I just watched it and enjoyed some of it. But it really didn't feel like the kind of story you should be wasting the visually homaging Universal Monster Movies gimmick on.
As someone who's brain has been thoroughly poisoned by Anime, at the beginning I quickly found myself thinking "oh it's the Battle Royal/Death Game/Holy Grail War" set up. But then also about how the thing that makes Anime with a premise like this work is that at least some of the characters are ordinary people who were drawn into it. Everyone involved being a hardened monster hunter completely changes the vibe.
This of course reminds me of Patrick Willems criticisms of the post Whedon MCU in general, the lack of the perspective of ordinary people that for example the Raimi Spider-Man movies used so well.
And doing a supposedly Classic Monster Movie throwback really draws further attention to it. When everyone in the story is used to dealing with monsters then there is no one to be quite as horrified by them as the average viewer would be. Moon Knight exists somewhat in this same corner of the Marvel Universe but it works so much better because Grant was living a pretty normal life when it started.
I also think about the rather lazy handling of Ted. Again what an Anime Protagonist might have done is taken a shot on actually being kind to the monster without already being told in advance it's actually a chill dude. That much better serves the "don't judge people by how they look" moral that is supposed to be the point of having a monster that's not actually evil.
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