Pros: Great designs, great story, excellent special features, great DVD, very faithful to Pulido's comic book vision.
Cons: In a lot of scenes, Lucifer sounds like he's speaking in a booth yards away from the other voice actors.

My Take:

When Lady Death: The Movie was announced, Chaos Comics was still making comics. There was no Adult Swim, and Toonami was fairly new. There was no such publisher as CrossGen Comics, where the franchise ended up in recent years, and there was no Anime Network. Xena: Warrior Princess was still making new episodes and Buffy had just entered the Hellmouth. Non-kiddy anime had not caught on, though the Madhouse-animated HBO series Todd McFarlane's Spawn received critical praise and awards, including an Emmy.

It's been a long, long journey for ADV Films and their animated vision of Brian Pulido's Lady Death, but on October 5, the wait is over.

The story, conceived by Pulido and written by Robotech and Aura Battler Dumbine master Carl Macek, begins in a Swedish village in the 15th century. A young girl named Hope is in love, but her father Matthias, who is really the Lord of Lies known as Lucifer, has betrayed his daughter by convincing the villagers that she was in league with the devil. Before being burned at the stake as a witch, Hope makes a fateful promise to Pagan, an impish servant of Lucifer, to have life in Hell. There aren't any one-earred rabbits, but there are numerous demons all over the cold, desertlike environment of hell. Hope finds solace in a rebel named Cremator, who trains her to become a strong warrior for several years. She has renamed herself Lady Death to go along with her pale skin and white hair and has begun a crusade to end the reign of terror of her father Lucifer once and for all.

There are plenty of religious themes throughout this film, including a Swedish peasant saying Christ's last words during the cruxifiction and elements from the story of Adam and Eve, with Hope and her beloved Niccolo in that role. With that said, Lady Death isn't for kids. It's a viceral testament to Brian Pulido's world of demons and warriors with blood, gore, and beautiful women. Lady Death is almost like a companion piece to Ralph Bakshi and Frank Frazetta's animated vision Fire and Ice. That's not to say that there aren't any major faults in it. In some scenes, Lucifer sounds like he's speaking behind a door yards away from the others in the voice booth. It's kind of awkward to have the haunting music of Bill Brown rise to a crescendo muffling what Lucifer had to say. Of course, prudish otakus won't like it because they'll claim it looks "too American" and not in Japanese. This movie isn't for them.

Lady Death is a gothic fantasy marvel to witness. ADV Films went out of their way to bring this film to the masses, and it shows in the presentation. Two featurettes shows the creative process from conception to completion. Lady Death may have been five years in the making, but I feel that it was well worth the wait.