The Machine Girl

Variety Review of the machine girl

Kataude mashin garu (Japan)
A Fever Dreams presentation of a Tokyo Shock Original, Nikkatsu, Fever Dreams production. (International sales: Nikkatsu, Tokyo.) Produced by Yoko Hayama, Yoshinori Chiba, Satoshi Nakamura. Executive producer, John Sirabella. Directed, written by Noboru Iguchi.

With: Minase Yashiro, Asami, Kentaro Shimazu, Honoha, Taro Suwa.

By RUSSELL EDWARDS
Shameless gore, gallows humor and guilty pleasures are the byproducts of a mechanical plot and impressive helming in the schlocky Japanese low-budgeter “The Machine Girl.” Already revered for outrageous efforts like “Sukeban Boy,” director Noboru Iguchi meets all the Nipponese extremist standards with this revenge yarn about a machine gun-limbed schoolgirl who takes on the yakuza. Designed for a gaijin crossover audience (complete with English credits), pic has a long future in ancillary for Nipponese and international auds with a grindhouse sensibility.

When bullies kill her younger brother, schoolgirl Ami (Minase Yashiro) seeks revenge on the perps and their parents. She loses an arm during a yakuza torture session; fortunately, sympathetic motor mechanics help with a machine-gun prosthesis, and Ami turns the bloody tide. Pic shows evidence of cultural recycling, with Japanese influences on Robert Rodriguez being reconditioned for this much cheaper model. Perfs are as gaudy as the bloody special effects, though artful framing belies the idea that Iguchi has knocked out this film carelessly. Adequate tech credits show little finesse, but the target aud won’t care.

Camera (color), Yasutaka Nagano; editor, Kenji Tanabe; music, Koh Nakagawa; production designer, Yasuo Kurosu; Special Effects & Gore Effects, Yoshihiro Nishimura. Reviewed at Berlin Film Festival (market), Feb. 8, 2008. Running time: 96 MIN.

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NY Post The machine girl Review
ID you hear the one about the schoolgirl who loses her left arm in a fight with mobsters and has it replaced by an eight-barrel machine gun (shades of Rose McGowan in “Grindhouse”), which she uses to exact vengeance on the bullies who killed her brother and his best pal?

So goes “The Machine Girl,” by Japanese schlockmeister Noboru Iguchi.

But there’s more: Nonstop violence, gallons of spurting blood, outrageous humor (a kitchen scene is a hoot), extreme vomiting, a drill bra, human sushi and tempura, and other perversity.

Iguchi, who has a well-deserved reputation for outrageousness, never allows this low-budgeter to take itself seriously. Viewers who take the same approach will have a kick-ass time – if they have a strong stomach, that is.

In Japanese, with English subtitles. Running time: 96 minutes. Not rated (violence)
V.A. MUSETTO

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.

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

Fight scenes featuring beautiful Asian women with machine guns are sexy, scary, and fetishistic. If you’re in San Francisco in June, you’re in luck—you can get a double dose of ass-busting Asian women at the Another Hole in the Head horror movie fest, where two crazy, ruthless Oriental beauties battle evil in a cumulative three hours of gory revenge and fantastical sci-fi crime-fighting. The Gene Generation and The Machine Girl are two completely different kinds of movies—one is American sci-fi, one is a low-budget Japanese gory B-movie. But when stripped of their decor, there are a lot of common themes and subtexts.

The Gene Generation is a cultish movie about a dark, crime-ridden future. Think Blade Runner meets Ghost in the Shell. Singaporean movie director Pearry Reginald Teo draws a scenic dystopia, and Bai Ling stars as Michelle, a hot, soulless assassin who just wants to get out of the creepy hell she and her brother live in. But her brother, Jackie, keeps gambling away her hard-earned cash. One day, Jackie buys a weird mutant glove with tentacles (“A Chinese finger trap!”) which turns out to be a unidirectional biological transcoder that reconfigures a person’s DNA and could potentially end disease—or wipe out mankind. As usual, Michelle has to slaughter many people to get her brother out of trouble. Her performance and hotness are mesmerizing, even if you’re just watching her walk around her blue-and-green-hued apartment in her black leather strappy shorts and holster. Michelle was probably born a badass; we don’t know anything about her past, and she lives in a totally fictional future world.

The director of The Machine Girl, Noboru Iguchi, is best known for making provocative porn featuring lesbians and skatology. Ami is played by Minase Yachiyo, a swim suit model, and her partner-in-crime, Asami, is played by a well-known porn star with dozens of titles. This movie was made only for a US Release; porn stars in violent B movies don’t always make it big back home, but busty Asian women fighting against ninjas and yakuza—well, there is apparently a good market for that kind of stuff here.

Ami, the teenager in The Machine Girl, starts off as an ordinary girl in present-day Japan. She plays basketball at school and, like Michelle, has dedicated her life to caring for her little brother. Even when the local yakuza boss’s son throws him off a balcony to his deathbed, she keeps her cool, and tries to solicit apologies from those responsible. But when a family she visits goes psycho on her and turns her left arm into tempura, Ami transforms into a blood-and-guts-loving, vengeance-seeking mean killing machine.

Here’s a quick point-to-point comparison of some of the similarities and contrasts between the two films.

Plot:
Gene: Badass older sister kills to pay the bills while her roguish little brother gambles it away and gets in trouble.
Machine: Badass older sister plots to kill everyone who was involved in the bullying death of her little brother.

Parents:
Gene: Murdered after owing too much gambling debt.
Machine: Committed suicide after being falsely accused of murder.

Weapons:
Gene: Handguns and sex appeal.
Machine: Pure vengeance and a machine gun arm made by her auto mechanic friends.

Outfit:
Gene: Sexy black leather everything.
Machine: Like a good Japanese schoolgirl, Ami is always in her uniform.

Nudity:
Gene: Yes, you get to see Bai Ling naked. And having sex.
Machine: Ironically, the pornstar-filled movie has no nudity. Just lots of spilled guts.

Cast and Crew:
Gene: Fight choreographer Jeff Imada (Fight Club, The Crow), producer Kim Winther (Mr. and Mrs. Smith)
Machine: Porn director Noboru Iguchi (Hot Girl on Toilet, Underage Girl on Toilet), actress Asami (Wild Thing x Asami, Let’s Virtual Fuck With Asami)

I was fortunate enough to watch both these movies in the past week. What did I think? Honestly, Machine made me want to throw up in my mouth, but I enjoyed the humor and the sheer insaneness of the innocent-looking school girl. And as much as I am not ordinarily a sci-fi movie nut (remember, I’m the io9-er who has never seen Star Wars), I enjoyed Gene Generation. But probably less for the sci-fi and more for the hot Asian girl. What can I say? I prefer dating guys, but I think women are easier on the eyes.

The US premiere of is on June 5, followed by the West Coast premiere of The Machine Girl on June 6, both at the Another Hole in the Head film fest. Images by Another Hole in the Head

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By JEANNETTE CATSOULIS
Published: May 23, 2008

The Japanese obsession with cavorting ninjas, cunning hardware and comely young avengers in abbreviated plaid skirts reaches some kind of climax with “The Machine Girl,” a riotous blend of arterial spray and grindhouse glee.

Playing Ami, a basketball-loving high schooler whose beloved brother is killed by bullies, the soft-core starlet Minase Yashiro blazes through the movie like a vengeful hall monitor. Seeking justice, Ami confronts the parents of the lead bully, who respond by pan-frying her forearm — an extremity that will later be replaced by a machine-gun prosthesis. Like Rose McGowan’s character in “Planet Terror,” Ami is retrofitted for revenge.

Written and directed by Noboru Iguchi, “The Machine Girl” plays to the balcony with schlocky effects (the camera lens frequently suffers collateral splatter) and visible roots (a terrifically cheesy 1970s title sequence). As Ami tackles a bewildering array of adversaries — including a bunch of bereaved parents known as the Super Mourner Gang — faces are flayed and eyeballs impaled in an escalating rush of inventive mortifications.

Offering her fans only a teasing glimpse of pristine white panties, Ms. Yashiro remains aloof from the screenplay’s sleazier moments. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for the movie’s scariest villain, a yakuza mom only Tarantino could love. What she does with her bra is worth the price of admission alone.

THE MACHINE GIRL

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.

Written (in Japanese, with English subtitles) and directed by Noboru Iguchi; director of photography, Yasutaka Nagano; edited by Kenji Tanabe; music by Koh Nakagawa; production designer, Yasuo Kurosu; visual effects supervisor, Tsuyoshi Kazuno; produced by Yoko Hayama, Yoshinori Chiba and Satoshi Nakamura; released by Media Blasters Releasing, Fever Dreams and Tokyo Shock. At the Two Boots Pioneer Theater, 155 East Third Street, at Avenue A, East Village. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Minase Yashiro (Ami Hyuga), Asami (Miki Sugihara), Ryosuke Kawamura (Yu Hyuga), Nobuhiro Nishihara (Sho Kimura), Kentaro Shimazu (Mr. Kimura) and Honoka (Mrs. Kimura).