Rise of the Machine Girls (2019)

In the not too distant future rampant inequality means there is a thriving black market for organs. Two sisters are sold for parts by their parents, and now live in a slum town populated by the delimbed and deboweled. One of the sisters leads a secret rebellion against the Dharma Corporation, who took her arm, but when she is captured the other sister has to team up with a washed up assassin to rescue her.

RISE OF THE MACHINE GIRLS gives a writer credit to Noboru Iguchi for "original characters", even though as far as I can tell none of the characters here are from the original The Machine Girl. One is called Yoshie but that is the case with every Noboru Iguchi movie, and she's clearly a new Yoshie. It's fair to say the characters are inspired by Iguchi's splatter masterpiece though, as is the rest of the film.

Yoshihiro Nishimura gets a producer's credit but seemingly wasn't involved in the special effects, which is a shame because they would almost certainly be better if he was. Nobody can make gore on a budget like Nishimura - which makes you wonder why they don't ask him to teach them how it's done.

ROTMG feels cheaper than THE MACHINE GIRL, which is odd when you consider that film had almost no budget. If anything I suspect this had slightly more money to play with, but not as much talent I guess?

The film is fun though, somehow wholesome despite the extravagant violence and perversion, largely thanks to the sisters' positivity and devotion to maintaining an idol-like demeanour however many limbs they might lose. It was nice to see Kanon Hanakage and Himena Tsukimiya reunited from Red Blade - both with each other and with Tak Sakaguchi.

Tak presumably choreographed the action, and it's pretty much what you'd expect for the budget. There is a one-shot at the end that's pretty good, but doesn't really do anything that Yakuza Weapon didn't already do.

RISE OF THE MACHINE GIRLS doesn't quite live up to the films that inspired it, and I don't really understand why... if you've got the originals to study it shouldn't be too hard to emulate them, even if you're not going to innovate beyond them, it's not like they're hi-tech films. I guess making them is harder than it looks though.

Kudos for not showing the opening credits until 55 minutes into a 75 minute film.