Yeah, I know. What the fuck?
A teenage girl shows the mob who’s boss in this over-the-top blend of action, horror, and comedy. Ami (Minase Yashiro) is a seemingly ordinary Japanese schoolgirl who refuses to turn a blind eye when thugs at her school subject her little brother to needless cruelty. Ami retaliates against the vicious kids and their folks, which turns out to be a dangerous decision when she discovers some of them are connected to local gangsters. Ami is kidnapped by strong-arm men whose intimidation tactics include cutting off one of her arms, but Ami refuses to let the criminals go unpunished. With the help of a mechanic sympathetic to her cause, Ami’s arm is replaced with a high-caliber machine gun, and she is transformed into a single-minded killing machine in a school uniform. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
A wonderful lesson in what a no-holds approach to grindhouse style filmmaking is truly about, The Machine Girl basically showers you in the fresh blood of an arterial spray, which there are tons of that happening in this movie. An art gallery in pure gore, this is the sort of junk food that gore/action fans would want in a mindless movie. I will say with complete honesty, this and the entire glut of Japanese, cheeky gore films are a guilty pleasure. There is something wicked about seeing what sort of wild, unbridled depravity that the directors of movies like this or even Tokyo Gore Police can come up with. I guess that is why I was able to tolerate the insanity that was The ABCs of Death, but this is certainly just dumb fun.
The Machine Girl is shameless in what it does and that is to create absolutely shit-house insane fight scenes and copious amounts of gore that comes along with it. The smallest cuts produce the biggest gusher fountains of blood ever, making you think that they don’t have platelets what so ever in their bodies. But the gore, which is the only reason for these movies to exist, is given way to insane creations of death in terms of the kills and the villains weapon. Tempura shrimp throwing knives to a drill bra and even the ubiquitous machine gun arm that our heroine uses, it’s a cavalcade of just weird and weirder contraptions of death. The fight scenes are just the icing on the cake as they are brutal and bloody, but also cause they just get weirder than the next.
Is there anything redeeming about The Machine Girl? Nope. This is just an exploitation film, wrapped in a gore flick, and banged by grindhouse vibe. This is just for pure voyeuristic intentions in watching utter Japanese insanity with these sort of movies. How this is a thriving sub-genre out there, I will never know, but if they are at least absurd as this one, I might give it a whirl.
