The Machine Girl (2008)

The Machine Girl is a typical cinematic revenge tale told in a very atypical way.

Cute Japanese schoolgirl Ami (Minase Yashiro) is tough and athletic, but otherwise a normal young girl until her brother, Yu (Ryosuke Kawamura) and his slightly simple friend, are killed by a gang of bullies led by the son of a local yakuza crimelord (who happens to come from a family of ninjas).

The film starts off with a glorious ballet of blood as Ami, already fitted with her machine gun arm, wipes out the gang of bullies in true Grand Guignol style; we're talking severed limbs and pulverized faces and totally over-the-top amounts of gore and spouting torrents of blood.

The Machine Girl then flashes back six months to tell Ami's story, heading first to the murder of Yu and his friend and then Ami's initial attempts to talk to the parents of one of the gang.

She and Yu have tried to follow a path of pacifism after their parents killed themselves because of phony murder charges against them.

Unfortunately Ami's rational approach only leads to the onset of graphic violence and her rapid decline into madness.

From then on the violence is pretty much relentless and the story sees Ami eventually teaming up with Miki, the other dead boy's mother (Asami) to take down the yakuza family.

At one point Ami is captured and tortured by the yakuza and it is as a result of this that when she later teams up with Miki and her husband, ex-bikers now running a garage, she gets fitted with the honking-great machine gun attachment.

The film is overflowing with a mountain of bodies, buckets of blood, many inventive ways to maim and kill, and a splattering of wince-inducing moments for our sensitive Western palates, but all delivered in a darkly humourous style by writer/director Noburo Iguchi.

Maybe I missed something in the quickfire plot but I couldn't see how the opening sequence tied into the narrative flow of the rest of the story, but I guess ultimately it doesn't matter. You don't generally watch this type of gorefest for the intricate plotting.

Occasionally the special effects slip a bit as well - there are a couple of times when you can clearly see that Minase Yashiro's missing arm is actually tucked inside her sailor-schoolgirl uniform and sometimes the CGI effects go a bit blocky when heads are being shredded by machine gun bullets - but again these are trivial issues on a par with any piddling plot holes.

The Machine Girl is a distinctly Japanese, very black, comedy about revenge that doesn't take itself too seriously, has a very attractive lead, and showcases a wide selection of armaments - including a chainsaw, throwing stars, numerous katanas, handguns, knives, a drill bra, hot fat and the semi-mythical flying guillotine.

What more could you ask for?