Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl (2009)

Memorable, crazy movie

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

I didn't find this crazy little film quite as good as many have and I think it was probably, what I would call the MTV sequences, that seemed to distract from the story and exaggerate the silliness. For the most part this is a well put together, extremely OTT film where everything is taken to extremes and the blood spurts and flows more than I have ever seen before. There are some innovative special effects, hand with a head, 'living' screws and various limbs used for extraordinary and imaginative uses. The interaction between the various school kids and others is good and a welcome relief from the madness, its just that every now and again the soundtrack seems to go all J-pop and we get a continuation of the effects without dialogue. Having said all that, this film is certainly engaging, different and very violent without being too distressing, more like a cartoon, in fact. I suppose, I'm saying this is very good without being as brilliant as it might have been.

This one is not quite as good as "Tokyo Gore Police", almost just not quite. If not for the vampire of the flick and the love interest I would probably not liked this one nearly as much, but both she and he gave the movie a bit more charm than should be expected. It is also kind of a strange parody of Twilight, though not sure if that was intended or not. The Frankenstein girl was cute, but annoying and firmly the villain of the piece so she was all right too. The film is about two girls fighting over a boy, one a vampire the other the vice principle's rather spoiled daughter. The vice principle has a secret, however, and that is he likes to try and revive the dead in his spare time like Dr. Frankenstein, he just is not very good at it. That is until he gets a bit of a vampire's blood. The film is gory, but not quite as good as Gore police is. There are some effects that look rather bad and then there are things in this one that seem very needless. Like the strange wrist cutters club and the even more bizarre group that made themselves look dark and made me uncomfortable every time they were on the screen. Granted, they worked these bizarre groups into the making of Frankenstein girl, but their presence seemed very forced. Like I said, what really saved this movie from me giving it a score of four or five were the vampire girl and the guy she coveted. I just liked her strange straightforwardness and I liked how he was kind of relaxed even while being kidnapped and such. I also liked how he decided to finally kiss and become a vampire suffice to say it was not so much love as it was self preservation. Okay movie, but like Tokyo Gore it needs a lot of work.

Okay, every time I think I've seen bits of Japanese strangeness that top it all, they have one more thing that tops everything else.I think that this is supposed to be a comedy. So not only are Japanese people easier to scare than Americans, they must also laugh at cornier stuff.The plot is that at a school, a vampire girl named Monomi has a crush on a boy. But she comes into conflict with another girl whose father happens to be a mad scientist who makes monsters out of body parts.What we get is about an hour and a half of comic gore...and a few truly cringe inducing moments, like the "Afrika" girl and the wrist cutting girls...

Japanese culture is as bizarre as it gets, among the various oddities that have sprung from it are game shows which consist of male contestants being whacked in the genitals and animated pornography, termed "hentai", whose various sub genres involving bestiality and lactation have become widely popular amongst the population. Hell, they even sell toilet paper with short horror stories printed on it for god knows what reason. This utterly insane culture extends into their film as well and one doesn't have to look any further than Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl for an example of how depraved, grotesque and downright "weird" their movies can get. There are very few American-produced films that can match the sheer lunacy occurring within this "versus" circus freak show. Continuing in the tradition of previous hyper-violent, excessively-sexual Japanese horrors centered on attractive school-girls (popular films like The Machine Girl and Tokyo Gore Police), Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl throws a whole bunch of other peculiarities into the mix, including blackface, a kabuki mad scientist who air guitars using his victims spinal cords, an oversexed nurse with eyeballs sewn onto her nipples, a wrist-cutting competition, and copious amounts of blood equal in proportion to the accumulation of ten regular horror movies. If it isn't one of the strangest films of all time, it certainly is of this year.Throwing up an assortment of depravity and blood-drenched insanity into a film always makes for good fun, but never makes up for a lack of plot, lazy writing or poorly-executed film-making, a few key problems that permeate through many of these gory, low-budget efforts. These are all issues readily apparent in The Machine Girl, a prior similar undertaking which, for all its excessive gore and dismemberment, was at its core really nothing much different than most substandard Hollywood fare. Here, directors Yoshihiro Nishimura (who tread similar ground with Tokyo Gore Police) and Naoyuki Tomomatsu have crafted both an emotionally-charged teen love story and a hilarious satire of popular trends, the film elevated by the over-the-top absurdities rather than reliant on them. High-school heart throb Mizushima finds himself in the center of a vicious tug-of-war between two lovers: Keiko, his high-maintenance girlfriend whose spineless vice-principal daddy bows to her every demand, and Monami, a new student in the school who falls for Mizushima's kind personality...and who also happens to be a vampire. Of course, when the two girls get into a feud, Keiko is no match for the supernatural Monami and is killed. However, Keiko's father moonlights as a mad scientist and he reanimates Keiko, upgrading her with a variety of different physical attributes swiped from corpses. Now, the Vampire Girl and the Frankenstein Girl find themselves facing off in a battle to the death for Mizushima's affection.There are a plethora of outlandish gags to please any hardened gore-fan. Among the best are the Vampire Girl tearing a hole in a girls face and unraveling her skin like the wrappings on a mummy, a reanimated foot-hand creature, blood drops with a life of their own and the Frankenstein Girl tearing off an arm, screwing it onto her head and using it as a helicopter propeller to zip around through the sky. This is the love-child of a three-way between Looney Tunes, an early Peter Jackson film and a Troma movie. Nary two minutes go by where someone's head isn't being crushed in or where some appendage isn't being attached to some other ludicrous concoction. It is amazingly fun, completely original and absolutely never dull. Even those who don't enjoy the film, possibly too much for their tastes, will likely be enthralled by the madcap display enfolding in front of them.However, it's when the film steps back from the lunacy that it's at its best. The characters at their best, particularly Monami and Mizushima, are surprisingly fleshed out, likable and quite funny; at their worst, over-the-top caricatures that are usually funny and always interesting. There are a lot of laughs mined from the absurd notion of falling in love with a vampire, as well as the battle being waged for Mizushima, the tone always light and self-deprecating; one comical part has Mizushima proclaiming, as he narrates the battle, something along the lines of "Has anyone ever asked my feelings about this", which sums up the ridiculousness of the obvious lapses of logic that allow the fight, and pretty much the entire film, to occur. Perhaps the funniest scenes involve those lampooning current teenage trends. The "emo's" are part of an after-school wrist cutting club. The trend of imitating black culture is taken to absurd limits with a trio of girls not only in black face, but with afros, over-sized lips and the refusal to drink any coffee but black. Not only isn't there a boring minute, but there isn't one that's not either laugh-out-loud hilarious or just plain crazy.The only shortcomings are the occasional limitations of the low-budget paired with the wide scope of the films imaginative dismemberment. Some of the effects, although most often not, are poorly executed. As well, the arterial spray of blood throughout the film is less than satisfying due to the reliance on CGI effects, which look both incredibly cheap and silly (in a bad way). The entire film also carries a somewhat cheap vibe to it, which leads me to believe it was either digital video or inefficiency behind the camera. Regardless, these are small prices to pay for the amount of imaginative fun and hilarious splatter that Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl delivers, making it one of the better exercises in this type of frenetic insanity that so often falls on the wayside.Dylan, allhorrorfilms.com