Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl

aka Kyuketsu Shojo tai Shojo Furanken

2009
Directed by Yoshihiro Nishimura and Naoyuki Tomomatsu

Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl (hereafter VGxFG due to our crippling laziness in both typing and copy/pasting the movie title) is from the same Japanese goremasters that brought us The Machine Girl, Tokyo Gore Police, and Hypertrophy Genitals Girl. That’s the movie where the girl has the giant genitals. It won six Oscars. Yoshihiro Nishimura is a special effects expert who has directed several of the gore flicks, while Naoyuki Tomomatsu is a director and writer who also produces a lot of gore flicks such as Stacy and Zombie Self-Defense Force . VGxFG is based on a manga I haven’t read because I only read scifi novels published around the time my mom was born I get from used book stores. I also read books about McBroom’s Farm, but there were never and Vampire Girls fighting Frankenstein Girls. Maybe some of his kids were vampires or Frankensteins, he had like a million of them and also ran a zoo at one point besides the farm where I bet the Silver-Tailed Teakettler fought the Sidehill Gouger.

If you like gore and splatter effects and CGI blood, then this movie has that stuff and you probably already at least know about it. But maybe you haven’t bothered to rent it from NetFlix yet and are deciding on if you should see it or requesting Goonies one more time. And that is where TarsTarkas.NET can help. First of all, go get Goonies from a used DVD store, you can probably get it for like $5 thanks the the economic apocalypse. Second, give us $5 as well. This doesn’t help you, but it helps us. Everyone wins! (Everyone at TarsTarkas.NET!)

VGxFG is much like the Twilight saga, in that there are two specially powered teenagers fighting over the heart of a normal teenagers. Sure, the sexes are reversed, and the werewolf is a Frankenstein monster now, but it is similar. And no one sits in a window for four months while some generic alt rock blares in the background about possibilities. Come to think of it, VGxFG is nothing like Twilight. Forget I said anything!

Let’s get the Roll Call out of the way before I devote another paragraph to how VGxFG is exactly like Lethal Weapon 3…

Monami Arukado/Vampire Girl (Yukie Kawamura) – A lonely vampire girl searching for love by tricking boys into eating her blood. Just like all other women… Yukie Kawamura is a gravure idol so check out her gallery we put together. Keiko Furano/Frankenstein Girl (Eri Otoguro) – dresses in the gothic-lolita style tough girl with a squad of three gang members who bully Jyugon into being her boyfriend…until Monami comes along. Is eventually killed and rebuilt by her father as Frankenstein Girl ready for revenge. Jyugon Mizushima (Takumi Saito) – The innocent cute boy trapped in a world where two super-powered girls battle over his heart without consulting him in the slightest. Isn’t love grand? Kenji Furano (Kanji Tsuda) – Vice-Principal/science teacher and Keiko’s father. Also secretly a mad scientist who experiments on the students. Midori (Sayaka Kametani) – The over-sexed school nurse Mizushima goes to see because he’s still freaking out. It turns out she is also the mad assistant to Kenji Furano for his crazed experiments in chopping up students.

In the opening minutes of VGxFG, the Vampire Girl Monami Arukado bites into the head of one of three zombie/chopped up/frankenstein sukeban girls, and peels off the skin of her head like a mummy unraveling. Then the peeled skull is knocked off of its body and comes chomping down on the nose of a second member of the Frankenstein sukeban gang. Blood splatters all the while like red fountains of artistic freedom. Freedom isn’t free, it costs lots of battles between Vampire Girls and Frankenstein Girls. So thank your local Vampire Girl for making freedom possible. The thrown skull rips off the flesh of the second girl, and Vampire Girl lops off the second girl’s skull via some blood sword arms she has grown. The third girl gets disarmed and then stabbed in an uncomfortable place until her skull pops out, and soon all three skulls are stacked uptop each other like the diagram of three apples high used to show how tall the Smurfs are. You know, VGxFG is a lot like the Smurfs…

So all that violent crap you just saw leads into a flashback explaining how it all happened that will take up the entire movie. So strap in, there will be a while before the blood spurts like Old Faithful.

We start in class on Valintine’s Day with the teacher confiscating valintines. In Japan, a screen tells us, Japanese schoolgirls declare their love of Japanese schoolboys by giving them chocolate on Valentine’s Day. So now you can feel socially awkward in a culture you didn’t know anything about if no Japanese schoolgirls give you chocolates this Valentine’s Day. I guess no one loves you. TarsTarkas.NET loves you, but we need $5 to buy chocolates!

This class has some ganjuro girls in it, who are so ganjuro one has a giant lip plate, others have nose rings and complete fake “African” noses and giant afros. In America, this would earn the film an instant giant protest, but in Japan this is actually lampooning the girls who were dressing like this. But it’s still racist.

Gothic Lolita girl Keiko is upset as the teacher stomps her gift, which was for Mizushima (as revealed in a short flashback, she just declared to him that he was her boyfriend and he had no say in the matter.) She has three lackey gothic lolita girls and her father is Vice-Principal Furano Kenji, which we see as she screams for him and he comes busting in. Dad is ineffective and all the chocolates are taken and burned.

Besides lampooning the ganjuro girls, the film takes swipes at another group of goofy Japanese culture as the Wrist-Cutting Team is meeting in preparation for the 13th Annual Wrist-Cutter’s Rally. They will eventually win the contest, the team’s leader having super-strong wrists that resist cutting. There is also a hunchbacked janitor, because, why not? The Ganjuro Club goes even more racist and they namedrop Obama. Ah, Japan! Because they are fake black, they are good at running. Because…racism!

Monami grabs Mizushima aside and tries to give him a small chocolate, which he eventually takes just to get her to leave him alone. He takes a bite, and there is blood in it! Soon Mizushima is going all acid trip freakout crazy time! What is this, the 1960s? We just need some Cream blaring in the background to make the return to Woodstock permanent. Mizushima is seeing people only as their blood vessels. Monami reveals it was her blood he at, and is then confronted by gothic lolitas.

Mizushima goes to see the school nurse Midori, and in her office Monami admits she is a vampire and that she made him half of one and some more blood will make him a full vampire. She bites her lip to produce more blood and leans in to kiss, but is interrupted by Keiko, who burst in and slaps Monami, the blood splashing on the floor.

That night, Vice-Principal Furano Kenji gets all dressed up in kabuki makeup for his mad scientist routine. He and his assistant Nurse Midori go all Frankenstein time on a poor captured student. They carve him up and then rebuild him set to a musical number. The rebuilding doesn’t go so well for the student, who is dead.

Keiko is spreading rumors that Monami is doing compensated dating (that means she’s a whore) and Monami is now being stalked by the teacher who is hoping to spy on some action. But he now has gone missing. Hmmm…. Yes, it is because she vampired the frak out of him, after he saw Monami spinning around in utter joy as blood sprays down like rain from the chomped artery of a different guy as happy love music plays. No one can see that and live, so Monami gets desert in the form of her teacher.

The hunchbacked janitor is her servant/slave Igor who is now burning the drained bodies. Monami asks Mizushima to move in together while he is busy trying to process everything that has happened in the past two days.

Midori the nurse finds the drop of vampire blood, which moves, and moves all over her body, attracting the attention of male passerbys when the blood is busy putting her in the throws of passion. Someone keep this blood away from Dexter Morgan, or that show will get weird too!

Furano Kenji gives the vampire blood some of his blood after it requests it, the vampire blood goes gaga. It is caught in a bad romance. The class’s new teacher is Chinese, but is really the guy who directed the Ju-On movies (director Takashi Shimizu) who mentions those movies when he is introduced in case you don’t know who he was (I admit I did not, because here at TarsTarkas.NET we are honest. I can honestly tell you the Ju-On movies were terrible.)

Mizushima is given more vampire blood, because the alternative is that he gets killed by Monami. Mizushima gets bonus flashbacks to her life as a child, where the famous vampire hunter Sir Francis Xavier (who???) kills her mom. But first Mom fights a samurai warrior from hell, who is a masked and bladed crazy dude that allows more blood to go flying all over the place. This entire sequence was just to shoehorn in some more stars and an extra monster to have blood splatter effects. Not that I am complaining.

Keiko arrives on the roof where the other two characters are to try to save Mizushima, having seen the moving blood. But it is too late, Mizushima has fangs now, so Keiko attacks Minomi, who just steps out of the way and Keiko falls off of the roof of the school and splatters on the ground, dead. Okay, rule of thumb: Most Japanese movies involving schoolgirls will have a scene on the roof, and someone will fall from the roof to their death during one of the scenes. Never meet a Japanese schoolgirl on the roof unless you have a bungee cord attached.

Keiko’s dad then gets parts from the various minor characters to use to rebuild his daughter – strong wrists from wrist-cutter team captain, strong legs from the ganjuro girl leader, lungs from the new Chinese teacher – Midori the nurse is eventually hunted down by students and falls to her death after being blamed for all of the murders. We’re running out of characters here so let’s end this montage and get back to the plot.

Mizushima is kidnapped again, and a note is left for Monami to show up at the gym tonight from “comeback Keiko”. Ummm….

Keiko is wrapped up as a mummy while Mizushima is tied to a cross, The three gothic lolita lackeys are also there. Although Vampire Girl vs. Mummy Girl sounds like a winning title, we know that she is really Frankenstein Girl so the deception is not fooling anyone. Minomi shows up, and Keiko rips off bandages to be revealed as Frankenstein Girl.

The two girls fight, giving us movie title! Woooooo!!! But the battle is still one-sided as Minomi is faster, until Keiko shows she can remove her limbs and throw them around, holding blades, as weapons.

Minami is cut, but she can also control her blood and form it into blade weapons over her arms, as we saw in the first fight in the film. Being an observer of this fight is hazardous to your health, as the now dead gothic lolita lackeys can testify to. Igor also shows up with bone weapons, because the film hadn’t gotten messed up enough.

Minomi retreats to lure Keiko away, who follows with the most unusual method of flying after her prey you’ve ever seen. Igor must battle Vice-Principal Furano Kenji and the newly revived and electric powered Nurse Midori.

Meanwhile, the two title character girls battle it out atop Tokyo Tower. Just hope Godzilla doesn’t stop by or that tower is toast! Frankenstein Girl is impaled upon the tower, but soon rebuilds herself because she can control the bloody nails and screws that hold her together. She reforms as a giant iron-type monster. Now, the secret to Vampire Girl’s power is her magic cloak, which is why you can understand it is bad that Frankenstein Girl manages to grab the coat off of her.

Nurse Midori is killed again, and Furano Kenji has electric powered kabuki hair. Yeah. The cross with Mizushima tied to it is tossed out the window during their battle and it rams into the Tokyo Tower. Considering how he is the reason they are all fighting no one really seems to care about poor Mizushima. Mizushima gets the cloak and catches the falling Minomi, and even gives her some blood so she can re-energize.

Then we have the ending battle and what happens there….uh…wow. But Frankenstein Girl can’t win, because she wasn’t in the preview scene in the beginning! Igor wins but after the battle he turns to dust. We also learn the stunning secret of Igor. He wasn’t a natural blonde. Okay, that isn’t the secret, watch the damn movie yourself!

Just when you think you’re out, the movie sucks you right back in light Vampire Girl sucks blood as a giant Tokyo Tower-infused Furano Kenji prepares to battle Minami. Where’s Godzilla when you need him to trash Tokyo Tower?

This is a fun movie at times, but the crazy racism sorts of throws you for a loop in the middle The racism is so crazy it is embarrassing to try to explain to anyone, as you have to throw in the whole cultural phenomenon behind the Ganjuro girls and all that stuff. It’s much easier just to say that Japan is frakked up. But you can plainly see how VGxFG is Lethal Weapon 3. I rest my case.

Poster time!!!