In short: Bloody Chainsaw Girl (2016)

Original title: Chimamire Sukeban Chainsaw (血まみれスケバンチェーンソー)

Giko (Rio Uchida) is just your typical delinquent style middle school girl waiting for a girl boss movie to happen. Well, I say typical, but she does tend to bring the chainsaw that’s the symbol of her family’s business with her to school, which I’ve never seen Meiko Kaji do. However, said chainsaw turns out to be a rather useful survival tool, because Giko has somehow – she honestly has no idea how - pissed off the school’s very own teen mad scientist, one Nero Aoi (Mari Yamachi).

Nero, on a bit of a rampage after being bullied for turning a classmate’s cat into a cyborg zombie kitteh, turns many of their school mates – well, everyone who doesn’t simply flee, really – into one type of cyborg zombie mutant or another, many of which seem to develop a bit of a cultish appreciation for their mistress Nero, and are all too happy to try to murder Giko for whatever Nero thinks she has done to her. Ah, teenagers.

The time when practically every single film of the Japanese bizarro splatter world made it to Western shores are, alas, long over, so whenever a film like Hiroki Yamaguchi’s (of Hellevetor fame) Bloody Chainsaw Girl still does make it here, I do feel a faint tingle of excitement, even though I by now know well that only a few films in this particular genre keep the promises their absurd titles and lurid covers make.

Bloody Chainsaw Girl, to my delight, actually does its job rather well. It’s obviously a pretty low budget affair, but Yamaguchi’s direction keeps things snappy enough you’ll only notice if you really want to. The special effects are cheap but the right kind of cheap, enhancing the charm of the affair by emphasising the absurdity of everything that’s going on onscreen, from the cheerleader with the traditional Japanese thing of shooting rockets from places where rockets should most certainly not be shot from (the film adds an actually pretty funny moment concerning the reloading of this particular device), to the enhanced members of the ninja club (of course this school has a ninja club. Keep up, please!).

It’s all very charming if you’re like me and willing to be charmed by the merry absurdity of proceedings like this. I was also pretty happy that the motivation for the film’s villainess’s hatred for our heroine and the reason for all this carnage does have the pettiness of actual teenage grudges, lacking as much in reason as the less believable parts of the film.

Rio Uchida does the whole snarky teenage delinquent bit rather well (apart from very obviously not being a teenager), making for a surprisingly likeable heroine, whose shrugging, sarcastic, acceptance of every new absurd turn of events did rather endear her to me. Whereas Mari Yamachi’s a decent glowerer and a pretty decent ranter, and what else do you need from the villain of a piece like this?


All of this does obviously add up to a lot of good, clean fun, if you share my loose definition of “clean”, at least.