Hell Girl Fourth Twilight Series Review: Half a Series Review?

Overview:

So we got half a season of new material and then half a season of re-run episodes, however it had been so long since I’d watched Hell Girl that fact escaped me as I hadn’t really read anything about this series until someone pointed it out. Makes you wonder why they actually bothered.

Review:

The first half of this fourth season of Hell Girl is actually really good. Pretty standard if you’ve watched through Hell Girl, but why mess with a formula that is working. It is all dark and negative and people kind of suck and then someone gets cursed and taken to hell. It works well enough as an episodic narrative even if it isn’t terribly exciting.

Ai herself remains fairly enigmatic as the central but scarcely seen main character but for the first half of this season we have another girl appearing at the scene. Her story is actually the more interesting part of this as we see how the girl gave in to vengeance and ultimately has now got to become a hell girl. It is an interesting story that comes together in bits and pieces before we get two episodes that more or less finish this plot off.

That’s the half-way point and up until then I was really enjoying this fourth season, which was odd in itself because while Hell Girl is usually watchable, it isn’t normally all that noteworthy. After that point we returned to business as usual in more ways than even I realised. The stories are all pretty samey and began to feel repetitious, and then I found out they were in fact repeating old stories that I’d just forgotten because I hadn’t paid enough attention back whenever it was I watched this in the first place. While these episodes are marked by the characters sitting around in a bar discussing the case when, so you know when you’ve crossed from new episodes to repeats, you just have to wonder why they couldn’t either make a whole new season or why not just not release a new Hell Girl if they didn’t actually have enough material.

So judging this on the new episodes, it is actually pretty good. You get the usual round up of suspects. People who are horrible, people who are confused, people who are innocent victims but get pushed over the edge. All of them end up reaching out to Hell Girl for revenge only sometimes I think even they are confused about who they want revenge against and why. For some the hesitation on pulling the string becomes the main point. They want revenge but fear the consequence, whereas in other stories they have been pushed too far and simply want to yank that string as fast as they can.

As with every season of Hell Girl you could spend a lot of time discussing the nature of vengeance and how it is a double edged sword.

Basically I would recommend the first half of this season. It was actually the most fun I’ve had watching a Hell Girl series to date. But, after that, there’s probably not a lot of point in continuing on.

Thanks for reading.

If you enjoyed this post and like the blog, consider becoming a patron to support further growth and future content.

Thanks,

Karandi James.