Anime Review: Goku Midnight Eye is utter nonsense, but good nonsense.

It was the late 90's and early 2000's where I initially started getting into anime. While I did see a fair few older shows, like Akira, Record of the Lodoss War, and the Vampire Hunter D movies, I did miss a lot of older shows. Just recently I caught an older anime called Goku Midnights Eye, and there are two things I want to say about this show upfront. The first is the show is absolutely terrible, and the second is I love it.

The show goes on for two episodes and follows around a private eye named Goku. After getting involved with an illegal weapons operation he cuts out his own eye to break the hypnosis of a naked woman who grows peacock feathers out of her back that has eyes on them. He comes too and is told by a voice in his head he was given a new eye with the power to control any computer system, and even has enough power to take control of every nuclear device in the world allowing him to end humanity.

You'd think there is a reason he is specifically told his eye is capable of doing this, and it comes back up in the second episode, but never does anything happening in the story proper has anything to do with nukes, international conflict, or anything that would make you think it was important to bring up the fact he can do this. I guess the anime just wanted you to know the lead character can, at a whim, end the world. And the real kicker here? There are no more episodes, and you never learn who gave him the eye, or even why he was given it.

Each story is a self-contained episode without a connecting plot, and both stories suffer from feeling short and undeveloped. The show's pacing is horrible, and it just feels like it jumps from scene to scene without really caring about how it got there. The fights feel the same way. For example, he gets on a train in the second episode and opens up all the doors using his eye, and the moment the train straightens out he uses his extendable metal stick to hit the guy he's after on the train, but in the next shot the guy is ejected from the side of the train, despite it making no sense for that to happen.

Worse yet is the first episode when a woman who is completely naked and right on his lap suddenly has a knife and attacks him with it. There is no rhyme or reason to the fight scenes in this show, despite there being some pretty solid animations.

But it almost doesn't matter, I'd almost say it's one of the things that made this show so fun to watch. The show has a scene in a strip club, but the stripper is down on all fours and she has handlebars on her back. The music playing includes motorcycle rev sounds, and it is wonderfully stupid. And, later in the episode, she comes back and is apparently really strong and threatening, but she hisses and fights while on all fours. Later on, in the show, she comes back a third time but only now she is being ridden by a midget in robot armor, and she is able to shoot lasers out of her mouth. And to top it all off Goku takes her decapitated head (She seems to have either been a robot or cyborg, the show isn't clear on this) to the villain's office for no other reason than to make a really bad one-liner.

There is a charm to the idea that I don't think this show understands how absurd it really is, and tries and fails to play all of this straight. I mean our hero spends the entire run of the show wearing suit pants, a vest waistcoat/vest thing with no shirt underneath, and a tie. Does it really matter if the plot is stupid and the show has no idea how to direct it's fight scenes?

There is a sincerity to shows like this that are lacking in a lot of anime these days. It's almost become so self-aware of how goofy some of this, and it loses a lot of that charm because of it. A show like this would not likely ever exist in this day and age. It's the difference between a movie that's so bad it's hilarious and a movie that is intentionally bad as a joke, there I just no comparison between the two.

For a little under two hours of your life, Goku's Midnight Eye is just bizarre and captivating beginning to end, I never felt like there was a dull moment. I can't recommend this show highly enough, definitely worth checking out if you like watching this kind of thing.