The Machine Girl

I saw someone else review this here on Letterboxd, and I was intrigued by the cover art and plot description. I had recently watched Nuigulumar Z, or as its known in English, Gothic Lolita Battle Bear, a relentless barrage of weirdness of a movie. It was joyful and insane and overwhelming and memorable, and I was hoping for more of the same with a movie that has a high school girl wearing Sailor Moon's outfit whilst holding aloft her Gatling gun arm. So, like my review for Nuigulumar Z, I won't bother with discussion of themes or character arcs or anything. This isn't that kind of movie. But it isn't much like Nuigulumar Z, either, not in the strictest sense. It does adhere to Nuigulumar Z's "reality is malleable" credo; when this movie was made, it was with the express intent of giving the laws of physics and human biology the day off. Logic, too, has been told to keep a respectable distance here. The Machine Girl is all about insanity and spectacle. But where Nuigulumar Z played in a bright, cotton-candy-coated carnival of intergalactic warrior teddy bears, The Machine Girl is the polar opposite. Every wound sprays blood like a lawn sprinkler. Every kill is overkill. There are decapitations, bifurcations, trifurcations, amputations, and so, so, so much more. The special effects with these aren't always the best (the CGI used here is looks a good five years older than when the movie was released), but the movie has so much energy and momentum in its fight scenes, you won't have time to care. The issue, for me, is that when it wasn't an action scene, The Machine Girl didn't know how to keep momentum going. Since I have a very limited frame of reference to Japanese cinema, I have to compare it to Nuigulumar Z again; even in the non-action scenes, that knew how to maintain a level of interest, with fun character work and crazy visuals. When The Machine Girl slows down, it becomes a bog-standard revenge flick. This is Death Wish and Becky and 75% of Steven Seagal's filmography and a thousand other movies. It's not that I needed relentless, wall-to-wall carnage, but if it's not going to be that, then the quieter spots in between need to have more to them. I mean, this movie uses a training montage, and it's every training montage you've ever seen. "You think you're gonna get revenge fighting like that?" leads to "now you're ready" in about 30 seconds, inter-cut with strikes and reversals and combos and somebody working on a special weapon. Be campy, be sexy, be contemplative, be all of that, but be SOMETHING. If you like comical levels of gore, this is fun. There's a lot of memorable and imaginative kills here. Minase Yashiro as the titular girl has a surprising among of presence in this role, and Honoka excels as the Yakuza leader's wife who turns out to have a deeper psychopathic streak than he does. As long as you like uncontrolled mayhem, you should like this. But if that isn't your thing, there just isn't enough in between the vivisections and flesh sheared from the bone with bullets that will hold your interest. Nuigulumar Z could survive on crazy and imagination alone; this needed a little more.