Our synopsis goes like this: “A teenage girl named Angel discovers that her widowed father has recently begun dating again. Worse, Angel’s father has canceled the yearly summer vacation that he and Angel take every year together in order to stay near Ryoko, his new girlfriend, whom he intends on marrying soon. Furious at this situation, Angel invites her friends to come with her to her visit her long lost aunt at her remote country home.

Arriving, they discover Angel’s aunt seems to be sick and wheelchair bound, and they all agree to help fill their time fixing up her run down estate located in the woods. However, unknown to anyone, the aunt is, in reality, a vampiric witch who feeds off the flesh of young virgin girls to sustain her youth and strength. Possessing her niece, the aunt murders the girls one by one with help from her bewitched house. In the end, the aunt takes over Angel’s body so she can continue waiting for her long lost fiancee, who went M.I.A. during World War II, to finally return to her. Will any of them survive the strange horrors and escape alive?”

Wow…. now this one certainly sounds like Neko’s sort of film. I’ve always loved the creepy weirdness of 70′s Japanese ghost stories…. so I’m hoping for something along the lines of “Mansion of the Ghost Cat” or “Kuroneko”. I’ve heard however that this one is…. well… a bit stranger than the Japanese films I’m used to. Will it live up to it’s reputation and still turn out to captivate and entertain me? Guess there’s only one way to find out….

Psssst!! That’s your cue….. it’s time to “Read On”, o’ Gentle Visitors!!

As this one starts out we meet Angel, a simple everyday Japanese schoolgirl preparing for School Break. Her friends are all excited about a camping trip they have planned together with one of their hunky teachers as chaperon but she’s just happy to be taking a vacation excursion with her dad…. an annual tradition they’ve done every year since well before her Mom died. At least that’s what she thought she’d be doing….. Little does she expect that this time out things are to be different… her widowed dad has a new girlfriend. Even more annoyingly… her Dad wants her to come along on this year’s outing so Angel can get acquainted with her before the marriage…. Not exactly what daddy’s little girl want to hear.

All upset, she decides instead to visit her estranged aunt who lives alone waaay out in the boondocks at the family mansion there. Since her friends end up losing the chance to go camping, she invites them along to keep her company. Sounds simple and relaxing, eh? That’s always the warning sign isn’t it?

By now…. this film had really got me worried. It’s certainly different alright, with a trippy 70′s funky style that makes you fairly certain director Nobuhiko Obayashi might just have been dropping a lil’ acid in his saki when he did this one. The colors are vibrant…. too vibrant to be real and scenes that shift rapidly from slapstick comedy nonsense to cartoonish fantasy dream sequences at the drop of a hat. Sets are deliberately fake at times…. with a constant reliance on painted backdrops and matte painting to give the whole movie a very strange look unlike anything I’ve seen from old Japanese films. There wasn’t anything else like this going on in Japanese films at that time….. and I’m thinking it was probably quite a surprise to audiences then.

Our heroines are all cardboard stock characters right out of a manga story too. The film gives them all nicknames to easily identify them based on each of their main character traits. We get the beautiful Angel of course, the human eating machine known as Mac (short, we are told, for “Stomach”… Seriously!! I just can’t tell you how many girls wanted that nickname when I was a young schoolgirl!!)), the serious glasses-wearing Prof and her wealth of knowledge, the musically talented Melody, naive and timid Sweetie, the dreamer of the group, Fantasy with her wild imagination, and karate expert called Kung Fu. There’s one more companion…. one who we all are immediately suspicious of, and that’s Snowy, the mysterious stray cat Angel finds one day and who seems uncannily able to follow her anywhere…. even the train that takes them away from Tokyo on the first leg of the trip to the countryside.

Once they arrive, they find Angel’s auntie is friendly enough, but frail and seemingly confined to her wheelchair and allergic to even the dimmest sunlight…. but not cats! Snowy takes to her immediately… as if they’ve know each other for years. Apparently none of the girls had ever seen “Mansion of the Ghost Cat”….. or maybe they would have know something was up…. big mistake. Oh well….  Being a bunch of nice girl-next-door types, they pitch in to try to bring some joy to the lonely woman. Strange eerie things start to happen to the girls almost immediately and despite thinking that Angel is our main heroine, she’s actually not. Turns out it’s Fantasy who is the only one start to realize almost at once that something bad is going on even if nobody believes her. The girls start dropping like flies….. first Mac gets ambushed at the old well retrieving a yummy melon from the cold water. Fantasy encounters her severed head in a funny sequence not to be believed where her head flies around before biting Fantasy firmly on the butt!!

Nobody believes her weird story (I guess our lil’ Fantasy must have had a history of some serious opium addiction or something….) and this prevents them from taking any precautions till it’s far too late to do any good. More and more girls get killed…. Sweetie is eaten by some futons and turns up inside a crazy grandfather clock. Melody gets her fingers eaten off before being devoured by Auntie’s piano….. Prof. is drowned in a room full of Cat’s blood…. Kung Fu gets herself eaten by a lamp… yes, that’s right… a lamp!! But worse….. just when you think Angel is going to figure out what her evil aunt is up to, she gets consumed by her own reflection, her body possessed by Auntie… D’ohh!!! Ok…Ok, so this means our hero here is really our hunky teacher who’s on his way to rescue our young maidens in his funky dune buggy, right? Ummmm? Nope. He’s well meaning (and the secret crush of innocent Fantasy), but destined to end up as nothing more than a pile of bananas in his abandoned buggy by the side of the road.

So? Does anybody survive this one? Well…. you all know how most Asian ghost stories go. Let’s just say I wouldn’t get fond of any of our spunky young ladies and leave it at that.

My goodness!! Where to begin…. This film is just plain crazy. If director Obayashi wanted to do something different with his first commercial big budget film for a major studio, he most certainly did that! I’ve seen plenty of old Japanese films in my time, but this one stands out as probably the most unusual one ever. It’s a horror film alright….. but it’s also simultaneously a comedy, a cartoon, a karate film, and has all the jarring art house film elements you’d ever need (or want)…. all crammed into 88 minutes. Many images…. while being completely nuts… are even surprisingly effective scares. I’ll never get the picture of Auntie with the eyeball in her mouth out of my head… ever.

Eureka has done a good job with this one too. It’s presented in an anamorphic original aspect ratio of 1.55:1, with the original Japanese stereo soundtrack intact. The newly translated subtitles are good, and there are over 90 minutes of bonus interviews  available with Director Nobuhiko Obayashi, his daughter Chigumi, actress Kumiko Oba who played the character of Fantasy, and Toho promotional executive Shoho Tomiyama. Add a generous booklet of production stills and promotional material on the film, and there’s a lot to like here. If you’ve been waiting for this one to come out, you could do far worse than to add it to your collection.

So…. weird it is, but it’s still definitely worth a look. Neko gives this one 4 “Meows” out of 5. It’s a nice fantasy film… but it’s also just a wee bit too strange to be on my list of all time favorites. I guess I’m just too simple a girl to enjoy really deep and artistic stuff….. sigh. However… there’s absolutely no denying that it’s certainly a unique vision of a film… and I can certainly appreciate the effort made to realize that vision and to make it so unusual.

Trailer? Silly people…. Your Favorite Catgirl would never leave you without a wee lil’ something to get you in the mood for one of these weird lil’ films…… So here ya go!!

In that vein comes this one…. “Negative Happy Chainsaw Edge”. Even better… Well Go USA have just announced they are going to be releasing this one on R1 DVD this March 30th.

They give us this synopsis to pique our interest… “One night in modern day Tokyo, Yosuke encounters Eri a beautiful girl in her school uniform and suddenly a surprising battle begins. Pitted against a seemingly immortal giant who brandishes a vicious chainsaw, Eri and Yosuke must come together and understand why this chainsaw wielding ghost continues to appear. Is he determined to end their life or simply communicate a dark message and the truth about Eri?”

Ghosts? Schoolgirls with crazy mad ninja skills?…. and Chainsaws? Oh.. yeah, Neko’s gonna have to see this one….. There’s even a Trailer available for it…. but if you wanna see that, then you’re gonna have to “Read On”…..

Oooohhh!! Here ya go!! (Sorry… but this stubborn one just didn’t want to embed itself… so you’ll have to watch it at Nipponcinema….just follow the Linkie!!)

CHAINSAW TRAILER!!

Our quick synopsis tell us: “Typical Japanese schoolgirl Rika becomes a full-fledged zombie fighter when she travels to the countryside for a visit with her grandfather, and discovers his village has been overrun with the living dead. Rika almost makes it to her grandfather’s house in one piece, but a nasty run in with some particularly hungry flesh-eaters leaves her half the girl she used to be. Fortunately for Rika, Grandpa Ryuhei is a talented surgeon. In the process of patching his granddaughter up, Ryuhei goes one step further and turns Rika into the ultimate zombie fighting machine. But Rika’s ordeal isn’t over just yet, because Zombie Boss Glorian is still out there and thirsting for vengeance. Perhaps with a little help from her friends Takashi and Yuji, Rika will finally lay waste to the lowest of the low, and somehow find the time to keep up her good grades.”

I almost gave this one a pass…. as it was Part 3 of the same “Direct to DVD” series that also gave us the absolutely abysmal piece of craptaculous soft porn nonsense “Attack Girls’ Swim Team vs. the Undead” which you might remember I reviewed here at the Litterbox some time ago. That one left such a terrible impression on me that only my overwhelming need to watch practically every bad Zombie movie ever made gave me the strength to take a chance on this one.

So….. Let’s see if that was a big mistake or not…. shall we?

Your Favorite Catgirl’s known about “Rika” for a long time…. even before I knew of it’s connection to that OTHER film…. (Which we’ll all agree… never, never…. ever, to mention again….Hehehehe!!) and back then the preliminary buzz on it looked fairly good. Given that bit of memory swirling about my lil’ noggin’ I took the chance and picked up a copy of Switchblade Pictures Region 1 DVD release just this last week. Pairing it with another Korean film with similar theme (Which I’ll also be reviewing soon…..Tease, tease!!) , I settled in to make an evening of it with Carolyn and Goober all snuggled with me on the couch.

We start off with regular schoolgirl Rika (played by Risa Kudo) on her way to school one day with her best friend Nami. On a whim, they decide to skip classes and sneak off to take the train and visit Rika’s grandfather Ryuhei in the little mountain village where he now lives. Rika loves her grandpa dearly and hasn’t seen him in quite some time for reasons that are unknown… (and never really explained..). Arriving in the town, the story wastes no time in having them attacked by a horde of zombified villagers only to be saved at the last moment by a slick young man who agrees to take them to Rika’s grandfather’s house so they can rescue him from this new menace.

Once there, Rika is surprised to find her grandfather married to a much younger woman Sayaka, supposedly the sister of the guy who saved them at the train station…. but somehow that seems fishy. Rika’s Grandfather appears to have has gone senile and doesn’t recognize his favorite granddaughter at all!! Once a brilliant surgeon and also an instructor in swordsmanship, now he’s been reduced to a helpless invalid under the care of his suspicious “wife” and three goofy maids (….. even an honest to goodness Catgirl Maid!). It doesn’t take a genius to see she’s really an evil “black widow”, whose “brother” is actually her lover, and who’s slowly poisoning grandpa to inherit all his money….. but things start happening too fast for Rika to really have the chance to figure that out.

There’s the prerequisite risque bits sprinkled in here…. Sayaka going into slut mode out on the veranda with her “brother”, and then with three maids having a wierd moment in which they argue about which of them is the most “busty”…. but these moments are quickly over as the house gets surrounded by the living dead who batter their way inside…. nearly overwhelming our little group, even biting poor Rika savagely on the arm. All is almost lost, but grandpa has a moment of clarity and swings into action, first going all “Shogun Assassin” on their zombie butts…. then severing Rika’s wounded arm at the shoulder to prevent her being turned into one of the walking dead. It’s into surgeon mode then, and he patches her up and saves her from bleeding to death before dropping back into his catatonic state.

Plenty of Zombies already…. not amazing ones mind you, most are simply really greenish skinned people all bloody and wearing ragged clothing, but at least we got zombies…. you really can’t expect great makeup or effects in such a low budget effort shot to go direct to video sales. That’s pretty much the weakest part of “Rika”, but it stands head and shoulders above that “other” film we won’t mention…..

Anyway…. at this point a couple of new faces join our little band of human survivors… three goofy locals and… of all crazy things, a zombie scientist who has sworn off eating people to help stem the tide of the undead menace. The big problem…. each one has a different story about what’s ultimately going on. The Zombie doc tells everyone this is the result of a failed government conspiracy to develop a euthanasia drug to combat Japan’s growing population of elderly citizens using up heath care resources. Not only that… there’s a “Boss Zombie” named Glorian who needs to be killed so that everything will mystically “set itself right”…. Say What?? I guess zombies aren’t the sharpest cookies in the box…. must be the brain that rots first.

Our other three have a story about a secret US government program to combat Zombies that have always been around since…. like.. forever…. the only reason we aren’t all dead is because of their ceaseless efforts to stamp out all outbreaks just as they occur. They send in one guy… the “Master Zombie Hunter #1″ who usually just chops them all up with his magic sword…. unfortunately this time, he died…. so it’s time for Plan B now. In 10 hours they just nuke the place where the Zombie Hunter died and get rid of the problem that way. No wonder everybody around the world seems to just hate the US….. Sigh….

Regardless of who’s right, eventually they get the arm that was chopped off this Zombie Hunter and Grandpa the genius surgeon transplants it onto Rika, giving her this freakish big ol’ Guy arm that can actually use the magic sword….. This is somehow simultaneously both the dumbest and coolest idea ever, and it’s a hoot watching our heroine roam about with the fake looking arm for the rest of the film kicking zombie butt all over the place. For this silly idea alone, I give “Rika” a particularly satisfying purr for originality…..

As they try to figure out what’s really going on, the all meet horribly bloody deaths, one by one, the only consolation being that if Zombie doc is right, when Rika kills Glorian everything will be just fine, as if none of the horrible stuff ever happened. You just know that she’s gonna get to do just that…. it’s that kind of movie… and when she does, we get to see her battle a monster oni/ zombie thingee right out of an episode of “Power Rangers”…. Heck, I almost expected “The Masked Girl” to show up and make a cameo.

So…. will Rika destroy Glorian? Will everything go back to normal? With the naughty Americans nuke the little village and kill everybody first? Well…. Neko’s not going to spoil it for you… but lets just say, there really isn’t any question that it’s all gonna happen and more……

So how does “Rika” stack up in the end? Well, it’s definitely not gonna win any awards for film making, acting, makeup, effects, screenplay or… well… anything actually. But…. it was made with a true sense of fun by people who seem to love the goofy zombie genre enough to have some desire to do a film you can enjoy watching just for the sheer silliness of it all. So I guess Japanese Schoolgirls can continue to hold their heads up high and kill as many more monsters in the future as they want. It’s won a firm 3 “Meows” out of 5 from me for it’s quirkiness alone….. although it had poor Carolyn rolling her eyes at a couple of moments. (I think I owe her an evening of romance movies in english for THIS one….. Yep.) The DVD by Switchblade Pictures is spartan…. with only subtitles and a couple of Trailers on board, but it does the job adequately.

Trailer you ask? Well, naturally we’ve got a Trailer!! All the Zombie Hunting fun you could want…. just for you o’ Gentle Readers!!

Our synopsis for it reads: “In “The Masked Girl” an ordinary high school student named Ai Hoshino (Yuki Shimizu) is kidnapped on her way home from school. She later wakes up and finds herself held captive in the hideout of “Joker” and the evil Black Maria (Aiko Sato). Luckily she’s able to escape with the help of Aoyama (Tsuyoshi Kida), but not before being genetically altered by Joker—giving her super-human powers. While being pursued by agents of Joker, Ai confides in her friend Yumi (Shizuka Nakamura), but discovers Yumi has also been altered by Black Maria and brainwashed into swearing allegiance to Joker. Ai is forced to fight Yumi, but more powerful enemies will soon arrive. Eventually Ai gets a superhero outfit from Aoyoma and becomes “The Masked Girl” to confront Black Maria’s minions.”

Soooooo then….. can super powered Japanese schoolgirl vs monsters action stand up to the violent butt kicking standards we saw in “Milly”? Let’s all “Read On” and find out!!

Let’s see…. first off it should be said that this one, as with “Milly”, is only a short 45 minute or so in length, so we can’t really expect it to be an epic now can we? The story starts off quickly, with a young frightened girl being chased through darkened streets by an unknown menace. We never quite get to see exactly what it is, but eventually it catches her in a blind alley and we fade to black as she screams in sheer terror! Next we meet our heroine Ai (played by Yuki Shimizu) and her best friend Yumi (played by Shizuka Nakamura) (called Alice and Eunice in the subtitles, strangely enough, but Neko understands just enough Japanese to know that’s just plain wrong….). They discuss the rash of disappearances of healthy young girls… all of them excellent sports enthusiasts. Luckily Ai figures she’s completely safe from any danger of abduction, as she has to be the single most awkward and uncoordinated girl in school. Yumi, on the other hand, is a physical genius at sports and this worries her friend Ai, as she’s almost definitely the type of girl in the most danger of disappearing.

Wrong!!! Oh, so wrong…. As soon as the girls split up poor Ai gets chased and abducted by a couple of creepy thugs in a back sedan…. Next thing she knows, she awakens all chained up in a bathrobe in the evil lair of the Joker Organization and their leader, Black Maria (played by Aiko Sato), does the whole “tell my victim all about the details of my evil plan” thingee…. Boy are villains stupid when it comes to this…. Worse, it seems they did the super augmentation surgery before the Brain Washing surgery…. (Note to all Evil Villains: Always…. and I mean always, do the Brain Wash Surgery first before making your victim all super powered….. D’oh!!!)

Before they can get to that part of their nefarious plan, alarms start sounding and as they run about trying to figure out what the heck is going on, Ai’s gym coach Aoyama (played by Tsuyoshi Kida) shows up to rescue her…. Huh? Say what? Naturally before they can get safely away, the two of them get cornered by Maria and her henchmen. Aoyama grabs a hold of Ai and tells her to jump through the skylight located waaaaay up on the ceiling. Despite the impossibility of it, Ai finds she is able to leap 50ft into the air, explosively smash through the window, and land safely outside with her teacher, then beat up a half dozen thugs so they can escape. Zap… Biff…. Whammo!!

Maria lets them escape…. not to worry she’s got a plan to fix things. Oh yeah….. she’s just that sort of villain to have a backup plan all in place….. We get a little bit of Ai worrying about the whole mess she fallen into… Why is she so important to Maria’s schemes? What will she do now that she’s all super powered and stuff? How come her creepy gym teacher was following her around with a bag of her clothing?…. and most importantly…. How is she going to tell Yumi about all of this?

That stops being much of a problem, because before you know it Yumi gets captured by Maria, super powered too… and Brain Washed to become Maria’s loyal minion!! GASP!! The girls have a big ol’ no holds barred  super schoogirl smackdown… Yumi trying to kill Ai for betraying the Jokers (although… as Ai quite correctly points out, over and over… she never did join the Organization in the first place..) and Ai trying hard not to hurt the friend she loves. Luckily she manages to knock some sense back into Yumi in time for the two of them to team up and fight on of Maria’s cyborg monsters….. Cyborg Monsters? Where the heck did they come from? No time for the plot to tell us…. instead it’s creepy Gym Teacher to the rescue again…. this time equipped with some fancy “Power Ranger-y” style battle armor. Since it only fits Ai…. she gets the chance to put it on and destroy the evil monster. Still…. before it dies, the monster promises us that we’ve not seen the end of Maria’ the Jokers, and more monsters who he promises will take a terrible revenge!! Cue the credits!!

But…… Wait!! There’s a wee bit more!! Following the credits… we find ourselves in Black Maria’s secret lair where creepy gym teacher Aoyama reveals that he has been Maria’s loyal minion all along…. that saving Ai… letting Ai save Yumi… and even giving her the special battle armor is only part of Maria’s great scheme!! OMG!!! Will we ever find out what in heck is really going on? Only if there turns out to be a sequel……

So….. how was this one overall? Hmmmm? I’d have to say it wasn’t as nifty a lil’ film as “Milly”. The plot is too sketchy, and the action sequences lack the feeling that anybody here is actually a trained fighter at all…. Effects are passable but not remarkable. About the only nice thing is the comedic elements thrown in here and there along the way. Most are very “anime” inspired…. lots of Sailor Moon type of stuff…. nice but not remarkable at all. Neko can only give “The Masked Girl” a simple 3 “Meows” out of 5 for not being terribly original, but at least being a good hour of fun. Will I watch a sequel? Probably… especially if it’s a inexpensive as this one was. I saw it on the HK All Region disc for the nice price of about 8$ US. Not too bad for a film like this.

Trailer? Well…. if you’ve seen the Trailer for “Hard Revenge Milly” you’ve already gotten to see it, but it’s worth linking in here again for the sake of completeness, so here goes!

Apparently this lil’ Catgirl wasn’t the only one thinking it needed more… for news is out now that indeed such a sequel will come out this summer and it’s going to be titled “Hard Revenge Milly – Bloody Battle”.

The preliminary synopsis reads: “After Milly eliminates the Jack Brothers to avenge her family, a beautiful girl named Haru (played by Nao Nagasawa) approaches her for help avenging her own boyfriend. Milly initially brushes her off, but eventually recognizes her passion for vengeance and agrees to train her.

Soon, Ikki (Kazuki Tsujimoto) and his brother Huma (Rei Fujita), two of Jack’s former associates, arrive to take them on. Milly makes short work of their minions and knocks Huma out cold, but the steel-armed Ikki manages to injure her severely. Will she be able to survive and help Haru exact vengeance?”

There’s a nice Trailer available… but to see it and to learn more you’re gonna have to “Read On”, gentle visitors!

All I know so far is that the special effects are being handled by Yoshihiro Nishimura, whose also did the ultra gory effects seen recently in both “Tokyo Gore Police” and “The Machine Girl”. I’m not certain yet about the run time for this one… if it’s another short one like it’s predecessor or if it’s a full feature length film, but I’m certain we’ll hear more in the future as the release date gets closer…. and your favorite Catgirl will keep her ears peeled for ya, worry not!

Till then, here’s a peek at the Trailer, just to whet your appetites…