VAMPIRE GIRL VS. FRANKENSTEIN GIRL (2009, Blu-ray released October 19, 2010 – MSRP $29.98)
I’m at a loss for words. How can anyone accurately describe the bat-shit craziness of a film like Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl - Crazy-ass, low-budget horror? School-girl, blood-spatter fetish film? Live-action anime? Or is it simply a sweaty fan-boy fever dream? After watching the new FUNimation Blu-ray edition of the film and all of the excellent special features on the disc I can safely say that I don’t exactly have the answer. But what I can tell you is that the film is a hell of a lot of fun!
Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl is loosely based on the manga of Shungiku Uchida. Writter/director Naoyuki Tomomatsu and director Yoshihiro Nishimura took liberty with the work which featured separate tales of the two characters and, inspired by a single piece of art that featured both Vampy and Franky girls, combined the tales to create this single, crazy piece of genre exploitation.
The film is lite on story and super-extra-heavy on the blood spatter and gore. But the creators play those assets to the films advantage. At its core is a high-school love triangle, with classroom hunk Jyugon (Takumi Saitô) caught between the fangs of school-girl vampire Monami (Yukie Kawamura) and the stitches of reanimated school-girl corpse Keiko (Eri Otoguro). As Monami draws Jyogon closer, Keiko pops her stitches and the girls end up at each others throats…literally. Add to the mix a hunchback janitor, a club of manic wrist-cutting athletes and a mad-kabuki-scientist, all of whom get in on the flesh-rending, blood-spraying action. This is silly, silly stuff. More of an over-the-top comedy than a horror film of any sort. But an easy recommendation for the sheer unbridled amount of fun to be derived from it.
The Blu-ray presentation of Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl is a tough one to pin down. It’s a heavily processed affair, shot on the cheap with colour and contrast that’s been pushed and pulled to within a chromatic degree of it’s fidelity. But that’s the style of the thing. It’s manic insanity from top to bottom. On the whole, I’d say the transfer appears softer than I would have liked, with the occasional artifact popping up in the wilder moments. But all in all, considering the origins of the film, any faults in the image seem easy to forgive. The original Japanese Dolby TrueHD 2.0 stereo mix is clear and robust enough but the real winner here is the English dub, presented in Dolby TrueHD 5.1 surround.
The special features on the disc don’t seem like much on the surface but in truth, the collection of behind-the-scenes videos and featurettes provide a fairly candid look at the making of the film and offer a remarkable amount of detail! The “Making-of” documentary is strangely divided into two uneven parts, one clocking in at a mere 15-minutes while the other runs nearly an hour. Taken together (as they should be) they chronicle the filming of Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl nearly from beginning to end. Anything you fail to learn about the production from those docs, you’ll discover in the 20-minute “Opening Day Stage Greetings” question and answer session. The disc is rounded out with the films original trailer and a collection of previews for other FUNimation titles.
[...] the Blu-ray release in more depth in the full review of the disc (which you can read in full here) so I don’t want to go overboard heaping the praise on this bad boy, but let me just say in [...]
Yukie Kawamura is so good in this. She is my fave Japanese model coz she always looks so happy and pretty.
http://www.japansugoi.com/wordpress/yukie-kawamura-sexy-japanese-gravure-idol/