Recently, I've been on an 80's anime kick, basically just finding the most obscure stuff and giving it a watch:
Goku - The Midnight Eye
Another 80's masterpiece from the king of anime trash: Yoshiaki Kawajiri [Cyper City Oedo, Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, Ninja Scroll] and based on a series from the creator of Space Adventure Cobra. Goku is a cool detective who gets drawn into the deaths of his former friends on the police force, which all tie back to this bad guy who kills people with crazy hypnotism. Over the course of this, Goku gets one of his eyes replaced with this cybernetic eye that can hack any computer and tell him that there's poison on this woman's lips. And it's all set in some dark, cyberpunk world heavily inspired by Blade Runner.
Capricorn
Breezy bit of fantasy fluff from sometimes hentai artist Jouji Manabe [Outlanders, Caravan Kidd, Drakuun]. There's really not much to it, unfortunately, as it's too many ideas and too much story crammed into too little time. That's a common problem in these old 80's OVAs. And this one doesn't even really have any decent animation to fall back on. It's not bad, I guess, but not particularly interesting either.
Girl Detective Club
Another example of an 80's OVA that would have made a decent series but doesn't work with too well in the one-shot format. Here, three girls get involved in a plot by the superintendent of their private girls school to steal a crazy spaceship-looking weapon developed by the father of one of the girls. There's way too much that needs to be established and developed for that to really work but isn't because they don't have any time. It jumps between goofy and oddly dark for a while and then ends with a giant explosion. Animation is pretty flat, for the most part.
Prefectural Earth Defense Force
A group of dumb aliens [maybe they're aliens, it's hard to say] are intent on taking over the world by starting with a rural prefecture [just like Excel Saga!]. It's all just pointless fluff, but has a good sense of humor and some really nice animation. Basically, the titular PEDF are the three sole members of the local highschool baseball team and they sort of get paired up with a guy who got transformed into a robot by a crazy doctor and the aliens are basically incompetent and incapable of doing anything remote threatening. The content works better in this format since it never takes anything even remotely seriously. The only downside is that it, unlike the others, actually makes you wish there was a lot more.
