Joshikyôei hanrangun (2007) (V)

User Rating:

4.4/10   

Director:

Kôji Kawano

Writer:

Satoshi Ôwada (screenplay)

Release Date:

9 December 2008 (USA)

Genre:

Action | Horror

Plot Keywords:

Knife | Torch | Soccer Ball | Seduction | Laser Gun

Cast

Mizuka Arai
Sasa Handa	...	Aki
Yuria Hidaka	...	Sayaka
Hiromitsu Kiba
Hidetomo Nishida
Ayumu Tokitô
Sakae Yamazaki
Tôshi Yanagi
Kiyo Yoshizawa

Also Known As:

Attack Girls Swim Team vs the Unliving Dead (USA) (DVD title)
Attack Girls' Swim Team Versus the Undead (USA) (DVD box title)
Nihombie 2 (Japan: English title) (series title)
Nihonbi 2 (Japan) (series title)
The Girls Rebel Force of Competitive Swimmers (Hong Kong: English title) (DVD box title)
Undead Pool (International: English title)

Runtime:

78 min

Country:

Japan

Language:

Japanese

Color:

Color

Company:

Filmworks Movie King

Movie Connections:

Follows Zonbi jieitai (2006)

How can a movie about a girl swimming team fighting zombies FAIL?

I don't get it. All you have to do is scrounge every penny you can get and throw it on decent SFX. Then get a couple of girls to throw off their clothes. The successful recipe for a good exploitation movie. Girls Rebel Force does the second alright, but slacks on everything else.

The nonsensical plot involves a dangerous virus that turns schoolgirls into zombies (unless they swimmed in the pool) and an evil master that trains a young girl to become a killer and water terrorist (?!#%!). This satanic mastermind dresses in impeccable red suits like some kind of yakuza Nick Cave, seduces young girls by playing the flute then rapes them. Also said flute has the annoying tendency to sound like a church organ and occasionally it may play by itself in the background while the evil master has sex. There's also a 5 minute lesbian scene where two young girls get buck naked, kiss like fish and fondle each other's breasts. There are made-up-in-the-editing-room fights that make Godfrey Ho stuff look like Citizen Kane and the ending is a complete Takashi Miike rip-off (Fudoh/Dead or Alive) only with Sega Mega Drive CGI. A scene turns from night to day (continuity is for the art-house). The soundtrack was probably done on Cuebase and is double-bass full-on metal one moment, cheapo electronica the next. During a fight scene an electric guitar starts solo-ing out of nowhere for no good reason. I'm telling you, everything is WAY off here. I should have known what I was getting into when the credits announced "Derected by".

So technically it's bad but that's of little consequence for me as long as it delivers what I came to see. I can appreciate the badness of it all but I want the punchline to go with it. I'm here for the gore and tits. We get the tits but alas. The SFX are BAD and I'm talking high school students bad. There's some gore alright but it's so sloppy and amateur-ish that I couldn't help but think of kids throwing ketchup at each other. The classroom scene where a teacher goes apeshit and starts chopping his students' limbs with a ruler was probably the highlight. Girls Rebel Force just shouts shoe-string budget at every turn. Nothing wrong with it as long as you can be creative and work your way around it, except the film-makers go on and shoot themselves on the foot with crappy CGI. What's the point in having a totally unnecessary explosion that has absolutely nothing to do with the plot when you don't have the budget to do it? What the hell was that, a match superimposed over a window? Sheesh people.

In the end of the day, Girls Rebel Force wishes it could be part of this new wave of wacko Japanese action/horror but stops dead on its tracks due to a lack of... everything. The funny thing is that a good editor could still make a solid trailer out of this mess and sell this movie as a gory action flick. Which it is. Only an amateur-ish one. As an indication of how amateurish the gore is, Troma would get Oscar nods by comparison. Worth a watch just for finding out how much worse it can possibly get. You might get a couple of laughs out of it. I know I did, hence the 2 extra points...