Labyrinth of Flames

Original Title: 炎のらびりんす
Romanized: Honoo no Rabirinsu
Literal:

Plot Synopsis

Galan is a high school kid with a dream--he wants to be a Samurai. That mainly means he spends most of his time in an elaborate Halloween costume watching old movies, but hey, it's a start. Things change for Galan when his refined schoolmate Natsu gives him a real, live, sword... and promises more if he just comes to visit her hometown. The catch? She lives in the wilds of Russia in an isolated village where she's royalty. And there's also a little domestic dispute over who Natsu is going to marry... and a plot to steal long lost treasure... and a busty American reporter... and several people who want to kill him. If Galan survives, it'll be one heck of a vacation.

Quick Review

Rating: 3 / 5
Reviewer: Marc
Review Date: 2003-06-24

Labyrinth of Flames is well made, well acted, nice looking... as well as incredibly tasteless, filled with huge amounts of exposed underwear, and an equal amount of very stupid and very screwed-up comedy. Unlike Agent Aika, which dressed an upskirt/underwear fetish movie in the guise of a standard action series, Labyrinth does the same (with less dirtiness for the most part) with an over the top comedy, which works much better--it's sleazy, but you can almost forgive it. The humor is base and simple, and there are enough lecherous camera angles to ward off even the most vague notion of decency, but it's still wacky and equipped with enough likable characters to be funny when it gets going.

Those of you out there who can appreciate this sort of giggling frat-boy comedy know who you are, and will have a ball. Just don't watch it with anyone you want to convince of your maturity.

US DVD Review

I'll make it simple: This DVD is so good I couldn't believe it was made by US Manga Corps. After years of second-rate DVDs, this disc includes everything you could possibly want. Of course there's a very crisp video transfer, clean stereo audio, and a subtitle track, but the disc also includes a thorough chapter index, complete Japanese voice actor credits (both at the end of the program and in the menus!), an art gallery, character sketches, textless opening and closings (more interesting than usual in this case), a rather amusing text interview with the director and character designer, an even more amusing, live-action "documentary" on the making of the dub, and one of their standard little DVD-ROM programs, which includes art, the script, and cast. Easily the best DVD I've seen out of USM so far, and has just about anything you could ask for, plus a few things you wouldn't have thought to. It's about time--now keep it up, guys.

Content Guide

Rated 16+ by USM with good reason--gross, bloody, and rather lecherous.

Violence: 2 - There's a bloody samurai movie within a movie at the begining, and a couple of graphic pratfalls later.

Nudity: 2 - Only brief actual nudity (mostly in the credits), but there are a LOT of panties.

Sex/Mature Themes: 3 - Some implied hanky-panky, and a lot of crude jokes.

Language: 3 - Some crude language.

Notes and Trivia

There are a couple of elaborate and very random Russian-themed attacks in the production: "Bugachov Zugobra! Emergency Brake!" and "Tokachev Jump, Comrade Gagarin, Earth is blue! 1961! Vostok reenters the atmosphere!" The latter refers to Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space, who orbited the earth in the Vostok 1 space capsule in 1961.

As for the former, "Bugachov Zugobra" appears to be a mis-re-Romanization (or Russianization) of "Pugachev's Cobra," a flashy maneuver developed by the ace Russian pilot Victor Pugachev. It involves pulling the nose of the aircraft up very sharply, which drastically decreases the aircraft's speed in a short amount of time, so it loosely fits the "Emergency Brake" description. It's also apparently a crowd favorite at airshows. The translation error likely occurred because the English translator only had the phonetic Japanese to go off of, and they guessed poorly at what it was intended to be saying.

A couple of name notes: "Labyrinth of Flames" is a direct translation of the Japanese title (ok, technically the main title on the original was written in Russian, so I can't tell if it's accurate), but the title of the first episode is a bit trickier: "Chonmage Rabirinsu? Raburinsu?" is accurately translated as "Samurai Labyrinth? Loverinth?", but if you want to be literal "chonmage" is the name of the half-bald samurai haircut. In a somewhat more creative translation, Erola Suppaatoka's name (a bit of a pun) was changed to the similar pun "Erola Nakedoff" in the dub and subtitles.

Availability

Available in the US from US Manga Corps on bilingual DVD.

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