VAMPIRE GIRL VS. FRANKENSTEIN GIRL
Product Description
The demented might behind Tokyo Gore Police is behind with a chilling brand new crack that’s re-writing the sacred story of the abhorrence genre. Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl is the terrifying story of dual classical monsters re-imagined as super prohibited – and intensely fatal – Japanese propagandize girls. Gore manners autarchic in this blood-cake review of destruction selected as the leader of the Audience Award at the 2009 NY Asian Film Festival. Fan boys and movie blogs have been already buzzing over this bloodbath du jour, and aficionados of unusual blood-filled chocolates, insane scientist principals, sumo wrestlers from hell, and sex-crazed propagandize nurses have been on trial to lose their heads over this old propagandize splatter-fest.
Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl
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One word for this movie: holysonofajesustapdancingS#!+areyoufreakingkiddingme!? Alright. Let me slow down and collect myself for a moment. How are you with completely insane asian cinema? Do the letters TGP make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside? Have you ever enjoyed a film that was deliberately and unapologetically moronic and WRONG? Have you love for the neo-Japanese grindhouse, my friend? If so, welcome to it’s masterpiece. Yoshihiro Nishimura: you complete me. The man known as the Tom Savini of Japan has gotten progressively bolder and more accomplished with his trademark twisted over-the-top sensibilities and has grown in leaps and bounds as an effects artist in a very short time. Leading Japan’s underground cinema into the new millennium, he has contributed effects to films such as Suicide Circle and Meatball Machine, and joined up with partner-in-crime Noboru Iguchi for Machine Girl (a personal fave) before becoming a nearly one-man show writing, directing, AND doing special effects for the monstrously bizarre Tokyo Gore Police. After a quickie gig doing the effects for Samurai Princess, he reteamed with Iguchi-san to co-direct this slice of horror-comedy heaven. Now, if any of these films rings a bell, you know exactly how demented these two are. Ever wonder what their idea of romance is?
Allow me to recount the events of the opening scene of Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl, if you will. After a needless introduction to Japanese high school Valentines Day traditions a cute girl wearing a hood and her male companion are attacked on the road by three female undead atrocities. She bites the first in the neck and peels the skin off of it’s head with her teeth as if it were an apple to reveal a bloody skull (eyes still in sockets, of course). She then head butts the girl, sending the skull flying into the face of the second enemy. The skull gnaws away at the face of it’s comrade, sending gallons of the red, red kroovy splashing all over the lens and everything else within a half mile as our heroine spits out the very long strap of flesh she unwrapped from the first undead girl’s skull. As the killer skull pulls the second undead’s face off, the vampire girl bites her own wrists to utilize the Japanese vampiric ability of forming weapons from her blood (a’la the naime Nightwalker) She then beheads the second girl with her blood swords and the still-staring skulls land as a neat stack of two. Undead girl number three attacks and is relieved of both arms at once in a flurry of arterial spray. She is then slowly impaled through the crotch as J-pop singing begins to overpower the groovy surf music that has served as the soundtrack to this carnage thusfar. At this point, I literally raised my hand in a metal sign and nodded in approval with a mile-wide smile on my face even though I was in the room alone with nobody to note my visible pleasure at the ridiculousness of what i just saw. That’s how much I enjoy this kind of garbage. The last would-be killer’s skull is lifted out of it’s skin from below and the film’s title fades into view as our heroine lifts it and smiles from beneath her hood before tossing the final skull perfectly on top of the other two. Frankenstein: 0, Vampire: 3. My friend, we have not yet reached the 5 minute mark of this hyper-offensive gore-fest. Imagine what the other 80 minutes hold. I dare you….. Yeah, it’s even crazier than that.
Often have I partaken in the wonderland that is the neo-Japanese grindhouse and seldom have I come away disappointed, but this film just takes the cake for me. It’s like a perfect storm of violence, offensive stereotypes,and general insanity. Plus for the first time, the special effects actually look halfway good. TGP and Machine Girl were both brought down a notch by the fakeness of some of the effects (to be fair, with the things they were trying to do in TGP there was no way to not make it look bad). While James Cameron need not live in fear of movies like Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl dominating the special effects scene, for a low-budget flick of this nature they do look mighty fine. But what really put me over the moon for this one was the sheer light-hearted zaniness of it. Sure they are all zany, but this one is practically a musical at times. A musical engineered by a band called Blood-Stained Fellow. I want this soundtrack. There’s the aforementioned surf music and J-pop, along with metal, psychobilly, and even a showtune. That’s right. Showtune. And it’s used in possibly the greatest, bloodiest, and most excessive vampire kill scene ever to awesome effect.Not good awesome, mind you. Bad awesome. As in “so bad it’s awesome”. Oh, and you know the flying guillotine? Yeah, imagine that was made out of spinal column and a rib cage. Voila! Bad awesome!
Good god, I don’t even know how to describe some of this stuff to you it’s so overpoweringly off-the-wall. Well, at the high school where this tale of two girls who love the same boy takes place there are clubs. One such club is dedicated to the art of cutting yourself. These girls are so hardcore that at the school’s Wristcutting Rally (whoever gets the most blood in the bucket wins) a chick SAWS THROUGH HER OWN ARM with a razor blade. And she still doesn’t win! That’s gonna leave a mark. Another club is dedicated to Japanese girls who wish they were born black. There aren’t words to describe to you how completely offensive these scenes are. There just aren’t. You have to see it for yourself. Just…….damn, you won’t believe it until you see it. There’s also a sexy psycho-killer nurse, a hunchback janitor, a Chinese teacher with lungs filled with smog (a sharp jab at China’s environmental trangressions) who is prone to going on tangents about certain popular J-horror films (allow me to point out that the director of those films plays the role, which makes it even funnier) in the middle of his lectures. And guess what? All of these things play vital roles in the story. They aren’t there just to be retarded even though they fulfill that function nicely. What else do I like? How about an ending that’s a raggedly-veiled homage to Sweden’s sophisticated vampire film Let the Right One In? How’s that for contrast?
Pretty much every frame of this film is filled with bizarreness. As I said, there really aren’t words. This is my favorite film I’ve seen in 2010 so far.Now, take that with a grain (or pillar) of salt because this film obviously is not for everyone, but if you can appreciate the audacity of a story whose goal is to cram as much off-the-wall nonsense, violence, and absurdist humor into 90 or so minutes then proceed with confidence and prepare to have your jaw dropped. If you cannot enjoy the simple pleasures of insanity for inanity’s (not a typo) sake then consider this a pass. But those who enjoy this sort of trash should be better than pleased. Pretty ladies, gallons of blood, a sensibility that makes beyond absurd seem mundane, the most charming vamp you’ll ever see, and a hottie with detachable limbs (she uses an electric screwdriver) and screws sticking out of her face; a match made in grindhouse heaven. I adore it. Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl: place your bets, folks and don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Rating: 5 / 5
Transfer student Monami is a vampire and she has a crush on Mizushima who happens to be the kinda-boyfriend of Keiko who’s father is secretly a mad scientist who, in cahoots with the sexy school nurse, is killing students and experimenting on reanimation. Wow! The pretty much the entire story, but what makes this movie stand out is the fact that the filmmakers are just out to entertain the audience and they do.
I’m normally not a fan of these wacky, blood spray Japanese movies, but for whatever reason I really liked VAMPIRE GIRL VS FRANKENSTEIN GIRL. The story was imaginative, the girls were beautiful, the entire thing was set in a high school, the pace was fast, the direction and camerawork was impressive, the music was excellent (I especially loved the love song and the harmonica / accordion /acoustic guitar version of a song that sounds a lot like Oasis’ “Don’t Look Back in Anger” – somebody please put that up on YouTube!) and the action was so over the top I couldn’t help but to just sit back, laugh and enjoy the ride. My only real complaint is I wish there had been just a little bit more time spent on the relationship between the two leads. Well also some nudity would have been nice.
Insane creatures, delightful take on the vampire and Frankenstein stories, every person has 30 gallons of blood in their body, over exaggerated high school cliques, sexy school uniforms. I thought it was great and I’ve already pre-ordered the Blu-Ray. I can’t wait til Part 2! Check it out!
Also there’s some good extras on the DVD including over an hour of footage filmed during the making of the movie!!! Great stuff!
Rating: 4 / 5
Based on a best-selling manga by Shungiku Uchida, this slice of dementia was fabricated for the hardcore audience of ‘Tokyo Gore Police’, ‘Meatball Machine’, ‘Machine Girl’ and ‘Robogeisha’, and ups the ante considerably when it comes to off-the-chain, over-the-top insanity, audacity and mind-melting hyper-violence.
A non-stop, balls-to-the-wall send-up of all the classic Universal horror flicks, we’ve got an adorable schoolgirl Vampire chick, a goth-girl gang whose leader becomes the Frankenstein girl after a fatal accident at the hands of the vamp chick, a hunchback dwarf who incinerates corpses left by the vamp, a school principal who’s also the resident mad scientist / Dr. Frankenstein with a lab in the school basement, aided by an over-sexed faculty nurse who later becomes an undead killing machine at the hands of the good doctor. Have I got your attention yet?
And we’re just scratching the surface of this psychotically-psychedelic celluloid centerpiece of all things absurd, offensive and voraciously violent. Imaginative beyond your wildest dreams, unapologetic in it’s insensitive use of stereotypes (there’s a group of girls who wear afros, facepaint, big lips, put plates in their lips and gangsta rap, ghetto dance and spew Ebonics about Michael Jackson, Barack Obama, Joyce Joyner and Michael Jordan – remember, these are Asian girls!), this flick has more WTF moments than anything I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying a lot.
Then there’s a parody of disturbingly real-life adolescent behavior in Japan, the wrist-cutting kids (who do this out of boredom, rebellion and status-seeking), and here we have a school sanctioned, annual wrist-cutting championship contest that the kids practice for after classes. Needless to say, the arterial blood-spray quotient has never been higher in one of these movies, and I thought that crown went to ‘Machine Girl’ when I saw it for the first time. Guess again. Noah’s Ark couldn’t withstand this sanguinary storm.
As the film progresses, the violence gets more vehement, the gore more grandiose, the larger-than-life lunacy now nearing apocalyptic proportions – there are no words that can adequately prepare your senses for this onslaught. It just keeps on building steam until the frenzied finale and a tip-of-the-hat parody of ‘Let The Right One In’ along with so much more. The only thing missing was nudity, but now I’m just being gluttonous…
For a low-budget film, the special effects work most of the time (even when not so special), and you can’t analyze or over-think what’s happening on-screen without ruining it for yourself – this is a roller-coaster ride, one of the largest you’ve ever been on. If you thought about this, you’d probably never get on one, and if you’ve never ridden one, you won’t enjoy this flick. You need to turn your mind off for a spell and get sucked into the bizarre madness on display. It’s not for everybody, hell, it’s not meant for most folks. But if you’ve seen the movies referenced above, you’re already in the choir and need to check this one out immediately. (By the way, it’s much better than ‘Robogeisha’, which I found to be a let down…).
Rating: 4 / 5