Published in Weekly Shonen Jump from October 1984 to February 1985, Baoh is one of Hirohiko Araki's many pre-Jojo works and was the first to display his signiture amount of ultra violence and gore.
The OVA produced by Studio Pierrot and distributed by Toho (yes THAT Toho) in 1989 is your typical OVA that's ment to serve as a blatant ment for the manga it's based on.
Not to say that such OVAs are all terrible. In fact, the Baoh OVA is actually quite good.
Ikuro Hashizawa, a seventeen year old young man is turned into a human bio-weapon after the evil Doress Organisation infects him with a parasitic worm like creature named Baoh, which allows him to turn into a more monstrous form with superhuman strength and other abilities such as emitting corrosive substances and electrical discharge.
Ikuro manages to escape one night with a young psychic girl named Sumire and the two live on the run. The evil scientist who infected Ikuro with the Baoh parasite, Dr Kasuminome naturally isn't pleased that the product of his experiment is now roaming free and dispatches various assassins to seek and destroy Ikuro to cover his and the orginisation's tracks.
The OVA would receive praise from Hirohiko Araki as it faithfully adapted his original manga if making a few changes and omittions from the source material and felt that it was very well made.
He did however have some grievances as he felt that adapting the manga in it's entirety into a single OVA was a bit of a waste and would have preferred if it was adapted into two parts.
And to be fair to Araki, his grievances aren't wrong as the OVA does feel like it's trying to cram as much of it's source material into 48 minutes and even feels rushed at times, which is pretty much the standard for direct to video anime that is basically made to the manga it's adapting.
Inspite of it's short comings, the OVA does have a lot of good things going for it.
The story is intriguing with two very likeable lead characters that we are made to care for right from the get go while the villains who hunt them are unscrupulous to the point of being outright detestable making them the perfect baddies we love to hate while rooting for the heroes and the art style, character designs and animation are beautiful to look at.
Baoh may not be a perfect anime by any means but it's definitely a well made and well written little film that I recommend seeing, especially if you're a fan of Jojo and are interested in some of Hirohiko Araki's other works or if you're a fan of ultra violent action titles like Guyver.
