Zombie Ass – Toilet of the Dead
Zombie Ass is an actual movie coming out, from all places, Japan! Noboru Iguchi is the mad genius behind this title and film, which by all accounts will be yet another entry in his splatter gore genre that has made him a cult fan favorite around the globe. Zombie Ass will premier at Fantastic Fest 2011 in Austin.
I can’t read all the names on the posters, but Asami and Demo Tanaka are back, and it also stars Asana Mamori (Gravure Idol) and many more names that are too blurry to read and too close to nakedness to Google at work.
The synopsis from the Fantastic Fest website:
We are going to flush you! The most crap-tastic zombie movie ever to emerge from the sewers of low-budget filmmaking is finally upon us, and it’s from the perverted mind of cinematic madman and legendary ass-fetishist Noboru Iguchi, creator of THE MACHINE GIRL, ROBO-GEISHA and KARATE-ROBO ZABORGAR! Given free reign by a generous, independent producer to plumb the depths of his toilet-obsessed imagination, Iguchi has created a splatter comedy guaranteed to warm the bowels of those with the stomach for it. Wracked with guilt over the suicide of her sister Ai, who was tormented by high school bullies, pretty young karate student Megu accompanies a group of older friends on a camping trip into the woods: smart girl Aya, her druggie boyfriend Také, big-boobed model Maki, and nerdy Naoi. Things start to go badly when Maki finds a parasitical worm inside a fish they catch – and wolfs it down alive, in the hope that it’ll help keep her skinny! Soon after, and not so unexpectedly in situations like this, zombies show up and begin to complicate things further. After they’re attached by a crowd of poop-covered undead who emerge from an outhouse toilet, the group seeks refuge at the home of strange Dr. Tanaka and his daughter Sachi. But unbeknownst to them, Tanaka has been conducting experiments on the parasites—and the zombies!—and has another fate in mind for the five strangers from the city. What’s the connection between the parasites and the zombies? And can Megu’s karate alone help them escape, or will she have to rely on the liberating power of farts to save the day? Featuring special effects by FF 2009-2010 guest Yoshihiro Nishimura, and some truly jaw-dropping contributions from Iguchi’s genius subconscious (parasite anus-zombies?!?), ZOMBIE ASS is a heaping plate of bad taste that may go down rough but is guaranteed to come out smooth and regular.
Categories: Movie News Tags: Asami Sugiura, Asana Mamori, Demo Tanaka, Japan, Noboru Iguchi, Yoshihiro Nishimura, Zombie Ass
Horny House of Horror (Review)
Horny House of Horror
aka Fasshon heru aka Fashion Hell
2010
Directed and written by Jun Tsugita
How many different ways are there to film girls chomping off a guy’s johnson while keeping thing interesting? Well, Horny House of Horror has an answer to that, and the answer is “not enough.” As we’ve seen time and time again the past few years, Japan has become a great exporter of films that fit a genre of ridiculous gore – The Machine Girl, RoboGeisha, Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl, Mutant Girls Squad, Gothic & Lolita Psycho – are all examples that TarsTarkas.NET has taken the time to view. And I admit that I think some of those films are rather good, in a WTF fashion, and I’m even shocked that the genre has lasted as long as it has without getting on my nerves. But when you get enough of something, parts of it will be crappy, and with Horny House of Horror is that part.
Up until the last third of the movie, the majority of the blood on display is arterial spray gushing out of the crotches of three unfortunate men. The rest is talking. And talking. And anticipating. At this point in the genre’s life, it is too late to try to do a slow buildup to the crazy, we’ve gotten to the point where we need a constant stream of crazy violence, much like the sprays of blood desired.
With a pedigree including writer/director Jun Tsugita (Mutant Girls Squad), and gore effects by Yoshihiro Nishimura (Tokyo Gore Police, Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl, and many more), this seemed like it would be a treat. Even some of the familiar cast members from Sushi Typhoon films pop up. But things just don’t go together right. And though the film gets around the banishment of full frontal nudity in Japan by using black circles over the severed and non-severed dongs, the limited freedom isn’t incorporated in a way that takes full advantage of the effect. It’s simply an afterthought, not part of the film itself. Though a small point, it is indicative of how much of the film doesn’t go together well.
The opening 16mm slideshow strip of a guy going to a sex massage club on the way home from work was rather nice – it is probably my favrite part of the film as a whole, and made me expect that things would be good throughout. But shadows of the strip remind me of my reading of Tokyo Vice by Jake Adelstein, which will sour you on the sex industry in Japan like nothing else will. We jump into our first victim, whose gets is wang rolled into a sushi roll that is promptly chomped by his working girl as he screams helplessly and blood reddens the world.
So let’s meet the cast!
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Categories: Movie Reviews, Ugly Tags: Asami Sugiura, Demo Tanaka, Japan, Jun Tsugita, Mai Nanami, Mint Suzuki, Saori Hara, Toushi Yanagi, Wani Kansai, Yoshihiro Nishimura, Yuya Ishikawa
Gothic & Lolita Psycho (Review)
Gothic & Lolita Psycho
aka Gosurori shokeinin
2010
Directed by Go Ohara
Written by Kuroki Hisakatsu
Go Ohara’s followup to Geisha vs. Ninjas delves into the genre of the splatter films that have become a popular export from Japan. To help he’s recruited Yoshihiro Nishimura of Tokyo Gore Police, Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl, and Mutant Girls Squad fame to handle the gore effects and makeup. Ohara continues the general themes of Geisha vs. Ninjas, with a girl hunting down people responsible for the death of a parent, an episodic structure of bad guy fights, and secret truths being revealed at the end about the parent but it not making a difference in the quest for revenge.
There are only a few fight sequences in this film, though they are pretty long. Some of them are interesting, some of them are boring and overstay their welcome. As a rule, the only interesting fights are against female opponents, though the final fight does get interesting as well. But the guy opponents are either: a psychic who levitates around like a lunatic, a guy who cries for his life for like 5 minutes, or a generic gang of thugs. The final boss entertains an element of danger and risk, though having seen these films enough I knew what the danger would entail, but there was an additional feature of the final fight that made it different from the other ubergore films. It isn’t as wild and crazy as Noboru Iguchi splatter flick, but it does have it’s own charm.
We watched an unsubtitled DVD, so some names are just descriptions and plot points are guesses. At TarsTarkas.NET, we don’t need no stinking subtitles. There’s gonna be spoilers below, so if you aren’t cool with spoilers go read some other review.
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Categories: Movie Reviews, Ugly Tags: Asami Sugiura, Go Ohara, Masahito Okamoto, Minami Tsukui, Misaki Momose, Rina Akiyama, Ruito Aoyagi, Yoshihiro Nishimura, Yurei Yanagi
Mutant Girls Squad (Review)
Mutant Girls Squad
aka Sento shojo: Chi no tekkamen densetsu
2010
Directed by Noboru Iguchi, Yoshihiro Nishimura, and Tak Sakaguchi
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Is that all you got, movie?
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So I’ll just copy the background of this pretty much directly from the ad material: Tak Sakaguichi (star of Versus), Noboru Iguchi (director of The Machine Girl and Robogeisha), and Yoshihiro Nishimura (tons of effects work and director on Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl and Tokyo Gore Police) got together in 2009’s New York Asian Film Festival, got drunk, and vowed to combine their efforts Voltron-style into one super movie. And here is the fruits of their blood-splattered loins. As those three are masters of the hip new subgenre of Japanese Ultragore, one expects this X-Men-ish flick to be the reddest thing under the sun. Imagine the worst oil spills known to man, only the black crude is instead red goo, and you know what to expect. And Mutant Girls Squad delivers on that effect.
But besides the blood spurting out like the lawn sprinklers at the local driving range, does Mutant Girls Squad deliver on the one thing I want, which is an entertaining film. And I declare that yes, Mutant Girls Squad is entertaining! I actually like it the most of all the gore flicks I have seen so far save The Machine Girl. The characters are more developed than usual, the storyline is a bit more detailed, and it looks like the three directors decided to try to outdo each other with fancier, technical shots.
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Trumpy, you can do magic!
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At this point having seen movies with girls with machine gun arms, girls with machine gun butts, swords coming out from butts, missing limbs being used as boomerangs, characters turning into mechanical monstrosities, every adult male being insanely perverted, and side characters being simply yelling people in wacky costumes, it takes a little more to make me take notice. Sure, you have a chainsaw coming out of your butt, but as you aren’t fighting a woman with flamethrower breasts I am not jumping for joy. Some of the characters are imaginative, including the girl with a weird mutant head best friend (which is sadly barely touched on) and the not-so secret final form of the Astro-Mutant.
There will be spoilers below, but we’ll not reveal every little detail, though probably enough that if you care you should hold off. We’re not going to point out every cameo and reused actor and actress from previous outings by these directors, as not only would that double the length of this review, it would be embarrassing when I missed like 4 or 5 of them. So we’ll only point out the highlights and let you know now there is plenty of interesting things to see if you pay attention.
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Yeah, yeah, we’ve all gone through that phase of life where we have a giant cannon arm and was turned into a robot.
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Okay, movie, you have redeemed yourself!
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Categories: Bad, Movie Reviews Tags: Asami Sugiura, Cay Izumi, Japan, Kentaro Shimazu, Noboru Iguchi, Suzuka Morita, Tak Sakaguchi, Women who kick butt, Yoshihiro Nishimura, Yuko Takayama, Yumi Sugimoto
Robogeisha (Review)
RoboGeisha
2009
Written and Directed by Noboru Iguchi
Robogeisha is exactly what you would expect from a movie with that title. Needless to say, that means it gets approval here on TarsTarkas.NET. We got geisha, robots, robot geisha, dudes getting killed by geisha, women with various weapons built into their body, fake blood spraying everywhere, and women kicking butt.
Now, Robogeisha sounds like the kind of film that doesn’t have some sort of commentary on culture of Japan or the world, and you would be right to think so, except for the fact that you are wrong. The thing is, Robogeisha is unaware that is has such comments, so we’re really grasping at straws here. Giant, obvious straws.
The plot sort of follows the basic lines of Memoirs of a Geisha for a few minutes before veering off into insane territory. But we have the similarities with the sisters being rivals (substituting the Sayuri/Pumpkin rivalry) and the steel industry tycoon. I’m not saying Memoirs of a Geisha would have been a better film had it had robot geisha fighting a walking building, but it probably would have.
But first the cast…
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Categories: Movie Reviews, Ugly Tags: Asami Sugiura, Aya Kiguchi, Cay Izumi, Hitomi Hasebe, Japan, Noboru Iguchi, Takumi Saito, Women who kick butt
Sukeban Hunters: Soukatsu Nagurikomi Sakusen trailer
The trailer for Sukeban Hunters: Soukatsu Nagurikomi Sakusen has hit the web. The Sukeban Hunters films began life as a 17-minute Yakuza Hunter short film which was included as a bonus feature on the DVDs of a movie called 893239 . Eventually they were announced as a trilogy of films, but now are just a pair of films and have changed from Yakuza Hunters to Sukeban Hunters, which is probably a good title change for selling import DVDs to the USA. Sukeban Hunters: Soukatsu Nagurikomi Sakusen is joined by Sukeban Hunters: Jigoku no Kettou as the sister film. The first is directed by Kazufumi Nakahira and Shinichi Okuda helms the second.
Sukeban Hunters: Soukatsu Nagurikomi Sakusen stars Asami (The Machine Girl and a weird movie I just watched called Mikosurihan Gekijo: Namashibori Super DX) as the main Sukeban Hunter, who is hunting a girl played by Rena Komine (Kamen Rider The First)
We got chicks with swords taking on lots of dudes with guns, psychedelic (they listed it as a feature, so…), girls with machien gun guitars, feather boas, cowboy hats, schoolgirl knifefights, obvious inspiration from Sukeban films, speedboat drivebys, and naked chicks (which is why we are linking to the clip instead of embedding it!)
Rena Komine demands you click for huge!
Source, as usual for awesome Japanese news, NipponCinema
Categories: Movie News Tags: Asami Sugiura, Rena Komine, Sukeban Hunters
