Japanese low budget underground film maker Kazuo "Gaira" Komizu is the man behind the hyper sleazy Guts/Entrails of a Virgin trilogy from the late eighties. Those films are filled with (almost) hard core level sex scenes, nudity, some very bizarre goings on, some ultra gore plus monster semen. Yes, you read right, those three films are perfect examples for those who think they've seen it all in the genre of low budget horror cinema. "Gaira" has also written a film called Female Market (Yasuaki Uegaki, 1986), one of the most deeply disturbing and sadistic rape related films I've witnessed. His lightest film may very well be this, Living Dead in Tokyo Bay aka Battle Girl (1992) which stars the female wrestler Cutey Suzuki, and she is, as her name suggest, quite cute.
The film is about some meteorites that crash into the Earth, bringing some kind of a zombie virus here turning people into flesh eating monsters very similar with the Romero ones. There's also an evil general that tries to take the world domination by using the virus as his weapon. One brave lady (Suzuki) is a daughter of a military officer and she is sent to fight the evil general as well as the zombies, dressed in a cool black leather uniform with incredible powers, martial art talents and ability to use various weapons! Unfortunately I only saw the unsubtitled Japanese version so any possible noteworthy things or bits of social commentary in the dialogue went sadly beyond me, but still I have plenty of positive things to say about the film.
Craig Ledbetter wrote in the ATC magazine, having just seen the English subtitled version, that the film indeed is a metaphor of the Japanese society and its history as Japan, for example, exploited the World War II by making horrible human experiments to the Chinese in the name of science, a truly horrific and disturbingly sad part of the world history depicted detailedly in a film Men Behind the Sun (1987) by Taiwanese/Chinese film maker Tun Fei Mous. This kind of low low budget zombie romp having such important message and metaphoras is a very great thing and it naturally raises this film to higher level.
The film is also very enjoyable as pure zombie horror with some inventiveness to fill the gaps caused by the lack of money. The film is not too long and thus never boring (especially if I had managed to understand the dialogue parts, too) and there are plenty of action and mayhem to keep things interesting alongside the calmer parts. The visual look is pretty dark which is nice, and the effects consist of much colored and naturally over-the-top "gore", rather well done zombie masks and zombies plus not so convincing but still good enough for a film like this meteorite scenes at the very beginning.
The film is naturally pretty close to George Romero's zombie classic Dawn of the Dead (1978) with many almost identical scenes. One poor soldier can't take it anymore and kills himself. A group of gun selling punks arrive to fight the ghouls, just like the Tom Savini led motorbike gang at the end of Romero's film. Still I don't find these things irritating or exploiting at all since "Gaira" knows what's he doing with his limited budget and always adds his own ideas and ambitions to the soup, and since the problems in the society haven't vanished since the Dawn's days, why should the fight stop?
This is, in fact, among the more enjoyable and interesting low budget action horrors I've seen from Japan and everything the director couldn't buy or pay for, he created otherwise with creativity and that's why the film looks so good and heart warming for those who understand the sub genre. 7/10
