Isaku Box Set

By Chris Beveridge     September 05, 2003
Release Date: June 27, 2003



What They Say
It’s the last day of school before summer vacation and Kenta is gearing up for another boring summer when he receives a mysterious note. Following the note’s instructions, he walks into the old, condemned school building and inside discovers that Jinpachi, Miyuki, Rika, Kotomi, Akemi, Ms. Kumi, Munemitsu and Mio have received the exact same note.

Just what's going on? Suddenly the sounds of pounding - someone is boarding up the entrance! The nightmare begins as the girls vanish one by one... A twisted story filled with scenes of shocking and graphic hardcore sex!!!

The Review!
Taking place before the events in Shusaku

Audio:
For our primary viewing session, we listened to this disc in its original language of Japanese. As with other hentai of a similar nature, the show is essentially dialogue driven and uses primarily the center channel. In this respect, things are nice and clear and undistorted. The show makes good decent of directionality across the forward soundstage with the lightning effects and other incidental sounds.

Video:
Coming out a few years prior to Shusaku, the series looks like night and day between the two. While Shusaku was a very clean CG styled show with bright vibrant colors, Isaku goes back to the old days of darker designs, backgrounds and a whole lot of dirt and dust throughout the print. When the camera pans around, you can see the shifting of the cels and the material on it, often times you can see the characters shift as well. While colors are drab, they’re solid and free from bleeding or cross coloration. Aliasing is very minimal as well, though the jitter may make up for that for some folks.

Packaging:
Released in three keepcases inside a simple cardboard box, each volume features artwork related to the individual episode. With each volume showcasing a different set of girls, there’s plenty of variety to each of the covers. The artwork is better than what’s in the show itself, mostly because it gets better coloring. The box set itself uses artwork from the second volume on its primary panel while the back of the box details each of the volumes and provides cover art for them. The front covers look pretty good, though things are pretty busy looking with the inclusion of the big uncensored lines and bars. The back covers show off some animation shots from each show and have a good summary of each episode. Features and technical information is nicely listed as well. As with all NuTech releases to date, there is no insert included.

Menu:
The menu layout for this series uses the video camera style once again by setting the background to colored snow while small animation boxes show up and play scenes from the series. Access times are good and submenus load quickly while the general layout is the standard for NuTech releases.

Extras:
The only extra included here is a two minute long video gallery that shows various stills from the episodes to music.

Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
The story of Isaku feels quite familiar right from the start, which is going to be plainly obvious since I ended up watching the sequel series of Shusaku and Shusaku Replay first. The concepts of that show are definitely visible here as well, though in a rougher form.

The story centers on a group of students at a private academy. They’re mostly friends, though some don’t get along well with others. One of them, Miyuki, had her sister die the year before from an apparent suicide, but it looked more like she was raped and murdered. Since then, she’s been cold towards men and generally quiet and unhappy. This doesn’t work well for Kenta, our male lead of the series who would like to get to know her better.

Kenta and his friend Junpachi are otherwise pretty typical kids. They spend time looking at the girls around campus, watch porn and smoke when they can get away with it. They do look out for their own though, as we see early on when the maintenance/groundskeeper, an elderly and fairly haggard man named Isaku walks by. Junpachi is convinced that Isaku is behind Miyuki’s sisters death and says so, hurling insults at him the whole time, unknowing that Miyuki is nearby and can hear all of it.

We get introduced to a number of other characters, such as a girl who has a crush on Kenta, a teacher who is always apologizing for what she does or doesn’t do, a pretty boy and a really bitchy girl. After we get to see them all with their school faces on, we end up following Kenta around a bit. He’s gotten an invitation to go out to the old school building that evening for something special, so he’s naturally excited though unsure of who it could be that will be waiting there for him.

So he’s quite surprised when he gets to the room in the boarded up school only to find just about everyone there. They all got the invitations and have been wondering what’s going on. With Kenta’s arrival, things are set into motion though and they realize they’re stuck in the building. It’s from this point that things start to go from bad to worse as people start disappearing. Though most of them don’t know what’s going on, we see those who have organized this, along with Isaku, as they begin to capture, film various kinds of sexual torture, and end up trying to get back to everyone else and escape.

This plays out in a similar style to the later Shusaku series but feels rougher, more raw and not quite as clearly planned out. Part of it suffers from having too many characters. And heaven help you if you listen to this dubbed. They try so hard to match the flaps that it is so stilted and contrived, combined with various accents, it’s not even laughably bad.

For those that enjoyed Shusaku, it’s definitely easy to recommend this precursor to it to see how things all began. It fares better in some respects to Shusaku since it doesn’t have as heavy a foreboding evil to it, but there’s a lot of similarities.

Features
Japanese Language,English Language,English Subtitles,Art Gallery

Review Equipment
Toshiba TW40X81 40" HDTV, Panasonic RP-82 Progressive Scan codefree DVD player, Sony STR-DE835 DD/DTS receiver, Monster component cable and Sony speakers.