Kill (2008)

Original title: Kiru

This Mamoru Oshii produced and financed omnibus movie contains four unconnected shorts by four directors.

The first one is called "Kilico" and directed by Takanori Tsujimoto (him of the pretty swell Hard Revenge Milly movies). Professional assassin Kilina (Miki Mizuno - Milly herself) has had some sort of falling out with her boss, who reacts by kidnapping her sailor suit school uniform wearing sister Kilico (Ayaka Morita). Kilina comes to the rescue, but both she and her sister end up horribly wounded and are left for dead by their enemies. Some friendly (or is he?) mad scientist makes the best out of a problematic situation and puts Kilina's brain in Kilico's body - probably to create the ultimate in sword-swinging schoolgirls.

Not surprisingly, the still quite lethal Kilina goes back to her boss to take her vengeance on him for the murder of her sister, but that's more difficult than you'd expect in a brain-swapping world.

I'm still quite impressed by director Tsujimoto's ability to get quite a bit of entertainment value out of some properly good fighting even though it takes place in the usual drab corridors, car parking lots and warehouse locations his generation of Japanese exploitation filmmakers has to work with. "Kilico" is no great shakes, but it has verve and a certain amount of style. Furthermore, Tsujimoto has obvious fun with the small amount of (very Japanese) freakishness his (even smaller) small budget allows, which is just the sort of thing to make me happy.

The second short film is called "Kodomo-Zamurai" and directed by Kinji Fukasaku's son Kenta, who is something of a hit-or-miss director with me. In this case, it's more of a hit. 6th grader Ryutaro is the earnest modern heir of a samurai clan but has - to the dismay of his family - sworn never to draw his sword. That's a promise no child can keep when an evil bully terrorizes his new school, his love interest, his comical sidekick and his little sister, so carnage ensues. The whole story is told in form of a silent movie, complete with a fake 1920s film look, and narrated (after all, that's how Japanese silent movies were shown in their time, being not all that silent) by Vanilla Yamazaki. Yamazaki is really pretty fantastic, with comical timing and an enthusiasm so great it's even obvious to a non-speaker of Japanese like me.

Fukasaku has quite a bit of fun playing with the form, using it to produce merry twenty minutes of children doing - on paper - terrible things to each other and make fun of films earnestly praising the samurai ethos.

After these fine efforts by Tsujimoto and Fukasaku, Kill gets dragged down by the last two parts.

In Minoru Tahara's (of whom I know nothing at all) "Zan-Gun", an evil sword possesses a soldier and merges with his gun into a sword-gun/gun-sword with which he becomes a successful serial killer. Another guy becomes possessed by the sword's arch enemy dagger, so they fight until one of them wins. The end. Yeah, well, this is basically one barely decent fight scene (in a drab corridor) that doesn't evoke any reaction beyond a shrug in me.

Last and possibly least is Mamoru Oshii's own entry, "Assault Girl 2". A nameless woman with a sword (Yoko Fujita) sits in a field, looks at the sky, and then looks at the sky some more. The camera stares at her face (understandable but not exciting) and shows some metaphorically loaded animals. Then our heroine stands up, slices a tank in two and fights another, SM chic-wearing woman (Rinko Kikuchi). Both grow wings and fly away. The end. As much as I love and admire Oshii's anime work (and I really do), all of his live action work I've ever encountered has rubbed me completely the wrong way.

The pacing drags, what is supposed to be beautiful and symbolic is mostly kitschy and Oshii's metaphors are about as subtle and ambiguous as sledgehammers. Especially the latter is always a bit of a surprise to me - Oshii's anime do after all show an artist quite capable of doing complex and ambiguous work instead of hollow pretentiousness. On the positive side, Oshii does at least include pretty women doing violence in everything he does.

 

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Hard Revenge, Milly - Bloody Battle (2009)

Like in the first Hard Revenge Milly film, we are still in a (sort of) post-apocalyptic Yokohama, seemingly the city of warehouses and empty industrial buildings. After having taken her revenge in part one, Milly (Miki Mizuno) now whiles away her time in one of those warehouses, smoking a lot, popping aspirin against regular headaches, looking depressed and doubting the authenticity of her own memory, and with it her humanity. It's a Phil Dick thing.

One day, a girl we will later learn is called Haru (Nao Nagasawa) arrives in warehouse central. She wants Milly's help in avenging the death of her boyfriend, but before she can explain herself properly, a group of gas-masked leather freaks (friends of the guys Milly killed in the first movie, it seems) arrive and try to avenge Milly back. They are less than successful.

Haru is wounded, though, and so good-hearted Milly brings her into the territory of something called LAND (no explanation forthcoming), where our heroine usually earns her money by selling the weapons of the people she has killed and knows a mad scientist (Masahiro Komoto) who likes to fondle her mechanical bits. The film calls him a "hentai doctor", so make of that what you will (the "weird doctor" the subtitles use seem a bit weak to me). When she's alright again, Haru explains what she wants from Milly, but finds the older woman not all that receptive. Of course, Haru doesn't know who her boyfriends killer actually is, so the whole discussion seems somewhat pointless.

In the end, Milly decides to train Haru to become a better fighter instead of taking her vengeance for her, but their first training session is again interrupted by weirdoes who want to kill the mechanically improved woman.

This time, it's Ikki (Mitsuki Koga?), the boyfriend of the leader of the last film's evil-doers - a non-effeminate evil gay guy who likes to hump dead bodies - and his brother Hyuma (Rei Fujita), who looks at his sibling's love for men with a certain exasperation. Which is even a bit understandable when you hear Ikki treating him to endearing little pep talks of the "if you weren't my brother, I'd make you gay" variety. Yeah, a price for the positive depiction of homosexuality lies not in this film's future.

Milly loses the fight badly and is only rescued by a clever ploy of Haru. Afterwards, she gets a do-over by her mad scientist friend. With a new pneumatic fist, our heroine now looks perfectly capable of killing the avenging people of dubious morals, but the identity of the person who killed Haru's lover will complicate everything a bit.

Everything I said about Takanori Tsujimoto's first Hard Revenge Milly film applies to its slightly longer sequel, too. Bloody Battle is still a pearl of contemporary Japanese no-budget filmmaking with decently made action sequences, buckets of spurting blood and fine little bits and bobs of weird ideas sprinkled throughout its running time.

Tsujimoto still shows a sure hand at picturing action as well as dialogue scenes (the latter something Ryuhei Kitamura for example has never learned) and still uses natural-looking light in a much more interesting way than most directors working on his budget level. I'm glad to see that the director's achievements in the first part weren't only based on beginner's luck. Now, if someone would kindly give him a lot of money for his next film so that he can leave the warehouses behind.

While she isn't playing the most complex role imaginable, Miki Mizuno has obviously put a bit more thought into her performance than just striking cool poses (which really becomes clear after re-watching the film with knowledge of the plot twist), and comes over as convincing and appropriately grim. Idol Nao Nagasawa is a bit less impressive. Sure, the script doesn't give her too much to work with, but she seems to be trying much too hard in her big emotional scenes. On the other hand, she is trying.

The rest of the cast follows the good old low budget tradition of chewing the scenery as outrageously as possible, achieving a wonderful contrast with Mizuno's permanent tenseness.

The plot, though minimalist, turns out to feature a few more points of interest than strictly necessary, with slight nods in the direction of Philip K. Dick, the question of what makes a human, and an honest attempt at making Milly's psychology work while still having as much outrageous yet very very cheap action as budgetary possible. Milly flows very well, with no scenes that are just there to fill out the running time. It's not a complicated film, but a concentrated one. If you squint, you can also find an ironic commentary on the vicious circle that is vengeance somewhere tucked away between the loudly squirting blood, but the film is not going to hit you over the head with it.

First and foremost, Bloody Battle tries everything in its power to entertain. It's fast, it's absurd, it takes itself not too seriously, yet obviously respects its audience and its genre. What more could I ask for?

 

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In short: Hard Revenge Milly (2008)

A woman named Milly (Miki Mizuno) roams a mildly post-apocalyptic Yokohama. She likes leather, swords and has a shotgun built into her right leg, as well as some other less obvious augmentations.

It seems as if Milly has spent some time harassing (alright, slaughtering) the men of a group of thugs known as the Jacobs Brothers.

After a little rest - weapon sharpening at the very empty bar of a once famous swordsmith called Jubei - Milly kills one of the actual Jacobs Brothers and uses him to lure the rest of her victims into an abandoned industrial building, where she wants to end her problem with the gang once and for all. Milly has good reasons for being as angry as she is - some unspecified time ago, the gang killed her husband, burned her baby and cut off her breasts, so her actions here seem like quite understandable.

From time to time, I think about giving up on the direct to video part of the Japanese film industry. After all, the last few years of its output have largely consisted of incredibly unenthusiastic genre films every bit as low on imagination or ambition as their Western counterparts. Fortunately, whenever I start to get too cynical, a film like Takanori Tsujimoto's short Hard Revenge Milly comes along like a mighty fountain of blood and restores my faith in Japan as the center of everything adorable and lovely in the world.

At first sight, Milly isn't too impressive. There's some of the typically crappy looking CGI you know from other films of its budget level on display, and the story takes place in the usual assortment of empty factory halls and other ruined industrial buildings every other Japanese direct to DVD film is filmed in too. But Tsujimoto is a much better director than many of his contemporaries, using his two or three locations for all they are worth, treating them as if they were the most exciting thing he had ever filmed.

Tsujimoto has a fine feeling for the use of natural light (instead of the more typical boring green and yellow camera filters), knows how to give his film pacing and rhythm through editing, in short, he works like a proper director making a proper movie and not like a drunken idiot who just doesn't care about the fact that someone will have to watch his output.

The fight sequences are more than decent too, showing a healthy love for over the top blood and gore effects and black humor combined with the tightness that makes for an effective action scene.

Miki Mizuno (who I found utterly dreadful in Joe Ma's attempt at making a Sasori film) does a solid job too, looking all grim and determined and throwing herself into the action sequences with verve.

Of course, the blood, the action, the tasteless jokes and Mizuno looking grim is all there is to the film, but its short running time of 43 minutes means it doesn't overstay its welcome and leaves me quite satisfied.

 

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