"Now you will experience true evil..."-Some shitty ass tentacle alien monster, 1995 Oh, believe me. I already have. This shit has pushed me to the limit... *spoilers for Super Kid. Don't watch this fucking abomination; it's not worth your time. Read the review instead and spare yourself the pain* Super Kid is some kind of South Korean knockoff of the ultra popular anime: Dragon Ball Z. This anime is so bad that I actually wish I picked Dragon Ball Evolution instead. This pile of fucking horseshit is why I wish we sided with North Korea instead, so the they couldn't make this dumpster fire. In the span oftwo hours, your patience and sanity is assaulted, put to the test; only the strongest of individuals will survive this travesty. It isn't even funny bad in any regard; it's just maddening. I legitimately find this to be a prime contender for the title of "Worst Anime of All Time", and in a world such as this, where over 2 decades after this dreck came out, the likes of Hand Shakers, Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei, and Mars of Destruction exist, that's quite an honor, if you wanna put it that way. You need an iron will to even last halfway through this heap, much less the whole 100+ minute torture session. I might as well have watched SAW; at least there I would know what I'm truly in for before I even watch it. Hell, given that this is a garbage DBZ knockoff, I probably should've watched Dragon Ball Evolution instead.
Before we even start the putrid excuse for a "story", we have to sit through almost 4 minutes of a trailer that shows almost everything that will happen in the movie. It's just an obnoxious and tedious recap of what we were literally about to see and it just kept dragging on and on just as soon as you think it would end. Keep in mind, after this, we have over 100 minutes left to view, and they literally waste our time for 4 whole minutes. Nonetheless, with that out the way, let's jump into the movie proper.
We actually begin with 2 minutes of Eunjoo sleeping and her coworkers chatting, and the snoring is obnoxious, but then her walkie-talkie goes all Walt Disney on her by sprouting arms, legs, and an angry 1940's Disney cartoon character face before waking her up with an excruciating ringtone that probably hurts us more than it does her. It's a call from the boss of her reporting business and she literally falls asleep again, snoring, and somehow the boss can't hear her loud ass snoring. How has she not been fired yet if she has been doing this kind of crap on a possible consistent basis? Whatever, we see some random, unexplained, green cubes of letters as Eunjoo takes off in her flying car and is given a debriefing on the "Super kids”, which is just crappy exposition for the audience. Also, the youngest member is 11, the youngest member to be active in the movie is 13, and everyone else is either older or infinitely older, with our protagonist being 199 years old and one of them being 2000 (though they can't identify an exact age but never even try an approximation). Kids my ass.
We then see these..."kids" take on a reject member of the family of Kang and Kodos from the Simpsons, and some Terminator reject, as they have kidnapped a scientist. We never see the scientist in this movie, so this was unnecessary as they could've just made it so that the criminals were causing havoc in the city or something (that way it would make sense how they handled it). After embarrassing interplay and fighting, they are apprehended. Also, we learn that we will never know how these characters get their powers as they just pull any and all powers out of their ass. Remember in Dragon Ball Z, Naruto, or even Fairy Tail how people would call out their attacks and perform specific motions in order to channel their body to perform them? Yeah, there's a reason that's important (as annoying as it can be to hear the same attack name shouted over and over); it's so that it doesn't just come out of thin air. These shounen series actually establish these attacks and what is supposed to happen for them to be executed like a hand sign or a specific body gesture. Here, these guys pull whatever our of their asses, some of which could've really gotten them out of sticky situations had they used them earlier, which becomes especially apparent in the second half.
After that, we see the heroes acting like brats before a commissioner and an officer give them their next mission, which is the bulk of the plot: stop this alien overlord which has ravaged planets (you're already making the Frieza and Buu connections, I just know it) and his assistant with a "tragic past". After it all goes wrong, said assistant, whose name isn't even on MAL, does a pathetic face turn and points out Heroes to the fact that the officer was evil all along, so they split up, two to take down the cop, and two to take down our main villain, especially since he has recently captured Eunjoo, who was a stowaway since she wanted to get more scoops about them.
The fight Gokdari and his rock buddy have against the cop who randomly turns into an alien is part for the course at this point, and runners the question of how they got back if tee spaceship they used to get to the alien planet isn't being used; this also applies to how they get back. As for the final fight, it's also par for the pathetic course at this point. The assistant takes it some kind of crazy energy ball the villain stores in him that made him powerful and performs a sacrifice to destroy it, and then the villain gets his ass kicked and arrested, and the heroes get money and spend it on some random charity. The end. Also, remember the 11-year-old girl who was shown in a screen in the beginning? Never shown. There was this guy that looked like Yamaha from the original Dragon Ball and he's only on one scene. Either way, you get my point, right. Everything is pulled out of its ass and never properly introduced and the plot makes no sense. It's such a simple plot, which makes it all the more unbelievable as to how badly they fucked this up. Either way, moving on.
The team of "Super Kids" is absolutely unlikeable and unworthy of being called heroes, the supporting cast is barely there and barely worth mentioning like the lazy and pathetic Bulma wannabe, Eunjoo, and the villains are pathetic and one Note losers that all become crybabies at one point or another. Gokdari is infuriatingly arrogant and dumb, and he actively goes as far as to basically torture opponents who surrender, like that alien. I needn't mention the assistant character with the "tragic past" of losing his son and then turning evil until only now decided "I wanna be good again so I'll help these good guys". Let's get the rest of this shit show of a cast started since I already covered Eunjoo and Gokdari. Also, the Yamchalookalike and the 11-year-old girl, as well as the generic mayor and the rest of the villains won't get a mention since I have literally already said everything you can say about them in this review as it is; they're that pathetically characterized. There's also this pilot guy who only shows up to do one thing: deliver a punch with his mech to the final boss, leave, and then go weirdly berserk in hopes of finding the now defeated villain. Well, here we go...
Big Boy (what a generic and lame name) is a 13-year-old coward who keeps getting the hots for Eunjoo and being an arrogant loser; that's his whole character. Samachi, who looks like a winged and anorexic King Piccolo, is just a bickering teammate who just gets his job done. Rockpile only talks when he wants to make rock puns about something going on and has nothing else to him. Saint Teolteol is just an old man with nothing to him other than the fact that he is the eldest one; he doesn't even do anything. You know, the sad truth is that I've just covered every single character here to a T. Pathetic.
I bet that as soon as you heard "Korean knockoff", you immediately knew that the animation would be cheap at best; you'd be right since sometimes you actually do have to judge a book by its cover. The animation often jitters to the point of looking like an animatic (or a series of still pictures moving fast but not fast enough to convince us of actual motion); this is a 1995 movie, a movie released the same year as Ghost in the Shell and Macross Plus Movie Edition, with both are gorgeously animated. The fight scenes are pretty bad as well thanks to the lack of actual choreography. Characters almost never dodge either. Expect a distressing amount of reused animation, which I have never seen in an animated film before. Then again, this was probably made in a puny budget; that would explain why they hired a Horrendous cameraman to record this. They often zoom in and out for no reason and in many scenes of travel, the camera just jitters in order to help make the scene look less like animation and more like an animatic. It's not like it records the full screen either given how during the scene where Eunjoo sees bios of the Super Kids, it's cut off. The animation isn't overall abysmal, but it's still terrible and coupled with it being reused and having a bad camera, yeah...
Ever wanted to see a film assault your ears? Then you've come to the right place, fucko! This film will make your ears bleed in pain and beg for mercy by the 10-minute mark. The OST is obnoxious as fuck, and that's largely thanks to the fact that the sound equipment in this film is so goddamn awful that a 1960's Hanna Barbera cartoon does a better job, no scratch that, fucking 1920's films have infinitely better sound equipment for their music and voice acting! Then again, the OST is worthless even on its own and I don't need to research the songs to tell you that. The sound effects are beyond atrociously as well, like the rocks or how when a character crashes into a ground it at one point has the sound effect of the classic "character gets slammed into a car", and I don't need to tell you why that is a horrible sound effect choice, do I? It applies to almost every single sound effect imaginable here. The Ocean Dub (yeah, it was dubbed by the people that gave you the god-awful DBZ Ocean dub) is easily the worst dub I have ever heard in my life, not because the voices don't remotely fit with the characters, but because they're so damn grating! Special mention goes out to the infuriating voice of Gokdari and the borderline incomprehensible voices of the cop's alien form and the main villain's final form! God, fuck this dub! Fuck everything about the audio! I'm damn sure I lost at least a few cilia over this horse shit! Let's just move on...
This film is so, so goddamn irritating that it hurts! Hurts like a mother fucker! If the abominable characters don't piss you off enough, the nightmarish audio will really crest an experience so irritating that it becomes even more maddening than having to put up with a whining, crying 2 year old at the supermarket that just wants whatever the fuck he can't have, and having to put up with that is not only infuriating (especially if you're the parent), but it's goddamn mortifying for all parties involved. Yet, this film is more irritating and more mortifying; I'd be less embarrassed getting caught watching hentai than even watching this shit, let alone getting caught doing so, especially since it's basically self-inflicted torture for me to view this; I'd get sent to a mental hospital. It's maddening, but not infuriating to the point where you just want to explode like the absolute worst title I've covered, though believe me, with the audio, it really comes close. It's just overwhelming enough to push you to the brink of your endurance but not destructive enough to the point of blind rage and a passionate lust for revenge, and that makes it all the more painful since I cannot reasonably vent until after the viewing is over rather than if I exploded while watching as that means I get to blow off steam to the very piece of technology that is broadcasting what I'm watching. I nearly gave up 15 minutes in, to put that into perspective, and if it was a full-blown television series with 12, 24, or more episodes, I certainly would have.
Now, is Super Kid the worst anime I've seen? No. Even despite what this score will tell you, it isn't; the worst anime I've seen just happens to fuck up a good deal less in the audio department, though it fails so absurdly hard in literally every single other category to the point where each of them dig far below the minimum 1/10 requirement, making the act of giving it a 1 to be generous. Unlike what I consider to be the worst, it doesn't have a gigantic and brutal concentration of plot holes, contradictions of its own logic, or abominable characters with absurd motivations and actions, nor is this as visually offensive. However, it is one of, if not the most irritating and audibly offensive piece of work I have ever endured. Its characters are shallow and pathetic, it pulls so many things out of its ass, it's world building is also ass, its animation is cheap and lazy, and its audio is irreparably bad in terms of equipment, music, sound effects, and dub. It may not be the worst anime I've ever seen, but it's easily in the top 3, as well as being the current worst movie I've ever seen by a wide margin. Fuck this movie and everything about it, not just as a DBZ fan, but a fan of anime, animation, action, and storytelling. With all that said, I'm off to watch some Dragon Ball Z Abridged. The new episode just came out 2 days prior to the publication of this review. Well, bye for now.
