Dead Leaves

Starring:Dead Leaves-Unique & Brilliant in Every Way
Studio: Manga Video
Product Type: DVD

Amazon.com

Dead Leaves is the latest installment in the collaboration between Manga Entertainment and Production I.G. that brought viewers Blood: The Last Vampire (2001) and Kai Doh Maru (2003). But Dead Leaves, which suggests a mixture of Ninja Scroll and Inspector Zim designed by Peter Chung, lacks the sensual elegance of the earlier OVAs. Retro, who has a television set for a head, and Pandy awaken with their memories erased. Sent to the lunar prison of Dead Leaves, they contrive an escape with hordes of other inmates. A long, pointless slaughter ensues, with blood, bullets, and body parts flying across the screen. The frame is so cluttered with angular characters, bright colors, Japanese and English words, mechanical devices, and gore, it's difficult to follow the frenetic action, let alone the fragmentary story. (Unrated, suitable for ages 17 and older: brief nudity, extensive violence, profanity, sexual humor, toilet humor, alcohol and tobacco use) --Charles Solomon

Customer Reviews:

Damn..........2006-09-23

Greatest dialog ever. You know the actors were dying to read their lines.

Tank Girl meets Fooly Cooly !!!.......2006-07-06

this anime blew me away! the main characters pandy and retro remind me of tank girl and booga. the pace and energy level of the story are reminisent of the anime Fooly Cooly,but much more anarchic and intense,plus the humorous parts are great! Dead Leaves is not like your standard anime but for people willing to expand their perceptions of what Anime can be,I would say give this anime a try and be prepared to hang on tight!!

EVER WONDER WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF SAM PECKINPAH DIRECTED AN ANIMATED FEATURE?.......2006-07-04

Well, this is as close as you're going to get to it. DEAD LEAVES is truly the child of the Tarantino/Bruckheimer era, with Tarantino's violence and Bruckheimer's "Let's blow up something" attitude. At only an hour, there's no room for character development, which means no attempt at John Woo's action mixed with an understanding of the characters. They are what they are - characters who shoot, kill, blow stuff up, then move on to the next scene of carnage.
I gave it three stars for the style - thick black lines and a dynamic mix of colors. It's a good "park your brain at the door" film, but "Howl's Moving Castle" it ain't. Obviously, the director wants you watch it, then turn on Metallica, down a six pack of Budweiser, then crush the cans against your head. Don't see it with a girl unless you want HER movie pick next time be "The Devil Wears Prada".

Migraine inducing gore fest........2006-01-31

I kept thinking the animation style of the credits and first few scenes was just some temporary effect that would fade to a more traditional style, but no - it stayed that way through the whole "ride." There are a few jokes, a few situations that induced a chuckle, but for the most part this is just an excuse to show dozens upon dozens of "characters" killed, maimed, mutilated, and pulverized in the most horrible of ways possible in the short hour or so that this lasts. Add in the toilet humor, the sodomy "gags" (one inmate has a powerful drill for his "equipment") and the shear volume of bloodletting and you have what amounts to a basically pointless romp. They try to insert a point and a story with a unique poem that the two heros can barely remember as they are suffering from amnesia, but in the end nothing is really resolved - and you are left wondering what the point was. Would have given it a one, but I have to admit, it made me laugh a couple of times.

Visual Madness.......2006-01-18

Dead Leaves was one of those anime that I was iffy about from the moment I saw it on the movie shelf. Looking at the case, it doesn't exactly look like anime, the characters look strange, and the movie itself, as is the wont of Manga, was short. Luckily, it was inexpensive. The store I bought it from had a sale on Manga titles and I picked this up, along with R.O.D. and Kai Doh Maru. After watching all of them, I considered myself lucking, being two for three (see my review for Kai Doh Maru).

To explain, I watched Dead Leaves last and was already jaded because of Kai Doh Maru. I was prepared to be disappointed when I popped it in. And, after the initial confusing moments of this anime, I was expecting it. But then came the action, a fiesta of explosions and a**kicking. The two main characters, Pandy, named for the tattoo over her eye, and Retro, named for the TV he uses for a face, are masters of destruction, and prove that in the initial scene of action where they almost completely destroy a city all on their own. Eventually, though, they are captured and imprisoned, and the action moves aside for some pretty suggestive comedy. Strange sex and nudity fill the next twenty minutes or so, until Pandy and Retro finally decide to make their escape, and once again, in comes the action.

The story is confusing and hard to explain, so I'll paraphrase the back of the DVD: Character wake up with no memory and no clothes, characters go on crime spree, characters are captured, characters discover the secrets of the prison known as Dead Leaves, characters decide death and destruction is the best way to deal with the secrets. I've written it the way I did because, well, the story is unimportant. Top notch animation from Production I.G. is what drives this anime, from start to finish.

And I'm thankful to Dead Leaves for one reason: it took the taste out of my mouth left behind by Kai Doh Maru.

The one problem I had with this anime was the length. I'm getting tired of spending so much money on something that doesn't even go past an hour. I wish it was at least ten minutes longer, making it a full hour and therefore a movie.

That, however, is no reason not to own Dead Leaves, especially if you enjoy quality animation. In many ways, this anime is similar to FLCL and Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi in that both of these anime use a certain amount of chaos in their animation style. Dead Leaves, however, goes beyond that. It's visual madness, and one I'd recommend to hardcore fans of anime.

Average customer rating:

A MOVIE ABOUT TRUE LOVE
Bleak look at obsessive love & suicide... Poor DVD transfer

Dead Leaves
Starring: Haim Abramsky , and Beth Gondek
Director: Constantin Werner
Manufacturer: Cult Epics
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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Description

Dead Leaves

Constantin Werner's award winning debut feature "Dead Leaves" is the story of a young man who travels with the corpse of his deceased girlfriend from New York City to West Virgina.

When Laura (Elizabeth Gondek) falls to an accidental death her already unbalanced boyfriend Joey (Halm Abramsky) suffers a breakdown. He steals her body and escapes on a self-destructive journey through lonely motels and rainy villages. While Joey is trying to preserve Laura's fading beauty in strange rituals he is haunted by the memories of the happy and dark moments of their relationship. As she starts to decay physically, he decends mentally and emotionlly......

Customer Reviews:

A MOVIE ABOUT TRUE LOVE.......2005-10-07

The plot written on the back of the DVD-box as well as on Amazon is correct but the description misses a single small detail - this is not a mainstream movie. So if you expect some interesting events, adventures and horrors related to travelling with a corpse you won't get them. "Dead Leaves" is a film of mood and feeling. There are practically no dialogs and no developments. But there are a lot of interesting metaphors, monotonous and hypnotizing music, long frames where you see actually nothing but mood - rainy highways, gloomy urban landscapes and deserted motels.
I wouldn't say this movie is about madness. It's about mad love, true love. When Joey takes his deceased girlfriend for a road-trip it seems first he's so devastated he just doesn't know what he's doing. But then we see he takes her to a place he recalls they were happy at. This is not a trip to nowhere - it's a fateful journey to the beginning. To the beginning of their relation and to the beginning of life itself. Here we start to realize this trip can have only one kind of an ending. Joey is so in love with his fiancee he just can't let her go, he decides better to initiate this self-destructing tour and stay with his love till the very end.
As I said this is a film of feeling and you can feel very clearly what Joey must feel. "Dead Leaves" is extremely sad and dismal, it's spellbinding and enchanting. And definately not for everyone. This is art-house at its best, very well crafted and elaborate. It's very nice to know such movies are still being made by someone.

Bleak look at obsessive love & suicide... Poor DVD transfer.......2005-06-15

This is an Art Film. It is not a horror movie or an exploitation flick. Don't buy this expecting thrills or gore. Its subject matter is morbid. It tells of the obsessive love of a young man for a woman. The woman dies during an accidental fall at home. The man then takes her corpse on an interstate journey, ending in the woods by the sea where they had earlier pledged their love. There he curls up next to her and kills himself. The director, Constantin Werner, consciously sets out to create an Art Film. It is laced with poetry readings in place of dialogue. There is extensive use of Edgar Allan Poe's late ballad "Annabel Lee", as well as readings from other poets, including English translations of Artaud and Baudelaire. The poems center on love and death. The accompanying music ranges from classical to discordant rock and can be used to trace the young man's mental implosion. Werner uses the Chorale from Bach's St. Matthew Passion (Simon & Garfunkel's An American Tune) during the travel sequence to very good effect. The Liebestod (Love-Death) from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde is of course totally in keeping with the movie's theme. Werner has deliberately created a distance between the characters and the audience so that you feel little empathy for them. The movie is unremittingly bleak and leaves you feeling depressed.

The theme of obsessive love that endures after death has been explored before on film. The one that came to mind when watching this movie was Dominique Deruddere's 1987 Belgian film, "Crazy Love". While both movies end similarly in suicidal deaths, "Crazy Love" ends on a transcendent note with the idea that love lives on after death and leaves you feeling uplifted despite its morbid character. Here we are confronted with just death, death as the end of suffering. I found it too depressing. Some may take solace in the visual aesthetics which are quite arresting though it'd be pretty difficult in this present DVD transfer. Dead Leaves will almost certainly not appeal to most American audiences.

The transfer as a whole is a mess. Cult Epics has provided a strange looking transfer with most of the film letterboxed in 1.85:1 (Non-Anamorphic) while certain insert shots as well as the end credits are in fullscreen. The picture quality is mediocre. This movie was shot on cheap 16mm film so you'd expect it to be grainy. It is doubly so. The image is soft to the point of blurriness. There are dirt specks and film defects scattered throughout the film. Circular imprints are also found throughout. Black levels are abysmal. You never get to see true black. Everything plateaus to a dull dark grey. The resultant picture looks flat with little depth. Shadow detail is non-existent. Audio is a basic 2.0 mono. There is an interesting director's commentary as well as a 20 minute "Making Of" featurette.

Average customer rating:

Rakeing leaves is more fun

Dead Leaves
Starring: Dead Leaves
Manufacturer: Manga Video
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: UMD for PSP

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Product Features:

Pandy and Retro awaken naked on Earth with no recollection of their past. They embark on a devastating crime spree in search of food, clothing and transportation, but are captured by authorities and sent to the infamous lunar penitentiary named Dead Leaves. While incarcerated, they quickly discover that Dead Leaves is also a top-secret cloning facility, occupied by villainous guards and deformed g

ASIN: B000BCE9DG
Release Date: 2005-12-06

Customer Reviews:

Rakeing leaves is more fun.......2006-04-13

Full tv screen mode with no viewing options. So you get black bars on the left and right.
I haven't watched the whole thing yet. I can't. I'd rather watch the black bars. The whole thing looks like crud. It tries too hard to be bright and loud.
Nudity?? no. if it is in there it looks like crud. don't get exited my fellow depraveos. the vid isn't as good as the pic on the box. false advertiseing

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