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Noboru Iguchi
Japanese pornographer who switched temporarily to over-the-top campy gore movies in the sub-genre I call 'bubble-gum splatter', with outrageously entertaining but dumb action featuring the usual endlessly fetishized Japanese schoolgirls. Body parts frequently transform into weapons, kills usually involve ridiculous geysers of blood, and every kill features unique, inventive and ridiculously bizarre violence, all in the name of dumb b-movie trashy camp and exploitation. His extreme movie output doesn't have the relative muscle and entertainment factor of his peers Yoshihiro Nishimura and Yûdai Yamaguchi mostly because he focuses on teenage girls or silly camp. Also directs a wide variety of films in other genres, including some teenage or erotic dramas, silly action and horror, and very wild and insane pornos.
ABCs of Death, The
See Extreme Movies.
More like Undead Sushi. You'd be amazed at how many things the Japanese can come up with around the very silly concept of zombie-sushi. Of course, sushi by itself can't do much, so they added sharp teeth and made sushi fly. A young woman runs away from her strict sushi-chef father to work at an inn with a second-rate sushi-chef where she will learn the true meaning of sushi-fu. Except that one day, a crooked businessman visits, and one of his disgruntled ex-researchers unleashes a sushi undead virus. There's body-sushi with biting sushi, squid-face mutations, sushi babies, a lot of silly martial arts while fighting flying sushi, gory sushi-piranhas, a human fish, and even a sushi battleship (don't ask). There's some splatter with very cheap CGI, but most of the special effects is Nishimura madness, with many silly rubbery mutations and sushi monsters. This one goes so many levels beyond silly and dumb, it just becomes uniquely entertaining insane trash. Based on a manga about a warrior teddy bear, and not a gore movie, although Iguchi maintains his wacky and bizarre approach to special effects and creatures for a relatively, slightly more bizarre manga than the usual fare. Reminiscent of his TV series Ancient Dogoo Girl in its mix of exploitation and silly, colorful super-heroics that seem suitable for toddlers if not for the violence. Warrior pieces of fluff drift through space and take over Earth's teddy bears with the ability to merge with humans to become super-warriors. One joins with a pink cosplay girl, the evil one joins with some loser. Lots of pink martial arts and silly sci-fi ensues. So far, it's just another manga. Some of the more bizarre elements include a group of 'lazy manga readers' that roll and attack while reading mangas, a group of embarrassed girls that can waste a whole city with laser-boobs, an evil grown-man baby, a spoon-thrower, farting teddies, a magic electric guitar, and lots of zombies. I have no idea what kind of audience this is meant for and I'd rather not think too much about it. Iguchi remakes yet another 70s juvenile Japanese superhero series, in the vein of Yatterman. This isn't a Iguchi splatter flick and is more family friendly, as long as you don't mind your kids watching violence with robo-metallic bras turning into dragons, that is. Basically, its the same insanity except without the gore. Every minute something new pops up, from a psychotic robot 'Bulldog Truck Car', to Diarrhea Robot that sprays acid, to cyborg fetuses, flying robotic heads, a kissing session that involves violence with tentacle-boobs, and robot-parts made of human DNA. The story? Who cares! Incredibly dumb, but it will definitely distract you for an hour and a half. Iguchi does a Cronenberg love story, and the combination of cheap exploitation with a juvenile mindset, the production values of a cheap porno, a teenage romance, and some low-budget body-horror, result in some truly ridiculous bizarreness. A nerdy manga artist develops an awkward relationship with his assigned female editor. He is traumatized by something he witnessed as a 'child' involving his adoptive family engaging in bizarre 'sex' that involves detached travelling eyeballs (don't ask). She is terrified of human touch and has a strange aggressive boyfriend. There are also some manipulative and cruel co-workers that get in the way. When he erupts in anger one day and mutilates her face, she develops a bizarre blood-hungry parasite. Somehow, hate, manipulation, violence and fear between them break and evolve into acceptance and love, while the world deterioriates into a blood-sucking epidemic. Thus, sex, relationships and gender-tensions manifest in bizarre body mutations and blood sucking, only it's done in ridiculous juvenile ways, Iguchi style, who seems to have been influenced by Cronenberg's Rabid. The ending is a laugh-out-loud absurdity involving truly unexpected body-horror. Dumb b-movie exploitation and action coupled with over-the-top gore and short bursts of creative splatter a la Peter Jackson. A Japanese high-school girl goes on a revenge rampage after her brother is killed by bullies linked to the Yakuza. She gets tortured and her arm cut off so her new friends build her a machine-gun arm. This is only one of the weapons used however, the rest include a chainsaw, flying guillotine, ninja stars, swords, deep fried oil, and bra-drills (nasty!). One minute you are watching some idiotic dialogue and a girl in a short skirt facing off three ninjas in costumes imagined by children, the next moment people are getting literally sliced into pieces with geysers of gallons of blood. People don't just get shot here, they get their heads hollowed by 200 bullets. Very entertaining, but painfully dumb and I miss the days of non-CGI splatter. I believe this Japanese bubble-gum splatter genre has reached a peak with this movie. This is their version of X-Men, with mutant girls being hunted down by the military and scared citizens, and an organized squad of mutants getting lost in idealistic hatred of all humans, causing an internal war. The insanity and inventiveness is absolutely over-the-top. Here are only some examples of dozens: An anus-chainsaw weapon, breast-swords, a sucker-mouth kissing weapon that causes eyes to pop up, a man with mutant mewling breasts and genitals, carving up a woman into a big baguette, slow spooling out of brain matter, human heads as gory bongos, and an octopus girl using a dismembered mutant girl with fiery rocket fuel as blood to fly in the air in order to attack a mutant transvestite that is so bizarre, it would take a whole page to describe him. Whether you enjoy this or not, you will be staring at the screen wondering what insanity will pop up next. And yet, thanks to the silly use of schoolgirls, some cheap CGI effects, a lack of personality and muscle, and a complete lack of wit, this is simply too dumb to enjoy fully. I much prefer Brian Yuzna who didn't mix his love for splatter with juvenile fawning over schoolgirls. More madcap b-movie entertainment from the crazy Japanese behind Machine Girl, only this time it's about violent robo-wars and bizarre weapons rather than gore (there's only one splatter scene). Rival sisters in geisha training are recruited by a guild of secret assassins with an aim to bring a new regime into power. Their hate for each other causes them to compete and sign up for multiple physical modifications, or their injuries slowly turning them into full-blown robots a la Robocop, giving them nonsensical over-the-top body-weapons. This is all just a backdrop for the special effects and mad trashy b-movie fun of course: Breast machine-guns and acid guns, phallic nose masks, asses that shoot ninja stars or full-length katanas, internal body-weapons when cut in half, buildings that turn into robots, bleeding buildings, cheap CGI blood, legs that turn into tanks, an endless stream of weird deaths and kill techniques, and so on. After almost a dozen banal sequels, Iguchi attempts his own reboot of this series which is somewhere in between normal J-Horror and Iguchi's usual insanity. Tomie is a popular teenage girl that embodies sheer lust and popularity, as well as all the negative consequences of these, who also just happens to be immortal, thus becoming a kind of teenage horror icon. In this version, the actress that plays her looks like a wicked Japanese version of Paris Hilton. A freak gory accident straight of Exorcist seems to have killed her in front of her jealous sister, but she returns to the delight of her parents and the horror of her sister, except as a freak of nature. Matters become more and more freaky and bizarre, Nishimura's effects growing more out of hand as the movie progresses: A couple of over-the-top splatter scenes, rubbery mutations, people commit bloody violence while under the influence of Tomie, and there's a whole collection of different ways to make a decapitated head mobile, including centipede heads and hair acting as limbs, like something out of a Re-Animator movie. Battle Royale, Iguchi style. In other words, Iguchi exploits an exploitation movie. Except, to be fair, this is supposedly based on a book featuring a game-of-death. The problem is, once you add silly Iguchi elements like half-naked killer girls and outrageous impossible deaths, the game of death loses its bite and it becomes just another Iguchi movie. The game here is that a man kidnaps relatives of a couple dozen unwilling young contestants, then blackmails them into running for their relatives' lives, leaving them clues and weapons to fight it out to the finishing line. Some die due to silly but gory accidents, but most lose their lives thanks to paid girly assassins and the blood-thirstiness of their increasingly frantic competition. Weapons like hand-chainsaws and elevator doors cause some over-the-top splattery deaths, but it's mostly about the half-naked girls and close-ups of butts amidst constant ultra-violence. This movie is neither here nor there. Prototypical movie by Iguchi featuring early versions of his fetishes and camp, under a theme of gender-bending. A rough boy that looks like a girl is convinced by his confused Dad to go to school dressed as a girl. Before he learns to appreciate the benefits of this however, he finds himself in the middle of a gang war between the Humility Club, 'Full-Frontal Woman' AKA Naked Witch, 'Braless Women', 'Monk Women' and other weirdos, all sporting super-powers like nipple clamps, or shooting bullets through their teeth or breasts, and of course, fighting mostly naked. Lots of nudity, girl-fights, gory body weapons, and some splatter ensues. Too dumb and badly acted to enjoy, but I'm sure this has its audience. Regardless of the silliness of the title, you have to realize that this is an Iguchi movie, which means he will take it to places you didn't want to know about. Iguchi takes a break from gore, and goes for insane gross-outs instead. Excrement zombies, monster mutating tapeworms, diarrhea, jet-engine farts, poison-cloud-farts, ass attacks, dueling tapeworms, tapeworm rape, and so on, and, of course, all involving Japanese teenage girls in short skirts. These girls, on a weird expedition to find fish with tapeworms and eat them, encounter a mad scientist and a plague that they didn't expect. Will Megumi's karate skills save the day, and will she overcome the embarrassment of fart attacks? As it sounds, this is simply too juvenile and stupid to enjoy, unless this is your cup of tea for some reason. |
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