Hentai Havoc! Angel of Darkness Episode 1 (1994)

I have been debating talking about hentai on this blog. Mainly because of lot of the more famous titles include non-con material. That includes the title we are going to be talking about today. So be forewarned, if you manage to hunt down the first episode of the Angel of Darkness series, it does feature non-consensual situations. In this particular instance these situations involve tentacles, as well as elements of characters being under mind control. As always I am not going to go into graphic detail about any of the sexy stuff, but just fair warning. 

Angel of Darkness was one of those hentai series that was surprisingly easy to find back in the 90's.  ADV, an anime distributor that eventually became Sentai, had their SoftCel line, which handled distribution of hentai. They had a bunch of series, most notably Dragon Pink, Can Can Bunny Extra, New Angel, and the series we are going to talk about today, Angel of Darkness. To get those tapes into stores like Suncoast they would do two releases. There would be a general release, which was trimmed to remove the most graphic elements, and a red tape Mature Audience release, which was uncut. I think the first time I saw this, I saw the general release. I have since seen the Mature Release, and I will say, it isn't much more graphic. The anime version of this series is near impossible to find today, especially the DVDs, but if you do find an old VHS of it, I will say that either version works. You can tell it is the Mature version by the marking on the spine, and the red VHS tape. The DVD releases are only the Mature Version.

It was actually watching this one more recently that made me realize what a little gem the first episode is. The basic plot follows a young lesbian couple who are madly in love. The threat to their love is their recently possessed professor who is now spouting tentacles and ravishing the other students. When one of the girlfriends is captured by the evil professor, it is up to our heroine and her band of weird forest critters to put an end to the demonic, multi-dicked force that threatens her love. 

The plot of this is silly as hell. The plot of most tentacle porn is silly as hell, because the reality is that tentacle porn is silly as hell... mostly. We will talk about Urotsukidoji another time. Angel of Darkness is, as far as these types of series go, pretty tame. It also really entertaining, SUPER queer. The whole story is about these two queer women fighting for their love. There are weird woodland fairies and goblins popping up. There is even a surprise evil dominatrix. This leans heavily into the B-movie tropes, and never pushes too dark.  Pink Pineapple, the production company, produced a ton of series like this back in the 90's. They for sure did heavier and harder stuff, but a lot of their output that made it to the US was just scratching the hentai surface since it needed to be easily paired down to trim out the dirtiest bits.

I really do love the way the central queer relationship is handled in this show. For something aimed at a straight male audience, this one leans heavy into trying to create a believable lesbian couple who are very clearly in love. It made me smile dammit!

It makes me sad that this series is so hard to find. SoftCel did release the entire four episodes on two DVDs back in the early 2000's, but they are next to impossible to find. Especially the first disc. ADV went under not long after the SoftCel DVDs got released, so they were not on the market long. A bunch of their series got rescued by RightStuf's Critical Mass label, but this series didn't make the cut. I actually found that kind of odd, because Critical Mass released the live action Angel of Darkness movies around the same time. Now those movies are insane! 

If you can find this one, I highly recommend giving it a watch. Even if it is the general release cut. It is pretty entry level hentai, although keep in mind this series does include non-con elements. There are plenty out there that are pretty safe, as far as that subject goes, but be ready if you wade into the hentai pool, you are going to run into some pretty nasty stuff if you aren't watching out for it. 

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