Starring: Minase Yashiro, Asami, Kentaro Shimazu, Honoka, Nobuhiro Nishihara, Ryôsuke Kawamura

Written & Directed By: Noboru Iguchi

Released: 2008

Grade: B+

Asian horror or even more so American remakings of it, have always been one of the weakest brands of horror in my eyes. The Host surprised me though as one of the first examples in a long time of a film in this category that had a thrilling but horrifying situation through fictional monsters as well as those who are hidden in society. The Machine Girl has a completely different tone, but it is just as thrilling and fun. It brings out the revenge sub-genre and does this with such grotesque scenes full of buckets of blood all throughout the movie and a very sharp and very dark comical edge.

Ami (Yashiro) and Yu (Kawamura) are very close siblings. They have fun with one another and look out for each other. They have to though since the two of them is all the family that is left. Their parents faced murder allegations and under the pressure and shame committed suicide to escape it all. All things considered, they have done pretty well for themselves. Ami is doing well in school, and has close friends as well as an athletic drive. Yu has close friends, but has been being bullied by a gang that looks down on him and takes advantage of him. This gang is headed by the heir of the Kimura ninja yakuza clan, who thrive upon torture simply for the joy and prestige of it. Yu and his friend owe him money and scrape up what they can. They are given no sympathy though and both boys are brutally killed along with the threat of hurting Yu’s sister telling them that they don’t really care about the money they are owed, but just want the joy of killing others.

Ami is sure that Yu wouldn’t have killed himself, which is what the police are claiming happened. She goes to everyone for help on her mission to prove the truth even Mikki (Asami), the mother of the other victim. She is so traumatized by the death that she lashes out on Ami and even claims that her and her brother were the cause of the deaths. Ami is determined that justice will be found even if she has to make that happen herself. She goes on a search for the one who killed her brother although she is sure it was someone in the gang that was giving Yu a bad time. When she goes to the house of one of the boys in the gang, she learns that the boys aren’t the only ones who are involved in these crimes of violence. Ami goes for answers and nearly gets killed herself. She gets her arm brutally boiled and burned. She pays back the family members one by one for what they did to her and Yu. She still is far from giving justice to Yu’s memory though. She continues attacking the gang and all of their even sicker and deranged parents. Ami eventually learns that The Kimura family are the center of it all. She finds them and attacks them through their son first. The plan unexpectedly falls through. Not only do they pierce a sword through her already very damaged arm, but they lock her up, hang her from chains, beat this same arm, slice off her fingers and just when that is about to be it for the day, the master’s wife decides that it isn’t enough and tricks him in to slicing off Ami’s arm. She still manages to escape and is healed ironically by Mikki and her husband. Despite their differences they come together for their revenge determined to kill everyone remotely involved, even if they die doing so.

The opening of The Machine Girl in particular is very stylistic, giving us a taste of the attitude and tone that the movie holds. When the boys are shot at with a machine gun, as the bullets hit them, their heads quickly disappear as if the bullet literally ate away at them. There are a lot of black and white very grainy shots. The machine gun that becomes attached to Ami’s limb reminded me quite a bit the one in Planet Terror that Rose McGowan’s has attached to her limb of a leg. The similarities are pretty obvious and with the combination of Planet Terror being a throwback to the Grindhouse films, and the old and gritty look and feel that we are given at the beginning is hinting that this will resemble those films as well and even more importantly show a dark and off settling wildly entertaining and action packed exploitation revenge film.

The comedy is there all throughout the film and since it is masked with evil in every direction, the laughs are uncomfortable but still fierce and delightful, which is ironic and has a hint of disturbance in itself. There are so many brutal moments that are completely unnatural. We know from the beginning that Ami has been wronged and her arm has been cut off of her. Even knowing this though, it is such a shock to learn what is done to her and how severe it is. One of the horrible things that were done to her would have been scary enough, but there really seems to be no end. Even the family’s cook who has done nothing wrong at all is treated horribly. In order to apologize to the family he is forced to cut off all of his fingers and eat them off of the sushi he made earlier. We even hear the crunching of his bones against his teeth, in that second we are given the single sickest sound in the entire film.

There are some almost stereotypical character types shown in the film like ninjas and the school girl. However, this isn’t for a lack of time or consideration put in to the characters but are used to mock these stereotypes. Even the comedy for these characters that can seem cheesy at times is really just poking fun at the situation themselves and highlighting the insanity of it all. The school girl follows neither of the stereotypes, she is neither the innocent timid girl or the least bit sexual in any way. Instead, Ami is given strength, attitude, and determination. This is only attained after such cruelty is shown towards her that all of her beliefs of violence not being the answer are thrown back in to her face and she retaliates believing that perhaps there is a time and place to hurt others. Ami becomes a ruthless murder, but she was completely created this way by the torturers that were involved not just with her brother, but even more directly those that inflicted pain upon her and pushed her to completely losing her way. The ninja/yakuza is shown to be a series of intense crime families. They are shown to be cruel in every way imaginable. The father prizes himself on raising killers for sons. The father gets complete pleasure, thrills, and empowerment by not just killing but giving his victims the most twisted pleasure. What is really surprising is that the father is not the worst in the family; the wife is. She is constantly saying that her husband is being too soft and she begs him to torture more, while he wants to spread it out. The desperation for her is interesting since she seems to crave it more than anyone even though she is not the one doing it. It seems like this is her only life, joy, and sense of power outside of her entrapment of her marriage, which forces herself to believe that this gives her importance and makes her a good mother.

There is clearly a lot of corruption, which somewhat justifies the revenge. The cops don’t seem to be taking enough consideration in to it. The clan claim to be the cops, hinting that they have the power that people assume the police holds or that they have some sort of a deal that puts them above the law. Either way though, they are sucking the equality out of their community and countless lives in the process. If the police can’t see this when the problem has probably been going on for decades, it is not likely that they will anytime soon. This is a representation of having to set things right for yourselves and the drive it gives you. On the other side of it though, it also shows how disastrous things can get when this essential anarchy ensues. The Machine Girl is very subtle about these types of accusations. It doesn’t come right out and say that there is corruption in the government or that either deaths have been covered up, but the intensity of the rest of the film is there to give us the information to question things on our own, something that is encouraged outside of the film too. One of the only flaws of the film is that towards the end it tends to drag. It is actually just over an hour and a half, but since the revenge starts so early on, it feels like the climax is actually the majority of the film rather than a turning point. Luckily, this really doesn’t hurt the film very much though. We are given plenty to keep our attention. As I mentioned there is constant gore and just grotesque situations. I found it pretty funny the excessive use of the word ‘bitch’ especially following the word crazy. It has to be used at least 50 times, probably more. I think just in one scene it is used a least a dozen times. It is as if that is the only insult this crazed man can used to harm her, when he is already physically doing so much to her. The Machine Girl is locked and loaded with continuous laughs through dark stylized humor and intense gore in twisted kills, giving us a throwback film that has underlying meanings and questioning and does this while having a lot of fun with itself.