Rating: **
Review Date: 2/6/00
Divided into three installments.
Based on a Japanese video game, Variable Geo is a popular fighting tournament to determine who is the toughest waitress in the world. Yes, this is a fighting waitress film. But there's more to it than that. The winner wins money and real estate, while the loser is publically humiliated by being stripped naked before the crowd. Such a plot device could only be borne of the depraved wet dreams of adolescent boys, but surprisingly, it's not nearly as bad as you would expect. Our heroine is Yuka, whose combat expertise comes not from her physical strength, but from her strong spirit and compassion for others. As she puts it, "I've always believed that combat creates mutual understanding and communicates feelings." No wonder women scare me so much... Anyway, much like "Natsuki Crisis," all of the fighting serves as intimate female bonding, and all of the girls that Yuka defeats become her closest friends. Must be a chick thing. Strangely enough, the whole "fighting waitress" and tasteless sexploitation angle is abandoned in the first twenty minutes as a more serious problem arises. Yuka's best friend, Satomi, has fallen into the clutches of an evil entity and it's up to Yuka and her newfound friends to rescue her. The animation is decent and the female character design is very good, although they all seem to have laughably large breasts. A guilty pleasure for those of us who like to watch cute anime girls beat each other senseless.