Michael's Anime Lase-O-Rama: M.D. Geist

Source: LDDB.com

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I have a confession to make: I've never seen M.D. Geist.

I'd heard it was one of the most awful anime ever produced, no matter if you watched the subtitled or the dubbed version. Needless to say, when I ran across a copy on laserdisc mixed in with a bunch of vinyl at the local thrift store, I had no choice but to plunk down my two dollars and take my chances. I mean, the cover art says it all, right? "The Most Dangerous Ever". Most dangerous what? I've no idea. So I willingly and deliberately exposed myself to a film almost universally reviled for being a waste of celluloid and magnetic media.

I now feel the need to report myself for violating the Geneva Convention against cruel and unusual punishment, because I made myself sit through this mess. I'm not going to say M.D. Geist is the worst anime I've ever watched (never will I forgive the ass assassin who introduced me to Violence Jack), but holy shit, is it ever up there on my list.

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M.D. Geist is a post-apocalyptic tale about a guy born and bred to be the perfect soldier. The army produced a selection of these utterly ruthless killing machines, dubbed them "Most Dangerous" (hence the M.D.), then scrapped the program after every last one of these remorseless sociopaths turned out to be remorseless sociopaths. The M.D.s were placed in cryogenic suspension aboard a satellite, where hopefully nobody would ever find them. This plan works for a few hundred years, until the satellite carrying Geist suffers a malfunction in its orbit and crash-lands in the middle of the desert. Geist emerges from the debris, naked but otherwise unharmed and unarmed. Then, much like the Terminator which found itself in the middle of 1984 Los Angeles, he walks off into the night in search of something to kill.

Fast forward a bit (or maybe flash back, since the director of this clearly had no understanding of timing and puts Geist's introduction scene several minutes into the picture, after he's already been introduced), and Geist's doing his 'roaming the wasteland' bit when he comes upon a power-armored soldier pursued by a ruthless gang. Peppered with arrows and speared through the head by the gang leader, the soldier dies.

Before the gang can collect the body and the armor for themselves, Geist claims it for his own. The gang leader, a hulking brute far larger than Geist's compact and athletic frame, decides he likes the cut of Geist's jib and offers him two choices: he can turn over the armor, in which case he can join the gang and the leader will spare his life, or he can challenge the leader to mortal combat then and there to determine who owns the armor. Geist opts to fight the man, and within seconds has severed both of his arms at the elbows, leaving him to bleed out in the dust while Geist collects the prize.

Naturally the now-ex-gang leader's girlfriend throws herself at Geist, recognizing that he's a powerful badass, and she needs a powerful badass to protect her or something. She later tries to seduce him, producing the movie's obligatory boob shot, but Geist rebuffs her advances. Not because he finds her unattractive, but because he's not interested in sex. Violence is Geist's thing, and the more fighting he can do, the better. Good thing there's a war on!

Geist and his gang intervene in a conflict between two armies, defending a mobile tank/gun platform run by the regular army from a band of Nexrum soldiers, and having proven his mettle, the bandits and the military enter into a temporary alliance. The army was heading towards their own fortress called "Brain Palace" (not making this up) in order to deactivate a doomsday weapon triggered by the assassination of a prominent political figure. Unless they can turn it off, the fortress will unleash an unstoppable army of machines programmed to strip the life from the surface of the planet.

Geist and the surviving soldiers along with their commanding officer drive the tank into Brain Palace, don power armor, and invade the fortress. During the ensuing battle, all the soldiers save Geist and the CO get hosed by the defense systems. The CO, having identified Geist as a member of the M.D. program by his dog tags, then betrays Geist by activating a powerful defensive robot and locking Geist in with it.

After a madcap battle that plays like a three-stage boss fight from your least favorite video game, Geist emerges victorious and hunts down his betrayer. The commander has already arrived at the target destination and deactivated the doomsday weapon, but Geist slaughters him anyway. As his not-girlfriend arrives in the base, having made her way through the now-lifeless defenses, Geist re-activates the doomsday weapon, thus unleashing a horde of unstoppable killer robots on the planet and ensuring he'll never run out of things to fight.

The anime then ends with the viewer wondering what the actual fuck they just spent 40 minutes watching.

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M.D. Geist belongs to a very specific sub-type of anime that is heavy on action, heavy on violence, isn't afraid to show some skin, and couldn't care less about story. One watches it to see gallons of blood spilled and enough explosions to make Michael Bay throw up his hands in surrender. M.D. Geist doesn't care one bit for characterization, for subtext, or anything else that makes a story passable--its only concern is to showcase what happens to people when their internal organs become external.

If this is your bag, by all means, pop it in and give it a watch. But if, as I suspect, you'd rather have some story to go with your blood and boobs, M.D. Geist should not be a part of your library. I'm not going to say I hated it (once again, I sat through Violence Jack, and holy freakin' cow does this make Violence Jack look like a Verde opera), but I certainly have no reason to ever watch it again. I'm keeping it in the collection, but only to prevent it from falling into someone else's hands. If you want over-the-top violence, gore, and battle scenes, watch Fist of the North Star. If you want to see boobs, you're already on the internet so I presume you know how to use a search engine. There's nothing M.D. Geist offers that you cannot get in a better format elsewhere.

1.5 bisected torsos out of 5.

Best Scene:

There is no 'best scene' in M.D. Geist. No, I take that back...the black screen after I pressed 'Stop' on the remote held me enraptured for longer than this hyperviolent, underwhelming farce. Only for masochists, and even then I'm not certain.