Red Garden

Genre: Horror
Score: Good
Rating: 15 for violence

Four girls in New York, unconnected except by their friendship with another girl who is now dead, find themselves drawn to gather at the same place on the same night. They are met there by some MiBs who tell them that they are, in fact, dead – and the only way they can reclaim their lives is by fighting a series of werewolf-like enemies, who look like ordinary people but behave like rabid animals. None of them is the slightest bit prepared for a job like this, nor for what it will mean to their lives and those around them.

There’s a lot to put you off at the beginning of this show: the character designs and art style, the unconvincing New York setting, the way information about what the hell is going on is so slow coming, and the way the characters start singing for no reason. But it’s worth sticking with it long enough for the story to kick in.

Dead Girls
Genre: Action
Length: 45 mins
Score: OK
Rating: 12 for violence

This OVA is a sequel to Red Garden, so the plot is a Spoiler:
At the end of Red Garden, the four dead girls lose their memory, but with both sides wiped out they’re basically immortal. It’s been a few hundred years since then, and the four are working as bounty hunters, moving from town to town across the world to avoid being remembered. A lot can change over the centuries, and their personalities are all somewhat different.

Dead Girls pulls the same trick that the Full Metal Alchemist movie and Mai Otome did: it re-uses character designs for new people. Personally I find that really annoying, but at least the FMA movie had a sort-of excuse and a strong enough story to get away with it. In this case there seems to be no reason for it, and nobody notices or comments on it, so it’s basically just lazines.

A double-episode isn’t enough to develop anything in any depth, so this is really just a slice of moody action, a modicum of back-story. It’s entertaining enough for a few minutes, and plays interestingly against the character interactions of the series, but ultimately it’s all a bit pointless.