At the end of the second millennium Japan has emerged as the world's foremost economic superpower and consequently as the primary target of terrorism. To combat this growing wave of attacks Japan has formed the Special Security Forces, an independent unit of hard-core badasses who act not only as cops, but also as judge, jury and (very frequently) executioners.

The worst of these terrorist groups is the Red May, communist insurgents attempting to destroy the institutions of capitalism and government. Their leader, Suyama, has been arrested overseas, and along with his chief aide Tachihara, is returning to Japan to be turned over to SSF custody. When his plane lands at the airport, the fit hits the shan, so to speak.

Despite the best efforts of SSF chief Taki, Red May agents pull off a daring rescue of their returning leaders, but Tachihara immediately murders Suyama and takes over the sect. No sooner does he attempt to resume his mad bombings than the SSF's top agent, Raiden, and his new partner, Angel, are hot on his tail with motorcycles screaming and guns blazing. Tachihara and his men riddle Raiden with gunfire. Angel, a shoot first, shoot last, shoot in between and cuss like a sailor while doing it vixen, is so distraught that she momentarily slows her motorcycle to call an ambulance before kicking the pursuit into high gear.

She catches up to a few of the escaping terrorists only because they've already been eviscerated.

The war between the SSF and the Red May has erupted, but both are now under attack from shadowy, unknown, forces. Inspector Taki suspects that greater powers are behind the Red May when his political overseers and their corporate lords suddenly become very interested in Taki's unit. Meanwhile members of the Red May keep turning up as mangled corpses. And speaking of corpses, Raiden's body has disappeared from the street where Angel left him gasping for life.

When SSF agents Hacker and Peace capture Red May leader Tachihara during another bombing attempt, Taki, feeling threatened from all directions, breaks out the truth serum to get some answers about who is really behind the Red May.

The Red May are holed up in an office-building, and Angel joins the SWAT units going in to get them. Once in the building Angel and the cops completely lose control of the situation as a pyrokinetic child and her teleporting, telekinetic companion unleash a serious bloodletting.

Only the intervention of a mysterious, masked, supercyborg saves Angel from a confrontation with the deadly telekinetecist Osura.

Osura, a longhaired, leather wearing, telekinetic, terminator; Freya, a soft-spoken, preteen, walking incinerator; and Lucifer, a mind-raping psychic-cyborg/Scandinavian bombshell, call themselves the Hunters. Taki surmises that the Hunters were sent by Red May's hidden sponsors to dispatch with the terrorists before the SSF could arrest and interrogate them. The sole surviving member of Red May is the former leader Tachihara who has thus far resisted the truth serum. The gory ease with which the Hunters drove Red May to extinction has the SSF sweating bullets, so Taki wastes no more time getting straight up medieval on Tachihara.

Meanwhile Angel pursues her savior from the office-building conflagration. The motorcycle-riding black knight turns out to be her former partner Raiden. He takes Angel back to Ichihara, a brilliant scientist who kidnapped and rebuilt Raiden's body at his Cybergenesis laboratory. Ichihara insists that in order for the SSF to combat the powerful forces mounting against them, they will need greater power than a human body can contain. If Angel could see the armada of SWAT officers now descending on SSF headquarters at the behest of Taki's loathed political overseers, or the abundance of ordinance expended in the ensuing clash, she would have to agree.

The SSF members who survived the SWAT onslaught race to reconvene with Angel and Raiden at Ichihara's laboratory. Their former arch nemesis Tachihara is now the only witness who can save them by incriminating the politicians and businessmen who sponsored Red May for their own nefarious purposes. Which is why those politicians and corporate lords now sic the military Special Forces on Cybergenesis, and send the Hunters after the SSF agents transporting Tachihara to Cybergenesis.

When Hacker and Peace, with Tachihara, are intercepted by Lucifer, not even Angel's timely intervention can avert their suffering. But Osura and Freya are less sanguine about massacring cops than they were about terrorists. When Hunter turns on Hunter, the havoc escalates.

The military Special Forces assail Cybergenesis by the truckload, and Raiden can only make mincemeat of them by the carload. Fortunately Angel pitches in and the death of young Freya at Lucifer's hands has spurred Osura to join our heroes as well. Taki continues to unearth indications of massive corruptions, crime, and treason on the part of the evil masterminds, but it will do him little good if they all die.

In that regard, the Special Forces attempting to raze Cybergenesis are less of a worry than the lone figure on a motorcycle not too far behind them and closing fast. Raiden may have whipped the military like a chef making mousse; but when Lucifer arrives, cyborg savagery of Vesuvian proportions erupts.

Despite a Herculean effort, Raiden has not stopped Lucifer's approach. Knowing how terribly outmatched she is, Angel straps on some body armor and steps up to the plate with Osura to give the proverbial immoveable object a taste of some irresistible force. Lucifer and Raiden have exchanged grievous bodily harm, and the battle becomes a chase, then a hunt, then a trap as it rages towards its inescapable conclusion.

"Angel Cop" spends no more time on character development and nuance than is absolutely necessary to set up each outbreak of mayhem. For the first four episodes, director Ichiro Sakano's straightforward storytelling, quick pacing, and a steady stream of new threats, and new revelations, organize the constant carnage into a comprehensible story. The final two episodes increasingly rely on tired devices like villains spontaneously rattling off explanations of their motivations and plans; but as the quality of the narrative degenerates, the breadth of bedlam and butchery build steam.

The plot itself doesn't break any new ground, but it also avoids, for a while, the predictability of a generic good v evil action series. Continual introduction of new groups of combatants - along with betrayals and conflicts of interest within each group- ensure that opponents in the last battle may well be allies in the next against an even greater enemy or in pursuit of a more desperate objective. Thus Inspector Taki may conduct a manhunt for Tachihara on orders of his superiors in one episode, lie to those same superiors while he tortures Tachihara in the next, and rely on the terrorist as his only weapon against his own former employers soon thereafter. Nonstop progress in the story and never falling into static or status quo situations distinguishes frequent violence from repetitive violence.

In episodes five and six the story grinds to a halt. At that point the villains are the villains, the heroes are the heroes and all previous plot complexity and progress boils down to let's fight, last man, woman, or cyborg, standing wins.

While Angel Cop has its flaws, it undeniably has its cheap thrills too. Fans of the "Ninja Scroll"/ "Fist of the Northstar" school may particularly enjoy watching Lucifer's victims writhe and gasp while she inserts her fingers into their skulls and commands them, "Let me rape your mind." Fans of unintended irony may prefer hearing Osura swear that his mission is to, "End the senseless violence," before telekinetically seizing a copper pipe and treating a man's head like an overripe tomato on a wiffle-ball tee.

Most of the design work in "Angel Cop" strives for a relatively realistic look. The city, the characters, the clothing, and the armaments aren't exaggerated or fantastic, they look like a normal city, normal people etc. Only after Raiden shows up rebuilt as a cyborg with tricked out weaponry, and the Hunters with their psychic superpowers join the action, does Sakano begin to indulge in increasingly stylized imagery. The characters continue to look basically like people, but the ways they find to render each other corporeally irrelevant become more extreme. Sakano and his colleagues depict much of the violence quite graphically. By the end of the series bullet wounds send geysers of blood further, limbs seem more prone to detachment, and gravity seems to have less and less effect on the flying detritus of flesh. The final series of battles between Lucifer and Raiden, Angel, and Osura, truly revel in prolonged mutual mutilation.

Any series with primary characters named Lucifer and Angel aspires to have a meaningful subtext, but "Angel Cop's" subtext isn't worth reading. Most of the characters are caricatures, including an unbalanced scientist who cackles loudly and proclaims, "I am a genius," and a politician who is (gasp!) secretly greedy and corrupt (say it ain't so). The title card reading, "Angel Cop" at the opening of each episode is lettered as if painted in spattered blood. By the end, everything else in the series has been too.