Rei Rei (The Sensual Evangelist)

Kaguya is a mysterious woman. Living with her manservant, Pipi, in a lonely, remote dwelling of unknown location, she tries to solve the woes of the world to keep the moon from drifting further from the Earth. To do this, she seeks out the souls of those in pain and tries, through the use of some fairly powerful incantations and a sometimes twisted sense of humour, to ease the problems troubling them.

The two part OVA starts with "First Night", the story of Tanaka and Ikuko. It's Ikuko's birthday and Tanaka wants to take Ikuko out. He even buys her flowers for the occasion, but is greeted with cruel words and cold rejections. Seemingly Ikuko regards boys as a nuisance. It gets worse for Tanaka when first he is introduced by Kaguya to the object of Ikuko's desires, a lady doctor that had once been a tutor, then when Ikuko collapses in a restaurant and is rushed to hospital, her "lover" fearing for her life. But love isn't all it seems, at least not on closer examination of Ikuko and Manami, and Tanaka will have much to bear before he can hope to resolve things.

"Second Night", and Satoshi is having problems. Yes, he loves Mika, but he is nervous around women. His chance encounter with Kaguya in a fortune-telling booth proved that much! However it gets worse when his latest "date" with Mika, a trip to a planetarium, turns out to be not to Mika's liking. Rejection is at hand and Kaguya now has to find a way of getting the two back together again. Problem is that unless Satoshi can be cured of what ails him, this isn't very likely! This episode features about 25 seconds of cuts involving "naughty tentacles", which were in the Kaguya/Pipi in the video game section, including the immortal phrase from Kaguya... "It'll never fit up there!"

The Gigolo(Dochinpira)/Rei Rei DVD (UK)

Kiseki Films PAR 61030 (Cert: both)

The two titles appear on the single DVD as they appeared originally on VHS. The Gigolo is dubbed into English, which Rei Rei is subtitled Japanese. The subtitles are on the video stream and must have been taken from the master used originally to create the VHS release, and the cuts are identical to the VHS versions.

Although the pairing of these titles seems only natural, the difference in years between the releases by Kiseki is considerable, and the titles are not without their drawbacks. Indeed The Gigolo is not a particularly brilliant work, with some questionable art, a storyline that lurches on occasion and some truly awful lines that would probably not look out of place on a Johnny Bravo short. Rei Rei suffers at the hands of an ancient subtitle machine that last saw action in the 70's at the BBC doing French movies, some heavy handed chopping courtesy of the BBFC and a story that goes nowhere, but is a little more enjoyable to watch than it's partner on this disk. The DVD itself has obviously been done on the cheap, the titles and the navigation as basic as you can go without discarding the index altogether, though the picture quality is reasonable.

Please note that the subtitles and cuts seen on the UK releases are not reflected in the AD Vision US release which has far less cuts and a less prudish translation. See? It does happen!

Review by Chika, 01-Apr-2000

Site written and maintained by Chika.

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