Author: Jim McLennan

Yo-Yo Girl Cop

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★★★½

“Yo-yo. Girl. Cop,” said Chris, burdening those three words with sarcasm, as only she can, and giving me one of those sidelong glances, heavy with additional meaning. Hey, what can I say. This was an unexpected revival of the series, from 2006, with the lead played by pop singer Matsura. She is a wild-child coerced into undercover work by Kazutoshi Kira (Takeuchi, from Takashi Miike’s Dead or Alive trilogy), to save her mother who is being held on espionage charges in the US [in a nice touch, Mom is played by Yuki Saito, who was the first live-action Sukeban Deka, in the original TV series]. Her mission – should she choose to accept it – is to go into a high-school and uncover those behind the threatening Enola Gay website, a neo-terrorist URL that now has a counter on it, with less than 72 hours remaining. She befriends Konno Tae (Okada), the meek victim of relentless bullying, and also encounters the school’s queen bee, Reika Akiyama (Rika Ishikawa – shown right, and another pop singer, like Okada part of the v-u-den group) and her clique. Can she work out what’s going down, and pull the plug on it?

The movie has a distinctly split-personality. Early and late, it has the straight-laced but extreme camp aspects you’d expect, with much meaningful staring, po-faced declarations and radical costuming decisions. However, for most of the middle, such angles are all but discarded for an earnest examination of contemporary social realities in Japanese educational establishments, with special focus on the problem of bullying. It isn’t bad, on its own terms – and handles the dehumanizing nature of the Internet particularly effectively – yet appears to have come from an entirely different film, and the two aspects fail abjectly to mesh, resulting in a startling unevenness of tone. Fortunately, Matsura is surprisingly good in the role, with a gutter-mouthed toughness quite at odds with her background in the entirely artificial world of J-pop idols.

Fukasaku’s father was the director of the infamous Battle Royale, a film still unreleased officialy in the US, but the son brings an entire bag of other influences to this work. There’s the ticking clock intertitle of 24, the Bond-inspired opening credits, Hannibal Lecter’s mask, used to restrain our heroine before her recruitment, and a good chunk of the central plot appears borrowed from Heathers – or, probably more likely, Suicide Circle [a.k.a. Suicide Club, a film most renowned for its opening scene]. When it moves onto its own territory, this is somewhat less effective: if Fukasaku had decided whether or not he was going for serious drama [and given the yoyo-esque aspects and its ancestry, I’d have recommended going with “not”], then the results would likely have been better. Instead, you get something that, while having its moments, won’t quite satisfy trash fans like ourselves [though it wasn’t as bad as Chris feared], and anyone else will likely give this a wide berth.

Dir: Kenta Fukasaku
Star: Aya Matsura, Riki Takeuchi, Yui Okada, Shunsuke Kubozuka

Sukeban Deka 2: Counter-Attack from the Kazama Sisters

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★★½

Perhaps the most startling thing here is the amount of political subtext, albeit likely somewhat unintentional. Saki Asamiya (Asaka) is part of the student police force, but feels they are overly brutal, beating anyone who “isn’t a straight arrow”, to quote Asamiya. This leads her to quit, heading off for a spot of slow-motion horse-riding more befitting a feminine hygiene commercial. However, she returns, teaming up with her sisters, when she discovers that her erstwhile colleagues are staging terrorist attacks, and blaming them on a group called the Outcast League, a with the aim of strengthening their position and gaining even greater powers. Asamiya joins the League, only to find the full force of the law now turned on her.

From a post-9/11 and Patriot Act world, this has acquired a weird resonance that, presumably, was nowhere in the creators’ minds at the time. This reminds me somewhat of Demolition Man, in which Stallone teamed up with those beyond the pale, to take on the authorities; here, the head of the League is a drug-dealer; that he is portrayed even vaguely sympathetically, is remarkable for this kind of movie. Unfortunately, the other aspects of the film are a great deal less interesting, and Asaka’s deficiency as any sort of credible action heroine are painfully obvious – she doesn’t get to do very much except look stern and repeat the same yo-yo throw over and over again. I was amused by the scene where she and her sisters are tagged with grappling hooks, swept off a balcony and towed along a river for a bit, before Asaka somersaults out of the water to land – completely dry – on the deck, to battle the bad guys with highly-mediocre martial-arts.

The movie also slows to a crawl for about twenty minutes after she teams up with the League, though Things do perk up somewhat down the stretch, with the student cops launching an assault on the Outcast League compound [shades of Waco here!], starting with water hoses and escalating up to a flamethrower-equipped tank, against which our heroine’s yo-yo proves ineffective. However, she escapes and has to catch a lift from a conveniently passing Kodak blimp – no, I couldn’t make this kind of stuff up – in order to stop another of the fabricated terrorist attacks. There, we learn the answer to the burning question of the day, “Is it possible to bring a light-aircraft down, using only a yo-yo?” Though if you’ve read the synopsis to the previous movie, you are probably a good way along towards working out the answer.

Dir: Hideo Tanaka
Star: Yui Asaka, Kosuke Toyohara, Minako Fujishiro, Yuma Nakamura

Sukeban Deka: The Movie

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★★★

This film was made between season two and season three of the television series, and represents a passing of the torch from Saki, SD #2 (Minamino) to SD #3 (Asaka), in preparation for the upcoming TV show. Saki has just about given up her life as a detective, but finds herself dragged in when she, literally, bumps into someone on the street. He turns out to be an escapee from Hell Castle, a reform school for wayward kids on an island near Tokyo, and she discovers that Principal Hattori (Ibu) is training the pupils to be a brainwashed army for an upcoming coup d’etat [the word is exactly the same in Japanese, incidentally]. She goes to her bosses with the information, but the investigation is quickly killed from above, for reasons I’m sure you can guess. So, it’s up to Saki to put together a team, sneak onto the island, rescue the inmates and stop Hattori. He turns out to be a nemesis from the TV show, though that back-story will, for obvious reasons, be lost on the vast majority of Western viewers.

It’s entertaining enough, with some great moments: probably none quite surpasses the one where the girls stealthily make their way, by rubber dinghy, onto the island, and remove their camouflage to reveal… their sailor-fuku school uniforms, a moment of beautiful surrealness – more of this would have been welcome. Almost at the same level is the sequence where our heroines apparently decide to have a meeting in a gravel-pit and are attacked by a helicopter, which they have to fend off by yo-yo. The martial arts of Minamino are nothing too amazing, though she performs credibly enough, and Tanaka at least keeps the camera in one position, and lays off editing the fights with a weed-whacker [even if this may simply be a result of the era, rather than a conscious stylistic decision]. Also worth noting, the manga creator, Wada, cameos as a street yo-yo seller.

The main weakness is that the movie doesn’t really seem too concerned about giving any of the girls much personality – it compares badly in this area to something like the Charlie’s Angels film [in honour of which, I almost titled this piece, “…and then there’s the yo,” but thought better of it!]. This is perhaps a function of its origins on television: with the characters already established there, the makers may not have felt there was much point in rehashing the territory. It’s hard to blame them for this – they likely didn’t foresee the advent of DVD, or that anyone outside Japan would ever watch the movie – yet it undeniably does hurt things, from the viewpoint of a Western audience.

Dir: Hideo Tanaka
Star: Yoko Minamino, Yui Asaka, Masato Ibu

Sukeban Deka

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“The String Cheese Incident”

Rarely has the phrase, “Only in Japan,” ever been more appropriate. It’s not just the notion of a delinquent schoolgirl, taken in by the government and turned into a secret-agent of sorts. That, alone, is odd, but not particularly memorable. No, it’s that her weapon of choice is a yo-yo, which lifts this into the realm of the call-sign, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. [Contrary to popular belief, the toy was not inspired by a Phillipino weapon, as has often been claimed – the yo-yo appears on Greek vases dating from well before the birth of Christ. Never say this site is not educational.] Combine that fairly ridiculous aspect with an absolutely straight-faced approach to the subject matter, and you’ve got something which has definite potential to be a trash classic, and was obviously the inspiration for GoGo Yubari in Kill Bill.

The title, Sukeban Deka, roughly translates as “Delinquent girl detective”, and was created by manga author Shinji Wada, running in 22 volumes from January 1976 through to December 1982. It was, to some extent, a fortuitous accident: the publisher was expecting a detective tale, Wada was working on a high-school story, and the two concepts ended up getting welded together. The heroine is more or less the same in all incarnations: Saki Asamiya, the trouble-making schoolgirl who ends up in prison, and eventually becomes an undercover spy for the government, though in the manga, it seems this only takes place after a fair amount of babes-behind-bars shenanigans. For the purposes of this piece, I’ll largely be glossing over both the manga and the TV show, and concentrating on the three feature films. The first two of these were spin-offs from the TV series, and appeared in 1987 and 1988, while the third reached cinemas almost twenty years later.

However, let’s start with some discussion of the TV series, albeit only because I somehow ended up with three episodes of the second series on laserdisc, about fifteen years ago. This ran for 108 half-hour episodes over three series between April 1985 and October 1987, which starred Yuki Saito, Yoko Minamino and Yui Asaka respectively. These appear to be different characters, albeit with the same name, suggesting that “sukeban deka” is a label perhaps more akin to the “Double-0” tag, with Saki Asamiya being the equivalent of James Bond. There was apparently also a TV movie, with the catchy title of Sukeban Deka III: shôjo ninpô-chô denki: san-shimai mottomo kiken na tabi: yattsu no shi no wana, which was screened in April 1987.

This appears to be episodes 34-36 of the second series, and having watched them, I feel I can convincingly state, with little fear of contradiction, that I have little or no idea what is going on. #34 takes place mostly in the woods, with Saki apparently possessed by something that causes her to attack her friends. Also roaming the woods is a samurai, and another schoolgirl, who possesses fangs, and leaps to the attack accompanied by cat noises. There is a fair amount of largely-unconvincing fighting, ending when Saki has her memory jogged by a small trinket, apparently breaking the curse placed upon her. To say any more would probably be…unwise.

It is, however, a masterpiece of comprehensibility compared to parts #35 and #36, though I was distracted by the arrival of a family friend, and so I must admit, my attention was largely diverted. If I had to hazard a guess – and you would probably need to use pliers and a blowtorch to get this out of me – it appears to be something to do with an after-school justice club, whose activities somehow land Saki in jail by the end of the episode. There is also a metal mask of some sort, whose eyes occasionally glow red. Please note, I am simply reporting these things.

The final episode has Saki’s two friends wondering what happened to her, while Saki sits in jail and stares at the metal mask on her bed. This does not exactly make for enthralling television, in any language, but things do perk up towards the end. There’s a roof-top battle in which Saki wears the mask and, along with her two colleagues, fights the bad guys until one of them shoots hooks from his sleeves, which attach to the mask and rip if off her head, to the ground below where someone then runs off with it. I imagine it probably has some kind of power, but what it is, I’ll probably never know.

[Below, you’ll find links to further reviews, covering the first series, both the contemporary feature films, and the 2006 revival. Thankfully, these did at least come with subtitles.]

Marujas Asesinas

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★★★
“Marriage can be murder.”

This tale of a Hispanic wife whose sanity disintegrates, beginning with the murder of her husband and ending with…well, you have to see it, had me shifting somewhat nervously, as my Hispanic wife sat beside me. “These are your people,” I said. Chris disavowed all knowledge, being Cuban rather than Spanish – while I can see her point, still… Azucena (Asensi) is unhappy in marriage to a greedy builder (Resibes), but his money keeps her family afloat, so she tolerates it, finding love with his hunky employee, Pablo. However, when the money looks like drying up, she hatches a lethal plan – which would probably go better if she didn’t hire the local retard [Non-PC that may be, there’s no other way to describe him; he agrees to do the murder for 1,000 pornos and a VCR]. However, that’s just the start: Pablo has a nasty surprise, and Azucena soon finds others needing disposal. And did I mention her TV is now talking to her?

Things take a bit of time to get going, and for a while it looks like it’s going the tiresome, Almodovar route of “All men are bastards.” Fortunately, it starts to develop its own style, and Asensi is great in her role; you can see while the individual choices make sense, even if the end result is disastrous in every way. The director does a nice job mixing a number of genres: telenovelas [the Spanish soaps], black comedy and horror – particularly the final scene. Credit also to Karra Elejalde as the imbecile Lalo, who manages to bring humanity to a role which could easily no more than a stereotype. There is some unexplored potential in the idea of the heroine getting advice from her television, and that could easily have been expanded. Mind you, at 105 minutes, it is somewhat over-stretched too, and tightening of the early portions would have helped. Overall, though, the time passed quickly enough, even if I will be keeping Chris away from sharp objects for a while. :-)

Dir: Javier Rebollo
Star: Neus Asensi, Antonio Resines, Nathalie Seseña, Pere Ponce

Bitchslap trailer

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The nice people over at Bitch Slap were kind enough to send us a copy of the new trailer for their film, which explains a bit more about the plot, and has whetted my appetite to see this one even more. The release date for this one is now looking to be at some point next year, though there is as yet no exact date. Which is probably the only thing about the film that is not firm. :-) Enjoy!

Princess Aurora

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★★★★
“Hell hath no fury like a woman… Well, let’s just leave it at that, shall we?”

After inflicting Forbidden Warrior on Chris, my stock with her had slumped like Morgan Stanley. Fortunately, this Korean serial-killer flick provided a good measure of redemption. It stars in a department store, where Sun-Jung (Uhm) sees a mother abusing her young daughter, before leaving her and going into a stall. Sun-Jung shepherds the girl outside, breaks into the stall and stabs the mother repeatedly. The case is investigated by Detective Oh (Mun), who spots his ex-wife in the store security video. When bodies keep turning up, though killed in different ways, the police link the cases due to the cartoon stickers found on each scene. Oh gradually comes to suspect his wife is taking revenge on those holds she responsible – directly, or otherwise – for the death of their child, killed in a brutal kidnapping previously. Is that really the case, and if so, does he have the moral fortitude to turn in a woman he still loves as a murderer?

At first it seems that Sun-Jung is simply a psychopath, albeit one who only takes out those who (more or less) deserve it, such as the mistress she sees being unsufferably rude to a food-delivery woman. However, the truth that emerges makes her different from just being Hannibal Lecteress (which makes sense, since female psychopaths are different from their male counterparts), and director Bang brings her own female sensibility to the portrayal. There’s no doubt where the focus of the film or its sympathies lie. However, not until the final reel, after you think everything is over, is everything unfolded: it makes perfect sense, and is as chilling a denouement as you can possibly hope to imagine, with Sun-Jung not the deranged killer she appears to be.

It’s Uhm’s movie as much as Bang’s, with her performance entirely convincing: she doesn’t look like a dedicated, cruel and ruthless killer, which is exactly the best way to be [and reminds me, I’m heading off to watch Dexter in a few minutes]. Her character is absolutely sure that she is doing the right thing, leaving the audience in an interesting predicament: do they go along with this moral certainty, and effectively become an accomplice to her crimes? Usually, in the female vigilante genre, there is some scope for distancing oneself, since the victim is usually the vigilante herself. Here, the perceived moral is more altruistic, and that makes things muddier. I’d love to say more, but can’t, without serious spoilerage, but there hasn’t been a more poignant story of love for a lost child in some time. It seems no-one does revenge quite like the Koreans.

Dir: Bang Eun-jin
Star: Uhm Jung-hwa, Mun Sung-kyun

Forbidden Warrior

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★½
“Eminently forgettable. And I’ve now watched it twice, just to prove that.”

Though I couldn’t put my finger on why, large chunks of this seemed very familiar when I was watching it last night. Maybe it was just the story, cut from a template [mystical book, blah, chosen one, blah-blah, key to all power, etc.] we’ve seen a million times before. But then, when I Googled the film’s title, I realised why: at #6 was my review on our other, non-GWG site, from back in October 2005 when this came out on DVD [which I’ve just seen contains basically the same ‘blah’ line as above. Hey, if I had to watch this twice, you can read it twice. It’s the least you can do]. It made little impact on me then, and it hasn’t improved with time. The main problem is its absolute failure to stand on its own: the movie ends just as the heroine heads off towards the evil emperor who holds said mystical book, which only she can read. The aim was, apparently, to make a trilogy, but three years later, we’re still waiting for any word of the sequel. The moral is, if you’re going to make a series, either get your cash lined up in advance (as in Lord of the Rings), or make your first film capable of working by itself (see The Matrix) – otherwise, you’ll be left with something that looks utterly unfinished.

That aside, this is also not exactly enthralling. While the fight sequences are not bad, they are nowhere near frequent enough, and the first hour in particular is turgidly-paced. Seki (Matiko) is sent into exile for her own protection, as the only person standing between the emperor and world domination. There, her blind sifu (Amendola) teaches her magic and self-defense, while the emperor eventually sends out his sons to look for her – albeit after first waiting a couple of decades for her to grow up. It’s nice to see a good number of Asian-American actors getting decent roles, even if there there is a random mix of ethnicity that detracts from any real sense of time or place. It seems to be trying for some kind of Princess Bride-like vibe, yet the clunky set-up approach taken here would likely tax the patience of even a moderately-impatient eight-year old. Maybe they should have started in the middle, like Star Wars: the second episode has to be better than the first, largely because it can’t be much worse.

Dir: Jimmy Nickerson
Star: Marie Matiko, Sung Yang, Karl Yune, Tony Amendola

Chocolate

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★★★★
“I tried to come up with some cute pun on “chocolate bar” but couldn’t quite work one out.”

We couldn’t wait for this one to get an official American release, so off to Ebay we went for a copy of uncertain origin. This was something of a double-edged sword. It means we get to tell you that this is, hands down, the action heroine film of the year, with fights the like of which I haven’t seen since Yuen Wo Ping was working with Cynthia Khan in Hong Kong. However, it also means that we had to suffer the worst set of English subtitles I think we have ever seen, which appear to have been pushed enthusiastically through Babelfish several times, with feeling; this culminated in a line which will live forever in my memory. It is, and I quote the subtitle in its entirety, “Wang monkeys.” You’ll thus forgive me if the subtleties of the plot were perhaps lost on us, though by most accounts, this likely improved our enjoyment of the endeavour overall.

Zen (Vismistananda) is the autistic daughter of a Japanese gangster and a Thai woman (Siripong), who betrayed her local partner, a rival boss (Wachirabunjong), to be with her lover. When her mother gets cancer, it’s up to Zen and a chubby friend (Phobwandee) to collect on debts owed. Fortunately, Zen has a sponge-like ability to learn martial arts, be it from Tony Jaa movies on TV, or the school next door, and proves herself adept at “encouraging,” shall we say, repayments from those who are reluctant to pony up. The bad news is, this attracts the attention of her mother’s former employer, who has not forgotten the past and is unwilling to let matters lie. Which, inevitably, leads to a showdown where Zen takes on an apparently infinite line of henchmen – it’s somewhat reminiscent of Kill Bill, Volume 1, in the same way an earlier ice-house battle reminded me of The Big Boss, However, the final fight, on a series of balconies, is bone-shatteringly unique.

If Vismistananda isn’t yet quite up to the level of Jaa – there’s nothing quite like the five-minute, single shot fight scene in The Protector – she is amazingly lithe and powerful, quite belying her waif-like physique. There is some use of undercranking and wire-work that occasionally distracts from her natural talent, as much as it enhances it, and I have to wonder if the ‘autism’ plot-device was a cunning plot to cover for lack of actual actimg talent, though this angle is not played anywhere near as exploitatively as it could be. Still, if the dramatic aspects are somewhat perfunctory and uninteresting, the fight scenes more than make up for these shortcomings, and the result is quite the kick-ass action flick.

The Machine Girl

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★★★★
“If the Black Knight scene in Holy Grail was just too restrained in its use of arterial spray…”

nullIf you enjoyed Planet Terror, you’ll likely get a kick out of this, which also combines elements of The Evil Dead, Kill Bill and Tetsuo the Iron Man into what has got to be the bloodiest movie of 2008. The life of Ami (Yashiro) is turned upside down when her brother and his friend are killed by school bullies under the control of a local gangster’s son (Nishihara). Ami sets out for revenge on all those responsible for the killings. But the Yakuza don’t take kindly to this and Ami finds herself with a count of functioning limbs that ends at three. Does that stop her? Of course not. Teaming up with the late friend’s mother Miki (Asami), whose husband happens to be an ace mechanic, Ami gets fitted with a machine-gun and the pair of vengeful vixens head off for a return match.

Right from the opening scene, this makes no bones about its point: to spray as much of the red stuff over everything in sight, be that characters, the walls or even the camera itself. I never realised high blood-pressure was such an epidemic in Japan, but almost the slightest nicks here result in fountains of gore that continue far beyond what a normal circulatory system should generally produce. There’s no doubt that it’s all complete nonsense, and is intended as such, with the heroines having to fend off attacks from the Super Mourner Gang and the Junior High Shuriken Gang. And that’s before they get to the Drill Bra. That said, you will either find all of this ridiculous and stupid, or gleefully embrace this as highly entertaining excess. No prizes for guessing into which camp we fall.

Yashiro’s background is in…well, what could politely be described as ‘bikini videos’, not action movies, but her performance here is respectable enough. Probably more impressive are Asami, and Honoka, who plays the wife of the Yakuza boss. They both, too, come from the adult industry, possessing an impressive feral intensity which reminded me of Brigitte Lahaie in Fascination, and is entirely in keeping with the grindhouse feel of the entire enterprise. You could argue that the trailer contains everything you need to see, in a more concentrated form, and I wouldn’t argue with that, or if you said this was no more than a porn variant, where nothing matters except the money shots of body fluids getting sprayed everywhere. Still, we had a blast, and the film fully lives up to the sleeve description, delivering the “One-Armed Ballistic Assault Heroine” it promises, in spades.

Dir: Noboru Iguchi
Star: Minase Yashiro, Asami, Nobuhiro Nishihara, Honoka