The Machine Girl

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

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