Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl (2009)

Almost as much gore as The Machine Girl, but on almost all levels a better, trashier experience, featuring a string of striking visual ideas.

Mizashima is informed by Vice Principal's daughter Keiko that he is to be her boyfriend. He's the best option in class apparently. Yet the relationship has barely commenced when transfer student Monami shows up and feeds Mizashima some of her own blood inside a chocolate. Now half a vampire, he has to decide where his heart lies. Keiko would seem to have been rather abruptly ruled out when Monami pushes her off the side of the school building, but is soon back as Frankenstein Girl, thanks to the basement experiments of her father and a blob of Monami's blood, which has quite a will of its own.

As well as the central love triangle, we get a politically incorrect insight into Japan's teen tribes, via the high school wrist cutting championships and the ganguro girls ('Black Faced Girls') who not only darken their skin (thus breaking the centuries old male preference for painted white faces) but go as far as to don facial prosthetics and chant 'Yes we can!' All very superb.

Grade: B+



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