Review: Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl

Um…here we go. Supposedly hunky Takumi Saito is romantically pursued by bitchy VP’s daughter Eri Otoguro, but quiet girl Yukie Kawamura beats him to it, giving him a special chocolate for Valentine’s Day. Said chocolate contains her blood, and since she is a vampire, it leaves him craving blood too. Meanwhile, Otoguro’s dad the VP (Kanji Tsuda) is in the basement with the school nurse conducting experimentations in the reanimation of the dead. You see where this is heading, no doubt, but I bet you never counted on the ‘Wrist-Cutting Championships’. Yep. You read that correctly.

 

Based on a comic book, this 2009 exploitation film from directors Yoshihiro Nishimura (“Tokyo Gore Police”) and Naoyuki Tomomatsu (the latter of whom scripted) is further proof that this sort of stuff was done better in the 80s and 90s, and usually in Cat III films from Hong Kong. One splatter effect involving a partial skeleton suggests the filmmakers have seen “The Seventh Curse”. Me too, and it’s a thousand times better than this. I liked “RoboGeisha” (and Nishimura did makeup FX on that film), but this one was just trying way too hard to be all crazy, all of the time, and I checked out mentally pretty early.

 

It’s the kind of thing that sounds a lot more fun than it actually is, because when you watch it you can see it’s just crazy for the sake of it. That usually doesn’t work, and certainly doesn’t here. It’s actually pretty boring. The tone has simply been botched in execution. It’s trying to be crazy funny, and failing. When a film gives you a woman with hands that have eyeballs, where there should be nipples, the lack of entertainment value is a head-scratcher. Either I’m broken, or the machine-gun approach to crazy splatter humour ends up sinking the whole thing because there’s no breathing room. Or a second note to be played.

 

The only good gag in the whole film is a visual one: A character ends up wrapped up like a mummy. Think about it. Clever. Actually, there’s another clever idea in the film, if not exactly hilarious: The scientist morphs into a kabuki scientist and descendant of Dr. Frankenstein. That made me chuckle. The rest? Eh, though Yukie Kawamura is pretty good (and cute) as the vampire girl.

 

The film definitely needed a lot of sex to go with the gore, it has none, and gets rid of the sexy school nurse way too early. It’s certainly the bloodiest movie I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen “The Story of Ricky” for cryin’ out loud. But that film worked (well, for anyone who can stomach its ultra-violence), this one doesn’t.

 

The problem with this film isn’t that it’s racist (blackface gags), offensive (jokes about ‘cutting’) or shocking (Get your decapitations here, folks). It’s trying too hard to be those things, and forgetting to be either a good movie or a bad one. It’s neither. It’s a botched ‘bad taste’ comedy, and the version I saw was apparently subtitled by a drunk person. Just thought you should know that.

 

I’m sure someone will respond favourably to this film (Japanese audiences will certainly relate to the cultural trends being lampooned, the blackface thing is apparently an exaggeration of a true trend in Japan), just not me, and I even like some Troma films for chrissakes. 

 

Rating: C