Tag: gore

Rise of the Machine Girls

  By

★★★
“Rage against the Machine Girls.”

A decade after the splattery joy which was The Machine Girl, we get this – not quite a sequel, not quite a reboot. Creator Noboru Iguchi helped on the script, but hands the directorial reins over to another, and… Well, it’s amusing and moderately entertaining, rather than the jaw-dropping and ground-breaking spectacle which was the original. Part of this is simply the passage of time: what was fresh and original at the time, has now become much more familiar. There is still no shortage of invention here, but it does seem  haphazard. It’s less a story, than a series of skits, albeit ones heavily drenched in gore – unfortunately, a lot from blood group CGI-minus.

It takes place in a futuristic dystopia, where the poor are left to sell whatever they can to make ends meet, including their children, limbs and internal organs. Sisters Ami (Nagimiya) and Yoshie (Kanon)  are both a bit short in the body-part department, but make a living as idol performers. Less the singing kind, more as combat performers, though they yearn to be one of the more kawaii (cute) variety. Yoshie moonlights as a vigilante, taking out the organ traffickers she feels responsible for her plight. This brings her the wrath of Aoyama Dharma (Negishi), leader of the local ring, who captures Yoshie. Fortunately, help for Ami is available, in the form of wandering assassin, Matsukata (Sakaguchi) , ranked the #5 hitman by his company.

There are certainly some cool moments here. The pregnant killer… though pregnant with what, I can’t even begin to describe. Or the Battle Bust Sisters, who are exactly what you think they would be from their name, e.g. one sibling’s bosom is capable of inflating into a pair of large, bullet-proof airbags as a defensive mechanism. But it never manages to gel cohesively, and I occasionally even got the feeling that new director Kobayashi was frankly bored of the whole endeavour. For instance, there’s what should have been a glorious, extended one-shot when Matsukata and Ami storm the Dharma HQ, dispatching minions with fists, swords and head-shots. But half of it is played out in fast-forward, entirely negating the point of the whole exercise.

There are some dry jabs at things like idol culture, fans being admonished pre-performance, “If you must jack off, please do so in your pocket.” [This is somewhat ironic, given the copious number of panty shots present!] It seems to lack a forceful personality at its heart, with neither of the sisters having the same presence of Ami v1.0 from the original. Negishi does deliver an enjoyably villainous performance, chewing scenery in a way that’s fun to watch. I certainly wish they had gone with a more practical approach to the effects; while some things obviously need CGI (those airbags mentioned earlier), there’s really no excuse for ever using it to fake arterial spray. It’s fun, but forgettable, and probably won’t stray across my screen again.

Dir: Yûki Kobayashi
Star: Hina Nagimiya, Hanakage Kanon, Tak Sakaguchi, Kimono Negishi

Tokyo Ballistic War

  By

★★
“Long live the new flesh.”

tokyoballisticI’m on the fence with regard to the Japanese uber-gore films, most notably, by the Sushi Typhoon studio, which have achieved renown (or infamy) of late. While some (Mutant Girls Squad) are entertaining nonsense, others (Helldriver) are pretty tedious. So, the concept of lower-budget, exploitation-er versions of these, already low-budget exploitation flicks, is a mixed blessing. Enter Zen Pictures, and their formula, which appears to consist of costumed heroines who alternately fight and get tortured. The story here is split into two volumes, but with each barely an hour long and containing plenty of filler, probably better to consider them a single, feature-length entry.

I do like the central story, which is daft as a brush, yet executed with the right level of straight-faced intensity. In order to market his half-human, half-machine cyborgs to the military, Koumoto, chairman of the Dainippon company, comes up with a cunning plan: create a set of female athletes, who will smash all existing records. However, he has forgotten the Japanese Sports Association, under chief Gondo, who don’t take kindly to these performance-enhancing shenanigans. The solution? Naturally, build their own (eco-friendly!) cyborg to fight the Dainippon team. Except, due to an administrative cock-up, the original candidate, Megumi Asaoka (Taki), is accidentally replaced by Ai Asaoka (Noda). Initially, Ai is successful, but after being captured by Koumoto, she is reprogrammed, and her friend Megumi has to battle to rescue Ai.

The first volume is significantly better, though still has its weaknesses, not the least being more evidence that crappy CGI is far less endearing than crappy practical effects – and there’s enough of both to be seen here. However, it whizzes along with sufficient energy, and contains plenty of action, to merit forgiveness for the obvious poverty-row origins, and everyone involved chews scenery to amusing effect. After the break, unfortunately, things slow down, with a pair of lengthy torture sequences which had absolutely no value for me whatsoever, and the fights seemed, to a large extent, repeats of those from the first volume. Both parts also have another severe weakness – taking an idea and running with it, well past the point where it stops being interesting. Case in point: one of the battles includes the participants each releasing a cyborg arm, which then stage their own fight, independently. For 15 seconds, it’s kinda amusing. After a minute, it’s dull. But the film keeps going far beyond that, and there are plenty of similar cases; the surgery which turns Ai into a cyborg is also depicted at far greater length than necessary. Maybe this is some Japanese fetish thing, of which I was previously unaware.

tokyoballistic2This is definitely a case where less would have been more, and with a more enthusiastic hand on the editor’s knife, this could have become a decent eighty-minute feature – and possibly an even better 50-minute one. Kamikura does often demonstrate an awareness and acceptance of exactly how ludicrous the entire scenario is, and the film is at its best when wholeheartedly embracing its own insanity. For instance, each of the cyborg athletes’ talents is influenced by their sport: Hitomi Oka is a tennis-player, so whacks people with an over-sized, pneumatic racket, and lobs exploding tennis-balls at them. Additional helpings of that kind of imaginative lunacy – and considerably less tied-up schoolgirls being prodded or whipped – would certainly have made for a more entertaining end product.

Dir: Eiji Kamikura
Star: Ayaka Noda, Arisa Taki, Masahiro Saito, Shinya Nakamura

Claymore

  By

★★★½
“Broads with swords. Really big swords. And monsters. There will be blood.”

You can almost imagine the trailer for this anime series being done by The Trailer Guy [y’know, who does all the voice-overs for Hollywood action flicks]: “In a world where demons stalked the land… One woman… Was humanity’s final hope…” The particular focus here is Clare (Kuwashima), one of 47 Claymores, an all-female sect of nomadic warriors who travel a fictional country, battling the flesh-eating Yoma, with combat abilities that border on the magical. But doing so requires them to unleash their own Yoma power, an act which runs the risk of them becoming what they hunt if they lose control. Clare rescues Raki (Takagi), who becomes her companion and cook, but out heroine has a mission of her own: hunting down and killing the Yoma who, years previously, killed her own mentor, Teresa of the Faint Smile.

This 26-episode show does not skimp on the violence, to say the least, with limb-lopping and arterial spray, both human and demonic. the order of the day, and the style is nicely mature (I’m no fan of the huge eye approach so often seen in anime, which inevitably makes me think the show is aimed at 11-year-old girls. Sailor Moon has a lot to answer for). But what worked best for me was the characterization: it’s a neat role reversal, with the taciturn warrior being female, and the clingy tag-along, male. The other members of the organization, when we meet them, are also well-drawn, with their own back stories and motivations, as well as abilities. The interplay among them is fascinating, with a strict hierarchy, which Clare threatens to up-end, due to how she became one of them.

Two-thirds through, this was poised on the edge of greatness, but it ended up falling short. The sub-plot involving her splitting from Raki, and their subsequent reunion, is poorly handled, and the series topples over into repetitious battles, with the final few 25-minute episodes little more than two long fights, with a brief pause between them. One wonders if this might have worked better in a longer format: by the time you lop off opening and closing credits and the “story so far” sequence, there isn’t a lot of room to move the story on and provide the necessary quota of action. Do not expect any resolution either: the series ends in a way that requires a second season, which hasn’t happened at this point (the manga is ongoing, I think). Still, even as someone who is nowhere near as much an anime fan as I used to be, this was not unimpressive stuff, and definitely didn’t leave me feeling like I had wasted my time.

Dir: Hiroyuki Tanaka
Star: (voice) Houko Kuwashima, Motoki Takagi, Aya Hisakawa, Hana Takeda

High School Girl Rika: Zombie Hunter

  By

★★½
“High School Girl? Check. Zombies? Check. Hunting? Not so much.”

Rika (Kudo) and her schoolgirl pal ditch education for a day and head off to a remote village to check up on her grandfather, who hasn’t been heard from for a while. But as soon as they arrive, the pair come under attack by zombies, initially spawned as the result of a euthanasia drug being tried out by the Japanese government to address the whole “inverse pyramid” thing. They do reach Grandpa’s house, but find him in the stages of advanced Alzheimer’s – at least, until Rika is bitten. Gramps removes the limb, and replaces it with one conveniently lying around, which happens to belong to a master zombie hunter. Who cares if it’s the wrong colour and incredibly muscular? With America preparing a Return of the Living Dead style cleansing operation on the area, Rika and her allies have to locate the King Zombie and kill him, before being reduced to their constituent atoms.

There are a couple of nice ideas here, so let’s get those out of the way first. The master hunter is an amusingly male version of the Onechanbara heroine, both in the cowboy hat and otherwise scanty clothing. And I liked the fact there is actually an intelligent, polite zombie thrown into the mix, who retains his fondness for humanity (or does he? For he’s still a bit bitey…). However, it’s the best part of an hour before anything approaching the title is seen, by the time Rika loses her arm, gets her new one and comes to terms with the new, strong urges to swing a sharp sword in the direction of anything lacking a pulse. When it does…it’s really no great shakes either, and the action aspects of this are absolutely no match for the likes of Machine Girl or Hard Revenge Milly.

This is, however, operating in a rather different genre, as you’d expect from the makers of the catchily-titled Girls Rebel Force of Competitive Swimmers, which occupies an uneasy middle-ground between horror and soft-porn. This is mostly horror, occasionally comedy (the Three Stooges who are also roaming the town could have taken their comic mugging and left, without doing the film the slightest damage), and the action is some way back, likely less important than the “let’s all compare our breast sizes” scene. I’m certainly not averse to horror, and on that basis, given its low-budget, it’s a harmless time-passer. But given the title, I’d have liked to see Rika do an awful lot more actual hunting of the zombies.

Dir: Kenichi Fujiwara
Star: Risa Kudo, Takeshi Yamamoto, Mai Minami, Tsugumi Nagasawa

Robogeisha

  By

★★★½
“‘I, too, have an ass-sword.’ That quote about sums this up.”

Having been largely unimpressed by Iguchi’s other work, which seemed to have little to offer except megabytes of digital blood, I likely wouldn’t have watched this except an accident involving beer and my Apple TV remote has stopped me from much of my usual viewing. I could still stream from Netflix, however, though when I saw this was dubbed in English, I almost didn’t bother. But surprisingly, this has easily the best plot of his movies, with a slyly-twisted sense of imagination that’s very effective.

It centres on sisters Yoshie (Kiguchi) and Kikue (Hasebe), the latter a geisha who is cruel and vindictive to her younger sister. They are taken by Hikaru Kageno (Saito), the scion of Kageno Steel, to his castle and inducted as recruits into a geisha army, which he is using to take out opponents to his plans for national domination. Yoshie has an innate skill for assassination, soon surpassing Kikeu, who begs Hikaru to “upgrade” her mechanically, so she can best her sister. Yoshie, to keep up, is similarly enhanced.

The scenario shifts when Yoshie is sent to take out a group of senior citizens and discovers they are the families of other members of the geisha army – far from being willing volunteers, they were abducted and brainwashed by Kageno and his father. After narrowly escaping a suicide mission, Yoshie switches sides and joins the senior citizens, who add further to her artificial armoury. It’s up to her to stop Kageno, before he can drop a massive nuclear weapon into Mount Fuji, completing his plan.

This is certainly out there, but is a good deal lighter in tone than expected, often crossing the border into an outright silliness that is actually endearing. For instance the whose “castle-shaped robot” concept is beautifully ludicrous, not least as the building rampages around, whacking building that then spurt blood, for no readily apparent reason. There’s also shades of 60’s spy thrillers like Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs in the basic concept of the geisha army, though there’s still a certain ass-fetishism which I could have done without – swords and shuriken both come flying out of there.

Complaining that this is, to quote Monty Python, “too silly,” would be missing the point, and the fight sequences are well put-together, not least when involving Kageno’s lead henchwomen, the Tengu Twins. At over 100 minutes, it is likely a little too long and these are less performances, than hangers, on which to place lurid visuals of questionable taste. However, you will want to keep watching, simply to see what the heck Iguchi will come up with next.

Dir: Noboru Iguchi
Star: Aya Kiguchi, Hitomi Hasebe, Takumi Saito, Taro Shigaki

Helldriver

  By

★★
“Conclusive proof that more is not necessarily more…”

I think I am officially over the whole Japanese uber-splatter thing. Either that, or I just don’t like Nishimura’s approach. He has been behind the last couple of examples I’ve seen (this and Tokyo Gore Police) and neither have reached the heights of te better genre entries. At 117 minutes, this is even more overlong than TGP and, to be blunt, I fell asleep before the end. Oh, there’s no lack of stuff going on, as we’ll shortly see, and certainly no shortage of arterial spray. However, neither of them make any significant impression, on either the emotional or visceral levels.

Kika (Hara) comes home to find her father being eaten by her cannibalistic mother (Shiina) and uncle; Mom has designs of dining on daughter too. However, this is interrupted by a meteor which blows right through her chest. No problem: she’ll just rip out Kika’s and stuff it into the hole. Dust, apparently related to the meteor, spawns a zombie epidemic which forces the government to wall off the top half of Japan, though the zombies grow antler-like tumours, which are much in demand for the psychedelic high they induce when ground up and ingested. Meanwhile, Kika is rescued and given an artificial heart which also powers her chainsaw-sword. She is sent into the infected zone, along with her associates, to take out her mother, who has now become the queen of the zombies.

Yeah. Like I said, it’s not short on “stuff.” However, none of this is explored in any meaningful way, and the uber-low budget ($600K) is stretched thin, with most of it going on gallons of corn syrup and obvious latex prosthetics. There’s certainly no shortage of imagination on view – witness the vehicle made entirely out of zombies – but it’s operating in a vacuum, and it may be significant that the opening credits don’t appear until 40 minutes in. The fight scenes, while plentiful, are badly assembled and rarely memorable. The length here is less necessary, and more an exercise in desensitization, and long before the final mother-daughter confrontation, the arterial spray will have lost its impact.

Dir: Yoshihiro Nishimura
Star: Yumiko Hara, Eihi Shiina, Yurei Yanagi, Kazuki Namioka

Big Tits Zombie

  By

★★½
“A better trailer than a movie.”

There seem to have been a spate of these recently. Not just zombie flicks – though there’s been no shortage of those – but zombie flicks set in or around strip clubs. This is the Japanese take, and follows more or less the expected pattern of such things, combining nudity, violence and self-awareness in varying degrees. At least initially, this is definitely leaning towards a 70’s, grindhouse aesthetic, but after a few minutes, that aspect vanishes, and never really returns. Instead, it’s a fairly straight-forward tale of a motley crew of stereotypical strippers, e.g. the money-hungry one, the intellectual one (who quotes George Bataille), who work at a pretty crap club in a spa town, but who find a tunnel leading across the street, which brings them to a book of dark magic and a well containing an apparently infinite supply of zombies.

It takes its time getting that far, and given the title, it’s a lot more restrained in terms of nudity than you might expect. It’s clearly not intended to be taken seriously, and does seem to be riffing on the genre (another of the alternate titles is Hot Spring Zombies vs. Strippers 5). At one point, a character says, “Must be a cheap movie. They’re big recently. Like some girl fighting zombies with a sword” – perhaps a reference to Onechanbara, which is also echoed in some of the costumes. But the make-up is largely bargain-basement stuff, and so are most of the FX, with obvious wires at some points, and an over-reliance on unconvincing digital work.

The real problem here, is likely that it tries to be too many things, and ends up being not all that good at any of them. It’s a fairly poor zombie flick, and certainly can’t hold a candle to the uber-gory genre entries also coming out of Japan in the past few years. As noted, it’s pretty tame for a movie set where it is, and none of the more traditional aspects of cinema (characters, performances and script) are interesting enough to make up for those shortcomings on the grindhouse front. It doesn’t exactly outstay its welcome, at a brisk 73 minutes, and can be commended for that, and certainly being aware of (and, largely, not giving a damn about) its limitations. However, like many of its kind, the sizzle is considerably better than the steak.

Dir: Takao Nakano
Star: Sola Aoi, Risa Kasumi, Mari Sakurai, Tamayo
a.k.a. The Big Tits Dragon

Tokyo Gore Police

  By

★★½
“The middle word in the title is easily the most applicable. Far and away.”

In the near-future, Japan is plagued by “engineers” – criminals who have voluntarily undergone genetic modifications, which not only mutate their bodies in bizarre ways, but give them near superpowers and the ability to sprout weapons from their wounds. To combat this, the privatized Japanese police force under their chief (Benny) has an absolutely no-holds barred policy of shoot first, ask questions… Well, don’t bother asking questions. Their top “engineer hunter” is Ruka (Shiina, whom you may recognize from Audition), the daughter of a police officer who was killed in the line of duty while she was just a young girl. She is tracking down the scientist behind the engineers, known as “Key Man” (Itao) because of the key-shaped tumours which trigger the mutations. But when they meet, he infects her – and also reveals the truth behind the deaths of both their fathers.

The most obvious parallel would by Robocop, not only in the cautionary tale of law-enforcement run for profit, but also the sardonic commercials which pepper proceeding, showing how brutal society has become [here’s an example, for a wrist-cutting knife]. It’s against this backdrop that the cold, to the point of being emotionally-dead, heroine plies her trade, troubled by a past that she can’t forget. Shiina is certainly good at that kind of role, but it’s more or less a one-note performance, that doesn’t provide much reason for the audience to empathize with her. However, I get the sense that, as far as director Nishimura is concerned, characterization is probably not quite the main thing he’s concerned with here.

That would, instead, be the splatter, which goes to a whole new level, even by the outrageous standards of the genre. The arterial spray is so copious and powerful that, at one point, an engineer uses it to propel himself about, like a haemoglobin propelled jet-pack. That pretty much sums up the tone to be found here, with body parts also flying when not attached to their owners. It’s arguably the goriest movie ever made, though I’d have to re-watch Peter Jackson’s Brain Dead before I can be certain on this front. However, there isn’t quite enough to sustain it, especially at a fairly extended running-time of 110 minutes. While there no shortage of surreal imagination on view (like the creature which has had all four limbs replaced with samurai swords), and it’s undeniably the most OTT of its siblings, this probably works better as a party tape, playing in the background for your next Halloween bash, given its apparent apathy towards more conventional cinematic attributes.

Dir: Yoshihiro Nishimura
Star: Eihi Shiina, Itsuji Itao, Yukihide Benny, Shoko Nakahara

Gothic & Lolita Psycho

  By

★★★½
“First martial arts movie where the heroine dresses like a refugee from a Sisters of Mercy concert. Er, kids, ask your parents.”

First of all, “Gothic Lolita” is a Japanese style term; Lolita fashion is based on clothing from the Victorian era, and the Gothic sub-genre is…well, suitable for a Victorian funeral, basically. Quite why heroine Yuki (Akiyama) decides to dress like this, after her mother is murdered by a group of five thugs, is never satisfactorily explained. Actually, it’s never even mentioned, putting it alongside the issue of why her father (Yanagi) is apparently a Christian priest, now confined to a wheelchair as a result of the attack. Or where Yuki is now a skilled fighter, armed with a bulletproof, lethal umbrella that can kill you in a variety of ways. Where does she get those wonderful toys, to borrow a phrase.

What matters here are her battles against the five killers, starting with a gambling den house-mother, through a lecherous and psychic teacher, up to the “big bad” (Aoyagi), the man who co-ordinated and led the attack on her parents. They’re a decidedly mixed bag. The lower tier make it clear that Akiyama was likely not cast for her fighting talents, but more to do with her being named “Best Butt in Japan” for 2007, though the film is pleasingly free of nudity. The best is probably her fight against Lady Elle (Momose), a marvellous character who comes off like a highly-caffeinated version of Elle Driver crossed with Hit Girl, complete with sparkly eyepatch and a gun that flips open into a pink mobile phone. I could have watched those two for the entire movie, bickering and brawling.

Yeah, if you hadn’t noticed, it’s more than a little like Kill Bill, though mercifully without anyone droning on about comics. The final battle isn’t quite up to the same level, and there’s a twist in the ending which is probably not necessary: it adds a level of fantasy to proceedings that goes nowhere. But despite the flaws, it remains a unique item, and if you appreciate the recent wave of Japanese hypersplatter, this is another entry you’ll enjoy in the genre, with everyone possessing appropriately-high blood pressure.

Dir: Go Ohara
Star: Rina Akiyama, Yurei Yanagi, Ruito Aoyagi, Misaki Momose

Mutant Girls Squad

  By

★★★★
“X-Men, as directed by Peter Jackson. And not LotR Peter Jackson. Brain Dead Peter Jackson.”

It makes sense that this stems from a drunken agreement between the three co-directors at a film festival, because this is the sort of film you would only make under inebriated terms, and it’s probably true to say that drunk is the best way to watch this. That’s not a bad thing per se, just that its loopy sensibilities and over-the-top antics would seem to go particularly well with a few beers. Rin (Sugimoto) hits her sixteenth birthday not too happy, being bullied at school. However, the bullies have a surprise in store, as it turns out Rin is half-human, half-Hiiko, with her father being from a mutant race with extraordinary powers. They have largely been hiding from humanity, but are now fed up of being persecuted, and under the leadership of Kisaragi (Sakaguch), are about to declare total war on us. Rin, along with Yoshie (Morita) and Rei (Takayama), are to lead the strikeforce, though Rin is less convinced over the need to target all of mankind.

This is right up there with Brain Dead in terms of the goriest movie ever, with fountains of blood, real and digital painting the entire screen, including the lens, though rarely affecting our heroine’s sailor-suit school uniform. Which, one assumes, is part of the joke, for everything about this is so amazingly excessive, it’s impossible to take any of it seriously, even as it is played completely straight-faced. The talents, for instance, include a waitress whose breasts each sprout a sword and a cheerleader, concealing a chainsaw in a place power-tools are not normally located. No explanation for any of this is ever given. It just is, and you either buy into it or you don’t. Yet there’s also a moment or two of poignancy, as Rin struggles to decide whether to align herself with a human race which has largely rejected her, or her new “family,” weird and incredibly ultraviolent as they may be.

While the gore is certainly present in buckets, as we’ve seen, that isn’t enough by itself to make for entertainment, and the insane imagination on view here is equally impressive. This is particularly true at the end, when Kisaragi reveals his final form. Let’s just say, breasts that squirt acid milk is one of the lesser of his talents. This kind of lunatic invention makes the film work, and while you undeniably need a large tolerance for arterial spray, and some of the FX are rubbery, to say the least, it is thoroughly fun schlock, unlike anything produced by even the most warped Western company.

Dir: Noboru Iguchi, Yoshihiro Nishimura, and Tak Sakaguchi
Star: Yumi Sugimoto, Suzuka Morita, Yuko Takayama, Tak Sakaguchi