The Machine Girl

Title: The Machine Girl
Director: Noboru Iguchi
Cast: Asami, Ryôsuke Kawamura, Kentaro Kishi
Year: 2008
MPAA: Not Rated
Date of Review: July 9, 2008

A lot of the charm in the "grindhouse" films of the 1970s came from how earnest a lot of them were, even with their sleazy subject matter and often shocking content. It wasn’t just the script, but the technical quality of the filmmaking - Super 8 cameras and bad special effects added to that whole aura, giving these films their personality. This is an area where Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez really missed the mark with Grindhouse. Despite their best efforts to make the film look grainy and worn, the script sound ham-fisted and the effects look sub par, it all felt so intentional and precise that it became artificial. It still looked and felt like a big-budget studio feature. If they had really wanted to capture the authentic feel of ‘70s exploitation films, they should have employed the same tools and constraints as those maverick filmmakers of 30 years ago. In this way, The Machine Girl is more successful in recreating this era of shock cinema. It uses its low budget and borderline bad taste to its advantage, creating a cartoonish revenge saga with some of the most ridiculous gore since Riki-Oh.

A woman vomitting out her intestines into a bowl of soup. A man forced to eat sushi topped with his own severed fingers. And, of course, the titular Japanese school girl with a machine gun for an arm. These are just a few of the "simpler" sights to be seen in The Machine Girl, a movie so outrageous that the only thing genuinely shocking about it is how funny it can be. Like Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive, humor is found through a mixture of slapstick and extreme gore. And while some scenes contain torture and mutilation, the 10-foot blood sprays accompanied by the occasional puff of air from the wound remind us that this is fake blood spraying from a hose, not an artery. If a "Looney Tunes" episode contained gore, that’s the tone you could expect here. Nothing is serious, and even the over-the-top attempts at emotional content are funny because of how aware the film is of its own ridiculousness.

Like Versus, another gonzo gorefest from Japan, The Machine Girl doesn’t have anything to offer other than its supreme level of entertainment. The story is not much deeper than the title suggests - a young girl avenges the death of her brother (and the loss of her own arm) at the hands of the yakuza, by having a machine gun built that fits perfectly on her stump. Insanity ensues. She fights the aforementioned yakuza, as well as a trio of ninjas dressed in red jogging suits, throwing hundreds of ninja-stars every time they leap, flip, or move in any way. She encounters the yakuza’s mistress, who is armed with a "drill bra" - no further explanation is warranted, you have to see the movie to believe some of the stuff that happens here. Suffice to say, it’s never boring. Even when it falls into lulls of attempted emotion and dramatic tension, it’s all done so tongue-in-cheek that its "so bad it’s good" badge is worn with pride.

It’s not without its problems, though. While the make-up effects used to create the gore are hardly what one would call "realistic", they have a tangibility not found in CGI. So during the few instances when CGI is employed - and it is truly awful - it really brings the experience to a halt. Also, the humor tends to go a little overboard at times. Perhaps it’s just personal taste, but a visual gag where "bad guys" are torn to pieces by machine gun fire is leagues away from making jokes about rape and necrophilia. Maybe this could be a little message about our times, and how violent content is so readily accepted while anything sexual is frowned upon, but it seems unlikely that that is the case, given the context of these jokes.

It would be interesting to find out what Tarantino thinks of The Machine Girl, because it is such a different take on a modern-day grindhouse experience. Instead of the constant winks at the audience which Tarantino and Rodriguez gave us, The Machine Girl tries to provide us with a more authentic experience without the "wink wink, nudge nudge". It actually feels a lot more like the trailers between the two films in Grindhouse - which also captured not only the look but the feel of this era of cinema much better than the films they appeared between - and if you’ve been eagerly waiting for Machete to come to theatres, The Machine Girl may hold you off for a while.

7.5 / 10