NOW Magazine // Movies // The Machine Girl

Don’t worry, The Machine Girl isn’t some cheap Planet Terror knockoff.

Story Tools
Email
Print
Republish
Save
Share

THE MACHINE GIRL (Noboru Iguchi, Japan, U.S.). 96 minutes. Subtitled. Saturday (May 3), 11:55 pm. Royal.

NOW Rating	N	N	N	N	N

Reader's Rating

Rep Cinema Feature

The Machine Girl

By Andrew Dowler

The Machine Girl offers lunatic excess from beginning to end. Never mind that our heroine has a machine gun on the stump of her arm – this isn’t some cheap Planet Terror knockoff. It’s a revenge tragedy in the spirit of Lone Wolf And Cub, in the style of Evil Dead II, about a Japanese schoolgirl hellbent on revenge on the yakuza scum who killed her brother.

Not every shot and effect works, but director Noboru Iguchi’s creativity with deep-fried heads, a flying guillotine and much more easily outweighs his small blunders.

True to the Evil Dead aesthetic, the movie starts at a dead run and accelerates from there, delivering massive mayhem with a delerious sense of the grotesque that comes out in the acting. Everybody is channelling Bruce Campbell, and that’s a good thing.

At the same time, in the Lone Wolf tradition, Noboru creates memorable characters in a few swift strokes and puts it all together in a movie without a single wasted frame.