Audience reviews
5 · Sample from the first available page, separate from the total number of ratings.
Gsarthotegga
Hell Target is a B-movie horror OVA that is an odd mixture of Alien, The Thing, and Solaris, with a bleak cosmic horror ending. There's often an eye-roll-inducing debate when it comes to horror, whether to show the monster or not. Well, it depends. Showing or not showing has a different impact and neither is necessarily better, but not showing tends to be better when you have limited resources because showing can look laughable, which is actually the case for a few parts in Hell Target. The dream sequence in the beginning is decently effective for its silhouette and composition-based abstraction. one of the first deaths comes from some kind of large canine or feline creature, and the scene looks cheesy, and we would have benefited from not showing at this point. Usually the first few death…
Read at the sourcejadedXotaku
I truly believe the 1980s OVA boom was the greatest time for anime. But despite that era churning out amazing stuff, there's the inevitable duds. So enter 1987's Hell Target. It's about a group of space travelers who go to the dubiously named planet Inferno II in order to find a missing ship, and run afoul psychic illusion casting space demons with plans of targeting Earth to turn it into hell. It's their hell target. They actually say that. I watched this back to back with the similarly themed Roots Search (which featured a psychic illusion casting vagina mouthed alien...or space demon...or god, who knows), and while both are silly fun, I can also say largely forgettable. With just passable art, decent enough animation, and a meh story, there really just anything terribly memorable about…
Read at the sourceRyuk9428
Hell Target is a pretty interesting anime. I'm not quite sure why it has such a low score. I will say, there's nothing particularly creative about the plotline of Hell Target. Astronauts going out to space and finding a monster picking them off one by one. However, the thing that I felt made this unique and something we haven't quite seen in an story like this before was the use of the art style. The art style is very 1980s, but for the theme of this anime, it works incredibly well to make a dark atmosphere. At many points, you can't quite tell what's going on, and I think that makes the anime much better.
One complaint I do have is that the characters are not very well developed. Their deaths don't have a whole lot of meaning so the horror aspect to their deaths was lacking in that area.…
Read at the sourcematthigh
Did you ever watch the 1997 movie "Event Horizon"? Well, then you pretty much have the gist of what's going on here.
This 1987 OVA pretty much the same basic idea, with a little bit of "Alien"/"Aliens" mixed in for good measure. That's not to imply that one or the other is ripping off the other -- the basic story idea is generic enough I'm sure that if you sat down and thought about it for a while, you could think up some other examples that follow the same trajectory.
And, unfortunately, "Hell Target" manages to follow that trajectory fairly poorly. For a story that relies heavily on space-horror and suspense, there's very little of it here. And, of course, there are times when you just want to scream at the screen, "Don't do that, you idiot!". But, naturally, they never listen. And b…
Read at the sourceAlpharon
Esta review también está en español.
Forgotten Horror, Chapter 1: Hell Target
Hell Target (HT) is a 50 minutes OVA that combines a few elements of the science fiction with the classic horror from the 80's, where we had lots of melted heads by the action of acid, deaths everywhere (in the more bizarre ways), and at least one scene of softcore sex.
The story of HT shows us the crew of a spaceship arriving to the planet Hell II, with the intention of finding the survivors of a previous mission, performed a couple of years ago. Once in the planet surface, they discover that the whole trip was a waste of time: they found the ship, but no survivors. To justify the cost of the fuel, our heroes decided to discover what the hell happened to the poor bastards. And they find something historical: i…
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