Weird. Creepy. Cool. All good words to describe Iria. This anime has cool looking technology, a creepy story and some weird creatures. 

It begins with Iria rescuing two girls from a terrorist. In the process of doing that, another bounty hunter named Fugijuro comes along and steals the bad guy. It makes for a rather interesting beginning. The rest of the tale gets pretty dark.

Iria is a bounty hunter apprentice to her older brother, Gren. They don't only do bounty hunting, but I really don't understand what all they do. It seems they might be some kind of mercenary-for-hire as well. Anyway, Gren gets hired to go help a spaceship that's in trouble and he and his boss, Bob, go with Iria tagging along.

They find out that a monster known as Zeiram was being brought to their planet (I think) for either some kind of experiment or for military use. It wasn't really explained very well. For some reason, they think Zeiram is immortal and from what you see of that nasty bipedal monstrosity, they could be correct.

Bob get chomped by it in a gruesome scene and Gren sends Iria out of the ship in an escape pod while he tries to destroy the creature or the ship. The ship explodes and Iria's little ship shakes so much that she is knocked out. She ends up on a planet that must be nearby and we get to meet Kei and his friends. They're a bunch of kids (I'm guessing 8 - 13 years old) who live in the poor side of town. The rich people consider them trash and when Zeiram lands, the rich are happy to have it destroy that part of the town. 

Iria helps them, of course. Kei and the rest of those pests got on my nerves when watching the show. They were brats and didn't treat Iria very well. Anyway, Zeiram gets led to the palace, so the rich people can deal with it.

OK. I think that covers the first 2 episodes. There are 4 more. In them we have Iria searching relentlessly for her brother, who she thinks is still alive. Bob died and somehow his "essence" got put into a computer. So she finds "him" and takes him with her, after first paying a visit to the guy responsible for bringing Zeiram to their world.

Somewhere in the middle two episodes, we meet a scientist that helped study (and maybe create) Zeiram. He helps Iria and Kei (yes, he/she is now a regular) fight the critter. I think it's the 4th episode that we find out what happened to Gren, which is probably best left as a surprise. 

Finally, we get to the last couple of episodes. In them we see Zeiram has the ability to take people that it has killed and create new critters out of them that are partial clones of itself. They are butt-ugly, but not as nasty as Zeiram's mini-face. Zeiram tries to contact more of its kind with a mushroom (that's what it looked like) and Iria destroys it.

Eventually Iria overcomes Zeiram, but once again, you'll have to watch it to find out how she does it. Kei and Fugikuro also help her. 

The Good Stuff:

The Bad Stuff:

I thought this was a pretty interesting anime. It's not one that I'd watch very often, but it's not because it's bad. It's more due to the Zeiram. I just didn't like it or what it did. This is not a movie for your little brother.