At the moment no one does splatter quite like the Japanese. They have taken the early works of Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson and gone to the next level. They have filtered the splatter genre through the organic body horror of David Cronenberg and Shin'ya Tsukamoto. The end result has been a series of some of the bloodiest, over the top, and inventive gore films to ever be made. With Mutant Girls Squad, the genre has found a way to yet again top itself.
Over the past decade these movies have come out fast and furious, a building crescendo of blood, body parts, and school girls. Just look at films like The Machine Girl, Meatball Machine, Robogeisha, Fankenstein Girl vs Vampire Girl, and Helldriver and you will see what I mean. Now we have Mutant Girls Squad, a movie that seems to step up the story quotient (albeit not by much) while not skimping on the blood and the bizarre.
At the center of the movie is bullied teen Rin (Yumi Sugimoto). We see her as she is picked on by her fellow classmates and it is pretty clear that she is not very happy with it, but she manages to deal anyway. However, things in her life are about to take a drastic new direction. As she is about to turn 16, her parents have some important revelations for her. It turns out she is half-alien, her father is a member of a species called the HILKO. This fact means that as she turns sweet 16 she will begin exhibit mutant abilities. The story is essentially a coming of age tale as she deals with the appearance of these new abilities and the problems that they bring.
Well, no sooner has the revelation been made that Rin becomes a target of some bad guys with guns on their noses (no joke). Shortly thereafter she is found by Kisaragi (Tak Sakaguchi). He is the lead of a HILKO group who are at war with humans who wish to exterminate the aliens. So, Rin joins with a couple of other mutant girls, Rei (Yuko Takayama) and Yoshie (Suzuka Morita), to battle the humans.
Their first mission is to assassinate a general. The mission does not go quite as planned and Rei realizes something about the group that does to sit well with her. She begins to rethink her place within this organization and if she really wants o be a part of it. This leads to a big battle with lots of blood and some crazy mutant abilities.
I am sure there is more to this movie and others of the genre, but I have found I just really enjoy the sheer insanity of the action on the screen. I generally don't want to think about any subtext or deep meaning. I just want to watch limbs getting severed, high pressure blood blasts, and just whatever weird stuff they can think to throw up on the screen.
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