#259: Hell Target (1987)

 

Studio: Nakamura Production

Director: Keito Nakamura

Screenplay: Kenichi Matsuzaki

Voice Cast: Akira Murayama as Kitazato McRoe; Katsunosuke Hori as Hans Kruger; Kōichi Chiba as Yura Treyanov; Gara Takashima as Meryl Brown; Hirotaka Suzuoki as Harry Howard; Ikuya Sawaki as Rico Fernandez; Kaneto Shiozawa as; Jean Müller/Jean Myaura ; Shingo Hiromori as Chan Li; Sumi Shimamoto as Tiki Carmack

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

In the far-flung future, a space ship ventures out to a strange red world where a previous crew were lost upon - looking like copper art at times where you need to scratch the black surface of for the image created underneath, especially due to the history of this one-off straight to video work in terms of preservation. It is pretty much an early warning of what they are in for when one of their male crew members dreams of a monster perusing them on the landmass they will land on.

Note, out of many OVAs, Hell Target can be found in a version best described as shot through a dirty sock, a title which strangely never got a Western release despite the fact even Roots Search (1986), a notorious sci-fi horror one-off, managed to in the day. Travelling to this planet, the ominously named Inferno II for mission, obviously you get the vibes of this being another anime riffing on Alien (1979), as did many live action films in the day too. In truth, this is probably riffing on one of the films trying to capitalise on Alien's success in the ultimate irony, as the premise here, of a place of monsters who attack and kill their victims by psychically filling their minds with hallucinations based on their fears, evokes the Roger Corman produced Galaxy of Terror (1981), of a similar premise.

It is a curious touch in terms of what inspired this - compare this to Lily C.A.T. (1987), a feature length one-off which was released in the West and was openly a remake of Alien in its own way - and as a result, this has its own idiosyncratic mood, of a strange gigantic monsters who yet kill by causing hallucinations, such as snow falling inside a cockpit despite being also on a desert planet. There is a satanic mood or at least a demonic one too to these figures, with supernatural edges to them, and fittingly, in the best way for any anime from this era, it gets stranger in its aesthetic choices in depicting this which stand out. The acidic blood is taken from Alien for one of the few ultra gory scenes, a reminder of what era this horror tale comes from, but there are definitely gorier titles from the time, and eventually you do see some idiosyncratic touches which this can proudly say managed to make its own. Zombies of former victims is obviously expected but a Valkyrie attacking a space ship on a flying horse is not a sentence I would have had to include for science fiction, nor one eyed spirit God birds. Credit the anime, it goes for a weird mash-up of ideas than just remake Alien, if structured around the simple template of a slasher in picking the crew off one-by-one.

In terms of the story altogether, Hell Target can be accused of being very simplistic as the cast do fit the term "disposable" filly, which is going to be something you have to accept though with the advantage this is at least less than fifty minutes. They do not even really fit stereotypes either, barring the two who matter, the female lead who is stereotyped as more "feminine" and in peril a great deal of the work, and the stoic male lead, and barring the abrupt moment the pair have a sex scene, to clear their heads after witnessing their colleagues get slaughtered on mass and terrorised by the likes of a sentient tank, there is nothing that remotely ludicrous or distinct about this cast beyond that moment. One of the obvious issues that you can see in a lot of animated and live action works inspired by Alien, all in spite of the fact that film explicitly went out of its way to make its characters idiosyncratic, is how you can end up with a lot of pure "canon fodder" which you cannot even appreciate as stereotypes, a risk also the slasher genre can suffer from, and this anime production does as well.

It helps the work has an ending you could find in a macabre horror tale, bleak in outcome, Hell Target a work that has to be appreciated as part of a moment of single entry productions which allowed their creators to improvise original stories and flex, even if as full narratives they are not all perfect. This title came from Nakamura Production, a company who are prolific in areas like in-between animation to 2nd key animation, a studio who deal with working on productions for others in a vast number of titles, from entries in the Gundam franchise to the series adaptation of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. Work like this is important for animation, but they themselves only produced one work of their own in Hell Target, which is strange to consider, that for a company founded in 1974, they exist more as a support studio for others and only expressed themselves this once. This title, again, surprisingly never got a release in the West despite not having any specific cultural traits as a Japanese production, and found itself in danger of potentially being lost were it not for amateur online perseveration, making it a legitimately curiosity thankfully preserved in some way even if not necessarily a masterpiece in its context.