Deadman Wonderland

I'm going to cut right to the chase: Deadman Wonderland is one of the goddamn stupidest motherfuckin' television shows ever thought up, given money, and eventually produced (I will acknowledge that there are probably plenty more that are stupider that were never produced, but what amazes me is that this one actually made it all the way to being animated and aired... Even in Japan that's derping ridiculous).

I went into Deadman Wonderland very hopeful, truth be told. For as cheesy as they are, I've enjoyed previous "prisoners must battle to the death" movies and books like The Running Man, Battle Royale, and The Hunger Games. So when I heard that Deadman Wonderland was about a private prison in the near future Japan, where the inmates must work in a deadly theme park (deadly for them, not for the average Joe and Jane customer, who actually pay money to watch prisoners serve them and sometimes die horrible deaths) attached to the incarceration facility in order to earn food, cigarettes, and a few more days on their life sentences, I thought "That sounds pretty goddamn awesome! I'll give this a try! Hooo-aaaaaaaaaah!" And then I did watch it. And then I was left to wonder just how the hell it all turned to crap so goddamn fast. And not just any crap mind you, but runny, diseased, filled with corn-bits crap that's been sitting out in the sun for a few days, and is now crawling with wriggling maggots.

Okay, so here's Deadman Wonderland's deal: It's ten years after the Red Hole incident. This giant exploding phenomenon (that we're never told much about) sunk more than half of Tokyo into the sea, but the country's kind of recovered since then, and a private firm erected the Deadman Wonderland prison right on the epicenter of the Red Hole, and they started taking in inmates from around the country in order to have them work and entertain at the connected "amusement park" (I put that in quotes because NOTHING about this show amused me, and the ridiculous sufferings that the prisoners endure in the penitentiary aren't amusing to them, nor should they be to the paying guests), and secretly get experimented on by the wackily insane Assistant Warden (the zany, kooky Tsunenaga Tamaki). Tamaki's one of those typical villains with the crazy eyes and constant stupid smirk on his face all the time which somehow gets overlooked when people meet him. Seriously, despite the fact that his INSANE expression invariably makes him appear to be mentally raping a a chained and gagged gorilla (and liking it), NOBODY thinks him batshit loco. But I digress.

Into this whole system comes Ganta Igarashi, a middle schooler who is convicted of slaughtering his entire classroom one day and sent to Deadman Wonderland due to the ENTIRE courtroom being filled with retarded dipshit inbred morons. You see, Ganta is of course innocent of this most heinous crime — there was some dude dressed all up in red armor and a flowing cloak who flew in through the classroom's window and RIPPED THE ENTIRE CLASS to bloody shreds. We're talking decapitations, bodies sliced clean in half, entrails hanging from the ceiling... pretty much a guro-fanboy's wettest dream possible. And the court believes a 14 year-old kid did this all on his own, bare-handed, no weapons found, and with nobody able to gang up on him (in a class of 30) in order to either inflict the slightest bit of harm or to stop him. Ugh... Yeah, the writers TRY to make this conviction believable by having a supposed secret video tape leaked to the press where Ganta admits to the killing (and to hiding his super-secret slash-o-matic weapon that he supposedly used) to his defense council in a private meeting, but it's OBVIOUSLY faked, and the government appointed attorney is in fact the sadistic Assistant Warden of the world famous Deadman Wonderland Prison/Amusement Park, "Crazy Face" Tamaki.... Whom NOBODY in the court room, let alone on the planet recognizes during the course of this heinous trial that's aired throughout the world. Oh, it only gets dumber from here.

Okay, so Ganta gets framed for murdering/butchering his entire class (within a 3 minute slaughterfest window at maximum), and sent to Deadman Wonderland (from hereon out referred to only as "DW") and scheduled for death. Death row in DW means that the high-tech Battle Royale-like tracking collars that all prisoners wear pump a poison into the bodies of those who were given the death penalty, and they have to eat a special candy every 3 days in order to neutralize the effects of it, despite the obvious flaw that the the prisoners would become immune to the poison after getting small doses in their system, and then "healed" over and over again. That or the poison would end up building up in the convict's system and kill them relatively quickly after doing this just a few times if the deadly cocktail was too strong... But I guess they are on death row already, so whatever. In order to earn these savior candies, the death row prisoners must dance like monkeys in any of a number of extremely dangerous attractions/shows for the amusement park's paying customers' merriment.

So Ganta's in DW and on death row, despite being 14 years-old. He starts to get bullied almost immediately after entering the prison (by the senior female guard with the G-sized rack, as well as by other [huge, manly, extremely violent] prisoners), but a young girl comes to his rescue early on during one such "pick on Ganta" encounter, and then she (very childlike) befriends him and becomes his unofficial bodyguard. This girl (one albino in a skin-tight body suit, with giant, padded gloves, and a slightly retarded personality, named Shiro) is super strong, able to jump and fall several stories without getting hurt, and looks just like the girl Ganta liked in his homeroom in school (well, Shiro looks like this girl before she had her head sliced clean off her neck by the man in red). Nobody (and I mean NOBODY — not the prisoners nor the guards) questions why this 14 year-old albino barefoot girl is waltzing around the male prisoners (most of whom I'm guessing have raped a woman at least once before being sent there, where they've not been allowed to see or touch one since), nor do they wonder why she's in a super sexy white body suit instead of a dull prison uniform, nor do they seem to give a shit that she doesn't even have a tracking/shock collar on. That's great security there, Lou.

Anyway, soon Ganta's forced to join in a number of completely bonkers obstacle courses and fighting matches for the amusement and gambling of others. This is pretty much when I gave up on this shitfest. Up till this point I was STILL willing to hold out hope that something good might come from this tale, but once we see a group of about 100 prisoners (most only in the lock-up for small time crimes) run through a literal meat-grinder obstacle course from hell (complete with chainsaws, guards with bows and arrows [with great friggin' aim], fire, explosions, and drop-away floors onto giant spikes), and watch EVERYONE of them (except Ganta of course) get stabbed, shot, sliced up, or blown to confetti in a stadium in front of a crowd of 10,000 unsuspecting DW park customers (who think the extreme violence and bloodshed is all just "special effects" because they are all dumber than a crackhead on welfare who finds a twenty on the ground and buys lottery tickets with it instead of fruits and/or vegetables at the local green grocer — and even the man behind the counter tries to talk Mr. Crackhead out of this most non-intellectual decision, but he'll have none of that, thank you! Just twenty $100,000 Leprechaun Cash tickets please... Not even anything for the Powerball drawing, which is up to $175million... God I hate that crackhead...), well, I lost my last strand of respect for this show.

Oh, and did I mention that there are mutants in the DW who have blood powers? Meaning they can turn their own vital liquids into knives, projectiles, or whips?... WITHOUT dying, despite the fact that whenever these mutants are made to battle each other (in front of cameras, for the super rich and powerful to bet on) they use up about 3 gallons of blood each? And did I mention that ever since Ganta woke up after his class was obliterated he has blood powers too? And then he finds out that the red man is in the prison too? And then Ganta creates a shonen-fighting-team of other blood fighters because he's so honorable and coo' (despite being the biggest whiney wuss in the world), and all his once enemies are all like "Hey, that Ganta kid who just accidentally kicked my ass, he's pretty coo'... I want to friends with the him"? Well, all that and more happens, and it's even gayer when acted out on screen.

Oh, and I have to tell you about Scar Chain, a resistance group (that's all about taking down the establishment) that meets in the smack-dab middle of the prison (where the freedom fighters mostly just chill out in a fully stocked bar, playing pool, drinking, and eating ice-cream sundaes all the time) that makes its appearance late in the show. By that time I was already rolling my eyes at every new character and "plot point" thrown our way. NOTHING in this show makes any sense. It's like it was created by some autistic schmuck while he played with his GI Joe action figures in the basement while cutting himself all day long. Anyway, Scar Chain wants to ruin the DW by getting out footage of what's "really going on" in the prison/amusement park to the press outside..... DESPITE THE FACT that the cruelty, murder, and all around illegality is there for the world to see if they just stepped foot into the obstacle course attraction and looked at all the horrendous murder and violence with their own damn eyes! People got fucking SHOT by guards in owl costumes right in front of an audience of thousands! What more proof do these resistance fighters need to show?!

One of the saddest aspects of this series (saddest for me and my brain, not the characters in the thing, since they deserved it all) is that despite everybody in this thing being repeatedly LIED TO and BETRAYED 60 times each since they entered DW, every single one of the good guys still blindly believes everyone else and whatever they have to say, no matter how obviously they're being set up to fall into a trap or fail. You want to scream at each character like an annoying fat bitch in the movie theater, "DON'T BELIVE HIM, Ganta! That sonovabitch be lying to you!....Oooooooooh LAWDIE! You gonna get killed like a dog in a lawn mower for fallin' for that bullshit, you duuuuumb cunt!" There was one time when one turncoat of Scar Chain actually gets pissed that his plan to kill his ex-friends fails (thanks to Shiro's intervention), and he openly TELLS the group that he's turned Benedict Arnold on them and attempted to slaughter them all... And they're like, "Ha! You so funny. Oh man, seriously though, we have got to figure out who screwed us over and informed the man about our rebellious actions! 10 of our guys were killed! Wait! Oh no! Get out of the way, guy! There are prison guards right behind you! Oh no! Now they walked around you and are attacking us! This is terrible! Run for it, guy! Save yourself!" Apparently you need to have an IQ of less than 60 to join Scar Chain. No wonder Ganta made it in.

And never mind the fact that Ganta can't figure out that the red man he's been searching for this whole time is of course SPOILERS FOR THE STUPID, BECAUSE I FIGURED THIS OUT THE FIRST TIME WE MET THIS PERSON Shiro SPOILERS OVER, AND SERIOUSLY, IF YOU DIDN'T SEE THIS COMING YOU ARE A GIANT TARD. I mean, come on, Ganta! All the clues are right fucking there! The red man's smirk, his power, and the song he sang while he turned your classmates into hamburger... YOU YOURSELF even bring each of these points up, and you can't figure this shit out?!

Other stupid bits that just blow my mind in this anime are as follows: Every evil person in this thing (from the head honcho down to his smallest lackey) is nothing but a wide-eyed, slobbering, cackling, one-track minded, insane A-hole; there's a bad guy henchman who's a second grade schoolgirl with a sword bigger than Cloud Strife's; and there are several points in the narrative where Ganta (after finding out he's got some blood powers of his own) shoots out so much plasma that he starts passing out from anemia, but due to PURE WILLPOWER!!!! he's able to keep moving for another 1 to 2 more episodes and STILL shoot out about another 3 liters of blood without rest, food, or a full-out transfusion. God I hate this show.

And to add insult to injury (MY injury for having sat through this whole thing), the story doesn't even end with the final episode. This is only the first half of the tale. Did the creators actually think people'd WANT MORE of this ultra-retarded chronicle? Did they think people'd be all like "Holy shit! That was the stupidest goddamn thing I've ever seen where not even ONE plot point was based on anything smart happening, nothing made sense (even by the show's own internal logic), and all the characters were either stupid or psychotically evil, or both!...... GIVE ME MOOOOOOOOOORE!!!!!"? Fuck this shit. You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away, know when to run... I'm fucking running — as far away from Deadman Wonderland part 2 as I can.

Deadman Wonderland simply HAS to be either a joke on the Japanese public, or a test. I'm willing to bet that the Japanese government funded this terrifically idiotic series as a test to see which of its citizens is too stupid to be allowed to live. Those who blog about how awesome a story it is (with "amazing and engaging characters whom you love from the very beginning") should be made to run a deadly obstacle course (like Ninja Warrior, only with more razor wire and pools of acid instead of water), shot, thrown in an oven, and their remains made to line the bottom of portable toilets at rock concerts. Anybody who blogs about how the show was imbecilic, filled with pathetic characters and situations, with no idea how a real narrative (let alone the real world) works (where the logic of the universe that events take place in should not immediately counter the already retarded previous scene) would then be given positions of power in the local, prefectural, or national government.

So in the end, what'd I think of Deadman Wonderland? DW was dim witted, dangerously woeful, definitely wanting, disturbingly wanktastic, deranged waste, devoid of whimsy, and dickishly weak. If anybody you know actually likes this show, ask them why. It's not cool, it's not smart, it's not fun, it's full of retardation (story and characters), and it's just so fucking pathetic. I'll just say it: the only people who like this show are fucking mongoloids. That's their only excuse. This was one of the all-time dumbest monstrosities I've ever seen. It's made me a little stupider for having sat through it, and for that I award it no points, and may God have mercy on its soul.

Arrrrrrr. Bein' a true man of the sea it be a slight bit of requirement for the toughest and roughest of us to get thrown into your average Singaporean prison every now and then, and let me reassure the Rossman that this Deadman's Wonderland program indeed be quite accurate in how the countries of the far East treat their prisoners.

No, they ain't be as high-tech as this show makes them out to be, but who needs shock collars when they have shock monkeys... Monkeys with tasers and rabies guardin' the front gates. Arrr, those little fookers can strip the flesh off a prisoner's legs in less time than a feeding frenzy of piranha. Plus I've seen piranha know when to yield... Those damnable little monkeys just keep going and going until well after a grown man stops makin' any sound or movement... Poor Juan Ramirez... He was a good cabin boy who just got caught up in smuggling Singaporean poisonous tree frogs in his pants (for folks who'd pay $50 per froggie in order to turn them into a crystallized powder and snort them like a delicacy for the nose)... But he made a good patsy, that he did. Arrrrrrrrrrrr.

That reminds me, I haven't had me a good Singa-whore in a long while... Arrrrr. Do they all still know how to do that thing with their legs and the uneven bars? That may be worth another 50 quid, but blow-me-down is it worth it. I even shave my back for them so their dismount has no carpet burns. Arrrrrrrrrr.

This show be pretty sad in how over the top it suggests any prison can be. Not even the gulags of Siberia are half this depression. I'm afraid I have to call bullshit on this tale and give it 1 out of 4 stars. If ye be needin' a prison story, matey, best be rentin' that Women's Penitentiary IV. That's the one with the rapin' and the whorin'... Well, the one with more than the previous 3 I mean.

Do you honkies know just how fast this private company that opened this mothafuckin' Deadman Wonderland prison would get sued by the inmates in the real world if they forced them to work for food? Or didn't give them conjugal visits? Or made them wear collars that poisoned them every goddamn day? You know, forget about suing, they'd have full-fledged riots on their hands with this shit! Apparently those "shock collars" didn't matter for squat, since the prison guards let freedom fighters amass in a fully stocked goddamn bar whenever they wanted to, any time of day or night. And when these prisoners physically ATTACKED any guards or expensive guardian robots, they didn't get shocked or anything either. What the fuck was the point of those collars?

This show was so dumb on so many levels. The writers didn't think anything through before putting it down on paper. They just thought "Hey, homie, wouldn't it be cool if we had a prison that killed its prisoners for fun! Ha ha! Fuck them prisoners! This is totally something that could happen, G. It's so scary!... No, mothafucka, I don't think we need to have reasons for anything. Reasons are for white faggots and sissies, who are all white faggots." And so, a prison show where there are no rules for the prisoners or the guards was then made, and it was dumb. And if you think about any of it for over 30 seconds you'd see how even in a world where a prison like this might possibly happen, there's no way in hell, mothafuckas, that half the shit goin' on in this prison would logically be able to occur.

This show is duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuumb. It so dumb that it tried to put its M&Ms in alphabetical order! It so dumb that when it saw the NC-17 sign at the movies, it went home and got 16 friends! It so dumb it took the Pepsi challenge and chose Jif! It so dumb I want to beat some smarts into it with that nightstick I got off that dead pig I found trying to write me a ticket for my Z-mobile for parkin' in front of my own goddamn apartment's fire hydrant. I will beat it to death if I need to, bitches.