With one last episode to bring it all to a close, the Sex Taxi makes its final rounds.
What They Say:
There is new prey this time around. One is a young proprietress named Kyoko of a Japanese restaurant, and the other is a cute nurse named Nanami. There’s something about their bodies that excites the men. All the materials have been gathered to blackmail them. They’ll end up being nothing but toys from here on.
The Review:
Audio:
The audio presentation for this show brings us the original Japanese language track in stereo as well as the English language dub, both of which are encoded at 192kbps. The show is almost entirely dialogue based other than the sounds of the car coming and going and the music so there’s not exactly a lot to really go by here for directionality. The track is nice and clear though and we had no problems with it in regards to dropouts or distortions during regular playback.
Video:
Originally released in 2004, the final OVA in the series is presented here in their original full frame format. The transfer in general looks beautiful with its lush colors and fluid animation sequences but some problems do crop up. During several panning sequences you can see some rather visible cross coloration getting into the tight line work and some aliasing occurs during similar pans up and down. Barring that, which isn’t all that distracting from the bulk of the show, the transfer looks really good and is a pleaser in general.
Packaging:
Going heavily with the taxi theme, the front cover has a great shot of the nurse being laid out in the back seat so you can see out her window as she’s been tied up to the ceiling, leaving her legs open and exposed. Like the previous volumes, the layout is just right and the logo and its design is perfect. The back cover is very heavy on the purple with a summary and a few pictures across it while a black and white checkerboard along the left brings in various character facial shots. The discs features and technical information is all nice and clearly listed. The insert takes the layout of the back cover and adds in the logo from the front as well as the chapter stops.
This final volume of the series is released a bit differently than usual in that it comes with a “slot pack” as they call it. This is basically a very thin paper cardboard art box that will hold all three volumes of the series. Each of the sides has artwork from the previous volumes but surprisingly nothing from this volume itself really. It uses the same designs and layouts and really looks great, making me wish that they had charged a bit extra and made it a full on chipboard type. This is in the category of “it’s the thought that counts” though and it’s certainly not a bad inclusion.
Menu:
The menu uses a variant of the front cover by taking the nurse and putting an actual taxi around her so she’s a bit more obscured by the frosty window. The selections are lined up along the window at an angle and some of the instrumental music from the end sequence plays along to it. Access times are nice and fast and the layout easy to navigate. The disc also properly read our players presets for language.
Extras:
None.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Watching the last episode of Sex Taxi is admittedly a bit awkward. It had been two years since the second volume came out and this one wraps everything up. So unless you have a great memory for these shows, a lot of it may not come back all that quickly. Thankfully, I’d actually enjoyed the first couple of releases and the visual of a pink taxi is something that doesn’t exactly stray too far from mind when you see it again.
Being that there is only one episode here and it’s a closing one, there isn’t all that much to it in terms of a real plot or storyline. As we’ve seen in the past episodes, our favorite driver has brought an interesting collection of women to the abandoned building and has made great use of them, both for himself and for others. He’s still got a great thing going and after a recent pickup of a doctor and a nurse, he’s found himself his next target. The doctor has been conspiring against a particular patient in order to receive his wealth and has convinced the nurse to go along with him, but she’s resistant. And as we’ve seen in previous episodes, people do all kinds of things when they don’t believe a taxi driver is really paying attention. With the knowledge he now has, he’s able to pick up the nurse and blackmail her into his clutches. The young woman is the epitome of the fanservice nurse and one who really gets taken advantage of here.
The driver also has another woman, a young restaurant owner, who he snatches up after catching wind that she’s been servicing a popular musician after his concerts in secret. Since this would not only ruin his career but drive her business out completely, she falls into his clutches all too easily. For her though, this isn’t as bad as it was for the others because his entire operation starts to crumble under its own weight and the sneakiness of the young girls he captured some time ago. The restaurant owner is a nice way to close things out though as she brings something of a “classic charm” to her scenes and like the nurse they’re well done and quite enjoyable.
Like the previous installments, the animation here continues to look really good and the sex itself is just a lot of fun, even if it is in the dominated and non-consensual/blackmailed manner. The designs have a very clean look and the colors are just great overall. Unlike a lot of other shows we’ve seen lately, this one avoided looking soft at all and was just a solid piece overall.
In Summary:
The downside of adult series is that you can never be quite sure when you buy into one early on whether they’ll ever really make more of it. Sex Taxi had a good set of four episodes come out during 2002 and 2003 that we saw licensed in 2004 but it wasn’t until close to the second volume being released that they cranked out another one in Japan. That left us sitting here for two years without the finishing episode. And single episodes aren’t the easiest thing to market. Thankfully, Kitty did it right by providing it on the cheap and with an art box to hold it all as well as offering the entire series as a whole for others who didn’t check it out back then. While there are a couple of elements that crop up in the series that aren’t exactly my favorite, Sex Taxi overall is a surprisingly enjoyable dark little show with solid animation, great designs and some fun sex. It’s definitely a recommendation in total.
Features:
Japanese 2.0 Language, English 2.0 Language, English Subitltes
Content Grade: B-
Audio Grade: B+
Video Grade: B+
Packaging Grade: A-
Menu Grade: B
Extras Grade: N/A
Released By: Kitty Media
Release Date: October 10th, 2006
MSRP: $24.95
Running Time: 30 Minutes
Video Encoding: 480i/p MPEG-2
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Review Equipment:
Sony KDL70R550A 70″ LED 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.
