Disc Reviews
Gun Woman Review
In California, an assassin arrives at an apartment where there is a woman in the shower. He creeps up on her and shoots her in the back of the head. He leaves and gets in a car whereupon he talks to the driver and talks about a story that sounds like some kind of Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez urban legend about revenge from an embittered and talented doctor who is seeking revenge upon the man who murdered his father. Except that this isn’t a Tarantino/Rodriguez, it’s a Japanese exploitation film. The murderer is a deeply psychotic individual who has a penchant for necrophilia and this is the lynch to how the doctor can entrap him. The doctor, driven by his desire for revenge, kidnaps a loner girl who had faced abuse and had been a prostitute. He keeps the girl, Mayumi as his captive, beats her tortures her, feeds her when he feels like it and trains her to shoot. But his plot has an even further messed up twist to it. This talented doctor explains that he will sew a gun in a plastic bag into her side as well as a bullet magazine under her breast. The plan is that when she lies on the gurney in a special facility where people arrange for their special clients to take part in their necrophilic activities (not screwed up enough yet?). Filled with drugs to emulate death which will allow her to wake up at a particular time she then unstitches herself (painfully) to take the gun and its constitute parts out of her body assemble to it and kill her target. The film is also at pains to explain that when she awakes and opens herself up there will be a lot of blood, she will want to pass out, hallucinate but she must complete her mission or she will be a dead woman.
To a certain degree this seems like an updating of the Luc Besson French classic Nikita (1987) about a waif who is taken off the streets and trained to become an assassin but this is not to take into account the deep seated nastiness of Kurando Mitsutake’s film. Despite its revenge and female action heroine, the film is deeply misogynistic and is no way gratifying, even as a guilty pleasure. Although it has moments of medical explanation on the effects of bleeding to death it doesn’t take into count post op pain as heroine Mayumi kicks her way through the final action sequences. Asami, the actress who plays Mayumi is great in the role as she bravely and shockingly tears the gun from inside her and fights her out through all the sticky blood all over her naked body. The rest of the acting, in particular the two American actors who play the assassins at the beginning are sub-standard but Asami, no stranger to J-horror of the more exploitative kind. The ending of the film does promises us a sequel so we can see where we are going with these films. Not pleasant viewing, I can’t imagine that a part 2 is going to be any more of an improvement.
Chris Hick