Dir: Yoshihiro Nishimara (Tokyo Gore Police/ Special F/X for Machine Girl/Tokyo Gore Police)
I truly am starting to believe that most Japanese Horror Film Makers want to make Dead Alive a Genre unto itself,because every time I finish watching a J-Horror/Gore film I feel Like I just watched a updated version of that film. Now I know these films are all completely different and all but the Over the top gore mixed with the sick humor and Odd ball cast of characters I cant help but feel that they are ripped straight from the mind of a young Peter Jackson. So Now onto this little gem of a film. Vampire Girl v.s. Frankenstein Girl is your typical Neo Tokyo Gore fest centered around the most common of places in J-cinema ...high school.Monami is a new transfer student and she takes a liking to Jyugon , The Love interest of Keiko a popular girl and daughter of the Vice Principle. Valentines day comes around and in Japan it is tradition for the girl to give the boy of her choosing chocolate. monami opts to give her treat to jyogun and he in turn it's eat , but there is something odd about her little gift as the main ingredient is her blood.Once he eats it he starts to feel strange and it turns out that by eating the candy he is turned into a Vampire by ingesting her Vamp Blood.While Keiko's jealousy of Monami's advances and Jyogun's transformation and growing exceptance of his situation develop we meet some of the other interesting groups of students. Including a wrist Cutter club , A group of emo girls who meet after school to compare blades and discuss the benefits and different techniques that go into cutting. This is a direct tie in to the directors prior film Tokyo Gore Police in which we see a commercial for Wrist Cutter fashion. We also meet another interesting group of kids known as The Ganguro Club which is a small gathering of girls who imitate Black people or at least what they envision African Americans to be like but not to accurately as some of them have lip plates and spears and the leader of the group in complete face prosthetics and a huge afro wig , and all of them are dawning extremely offensive Black face make up...this type of character would never fly in the U.S. as it is truly pretty tasteless but in all honesty quite funny in some instances but do to our sensitivity it just would not be allowed. We also meet The sexed up school nurse Midori, the Vice principle Kenji and the new school janitor a hunchback named Igor. We learn that Kenji is also a mad scientist who dawns Kabuki garb and admires Dr. Frankenstein and alongside Nurse Midori conducts experiments in reanimation to no success until later in the film when they find that monami's blood has a life of it's own and can bring anything to life weither once living or not.One day Keiko finds Monami and Jyugon on the roof together and she attacks Monami which leads to Keiko falling to her death . Her father decides this is perfect for his work due to his new discovery of the Vampire blood and he turns his daughter into a undead killing machine built out of the strongest parts of various students and alumni of the school. this of course leads us to our inevitable showdown between Vampire girl and Frankenstein Girl. There are allot of similarities between this film and Tokyo Gore police that shine through in the battle scenes of this movie such as the extreme gore and the damaged limbs becoming deadly weapons gimmick that seems to be a mainstay in this type of film.The two do battle on top of a giant tower in Tokyo and this makes for a interesting fight to end the film. This film was allot of fun to watch and has some pretty good comedic moments thrown in amongst the flying guts and spraying geysers of blood, I truly could believe that this film along with Machine Girl , Meatball Machine and Tokyo Gore Police are supposed to be some sort of unrelated series , because there are subtle nods to all of those films in this one and you can truly see the similarities in style that seems to sew these flick together effortlessly. If you enjoyed any of those fore mentioned films then you will love this one or if you have never seen any of them but liked Dead Alive than this film should be right up your alley. I have grown a soft spot for these kinds of films as I think they are allot of fun and they are in my eyes kind of a new age of Troma film , bringing me back to my childhood of wanting to find the grossest film I could but at the same time these ones can still make you laugh and not just set out to make you feel uncomfortable watching it like so many gore films can. I really hope that this director keeps pumping out these kind of movies because one thing they have going for them is that they are never boring , managing to be balanced between being just gory enough to hinder the squeamish but still being funny and entertaining enough for the casual watcher to stay tuned in and being amazingly well paced for a movie of this kind. throw this one in with Tokyo Gore Police and Machine Girl and you will have yourself one hell of a movie night to talk about for days after .
Final judgement on this strange piece of celluloid is 4 out of 5
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