Prison School
The premise of Prison School seems innocent enough for a raunchy story. A group of five boys find themselves in an all-girls school, and after a silly plot to try and peek on the girls in the showers, they are caught and given a choice of expulsion or to be kept within a prison within the school. While in the prison, the boys are forced to endure punishing physical torture and undertake heavy labour.
The show clearly knows who its audience is going to be and caters for it exclusively, but in doing so it not only goes too far but alienates most potential viewers. The result is a final product stuck somewhere in-between the usual comedy ecchi series filled with panty shots and comedy innuendo, and a full-on hentai series that should be sold in an ‘Over 18 Only’ section. By sitting on the fence between these two things, it ends up being a poor version of both. There are moments that are far too extreme for casual ecchi fans to enjoy, and they will be better off sticking with this season’s Monster Musume.
The protagonist of the show, Kiyoshi Fujino, is not a likeable or relatable character, either. Admittedly, all of the boys on the show are flawed teenagers making questionable decisions and acting based on their hormones, but when closely looked at, Kiyoshi is clearly the worst of the bunch instead of being the noble one. His attraction and flirtation, then the eventual relationship with a girl in his class (named Chiyo) is all based on lies that he continues and worsens over the course of the series. Their initial meeting is caused by her seeing his sumo eraser, which is the beginning of, what she thinks is a friendship based on a shared interest only he doesn’t have an interest in sumo. His eraser was a gift from his mother, and his own internal monologue laments it at first, when he thinks how uncool she will think he is, thinking to himself how he doesn’t even like sumo.
This initial meeting leads to Kiyoshi not wanting to peep on the girls showers – not because all he’s thinking of is her and he doesn’t want to see anyone but her, or that he has made his first female friend and has started to grow – no, he doesn’t want to peep because he doesn’t want the other guys to see her, since she’s his now It’s just terrible.
There are some saving graces, as some of the moments make for truly funny sequences – a potential romance between Three Kingdoms Otaku and Kiyoshi is hilarious, Hana’s drastically different innocent girl appearance and her extreme martial arts punishments make for fantastic slapstick moments, and just, in general, the beatings laid out onto the boys can be very funny – Meiko’s arm wrestling sequence will have any viewer in fits of laughter, for instance.
