GARO

An absolutely senseless and merciless fan service that clearly cares more about a beautiful picture than at least some sense in the plot. The first half is just plain boring, and then there's the stamp on the stamp. The action is as beautiful as usual and the fanservice with three generations of Garo still got to me, but overall it's a mess.

NOW THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKIN' 'BOUT!
Super-thrash, super-melodramatic, super-idiotic insanity, in which there is almost nothing even from Tokusatsu - just a collection of cliches about the royal battle and VRMMO, a COMPLETELY different series compared to all previous seasons, but at the same time inhumanly funny and watchable. It doesn't surprise me at all that I've seen so many reviews that Versus Road is shit. It's really shit, but it's absolutely CARBON MONOXIDE shit with surprisingly evil hand-to-hand combat with a bunch of wrestling shots, quite antiheroic characters of varying degrees of filthiness and memes about WE LIVE IN A SOCIETY. It's basically as meaningless as the rest of Garo, but it's much less boring *outside of "fights," because they've put all the emphasis on, ahem, the "ent" of the dreariest urban fantasy of previous seasons. Huge respect for such an attempt to do something different from the previous material, and I am more than glad that the year of watching this nonsense ended on some positive note. It's even a pity that the sequel will be a return to one of the old universes again, I don't really hope for anything good there.

The problem with "Garo" is not only that he's dumb shit, but also that he doesn't elicit any emotional response from me. Like, yeah, the actors are sexy, the style is great, that's it. But how unbearably funny it all is in their attempts to create DRAMA - so much so that they skip the level of sublime melodrama and land right in the land of ABSOLUTE ABSURDITY, even by the standards of Japan. I just look at it in silence and nod-well, it's not bad, but no more.
Although this time, for the most part, everything was very good, albeit a little annoying in the sense that they were raping Ginger's corpse again as the only decent villain in the history of the series. The guy is obviously trying very hard and playing two characters, and even for once the script has the courage to end the story WITH a LESS THAN absolute victory for good. It's just that all this is too late and the general lack of ideas and banality does not save in any way.
Sometimes it seems to me that I get too steamed up when watching stupid tokusatsu.

It's just cosmically depressing shit, where any hints of a sane plot have been replaced with a deranged anthology about worthless minor characters. It's not clear who decided that this would be a good idea, but three worthwhile series pieces don't change the situation in principle.
It seems to me more and more that I like Garo much more in theory than in practice.

This is probably Garo in the best shape possible, for better and for worse. The plot is nonsense, the characters are charismatic, the action is ostentatious and original, and the style is outstanding. It's nothing more than popcorn, of course, but it's incredibly fun and not boring, and that's the most important thing.