#83: M.D. Geist II - Death Force (1996)

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Director: Koichi Ohata

Screenplay: Koichi Ohata

Based on the original script by Riku Sanjo

Voice Cast: Jason Beck as M.D. Geist, John Hollywood as M.D. Krauser, David Fuhrer as Eagle, Greg Stuhr as Breston, Joan Baker as Vaiya, Vincent Bagnall as the Major

Viewed in the English Dub

Part 3 of the Koichi Ohata Power Hour

Rather than write the usual synopsis, let us combine the synopsis of the sequel to the infamous M.D. Geist (1986) and the real life story of its creation together. Ten years after M.D. Geist was made and became a successful release for Central Park Media in the US, head John O'Donnell alongside being a huge fan of the original helped both a Director's Cut of the original to be funded, fixing major animation and plot hole flaws with questionable success, and allowing Koichi Ohata to make a sequel. Obviously, spoilers come ahead now as for the sequel itself, but as a viscous sociopath with an erratic behaviour spectrum, super soldier M.D. Geist set off a Death Force of robo centaurs to destroy the world of Jerra in the prequel, and everything's worse than before.

Now robo centipedes which eat human beings for an unknown sustenance reason exist, and the last vestige of humanity is a fortress ran by M.D. Krauser, a blue skinned former super soldier whose nobility is unfortunately matched by a God-like ego. Things are already signposted to get very silly and actually worse in quality from the first anime just from the first scene - a car fleeing from robo centipedes, messily animated with the set-up exposition in the English dub a words-per-second stream of consciousness from a character we never see again. This first sequence alone enforces just how this can top any incompetence and hilarity of the first anime completely.

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If the first M.D. Geist represented the notorious anime OVAs of the eighties, then befittingly its sequel is the representative of trashy poor taste nineties equivalents, where it belongs to the kind of gruel and absurdity that would get replaced in the 2000s onwards by fetishes and the OVA market being phased out. The English dub arguably adds a great deal, especially as Krauser has all his lines e m o t e d as to reach the back of the theatre. Of the pair of M.D. Geist anime, Death Force is the more entertainingly bad anime. It has the convoluted plot trajectory of whatever Geist himself is meant to be, the villain destroying everything in the end yet at times presented as meant to be an anti-hero, alongside M.D. Krauser in contrast, who has erected the last bastion of hope for humanity, a moving fortress, but is doomed for the hubris of believing himself to be a God alongside hiring a scientist who unfortunately wants to capture Geist to experiment on. Vaiya is still useless as the lead heroine too, now with amnesia and with a sense of more rudimentary existence despite having a lot more to do with her romantic relationship with Krauser than she did last time.

Death Force, with its jarring plot twists, is the true epic of the awful pair for unlike the expected rules of sequels this feels the more ambitious, with a larger plot by Ohata yet more magnificently awful in comparison. More vivid characters populate the environment (such as an evil scientist or his henchmen, a mere torso who uses robotic limbs that can be attached and detached to him), and just more gruesome in lieu of Ohata's reputation. It does thankfully return with a score that (sincerely) is good in its jazz epicness too; it wasn't necessarily the sax that lead to M.D. Geist getting a sequel ten years later, but the music is still the strongest aspect of the entirely lot and thankfully returned too.

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Death Force even does a Gunbuster (1988-9), its last act abruptly cutting to black-and-white animation as M.D. Geist and M.D. Krauser have their final fight. It's significantly worse than the prequel - ending in an abrupt child impalement that shouldn't be funny weren't it not for the voice performance in the English dub, followed by an even more abrupt death as the animation budget is even less existent, all of it is completely bad but compelling, this sense of trying to force out excitement when, from the first shots, its already doomed. The sense of struggle in production is as much visible here but without the context of before of the prequel; however unlike the first M.D. Geist, the ramshackle nature feels far more interesting here. Certainly it has the bright, gaudy colour of the era, not comparable in the slightest to the original's eighties production even if the character designs and world hasn't changed drastically. The irony is how far later the production was funded, not because it was ten years exactly after or so, but because by the late nineties OVAs were past the boom of them during the bubble economy of eighties Japan and were about to see the righting on the wall the decade soon after.

As much of it is a sympathy for its weird history too why I liked this sequel over the other - some of it has to be derision from my part by in an affectionate way, wondering how the hell the original M.D. Geist got a wider legacy than better or schlockier OVAs, even without John O'Donnell's involvement still selling tapes. Even if O'Donnell's the reason the sequel even exists alongside the Director's Cut, the prequel even if it was the sole release of a non-existent franchise still sold well in the USA. Some of it is admiring the car crash as a whole; all with a bad taste as its childish nihilism with an anti-hero whose morality is entirely absent barring about killing people, who makes Violence Jack look positively chivalrous of all people. And it's ridiculous - so silly, amazing to think Ohata made bad anime like this when Genocyber (1994) (for most of it) succeeded, and that even now Central Park Media is gone their more infamous catalogue titles like this even without a Discotek re-release yet are still known and could actually get one.

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