Mike Bracken’s Full Review: Machine Girl
Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie’’s plot.
TokyoShock, the Asian exploitation branch of film distributors Media Blasters, has long been known for bringing quirky and crazy Japanese films to domestic audiences (my personal favorites being the three Misa Kuroi films that make up the Eko Eko Azarak trilogy). However, for their latest offering–The Machine Girl—the company has decided to step out from their role as mere distributors and instead become producers. The end result is a creative Japanese splatterfest that has just enough heart to make up for its numerous shortcomings.
Asami is Ami Hyuga, a young high school student living alone with her brother Yu. Their parents are dead, having committed suicide after being falsely accused of committing some heinous murders. Despite this, life is good. Ami is fairly popular and a pretty decent basketball player. Her brother isn’t quite so lucky. He’s a little more geeky than his sister, and has run afoul of a gang of local bullies. If this weren’t bad enough, the parents of the head bully are also highly connected yakuza. When these bad seeds kill Ami’s brother and his best friend, she swears to get revenge—and she almost does, only the Yakuza parents eventually thwart her plan and hack off her left arm in the process. With no one to turn to, Ami finds herself teaming up with the parents of the other victim of the murder. The mother is just as gung ho for revenge, while the dad is a mechanical genius who comes up with a machine gun prosthetic for Ami’s missing arm. Reloaded, she and the mother set out to get revenge against the family responsible for the death of their loved ones. What ensues is an outrageous Japanese battle royale with enough blood, guts, and carnage to remind me of the good old days when Japanese cinema was more concerned with gore than angry dead girls.
The film takes its place in a cinematic pantheon alongside movies like Takashi Miike’s Full Metal Yakuza and Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror. It’s not quite as accomplished as either of its inspirations, but for being something of a fan-made film, it avoids many of the pitfalls that those sorts of movies often fall prey to: snarky pretentiousness, a seemingly never-ending string of obvious homages, and the constraints of a miniscule production budget. Despite this success, The Machine Girl still finds other ways to fall just short of exploitation perfection. The gore, while generally fantastic, suffers whenever a sequence employs CGI as opposed to a more traditional splatter gag. For all the blood and severed limbs on display, the film has a noticeable lack of nudity (which is an exploitation film staple). Finally, despite only running 96 minutes, some of the early parts of the film suffer from poor pacing.
Even with these problems, the film is still entertaining—provided you like the standard Japanese exploitation film elements. These invariably include ninjas, insane yakuza, girls in sailor schoolgirl outfits, attempted rape, geysers of blood from any and every wound (if someone were to get a paper cut in one of these flicks, the blood would shoot out three feet into the air and the victim would lose gallons of life fluid before the bleeding could be stopped), and crazy martial arts violence. In fact, the film opens up so strongly (with Ami facing off against a young gang and slaughtering them in increasingly more violent fashion) that it becomes that much easier to forgive the problems that follow. The Machine Girl basically shows us a few of the tricks it has up its sleeves in those first few moments, and because of that, we give it a pass whenever it slows down and wanders off course. We know what has to be coming—and we’re willing to wait because director Noboru Iguchi gave us a taste in the early going. It’s like a drug dealer giving us a free fix for our first high. He knows we’re gonna hang around and want more no matter what.
The film itself is relatively well made from a director’s standpoint. Iguchi may not be the most gifted visual stylist to ever step behind a camera, but his scene compositions are solid (if a bit basic). What he lacks in aesthetic sensibilities he mostly makes up for with sheer enthusiasm for the material. He works in homages from films like Evil Dead 2 in a way that’s somewhat obvious, but not obnoxious. You get the sense that he clearly loves these kinds of films and he’s happy to be making one. The enthusiasm is contagious.
Still, what ultimately carries The Machine Girl is the gore. I’ve already mentioned that most of the CGI effects are a bit disappointing, but there are more than enough standard gore FX to make up for it. To quote one of my idols, Mr. Joe Bob Briggs, heads will roll in this film. It doesn’t stop there, either—limbs fly (and get turned into tempura at one point) People get drilled by a bra (you have to see it to believe it), swords and shuriken fly, bullets chop people in half, then into quarters and beyond. Blood doesn’t spurt in this film, it fountains. Simply put, this is a gorehound’s wet dream. If you love your movies with a bit of the old red sauce, then you’re bound to be pleased with The Machine Girl just on the basis of the onscreen mayhem and seemingly endless supply of blood and guts.
Overall, though, the gore is just enough to get the finished product a slightly better than average grade. There’s franchise potential in Ami’s character and I wouldn’t be shocked if we see a Machine Girl 2 in the not too distant future. Given what I’ve seen in her debut outing, I’d be more than willing to see what trouble Ami finds herself in next.
