Kamyla Box Set

By Chris Beveridge     September 01, 2002
Release Date: August 27, 2002



What They Say
Two stories of a lust-ridden drug called Kamyla. The side effects are unsurmountable and seem to control the lives of our dear heroines who run rampant all over town, stopping at nothing. The evil drug is spreading through my body and destroying my soul...

The Review!
Take one part police action show, one part hentai and the thought of what a plastic surgeon could do with a watermelon and you get Kamyla.

Audio:
For our primary viewing session, we listened to this disc in its original language of Japanese. Though this is a fairly recent release, the show is a pretty basic stereo mix with most everything being center channel dominated. The only real exception is the music, but even that is pretty much just filling up the entire forward soundstage with no real directionality. But in the end, it's a decent sounding track with no dropouts or distortions.

Video:
A 2001 production from Wide Road, we get a good looking transfer here but not as good as several other NuTech offerings. The main offense is the cross coloration that shows up along the edges of character animation, particularly hair, during most scenes. This isn’t as strong on our Skyworth player with its suppression capabilities, but shows up more on our other setups. Colors are very vibrant and well varied without being over saturated or bleeding.

Packaging:
The two keepcases for Kamyla in the box have some good looking covers, each one featuring the three main female cast members in various serious poses. The covers do look great with good looking colors and character poses, though, the uncensored and adults only logos it feel somewhat crowded. 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. The box set itself features the artwork from the second volume while the back does a summation of the two keepcase backings. As with all NuTech releases to date, there is no insert included.

Menu:
The menus here are pretty decent, with a mix of animation and CG providing the intro animation to the menu and then going into a mix of showing the selections with actual shots from the show. While there's a decent bit of intro to it, once you get there you don't see it again unless you start the disc from scratch. Submenus have brief transition animations from the show as well and access times are decent with them but not as fast as we'd normally like. Overall the look and designs of the menus are pretty good.

Extras:
The only extra included is an image gallery which runs briefly and showcases various stills from the show along to part of the score.

Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
These episodes really feel like they were sponsored by the society to promote watermelons.

The setting is the late 21st century, and society has fallen into serious corruption. Social order is being undermined quickly and the biggest crime to go on these days is in the human sex slave trade. This particular crime has gotten so prevalent that an entire new division of law enforcement is created to handle it. And it appears to be entirely staffed by women in the shortest skirts around and the largest breasts around as well.

To make this particular criminal element even worse, there are a number of them running around using a new kind of drug called Kamyla. When injected into the subject, they have a quick rush of “heaven” and can’t control themselves. It also places their mind under total control of the person with the keyword. This will go so far as to allow the controller to tell a subject to kill themselves and they’ll do it. One of the agents gets to experience the drug first hand when she gets captured during a hostage rescue attempt and ends up being the latest subject of one particular criminal.

The various encounters the women have with the criminals makes up pretty much all of the explicit scenes during these two episodes (with the first episode having a flashback to the first sequence mere minutes after it ended, which felt like they were just stringing out the episode to fill its entire length). Unfortunately, most of the character designs tend to be fairly poor to below average as seems to be the norm for Wide Road productions. Some of the digital effects also look rather cheap at times and takes out the seamless feel of most shows.

Kamyla plays a pretty standard story when it comes to drugs and sex, but doesn’t manage to play it all that competently or all that interesting. Add in the (to me) unappealing character designs with their massive watermelon balloons that double as frosting tubes and I ended up rolling my eyes more than anything else.

Features
Japanese Language,English Language,English Subtitles,Image Gallery

Review Equipment
Toshiba TW40X81 40" HDTV, Skyworth 1050P Progressive Scan codefree DVD player, Sony STR-DE835 DD/DTS receiver, Monster component cable and Sony speakers.