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The Machine Girl

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


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.

OVER THE TOP FEST 2008 continues to May 4. For ticket info, venues and complete lineup, see listings.

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