Secret Undercover Agent: Wild Cats in Strip Royale
aka Himitsu Sennyu Sosakan – Wild Cats in Strip Royale
2008
Directed by Keiichi Kobayashi
Secret Undercover Agent Wildcats in Strip Royale continues the tradition of having weird microchips in fashion accessories that do amazing things started in the previous film. Wildcats in Strip Royale also continues the tradition of the film looking freaking gorgeous. The cinematographer should be doing mainstream work in Hollywood, not Japanese DTV exploitation trash. But Hollywood’s loss is our gain! In fact, a lot of directors in Japan get their start doing trashy exploitation work. That’s partially why a lot of the 1970s Sukeban films look so good, along with the hundreds of detective films and pinku films.
The biggest news of the sequel is that Haruna Yabuki left, and was replaced by Reon Kadena. As Reon Kadena has a much higher profile, this announcement caused a large amount of internet buzz that the first film just didn’t have. Although the internet buzz was pretty much “Hey, Reon Kadena is in a movie!” it was enough to raise the profile of the film far above the nothing the predecessor had.
Wildcats in Strip Royale does have a few other things going for it. It is obvious the actresses are having more fun in this one, Yuuri Morishita especially. Some of the costumes are pretty ridiculous and funner than in the original (the cats suits are actual cat suits!) and the plot is easier to follow without subtitles. Yes, that’s right, TarsTarkas.NET doesn’t need no stinking subtitles! I still don’t know the name of their agency or of some of the minor players, but such is life.
Quick lesson for everyone: In Japan, there are these supermodel girls called Idols. Some of them are just models, some do more than that such as singing and/or acting. The big Idols pull in a ton of cash, then marry some rich guy and retire. The lesser Idols do car shows and mall openings and marry midlevel accountants. Most of the bigger Idols have followings all over the web, and there are guys who just scan photobooks of models all day, or host websites that just catalog Idol pictures and news. Idols can specialize in certain genres, like the gravure Idols that star in the film, there are also AV Idols which is a nicer way of saying porn stars. This film will talk of Pure Idols, which is another term used but I don’t know exactly what it means. And let’s not forget the Idols who are thrown so whips can be received.
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Things start off weird (and cool!) as a bunch of pyramid head/black vinyl KKK hood wearing mofos are having an auction. Thanks to the title card we are told this mission is “Target the Man With 1000 Faces”! In this auction, lot number 14 is Monroe’s panties! Marylin Monroe, I presume (I sure hope it ain’t President Monroe!) Lot number 15 is…Bunny! The hood she was wearing is yanked off and she is handcuffed to the cart. Her cover is more blown than a bouncer at a brothel. Don’t worry, because the winner of these two lots is…Honey! She grabs the auctioneer and flashes her badge (badge??? When did they get a badge?), then she yanks off his hood…he has a luchador mask on underneath. Honey yanks that off, another mask is under that. More and more and more and more and more masks. He does have 1000 faces, remember? Finally, Honey gets to the bottom, and the auctioneer has panties on his head as a final mask! The real Monroe panties! This segment alone is more bizarre then the whole original film.
The panty-faced auctioneer get gets up and runs, but honey tosses Bunny’s bra on his head, causing the crowd to swarm him to get her bra. Yeah. Bras turn men into mindless animals. Japan wins again.
Let’s have another James Bond-style opening song and credit sequence!
Meanwhile in Hanjuka, a new girl named Kaori is at the spy shop. Honey (now dressed in pink cowboy hat and red, white, and blue American flag bikini) is upset, because that’s what she does. The plot now involves something with a microchip in a new line of panties that make women want to have sex with whoever you command them to. It doesn’t say what happens when these brainwashed girls remove those panties, which is usually required for sex, but then why are you overthinking a Honey & Bunny film? In addition, Bunny is in a short dress and spends pretty much the entire film bending over so you can see part of her butt. Even when there is no reason for her to be not facing the camera and bent over, Yuuri Morishita will find a way.
Mission 01 – The Pure Idol Full Nude Case. Full Nude, huh? The two agents must train to be a pure idol, so they can find out who is blackmailing pure idols with nude photos. This involves jogging, bouncing, jiggling, all the fun stuff! Honey and Bunny also need to learn the pure idol smile, pure idol hand shake, and pure idol posing. Being a pure idol is a lot of work.
The Akihabara district will be where Honey makes her debut as a pure idol. The Akihabara district is known for some of the crazy fashion stuff from Japan such as Ganguro girls. Honey’s premier seems to go off okay, but do idols in Japan really premier at press conferences attended entirely by nerdy guys? I guess the hardest part of being an idol is not being creeped out by your fanbase. Honey is acting as a super-bubbly and giggly girl, a complete contrast to her tough personality. She is supposed to be the same character and is briefly played tough earlier, so this is like a 180 change in direction.
Bunny seems to have problems getting an idol job, she is interviewing with a lady with multiple uniformed servants and now is posing for gravure photos again. Basically she is doing the same thing she did in the last film. It is harder to become an idol than it looks!
Later on, Honey is packing in the crowds to her idol events. Something happens where someone questions her and takes photographs, so she yanks off all of her clothes (of course, we don’t see anything…) She regrets it later. Honey spots a paparazzi sniping photos off the top of a skyscraper, she dodges the flash with a mirror, and when Honey goes up to check on him, he has stripped his clothes off. His pockets have same candy that Bunny has been eating. So the conspiracy involves commands delivered by camera to cause involuntary stripping, and candy that is ominous for reasons unknown. Can’t you see the urgency?
Capp and Nervous Guy are on their massage tables…tied down to them this time! Uh……………..yeah. Capp gets a phone call brought to him that leads to…
Mission 02 – The Restroom Blast Case. Wait, did we solve Mission 01? Oh, they are multi-tasking!
Now Honey and Bunny are practicing….skip, rabbit jump, horse jump, repeat. The video company must have gotten customer feedback that they wanted more shots of girls hopping around in gym shorts. Back at Bunny’s job, her new task is to hop up and down while tossing balls in the air. I guess all that practice pays off. This hop-tossing is taped for someone. Bunny is still eating the candy all sexy like, for those of you who were concerned about it. Honey sneaks around a building, finds bras attached to electronic breasts on the ground, and guys looking in peepholes. The other side of the peephole is Bunny in the nurse outfit??? What? This is like Ground Zero for fetish weirdness.
Honey arrests a photographer who has one of the special stripping cameras, he used a language dictionary to speak to her in the peephole room but talks just find when brought back to the fashion spy HQ. Honey gets him to tell his life story. He loves Kaori the idol, but she doesn’t love him back. Unlike most people who give up their celebrity crushes as children, he just gets more obsessed. He saves her hair, and then sees her in the street one day and freaks out/collapses. We also find out the camera by itself doesn’t make people strip, but they don’t know how it all works together.
Bunny gets a flyer advertising something called Strip-1GP. Honey and Bunny still have to massage the two male agents, I see misogyny is alive and well in the Japanese fashion secret agent world! And why do I have to see the male main characters in tighty whiteys? Honey and Bunny argue and toss down the flyer, which is picked up by Kaori.
Mission 03 – The Strip-1GP in Strip Royale
Wait, we are are Mission 03 already? They haven’t completed the other missions! Talk about biting off more than you can chew. I guess they did enter the Strip Royale, which is sort of like Casino Royale except you strip and the long Parkour sequence is in Liberia instead of Madagascar. And what is the -1GP? Is that short for 1 Gold Pole? 1 Good Pig? 1 Godzilla Pancake? Inquiring minds want to know. Okay, maybe just this mind.
It is sting time at the Strip Royale! Nervous Guy, Saki, and Capp are in the audience on survelance, while Kaori on the main stage. The photographer they arrested is also there, and Honey and Bunny are backstage, with Bunny set to go onstage. Her strip number goes fine until the audience realizes she isn’t gonna strip for them and they start tossing cups at her. Then, the photographer snaps a photo of her and she suddenly has the urge to take off all of her clothes.
Next up is Honey’s turn. She comes up dolled up like Jessica Alba dancing to a faux-James Bond theme in Japanese. During Honey’s dance, Saki is grabbed by two blue-clothed girls. The photographer’s attempts to photograph Honey all fail until the song she is dancing to is completed. Now when she is photographed she doesn’t have a strip urge at all. They figure out it is a combination of the photographing flash and music that triggers the stripping.
She beats up and hogties the photographer onstage and goes through his stuff. Everyone is watching her do this. No one seems to find it out of the ordinary. She finds an electric breast, and a detonator that matches that of bomb that exploded before. A tone gets played and soon every guy in the place is stripping. A mysterious woman was holding a special light during all of the strip incidents, that’s the light that set everyone off, not the photographer’s flash! This is pretty complicated of a plot to get people stripping for a gravure movie.
The two Secret Undercover Agents get in their skintight wildcat outfits mentioned in the title of the movie, but are immediately drugged by women in blue. In the last film they got captured immediately, also! We want action! They put on this skintight outfits for a reason.
Hey, it is the evil lady Shitagi from the first film! With her assistants, one of which is the manager of Honey and seems to be the main assistant. Shitagi brings out a bomb, and shines the two captive girls with light, which somehow makes the writh in agony. Guess which sick festish that is catering to? Yes, the Light Torture Fetish. 17 million Japanese men strong (and a surprising number of guys from Nebraska if the referral logs are to be believed…)
Eventually the evil women leave, so our girls plot their escape. Oh, look, one of Shitagi’s girls in blue was Kaori, who sneaks back in to save Honey and Bunny. Honey’s evil manager also comes back, so Honey fights her while Bunny gets untied. Finally, girls in cat costumes beating people up. How long did it take to get to this? Over 77 minutes! Far too long. I demand more cat costume girls fighting! That’s the whole point of the film, isn’t it?
They try to disarm the bomb, but somehow it can only be disarmed when worn as a bra…okay. Hope that Al Qaeda doesn’t start making these bombs in Afghanistan, or you will be seeing marines in D-cups! Semper F-cup! Bunny puts the bra bomb on as Honey fights. Honey’s snake style is no match for Evil Manager’s eagle claw, but Honey defeats her Evil Manager by using her brain. Yes, even models have brains. Don’t be so prejudiced against beauty, haven’t the Secret Undercover Agent films taught you anything? Tyra Banks will show up to your house and yell at you for your attitude, but by the end of her rant it will be about Tyra Banks, so maybe she shouldn’t go yell at you. Just read this review instead.
Shitagi is defeated again. Maybe they should arrest her instead of letting her go at the end of each movie. Shitagi’s evil alien(?) mistress punishes her by having her tied up and her minions (the girls in blue) throw puffballs at her. Yeah, you read that one right.
The end….but the Wildcats will be back in…something. I’m too lazy to look up the kanji, but if the movie comes out, TarsTarkas.NET will be there. Not sure why, but we will…
And we get the Honey and Bunny Mambo song for the closing credits!
Rated 8/10 (Badgeu, Pervertu, Bombu, Nerdu, Otaku, Geeku, Lipsu, Goldfishu)
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