BATTLE GIRL: THE LIVING
DEAD IN TOKYO BAY
Japan | 1992
Directed by Kazuo "Gaira" Komizu
Starring
Cutie Suzuki
Kenji Otsuki
Kera Keiko Hayase
Color | 74 Minutes | Not Rated
Format: DVD (R0 - NTSC)
Synapse Films
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Review by
Rod Barnett
Film:4
DVD:6
I first learned of this film years ago when I saw a brief clip on a videotape that was a collection of outrageous moments from obscure cult movies. The sequence sported a hot Japanese girl running through dark city streets dishing out over-the-top violence to a slew of reanimated corpses. Hot damn! That one scene and the title given (The Living Dead in Tokyo Bay) was enough to mark it as one film to seek out and enjoy with popcorn and beer close at hand. But I never got the chance. Then, as now, I find myself caught up in the fact that there are so many interesting looking movies out there that I can never see all of them and have to make do with what's in front of me right now. Time passed and this movie slipped from my mind. So imagine my surprise a few months ago when I heard that the good folks at Synapse were going to issue this violent little (half-forgotten) bit of grue on North American DVD. I could hardly wait to scratch this long-festering and partially healed itch. Think of this review as my version of applying antibiotic salve and bandages to my itchy places.
    The time is 1991 when we witness a meteor crash into Tokyo Bay, throwing a thick cloud of contaminated dirt and stuff into the air upon impact. This airborne junk engulfs the entire city in some kind of deadly cloud that cuts the place off from the outside world. Tokyo is quickly placed under martial law by the Japanese government in order to contain and assess the situation, which turns out to be a very good idea. Those unfortunate enough to have been trapped under the toxic cloud discover that whatever this stuff is, it has one very bad effect on human bodies — it transforms the newly dead into flesh-eating zombies! Or actually it seems that whatever effect the meteor crap had on things is secondary to its effect on the drug Cosmo-Amphetamine, which causes the zombification process. Or was it a virus? I can't completely remember. Anyway... Captain Fujioka (Shiro Shimomoto), the Tokyo leader of the Ground Self-Defense Force, isn't worried about protecting the citizens of the city. He's much more interested in experimenting with Cosmo-Amphetamine to see if he can use it to create superhuman zombie soldiers and thereby rule the world. Or something like that.
    Roaming the streets and fighting it out with the hoards of zombies are gangs of looters, punks and the general wastes of skin that populate poorly scripted zombie movies. Enter K-ko (Cutie Suzuki) a female badass trained in badassery by her military father Colonel Kirihara. It seems that he used to be in control of the Ground Self-Defense Force and still has access to some of the military hardware it has created. The Colonel has been given 20 hours to corral together as many survivors as possible and shepherd them to a checkpoint where a possible antidote is being tested. He communicates this to K-ko and tells her to get to the rendezvous with as many surviving humans as possible. He also warns her about the Human Hunter Unit, a band of military maniacs who kill any human, living or undead, inside the city. Col. Kirihara wants her to destroy these vermin if she can, and to make that a little easier K-ko is given a black battle suit designed to enhance her natural fighting skills and protect her from bullets and arrows and spitballs. Now all she has to do is march across the length of an increasingly apocalyptic cityscape where everyone she meets is trying to kill, eat or just dismember her. A Battle Girl's work is never done.
    While slogging through this uninspired, barely coherent mess I kept wondering what went wrong. It's clear that the idea was to do a riff on The Evil Dead and cross it with the final Ripley-on-a-rampage section of Aliens while tossing random bits of anarchist angst around for flavor. Sadly the film has neither the intellectual cleverness to pull this mash-up off nor the budget to make its failure entertaining. When I learned in the extras that the movie was created as a showcase for a special effects company it all made sense. The driving desire was to just build something to hang various splatter sequences onto with simple A to B plotting being a total afterthought. So maybe its not fair to point out how lame the film's story, dialog, acting, direction and pacing are since the main aim was to just make an effects reel to get the company Moby Dick more film work. If you want to see an occasionally interesting bit of splattery gore or a series of mostly well crafted low-brow comedic zombie crash dummies being crushed this film may entertain you. I was bored by Battle Girl: The Living Dead in Tokyo Bay and I never would've thought that would be true. When a zombie/action movie clocks in at less than 75 minutes and still bores me something has gone terribly wrong. Some movie itches are best left unscratched.
Since the movie was done as a video release it was shot in the 1.33:1 aspect ratio and that is how Synapse's DVD presents it. Apparently transferred from vault materials, the image looks pretty good considering its extremely low budget origin. Since 99% of the movie takes place at night it’s nice that it's possible to see everything with some good definition in blacks and browns that doesn’t look craptastic when bright colors come onscreen. I suspect Synapse did a lot of hard work to make this thing look as a sharp as it can and for that I thank them. The only audio track is the Japanese 2.0 Dolby stereo offering which handles the stilted dialog and cheesy synthesizer score well. Optional English subtitles are offered and are quite well done with none of the awful spelling and grammatical errors that have become standard on Region 1 genre DVDs in the last year. The only extra is a 55-minute long interview with the movie’s director Kazuo Komizu — the same fellow who helmed Entrails of a Virgin. (If I had known that before I decided to watch this one...) A single static camera interview with terrible sound, this piece is worth seeing just to get a peek inside Japanese genre filmmaking of the late '80s and early '90s. As Komizu chain-smokes his way through a pack of cigarettes he relates the often casual methods for making creative decisions that left an inexperienced script writer sitting in the director's chair. He doesn't try to justify his work but seems proud of what he accomplished. If you are someone who enjoys this film I think you will like this interview. I hated the film but still got a kick out of it. 4/05/10
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