ANI-MOVIES, *Sin: The Movie

The 1990s were an eternal wellspring of testosterone-fueled cyberpunk action and anime based on video games. Sin: The Movie is a combination of both which was one of the few original anime productions that was partially headed by American distributor, ADV Films. Sin was a shoot 'em up game from the 90s using the Quake game engine, and even though it was a modest hit, somebody at ADV thought it would be a great idea to fund a production turning this into a single anime feature. Phoenix Entertainment was the studio that animated it and had some decent character/monster designs with cringy-looking CGI. This anime has been regarded as a dud by most anime and gaming fans, largely because the gross body horror mutations genre had kind of worn down when this was finally released in the year 2000, plus video game-based anime was a sinking ship at the time it came out unless it had something to do with cute monsters like Pokemon. This release came and went with out any real fanfare despite ADV building up publicity on their own for over a whole year.

Where the game took place in the 2030s, Sin: The Movie happens in the 2070s with the technology being upgraded like having rocket-powered 3-wheel police cars. Col. John Blade is fighting time in a future time as a New York City cop whose partner was attacked by a marauding mutant leaving Blade no choice but to kill his partner as he was also mutated. The cybernetic Blade is part of a police team called HardCorps who specialize in extraordinary cases, and he's trying to find out where these mutants are spawning from. After getting help from armed forces agent Jennifer and learns the sinister SinTEK corporation is behind all this. After getting some help from his local old mafia contacts, Blade launches an attack on SinTEK's building which is a dead ringer for Genom Tower from Bubblegum Crisis. The merry mutant makers are lead by the femme fatale Elexis who unleashes a horde of monsters after Blade as he an Jennifer fight their way up to the top to face an abomination put together from the remains of her dead father who created the mutation process, plus Blade has to free a little girl who Elexis is using for her experiments making her the token damsel in distress. There wasn't any real final boss battle as the bad guys are dispatched mostly by circumstance.

Sin: The Movie is a mismatched flow of action movie tropes and fanservice cliches that is only held together by the "plot" that the creators totally rewrote from that in the original video game. There's reused footage, stupidly-long opening credits, and an outdated obligatory shower scene which might have worked for an anime release in the early 90s, but since it came out just after the turn of the century, the whole routine is absolute trash. The dub is fair, even though the subtitles are off-track, and the only thing good about it is that it's a classic case of how not to do a video game adaptation.