The movie, which has been screened in many festival, is not just a gore movie but it has a real scenario which gathers typical Japanese elements. There are yakuzas, sushis, tempuras, girls in school uniforms, ninjas throwing shurikens, a “Hattori Hanzo” clan, expert in handling the sword. The matter comes from the fact that the producer, Noboru Iguchi, is mad and does not care about all those clichés, in collusion with the western audience, which are clearly included into the target of potential viewers. Iguchi is mad and he proves to be right on the first scene: a demonstration of what the “machine girl” is. A group of teenagers tortures a weaker teenager with knives. The girl appears, shows her stump and plugs a machine gun on what’s left of her arm before bursting the team to decimate them. There are so many bullets that the bodies are completely pulled to pieces and the heads have big gaping holes. This festival of red spurt and bloody skin immediately shows the tone. However, what follows is calmer because we discover how the young woman, Ami, who is a pacifist at first, has become a revengeful weapon of mass destruction.
The flashback does not displease because it shows how two teenagers are confronted to a yakuza’s powerful son. In the end, Ami has to face the whole Hanzo clan: a gallery of hysterical and very violent people. At first, Ami’s hand is grilled in boiling oil. Her hand becomes a tempura (a fried specialty in cooking). The show is constantly present and scenes of complete madness are numerous. Though, some special effects are too cheap (the shuriken are in CGI) and this is regrettable. On the contrary, other scenes are very extreme: the mother who finds her son’s head in her soup, before a knife crosses her neck and makes her vomit her dish, her innards and her blood on her son’s head which is still in the soup. There are also the machine gun tearing apart; ninjas cutting up with their shurikens and acting like another ersatz of bioman. The end of the movie shows other surprises composed of parts of bodies replaced by mechanics.
The armed amputees are about to become a real genre. We remind of Ash in Evil Dead 3, who replaced his stump by a chain saw. More recently, Rose McGowan caused a sensation with her heavy machine gun instead of her cut leg in Planet Terror. Machine Girl mixes previously seen things with its own style: one of the characters looses his foot, and he replaces it by a … chain saw!
Dvd released by Cine-Asia in the UK.
Translated by Camille