Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl ★★

With a plot that can be charitably described as stream-of-consciousness, it left me feeling as if I’d just experimented with high octane hallucinogenic drugs. Screened at the 2009 edition of Montreal’s Fantasia film festival, it tells the story of Monami (Yukie Kawamura), a pretty, centuries-old, perpetually teenage vampire who falls for heartthrob Mizushima (Takumi Saito). Conflict arises as the prissy Keiko (Eri Otoguro), daughter of the school’s vice-principal/science professor, has already claimed Mizushima as her steady, leading to the inevitable clash between the two, and a duel the mortal Keiko is doomed to loose.

Fortunately (or unfortunately) for Keiko, her father moonlights as a kabuki-clad mad scientist bent on trying to reanimate corpses, going so far as to kidnap and kill students, with the aid of the school’s nymphomaniac nurse, in order to try and bring them back to life. So when Keiko is killed during her initial confrontation with Monami, she becomes the latest candidate for her all too delighted father to revive, thus becoming Frankenstein Girl out for a second battle of revenge against Monami.

Co-directors Yoshihiro Nishimura and Naoyuki Tomomatsu spray the screen enema force with blood, gore and unbound preposterousness. They also resort to cringe-inducing parody that would likely embroil them in a hurricane of trouble had they made their film anywhere in the west as they take shots at the local ganguro subculture, which involves Japanese girls who use makeup to appear black. Just think of Al Jolsen in blackface and you’ll get the picture, however here parody takes the form of a clique of girls who wear absurd theatrical makeup to give themselves grossly stereotypical features such as huge lips, grotesquely wide noses, huge afros, nose bones, lip discs, Zulu spears and shields and the like. It’s enough to make the NAACP, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton collectively go apoplectic.

Everything from dialogue, to action, through over-the-top gore (one scene involved a girl’s flesh being peeled away in a continuous string like the unraveling of a mummy) broaches the bizarre. And while I did catch myself chuckling once or twice at the absurdity of it all, those moments were eclipsed by the amount of times I found myself cringing at the offensive, generally saying “what the hell?”