belly and kill him. The wizard did this so he could lure Lemnear to his flying fortress and kill her himself. Even though he could have just killed her right there when she was under hypnosis and totally helpless. Lemnear uses her pterodactyl to fulfill its reason for being in this movie and fly to the floating skull fortress. There Lemnear discovers that the wizard is only a part of the main villain's body, which he detaches and uses to do his bidding at a distance. The main bad guy is called the "Gold Champion" and after literally 15 seconds of back story about how he hates humanity because he was thrown into a forest as a kid, he transforms into a dragon and impales Lemnear! Due to the power of complete bullshit, Lemnear regenerates her wounds and uses the pterodactyl to fly above the clouds and gather sunlight into her sword. This allows her to shoot a beam of sunlight at the Gold champion's forehead jewel...which kills him instantly. The End! Seriously, it just kind of ends right there!

Animation: 6/10

Although it doesn't look all that impressive today, you must take into account the extremely limited budget of this OVA, along with the fact that this was 1987. For an anime made in 1987 with an absolutely shoe string budget, this actually looks pretty good. There are plenty of anime from the 1990s with much larger budgets that look worse than Lemnear.

Music and audio: 2/10

Unlike some other terrible 80s OVAs like MD Geist, Lemnear does NOT even have the benefit of a rockin soundtrack. Instead we get rather bland and repetitive music that really doesn't add anything. The best song in Lemnear is actually a ripoff of the opening rift from the Transformer's theme "The Touch", but it never quite gets to the singing part and just cockteases you instead. The English dub is HORRIBLE as you would expect from Central Park Media, but the Japanese is available for free on Youtube if you are curious what the original sounds like. Normally, I would recommend watching the hilariously bad English dub, but for some reason the audio quality suffered horrendously for the English dub version and sounds REALLY fuzzy like it was recorded on VHS. Probably because they DID use VHS to transfer the audio. Some viewer's might find this SO annoying that the Japanese version would be better then having to listen to anything "shot on shitteo"!

Overall: 3/10

Legend of Lemnear is 40 minutes of pure 1980s cheese, but with almost all the fun sucked out. Nothing is creative or well written. The action scenes are short and poorly executed. The ONLY thing this anime has going for it is tits...lots and lots of tits. This may be the first anime I've reviewed that actually got spared a 1/10 rating simply for having lots of appealing mammary glands. I will also begrudgingly admit the animation was decent given its budget and time period. Unfortunately, Lemnear isn't even one of those old anime that is so bad it's funny like Mad Bull 34 or MD Geist. Lemnear is either really boring, or showing tits. Those are the only 2 modes it has. I would laugh at the English dub, but the fucking VHS audio recording for the English version just makes me cringe instead! I wouldn't really recommend watching Lemnear, unless you have a group of friends that simply love to watch REALLY bad movies!
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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