Reviews for Psycho Diver: Soul Siren

I was very surprised when I purchased this after only watching the trailer. Usually, it's been about 50/50 when I do this, but this one is very hard to find in eng dub. I thought it was very good. Older anime style from 90's with good, original story. Pretty gorey violence that was typical of the Akira, Ninja Scroll type. Short 50 minute OVA, but worth watching. The main character dives into people's brains and tries to stop them from commiting crimes or to get info. It has nothing to do with deep sea diving. It's sorta like a cop drama, almost like Jonny Mneumonic(keanu reeves). Check it out if you like cyberpunk too. I would not call it a cyberpunk anime, but similiar in animation.

Overview: My quest to watch the obscure and the weird continues with Psycho Diver! This 45 minute, standalone OVA is one of the most skull fucking insane anime I've ever witnessed. It has some really good ideas that were pretty damn creative for the time, but the execution is all over the place. Background history: This wasn't based on a manga. It wasn't based on a light novel, video game, or anything else. Anime industry veteran Mamoru Kanbe just went to Studio Madhouse with a script and pitched this as a 45 minute OVA. Madhouse accepted and we got this blessing of insanity. In America, it waslicensed by Urban Vision, who saw themselves as the "mature" dub studio. Urban liked to exclusively license the darkest, grittiest anime they could get their hands on. Psycho Diver is a psychological horror that certainly fits in the Urban Vision catalog.

Plot:

A tough, film noir detective named Busujima uses a device to dive into his clients' subconscious and solve their psychological issues. This came out a full 10 years before Paprika and almost 15 years before Inception! A young singer named Yuki has lost her ability to perform after joining a shady cult. Her talent agency hires a psycho diver to solve her issues, but it turns out the cult has given Yuki dark powers. The psycho diver's head explodes and the agency realizes they need the best psycho diver in the business, Busujima! At first he refuses, but the talent agency kill his dog in a scene reminiscent of the horse head scene from the Godfather. Busujima gets the message and agrees if they pay handsomely.

Busujima dives in, but nearly gets himself killed after witnessing some End of Evangelion nightmare imagery. He announces he will need better equipment and says he will try again in a few days. It turns out the cult isn't happy about the talent agents hiring Busujima and send some assassins to kill him. Busujima escapes and hooks up with a lady talent agent. It turns out she was against the whole dog thing and sincerely just wants to help Yuki, whom she considers a dear friend. Some cult assassins manage to brutally murder Busujima's new lady friend and he decides its time to go deal with the cult. On the way, he runs into the asshole talent agent who is insinuated to have been the dog killer. This sunglasses wearing asshole is actually an agent of the Japanese intelligence bureau and was working as a triple agent to infiltrate both the cult and talent agency! Sunglasses drops some narrative exposition that the cult leader is actually Yuki's mother and wishes to transfer her psychokinetic powers so Yuki can be the next cult leader. Yuki's stage manager is her father, who has decided to betray his wife and gain Yuki's power for himself.

Now it's time for the final act and things get weird! Busujima and Sunglasses arrive at the cult building and engage in an all out brawl with the cult members, including some minion with a retractable shoe knife. Yuki's father arrives and murders her mother with a surprise gun shot. Daddy explains that he only hired the psycho diver as a distraction to confuse the cult leader mom and distract from his true intentions. Yuki unleashes her full power and kills her evil father along with totally destroying the cult building. The only survivors are Yuki, Busujima, and Sunglasses. Busujima now decides that Yuki is losing control of her powers and he needs to fix her with a psycho dive. Her first layer of subconscious is the guilt she feels for still loving her mother despite knowing the cult is evil. Our hero dives 1 layer deeper and discovers that Yuki killed a childhood friend with her powers because she was upset after losing a board game. Seriously! All of Yuki's inner evil manifests itself into a dark Yuki and attacks Busujima. He loses a lot of blood, but finishes Dark Yuki off by pummeling her with a chair until she explodes into sand! The anime flat out turns into Professional Wrestling to deliver one of the greatest WTF moments I've seen in anime. You would think that's the end, but NOPE! The Shoe Knife minion is still alive and kills some lab techs with ninja needle projectiles. Sunglasses shoots the minion right before he can kill Busujima and FINALLY we reach the end. Yuki is now cured from her inner darkness and can sing again. She dedicates her next album to Busujima and his fallen lady friend, along with wishing him to find happiness.

Art:

Studio Madhouse rightfully deserves its glowing reputation, but 90s Madhouse was a bit more hit and miss. This anime looks a little rough at times, but is ok overall. This clearly wasn't a big project and was probably made because somebody lost a bet or owed Mamoru Kanbe a favor.

Sound:

I highly recommend the hilarious Urban Vision dub. They want to make it like a hard boiled detective movie from the 1940s and it's glorious! These guys were like America's version of Manga UK.

Overall:

God bless Mamoru Kanbe. He may not hit a home run every time, but he directed my favorite anime and he NEVER makes something boring. I'll once again say that this had potential and a number of great ideas, but was clearly condensed and under a strained budget. It's a very flawed work, but a deeply enjoyable piece of WTF vintage old anime!

its sad that this ova is such an anigma,when it really deserves praise.I watched it many years ago on the former action channel and its still awesome.for an ova that is less than 50 mionutes long ,it is filled with so much quality.Its about a guy who by his profession is called a psycho diver because he dives into peoples mind to uncover any mental trauma or disorder and remove it.one day he is force to come out of retirement after getting a special case of a singer who is suffering from a serious disorder,he later finds out that this case tookthe life of his close friend.the entire plot is sorounded with deception and intriqe.The animation is wonderfully done with the dark colours suiting the mood and feel of the anime very well.a very good watch go check it out.

Psycho Diver is an anime original 1997 Madhouse OVA that runs only about 50 minutes long, and I feel kind of bad giving this such a low rating, but it really is the sloppy rush-job you'd expect from a short OVA without any source material. It's styled like an old-fashioned noir: a somewhat ugly main character who looks like Golgo 13, the phoned-in "love interest," deep shadows and grimy imagery, a bunch of tough guys and assassins; and a crime plot involving two intertwined subplots that probably would have been better served as separate scripts with such a short running time. We have a weirdpsychic cult that remains pretty ambiguous, as well as another subplot involving a pop star who is experiencing "psychic disturbances." You could probably liken it to Exorcist with the possession scenes, but it's not as colorful. There's a massive amount of plot cramming, but it never culminates into anything rewarding or worthwhile.

The really interesting aspect of this OVA is why I think almost everyone is drawn to it, which is hinted at in the name: Psycho Diver. The dark gritty noir stylings merge well with the mild psychological horror elements embedded into the script. Characters can dive into the psyche to correct psychological distress or other disturbances. We don't have a baseline example of how this works—we only have Yuki Kano, who is such a unique case that the previous Psycho Diver was actually KILLED by diving inside of her mind. He basically exploded because of the amount of trauma his nervous system experienced from the event XD. Any decent production would give you an example of a more normative case to actually understand the process. What we're given looks like a random nightmare. Filled with stabbings, imagery as you can see on the cover, dim interior shots, and Hans Bellmer-esque ball-jointed dolls. The main only even psycho dives twice in the short running length—the rest is focused on gumshoeing and action sequences. Although his dream-self becomes a voodoo pincushion, the final psycho diving scene is anti-climatic and limp-wristed. Better would be if these diving incidents weren't so high octane, and they were more explorative and atmospheric. We're never even given any surprises, where the main character loses his sense of reality, as you'd expect with most good productions on this subject.

I've always been intrigued by this sci-fi concept, but thus far, it hasn't been pulled off with great success, at least not in most instances I can recall for visual mediums. ID: Invaded does a decent job, despite its flaws. Paprika, is another adequate alternative, even if not one of Satoshi Kon's best. For films, The Cell and Inception both explore this subject matter; the former has interesting visuals as you might expect from Tarsem Singh, and the latter is overrated pap, though worth watching for the effects and the exploration of diving into the mind—it's just hollow as art. Frankly, I would say none of these listed are strongly above average, unfortunately.

In terms of production values, this is okay, but this was obviously a small-time, low-budget project for Madhouse. Some of the noirish cinematography and lighting are pretty good, there is fairly creative direction, and a nice dark atmosphere. Animation is passable—fair at times, but never overwhelmingly good or anything you'd expect to see on a sakuga video. While the opening music video is a fair effort, the english dub is exceptionally cringe when it comes to the opening song. The dub is probably more fun overall, but I couldn't tolerate it just because of the song.

In summary, Psycho Diver is a quirky combination of sci-fi/horror/noir with a cool concept, but it's just too rushed to be truly worthwhile.

Watched with eng. dub. Was a 7-8 rated movie for me. Very Impacting with their message(the main song) This anime was hard to rate. On one hand: the story kind of made sense; did allow for revisits to better understand the movie; great art considering time frame it was made. In the other hand: art was not current with life to date, there was still some confusion with the ending at least for me. p.s. To better appreciate this movie i suggest reading on the back story of some actors like the person who played Paige in the TV charmed. perhaps after viewing the movie and getting some insideon some celebrities you will better appreciate your life. I know i did.

As I've been watching these OVAs, I've noticed that most of them have been not that great. A lot of them are adaptations of longer manga and the short length drastically hinder the storytelling, or there's ones like this which are anime originals but till fail in my opinion. My guess it's a lack of competent direction which ruins it in this case. The story just kind of meanders for the majority of it, and it's only 48 minutes long, it's the shortest of these 90s OVAs that I've seen yet. What plot it did have was so confusing I can'teven begin to describe it and I just finished watching it, and I didn't care about any of the characters. It doesn't even have as much violence or nudity as you expect from 90s OVAs, which is disappointing mainly because of how bad the rest of it is, you'd think they'd give us at least that to keep our attention. The song they keep playing throughout the OVA is pretty good, though.

I'm not disappointed that I spent 50 minutes on this OVA. It was made by Madhouse in 1997, and it's an original story. Old 90s drawing style, adult characters, and some interesting things, as "divers" work. It gives you some calm, cyberpunk-like vibes. Also, there are some pretty bloody scenes of violence here. But anyway, if we start talking about plot, it's something incomplete. All this OVA feels like some template for full anime with many understatements. It mostly looks like it's a cut story from the middle of some anime. And I guess I will be about to watch this full anime if itexisted, but we have only this "cut".

As a result, if you want to relax in the evening and watch something short at the end of a hard day, this OVA may be what you need.

This isn't horror, it isn't even remotely trying to be horror. It's an adult sci-fi action movie. Compared to sub, the English dub adds a lot of noir detective tropeyness: lots of internal monologuing exposition by the MC and a ton of creative liberties with the dialogue even to just straight up invent entire plot elements not originally there (such as MC mentioning he's coming back out of retirement. there being an undercover agent). Some of it decently builds on traces to form actual concrete connections/themes and it also makes some dialogue more coherent from what I presume are poor sub translations, it is a bitunsubtle in spoonfeeding themes and all to the audience though. Most would probably prefer it (even I prefer it), but there's also genuinely horrendous redubbing of the music video in the beginning (and end credits), so I'd recommend switching to the Japanese version for those parts instead at the very least. (Aside from sub for the music opening, The best way to watch is to have the sub's subtitles on the dub as some sites do.)

If I were reviewing the music video, I'd fully recommend it (it starts 1 min in), and much of my good will towards not completely panning this OVA comes from that. But the rest of the sub OVA has nothing to do with this random completely irrelevant backstory of the girl as a singer. These are very much 2 separate animation projects smushed together by sharing the same character model (with no character consistency, literally explained away through brainwashing). To be clear, this is essentially a pretty decent punk-rap music video lasting 3 mins that has been attached to an uninspired 45 min OVA not because the 2 have any purpose being connected but because it's commercially convenient for their intentions of selling a full-length OVA product.

The story of the OVA is like a sci-fi Indiana Jones with their shared spoofed James Bond guy and Bond girl, it's also very reminiscent of Ghost in the Shell (1995) and Akira (1988) (it also reminds me of a lot of other media at points, though to be fair so much of it is cliche af). In other words, it's a bunch of random bs strung together involving noncharacter ESP cultists (such as her mother) worshiping a noncharacter god using the noncharacter ESP girl as a noncharacter vessel for their unspecified goals, all of which comes of nothing and goes nowhere when ESP MC actionboys his way through the action climax to save the girl or whatever because he's just so cool.

To be fair, the plot of this movie is mostly dumped in at the action climax ending, and there's actually an entire rest of the screentime prior dedicated almost unrelatedly to a plot about having the MC dive into the girl's mind... This becomes almost an afterthought to the story though by the end...

Though, the dub goes a long way in trying to fix some of these issues as best it can with rewritten lines here and there, (though some of it requires info from the sub too: the sub's gamey-competitiveness comment of their mind-fight to the dub's killing a girl over a board game).

There's a ton of superficial imagery alluding haphazardly to a bunch of stuff... though much like the sexdoll-torso's phylactery, most of it has little meaning and crumbles away to nothing upon the slightest scrutiny.

Fine, maybe I'm being a bit unfair. The blue phylactery is actually supposed to represent the manager's blue teardrop necklace. Why? Unclear. (maybe repressed lesbian subtext that the dub removed). There isn't a single character in this with long black curly hair like that doll-head thing has, so... no one in particular. I suppose the doll would naturally be representing her shadow self she rejects, so just a wig since she wears the mask of an actress. Her darkness is supposed to stem from the kid whose head she popped and her cult brainwashing and maybe a real god, but... sure, random sexual doll symbolism because of her job as a performative sex icon I guess... but this has nothing to do with why she can't sing (and directly contradicts how she really likes that idol job), I mean there were definitely plenty of avenues they could've actually explored with that very much like Perfect Blue, but it doesn't even really try, oh well. Random sex-doll. Random broken chair. Random bandaged head-staff and wandering mystic. Random monster hand pullout failsafe.

The art and animation are typical for OVAs of that time, maybe a little below average of the better ones people still watch, better animation than many anime these days anyway.

I'd give the original sub a 3/10, but I'll be generous: merging the best of both with the sub's songs and much of the dub I'll give it a 4/10 (where 5/10 is average).