Darkside Blues

Let's run this English-dubbed Japanese title through the checklist. Tale about a ragtag band of rebels fighting a totalitarian impersonal corporation? Check. Sporting characteristically solid animation? Check. With blood and breasts? Check and check. Unfortunately, it also features a fragmented storyline that wouldn't even pass muster with David Lynch (non-narrative filmaker, non pariel). As near as I could figure, the Persona Century Corporation (bad guys) were fighting a pocket of rebel resistance in Kabuki Town, an area of Tokyo also known as Darkside. Arrayed against the corporate nogoodniks were a) a boy who fell off a building into a widening black hole and returned as a ghost, b) a guy calling himself "Darkside" who lives in a hotel where entrants enter the room they're looking for merely by crossing the threshold (I would like to know if this technology can be licensed for Chicago's O'Hare airport where the gates between connecting flights are located approximately one to two day's journey apart), and c) a mysterious (yes, I'm using the term facetiously; they're all mysterious) young woman named "Mai" whose favorite term of endearment is "you ass." For about 83 minutes, I felt like a Bushman in the middle of the Haight-Ashbury district during the late '60s: very out of context. Not a necessary purchase. (R. Pitman)