A Girl and Her Claw

LET’S TALK FOR A MOMENT about underwear. (It’ll all make sense in a minute.) The Japanese word for male underwear is fundoshi—a style of thong-like underpants you’d see on the average sumo wrestler.

Directors/screenwriters Noboru Iguchi, Yoshihiro Nishimura, and Yukihiko Yamaguchi have taken on this moniker to become the cult moviemaking team Fundoshi Corps—a company specializing in producing gore-tastic softcore sex flicks that combine Japanese schoolgirls, machine prosthetics, and gallons and gallons and more gallons of blood. (Fundoshi’s freaky classics include The Machine Girl, RoboGeisha, and my fave title, Meatball Machine).

Iguchi and Nishimura have teamed up once again to produce another sterling entry in their hemoglobin-soaked canon—a funny little slab of gore entitled Mutant Girls Squad. When a bullied high school girl discovers she’s a mutant (oh, hello, creepy bulletproof claw!), she’s taken under the wing of an X-Men-style gang of gals with similar attributes (including one with tentacles for hands, and another with samurai blades springing forth from her nipples). Unfortunately, things aren’t what they seem in this super gross/hilarious decapi-thon, where heads never stop rolling and no one ever seems to slip on the blood being spilled.

While there’s certainly a lot of fun to be had here—especially if you attend the screening high as balls—the uninitiated should be warned there’s a bit of a strident one-upmanship that goes on in this particular type of film. A sort of competitive, “Look! This guy’s arms get ripped off, and then he drowns in his own blood!” followed by a “Oh yeah? Well, this girl slices people up using the chainsaw growing out of her butt!” Gory gamesmanship aside, Mutant Girls Squad is a wicked lesson in teenage self-esteem that should never be shown to any teenager—EVER. (P.S. Don’t forget your fundoshi.)