Don't Fear the Subs: 'Machine Girl' and Ridiculous Splatter Gore
Filed under: Foreign Language, Horror, Cinematical Indie
Forget about a blood bath, this movie features enough red syrup for a blood flood. Maybe you saw Rose McGowan in Grindhouse and thought, 'Pretty good, but not enough severed limbs and geysers of blood. And wouldn't it be cooler if she had a machine gun arm instead of a leg, and it had a chainsaw attachment?' Well, have I got a movie for you!
Noburu Iguchi's The Machine Girl, which was released on DVD last Tuesday, features copious spraying fountains of blood and dozens of detached body parts. Add ninjas, yakuza, a flying guillotine and a drill bra to your basic 'revenge for the murder of an innocent loved one' formula, and I think you already know if this movie is up your alley.
Scott W. pointed to the trailer over at Twitch last year and, truthfully, nearly all of the movie's best bits are highlighted in that two-minute blast of gore. But, really, if you're a fan of this kind of stuff, you'll want to see all the action sequences in their complete, unrated, unadulterated, possibly nauseating glory. Watching the entire movie also makes it abundantly clear that the filmmakers did indeed have their tongues planted firmly in cheek. After all, you can't slice up this much latex and spill this much blood without having a demented sense of humor, can you?
The Machine Girl starts by showing Japanese schoolgirl Ami (Minase Yashiro, making her acting debut) in spectacular action, annihilating a gang of schoolboy thugs, and then rewinds six months to tell her origin story. Ami and her brother Yu are teen orphans; their parents were accused of murder before killing themselves. Yu and his best friend Takashi are killed by arrogant teen gang leader Sho Kimura (Nobuhiro Nishihara); his parents (Kentaro Shimazu and Honoka) are maniacally protective yakuza. Ami swears revenge, loses her arm to the yakuza, and teams up with Takashi's mom Miki (Asami), whose husband builds Ami a new machine gun arm.
The pace rarely flags, and if you get bored you can just fast forward to the gore, but the dramatic scenes are well-designed to establish the right tone and provide context for the explosions of viscera.
Tokyo Shock's DVD looks good for a movie that was probably shot on video. If you have an irrational fear of subtitles, you could wuss out and listen to the English dub, but the Japanese-language version is much stronger. Both Japanese and English tracks are available in DD 5.1 and DD 2.0. The English subtitles are well-timed and easy to read.
"Behind the Scenes of Machine Girl" is a decent 10-minute promo piece with sound bite interviews and production footage, but no details on any of the gore effects. Neither do we get to hear anything extensive from writer/director Noburu Iguchi. The original trailer is included, as well as trailers for Heroes Two, Death Trance, Lone Wolf and Cub (TV series) and Zebraman.
1. I first saw the trailer for Machine Girl many months ago thanks to a link from Cinematical to another site. It was awesome. I saw the hilarious gore in the trailer, and I also saw a couple of bad special effects, so I could tell it was low budget.
Well, I picked up the DVD this week, and sure enough, the movie is a story connected only by hilarious gore and senseless violence, with horrible CGI mixed in for no reason. So basically, I guess this movie could be dumbed down into a YouTube video highlighting every death scene in the movie, and you'd have a better experience watching that than Machine Girl.
I have a hard time deciding whether or not to listen to the English track or the Original track with subtitles for any foreign films I watch. But with this one it was a no-brainer for me. How was I supposed to watch the mindless violence and insane action and read a book (Subtitle) at the same time?
Surprisingly, the English dubbing is pretty solid. It reminded me of a Dragonball Z cartoon because some of the shouting was just hilarious. None of the voices sounded the same, they had pretty good voice artists (What do I have to do to become an English dubber?! I want to be a voice!). To say that the original Japanese track is "Stronger" is stupid, because of course the original voices will sound better, but what's the point if you can't understand them...
I don't know, I rated it 3 stars out of 5, because the lines the actors read in this movie are often horrible, but there is enough over-the-top gore to get you through it. The theft from American films is clear, with Grindhouse, Saw, and Mortal Kombat (Scorpion is in this) very evident, and embarrassing, so Japan is behind us in that respect.
Tokyo Shock though, maybe they are one to keep your eye on. This movie is available on eBay now, in case anyone is having trouble finding it.
Posted at 8:54PM on Jun 7th 2008 by MCW