Onna batoru koppu (1990)

Champion tennis player Kaoru Okoshiba, mortally wounded by terrorists from the mysterious Cartel organization, is revived as the cyborg Battlecop, who seeks revenge against her assailants and their superiors.

Director:

Akihisa Okamoto

Stars:

Azusa Nakamura, Kisuke Yamashita, Yuki Kitazume

Cast

Cast overview:
Azusa Nakamura	...	Kaoru Okoshiba / Lady Battlecop
Kisuke Yamashita	...	Detective Masaru Saijô
Yuki Kitazume	...	Naoya Koizumi
Toshiaki Nishizawa	...	Iwao Kido
Masashi Ishibashi	...	Team Phantom Captain
Annu Mari	...	Team Phantom Elite
Derrick Holmes	...	Team Phantom Elite
Masaru Matsuda	...	Amadeus
Shirô Sano	...	Henry Ôba

Storyline

Lady battle cop is a Japanese film made in 1991, it features a tennis player and her partner, they have a run in with a terrorist group and she is subsequently transformed into a cyborg known as "Lady cop" or "Battle cop". She seems unstoppable until the same terrorists bring a super powered mutant to match off against them, time will tell who is the victor.

Details

Country:

Japan

Language:

Japanese

Release Date:

9 November 1990 (Japan)

Also Known As:

Lady Battle Cop

Company Credits

Production Co:

Toei Company

User Reviews

Low-budget Japanese rip-off of ROBOCOP

LADY BATTLE COP (1991) is a Japanese sci-fi thriller that's essentially a rip-off of the 1987 Hollywood film ROBOCOP (which itself drew inspiration from live-action Japanese superhero TV shows). This one's much shorter, because it cuts out all the background detail, character touches and news media coverage that made ROBOCOP so much more interesting and resonant. The scenes here sort of recall scenes in ROBOCOP, but the action direction is so much more sluggish. Every bit of business takes much longer than it would have in ROBOCOP.

The actress who plays Kaoru Mikoshiba, the tennis champ-turned-Lady Battlecop is pretty in a bland way, but she can't act and has no real presence. Her character is humiliated a lot; even after she becomes Lady Battle Cop, she is frequently overpowered and victimized by Team Phantom, the 4-person team of killers employed by the powerful Karuta crime cartel. She rallies two or three times, but doesn't really do anything strategically different when she does. This whole concept was handled in a more satisfying way in later Japanese robot-suited hero TV shows (BLUE SWAT) and animated series (BUBBLEGUM CRISIS, among many others).

There are some good ideas and interesting powers and gadgets that could have been developed or used more, but they just sit there. There's a formidable wrestler-type villain named Amadeus, who has the power to disrupt Lady Battle Cop's systems and send her flying back and forth. These are the best action parts and have the most special effects (although we see the wires in the flying scenes!). But Amadeus' origins are only alluded to (he was built by NASA, but the Karuta cartel stole him) and his character and background are never explored. There is lots of action in the film, but it's never terribly exciting or imaginative; without character development, there's nothing underneath to get us emotionally involved.

Directed by Akihisa Okamoto and starring Azusa Nakamura, LADY BATTLE COP is 80 minutes long and is followed on its Japanese VHS edition by a 15-minute `Making of LADY BATTLE COP' short that includes some of the special FX shots, including a miniature set showing cars getting blown up to test the Neutron Magnum gun (an interesting weapon with good FX that should have been used more imaginatively). There are shots that we don't see in the movie itself, including a shot of Lady B glimpsed on a giant outdoor video screen in a shopping area. The film looks like it was shot in the Philippines; the locations look more tropical than Japan and the soldiers in the final battle scene look Filipino.