This one breaks your brain in under an hour, and that's the appeal. One minute Hyoi and Ryoi are goofing off in cat form like a Saturday morning gag reel, the next the screen is full of tentacled demon plague eating their classmates, and the OVA never once acknowledges that those two things don't belong in the same story. The plot runs three threads at once that refuse to line up, and yet somebody on this crew clearly cared: there are genuinely well-composed shots buried in here, an actual idea behind the Dark Cat power system, and a real villain in the old master Jukokubo. That gap between the ambition and the execution is the whole reason people still trade this thing around. It gets named alongside Mars of Destruction and Skelter Heaven, except Dark Cat is the one where you can see what it wanted to be. Watch it with friends, loudly, once.

Hyoi and Ryoi are brothers who can take the form of cats, and they fight on the side of good. Their enemy Jukokubo, once their Dark Cat master, has unleashed a new horror on the students of their school: a plague of tentacled demons that drives their friends to madness and death. The brothers must uncover what lies behind the infestation and stop it before it destroys everyone they care about, which means facing Jukokubo himself. The single OVA episode mixes supernatural horror with action, drama and romance, and it contains graphic violence.