High school girl Ami (Minase Yashiro) lives alone with her younger brother Yu (Ryosuke Kawamura) since their parents have committed double suicide when they were accused of murder. All seems to go rather well for them. Alas Yu and his friend Takeshi have trouble with Sho Kimura, the bullying son of a yakuza boss (Kentaro Shimazu) who traces his family line back to Hattori Hanzo himself and still holds with old traditions like the art of the ninja and killing one's staff for the slightest error.
At first Sho and his gang (The High School Ninja Gang, of course) blackmail the boys for money, but it becomes very clear very fast that they mostly are sadistic little pricks looking for reasons to hurt people. When Sho and Takeshi try to defend themselves, the gang murders them.
Ami, who knew nothing about all of this is as angry about the deaths of her brother and his friend, which soon are declared suicides, as she is heartbroken. Then she finds a notebook in which her brother helpfully laid out the names of his tormentors.
She tries to show the notes to the parents of one the gang members and convince them to go to the police with her. What Ami doesn't count on is that these people (the father even a cop) not only don't care about what she tells them, but are as mad as the nice serial killers next door.
Our heroine barely escapes from the ensuing fight and a cooking related violent incident that nearly costs her an arm.
After nightfall she returns. This time she is armed and ready and in short order decapitates the son, kills the mother and baptizes the father with blood squirting out of his dead son's torso. Having done the first part of her job, she continues her vengeance with an assault on the Kimura Family Mansion. Sho,his mad father and mother (Honoka) and their yakuza-ninja bodyguards together are too strong for even an (ex-pacifist) single bad-ass fighter like Ami. She loses the fight and gets caught.
Fortunately Mister Kimura holds to the old ninja tradition of torturing imprisoned enemies to death in epically protracted sessions, so at first Ami only loses most of an arm, and intent on keeping the rest of herself fit to take further revenge, escapes by breaking the neck of a yakuza who really shouldn't have looked under her skirt.
Wounded and tired she loses her consciousness on the steps of the garage of Miki Sugihara (Asami; the name of M.S. is of course a friendly nod in the direction of the sukeban actress of the same name), the mother of Yu's equally dead friend Takeshi, who up until now was too struck by her grief to do much else than blame Yu for Takeshi's death. She and her husband tend to Ami's wounds. When the now one-armed Ami regains her consciousness, she and Miki have a little fight to clear the air between them. Ami of course shows such incredible spirit that the impressed Miki swears to help her in their relative's vengeance.
Miki trains Ami in the art of fighting one-armed and dragging heavy things around, while the husband constructs a few helpful artificial limbs, including a chainsaw arm and an oh so practical gatling gun arm Django would have been proud of.
On the day the gatling arm is nearly ready, Miki makes a fatal mistake - while learning the cowardly Kimuras have fled their old mansion, she is spotted and followed by one of their goons.
The High School Ninja Gang attacks the garage in full red Adidas ninja costumes, Miki is painfully hurt, her husband cut to pieces and Ami experiences for the first time the awesome power of her gatling arm.
The two women on a mission grab the only yakuza survivor of the massacre and convince him with their loving and caring ways (and some nails in his head)to tell them of Kimura's new hide-out.
There, an unpleasant surprise awaits them. Mister Kimura hasn't been idle during the last few scenes. He somehow trained and upgraded the dead Ninja High School Gang's parents to the Super Mourner Gang, wearing photos of their dead loved ones on the chests of their post-apocalyptic football dresses.
And even if Ami and Miki survive this fight, there are still Mister Kimura and his flying guillotine, Misses Kimura and her drill bra and three young and innocent hostages standing between them and their revenge. Who will survive? And who will be cut into how many funnily formed pieces?
There are two kinds of people in this world. Those that greet a film featuring a Japanese school girl with a machine gun arm shooting (and sometimes cutting) yakuza and ninja into bloody pieces with hardly suppressed screams of joy and glee, and those that just run screaming out of the room. If you belong to the latter kind of people, I'm not really sure what you're doing reading this, if to the former I can tell you this much - this movie is as entertaining as expected.
One could of course complain about not very competent acting (although Asami makes a swell classic style sukeban), script holes and so on, but those aren't things one should look for in a film like The Machine Girl anyway.
Instead I'd like to praise some of the film's virtues. Greatest among them are the gloriously bloody (and gutty) fight scenes complete with enough absurd (and absurdly cool) choreographed moments to fill two or three other films. The special effects are mostly practical, with a few solid moments of CGI and are as completely over the top as I dreamt of when first reading about this film. There just isn't much that won't happen to a body here - realism thankfully be damned.
The script doesn't try to chain the absurd fights with too much earnestness and plays mostly as a weird comedy, possibly even an affectionate parody of the revenge flick.
A few scenes look like quite effective attempts at subverting parts of the film's own genre to me, especially Ami's continuous refusal to let herself be raped like a good revenge flick heroine. She instead opts for kicking her would-be rapists' asses. There is also the concept of the Super Mourners - how many other revenge flicks do you know which say right out that revenge can be a nearly unending circle, even in a blink or you'll miss it moment like it is done here? And do I see a critique of the culture of public mourning here?
Late in the film we also have a just-barely-not-a kiss scene between Ami and Miki, a scene usually played out between our manly male hero and his useless girlfriend or someone of that kind, here transformed into something way more interesting by making it into a scene between two women who are both determined to die for their respective revenge, but unwilling to let the other one die.
All in all The Machine Girl features more hidden complexity than expected in an over the top gore movie. Plus the gore. This must be what love feels like.
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4 comments:
This one made me want to whip my shirt off and twirl it around my head like some kind of drunken sports goon.
Heh.
Yeah it's absolutely brilliant in that way. I was just a little too distracted by constructing weird theories about the film's subtext to do that.
Yeah, it definitely has some stuff going on. When I wrote about it, I just wanted to be all "Yes! Excellent!" But unfortunately I had to tax my brain and address some subtext (if only very superficially). I'm with you as far as seeing the Super Mourner thing as a satirical jab at the popular fetishization of grief, or private grief as public spectacle, or whatever. (I have to admit, though, that I have no idea whether that is as prevalent in Japan as it is in the States.) All of that is just a nice bonus, though, because if it was just about showing people being stabbed through the head in ridiculously explicit yet cartoonish detail, it would still be pretty awesome.
I totally agree with you on the last point. I think I'm leaning so heavily on the subtextual extras, because I didn't expect to find them in the film at all. Although Meatball Machine should have prepared me...
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