Emhilradim

So World's End Harem is a series about a man who wakes up in a world where the MK (Man Killer) Virus has decimated the population of men by 99.9%, there's like 1 million men remaining in the world. This is explained in an exposition dump. Our character wakes up, and is surrounded by women. Many women who barely wear clothing.

They start off introducing him into the world where they take him outside, where a woman throws herself at him only to be hit by a taser. I don't know if that was meant to be comedic or horrifying, it just came off odd. Our protagonist is put off by this, and right away you just know how it's going to be.

Women are constantly approaching him, coming onto him, even the woman who is supposed to be his caretaker wants him, but no. This is an anime man, so he refuses as much as possible. If you watch the uncensored version there's a lot of breasts, but that's really all there is for nudity. At one point the protagonist suffers a scratch and one of his bodyguards rips off the bottom of her shirt to wrap his wound, which exposes her breasts. This series is pretty much H, but because they don't show (or blur as is usually the case) genitals, it's classified as ecchi instead so it can be played on TV (in Japan that is).

Pretty lame loophole, and pretty lame anime. It's got nice art, but the story exists only because it's expected to be there, and this is pretty much just borderline adult material that goes soft to avoid the adult rating.

When you hear that this film is about the real-life murder committed by Alyssa Bustamante, you'd probably think that the film would center around that event. And you'd be wrong. Instead this movie tries to explore "who is Alyssa Bustamante?" and I'm not sure how much if any of it is accurate.

The weird thing is that the movie has a lot of awkward sequences that seem to be there to pad out the length, and don't seem to in any way service the story. At one point there's a really awkward shower scene, and at the halfway point in the movie we have to watch a music video in what I assume to be Russian?

The real story of Alyssa Bustamante is disturbing on its own, and it would have been better to tell the story of the actual events. The lying, the manipulation. Pretending to help look for her victim, all the while keeping entries in her diary about the thrill she got from it. That would have been good subject matter for a documentary of a murder. Instead we follow a girl with a terminal obsession with Russia.

Honestly, I would recommend to avoid this.

From the start of the film I didn't really know what I was getting into. I saw a few things here and there that I took note of, they seemed mostly irrelevant. But I remembered them all the same. I thought I'd seen Chekhov's gun at some point, and I knew where this film was going. I didn't expect it to end the way it did, but I was glad that we get closure as the viewer. We know what happened.

I've never seen Cho outside of a Harold & Kumar film, but his performance in this is fantastic. Thankfully not typecast into stupid stoner films, we get to see just how deep into the well Cho can reach to pull out a great performance. The whole cast was convincing on this film, we see a father go from being the cornerstone of a family to the close yet still distant single dad to a man desperately trying to find and hold onto the treasure that means most to him. It's a great whodunnit that doesn't make us sit through melodrama with actors exaggerating performances to seem emotional. I felt like the emotional element was actually realistic, this wasn't Twin Peaks levels of corny.

I guess I would be remiss if I didn't mention that yes, like everyone else says, "hooray, this film got the technology correct for the real world," and it's kind of a drag that people have to compliment the film for being refreshing about THAT. Not the film's fault, clearly.

Would I watch it again? Maybe in a decade. This is the kind of film that takes you places you might not be prepared to go, and does so unapologetically. I feel enriched for having watched it, nonetheless.