As soon as I saw the schoolgirls in the opening scenes, I was thinking please... not another bunch of dumb schoolgirls. I've had enough of that lot in "Shusaku" and "Shusaku Replay". But given the title and the premises of the story, I braced myself for the worst. The good news is, Blackmail is in a different league compared to the Shusaku series. The bad news is, its tone is darker and more sinister... and almost every minute of the three volumes is devoted to rape and abuse.

Blackmail is about a vengeful young woman named Yumiko. Apparently, sometime in the past Yumiko was gang-raped while her best friend Aya watched and even videotaped the whole sordid scenario. It's not clear to me why Yumiko was raped because Blackmail's storytelling is erratic. Flashbacks and present day sequences are mixed together haphazardly, making it hard to piece the plot together. However, I got the idea that Aya was bitter because the guy she liked (Ryosuke) proposed to Yumiko... and so she cooked up a scheme to make sure that Yumiko and Ryosuke wouldn't end up together. But now Yumiko is back, and she's going to make sure that Aya and all her friends "regret they were ever born as women," to quote her own words. Yumiko gets a bunch of sex-starved thugs to do the dirty work... blackmailing, raping, and totally degrading Aya's girlfriends -- who just happen to be a very gullible bunch.

I find it very disturbing that Aya and Yumiko would go through such extreme lengths to exact revenge on each other. Each female character in this series goes through the most hellish and derogatory sexual abuses possible, and I found it rather difficult to watch their ordeals. There was even one instance when a mother and her daughter were raped side-by-side, to the point that they were reduced to puppets who'd stare blankly and do whatever their abusers would tell them.

The art and animation are pretty good. Sex is portrayed explicitly, showing even the blood that comes with a girl's first time. Almost every type of fetish is given attention -- enemas, anal sex, golden showers, etc. The English dubbing is typical of a Nutech release, consisting of fairly tolerable voices but rather wooden acting. The DVDs also contain erotic photos of the two featured porn stars / voice actresses, Misty Rain and Tabitha Stevens.

Blackmail ends on an unsettling note. Just when you thought everything's okay in the world again, something pops up and upsets the balance. This series had potential, but poor storytelling ruins what could have been something more... meaningful.

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