By Keri O’Shea
Sometimes it’s completely unnecessary for a film to have a slow, believable build-up, let alone a believable set of circumstances, and for so many of Noboru Iguchi’s lunatic technicolour battle epics, it would frankly slow things down until they weren’t as entertaining. We know this, we love this, and it’s why we’re talking about these films so much this month with regards Asami’s career. Picking up on one of these in particular (which Nia has already mentioned in the first part of her excellent study of the splatter movies which helped Asami cross from AV to main-ish-stream) Sukeban Boy (2006) is a slightly less well-known example of Noboru’s output over the past ten years, but in terms of what he manages to cram in to one hour, it’s a more than worthwhile mention – and properly pure Noboru Iguchi, free from any outsider constraints whatsoever. Seeing as how it starts from the point of ‘insane’ and sort of goes from there really, it definitely fits in with his other work, but if anything it manages to be even more lewd and eyebrow-raising than his other films – which is quite some achievement, I’m sure you’ll agree.
In the first few minutes of Sukeban Boy, the film’s determination to use gender and sex as part of its arsenal of jokes and improbable plot devices is made clear, as we start out with what appears to be a pretty teenage school girl kicking seven bells out of a group of grown male assailants (who both want to beat her up, but are also mortified that a young woman would be acting so inappropriately). No problem: the schoolgirl raises her skirts to show that’s she’s actually male, and the kicking can continue. To clarify – we then find out that Sukeban (Asami) is a boy who has been cursed with the face of a girl, but all other male body parts are intact. She’s (I’m just going with ‘she’ to make it simple) tried to look more male but no matter how much she beats herself up (yes, literally) she still looks pretty, and her life in school has been made hell for it. Helpfully, her ‘freak biker’ dad suggests she start disguising herself as a girl, moving to a new school to help maintain the disguise. She agrees, though she struggles with the facade, and it doesn’t go so well at first: the other girls are suspicious of her for the amount of bad language she uses and as she’s introducing herself to her new class in that way we so often see in Japanese cinema, someone throws a knife at her. Hmm.
She eventually makes friends though, particularly with the sweet and innocent Mochiko (Emiru Momose) and although she warns her new friend of a ‘gang boss’ being present at the school, Sukeban’s embroilment with this leads her to become friends with the gang leader Kanko (Saori Matsunaka) after giving her a thorough whooping during a lunatic interlude where schoolgirls are being forced by the girl gang to practice fainting of embarrassment whilst stripping at the school ‘Humility Club’, and Sukeban takes issue with Mochiko being compelled to basically moon the group. So far, so Noboro Iguchi – very much doing his own thing with the staid old topics of high school rivalries and gang culture. This heady combination grows far more unlikely as we go on, though, with the mysterious arrival of a leg-chopping Full Frontal Woman (poor Kanko – though she gets an unexpected boom, sorry boon), the vengeful Braless Women, the deadly Monk Women (naked, obviously) and for balance, a bunch of Sukeban supporter males…in schoolgirl garb.
Spoiler: there’s lots of boobs and fighting in this.
When I say ‘lots of boobs’, I actually mean noteworthy amounts of boobs, and that’s even coming from a Jess Franco fan here. Yeah, that’s what I said. The nudity is absolutely gratuitous (though due to her role, not so much – so much – from Asami herself) and had this film ever been presented to the BBFC, I’m sure the combination of flesh and youth would have sent them into utter apoplexy – but the thing is, the context is so cartoonish that it really doesn’t seem titillating. It’s silly rather than sexy. And if you start even trying to zone out the action to focus on the flesh, then tough luck, there’ll be a fart joke along presently to ‘bring you back to yourself’. This is essentially most like the Beano for adults, with breasts and biotech to go with the school life observations and physical comedy – though of course the manga tradition would probably provide far better comparisons, and but of course this film is based on a manga series, ‘Oira Sukeban’.
The whole cast routinely send themselves up, pull faces and perform pratfalls worthy of vaudeville, whilst Asami’s comic turn here is hilarious, if you like your comedy lowbrow – and that’s an absolute must. Remembering that we have a young woman playing a young man playing a young woman, she does a great job; her ‘male’ walk with her briefcase slung over her shoulder as opposed to being carried in a demure, ladylike way, together with that voice…very funny, and perhaps even funnier to a Japanese audience who would know that typically, polite women will raise the pitch of their voice slightly when talking to strangers, particularly men. Asami’s voice at the best of times is a force of nature; get her impersonating a male and it’s like a foghorn. I laughed.
As for the gore, it takes a little while to get going here but once it does, you can feast your eyes on spurting blood, flying limbs, boob guns, women spitting bullets with enough force to kill (and getting the actors to pretend like they’re being shot even when they’ve run out of the FX to do it properly) oh, and hormone injections being used as warfare. All present and correct, I think you’ll find.
Sukeban Boy is silly, grisly, and doesn’t take itself seriously for a second; you may be able to wring a message of ‘acceptance whatever you look like’ out of the film, but I think you’d agree this isn’t the main point of the exercise. As a lesser-known movie by a now beloved cult director, it’s well worth a look if you like this genre, and because I can’t finish this review in any better way, I’ll end by saying that yes, worry not, Asami does her robot dance in this…