Hard Revenge, Milly/Hard Revenge, Milly: Bloody Battle - Japan - Directed by Takamori Tsujimoto
Synopsis: In a post-apocalyptic future, weaponized cyborg Milly seeks out those who killed her baby and left her for dead.
Milly is a wacko little piece of Japanese action splatstick, full of ridiculous weapons and showers of aterial spray. Of the two forty-five minute films, the first one is the best one. It flies by so fast that you barely have time to register how silly it is before it's over and done. Bloody Battle doesn't match the original's efficiency, but the last fifteen minutes are a gore-soaked fight scene that fans of this kind of thing (Machine Girl, Tokyo Gore Police) are going to love. Neither film are particularly artful, but both provide a cheap, high-energy, oftentimes inventive, serving of ultra-violent junk food cinema.
RoboGeisha - Japan - Directed by Noboru Iguchi
Synopsis: Two quarrelsome sisters are trained as cybernetic assassin geishas by an unscrupulous steel company.
Iguchi, director of Machine Girl, reins in his trademark gore for this oddball superhero origin film. I'd recommend avoiding the hilariously bizarre trailer for this movie, as most of its biggest gags are revealed there. Having seen that trailer, I was a little surprised at how conventional much of RoboGeisha actually is. It's weird, but never too weird--almost on the fence about whether or not it wants to be a kids' flick. The plot is dopey, the visual effects are intentionally terrible, and much of the violent humor falls flat, and yet...there's still something endearing about RoboGeisha. It's made with enthusiasm, and sometimes that's enough to turn dumb into dumb fun.
Trick 'r Treat - USA - Directed by Michael Dougherty
Synopsis: All manner of monsters haunt the residents of a typical American town one Halloween night in a series of interwoven stories.
You know those "haunted house" audio CD's that go on sale every October, full of wolf howls and ghostly moans? This is the cinematic equivalent of those Halloween front porch standbys. That being said, I don't think Trick 'r Treat really works as a movie. The fractured narrative is ambitious, but the continual jumping between timelines and characters quickly turned me into a passive viewer.
For better or worse, it's not interested in anything other than being a constant celebration of Halloween in all its sticky candy corn glory. The decision to maintain the same level of spookiness throughout robs the film of any suspense. If any scene is threatened by not being Halloween-y enough, Dougherty jumps to whatever characters are doing something nasty, regardless of whether or not it makes any narrative sense. Trick 'r Treat is a one-note drone of costume aisle horrors, that may not always work as a film, but it'll make for one heck of a great background movie for constant play during your next Halloween bash.
Doghouse - UK - Directed by Jake West
Synopsis: A group of guys out for a weekend away from their women end up in a zombie nightmare, where only women are infected.
I don't think Jake West and writer Dan Schaffer set out to make a misogynistic film--I think they just wanted to make a zombie movie with an alpha male sense of humor. Regardless, Doghouse has a questionable subtext through all of its comedy. The men escape the shrill women in their lives, only to try and escape another, deadlier group of women, while leveling all sorts of violence against them, all in the name of surviving to enjoy a little bit of "bloke" time. I honestly don't know if I was comfortable with the ideas simmering right under the surface of the film.
It's a good thing then that Doghouse is really funny. It makes it easier to ignore my feelings of politically correct male guilt, because Doghouse entertained me. The filmmakers strip the film of any feminine perspective, placing the "bro's before ho's" philosophy right at the heart of the film, then wrapping that in sharp dialogue, funny bits of grue, and fast-paced action. Zombie fans should definitely seek it out, then decide for themselves if West and Schaffer have only accidentally opened a can of worms, or if the filmmakers meant to fly in the face of feminism.