Review by Ben Bussey
Asami: a relatively common name in Japan so I understand, and yet to fans of contemporary Japanese exploitation cinema it can only mean one person. While she generally appears in supporting roles, the porno/pinku veteran has pretty much become the Linnea Quigley of J-sploitation: the mere sight of her face (not to mention the rest of her) immediately lets you know that you’re in for some good old trashy fun. As such, Gun Woman – her first work with writer-director Kurando Mitsutake – might just catch existing Asami fans a little off-guard (I was going to say “catch with their pants down” but… never mind). Ostensibly her first western leading role – though to all intents and purposes this is a Japanese film, despite being shot in the US – it’s in many ways pretty far removed from the more explicitly cartoonish and tongue-in-cheek fare with which Asami is most closely associated. While many of us first encountered the actress in The Machine Girl, in which Minase Yashiro’s arm is replaced by a gargantuan machine gun, this latest film approaches the whole Japanese body/weapon thing in a rather more grim and grounded fashion, and slides it messily into a bleak and nasty revenge tale that’s low on belly laughs, but high on sleaze and shock value. Take equal parts Thriller: A Cruel Picture and Nikita, toss in a blender, add some wasabi, and voila – you’ve got Gun Woman.
Nor does the Nikita influence go unnoted, by the way, as at one point an American supporting character mocks the scenario as being straight out of a Luc Besson movie. If that sounds a bit contrived and Scream-y, well… we’ll come to that later.
Asami is Mayumi – although it’s half surprising they bothered giving her a name at all, considering no one ever directly addresses her by it, nor does she herself say practically anything throughout. A fucked up meth-head, she’s literally on the cusp of suicide when she’s abducted for sale as a sex slave. However, her buyer, a brilliant doctor known only as Mastermind (Kairi Narita), has something rather different planned. Sending Mayumi cold turkey and putting her into some very intense physical and psychological training, Mastermind’s aim is to turn her into the ultimate assassin, in order to send her after the rich, powerful and politically protected sadistic maniac (Noriaki Kamata) who raped and murdered his wife. As for the specifics of Mastermind’s plan; damn, it’s hard not to give these details away, and sadly I’ve seen some write-ups online that don’t shy away from spilling it all upfront, but I’m going to hold back to keep from spoiling the series of bona fide WTF moments hidden up Gun Woman’s sleeve.
Wait, did I just infer Gun Woman has sleeves? Huh. That’s a rather inappropriate turn of phrase, as – just to add more weight to the Linnea Quigley analogy – Asami spends a great deal of her screentime with barely a stitch of clothing on, and once the final reel comes around she’s wearing literally nothing but blood; some her own, some other people’s. Though the film has yet to go past the BBFC, I note Monster Pictures have rather optimistically slapped a 15 certificate on their early DVD artwork, but I very much doubt that’ll read anything but 18 on the final copy.* I don’t use Thriller: A Cruel Picture as a reference point lightly; no, thankfully this film doesn’t have any hardcore penetration rape scenes, but it’s still a pretty rough and mean-spirited piece of work in which the heroes and villains are often very hard to tell apart.
Considering how much full nudity is involved and just how out there the material is, it is rather hard to envisage anyone other than Asami taking on this role – but still, her performance here is quite far removed from the Asami we know and love. She’s rightly noted for her comedic chops, and most of her roles let her really cut loose with melodramatic excess, yet in Gun Woman she’s playing very much the opposite; a taciturn, stoney-faced, serous character more akin to the kind of roles we so fondly remember Meiko Kaji for. Sure, the film itself is plenty excessive and melodramatic with heavy undertones of gallows humour, but Asami’s playing it totally straight, and doing a damn good job of it. And when the time comes to kick arse, you better believe she looks more than up to the task.
So it’s all good, as the kids say? Well, yes and no. There is the matter of the rather odd choice of framing mechanism, presumably utilised with a view to giving the film a more western feel, as a pair of American criminals (Matthew Floyd Miller and Dean Simone) relay the story to us in conversation whilst driving from LA to Las Vegas on a job. The film spends rather more time with them than feels entirely necessary, bookending the main story and popping up to comment on it now again, often to punch holes in its logic; kind of like if Peter Falk and Fred Savage in The Princess Bride were low-level gangsters. The actors themselves are fine, but the scenes are jarring and feel like they belong in an entirely different film; there’s also a certain awkwardness to the dialogue which would seem to emphasise these Americans are working from a Japanese script which may quite literally have lost something in the translation. All that said, in some sense these scenes feel entirely appropriate; there is of course a long history of Asian and European exploitation movies (and mainstream movies for that matter) tacking on American sequences to help sell the film internationally.
Caution – little bit of a spoiler coming up now…
In any case, the final scene with the American characters gives us a smirk-inducing climax which states that the Gun Woman – now reborn as a slick super-assassin complete with her own theme song (think a cross between Shirley Bassey and Pat Benatar) – will be back to kill another day. Could this turn out simply to be the origin story of a whole series of Gun Woman thrillers? I can think of plenty of worse things. Gun Woman is a very long way from flawless, but as a brutal, bloody and unabashedly sleazy slice of J-sploitation (minus the overly silly humour which sometimes threatens to derail the genre), it certainly gets the job done. If you like the idea of Asami going more Meiko Kaji than Linnea Quigley, then track it down for sure.
Gun Woman is released to Region 2 DVD and Blu-ray on 29th December 2014, from Monster Pictures.
* Update, 1st Dec 2014: Gun Woman has indeed been rated 18, with cuts. I’m told by Monster that the review copy I saw was uncensored, and the BBFC demanded the removal of a (simulated) cum shot in a scene of sexual violence.