ONECHANBARA

2008/Director: Yôhei Fukuda/ Writers: Yôhei Fukuda, Yasutoshi Murakawa

Cast: Satoshi Hakuzen, Manami Hashimoto, Ai Hazuki, Hiroaki Kawatsure

Unlike Rottweiler which is a fairly lame flick but one I can recommend I cannot say the same of this mess of a film called Onechabara (or Oneechabara sometimes) and means something like “sword fighting older sister”. It is based on some role playing video game and the heros are a cowboy hat wearing girl in a bikini, a sawed off shotgun toting gal in black and a school girl samurai. They spend their time killing off hordes of zombies that were the creation of a mad scientist. This seems like it could translate into a reasonable movie really, but real fast this thing turns into a load of total horse hocky and only gets more fetid as the minutes grind away excruciatingly.

One thing people online say is that at least the action scenes are decent and well done, but I do not think they are decent at all. They are long and boring and the site of a hundred zombies hopping around and flaying their arms while the samurai girl is attacked by one or two at a times is too shlocky here. Of course this is a gimmick we all know from any Kung Fu movie and accept it, because if the entire band of bad guys actually jumped the hero at one time they would pulverize him, so they sort of hop around and attack one at a time. I live in China and there is no tradition I know of here like that. The opposite is true, huge mobs maul you here at one time. All the gun shot blasts and blood splatter are computer generated and I think that sometimes we just need “real” fake blood from a bottle or tube, and not a computer program. Seems this type of thing is becoming more and more common in Japanese action and horror films. I read the film was shot on video and it looks like it too. Washed out and the night shots are grainy.

The story is simply too unbearable. I display my masochism in just doing this post, but I am trying to save someone out there. I cannot walk away from my responsibility. Why Asian films dip into this maudlin soap opera hell with family ties and tragic love issues and long, sappy death scenes with goofy, over scored soundtracks and crying girls is beyond me. It is so prevalent. Look, the heroine goes on a quest to kill her little sister and does just that, so why this long, drawn out scene at the end with gobs of tears and melodramatic grief. And then during the final duel are all these flashbacks that make the damned thing even longer. She sits weakened and almost beaten, but then… flash back! and she comes back stronger.  And then… flashback and reattack again. If I were the bad guy with a sword at her throat I would recognize that she is having another flash flashback by the3rd or 4th time and is about come back ten times stronger and I would chop her damned head off while she is still looking at the ground and lost in heart wrenching memories.  And at the end of the film I wondered, where are the zombies? It stops becoming a zombie movie for about the last 20 or 30 minutes and becomes this attempt at a cry baby family story. Why? The director and writer can not do a zombie splatter film much less a human interest story. They try to show why the little girl became evil, and how she really  looked up to her big sister and on and on and on… and who cares. I wanna see zombie guts and Japanese boobs in a bikini!!!!

And yes, the girl is sexy and wears a tight, red bikini and cowboy hat… sometimes.  Usually she’s in some gunslinger poncho looking thing. And it is really not that sexy. The one thing the film had going for it and it never exploits it fully. We never learn why she has to wear this outfit as she trudges through the barren wastelands of a ruined, zombie infested Earth. I would think combat fatigues would be better. I do not think any explanation would make it reasonable, but we are deprived of any good shots anyway, so what the hell’s the point. And the zombies are not scary and appear out of nowhere in unreasonably large numbers. One moment their slow and lumbering the next they’re doing Kung Fu flips through the air. The battle scenes, as I said, are brainless. Low end. There is some useless fat guy who cannot do anything but hide when the fighting starts but he is “the brains” of the team, but I never saw him accomplish much of anything other than whimper all the time. Our heroine’s evil sister dresses like a school girl and is always in a clean and pressed looking pedophile uniform, despite the fact the world is in an apocalyptic condition. And why do these women in action movies have to look so intent and serious. Jesus. They frown and grimace more than Clint Eastwood. If you want to frown and grimace do not wear a bikini with fluffy little things on your boobs. It does not work. Squint and suck on a cigarello. And about the sawed off shotgun girl. A double barrel shotgun can only fire two shots then you have to reload. The gun cannot hold 500 shells. I know, suspension of disbelief, but enough is enough.

I admit it. I am weak. I am a sucker for a pretty face and round butt. Take a look at that DVD cover. So promising. Sure, the girl cannot act and I did not expect her to. I did not even want her to. But I hoped to see her do something rather than try to actually act. And she does try, and that means what? Crying and feeling sad over the body of her sister that she kills. For some reason unknown to mortal man these lame soapy Asian films equate great acting with uncontrolled crying. And more crying. And more crying. The tsunami of hysterical crying must be accompanied by corny Asian soundtrack music that builds up and up like a melancholy, anguished bosom about to burst. Oh the sadness of it all. What is more tragic is that this stuff is played on the buses and on the outside PA systems here in China all the time, usually at woofer shattering volumes. Creating a dramatic soundtrack for our insubstantial little lives I suppose.

Asian movie posters are often very well done design wise. I was sucked into this one by the cover art. The covers are great, it is the actual movies here in Asia that seem to be getting worse and worse. God, this thing sucked. I have Machine Girl here too, but I am afraid to even try. The cover looks too damn good for the film to deliver on. Avoid this piece of crap please. But I did include a piece of 3D art of the heroine (I forget her name and refuse to watch the film again to find out or look it up on the net) that looks pretty nifty.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, September 6th, 2008 at 2:28 pm and is filed under Japanese and Asian Cinema, Pin Up Girls-Cheese Cake-Femme Fatales . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.