The Machine Girl

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.

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