The Machine Girl

Yoshihiro Nishimura’s latest gore-fest looks set to raise the bar in the exploitation market, with swords, cops and mutants galore

have to admit, a lot of the big 90s Japanese horror movies left me cold. You know the ones. Most of them were remade for the US market, and they often involved a vengeful spirit stalking the living through some piece of seemingly innocuous modern technology. Even the Ringu movies - which won a loyal cult following at home and abroad - just seemed a little dull and convoluted to me.

Which brings me to the latest slice of Japanese horror to hit our screens - the fantastically titled Tokyo Gore Police. Trailers for Yoshihiro Nishimura’s latest began to leak onto the internet in early May, via the always informative Twitch.net, and each successive trailer is serving to make this insane-looking exploitation flick seem more and more like essential viewing.

Obviously influenced by such low budget auteurs as Herschell Gordon Lewis (Blood Feast, The Gore Gore Girls), and
Andreas Schnaas (Violent Shit 1-4) - as well as seemingly taking some homegrown inspiration from the Yokai Monsters series - Tokyo Gore Police mixes cheap-looking gore effects, improbable plotting, and some breathtakingly imaginative creature effects. The plot (as described on the official site) revolves around Ruka, a samurai sword wielding female cop (played by Audition’s Eihi Shiina) and her attempts to track down Key Man, a mad scientist who has flooded Tokyo with all kinds of bizarre mutants. Ruka and Key Man, however, share a vendetta against the Tokyo Police, who murdered their respective fathers in the past. So we’re talking sword wielding cops, mad scientists, mutants and revenge. Sounds like a perfect Saturday night to me.

As with most films of this nature, the plot seems secondary to the visuals, and so far the trailers are promising us a slick, vile, silly and totally over the top feast for the eyes. Look out for the barmy crocodile woman in the second trailer. Tokyo Gore Police is the brainchild of the same team (director Nishimura and production company Fever Dreams) that gave the world the frankly astonishing Machine Girl. That one was the story of a schoolgirl who rebuilds herself as a cyborg assassin to take revenge on the yakuza who destroyed her life…

There is no official release date for Tokyo Gore Police, but already it is the talk of the horror movie fan sites. I’d say it’s about time to start drooling in anticipation now.

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by Peter Martin

Forget about a blood bath, this movie features enough red syrup for a blood flood. Maybe you saw Rose McGowan in Grindhouse and thought, ‘Pretty good, but not enough severed limbs and geysers of blood. And wouldn’t it be cooler if she had a machine gun arm instead of a leg, and it had a chainsaw attachment?’ Well, have I got a movie for you!

Noburu Iguchi’s The Machine Girl, which was released on DVD last Tuesday, features copious spraying fountains of blood and dozens of detached body parts. Add ninjas, yakuza, a flying guillotine and a drill bra to your basic ‘revenge for the murder of an innocent loved one’ formula, and I think you already know if this movie is up your alley.

Scott W. pointed to the trailer over at Twitch last year and, truthfully, nearly all of the movie’s best bits are highlighted in that two-minute blast of gore. But, really, if you’re a fan of this kind of stuff, you’ll want to see all the action sequences in their complete, unrated, unadulterated, possibly nauseating glory. Watching the entire movie also makes it abundantly clear that the filmmakers did indeed have their tongues planted firmly in cheek. After all, you can’t slice up this much latex and spill this much blood without having a demented sense of humor, can you?

The Machine Girl starts by showing Japanese schoolgirl Ami (Minase Yashiro, making her acting debut) in spectacular action, annihilating a gang of schoolboy thugs, and then rewinds six months to tell her origin story. Ami and her brother Yu are teen orphans; their parents were accused of murder before killing themselves. Yu and his best friend Takashi are killed by arrogant teen gang leader Sho Kimura (Nobuhiro Nishihara); his parents (Kentaro Shimazu and Honoka) are maniacally protective yakuza. Ami swears revenge, loses her arm to the yakuza, and teams up with Takashi’s mom Miki (Asami), whose husband builds Ami a new machine gun arm.

The pace rarely flags, and if you get bored you can just fast forward to the gore, but the dramatic scenes are well-designed to establish the right tone and provide context for the explosions of viscera.

Tokyo Shock’s DVD looks good for a movie that was probably shot on video. If you have an irrational fear of subtitles, you could wuss out and listen to the English dub, but the Japanese-language version is much stronger. Both Japanese and English tracks are available in DD 5.1 and DD 2.0. The English subtitles are well-timed and easy to read.

“Behind the Scenes of Machine Girl” is a decent 10-minute promo piece with sound bite interviews and production footage, but no details on any of the gore effects. Neither do we get to hear anything extensive from writer/director Noburu Iguchi. The original trailer is included, as well as trailers for Heroes Two, Death Trance, Lone Wolf and Cub (TV series) and Zebraman.

The Machine Girl is one of those movies that is successful only because it tries to be bad. (Remember Snakes on a Plane?) Of course, that doesn’t make it good. Ninjas, flying guillotines, drill bras, a girl with a machine gun for an arm — how could you not want to watch this movie after viewing the trailer? Unfortunately, Girl i s also one of those movies with a trailer that shows all the best parts, rendering everything in between underwhelming by comparison.

Want to have a good time? Don’t watch the trailer, gather a bunch of friends, and sneak some forties into this movie. The trailer spoiled all the best parts for me, but I can certainly imagine how outrageous this movie would’ve been had I walked into it blindly. The conundrum here is that most people probably would have no interest in watching this movie without seeing the trailer. And if you have seen the trailer, well, I guess the movie is still worth watching, but I’d either try to sneak in through the fire exit or wait for it to come out on DVD.

Whew. With that said and done, Girl is a Japanese revenge fantasy that revolves around Ami Hyuga (Asami), whose brother is brutally murdered by bullies for lunch money. In a Kill Bill-like fashion, Hyuga starts hunting down his killers one by one. But when she confronts the ninja/Yakuza family responsible for her brother’s death, she’s outnumbered and captured. Rather than killing her, the family chooses to torture her, first slicing off her fingers and then her left arm. She manages to escape and seeks refuge with a friend who engineers a machine-gun arm for her to aid her in her revenge quest.

You’ll get everything you want out of a movie with this premise. It’s a 90-minute splatterfest with enough blood spraying to fill a swimming pool. The bad guys are so bad they’re not just senseless killers; they’re also necrophiliacs. It’s always fun to see how far the Japanese will go with the bizarre and the grotesque, and clearly in this movie there’s no limit line.

Director Noboru Iguchi made a wise decision by not taking the movie seriously. The over-the-top visuals and cheesy lines like “What would Mom and Dad say, before they killed themselves over murder allegations?” make it clear this movie is a big joke aimed to amuse in the cheapest ways possible. Takashi Miike made the mistake of trying to make a serious movie out of Ichi the Killer, which was about a sexually repressed man who fights with blades that come out of his shoes. That movie is as repugnant as Gi rl but is lacking the laughs, which makes it feel more like you’re watching a snuff film. Awkward.

Aka Kataude mashin gâru.

Reviewed at the 2008 Hole in the Head Film Festival.

Reviewer: Brian Chen

So anybody viewing this product already knows what they should expect. I mean, look at the DVD art… you’re not going to get oscar-winning cinema here, but what you will get is some of the more violent, gory, gruesome and action-filled movies i have ever seen. We all know about Ichi the Killer (Unrated Edition) and Riki-Oh - The Story of Ricky and i think this could be lumped into the same category. Totally over the top action and violence to see how far the creators can go. So down to MACHINE GIRL specifically. Acting and overall plot were pretty god considering… A young girl’s brother and his friend are killed by a gang of high-school aged yakuza and she seeks revenge, only to get her arm chopped off in the process. She finds herself at the parent’s house of the other kid who was killed and they nurse her back to health. They also make her a gigantic machine gun arm just in time to have ninjas show up to make use of it. The father is killed and “Machine Girl” and the mother of the other dead boy basically go out to seek revenge on the rest of the family. EXTREME violence ensues throughout - holes blown in people’s head, chests; decapitations; drill-bras; limbs chopped off; bodies cut into pieces, Kill Bill, Volume 1 style blood-sprays - the works. I was surprised to see that the special effects were for the most part top notch in the old-school manner. Most were all practical effects and all worked - even if they were a lil cheesy, i think it worked for the movie considering it was all that way. This will be a great movie to add to a gore-hound’s collection, or those who are fond of grindhouse-revival cinema. I’m proud to add it to my collection (of over 850 titles) and can’t wait to show it off to my friends who could stomach it… lol

The Machine Girl is available right now on Amazon

It’s Five Minutes Of Madness In The TOKYO GORE POLICE Trailer!

Strap yourselves in, boys and girls, because things are about to get very, very bloody and very, very strange.

The creative team behind The Machine Girl is back together for Tokyo Gore Police, a cult action-horror starring Audition‘s Eihi Shiina as a cop forced to battle off a swarm of hideous mutants spawned by a man made virus. Machine Girl effects guru Yoshihiro Nishimura takes the helm for this one, working from a script by the writer Uzumaki while Versus star Tak Sakaguchi handles the action sequences, all of which means this thing has cult credentials like nobody’s business. What it also has is an unstoppable string of wildly over the top creature and gore effects washed down by buckets and buckets of blood.

If you’ve been waiting to get a look at this your wait is over. The first trailer debuted at the recent Yubari Fantastic Film Festival and the producers of the film have been kind enough to give Twitch an exclusive first look at that same trailer, all four minutes and forty nine seconds of it. It starts off fairly straight before building to a fever pitch and, good news for fans, as insane as this trailer is it doesn’t spoil the biggest shots of the film. Madness, I say. Madness.

You’ll find the trailer in the Twitch Player below the break, hit the link below for behind the scenes stills and watch for an interview with Nishimura in these pages soon.

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