Angel Cop opens with a Molotov to the face and never once apologizes. Ichiro Itano brings his missile-swarm instincts to street level here, so the violence has actual geometry to it: bodies come apart with the precision of a Macross dogfight, and the 1989 cel work sells every squib. Angel herself isn't a character so much as a loaded weapon the plot points at things, and the show knows it, burning through Special Security Force badges and psychic Hunters until Lucifer walks in and turns the whole thing into a body-horror arms race. Then there's the English dub, one of the most gleefully unhinged localizations ever committed to tape, profane and politically deranged in ways that made it legend on bootleg VHS. Six episodes, no denouement, just an ending that stops like the tape ran out. You don't recommend this to people. You put it on and watch their face.

In a future Japan where terrorism is an everyday threat and the police have grown nearly as brutal as the criminals they chase, Angel is the best officer in the Special Security Force. Her methods are uncompromising, and she stops at nothing in pursuit of justice. When she and her partner, Raiden, look into a string of gruesome murders of known criminals, they uncover the Hunters: a trio of psychics who have joined forces to track down and punish the city's worst lowlifes. After a few clashes with the police, two of the psychics begin to doubt that they are really on the right side. The third has no such doubts and prefers killing to morality. Enhanced with cybernetics from a mysterious source, he sets out on a killing spree aimed first at the Special Security Force. With help from the two remaining psychics and a partner turned cyborg after an accident, Angel must hunt down the rogue psychic and the organization behind the Hunters.