So, let me see if I got this straight—salaryman Tanaka Ouji used to be the lead singer and guitarist for a Japanese "hard rock" metal band called Black Heaven. (Note the use of quotation marks around the words "hard" and "rock," we will be coming back to these terms later in this review.) Poor Tanaka is burdened with a dead-end job, a hen-pecking wife named Yoko and a young son who is disturbingly obsessed with a Power Ranger-esque television show; truly a horrible fate for one who used to once rock Japanese teenagers in all those hard to rock places.

Now, just as Tanaka reaches mid-life crisis age, these attractive women from outer space occasionally show up to take him away to go play guitar on their space ship so that he can power their Ultimate Weapon and defeat some other faceless aliens on the Other Side. (I'd try to explain more about this Ultimate Weapon and the other aliens who are attacking Tanaka's kidnappers/friends, but the show conveniently neglects to elaborate on these two apparently inconsequential details.)

Oh, and did I mention that his penny-pinching, guitar-hating wife's name is Yoko? Just like the woman who is accused of breaking up the Beatles? Get it? Huh, get it?

I think BLACK HEAVEN was trying to be some kind of dramatic comedy, but rather than making me laugh I simply found it laughable, and rather than making me cry in sympathy for the characters, I was weeping over the 80 minutes of my life that I'll never get back.

For me anyways, this show was about as enjoyable as watching Bon Jovi music videos from 1989. I saw the same kind of bleached hair, leather pant fashion disasters with a melodramatic, indulgent soundtrack that helped me set a land speed record reaching for the mute button on the remote. Of course, some people may find BLACK HEAVEN's mix of glam and self-pity tolerable or even appealing (see the somewhat fairly positive reviews in EX 5.4 and EX 5.7), but I am not one of those people.

The only thing I found "hard" in BLACK HEAVEN is that it was hard to look at. To call the animation half-assed might be too forgiving. The characters had clearly limited ranges of expressions, and the use of repeated footage was obvious and irritating. I would also like to nominate BLACK HEAVEN for the most lackluster space combat sequences found in 1990s anime. Showing the same ship designs a dozen times, interspersed with green and yellow lasers simply doesn't cut the science fiction mustard.

Episode 6, Walk Away, was especially difficult to endure as I was forced to watch Tanaka slowly wander around in the rain, eat an egg from a street vendor and just generally feel sorry for himself for a solid 15 minutes of the episode. I guess the show's producers wanted to reinforce the sadness that Tanaka feels just because the aliens revealed that they don't really want to hear his songs, they just want his "sound" to power their Ultimate Weapon (Episode 5, These Are the Days). In fact, the producers want to reinforce this so much, they make us watch Tanaka mope for a quarter of an hour then they give us another five minutes of moping flashbacks in this very same episode. Even if the show had made me care a whit about Tanaka, I still would have found this to be too much of a bad thing.

If I had anything positive to say about the episodes on this disc, it is that Episode 7 (In Need) at least featured a handful of interesting camera angles and some inventive usage of shadows and colors for dramatic effect. Unfortunately, this visual ingenuity is undercut by the banality of the storyline as we get what's supposed to be an insight into Tanaka's sexuality (space groupies, anyone?) Even the fan service in BLACK HEAVEN is half-baked.

In my opinion, BLACK HEAVEN rocks only in the sense that if you're on a boat, and it's rocking, you get seasick. The cover of the DVD actually bears a sticker bragging how it features John Sykes' song "Cautionary Warning." Somebody missed the implicit irony of this notice in that mentioning a member of Whitesnake might in fact discourage people from viewing this disc. And if you do watch these episodes, be prepared to hear this "Cautionary Warning" more times than I could bear to count. It's not only the opening song, it's the "sound" Tanaka has to play when activating the Ultimate Weapon.

I do want to admit that there was one bit of music that did rock my world in BLACK HEAVEN. The ending credits feature a jazzy, funky little number sung by Kanaka Riyu that gives you a breathless look inside the flitting thoughts in one woman's head. This nifty, completely non-rock, song was like a breath of fresh air at the close of each episode, but perhaps my appreciation of it was colored by the fact I was glad the episode itself was over.

BLACK HEAVEN strikes me as the kind of anime Beavis and Butthead would create if they were given a budget and access to some old hair band albums. Adolescent and indulgent in terms of plot, with pathetic animation and nauseating music, I personally found these episodes of BLACK HEAVEN to be utter hell.

One last complaint: why in tarnation is this DVD entitled Space Truckin'? It had absolutely nothing to do with trucks, and precious little to do with space either.