Monday, July 12, 2010

WTF Japan?!?: Yo-Yo Sexy Girl Cop

Yo-Yo Girl Cop was a weird film.  It was a modern-day update of a '70s manga/live-action series, but was made to be much more serious.  For God's sake, it featured a group of teenage suicide bombers named after the plane that dropped one of the two atom bombs!  So what should I expect from this movie, which promises to be more fun and tongue-in-cheek?  Well, in a nutshell, it's a really, really dumb movie.  I'll go into more depth than that, but it does sum it up quite well.  The film is a mix of action, humor and High School intrigue.  By a 'mix,' of course, I mean that 90% of it is high school intrigue, 9% of it is humor and 1% of it is action.  If you ever thought, 'action comedies have just too much action and too much comedy,' you'll love this movie!  So much of it is terrible, but...so weird that I can't look away.  Get out your badge panties for my review of...

The film begins with a young woman walking down the street, only to get grabbed by a man, placed in a giant bag and kidnapped.  She is dumped in a warehouse with two other Japanese schoolgirls and the man reveals himself to be a rapist.  Oh, I thought that you were an Amway salesman!  The new girl, however, kicks him around and reveals that she is a cop...by flashing her panties...which have a badge on them.  She explains that she is Officer See-Through Panties and attacks him with her yo-yo.  No, really.  None of what I just described is part of some David Lynch-style fever dream- it's real!  The yo-yo shots, by the way, are done via really crappy editing.  The woman never actually uses it on-camera- instead opting to have a cartoon shot of the object serve as a replacement.  The woman meets up with her superiors in...a different warehouse, since apparently this movie couldn't afford real sets!  In a flashback, we learn that she was living as a normal, high-school girl until her mom was arrested for doing some sort of crack in her own home.  That bitch!  Our heroine was coerced/forced into becoming a cop in order to mitigate the mother's jail-time.  You really want me to care about her after the set-up you gave me?

The undercover mission for Officer See-Through Panties is to break up a High School prostitution ring.  That's...noticeably less interesting than in the first film, don't you think?  We learn about this is a long, drawn-out scene of a teenage girl doing a striptease for one of her male students and then trying to get him to pay for it.  Yeah, that's not how prostitution works.  Our heroine breaks up this shakedown and tries to fit into school life.  The only problem: she announces that she used to be a female gang-boss, which apparently makes her the talk of the town.  She hates the attention and pretty much forgets all about her mission.  My hero?  In a random moment, she breaks down and cries because she feels so alone.  Um, where did the plot go?  We get a kind-of interesting flashback showing her training, but it's full of cliches, including the 'knifes tied to the arms' bit from The 35th Chamber of Shaolin.  I'd act surprised, but I'm not.  After all of that, she decides that she wants to be part of the Mean Girls...I mean, the High School prostitute gang & does so, after they have their fun kicking her.  One make-over scene later (complete with a slow clothes changing), she is one of them, getting a new outfit, a cell phone and a date.  Good-bye, plot- I'll miss you.

After a date with the guy and a complete unnecessary sex scene (still fitting Japanese cultural rules though), the plot sort of returns.  The Principal is revealed to be the man behind the gang and his second-in-command is the only teacher we see.  They have a pointless sex scene too- yea.  When the prostitution gang leader has a change of heart, she gets raped and killed by one of the principal's clients.  This drives our heroine to attack the man, which immediately makes him give up all of the information.  However, the woman shows up, knocks out our heroine and kills the man.  Our heroine wakes up in *sigh* a warehouse and is set up to be raped by the same client who raped the other girl.  She escapes and beats up the man when her back-up arrives.  Oh yeah, her partner- the guy who has three scenes and adds nothing to the story.  She parrots her speech from the first scene and nearly kills the man, only stopping when the partner tells her to.  Back at the warehouse/police station, our heroine gets fed up with her boss and turns in her badge.  Of course, in this case, doing this means that she pulls off her 'badge panties' and walks out.  She sees a newspaper headliner about President Bush meeting with the Japanese P.M. (this was made in 2006), which prompts her to walk off-screen and have some sort of explosion occur off-screen.  Um, The End.

この映画は吸います!  There are so many reasons that movie sucks, so let me break it down for you.  First off, this movie has almost no action in it.  For all the bad things I said about Yo-Yo Girl Cop, it had some great action in the finale.  This chick can't even swing a yo-yo on camera!  Second, this movie is not funny.  None of the jokes are good or have any real point- they're just there.  Third, the movie has almost no plot.  We get a quick set-up of the plot, the film ignores it for about an hour and tries to wrap it up real quickly in the end.  How often do you think that a film about Japanese High School girls who are also prostitutes is a mainstream film, let alone a boring one?!?  Unlike the last film, which was a serious melodrama wrapped up in a silly action film, this one is just bad exploitation.  The lead villainess actually makes a comment about how she uses the boy to distract the cop from her job.  Yeah, it also distracts her from, you know, the plot!  I know I keep harping on that, but it's important.  Don't bother with this movie.  It's stupid, annoying and serves no purpose.  I know it goes without saying, but this film is not for everyone...or anyone.  Pass!

Next up, I bring you the second Turkish film in two weeks.  This one is not so much a knock-off of our films, but an example of blatant theft.  Stay tuned...

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