This left me twiddling my thumbs instead of having fun. Furthermore, to make up for the lack of impact, they throw in some bad CGI flashes to Rika's hits. Her action is always framed very close or very far away- close with the actual actress, far away for the obvious stunt double. Though the super arm graft comes about midway through the movie, Rika really doesn't start kicking butt until the end and fights in less than a handful of scenes. That kind of fakeness I can forgive in my silly low budget film, but when the gore and especially the action feel shortchanged I have a problem. Rika's super arm is rigid plastic, the zombie's are mostly gunky latex and some green-gray makeup, and the big bad has a still, expressionless monster mask. So again, death doesn't matter so long as one hero comes through. And, lets say they did flesh them out, the fantasy plotline states that once the big bad is killed everything is reset. Problem is, the characters are one note and there was no work on the page or from the actors to earn those moments.

Where Fujiwara oddly mucks it up is throwing in character deaths that we are supposed feel emotional about. Every cult film needs some seedy people, some goofballs, some eye candy, and a kick butt hero/heroine.

Zombie Hunter Rika unashamedly deals in cliches, including its cardboard comic characters. The zombies here stumble around, can use guns, get turned on for comedic effect, but, eschewing convention, they also die pretty easily, a stab or a gunshot anywhere and they drop. It riffs from a basic wide range of comic fantasy films but there is a lack of callbacks to the zombie genre. The plot really doesnt really delve into the aspects of being a zombie film either as a source or horror or parody. It could just as well be an alien invasion. If you've seen the films, I felt much the same way about recent Japanese genre imports like Meatball Machine, Attack Girls Swim Team Versus the Undead, and to a much lesser degree Tokyo Zombie. A film with this much gratuity- tits, gore, action, wackiness- should have one a little more amazed. It's the kind of territory Peter Jackson, Takashi Miike, and prime Sam Raimi mine so well, but director Kenichi Fujiwara seems to miss the mark at every opportunity. And, they've gotta' kill him/it before the US bombs the city to contain the outbreak. The basic lowdown, which makes about as much sense as you'd expect in your low budget, scifi, comedy, horror, action film with a heroine running around with some dudes magic swordfightin' arm attached to her body, is that the only way to reverse the plague- and I mean literally, everything goes magically back to normal including those infected or injured- is to kill some kind of zombie monster called Grorian. Oh yes, and Rika loses her arm but gramps springs back to life enough to sever her arm before she becomes a zombie and in its place grafts on the magical arm of a zombie killer so Rika can commence slicing and dicing. This is immaterial, just an excuse to put two unsympathetic characters in the film to get eaten by zombies, and that is fine by me.Įventually, a ragtag group is formed: Rika, her friend, the lothario and the black widow, the obligatory Japanese comic relief everyman trio of a cook, a mechanic, and a geek, and finally a zombiefied scientist who has somehow managed to retain his humanity, muzzled himself, and offers up all the helpful exposition. Aided by a scheming lothario, they make it to gramps house only to find that grandpa has become catatonic and married a black widow, who coincidentally is scheming with the lothario to poison the old man for his life insurance. They step off the train to find that the prefecture is overrun with zombies. Its that kind of film.Īnyway, Rika and her friend hop the train to visit her long lost grandpa, a surgical genius and swordsman, who has been incommunicado for a few years. As a matter of fact, I think every girl in Zombie Hunter Rika had artificially puffed lips. At least average for Jpn DTV films, which means she is about three to five years too old and has collagen implanted lips.

Rika is your average Japanese schoolgirl.

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