This hits UK DVD on Monday and the DVD itself is actually surprisingly decent. Great transfer, nice packaging, haven't checked out the extras yet but I often find that unless it's a real academic piece that I NEVER watch extras on foreign films for some reason.
Anyways I watched this as part of Night of the Dead last November and I saw it around 6am. At the time I thought my giddy enthusiasm for the film was due to sleep deprivation and an amazing audience. As it is the film really fucking works even when sober and with smaller audiences.
It's definitely my favourite film from Nishimura and Iguchi (who between them have made Tokyo Gore Police, The Machine Girl, Robo Geisha, Samurai Princess and this) who seem to have embraced a very weird mutual aesthetic which combines ridiculous gore with a weird sort of campy knowing humour.
Vampire Girl is the most light hearted of the film but it's genuinely funny. It's just completely bustling with ideas and it even transcends the fact that the story is essentially your typical 'love triangle in high school' by just being utterly demented. The fact that two sides of the triangle are a vampire and the resurrected corpse of another schoolgirl sort of goes into this. It's actually got a nice, if cheap, visual style to it but there's a level of energy which allows you to overlook how occasionally ropey it is. I mean it's got a mad professor who performs a weird glam rock routine with a cadaver, a group of Japanese schoolgirls who appear exclusively in prosthetic black face, a MUPPET VAMPIRE, and a vampire hunter who uses crucifixes as rudimentary clubs.
Definitely worth looking into.
Anyways I watched this as part of Night of the Dead last November and I saw it around 6am. At the time I thought my giddy enthusiasm for the film was due to sleep deprivation and an amazing audience. As it is the film really fucking works even when sober and with smaller audiences.
It's definitely my favourite film from Nishimura and Iguchi (who between them have made Tokyo Gore Police, The Machine Girl, Robo Geisha, Samurai Princess and this) who seem to have embraced a very weird mutual aesthetic which combines ridiculous gore with a weird sort of campy knowing humour.
Vampire Girl is the most light hearted of the film but it's genuinely funny. It's just completely bustling with ideas and it even transcends the fact that the story is essentially your typical 'love triangle in high school' by just being utterly demented. The fact that two sides of the triangle are a vampire and the resurrected corpse of another schoolgirl sort of goes into this. It's actually got a nice, if cheap, visual style to it but there's a level of energy which allows you to overlook how occasionally ropey it is. I mean it's got a mad professor who performs a weird glam rock routine with a cadaver, a group of Japanese schoolgirls who appear exclusively in prosthetic black face, a MUPPET VAMPIRE, and a vampire hunter who uses crucifixes as rudimentary clubs.
Definitely worth looking into.
