Joshikyôei hanrangun aka Attack Girls Swim Team vs. The Undead (2007)

Oh my freaking Gods. Nyarlathotep, Enkig, Nergal, Hastur, Azag-Thoth, Arioch... what the fuck is this movie about?




A young girl in a swimming pool. She seems to get pulled underwater at times,, although she's perfectly alone. Loses hair. Cut to Japanese schoolgirls in, well, Japanese schoolgirl uniforms. Cut to Japanese schoolgirls swimming. Cut to boob-shot. Cut to more Japanese schoolgirls in aforementioned school uniforms... and we're informed that a new virus is going around and that people are required to wash hands and gargle.



Weird scene with swim-team coach following.




If you like Japanese schoolgirls, you'll like this movie.

Aki, the new girl at school, finds herself variously under showers with other girls who happen to share the same birthmark as she does, being shunned as a creepy outsider, enjoying the air... and in the meantime, the pupils get shot up with a green vaccination*...




...and the teachers with a yellow one.




Then, Aki wakes up to this:



Sexual tension of course ensues. And all the time, the voice in the background (aka the subtitles) tell us that everyone should get their vaccination shots right now at the nurse's office. But still, the girls are coughing, feeling weak, stumbling occasionally...

And for some reason, it's important that Aki joins the swim team - at least to one girl (the girl she had a shower with, and who not only has the same birthmark, but also the same mole). Aki says she doesn't like the water...




Poor, sick people get the attention of worried, scantily-clad people. *sighs*

Enter the coolest maths lesson you ever had: Meet decaying zombie maths teacher.


Mahyem ensues. The school (all girls, I might want to add) erupts with zombies.

At this point in the movie, you have some vague idea of what is happening. There's a school for girls, with a swim team. Made of girls. There's a new girl, and everyone is wearing very short skirts. Suddenly, there is a virus, vaccinations, and zombies appear everywhere around school, normal people morphing into them. Some of them seem to be classical zombies, other seem to be more of the Versus-persuasion of zombies.




We find out that only the swim team (made up of Japanese schoolgirls) is unaffected by the virus/zombie-ism. They figure out, thanks to Aki, that there must be something in the water - or, as our heroine puts it, "the Secret is in the Pool".

But of course, there are difficulties on their way to... whatever it is they want to go.



For example, your zombified maths teacher who wants to kill you.

Then he suddenly wields a torch, and you, the viewer, are just sitting there, eyes wide open, mind blank. What. The. Fuck. Just. Happened?

You have about 3 seconds time to wonder before the movie cuts to another scene: Aki (our heroine), is in... some place, and the other girl (the one she had a shower with and who has the same birthmarks as she does) is caring for her. Talking about... stuff. Swimming. Sides. Training.

Aaaaaaand...

Character Background!

I like how frank this movie is with us. We don't need no characterisation of evil - "He was a mad scientist." Brilliant in its simplicity. I mean, what else do we need to know?

And man, we like our character background, aka "How Aki became a Water Assassin".

(involving kink-training)

...and her escape from the accursed life of a H2O Assassin because of reading up on serious mattters. Teenage girl magazines, in this case.




Turns out that shower-girl is willing to, eh. Look for yourself:




Also, you cannot not love the noises Japanese schoolgirls make whilst having sex. To quote teh_mally****: "The whimpering..."




So.... the plot at this point: Somewhere, people are turning into zombies, something is wrong with the water/the vaccinations, zombies, softcore lesbian sex, Japanese schoolgirls, Japanese schoolgirls, softcore lesbian sex, Japanese schoolgirls, tender moments... uhm... what is this movie about again?




Oh, yes. A chainsaw-wielding female super-zombie teacher. And zombie schoolgirls. Let me tell you one thing: I have rarely seen such ...idiotic zombie acting. And that says something. But still... if I haven't managed to say it yet:

This movie is full of win and awesome.

At some point, your brain just stops trying to make sense of what is happening onscreen. You just sit there watching girls taking showers, swimming, zombies, randomness, Japanese schoolgirls getting it on, random semi-erotic scenes, random semi-hilarious scenes... and sometimes, there are zombies. For a little while. Then there are encouragings speeches about fighting together as a girl swim team.

I think that screenshot says it all.

Anti-zombie-rally by the girl swim team. Appearance of mysterious coach. Former zombie-teacher appears. Still a zombie. Able to fake human emotions. Completely insane. Kill Bill with zombies and Japanese girls in swim-suits. With... swords. And staffs. And bricks. You're watching it, but somehow, it doesn't really register as a whole on your brain. It registers as... a bunch of weirdness. Again: What. The. Fuck. Is. Happening. On. My. Screen?!




...Followed by a twist that really actually isn't one, if you were somewhat sober when starting the movie (in the hope of it making any sense). Somewhat's not what he seems to be... and then, for some reason, there's a bomb. In the school. Exploding.

Aki, our heroine, barely escapes the mighty explosion, but alas! She is captured by her evil former master, who taught her how to become a H2O Assassin. He identifies her by, you guessed it, making her masturbate because of his flute-playing. Then she drops her schoolgirl-skirt... and...

...you start laughing and giggling hysterically and can't stop anymore. She defeats the guy, kicks him in the balls, he injects himself with zombie poison (green), becomes Super-Enemy(TM), and finds insane weaponry, nearly kills him, he injects himself with the yellow zombie poison (which makes him go all insane and rage-y), another Final Battle...

...followed by hawt lesbian incest kissing, as the two girls, Aki (our heroine) and Sayaka (the girl with the birthmark) celebrate that they're sisters. But then - alas! Betrayal! They're not twins at all - it was a fake! Just as Aki was the Master's slave, Sayaka was - and she adored the Master as a god. So, she, like kissed Aki after coating her lips with a nerve paralysis causing agent. called AK151.




Up until now, you have managed to suspend any disbelief - you just sit and watch. Dialogues like "Where should I start cutting? I'm pretty jealous of your cute, soft breasts..." (O_o)

Attempt at Final Battle - but then: Plot Twist! Unexpected one at that. Really unexpected. You could even call it another WTF?!-moment...

Really. It's just "WHAT. THE. FUCK. IS. HAPPENING. ON. MY. SCREEN?!"... all the time.

And I can't even bring myself to try and understand the... Final Final Battle. It apparently involves a stick of power. Cosmic power, or something. And,,, oh my Gods, You just won't believe it. You shall also mentally chant the mantra of this movie**.

It's awesome. Pure fucking awesome.




9/10 WTF?!-moments...



*Look at it. Can you feel it?***

**"WHAT.THE.FUCK."

***Black Science

**** ...dude.

The Grudge (2004)

As of now, I've escaped the surge of J-horror and the assorted remakes the USA is producing with an alarming rate... until now, that is. For today, I shall watch my second J-horror flick. Or should this still be considered to be my first one? The first product of Japanese terror I ever watched was Takashi Miike's Imprint. So... let's just call this my first full-length J-horror flick.

The Grudge.
It never forgives. It never forgets.


The movie informs us that, when someone dies in the grip of powerful emotions, a curse is born that will haunt the place where it has been created. Given that Bill Pullman (playing college-teacher Peter Kirk) commits suicide within the first seconds of the movie, I can't shake the feeling that he has something to do with this mysterious curse... and damn, I am right.

Speaking of Bill Pullman: I can't remember when I last saw the man in a decent movie. He seems to have fallen on hard times these days. But suffice it to say that he actually has a role beyond that of moodily throwing himself off a balcony in The Grudge. He's actually important, although the reason why he is important (and why he throws himself off his very own balcony) is revealed much later in the movie. I can't blame Takashi Shimizu (who wrote and directed this movie, and is also the guy behind the Japanese Ju-On) for the late reveal, though - any movie that features Bill Pullman as the romantic love-interest would have to try and hide this fact as long as possible from the audience. I mean, I do not dislike the guy and don't think that he is... weird or something, but... romantic love interest? That's quite a stretch.

So... Sam Raimi presents: The Grudge. With Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar). Which sort of pisses me off - her presence means that she's not the one who suffers terribly and then goes insane and dies (because that's what I want to happen to her). She's death proof by virtue of being the female lead. Yikes.

Buffy and her boy toy Doug (played by Jason Behr) have moved to Japan (from the US of A), apparently because they're studying (though it's hard to picture Buffy in a lecture - nigh impossible, even). And for some reason, I don't believe her when she's going all philosophical about Buddhist rituals - not that I doubt that what she says is true, but it just seems that she's a bit retarded and reads the facts off some sheet of paper. And I don't buy her being able to read Japanese either. Dear Mr. Raimi or whoever else thought it would be a good idea to cast Buffy as the lead: Don't. Just... don't.

But this movie has Ted Raimi as well, which maketh me happy. One appearance by Ted Raimi can make me forgive all the major flaws of a movie.

I know, I know... this is just a movie... However, seeing Buffy doing chores makes me feel as if my soul is being lifted up by invisible choirs of angels. Because I hate doing chores, and just had to do some of them and will probably do the rest of them after this review/after I finished eating this pizza (spinach and cheese topping), of which Rincewind has taken a healthy bite already (which translates to "I gave him a slice of pizza in order to befriend him"...).

It has kitteh!*

And so, we hop back in time, just in order to arrive at this dark place as it was in the past - just in time to see Matthew Williams (William Mapother) and his family (Emma appears to be his mother) as they buy the accursed house - and Emma feels that something is wrong... but greed and assorted emotions do not just exist in The West(TM) - also the Japanese are affected by it, and so they buy a haunted house. Gosh darn, that's what I call bad luck.




What The Grudge manages to do is showing us how lost someone can feel in a strange, new land, without knowing the language OR being able to read the script. I've been lost in France without the ability to speak or understand the language, but at least English is something even the French should admit to know, and the script is still our Latin script. But losing both, script and language... I imagine that would be tough. Hell, it would make me nervous.

Kitteh! Going "meow"!*

Creepy kid. But not creepy enough - I keep thinking about its hair rather than how threatening it appears. But maybe that's just me... although, strictly speaking, children should be the ideal monster for me - other people are traumatised to death by clowns, bacteria, viruses, disease, snow (I just mention that because it's snowing outside), ponies, death... with my inherent dislike for small human critters (aka "children"), the movie-world could scare me into submission, theoretically speaking. But it never does, no matter how creepy the creepy small human critters are.




Oh dear. Buffy feels that there is "something" in the house she was found in. Oh dear. Oh dear. My mind automatically made that into "MY BUFFYSENSE IS TINGLING!"... great. Now I can't take the movie seriously anymore. Curse you, sarcasm-muscle!

One thing that I simply have to mention is that I totally approve of the use of teh intarwebz in The Grudge. All too often in movies, you see some nameless search machine showing up on a computer, or some sort of eye-cancer inducing website that seems to have escaped from the early to mid-nineties, complete with animated .gifs and colours that just make you want to die (the alternative would be to slowly torture the person to death who actually came up with such a desaster in the first place). Here, we get so see the familiar face of yahoo and the (to me) less familiar face of some Japanese newspaper, the Daily News Japan (which is, of course, fictional but really conveys a feeling of "it's good, this site can exist"... Font-recognition can be something comforting).

The concept is interesting: When dying in extreme rage and/or sorrow, at death, that part of the mind is imprinted in the area the death happened. Death becomes part of that place, and kills whoever it touches. Sort of like an infection - you can run, but you can't hide. The curse will get you, no matter where you are.




I am not familiar enough with Japanese mythology, fairytales, sagas and assorted things. It's occasions like these that make me want to learn a bit more about Japanese culture and mythology - whilst the concept is interesting, I wonder how differently it impacts Western audiences than it would with a, say, Japanese audience. I know from my own experience that horror movies based on figures or stories that I am familiar with have a much deeper impact on me than a movie which deals with something I have no single iota of knowledge of.

Anyways... the camera is, as could be expected, very good. It's not perfect, it's not flawless, it's not too original... but it's solid, and a few shots managed to really impress me. Most of them were the claustrophobic ones I have come to like in Raimi's work. As I haven't watched the original Japanese Ju-On yet, I can't say how much he, in his role as co-producer, has influenced this aspect of the movie, as I don't know Takashi Shimizu's style... but no matter who it is that is responsible for them - I still like them.

Award 3 points for unnecessarily long and complicated relative sentence serving absolutely no purpose other than making this review longer.

The sound of kittehs routinely used in The Grudge makes me happy - I love the critters far too much to be able to feel anything but love and loyalty to the race of my feline masters**.

Something that didn't exactly help with my enjoyment of this movie was the American cast. I think my feelings on Buffy are already clear enough - but in case my dislike has been too subtle, I shall make it abundantly clear: I don't like Sarah Michelle Gellar, for she is stupid and her acting is about the quality of a dead slug. She is routinely outplayed by everyone in everything I've ever seen her in - and that includes the more obnoxious characters in the Buffyverse.




Besides for Ted Raimi, whom I adore because he's so full of win and awesome, the whole rest of the American cast appears wooden and artificial. I enjoyed the scenes in which there were only Japanese actors around - by comparison, they are much better and ....livelier than the ones in which we are nearly drowned in a puddle of American-ness. I don't know why this movie was re-done for Western audiences - unless you count using wooden actors and cutting down on the plot.

Speaking of the plot... I really don't know whether it's good or bad. As I already stated, I like the idea behind the curse - the "infecting" of others with it by sheer localised contact. But the rest... *shakes head*
It's really not bad, and I can't talk about it without giving away everything... suffice it to say that I feel a bit ambivalent towards it. But judge The Grudge for yourself...***





5/10 awesome scenes with a dislocated lower jaw.



* This is proof that the ability of cats to drastically lessen human intelligence through mere close proximity also works through the medium of film. xkcd speaks truth.

** Only people who are owned by one or more cats will understand this.

*** See what I did there?! O_o

Gojira no Gyakushu aka Godzilla Raids Again (1955)

Welcome to our 2nd installment of Gojira aka GODZILLA! I hope this is actually the 2nd movie in the "series", if I can call the franchise that. I would be horrified to learn that there was another one in between.

So... one year after the original Gojira came out, we are treated to this jewel. It starts with vaguely patriotic music... and someone flying a plane (my guess: our hero) communicating with a girl on a base (my guess: his love interest and our heroine). We are also treated to... well, words fail to describe it. Let me try to convey what I had to witness through the medium of pictures:

"Hey, darling, I'm at work. Care to ask me out for dinner? YOU BETTER ASK ME OUT FOR DINNER!!!!!"

"Uhm... uhm... errr... yes. Hidemi, my love, my rosy apple, my wonderful, beautiful rose of Japan - would you care to... erm... want to go out and have dinner tonight?" *wipes sweat from brow*

"Good boy. Yes, I would LOOOOVE to go out and have dinner with you! How did you GUESS?! I'll also force you to practically steal my dad's car, darling!"

And that face just SCREAMS "blowjob". Seriously. Don't blame it on me.

Instant classic, really, and it's not even 5 minutes into the movie. I wonder how the rest of the Gojira (yepp, still feeling authentic) movies will be like. I have been forwarned by TF that they are basically all the same, but I suffer from something called "morbid curiousity". Combined with "entertainment masochism" (I believe Jared of headinjurytheater-fame coined the expression, so I credit him with it here, regardless of whether I'm right or not), this makes for a deadly combination. Deadly for my brain cells, that is.

"Alas, my good man, may I propose that this creature right on top of us, or rather, in front and on top of us, might be the legendary creature known as Gojira - or Godzilla in heathen lands to the West, lands in which the inhabitants have never laid their eyes upon the majestic sight that is the King of the Monsters?"

"Forsooth! Good squire, I have never e'en heard of the creature you just mentioned, and which you boldly state is behooving itself to move just right in front of us right now. Who or what may this 'Gojira' be, if ye might be inclined to answer this question of mine?"

Sorry. Couldn't resist.

So... someone flies a fake plane over a fake ocean. Another fake plane has to land, our hero comes to the rescue. On an island. In the sea (fake sea, in case I hadn't mentioned it). And we all know what that means. It means:




And you definitely do NOT want to know that you're looking at a shot of Gojira's ass. From below. Thank you, movie. Thank you so very, very much.




You see, Gojira is wrestling another monster. One that walks on all fours, looks a bit like a hedgehog who was in the vicinity of Tchernobyl for a bit too long and grew to giant proportions, and has a decidedly less cool scream than Gojira.

Sometimes, the two of them like to go skinny dipping as well.

Managing to flee to safety after Gojira and monster #2, they (the two survivors, hero and non-nameless nameless character) are asked to identify #2.



It's an Angilosaurus. You can call him Angilas. Or Anguirus. I will stick to calling him Anguirus, although my fancy subtitled movie says Angilas all the time.



So, basically... there are two "prehistoric" monsters who can't be defeated by humanity. I say they'll just have to battle it out like men. Real men in rubber suits. Who have battled it out since PREHISTORIC TIMES!

However, I like that they explicitly mention the first movie, Gojira. Even the famous Oxygen Detonator is mentioned. You know, stickler for consistency and all that (see also Wrong Turn and Wrong Turn 2: Dead End).

GOJIRA COMES FROM THE SEEEEAAAAAAA!

The scientist guy from the first part of the Gojira franchise suggests that light may have woken the King of the Monsters up, and that it might be a good plan to bomb him with, uhm, "light bombs".



Poor Gojira looks more confused than anything... and gosh darn, he's still cute.

Irritated by the light bombs, Gojira smashes a lighthouse with his tail, walks away from Tokyo and screams once. Now that's what I call a definite success. But apparently, that was the intended effect.

On a lame sidenote, we have a subplot (as much as I hesitate to call anything in a Gojira movie "plot", I can't come up with a better yet derogative word, so stay with me) involving escaped prisoners. Three of them. However, the subplot ends rather quickly (luckily!), as they die. Because of Anguirus. He scares them so much that they instantly decide to drive their (stolen) car into a factory of some sort. Which goes up in flames. Which in turn attracts Gojira. *confused*

For reasons of "epic", I want to add that Gojira no Gyakushu features the first monster battle ever seen in a Godzilla movie. And no, no screens. I am too lazy to sit through this frame by frame. Just let me assure you that Gojira and Anguirus dishing it out actually looks cool, in a twisted, men-in-rubber-suits-way. Trust me on that. Seriously. You should, if you like Godzilla movies. Because, you know, every one of us has a bit of Gojira inside (hey, they actually state that in the 1954 movie, so stop looking at me like that!)...

The rest of the movie? Hrm. Gojira defeats Anguirus in a more or less epic battle (as if we hadn't foreseen that...), the people of Japan and Tokyo in special are worried about Big G's yearly foraging trip into Tokyo and shoot it, drop some stuff on it, worry a lot etc.

Of course, our heroine also worries a lot about our hero, who truly is a hero. For... reasons. I am sure they exist. I just go with the premise of him being the hero and run with it. Seriously, I am not exactly in the mood to actually watch the movie with reading the subtitles. Half of it is just people running around, stuff getting destroyed, Gojira marching through... the sea, mountains, snow... and even without the subtitles, it wouldn't be that interesting. As in "I NEED TO SEE WHAT HAPPENS AND WHAT IS GOING ON!!!"... But I still watch it. Proof?

Here you go:


In the end, they bury Gojira under an avalanche (hence the creative idea of luring him into the snow-covered mountains). I guess the next movie will see him coming out of the mountain/snow/ice.

Poor Gojira.

However, this movie, whilst lacking the moralistic implications and metaphors of its predecessor, doesn't suffer from long, drawn-out scenes that drown one's entertainment in something akin to boredom. I approve. More fun to watch than the first one.


6/10 spunky, skinny dipping monsters with the coolest scream ever in Kaiju history. And that spells out "Gojira", in case you didn't realise it.