One of those 'movie within a movie' scripts starts this very strange live action horror anime hybrid film off right. The premise? Well, the biggest anime feature of the year, the most hyped up, most in demand feature has got to be Talking Head. Everyone is waiting for it, but the production has run into some very serious snags. First and foremost, the director has gone missing before production actually even starts.

So, the eccentric crew do what any eccentric crew would do in the same situation, they hire a replacement, in this case a 'migrant technical director.' He steps up to plate and jumps in admirably but he's not without issues as he pushes his cast and staff members to meet their fast approaching deadline so as not to lost any money or disappoint any overly anxious fans.

Unfortunately, for those involved in the making of Talking Head, the deadline is the least of their problems, as someone has started killing them off one at a time and in sufficiently gruesome ways at that. The new director now not only has to worry about getting his adopted production completed on time, but also about his own life! So he starts out to investigate the series of murders while at the same time plugging away at his movie, in hopes that he'll figure it all out in time before his crew is finished off so that he can get the movie in the can and get back to a normal life. Things do not go as planned. Actually, from this point on, things get seriously weird.

The second film in the set, The Red Spectacles, is touted on the back of the box as 'a future only director Mamoru Oshii could create.' While in a sense this is hyperbole, at the same time, there are a few nice little spins put on this story that do give it a bit more flair and a bit more substance then a less capable director could have accomplished with the material.

The police have had no choice but to tighten up their belts and use harsher tactics against a society that has very quickly crumbled into madness. Given the name of The Kerberos, they become known as 'the watchdogs of Hell,' which given the state of the world in this bleak distopian future, isn't that inaccurate a description of them.

Three of the members of this force go renegade and start to rebel against the system imposed on them but only Koichi Todome, a detective, is able to escape from the government once the proverbial poop hits the fan. He goes into hiding for a few years but eventually decides to return to his home only to find that things haven't gotten better, and in fact, they've gotten much worse and he's the only one who can even attempt to sort it all out.

Another live action film from the famed director, this time with the emphasis on action! Stray Dogs is the story of Koichi Todome, who was the leader of a squad of men and women known as the Kerberos, who served as an elite force of crime fighters working for the government as a kind of super police squad. We're given some detail on his background in the earlier film, The Red Spectacles.

When the Kerberos become involved in a large scale riot instigated by Koichi, most of them are imprisoned for refusing to disarm at the request of the government. Koichi, however, escapes. A few years later, a former Kerberos member named Inui has served his time and is released from prison. But rather than go straight and make a new start, he heads out and right away begins searching for Koichi.

Inui finds that it's not going to be easy to track down his former leader and as things start to slowly but surely turn sour for him, he begins to realize that despite his best intentions, he may inadvertently be acting as someone else's pawn in a game he doesn't wish to take any part in.

It's great to see the early works from the writer of Jin-Roh – Wolf Brigade and the director of Ghost In The Shell finally released in a legitimate form with nice, clear English subtitles. Though these are his early works and aren't quite on par with some of his later masterpieces, they're still very entertaining works of dark and gritty cinema.

One can also see the seeds sewn here for what was to come from Oshii and a lot of the themes and issues laid out here would surface again in his later films. A lone soldier or agent trapped in a scenario of corruption and having to fight his way out against the system is a common theme that you can see throughout his work and it's interesting to compare how he deals with it throughout his work. Seeing his early material lends an alternate perspective to some of his later efforts and it's a nice way to follow the development of someone who started off with some less than perfect movies under his belt but eventually made it to the top of his game.

Video:

All three movies are presented in their original aspect ratio of 1.85.1 and all three are enhanced for anamorphic television sets. Colors are strong, blacks are rich and solid, and the contrast levels look to be set quite accurately. There's a bit of grain here and there but other than that, the prints used are very nice looking indeed and there aren't any real issues with compression artifacts or edge enhancement save for a few very minor occurrences in a couple of spots.