For Your Private Eyes Only Part 4: Sukeban Deka

A high school girl is forced to take on the over-privileged and corrupt armed with nothing but a yo-yo and mother issues.  Enjoy the surprisingly popular detective action in:

 Background:
Released By: ADV Films
Length: 95 minutes
Year of Production: 1991
Language: Sub and Dub both included, Dub reviewed
Available on Netflix: Yes

Sukeban Deka is usually translated as Delinquent Girl Detective.  This was an incredibly popular series in Japan that began in the 70's and had its latest movie installment just 5 years ago.  The original manga ran for 22 books and spawned 3 TV seasons (106 episodes), 3 movies, and this 2 part OVA.  

The Detective:
Our heroine this time around is Saki Asamiya.  Her mother is a convicted murderer, her victim being Saki's dad.  Mother dearest is considered criminally insane and is on death row awaiting her final day on Earth.  Saki herself in in jail after taking the blame for a friend who did something terrible and unspecified.  Her weapon of choice is a bullet proof ceramic yo-yo on a string that can't be cut, burned or otherwise destroyed.  The yo-yo also conceals a badge giving Saki a fair amount of authority among the police.  

Artsy

Story:
 A prison warden calls the young female inmate Saki to his office.  He offers her the chance to win her freedom in exchange for working for "the man."  She flatly refuses and starts to leave the office.  In order to sweeten the deal the warden also offers to lose the letter setting Saki's mother's execution date.  Saki is conflicted but reluctantly agrees in order to save her mother.

I have a mission, should you be coerced to accept it

 In a dark alley, in the bad part of town another girl is being chased by a trio of very rude gentlemen.  After receiving zero help from the people in the streets, the girl runs down a dark alley where the men proceed to try and rape her.  Saki shows up and quickly dispatches the toughs with a strategically tossed apple and her trusty yo-yo.  The girl thanks Saki before her savior disappears into the night.

Never leave the crowded street for a dark alley

Yet another scene shift and we see a convoy of buses traveling along a treacherous mountain road, presumably for a field trip.  A mysterious gas is emitted through the ventilation system in the two buses in he rear causing all of the occupants to pass out.  The buses crash into each other and careen off the mountain side.  In total 76 people died and the audience is treated to the obscured face of a blonde girl who is smirking cruelly as she looks at the carnage below.

Rubberneck mourning

These buses belong to Takanoha, an elite school for the upper crust of Japan.  Generic, girl-obsessed freshman Sanpei is entering the campus for the first time, scoping out all the young ladies around him.  He is duly impressed with the quality of girls, and then a limousine pulls up carrying the 3 Mizuchi sisters.  Their father is the school board president, elected after the bus accident, and they are treated as royalty.  The youngest daughter is Emi.  She is a well respected painter who has won many art contests and is well respected by the more creative members of the school.

Art imitating art?

The middle daughter Ayumi is obsessed with money.  Despite being from an incredibly wealthy family she extorts money from the other rich kids.  Ayumi also acts as the gang leader for the school's group of juvenile delinquents and uses them to shake down the students for even more money. 

Now I ain't sayin' she's a gold digger....she prefers diamonds or platinum

The oldest sister is Remi.  She is the apple of her father's eye and the most popular girl in the entire school.  She is smart, beautiful, athletic and kind.  Basically she is your run-of-the-mill anime rich girl with one exception.  She has the creepiest eyes I've ever seen in an anime.

I'm convinced she is an alien

The Vice-Principal, always the curmudgeon in any school anime, hates the Mizuchi sisters.  He doesn't have any real reason for this, just a gut feeling that those girls ain't right.  There is only one person who the VP hates more than the Mizuchis and that is Saki, but luckily for him she is safely locked away in.....wait, who is that in the dusty distance?

The VP is in for a rough year

Saki is being closely monitored by a man named Jin.  He provides her with intel and makes requests for particular bits of evidence or investigations.  Jin also gave Saki her super yo-yo.  While at school Saki meets up with the girl she saved from rape.  Her name is Junko and she is poor as dirt but got into the school on an art scholarship.  Saki also meets Sanpei who decides Saki is the hottest girl in school and begins hitting on her immediately.

Sanpei is smooth as sandpaper with the ladies

Ayumi decides she doesn't like Saki and sends her Four Devils to beat her up.  Saki senses someone is watching the fight and judging her strength so she holds back her true strength.  She gets pummeled fairly severely but eventually Sanpei shows up and tries to block the bullies.  Ayumi loses interest in the fight and calls off her crew, allowing Saki to limp away and lick her wounds.

I really wish he could shoot laser beams from his tongue

That night in the Mizuchi household Daddy sits down with Emi and Ayumi.  With Mr. Mizuchi's new found powers as school board president he is making more money and gaining powerful contacts.  To celebrate he has a gift for his three angels.  For Emi, he bribed the judges of an upcoming high stakes art contest to guarantee her victory.  For Ayumi, Daddy took bribes from parents desperate to get their kids into a prestigious school to make his money-grubbing daughter even richer.  For Remi, he rewrote his will to leave her everything in thanks for her masterminding the whole bus terrorism incident that made him extra powerful.  Clearly, you would want to make your will out to benefit a known mass murderer.

A generous father but not intelligent

 Sanpei meanwhile is following Saki around like a creepy stalker despite her continuous protests.  While walking the streets of the red light district they spot Junko leaving a Chinese restaurant.  The girl just doesn't learn.  The trio goes back to Junko's little rat hole where they learn she is an orphan and has to work her way through school.  She also shows them her upcoming entry for the art exhibition and it is breathtaking.   

Junko has a lot of talent

There is a brief scene here of Ayumi buying large quantities of drugs from a shady man in a black car.  She then heads to her secret, hi-tech hideout in the woods were she keeps her cash, Scrooge McDuck style.  Saki and Sanpei leave Juko's house as he professes his love for her yet again.  Saki gets annoyed and tells him to shave his head and join a monastery.  Sanpei agrees, shaves his head on the spot and agrees to serve the temple of Saki. 

Really not a good look for him

Since Sanpei won't leave her alone Saki decides to put him to work.  She has him hack into the school's computer to get a list of all of the students' addresses.  Saki then divides them up by grade, economic status and which of the Mizuchi sisters they follow.  Emi is using this same night to check out her competition for the art contest.  She visits Junko's place and is shocked by the quality of her painting.  Sanpei continues his computer hacking while Saki takes a quick break to beat up a bunch of Ayumi's crew in order to slow down their extortion operation.  When Junko gets home from work the next day, she finds her painting missing and then gets accosted by two large men, possibly American.

She attracts the wrong sort of people

Saki and Sanpei go to Junko's again so the trio can have a nice home cooked meal.  The people in the other apartments freak out when they see the two and call the police.  Junko's room has been trashed and many of her paintings stolen.  The police show up and arrest Saki and Sanpei for the kidnapping of Junko.  Apparently in their minds it makes sense that criminals who already kidnapped and robbed a girl would return to the scene of the crime in broad daylight.  This ends Part One of the OVA.

The tension builds! What will happen to our heroes?

Part Two opens with Saki and Sanpei being interrogated by the police.  Neighbors swear these two are behind Junko's disappearance and the police won't rest until they confess.  The missing Junko is actually being held captive in the Mizuchi's basement and is being periodically injected with drugs.  The Vice Principal is having some problems of his own.  His formerly demanding, trouble-making and stuck up students are now perfectly behaved.  Normally this would be a goodthing, but he discovers all of them are getting special "extra lessons" from Remi in a really creepy computer lab.

The VP just doesn't trust this angelic young lady

After a week in jail, Saki finally starts to worry about what happened to Junko so she flashes her yo-yo badge and gets herself and Sanpei released.  Jin picks them up at the station and informs Saki that she waited too long to get out.  Junko was just found dead in a train switch yard.  The apparent cause is a drug overdose and her arm was full of needle marks.  Saki swears revenge against Emi for stealing Junko's art, Ayumi for providing the drugs and Remi for.....well just being a terrible person I guess.  This is the point where the series starts getting a bit dark.

Granted, sending 76 students to their deaths for political gain was already kinda dark

 Saki vows to send the entire Mizuchi family to their graves but Jin attempts to reign her in.  He reminds her she is technically a cop now even if she was essentially forced into the job and gives her a pair of handcuffs to reinforce this fact.  Saki's initial act as the First Lady of Revenge is to destroy Ayumi's Four Devils in a 4-on-1 brawl.  She shows off her full rage induced strength and defeats them quickly and easily.  She then chokes Ayumi with her yo-yo and has Ayumi's followers mutiny.  Ayumi runs crying home to ask her sisters for help.  Emi turns her down and Remi gives her a shotgun.

This can only end well

Saki decides she'll need an elite squad to help her take out the Mizuchis.  Unfortunately the only person she knows with any useful skills in Jin, so she has to settle for the help of Sanpei and the somewhat skeptical Vice Principal instead.  While her crew provides tactical support, Saki goes around beating up people associated with the Mizuchis in order to obtain evidence of their crimes.  This goes well for a while until Ayumi hunts her down with the shotgun. 

A real rich girl would hire an assassin, stupid Nouveau Riche

While Ayumi is distracted with this revenge scheme, Remi is robbing her private vault.  Ayumi's alarm goes off so she decides to finish Saki quickly and fires the rifle point-blank.  This should have worked out well for her, but Remi rigged the rifle to backfire and Ayumi's hand get blown off and she takes massive amounts of shrapnel to the chest.  She slowly bleeds out and dies.  Saki and her company now move out to get the rest of the Mizuchis.

Not A Team material.....D Team at best

Emi and her father are attending the awards ceremony for the art piece she stole from Junko.  Saki crashes the party and accuses Emi of plagiarizing paintings from multiple other artists.  Her team appears on stage and reveals the evidence to prove this.  Daddy does not take this well and pulls a gun on Saki but Jin shoots it out of his hand.  The two are promptly arrested in front of the elite crowd of onlookers.  The gawking art afficionados crowd around the ashamed pair and in the confusion two gunshots are heard.  A young girl in a purple ball gown is seen holding a pistol, standing over the dead Mizuchis.  She then turns the gun on herself.

2 down, 1 to go

Saki recognizes the gunwoman as one of Remi's followers and now that all of her relatives are dead, Remi has inherited the entire Mizuchi estate.  Saki takes Ayumi's motorcycle and races to the Mizuchi manor while the rest of her team follows far behind.  Once there, Saki is assaulted by a veritable horde of brainwashed students from her school, all wielding knives.  Saki dispatches them quickly with her yo-yo and moves further into the manor.

And you thought the violence in inner city schools was bad

Remi meanwhile makes her escape out a secret passage to the helipad and prepares to flee the country.  She is escorted most of the way by her Ebony and Ivory bodyguards.  As Saki attempts to follow them she discovers a huge mountain of explosives, counting down the time until the house explodes and takes most of the student body with it.  This is a personal touch from Remi who believes, "That's the problem with terrorism these days, too much paperwork, not enough explosions."  Saki is forced to fight with the large, stereotypical black mercenary.  He manages to wound Saki's right arm before she hurls him into a glass tank full of snakes, killing him dead.

Snakes on a Stereotype

When Saki gets to the helipad, Remi decides to jump out of the safety of the copter in favor of fighting on a house rigged to explode.  She strips off her rich girl dress in favor of a commando jumpsuit and arms herself with a whip.  Remi has the upper hand in the fight, lashing Saki with both whip and tongue in the form of "yo mama" insults.  This infuriates Saki who switches to left handed yo-yo attacks and reveals her insane mother taught her to fight with yo-yos ambidextrously as she lands the final blow on Remi. 

Saki also threw Junko's necklace at her, I forgot to mention that

Saki's team arrives, better late than never I suppose, and Jin shoots down Remi's remaining mercenary in the helicopter with his handgun.  They also get to see the fantastic explosion from a safe distance.  Then Saki drag a handcuffed Remi out of the inferno.  I'll assume Remi hired a high priced lawyer and served no jail time.
The End.

All our moderately difficult work has paid off!

 Why watch?
1. Yo-yo Battles - The main reason to watch this show is the sweet battles using a common child's toy.  The action is quick and exaggerated just enough to be entertaining without destroying semi-realism of the series.  The battle against Remi is sadly one of the least entertaining, but the others more than make up for this one weak fight.

We need more official police yo-yos

2. Dark Plot - This show is a lot darker than you might expect given the premise of a yo-yo wielding high school detective.  Lots of death and murders for personal gain, drug use, and attempted rape.  This one goes a few steps beyond the norm.

Junko gets the worst of everything

  Why not to watch?
1. Stereotypes -  I'm not talking about the mercenaries here but rather the rich kids.  The accents in the English dub are especially atrocious for the unnamed rich kids.  The way the interact with the VP and and expect everything handed to them on platters made of Silver or better is also kinda terrible.

I'm surprised they come to school without their butlers

Should you be watching?
This one is certainly worth watching.  Good story, decent character development and fun action sequences.  This is a nice little installment from a popular Japanese franchise.  I'm almost tempted to check out the most recent live action version which was released in the USA under the title "Yo-Yo Sexy Girl Cop". Almost, but not quite.  You won't see a better detective anime involving children's toys anywhere.  I can guarantee it.