Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl [DVD] [2009]

A mad scientist, Kenji Furano, hacks up students with special talents for their body parts so he can resurrect his daughter in his secret basement situated underneath the high school of his employment, thus creating Franken Girl. The carefully selected candidates include: the winner of the wrist cutting championship; the fast and dedicated Ganguro athlete (that looks like a cast-off family member of Craig David/Michael Jackson from the hit TV series Bo Selecta); and a chain smoking professor (played by Takashi Shimizu - director of Ju-on). The scientist and his assembled offspring seek revenge on the couple responsible for her death: Monami the vampire girl, her half vampire lover and school heart-throb come lady killer, Mizushima and Igor the hunchback janitor. Adding more spice to the mix is the unconventional love triangle between the three main characters which drives the story

Top marks for artistic creativity and successfully blending humour with gore sprinkled with utter madness. Yoshihiro Nishimura has continued the stark, raving mad momentum he blasted his audience with in Tokyo Gore Police, thus creating a flick drenched in sheer dementia. Some scenes play out like a tripped out hippy cult fest hosted by the Manson family dressed in fetish outfits crossed with costume styles akin to those found in the '70's/'80's cult TV series Monkey, made all the more merrier with people dancing around in showers of blood. The Tarantino style soundtrack, with a '70's upbeat swagger, blissfully enhances the loopy images and encourages the viewer to have a little jig whilst watching young sassy babes in provocative uniforms get massacred in death scenes that would've been excellent fatality moves in the Mortal Kombat 2 computer game... arr happy days.

The special effects can look ropey in places but they're astonishing in most other scenes and, more importantly, the story never looses its craziness; just when you think it has reached its peak, you get richly blasted with more... more... more; and, that's exactly what most will be shouting when the credits roll - if you like flicks tainted in strangeness that unashamedly allow you to feed the freak within - of course! Highly recommended for anybody looking for some demeted Japanese brilliance amply coated in blood.

I have to confess to being a Yoshihiro Nishimura virgin, having missed Tokyo Gore Police, and furthermore haven't seen any other contemporary Japanese exploitation splatter - films like Noburo Iguchi's Machine Girl - of the genre he is associated with. So forgive me if I start to gush about this beautiful, crazy film that hit me round the head like a hammer made out of LSD, as it was something quite new to me, and I think it represents something quite new and exciting for horror cinema.

A high school soap opera set up has the class heart-throb Mizushima, good looking but familiarly bland and wet - it's the girls who run this film - caught between the attentions of class bully Keiko, a spoilt Gothic Lolita Harajuku girl who abuses her position as the vice principle's daughter, and quiet but pretty new girl Monami, who just happens to be a vampire. Alongside them in the classroom are members of bizarre, exaggerated youth cults - a team of girls hacking at their wrists in practice for the Annual High School Wrist Cutting Championships, chanting team slogans that include the line "Show me more attention!"; and even more controversially a brave send-up of the ganguro youth culture that led quite a few members of the Frightfest audience - not a film viewing public known for their sensitivity - to walk out of the screening. It's worth saying a bit more about this.

The Japanese ganguro - translated as "black face" - youth subculture involves the use of tanning products to create overly-darkened, unnatural orange or brown skin set-off by brightly coloured clothing and accessories. In Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl the ganguros go further, their faces grotesque parodies of African features with Afro wigs, black make-up and prosthetics, for example giant lips and noses and in one ganguro girl, a plate through the lips. When we are first presented with these characters context-free in the classroom the immediate reaction is one of outraged confusion; however later in the film, as the ganguros enthuse about the black race being "the coolest race" as they quote Barack Obama and practice athletics, it becomes quite obvious that Nishimura and co-director Tomamatsu are sending up the wrong-headedness and surface-deep obsessions of extreme Japanese youth culture, not to mention the lack of identity amongst Japanese youth. It is a shame that this was lost on so much of the audience, and a sign of how controversial the film may be in the west.

The wrist-cutters and the ganguros are in possession of superhuman abilities - super-strong wrists in the case of the wrist-cutters, and super-powerful legs in the athletics-obsessed ganguros - and their body parts are used by Keiko to undergo a Frankenstein transformation in order to defeat love-rival Monami, who seemed to have roundly finished her off with her vampire powers earlier in the film. The battle between them is a riot of over-the-top action and ridiculous splatter scenes whose only precedent I can think of is the "Salad Days" Month Python sketch. A dizzying mixture of techniques is used, from CGI and crude stop-motion to highly choreographed slow-motion scenes, often played out in a fine spray of fuschia-coloured blood in keeping with the gaudy psychedelia of the film. These scenes are relentless and fill most of the film, running the risk of overkill - which they sometimes do. The film's finale though plays on the classic Japanese monster movie as Keiko's body parts are upgraded further in the only logical direction such an illogical film can take, managing to go the extra step needed in an action-packed boss battle at the top of the Tokyo Tower.

Its look is more video game than horror film, the montaged special effects and bright colours reminding me of Capcom's Viewtiful Joe, a game that plundered Japanese pop culture from the 1960s onward to make a kitsch but super-hardcore twitch classic. Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl's relentlessness and refusal to hold your hand through its shocking content is in some ways part of the same thing, an inversion of the usual lazy safety that kitsch post-modernism represents. Just think what a kitsch film called Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl would entail if it were made in the UK or the US - an ironic plod through Hammer and Rocky Horror with a cast of Goth girls and a turgid rock soundtrack - and compare it to this, viciously sending up present day culture rather than the safe targets of the past, taking day-glo rather than black as its default palate, and even managing to make vampirism sexy again for the first time since the nineteen-eighties, mainly by completely exorcising the Gothic posturing that has become synonymous with the subject.

I don't give a score of ten out of ten lightly but this film is unlike anything else I've ever seen. Compared to its western gore-comedy counterparts, stuck in a rut of nineteen-seventies Video Nasty parody, it is a huge breath of fresh air. Though expertly made it isn't without flaws, but they are so irrelevant in the face of its overriding hilarious, shocking sense of fun they just don't figure. This is the sort of cinema that really raises the bar, and western film makers would do well to take note. QuietEarth.us

This is as great as the title suggests; better even. Set in a Japanese high school, dealing with popular subcultures within a class. This is the coolest School ever depicted in a movie, for sure. The students grouping into their own chosen culture teams to hang out and express themselves through fashion and attitude. One group is African black obsessed, another suicidal and of cause, we have the cool chick bitches who rule the corridors. Monami (Yukie Kawamura) is the new girl to the school, quiet and calm in attitude and appearance, although, on the inside she is a crazy ancient vampire. Head of the bitches is Keiko (Eri Otoguro) who is out to impress the local school cool guy Jyugon (Takumi Saito), but Monami has other ideas. Meanwhile, there is a crazy scientist collecting dead kids creating super beings. With the body of the super bitch and the finding of the magical Vampire blood, along with it's life giving properties, Frankenstein Girl is born and the battle commences for Jyugon.

This is nuts. It's colourful and gory, fast paced which rockets along with all sorts of madness thrown in for good measure. The acting is great, the camera work is fast and cool. The whole thing is just a lot of fun with crazy over the top gore to the extreme. I knew I'd like this film from the opening scene which has a girl getting her face bitten off, leaving just her skull spinning. Later, there is a scene with Frankenstein girl, power drilling an arm into her head to use as an impromptu helicopter type device. Crazy.

Also, the music is a lot of fun. Kinda 70's game show/supermarket/kitsch. Marvellous. Directors, Yoshihiro Nishimura and Naoyuki Tomomatsu should be praised for this film!