Gothic Lolita Battle Bear (2014)

Gothic Lolita Battle Bear (2014)
Aka: Nuigulumar Z
Japanese Title: ヌイグルマーZ
Translation: Nuigurumar[1] Z

 

Starring: Shoko Nakagawa, Rina Takeda, Mao Ichimichi, Hiroshi Neko, Sadawo Abe, Koto Takagi, Chieiko Imaizumi, Ai Yahata, Risa Takada, Arisa Sakamoto, Kami Hiraiwa
Director: Noboru Iguchi
Action Director: Takeshi Miyazaki

Noboru Iguchi has been in the game since the 1990s. A glance at the IMDB suggests that he started his career in porn and then moved up to horror, and then to more bizarre concoctions that mix extreme gore with general WTF. He helped usher in the “ohataku fan-wank” genre with Machine Girl (2008) and then made one of its most outlandish efforts, Robogeisha. Yeah, the movie where the protagonist has a katana blade that comes out of her butt. Apparently, Iguchi is an ass fetishist, with films like Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead and shorts like Bad Butt and “F” is for “Fart” (from the anthology ABCs of Death) serving as exhibits A, B and C.

Even considering his already questionable filmography, Gothic Lolita Battle Bear is a bit of a head-scratcher. It has all the hallmarks of an “ohtaku fan-wank” movie—lots of pretty girls, zombies, Japanese popular culture strip-mined for everything a director thinks is cool—but apparently this was made for local audiences, as opposed to Westerners who just want a hard-on from Japanese girls in cute outfits drenched in extreme gore.

The movie begins with a family—a man, woman and child—celebrating the little girl’s birthday. Daddy has gotten his daughter a teddy bear for a present. Before she can blow out the candles, however, a hand shoots up from the cake and zombies attack the household! The little girl gets away and meets up with Yumeko (Singer and voice actress Shoko Nakagawa), a lady dressed in Lolita attire (substyle: “Sweet” or “Hime”). Yumeko takes the teddy bear and hugs it, thus transforming into a pink teddy bear tokusatsu heroine Nuigulumar (Rina Takeda) and beats up the zombies with her karate skills and laser-beam sewing threads. After dispatching the zombies, Yumeko tells the girl her origin story.

Once upon a time in another galaxy, the planet Domoho exploded. Its inhabitants escaped, many of whom fled to Earth in the form of ethereal cotton balls. Most of them sorta disappeared upon arrival. One of them, however, merged his life force with that of a teddy bear. That was Dumava (voiced by Sadawo Abe, of The Lady Shogun and her Men), a great warrior. The teddy bear is a present that a divorced mother (Kami Hiraiwa) is making as a birthday present for her daughter, the perpetually pissed-off Kyoko. Nonetheless, Dumava takes it as his mission to always protect Kyoko, whom he calls “the Princess.”

Kyoko gets mad at her mother for not finishing the teddy bear, whom she calls Punchy, on time (“Why didn’t you make more time for your daughter?”) and discards the stuffed animal. Enter Yumeko, Kyoko’s Lolita-dressed auntie who is moving in following the death of her parents. Kyoko immediately takes a disliking to her aunt, whom she sees as a threat to her quality time with mom. Yumeko tries to help, including finishing the sewing on Punchy, but Kyoko is too angry at the world to care.

Meanwhile, a second survivor of the planet Domoho has arrived on Earth and taken up residence inside a black teddy bear. The bear belongs to a diminutive loser named Takeshi (Hiroshi Neko, of Death Yankee 2 and Dragon Yankee), who has spent all of his life getting pushed around be everybody, including his uncle. When Takeshi hugs his alien-possessed teddy bear, he transforms into a tokusatsu villain named Knitted Vengeance Warrior Charlie. Charlie transforms a random cosplay model into a zombie, who causes an small zombie outbreak in the city.

The zombies shows up at a restaurant where Kyoko, her mother and Yumeko are having lunch. Although Punchy does his best to fight off the zombies, he can’t save Kyoko’s mother from being shot to death by the zombified cosplay model. The zombies chase after Kyoko until she finds herself face to face with Knitted Vengeance Warrior Charlie and his two henchmen: Kill Billy (Rina Takeda in drag) and Lolita (Koto Takagi, of Bushido Sixteen), a gothic lolita with a machine gun for an arm. Yumeko and Punchy show up to help, but she’s injured by Billy’s projectile spoons. Just before she dies, Yumeko and Punchy fuse and transform into a superheroine called Nuigulumar. Nuigulumar defeats the zombies, but Charlie and his entourage go into hiding.

Several years later, Yumeko is Kyoko’s (now played by tokusatsu actress Mao Ichimichi) guardian, supporting the family as a bicycle delivery woman. Kyoko is now a rebellious rocker and hates Yumeko just as much as she did years before. One day, Kyoko is invited by another rocker friend to attend a seminar at a big company. Said company turns out to be a front for Knitted Vengeance Warrior Charlie’s nefarious activities. He transforms all of the attendees into zombies and thus initiates a new zombie outbreak, while simultaneously forcing Yumeko to marry him. Then things start to get weird.

Gothic Lolita Battle Bear is the Japanese equivalent to one of those Sharknado sequels from last decade. It is full of special effects, but none of them are very realistic. And yet, that’s sort of the point. It is meant to be kitschy, trying to give the viewer as much randomness as possible despite knowing that it doesn’t have the budget to do so convincingly. Each successive scene is meant to make the viewer’s jaw drop even lower. Think about the climax of Sharknado 3, which has a sharknado, and then the hero goes to space, and then the sharknado goes to space (despite the absence of any atmosphere), and the hero finds a light saber chainsaw, and then hero returns to the earth in the belly of a shark…NOT BURNING UP in the Earth’s atmosphere, and then we learn that the heroine gave birth to a baby in the belly of a shark while she was entering the Earth’s atmosphere, too. That’s the sort of bizarre mentality that dictates the events of Gothic Lolita Battle Bear.

The fact that a race of cotton ball aliens are actually powerful warriors that possess teddy bears and make them talk is really just the tip of the iceberg. You can hug the bears and transform into a tokusatsu character. And the villain transforms people into zombies using “happy gas.” Plus he has a doomsday weapon that looks like an ordinary straw dispenser. And one of the villainesses drips soy sauce on her boobs so as to sexually excite a terrorist brainwashed into thinking he’s a baby, which causes him to push THE RED BUTTON and release the zombies into the city. Wait, what? And much of the climax involves a quartet of Lolita’s (substyle: Classic) going topless and firing colored lasers from their breasts to destroy the city! Your reaction to this paragraph will determine whether or not you want to watch this movie.

Despite Rina Takeda having dual roles, she does not have a serious showcase for her karate skills in this movie. Stick with High Kick Girl! and KG: Karate Girl instead. There is a fair amount of tokusatsu action, courtesy of Kamen Rider stunt coordinator Takeshi Miyazaki. It’s the sort of fighting you’d see in a typical episode of a Kamen Rider or Super Sentai series. Takeda does some pretty decent bootwork, but she never really faces any real opponent in a seriously-choreographed one-on-one. Think of the Power Rangers just sort of kicking the Putties around. Takeda doesn’t do much handwork, since one of her hands (in superhero form) is a giant plush bear claw, which does laser slashes for killing zombies. Cutesy idol Shoko Nakagawa generally doesn’t fight, although at one point, she picks up a pair of plush nunchaku and wields them like Bruce Lee would. Yes, it’s kinda weird that pink-furred nunchaku would even be a thing, but then again, weird is name of the game here.

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[1] - The title is a play on the Japanese word for “stuffed animal” - nuigurumi

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