Sh-Ron Almeida
Assistant Arts and Entertainment Editor
Kimi is a young girl living in a small housing complex in Kurosaki. After Yuri, a girl from Tokyo, moves in with migrant fishermen, strange occurrences begin to unfold. Together, they must confront the many dark secrets of the housing complex.
Announced last spring, I was genuinely interested in watching this new anime. Toonami had been growing stale since “Fena: Pirate Princess” turned out to be a flop. Regardless, I was willing to go about this with an open mind and anticipating what this spooky show had to offer.
Goodness gracious, what the hell was I thinking?
The first episode should’ve been a warning sign. The red flags were there, but I persevered. I was hopeful that this series was just warming itself up. But as time went on, I was forced to accept the simple truth I tried to avoid. A sad, obvious truth that’s been staring down at me in the face all along.
“Housing Complex C” was completely and utterly boring from start to finish. It had absolutely no desire to tell compelling tales of horror, mystery or even intrigue. Instead, it was too in love with excessive amounts of exposition, cheap cop outs and aggravating bait and switch and it painfully shows. The only scares we get to see are grotesque close ups of dead animals. That’s all. This show made zero effort in wanting to make your skin crawl. 90% of the scary content happens at the end of each episode. It’s almost like the horror was crammed in as an afterthought.
The characters were not interesting at all, mainly because the series doesn’t make any effort to get the audience to care about them. They left very little impression on me to the point where I sometimes forget their names. The dubbing isn’t exactly the best either, as the Middle Eastern fishing interns don’t even sound like they’re from the Middle East. Luckily, we didn’t have to keep track of many of them, since they were unceremoniously killed off once the finale kicked in.
Speaking of the grand finale, my friends and I had to rage quit after seven minutes. The fourth and final episode starts off with a massive lore dump about an ancient god that comes out of left field. Instead of just telling us about this mythology, maybe show it to us? Like in a flashback or something? Horror seems to be a genre that anime often struggles with, and “Housing Complex C” is an unfortunate example of this. Instead of letting the audience slowly figure out what’s going on, we’re just told what’s happening.
“Housing Complex C” had no substance to it. It was way too short and barely gave us any time to process what was even happening or to care. The story was rushed, lacking any real payoff or build up. Instead of feeling horrified or even creeped out, all you can feel out of this experience is frustration and disappointment. The characters were useless, the plot structure is atrocious and the payoff is nonexistent. The Walten Files and Higurashi, the original 2006 anime, had better scares, more interesting characters and even looked better than this. You’re better off watching those instead.
“Housing Complex C” premiered on the Toonami programming block on Oct. 2 and concluded its run on Sunday.