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Movies FTW — The Machine Girl

When watching a movie, there comes a point where you feel as though you know already what to expect. You've seen the bottom of the rabbit hole, as it were. The gimmicks have already been played out, the plot has presented a predictable climax, and continuing to watch the movie seems a bit futile -- you've seen all there is to see from this movie.

This moment in The Machine Girl is the title sequence. There are some bullies beating up a kid. An unassuming schoolgirl walks up and acts tough. They talk smack to each other, the kids pull out knives, and the schoolgirl produces a giant machine gun from her backpack. The bullies try to fight her, but get blown away, literally. Some kid's head gets blown off within five minutes of the movie starting. They run around and try to dodge each other, and after a few close calls, Machine Girl ends up murdering them in the most inhumane, bloodiest ways possible. It's great family fun, for sure.

You wouldn't know it if it was your first time watching, but that five minute title sequence pretty much sums up the entire movie -- here's this girl who is going to go batshit crazy and kill everyone with this arm gun thing. There's a little more plot behind her motives, but that's the gist of it. Actually, there's a lot of plot. Let me spoil it for you:

Ami and her brother live alone in a little flat in their hometown. Ami's very athletic, happy; very genki (energetic) -- the girl-next-door kind of type, for sure. Her brother is kind of melodramatic and boring but it's okay because he's a teenager. Their parents were wrapped up in some cult or something and were rumored to have murdered some people, but they're dead now. Ami and her unbelievably forgettable brother deny it vehemently, despite people insulting them by calling them terrible things like "murderers" and "bastard children of murderers" -- you think they'd be used to it by now, but it still burns their biscuits. Ami's stupid brother is, as many stereotypical stupid younger brothers are, wrapped up in debt to his school's band of yakuza (Japanese gangster) misfits.

One night, he borrows money from Ami to go "buy a game" -- code for "paying off my yakuza friends so they don't slit my throat." (I wonder how prevalent this problem is in Japan, because it happens all the time in movies and stuff. That's for another entry though.) The deal goes sour because stupid younger brother and his fat friend, also indebted to the yakuza schoolboy pricks, try to fight back, despite being weak and outnumbered two to one. Ami hears about it and starts to worry that he's in trouble.

Then things turn from strange to weird.

Turns out the ringleader of the yakuza bully group is actually yakuza for reals. What's worse, he's not just a yakuza. He's also a ninja yakuza. What's worse, he's not just a ninja yakuza, he's a direct descendant of the greatest ninja of all time, Hanzo Hattori...or so his father claims. They have some "father-son time" and try to kill each other. His father then decides to have a little father-son bonding by cutting his wrist and bleeding out into his son's mouth. Yakuza kid gets ready to go to school and says goodbye to his mom, who is out back stabbing some girl in a maid costume because "she was new." If this is yakuza kid's normal routine, no wonder he's a prick.

Then a lot more stuff happens. Ami's brother and his fat friend confront the yakuza brats, and end up getting thrown off of a car park. They die and Ami vows to take revenge. She finds her brother's loser diary and the last note he wrote in it is, conveniently, an itemized list of names, titled "PEOPLE I HATE AND WANT TO DIE." These are presumably the bullies picking on him, Ami figures, and she visits one of the lackeys' houses to confront her brother's assailants directly. It turns out that his parents are insane and they try to kill Ami for accusing their son of murder when she is, they say, more of a murderer than he is. They fight and Ami's arm ends up getting fried.

She then does what anyone seeking revenge for their recently-murdered brother would do: grabs a sickle and returns to the kid's house. She brutally murders the entire family , and suddenly being called a murderer doesn't bother her anymore -- she actually starts calling herself a murderer in a weird "I have accepted my fate" kind of way.

More plot develops, Ami tries to go fight the Yakuza asshole kid, going so far as to sneak into his house and corner him. Of course, he's a ninja, and his whole family are ninjas, and they are surrounded by yakuza, so it doesn't end well for her -- this is how she loses her arm. She staggers back to her dead brother's dead fat friend's parents, who happen to own a garage. After fighting dead brother's dead fat friend's mom,  to prove that she's strong, of course, they agree to create a machine gun out of car parts. (Are you keeping up? There will be a test later.)

Ami and garage mom fight some high school ninja soccer squad or something, then they trek out into the woods to go kill ninja kid once and for all, doing everything from torturing a yakuza to get information out of him to fighting THE ULTRA MOURNING PARENTS DESPAIR LINEBACKER GUN SQUAD. Lots of people are dismembered and disemboweled, there are drill tits, lots of blood everywhere, and then Ami exacts her revenge. It's much more exciting than that, but only if you like lots of gore. Oh, yeah, ninja dad has a big gauntlet on a chain that magically lands on people's heads and decapitates them. That was pretty cool.

Overall, The Machine Girl is what it is -- a Japanese B-Movie. It's supposed to be campy and cheesy and have bad special effects and it certainly delivers on that. Don't go into it expecting any groundbreaking, spectacular stuff. If anything, the only thing you should expect is that there will be some truly revolting displays of gore throughout the movie. Multiple decapitations, arms and legs sawn and cleaved and ripped off, some guy has to eat his own fingers served on pieces of sushi because he sucks at being a chef, and some kid's flesh is shot off of his head. His head isn't just shot off, no, the flesh is peeled back like a banana peel and a meaty puppet skull mimes being shot for a full minute or so. It's kind of gross. For my screens I tried to get the least amount of gore, because I'm a classy guy and won't scare you away with shock images and gross shit.

If you're a fan of intense blood and guts and gore (the guy that did the special effects for this went on to put on another meaty gorefest in Tokyo Gore Police) you might enjoy this. If you're a fan of depth in plots, avoid this at all costs.

I would have to give this movie four severed arms out of ten, because really, it's a b-movie. It's very self-aware that it won't be earning two thumbs up from Ebert any time soon. It does one thing right, though -- a whole lot of hamburger meat and fake blood.

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If you're still reading this far down, you've given about as much attention as I did to the special spinoff short film, Machine Girlite, or Shyness Machine Girl in Japan. This was a special pack-in with the movie itself, and somehow manages to be EVEN WORSE. It's about one of Ami's forgettable friends with four lines in the whole movie and how she inherits the machine gun arm. She isn't actually missing an arm, she just sticks her elbow into it.

She's pretty much super cutesy, almost sickeningly so. It's basically The Machine Girl if you replaced all of the blood and gore with moé and all of the special effects and fake blood and hamburger meat with Photoshop filters.  The whole short film is supposedly about ten minutes long, which was far too long for me. Apparently she somehow produces a pistol from her butt at some point? There are panty shots. It was uncomfortable. I quit watching.

So there you have it. If you've ever considered watching The Machine Girl, take Fanservice FTW's advice -- don't. It's bad.