What They Say:
Undaunted by the curious preference and shady desires of sexy, anguished young women, men cannot resist the urge to dominate. The searing affairs of the heart take second stage to the sensual curiosity that these men and women explore as they confront their playful fantasies head on.
The Review:
Audio:
The audio presentation for this release contains only the English language track for the various clips. The mix is in its original stereo format encoded at 192kbps. Because the clips all come from different shows and different recording sessions, there’s an obvious unevenness about it with some of the volume levels but it’s not an encoding issue with it. The show runs through a variety of dialogue types but for the most part it has that full feeling to it where it’s not terribly distinct where it comes from. The first clip for example has the male character’s lips speaking from the right side of the screen, but it’s all center channel placed. It’s simply the way the show was mixed. Dialogue is clean and clear throughout and we had no problems with dropouts or distortions during regular playback.
Video:
Originally released across too many years, the transfer for this show is presented in its original full frame aspect ratio. The clips come in all different types from different shows and generally they look decent, though as we’ve seen with other clip shows it can be pretty variable. The backgrounds can be relatively solid and then shift to a fair bit of blocking as everything is kept to an average middle ground bitrate. These aren’t the best looking shows to begin with but they’re not outright bad either in terms of the animation. For one clip, the change in aspect ratio distorts things and it just doesn’t look good.
Packaging:
The front cover goes for some good, dark looking material here with the young and attractive woman with a bit of a mature look about her writing in her clothes that are torn while threads of bondage are spread across her. It all comes together well to give it a very distinct and eye-catching looking without using much in the way of color. Obviously it’s going for a particular approach to give a nod towards the novels and it does things pretty right here. The back cover has some softer artwork uses for the background which has the general premise on top of it. Several hardcore shots from the release are also used to make it clear exactly what it is. There’s no hiding what it’s all about and it sells it pretty well with a clean look and a simple breakdown of what’s included. No show related inserts are included nor is there a reversible cover.
Menu:
The menu design uses the same character artwork as the front cover but shifted a bit differently while adding in another still against a flowing non-descript background. It looks good as the cover was certainly appealing and this just has more pop to it. The menu is set to some upbeat instrumental music which is rather fun and bouncy in a way that works surprisingly well. The navigation layout along the bottom is simple and effective with quick loads and ease of access.
Extras:
The only extra included in this release is a three minute series of stills from the show.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
After the first “Shades of Hentai” release, you just knew there was more coming. The way hentai works, especially for so much that has been released in the past decade that Adult Source Media has on hand to work with, there’s a lot of darker material to deal with. Bondage and non-consensual scenes are pretty common and both of those play well into what the whole Fifty Shades angle is, whether you agree with how the novel portrays aspects of it or not. With the first release, we got a lot of expected material that hits the benchmark for what you’d expect for something named like it was and this installment just adds more and more material to it with something like fifteen different clips of varying length, form and quality.
The clips here do play up the non-consensual side in a lot of the scenes, especially the ones stemming from the Cool Devices collections of years ago but also elsewhere. One more “medically inclined” one definitely had me fast forwarding through it as I’m really disturbed by the whole fill her belly up with water so she looks pregnant and then go to town on her. It’s presentation is just strange and cruel in a way and how it’s presented leaves me unnerved as it has many times over the years since these are sadly all too common with the darker titles. There are a couple of medical style pieces in here and they play it from different angles, but there’s all generally this kind of cringe worthy aspects to it, at least to me.
Consensual isn’t a big part of what goes on here but there are those that are more into it than others. “College” age kids abound where they’re taken advantage of by either other students with a wicked sense of desire about them or teachers that abuse their position to get what they want. The opening segment has a teacher who is caught up in some bad things herself and is forced to service the standard overweight and bald man in a position of authority while being filmed. And when it does come to the students later on, we do get a good deal of the usual in that while they may hate it, they also tend to like what’s going on along the way, though that’s not always the case. Hentai tropes are all the more blunt when you remove the meager story side of events.
In Summary:
Fifty Darker Shades Of Hentai didn’t do all that much for me compared to the first installment as it went more for the medical side stuff that just turns me away and had less consensual material to it as well. There’s a lot of good bondage stuff out there and domination material that deals with consensual characters and situations, but when you put it all in clip form it just doesn’t work as well for a number of reasons. The mix of animation here is decent, some much older material going into it which is always fun to see come up, but I also dislike when we get something from the last decade that was widescreen being scrunched down to a full frame format. If this kind of material is up your alley, you’ll likely enjoy it, but it left me a bit colder than the first installment.
Features:
English 2.0 Language, Photo Gallery
Content Grade: C
Audio Grade: B
Video Grade: B-
Packaging Grade: B
Menu Grade: B-
Extras Grade: N/A
Released By: Adult Source Media
Release Date: November 13th, 2012
MSRP: $24.99
Running Time: 68 Minutes
Video Encoding: 480i/p MPEG-2
Aspect Ratio: Mixed
Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 1080P HDTV, Sony PlayStation3 Blu-ray player via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
Which ones are actually in it? Older stuff like what’s in Cool Devices?