Noboru Iguchi
Japanese pornographer who switched 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 movies don't have the muscle of his peers Yoshihiro Nishimura and Yûdai Yamaguchi mostly because he focuses on teenage girls and silly camp.
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 popup 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.
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.