ExorSister 2 (1994)

Also known as Chō-yōma densetsu Uratsuki-dōji: Hakui jigoku-hen, this is the second in a series of four horror-comedy-porn movies, starring the multi-talented darling of 90s american anime fandom Ippongi Bang as the eponymous Exorsister, a half-demon demon hunter named Sister Crow. In case you're wondering, she doesn't have any sex scenes. Anyway, ExorSister 2's plot involves an influx of immigrant vampires coming into Japan after the fall of the USSR, and a mafia plot to exploit them by selling cheap knock-off synthetic blood.

It's a very rare movie, and as far as I know, has never had a DVD release anywhere in the world. The copy I have is a .avi rip of a french VHS release from 1996, with french hardsubs and english softsubs super-imposed on top. I think watching a seedy old piece of crap like this in such a way adds something to the experience. Please understand, though, that I use the term "seedy piece of crap" as one of endearment, as I did enjoy this movie. It really seems like it was made as a labour of love for no money, and it honestly is pretty funny. It's so cheap that, along with a joke ad for an electric shaver aimed at the werewolf market, there's also a trailer for the first ExorSister movie partway through it. (The first movie seems to feature sukebans and a vampire with a penis for a nose, by the way.)

A lot of the movie revolves around very lowbrow comedy: slapstick, terrible special effects, dirty jokes, breaking the fourth wall, and so on. I think we can say that it actually breaks the second and third walls, too, as the plot wraps up via Sister Crow chasing another character, the Neon Medusa Fairy, across the set, coincidentally landing them right next to the nurse who'd been blackmailed into supplying the cheap knock-off blood. The Neon Medusa Fairy is a great character, by the way. She's a fairy with multcoloured hair that flies around in a skimpy dress, wrapped in christmas tree lights who jumps on men's backs and brainwashes them into sleeping with prostitutes. She's also a greedy backstabbing jerk and a coward, making her a great enemy/sidekick/comedy foil to Sister Crow. Plus, she stars in the only remotely entertaining one of the three sex scenes in the movie!

Yeah, there's three sex scenes, making up about a quarter of the film's length in total. Two of them are both boring and incredibly unpleasant, being demon-on-human rape scenes (one with wiggly tentacles, one without). The third is The Neon Medusa Fairy having a fun ol' time with a naked salaryman in a bathroom. It's not particularly sexy, but it's a lot better (and easier to watch) than the other two (which i actually skipped, so unappetising were they). To be honest, this would be a much better movie if it stuck to innuendo and boob/butt-flashing, eschewing the actual sex scenes and just being a particularly blue comedy.

So yeah, mostly, I liked this movie, and if you like the sound of it, look it up if you can. I think there are rips going about the internet of the first ExorSister, and possibly the fourth one too? But I don't think either of them have English subs.

Go For Broke!/V Madonna Daisenso (1985)

Every year, the violent motorbike-riding thugs of Yagyu High attack the good and pure students of Hopehill High (that's what the school's called in the english dub, I assume it has a different name in the original version) and demand monetary tribute. One day, six months before the next attacks, Hopehill's student council is discussing this, or rather, discussing how to negotiate a smaller tribute. The student president's younger sister hears this and convinces them that they need to stop being cowards and come up with a plan to fight back.

Though Yagyu's students are tougher and meaner than those of Hopehill, the president's sister has a plan. First, they need to recruit stronger fighters, all of whom are female (to "humiliate" the all-male Yagyu gang). Next, spend the next few months training under the outside fighters (or "Madonnas") and developing bombs and other weapons. She also comes up with a foolproof battle plan, chrecking it via computer simulation before the real battle.

These outside fighters include a Ninja movie actress who does her own stunts, a sukeban who dropped out of Hopehill the previous year, but wants in on the upcoming fights, and a wrestler with a whip-weilding evil nazi gimmick. Although two of them are adults, they all enrol in the school and wear its uniform while they're there. That's the kind of thing that can happen in the world of Japanese deliquency, I guess? Like in season 2 of Majisuka Gakuen, when Shibuya decides being an adult is boring and re-enrols in high school to go back to being a sukeban.

Unfortunately, though the Hopehill students win the battle with ease, it turns out that the war has only just started, as the Yagyu gang, under the leadership of an evil dominatrix named Panther Eye, start enacting brutal, horrific attacks on the Madonnas when they're alone at night, even going as far as kidnapping one of them and holding her to ransom. All this drives the Hopehill kids to despair up until the point that Panther Eye sends them a message via computer that she will turn their school into hell. This inspires them to vow that "even if we lose, let's go down fighting". Of course, this leads to an even bigger second battle, with the odds ever harder against the Madonnas and Hopehill High, and even higher stakes resting on their resourcefulness and use of guerilla tactics.

Though it was made before I was even born, on paper, Go For Broke! seems like it was made specifically to appeal to my tastes and interests. It's got female wrestlers, sukeban, 80s Japanese computer graphics, and all manner of other cool stuff. In practice, though it's not an all-time classic and it does have a few problems (it's occasionally a little hard to follow, heavy artillery seems to magically appear from nowhere, even the good guys don't mind gunning enemies down willy-nilly, and so on. Plus the usual problem delinquent movies have, that there seems to be almost no adult presence in the world, and no police involvement, no matter how far the violence escalates), it is a fun, entertaining, and very likable movie. It also inhabits a kind of middle ground between the gritty sex and violence of the sukeban movies of the 70s, and the more wholesome action of 80s TV shows like the classic Sukeban Deka (and, of course, its sequels and spin-offs). If you're not some kind of boring snob who needs frivolties like CGI special effects or even decent picture quality (the only copies I know of that exist of this movie are pretty grainy VHS rips. The one I have has english dubbed dialogue and hardcoded greek subtitles), you should definitely give it a try. I don't imagine anyone reading a blog like this would be one of those boring snobs, though. There's not really much for them here, to be honest.

Download: Namu Amida Butsu wa Ai no Uta (1992)

So, Download is an action/sci-fi OAV from 1992 that, on first glance, might look like a lazy and unimaginative Akira wannabe, but it's in the small details that Download keeps its charm and its uniqueness. It's about Shidou, a Buddhist monk-cum-hacker, who's dating an exotic dancer named Namiho. Unbeknownst to each other, they're both also using different methods to investigate the malevolent activities of the sinister Echigoya conglomerate. Eventually, they also team up with a biker gang who lost a friend to Echigoya's schemes to take the mega-corp down.

Now, though this is a fairly accurate description of the plot (which I've obviously left a lot out of to avoid spoiling anything in case any of you decide to go and watch Download), it might cause you to judge this OAV unfairly, assuming it's just one more entry among the many other darkly-toned and grimly violent cyberpunk OAVs and movies that were made in the wake of Akira's massive worldwide critical and commercial success. The way Download stands out from the crowd though, is in its execution.

Rather than putting on a parade of human misery, showing a world of starving street orphans and evil cyber-goons lurking around every corner, Download instead gives us a lighter take on the dirty and violent cyberpunk dystopia. The character designs (and the look of the world in general) have a soft, almost squidgy quality to them, and the way everything is animated, especially the way that characters move and interact with each other, has a frenetic, cartoonish look and feel. The result is that the setting, Moonlight City feels like a fun and exciting city of adventure (albeit a dirty, violent one populated by biker gangs and evil corporations), rather than the hellish pits of despair seen in the likes of Cyguard or Battle Angel Alita and so on (not that those works are necessarily bad or anything, just that it's nice to have something different).

The result is an entertaining and fairly unique way to spend 47 minutes, and one which comes highly recommended. It's a shame that this OAV seems to have been almost totally forgotten by history: it never received an official english release, despite being the sort of thing that Manga Video were filling the UK market with in the early 90s, and judging by the fact that the fansubs (done in 2015) only have a VHS rip as their video source, that suggests that it's been forgotten and never rereleased in Japan, too. A terrible shame that something so entertaining and with such a strong identity has been allowed to fall by the wayside like that.

Avengers Grimm (2015)

You could probably have guessed from the title, but this is a mockbuster cashing in on the popularity of Marvel's Avengers movies, made by the masters of the form at The Asylum. It's got a very different feel in general, though, and interestingly, there are more superheroines in this movie than there are in all of Marvel's movies put together.

So, there's trouble in the land of fairytales: Rumplestiltskin (who is not a hideous gold-loving troll, but a smug guy with mind control powers) has brainwashed the king's armies, and is generally causing havoc with the aid of his main henchman, The Big Bad Wolf (who is actually a large muscular man, not a wolf, though he does growl and snarl a lot). Using the mirror on the wall as a portal, Rumple, the Wolf and Snow White end up going to the real world. Some time later, Cinderella, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty and Red Riding Hood turn up and also go through the mirror, smashing it (but bringing a piece through with them) in the process. They arrive in a modern-day American-looking city that's ruled with an iron fist by mayor Rumplestiltskin, while Snow White provides a thorn in his side.

Of the heroines, only the actual royalty gets superpowers: Cinderella can cure Rumplestiltskin's brainwashing, as well as transform objects, Rapunzel has long, unbreakable hair with an iron ball on the end that she uses as a flail (prehensile hair tendrils would have been cooler, but probably also too expensive for a production like this), Sleeping Beauty can sort of project energy that makes people fall asleep, and Snow White has ice powers. Red Riding Hood is just a highly skilled fighter and archer, with an obsession on achieving vengeance against the Big Bad Wolf for killing her family. Red's also by far the most interesting and charismatic of all the characters, with the princesses all being a bit bland in comparision.

Obviously, the main plot is the princesses trying to kill Rumplestiltskin, Red trying to kill the wolf, and Rumplestiltskin trying to both kill the princesses and get their piece of the mirror so he can open a portal and bring through his armies to conquer the Earth. There's also a gang of Earth natives who are a kind of neutral third party, until Rumplestiltskin brainwashes their leader (Iron John, played by Lou Ferrigno) and literally turns him into a living metal golem.

I wont spoil any more of the plot, because I actually did like this movie. It was entertaining, it hid its low budget well, and it's about a team of super-powered heroines. Though I do have a small, probably futile hope that we might get a spin-off all about Red Riding Hood, the ending does leave things open for a possible sequel in the future at least. The reception this film has recieved in general though is really unfair: all the people you see wanting superheroine movies have ignored it because it's not licenced from a comic, and everyone else has really brutally slated it in what can only be a deliberately hyberbolic, affected manner simply because that's what "has to be done" when talking about B-Movies. Actually liking a flawed, low budget movie is totally uncool,  unless it's done ironically. How boring.

Rebirth of Mothra (1996)

So, one day a big logging company finds an ancient seal, so one of their executives takes it home and gives it to his daughter as a present. Turns out, though, that this seal being in place was the only thing stopping an evil fairy called Belvera from summoning a horrible monster, so she does, and it's up to the good fairies, the Elias (not the Shobijin for some reason) to summon Mothra to save the day. Oh and that exec's family were all drifitng apart, but they bond of the shared trauma of being caught up in a battle between enormous powerful beings and remember that they all love each other. Aww.

The horrible monster in question is named Desghidorah, and like long-time Toho antagonist King Ghidora, it's a giant evil three-headed dragon, but it's black and grey instead of gold. It's not just a simple, lazy recolour, though, as Desghidorah has four legs, shorter necks and a stockier build in general, as well as having a spikier and more agressive/less regal to it. The easy thing to do here would be to assume that Desghidorah's design is simply supposed to be a Satanic-looking Ghidorah variant, but I think it could be interpreted as representing pollution and unchecked industrialism.

Desghidorah is black and grey and spiky, and its powers include breathing fire and causing the ground to explode, while Mothra is a goddess that exists to protect all life on earth, and is implied to be connected to the earth's lifeforce. In fact (and there are spoilers from this point on), when the original Mothra is killed, one of her larvae creates a cocoon for itself to transform into a new Mothra, named Mothra Leo. This scene happens in the midst of incredibly lush greenery, and is interspersed with footage of animals living peacefully in the wild. Furthermore, Belvera rides around on a mean little robotic dragon named Garu Garu, while the Elias ride on a cute tiny Mothra named Fairy Mothra.

Anyway, Rebirth of Mothra is a pretty good film. I can't say it's one of my all-time favourite kaiju movies, but it's definitely worth a watch. This is thanks in no small part to the effects: Toho were really making incredible monster effects in the late 80s through to the 90s, and this movie is no exception. The monsters, minature sets, pyrotechnics and other effects all look amazing, and it's made even more impressive by the fact that none of the monsters in this movie are humanoid or even bipedal. Despite this handicap, the battles also look great, when they could easily have ended up looking like two inanimate puppets smashing into each other.

The only part I didn't really like was the ending, where the dad of the family looks out at the devastation caused by Desghidorah and/or the logging company and vows to change his ways and help create a better world for future generations. Then Mothra Leo flies overhead and magically turns the wasteland into a vast, fertile meadow. It's all a bit sappy to be honest. But yeah, as long as you turn it off after Desghidorah gets re-sealed, Rebirth of Mothra is a great movie.
(This movie is also known as Mothra, but if you call it that, then people will think you're talking about the 1961 movie of the same name.)