This is another Japanese film about a tiny woman fighting zombies. She has a gun. The zombies shamble. It all relates to some weird experiments. These are all obvious things that I have seen a lot of. They're all in this movie. One thing to note about this movie is that it was directed by the same man who directed the Entrails series, which includes Entrails of a Virgin and Entrails of a Beautiful Woman. Have I raised or lowered your hopes properly? Good. Let's get right to it. This is...
The film begins with a bad blue screen shot of a meteor approaching the Earth. It crashes into Tokyo bay- obviously- and has some odd effects. The noteworthy one: turning people into zombies. They explain it...kind of, but it's pretty much just a flimsy pretense for zombies. Another pointless side effect of this is a weird blue tint to the air which makes a city shot of Tokyo, which eerily looks like Troma's logo. We meet our heroine, who is a young woman in dull, gray clothes. She avoids some zombies before running afoul of a gang of weapon merchants. They all dress like they're in a Japanese punk band, which I guess is a look. They turn down a job to help someone due to low pay and follow this up by knocking our heroine off of their ride. You're the best supporting cast we could get, huh? Eventually, our heroine makes it to her bunker and gets her taped message a la Charlie's Angels, Mission: Impossible and every other spy story ever. Her contact is her dad, which sort of kills the momentum of our character. Why is she our heroine who gets all the weapons and the armor? Because her dad is in the army. Lame.
Once she gets out, she works her way to the military command. She kills some shambling zombies with her gun and just generally looks generic. One notable thing is that she has a sub-machine gun and an aiming light on her wrist. I get the idea, but putting there would make you always aim to your side. Plus, her armor is basically just treated leather. When she gets inside, she crosses paths with a quartet of people in ridiculous outfits. Basically, they look like people who would be fighting the Toxic Avenger. Maybe the Troma logo thing is not a coincidence. She talks to the head of the military brass in the area and learns that her dad is out in the field. The guy is trying to set up a boat to take all of the survivors out of the city. The guy at the base is clearly evil, a fact proved seconds later when he tells the oddly-dressed agents to kill our heroine. Outside, she fights the first one- a man with metal teeth and glove claws. After an awkward kung-fu fight, she kills him. The second one puts up a little more of a fight, but goes down as well. Wow, your crack team is sure worth...jack shit.
Out in the field, our heroine runs back into the punk rock gang near a village of survivors barricading themselves in. Thankfully for them, the two remaining men in the hit squad show up and start shooting. They're so powerful that their guns don't always make muzzle flashes when they're firing! Of course, they start shooting at the humans next, just to make sure that nobody with the infection possibly gets out. Our heroine joins forces with the punk rock group to take them out, but two of them get killed. For the finale, the boss man shows up and battles our heroine. For some reason, he is unaffected by an RPG blast a couple feet in front of him and he gets our heroine in a choke-hold. He grabs the sole remaining punk girl next and makes his big taunting speech. Basically, he wants to use a form of the weird space radiation to make super-soldiers (yawn) and wants to stop the dad from getting the people out. Why? Because if the world knows about the crisis, Japan will lose its power. I don't know- just go with it. He injects himself with the drug, but gets his arms paralyzed and a grenade shoved in his mouth. Our heroine meets up with dad and stays to finish up a mission. Thank you, sequel bait for a film that doesn't exist. The End.
This movie is not terrible, but it's not that great either. The film is pretty generic, in spite of its goofy title and silly plot. None of the stuff you see is all that unique, which is what you'd expect from a Japanese zombie film like this. Hell, for all of its faults, Attack Girls' Swim Team vs. The Undead has killer zombie teachers and a spy plot stolen from Alias! It might be unfair to compare this to some later efforts like Tokyo Gore Police and the like due to it's age (it was made in 1990), I suppose. You can see that they were trying with this one, but the effort just doesn't live up to the hype. A lot of movies are out there that have great titles, but end up being mediocre films. It sounds bad when I'm lumping you in the same category as Satan's Slave and Lucifera- Demon Lover, huh? This is a pretty decent film if you like the genre and quirky Japanese movies. Ultimately though, it's just not as interesting as you would think. I'll give it a 'C' for effort.
Dude Japan has been churning out some weird ass shit lately, I did enjoy TOKYO GORE POLICE, so this might have to be seen to believe
ReplyDeleteAs a film from 20 years ago, it's an interesting look at where they were going. This movie is not nearly as fun as the title would imply, but it's a good viewing for Japanese film buffs.
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