Here’s a splatter movie from the “everything including the gore-drenched kitchen sink” school of horror filmmaking. This collaboration between director Iguchi (responsible for SUKEBAN BOY, which featured a girl with two machine-gun legs) and FX man Yoshihiro Nishimura (who has since won accolades as director of the even more insane TOKYO GORE POLICE) is a riotous self-styled cult movie clearly crafted to get at least one major, universal “whoop” of fan boy joy every five minutes wherever it earns a public screening. Conscious of its own tackiness and deliberately excessive at every turn, MACHINE GIRL is the kind of movie that delivers exactly what the poster promises : conceived around the same time as the visually very similar Rose McGowan character in GRINDHOUSE, this movie exists to feature a pretty Asian girl in a fetishised schoolgirl outfit with a machine gun for an arm. And quite frankly, it doesn’t need anything else.
Minase Yashiro cuts an iconic figure in the title role of Ami, an attractive high school girl whose meek brother is constantly harangued by a callous gang of thugs and ultimately killed. The main bully is the ninja – son of a Yakuza boss, and Ami winds up being tortured to the point of losing an arm, but she refuses to become another victim. Teaming up with the genius-mechanic father of another gang victim, she constructs herself a unique weapon to replace her amputated limb and hit’s the vengeance trail.
“Torture is only truly pleasurable if you do it a little bit at a time…” MACHINE GIRL will have particular resonance for splatter fans and anyone who grew up loving uber-violent Eastern action / horror flicks featuring abysmal dubbing and worse English language dialogue. Sundry fan-pleasing elements are comfortably in place, from the outrageously sadistic bad guys (content to stab a young girl through the head, and constantly delivering ripe, leery dialogue like “It’s not often you get to pluck a flower before its fully bloomed“) to an endlessly inventive succession of creatively bloody deaths.
CGI combines with old-school gore FX to deliver a wall-to-wall array of multiple dismemberments, perforated heads, bisected bodies and, of course, many scenes of Yashiro blowing henchmen to pieces with her machine-gun arm. Iguchi particularly relishes every opportunity to show a hosepipe-like arterial spray whenever someone loses a limb, and he’s fond of reveling in gruesome absurdity (a man eating his own fingers).
It’s all so enjoyable that you don’t get much time to lament the one-joke nature of the premise or the lack of a really satisfying punch line. All that really matters is that, whenever the film threatens to get dull, someone gets chainsawed up the middle or says something hilarious like “Why don’t you wash your hair with your son’s blood?!”. And even those who get tired of the OTT screen-splashing gore set pieces can’t fail to get a kick out of the climactic revelation in which a key female character notes defiantly : “I’m wearing my special bra today. It’s made out of steel. It’s….[whips open shirt] the drill bra….!” Did someone say “spin-off”?
-Steven West
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
