The first episode of Angels of Death is an amazing, 10/10 experience. It starts with a genuinely intriguing Ontological Mystery and a tense, cat-and-mouse chase in the first half, and the second half is an incredibleBlack Comedy. From the moment the Obviously Evil doctor opens his mouth to reassure the cute, scared little girl that she can trust him, it's painfully clear that he's a bad guy, and the build-up to him laughing with his foot-long tongue sticking out of his mouth as he literally licks her face with it while ranting like a loon about her eyes (and props to the VA for always talking like a man with the tip of his tongue dangling past his chin when appropriate) had me in stitches.
Unfortunately, as the series continues, it becomes increasingly clear that it was unintentional black comedy, and it's not quite all downhill from there, but it's close.
I think I actually looked the show up on this site and learned there that it's an adaptation of some guy's freeware homemade RPGMaker game, which... yeah that tracks. Too well, really. There are long sections of the show that're clearly just killing time, representing points in an adventure game where you just walk around, backtracking, picking up things and examining things and using things on other things trying to read the developer's mind and pick out where you're supposed to go next. The pacing isn't uniformly bad, but it's a weirdly slow show, sometimes, for a show about a helpless little girl and a snarling bandaged beast-man stuck in an apartment building full of serial killers.
Speaking of, the small cast is both a blessing and a curse. In theory, this would mean we the audience have time to get used to all of them and really learn what makes them tick. In practice, they're all pretty shallow and most of them are dead by the halfway point of the series anyway. Several of them make a few cameos later on via hallucinations and flashbacks and the like, but it still means that nearly half the show is spent literally backtracking through previously-explored areas.
That fundamental shallowness is honestly probably the show's biggest weak link. A psychological thriller can't be thrilling if the psychology isn't interesting, and for the two-thirds of the cast who actually get explored it isn't. Why is Zack the way he is? Because he had an awful childhood and never learned to read. Why is Grey doing the things he's doing? Because he's got a god complex. Rachel is by far the worst victim here; absolutely none of the ideas explored through her in the entire show are the least bit interesting, and a lot of them don't make sense. When she, an ostensibly suicidal character who desperately wants to die, runs into a boy who wants to kill her right after the first episode, the show has to bend over backwards contriving increasingly-stupid reasons for her not to let other people kill her for basically the remainder of its runtime.
Worse, while I won't pretend that by the end I felt nothing for their relationship, the show tries to make Zack and Rachel messed-up True Companions way too fast, with the result that, by the end of the show when I should be enjoying demonstrations of how much their bond has grown, all I could think of was how badly it was bungled early on.
Also, the decision to abandon all supernatural elements was a big mistake, since having a rational explanation for everything inadvertently begs the question whenever stuff still happens that defies rational explanation.
All of that said, I want to give props to the artistry of the animation, which actually knows how to use CGI in a way that both looks good and saves money for a change, and to the voice cast, who act their hearts out trying to breathe life into the characters and the script. Even the sound mixing is pretty good; I can't remember any points where characters' lines were drowned out by the actually pretty good score or meaty sound effects. This is definitely an A-grade execution of C-D grade material.
Ultimately, would I recommend Angels of Death? Probably not. Most of it just isn't good; you can get good psychological thrillers that actually have some intellectual heft to them all over the place. The first episode might be worth a watch though, if you don't mind leaving it incomplete and accepting it peaked immediately and it's all various shades of downhill from here.
Lack of intellectual or thematic core sinks it; peaks immediately and never fully recovers.
The first episode of Angels of Death is an amazing, 10/10 experience. It starts with a genuinely intriguing Ontological Mystery and a tense, cat-and-mouse chase in the first half, and the second half is an incredible Black Comedy. From the moment the Obviously Evil doctor opens his mouth to reassure the cute, scared little girl that she can trust him, it's painfully clear that he's a bad guy, and the build-up to him laughing with his foot-long tongue sticking out of his mouth as he literally licks her face with it while ranting like a loon about her eyes (and props to the VA for always talking like a man with the tip of his tongue dangling past his chin when appropriate) had me in stitches.
Unfortunately, as the series continues, it becomes increasingly clear that it was unintentional black comedy, and it's not quite all downhill from there, but it's close.
I think I actually looked the show up on this site and learned there that it's an adaptation of some guy's freeware homemade RPGMaker game, which... yeah that tracks. Too well, really. There are long sections of the show that're clearly just killing time, representing points in an adventure game where you just walk around, backtracking, picking up things and examining things and using things on other things trying to read the developer's mind and pick out where you're supposed to go next. The pacing isn't uniformly bad, but it's a weirdly slow show, sometimes, for a show about a helpless little girl and a snarling bandaged beast-man stuck in an apartment building full of serial killers.
Speaking of, the small cast is both a blessing and a curse. In theory, this would mean we the audience have time to get used to all of them and really learn what makes them tick. In practice, they're all pretty shallow and most of them are dead by the halfway point of the series anyway. Several of them make a few cameos later on via hallucinations and flashbacks and the like, but it still means that nearly half the show is spent literally backtracking through previously-explored areas.
That fundamental shallowness is honestly probably the show's biggest weak link. A psychological thriller can't be thrilling if the psychology isn't interesting, and for the two-thirds of the cast who actually get explored it isn't. Why is Zack the way he is? Because he had an awful childhood and never learned to read. Why is Grey doing the things he's doing? Because he's got a god complex. Rachel is by far the worst victim here; absolutely none of the ideas explored through her in the entire show are the least bit interesting, and a lot of them don't make sense. When she, an ostensibly suicidal character who desperately wants to die, runs into a boy who wants to kill her right after the first episode, the show has to bend over backwards contriving increasingly-stupid reasons for her not to let other people kill her for basically the remainder of its runtime.
Worse, while I won't pretend that by the end I felt nothing for their relationship, the show tries to make Zack and Rachel messed-up True Companions way too fast, with the result that, by the end of the show when I should be enjoying demonstrations of how much their bond has grown, all I could think of was how badly it was bungled early on.
Also, the decision to abandon all supernatural elements was a big mistake, since having a rational explanation for everything inadvertently begs the question whenever stuff still happens that defies rational explanation.
All of that said, I want to give props to the artistry of the animation, which actually knows how to use CGI in a way that both looks good and saves money for a change, and to the voice cast, who act their hearts out trying to breathe life into the characters and the script. Even the sound mixing is pretty good; I can't remember any points where characters' lines were drowned out by the actually pretty good score or meaty sound effects. This is definitely an A-grade execution of C-D grade material.
Ultimately, would I recommend Angels of Death? Probably not. Most of it just isn't good; you can get good psychological thrillers that actually have some intellectual heft to them all over the place. The first episode might be worth a watch though, if you don't mind leaving it incomplete and accepting it peaked immediately and it's all various shades of downhill from here.