ANGELS OF DEATH: EPISODES 1-5 REVIEW

Kill me… please

Where do I even begin with this series? It’s about a girl who wakes up in a strange building, has no memory, has her heart set on getting killed, is all a big mystery and is full of psychos. All things that usually, have me hooked from the start and sitting on the edge of my chair until the end.

Instead I’m lying on my bed watching on my laptop, half falling asleep. Now to be fair I think I’m sleepy because I’m on some heavy duty painkillers at the moment that make me drowsy, but the point still stands that Angels of Death is very passive to watch.

It’s based upon a walk-through game, and it sounds exactly like one. Everything Rachel says is quite unnatural sounding to me. She’s repetitive, repetitive, repetitive. And I can’t help but feel that Zack getting mad at her for not having an ‘interesting’ look on her face and for always asking if they’ll keep their promises is the writers way of mocking the show’s origins. Zack summarises Rachel’s character well when he tells her she’s a doll, dull and boring, and by extension summarises quite a lot of the plot too.

Like I said, this show has literally everything it could ever need to make me love it, yet I don’t. Zack is the really the only one left to liven everything up a bit more because although I do like watching the psychos, they are pretty repetitive and only get two episodes for their floor max. I’d love to learn about who they are, why they choose to stay in the building to kill people, why they have the fascinations that they do… I appreciate that the killers all have different styles, things they like, what gets them going etc. Like how Eddie is for aesthetic and complains about how Zack is too messy. I love the different levels idea, and how all the psychos have a different focus on their own ‘thing’ like Cathy considering herself a judge of criminals in a gameshow. I love this idea so much and yet I feel like not much is being done with it aside from some quick characterisation of the floor psycho, a complication that get’s solved, virtually no character development from Zack or Rachel and then it’s time to move on. Instead of doing something engaging, we get crazy eyes, tongue licking and hysterical screaming for 20 minutes and then like I said, we move on to repeat. Even Zack after only five episodes in is super predictable. After the first three episodes I found him to be getting a bit repetitive – short temper, break something, yell, get annoyed… repeat.

The plot holds such potential though, so it’s sad to see that something more interesting hasn’t been done with yet. Each psycho has their own floor, what is the building, why is this all happening? And I understand that I’m going to have to wait to find out, but at least let me find out more about every character – not wait five episodes to find out probably all I’m going to learn about Zack’s childhood.

And some parts of the story just don’t make sense to me. Rachel and Zack are dead set (literally for Rachel) on keeping their promise to each other so that they both can get what they want. Now, if I was in Zack’s shoes I’d keep Rachel around because he needs her (because for some reason the writers thought it would be a good idea to make a person in his early 20s really dumb? Like he might appear to be illiterate, but that doesn’t make him useless), but honestly if I was Rachel I would have taken up Eddie’s offer to have him kill her. Eddie offered her a painless death in a place where he’d made her a very pretty grave in a pretty area which she clearly liked. But instead she chooses to keep going with Zack? If it was me in a situation like that, honestly I just would have done it already and let someone kill me. Is there something that I’m missing here?

I do like the animation, I’ll give it that. The blotchy ink stains are nice and just in general I like it, especially the elevator’s design. The OP and ED I don’t like very much, and have actually just been skipping after the first episode. But I do like the soundtrack for Cathy’s floor. That game show music is great. I would also normally mention something about how the soundtrack is very important to films and series that fall into the horror genre to help create suspense and all that too but to be honest for a aeries that is meant to fall into the ‘psychological horror’ genre, I’m not feeling it. It’s a weak attempt at psychological horror I think. I haven’t been scared yet, disturbed by anything apart from the Zack x Rachel shippers in the fandom, we don’t get to see any of the gore and the only thing that’s surprised me is how dumb Zack can be.

And speaking of which, why is Zack left so in the dark about everything? We know that the psychos voluntarily came to the building because there they can kill anyone they want on their floor, but that means that then surely someone must give them food, facilities and other essentials? Someone is doing voice announcements too about sacrifices and all the other psychos seem to know each other and have access to all the sacrifices’ profiles… so why does Zack give no hint that he knows anything more than the audience about what’s going on? I understand Rachel not giving us hints about what she knows because she probably doesn’t want Zack to know something important. So I understand that we’re getting restricted information because of Rachel’s subjective narration, but why? Are the writers saving some plot twist for later?

And speaking of narration and therefore talking (terrible segue, I know), Rachel sounds dead though I guess that’s what they want her to sound like? Zack and Eddie’s voice actors are great in terms of delivering emotion and stuff. I love Cathy’s voice too.

And something that I do love about Zack is that he spends his time telling the others how sick, freaky or creepy they are when he is literally running around killing people for fun with a scythe. His enthusiasm is nice too and although his reactions to things are highly exaggerated, we need some life in the main characters in this show. But even that is getting a bit too repetitive. So I’m hoping that we come across another character that’ll stick around to spice things up a bit or at least find out some more about why Rachel is in the building and what’s going on to make it more interesting to watch.

Overall:
I’m quite thankful for the fact that I had no expectations of this series. I started with no expectations and so my standards have been meet, and I will continue with watch this with no expectations so that later on I suspect it will also then meet by standards.

I can’t say that I love Angels of Death, or that I even like it all that much. It sounds like a walk-through, is passive to watch, is repetitive… yet for some reason I’m still continuing it. Probably just because I want to know what the hell is going on regarding the building they’re trapped in but hey, I haven’t fallen asleep yet.