OBSCURE O.V.A.S, *Judge

Fujihiko Hosono penned the short-lived manga Judge around the same time he worked on other works like Bio-Hunter after illustrating the Crusher Joe comic book adaptation. This horror/drama got a one-shot OVA produced by Hiroshi Negishi who went on to help create Tekkaman Blade, and animated by J.C. Staff which had already done the gory anime adaptation of Curse Of The Yoma. The American release didn't gain much success through Central Park Media on dubbed and subtitled VHS plus DVD.

Hoichiro Oma seems like a mild-mannered office worker who is secretly the Judge of Darkness, a supernatural figure that claims sentence over the guilty who escape the notice of human law. He is the latest in a long line of descendants whose family business uses a tome made of human flesh. One of the people in Oma's office is guilty of embezzlement and causing the apparent suicide of a co-worker, so the Judge speeds him off to the afterlife. Turns out the embezzler was benefitting from Kawamata, a strange fellow with huge eyeballs that is suspected by the Judge for sending his business partner to be killed off by mercs on a business trip. Kawamata gets represented by an otherworldly defense lawyer who sounds like Mr. Peabody for a court hearing by the Lords of Hell. Kawamata seems like he might be able to get off, but he accidently stumbles across a magic mirror which shows a person's truth, and his guilty reflection appears to strangle him to death. The fact that Hell has an artifact that reveals someone's sins in the first place really makes the point of having a trial completely pointless.

Judge is a confusing train wreck of perspectives and what leads to a character's final judgement. You would think that the ethereal forces of the underworld would know instinctively who is guilty of the laws of man, so the idea of a line of spiritual judges that dispatch these sinners wouldn't even need to exist, least of all if they have a magic mirror that could just straight up tell you if they had broken the law. The animation isn't bad, although Kawamata's eyes that look right out of The Simpsons is just jarring compared to the other character designs. At a short 50-minutes long, this OVA doesn't offer much in the way of scares or anything dynamic. It's largely boring and makes the watcher ask why they bothered wasting their time on it.