by Victor Pryor
If Gun Woman were a little bit better, or a little bit worse, it would be pretty good. Which is not to say that it’s okay or anything like that. It’s actually bad. But good, bad, and okay mean little in the realm of zero budget exploitation cinema. The only thing that matters is entertainment. Which means the question becomes, is Gun Woman entertaining, to which the answer is “kind of, eventually.”
For the uninitiated, there is a certain breed of exploitation film that gets by on pure insanity. Conceptual ludicrousness, excessive violence, unremitting sleaze and perversion, blessedly chintzy special effects, glorious directorial incompetence… taken separately, these things can be problematic. But when combined into a single package, the result triggers an immediate and highly powerful reaction in the reptile brain of a certain type of film buff.
It is, on the whole, unsurprising that the majority of these sorts of brain damaged items come from Japan, a place that has developed a certain pop cultural reputation for outre perversion. And rightly so: there’s something commendable about the Japanese method of zero budget filmmaking. A full-bodied commitment to the gentle art of not giving a fuck.
Gun Woman is an odd hybrid of that deranged Japanese sensibility mixed with a run of the mill amateur American crime flick, which as it turns out is not exactly a recipe for success. The core idea of Gun Woman is, strictly speaking, batshit insane.
The story begins with an assassin (credited as “Assassin”) performing a hit on a woman in the shower. Said hitman then catches a ride with his contact, hired to drive him from his current location somewhere in California to his “extraction point” somewhere in Las Vegas.
Now, one might be inclined to wonder why an extraction point would be located some four hours away from the scene of the crime. To the uninitiated, that might seem pretty damn extracted in and of itself. But why linger on such quibbles when there’s an entire flashback structure to wade through?
The bulk of the movie takes place in the form of a story told by the Assassin to his consistently incredulous driver (credited as “Driver”. So be it.)
It is at this point that the villain of the piece first appears. Known only as Hamazaki’s Son, he is the son of recently departed gangster Mr. Hamazaki (a wordless cameo by actual prestigious actor Tatsuya Nakadai), and a necrophile rapist.
To clarify: he is a rapist and a necrophile, not a rapist who specifically targets necrophiles. Apologies if there was any confusion.
As played by Noriaki Kamata, Hamazaki’s Son doesn’t have a whole hell of a lot to do, but makes a memorable impression through being one of the oddest looking people ever to be put in front of a camera.
You prayed for horror. Here is your horror. Is this not the act of a just and gracious God?
Hamazaki’s Son indulges his fetishes on the wife of a doctor, and when the doctor tries to intervene, he is permanently crippled for his troubles.
Driven mad by the loss of his wife , the doctor rechristens himself Mastermind and purchases a junkie named Mayumi from slave traders, with one goal in mind: unseemly, bloody vengeance!
So far, so good. Though, obviously, “good” remains a subjective term. The setup, and the full nature of Masterminds ultimate plot are executed about as well as one can expect if not hope. However, this movie falls down in exactly the place you’d expect it to.
First, there’s the nature of the framing structure. Telling the story in the form of a flashback serves no real purpose, and pretty much drops out of the picture early on, only to be brought back for the films ending twist. Which is not a twist when there are only eight real characters in the whole movie.
It’s easy to tell where this stuff is going from the jump, and each cut back to Driver and Assassins’ clunky dialogue about how much this story is like a Tarantino film or a Japanese manga (which happens more than once, for some reason) takes away from the momentum of what should be the most compelling aspect, the story of the Gun Woman herself.
Which leads handily to the second problem: the sequence wherein Mayumi undergoes training to become said Gun Woman, which is the sort of thing that really, should be accomplished over the space of a montage, takes up a little over half the film.
It’s a function of the remarkably low budget, obviously: it’s far easier to film someone slowly learning to fire guns on a single warehouse set than it is to have them do other, more interesting things in other, more interesting locations. But given that the characters are essentially ciphers, there just isn’t much excitement in watching a training montage stretched out to forty or fifty minutes of screen time.
Refusing to flesh out these characters is a tactical error. Despite a commendable commitment to not glossing over the horrific nature of Masterminds’ actions, there’s not much for actor Kairi Narita to do besides glower and look kind of cool. And Mayumi’s transition from scared victim of Masterminds machinations to badass Gun Woman isn’t so much a gradual evolution as a switch being flipped for no logical reason.
So the audience stuck with these two pills and not a whole hell of a lot of sleazy excitement for a major chunk of the film. Driver keeps comparing it to manga, but if it was, it’s one that nobody would have kept reading. Just a whole lot of water treading, really, until the last fifteen minutes of the film.
But those last fifteen minutes?
They are glorious.
While the back of the box reveals the full and insane nature of Masterminds plan, it’s best to experience it in the moment. Suffice it to say there’s a high tech secret bunker where Hamazaki’s Son pays good money to have people cater to his worst impulses, and the plan to sneak Gun Woman inside so she can get her retribution on transcends insanity to achieve a new kind of inarguable, impenetrable logic.
The mind reels as one realizes this is the only possibly way things could have unfolded.
This sequence is exactly the movie a potential viewer would want Gun Woman to be: gory, deranged, over-the-top and completely absurd. As the titular Gun Woman, Asami throws herself bodily into all the action, and her zeal more than makes up for the general blankness of her character up until now. Now THIS is a character worth following, and a set piece well worth remembering. For fans of the bizarre, it’s an instant classic.
The movie around all that? Significantly less so.
SPECIAL FEATURES: A subtitled audio commentary with writer/director Kurando Mitsutake and lead actress Asami; a second commentary in English with just Mitsutake; Behind-The-Scenes Featurette; Trailer
