We're told little of the kingdom of Kuruda in the opening scene of Shadow Skill: The Movie, but it's apparently one of those pseudo-Roman realms uncivilized enough to still allow gladiatorial combat. Things begin with a duel inside a coliseum, where an brawny blond woman named Elle faces off against a hulking zombie twice her size. The crowd's concern for her is misplaced, as she soon kicks her opponent's head clean off and, for an encore, slams the still-resisting creature into a wall. See, Elle's the current champion of the Seville warrior caste ("Sevalle" in other translations), and Sevilles don't take shit from no punk-ass zombies.

Elle's victory is watched by her blue-haired, magically active female friend Faury and a young man named Gau, who Elle literally adopted off a city street years ago. Gau has never spoken, though he's learned Elle's Capoeira-like "Shadow Skill” martial art well enough to draw attention from Kuruda's most reputed warrior, a wandering man known as Scarface (who, sadly, looks nothing like Al Pacino). Gau and Not Tony Montana meet shorty after Elle's win at the arena, but their staring contest is interrupted by an extremely ugly man who traps Gau in an ELECTRIC TORNADO, the name of which flashes on the screen three times. In less than a minute, Gau manages to free himself, kick Mr. Ugly's ass, and suddenly recover his ability to speak. He starts taking about being a "warrier of Seville" (his pronunciation, anyway), which is presumably like being a barber except you get to kill things and glow a lot.

Yes, it's a stupid fighting series, but it's one of the few with a medieval fantasy backdrop, and Shadow Skill further bypasses tradition by casting Elle as a powerful and uncommonly muscular woman who isn't subservient to a male protagonist. Yet that's as far as the story succeeds. The three OVA episodes that constitute this “movie” all suffer from unceasingly dull scripts; the first is a bland introduction, the second has Elle, Faury and Gau helping a girl named Kou (who resembles a Robin Hood cosplayer) defeat a werewolf-centaur creature in a long, tensionless battle, and the third introduces a villain who pits Faury and Elle against each other, with predictable results.

This wouldn't matter so much if some decent fighting erupted, but Shadow Skill: The Movie has little. A great amount of pomp and palaver surrounds the combat, with characters spouting off fearsomely named attacks and melodramatic commentary, yet it all comes out as a bland, muddy bore. There's simply no suspense, and no clean visual style with which to convey it. The characters are hideous, with pointy, curling hair, distorted faces and eyes that are huge gelatinous blobs, as though they're flatworms caught mid-evolution. It's hard to look at, but director Hiroshi Negishi (Burn-Up W, Tenchi Muyo!, Amazing Nurse Nanako) doesn't realize this and goes for close-ups whenever he can.

If Shadow Skill: The Movie were all that Manga's DVD had to offer, there'd be no reason to watch it. However, there's also the 40-minute “epilogue,” which was actually billed as a Shadow Skill movie in its original Japanese release and came out before this DVD's alleged "movie." Confusing? Perhaps, but it's easier to remember that the epilogue is the only part of the disc that one should ever watch.

Adapted from a later stretch of the manga, the epilogue covers Gau and Elle's rivalry, which manifests primarily by Elle routinely beating Gau to the brink of death. Their mix of mutual respect and resentment is juvenile, but the fight scenes have a visceral impact that the other OVAs entirely lacked, and the animation is much, much sharper. It's especially stunning in the closing scenes of Gau and Elle wrecking an entire coliseum, all in a muted sunset-yellow shade reminiscent of Negishi's Bounty Dog. It's hard not to find some comical excess when Elle and Gau tear through solid stone like particle board.

It also helps that the character art in the epilogue is vastly improved over Shadow Skill: The Movie, simply because everyone looks normal, or about as normal as they can get in terms of garish anime design. Here's a comparison.

Shadow Skill's dub deserves special mention, as it's among the worst ever put out by the seldom-competent Manga UK. Recorded at CTV Studios Cardiff, it features a bored, slurred, and truly abysmal performance by Gau's actor, who mispronounces things constantly while squalling about becoming a WARRIER OF SEVILLE. Elle sounds equally bad, as her actress strains to capture some tough-girl bravado and fails in every single line. At least she seems to care, which can't be said for the rest of the cast. Their dialogue is a procession of one-take groaners, smeared further by Manga UK's trademark not-quite-hidden British accents. The Japanese version is superior across the board, with performances from Tomokazu Seki, Yuri Amano, and, as Elle, the famed Megumi Hayashibara.

Is Shadow Skill worth anyone's attention? Barely. The “movie” kills most of this package's appeal, and though the epilogue offers a few bursts of gruesome fun, one or two crisply animated sparring matches can't save the whole thing. At best, this is no more than a forgettable sideshow for fighting-anime connoisseurs, and a curiosity for the rare viewer who likes to watch sinewy women kicking werewolves into bloody shreds. You know who you are.