ANI-MOVIES, *Lady Death: The Motion Picture

"Bad Girls" were a fad in American comics during the 90s that sparked semi-classics like Barb Wire and Warrior Nun Areala, but unlike the rest of them only Lady Death managed to have any real lasting power. Starting out as a character in Brian Pulido's Evil Ernie comic book series in 1991, Lady Death managed to get her own reoccurring title and even got her own action figure. Afterwards, the current publishers of Lady Death, Chaos Comics, arranged a deal with anime distributor ADV Films to release the company's first original animated project based on the character. Keep in mind, despite what a lot of people have claimed since then, this 2004 movie is not a genuine anime film as a majority of it was animated in Korea, even though quite a few Japanese animated productions also get a portion of their secondary work from there as well. Lady Death: The Motion Picture is reasonably well animated, although there are numerous cuts in the movie when you can tell that they just replay the same footage sometimes from a reversed angle just to pad out the film. The screenplay was written by none other than Robotech's own Carl Macek who had already fumbled previously in his less than successful Heavy Metal 2000, so a good portion of the dialogue is borderline hokey. Most of the reviews that this movie got when it first came out was by anime regulars, but the target audience of American comics fans didn't voice their opinion very much, another reason that The Motion Picture keep being confused for an anime. The limited animation and low production value didn't help either.

Mostly beginning in 15th Century Sweden, Hope is the daughter of the reckless lord Matthias who is in reality Lucifer. Hope is in love with Niccolo who gets drafted into Matthias' army, and all this military postering is spooking the locals which causes them to break into Matthias' castle just as he reveals his demonic self to Hope. Lucifer gets expunged to Hell, and Hope is burnt at the stake who gets tricked into giving up her faith as she also gets sent to Hell. Hope is taken to her daddy by his personal flunky Pagan and she finds that Niccolo and her mother's souls are being held captive at Lucifer's throne. She rejects her father's offers, and he casts her out into the wastelands where she meets Cremator, Lucifer's former weapons forger. Cremator spends the next few years training Hope to become a better fighter as she taps into her demonic powers which causes her hair and skin to turn completely white. Hope changes her name to Lady Death and assembles an army to rise against Lucifer. After getting a special sword to slay her daddy, Lady Death tries to remake the battle of Helm's Deep by attacking Lucifer's haunted castle which looks like Garamel's old place. Death has to kill Niccolo in order to send him to Heaven, and then eventually beheads Lucifer which of course causes the entire castle to crumble to the ground. Death's mother also ascends into Heaven, but Lucifer put a curse on her that she needs to kill all his remaining followers in Hell in order to be completely free of him which leaves the door open for a wretched sequel that never got made.

The movie took so long to come out that the publishing company that held the rights to the character at the time went out of business before the film was released. Original creator Brian Pulido had few liberties with the movie's script which rewrote much of Lady Death's motivations to being more of a heroine instead of a "bad girl" which in 90s terms was an anti-heroine. One major thing that was removed from the story was the character of Purgatori who was integeral to Lady Death's lore, which is like leaving Spider-Man out of a movie about Venom. Lady Death: The Motion Picture was a project that was already in too deep when the comic itself ran out of circulation to not finish the movie would've been a bigger loss for ADV Films, so they just completed the roughly animated production and sent it out on DVD. The film was a dud as at the time there wasn't any big market for original animated movies based on American comic books, a concept which would pick up later on in the decade by DC and Marvel. The sketchy animation, poor scripting, and absence of any real vitality meant that Lady Death: The Motion Picture was destined to end up in a landfill.