The Machine Girl (2008)

Machine Girl (2008)
Japanese Title: 片腕マシンガール
Translation: One-Armed Machine Girl

 

Starring: Minase Yashiro, Asami, Nobuhrio Nishihara, Kentaro Shimazu, Ryosuke Kawamura, Yuya Ishikawa, Noriko Kijima
Director: Noboru Iguchi
Action Director: Kensuke Sonomura

 

Produced by Tokyo Shock and Nikkatsu. I felt that I could not reach 200 Japanese movies without watching at least one example of these recent Troma-esque fan service films made for Western male viewers. So I went with this one, which is one of the first and most infamous and had an awesome trailer to boot. When I started watching it, the fact that it was produced by Tokyo Shock, a fairly well-known distributor of Japanese movies in the USA, not to mention the opening credits being entirely in English, hinted at the fact that despite it having an all-Japanese cast speaking Japanese, the movie was literally made for people like me. The cynicism meter went up a few notches at that moment.

The premise is simple: there’s a brother/sister pair who go by the name of Yu and Ami Hyuka, respectively. They both appear to be high school students and have lived on their own ever since their parents were accused of some crime and committed suicide. This fact becomes a frequent source of prejudice throughout the movie. In any case, Yu owes money to one of his colleagues who not only happens to be the son of a Yakuza boss, but is also a direct descendant of the famous ninja Hattori Hanzo (his mother is arguably more violent and sadistic than his father is). One day, Yu and his friend Takeshi fail to raise the money that the Yakuza kid, Kimura Sho, is extorting from them. So Kimura and his flunkies throw Yu and Takeshi out the window of an abandoned building, causing them to fatally crack their skulls on the pavement below.

Ami is crushed, obviously, which is compounded by the fact that the (unseen) police dismiss the deaths as suicide, taking her parents’ fates into consideration. She then discovers Yu’s journal and finds out that he had made a To-Kill list with the names of the Yakuza boys who were extorting money from him. She goes to the home of one of the boys, Ryota, to find out the name of the leader of the gang. This turns into a confrontation in which Ami’s arm is placed in tempura batter and stuck in hot oil. Later that night, Ami sneaks into Ryota’s bedroom and gets the info out of him before slicing off his head with a kama, or sickle. She then rams a knife into the back of Ryota’s mother’s head, causing her to go all Lucio Fulci on us and puke out her entire digestive track into the pot of soup on the dinner table. She takes her vengeance to the Kimura household, but ends up getting captured and tortured. Sho’s father slices off her arm and lets one of his men try to rape her. She fights back and is able to escape, ending up at the doorstep of Takeshi’s house. Takeshi’s parents, both auto mechanics, nurse her back to health and build her a new prosthetic arm, which is actually a large machine gun. The mother also teaches “karate” to Ami, so when Kimura’s ninja buddies storm the garage, they’re both ready to take on their loved ones’ killers.

Rating a movie like this is hard. It has few ambitions, those being a) put as much over-the-top gore onscreen as possible, and b) have cute Japanese girls doing crazy action things. It succeeds on both fronts. The movie is insanely gory, being chock-full of blood geysers, severed limbs and heads, drawn-out torso splittings, gut puking, a man being force-fed his own fingers, and a man getting nails hammered into his head. Then you have ninja battles, people dodging CGI shurikens, catfights involving chainsaws and drill bras, and an evil ninja Yakuza wielding the Fatal Flying Guillotine. If reading those last two sentences gets your blood pumping, then you might have fun with this, although choreography nuts will find said action lacking.

But I didn’t have fun…well, not much. There are a few blackly comic moments, although the bit where a schoolgirl gets a knife jammed into the top of her skull and then the Yakuza boss urges his men to violate her yanked me out of the movie. Even in a film as exaggeratedly violent as this, the necrophiliac rape of a minor is just too much, even if it’s not actually shown. But beyond that, there’s something too calculated about the carnage. It suffers from the “Trying too hard”.