Main cast: Yukie Kawamura (Monami), Eri Otoguro (Keiko), Takumi Saitô (Mizushima), Jiji Bû (Igor), Sayaka Kametani (Nurse Midori), and Takashi Shimizu (Keiko’s Father)
Directors: Yoshihiro Nishimura and Naoyuki Tomomatsu
Welcome to one of the most happening high schools in Japan. The vice-principal and the school nurse have a side-project going: they pick off students to experiment in the basement. Wearing his Kabuki outfit, the vice-principal acts like a boss while he and Nurse Midori disembowel and rearrange the resulting body parts to create a new life, just like that novel Frankenstein. Only, so far their experiments resulted in failure. Then comes the new girl, Monami, who turns out to be a vampire on the prowl for a boyfriend. She sets her sight on Mizushima, whose chief appeal apparently lies in his complete willingness to be any woman’s doormat.
Keiko, the vice-principal’s daughter, considers Mizushima her personal property, however. While her fellow Sweet Lolita gang members gear up for the annual wrist-cutting tournament, Keiko gears up to go against Monami. She gets aggressive when she realizes that Monami has lured Mizushima into eating chocolates laced with Monami’s blood on Valentine’s Day, therefore turning the idiot into a half-vampire. Unfortunately, she trips and falls to her death instead, oops.
Meanwhile, her father and Nurse Midori discover that Monami’s blood has special properties that can help them animate their creations, so they create a new and improved Keiko from the body parts of her fellow school mates. Now, Monami has a real challenge on her hands…
Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl (or Kyūketsu Shōjo tai Shōjo Furanken if you want to be a weeabo freak and insist on using the Japanese title in your conversations) is in many ways a classic Japanese splatter comedy. It certainly pulls out every trick typical of such genre to the point that the list of audacious moments seem more like a list of clichés: beheading, flesh tearing, disembowelment, and, of course, the obligatory skewer-the-vagina attack. There are also some expected satirical jabs at Japanese pop culture, and, in this case, the wrist-cutting tournament is actually inspired and hilarious. Still, I have to hand it to the cast: they carry themselves and act like rock stars despite the fact that they are in… you know, this movie.
Unfortunately, there isn’t much to savor aside from the mostly uninspired laundry list of shock value moments and hilariously awful gore effects. I can’t help getting this feeling that the directors expect the shock value and body horror to be enough to carry the movie to the finish line. There are many wasted potentials here: characters with amusing moments are introduced and later discarded without ever getting to the punchline, and subplots are introduced and then forgotten without any apparent rhyme or reason. As a result, Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl has some flash but little substance.
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