Kyûketsu Shôjo tai Shôjo Furanken

There's some good, some bad, and a lot of ugly to be found in Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl. The ugliness is the point. It's trashy and obscenely gory and all made in very bad taste. Well, the bad taste kind of leads to the bad, actually. I think it went a little far in being provocative with some side characters, and some of its humor would be the kind some might excuse teenagers making (then again, maybe not), but it's just kind of sad to see a film made by adults go there. The tiniest amount of slack can be cut for the bad taste being the point, but still, there are barriers here some won't overcome. I half thought about not going on with it, even though the opening scene was incredible.

The final act kind of justifies the heinous stuff. It doesn't justify that stuff well, but there's something approaching a point to it all. And the final act is fun in a similar way to the opening scene. It delivers on showing a fight between Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl (over a boy they both love, at that); that can't be denied. Seeing the assistants of the monsters get their own fight was fun, too. It would be funny to travel back in time and screen this in the 1930s or '40s, to a crowd of people expecting a Universal Monsters versus movie, just to see how people would react (and count how many people would pass out).

Probably don't watch this, if you're most people. It's almost kind of good in so far as delivering what it promises in the title, and for having some genuinely insane stuff. The gory violence is wild, and some of the monster designs are quite impressive. I think some of this film is awful, but some of it's quite funny and entertaining. Enter at your own risk.

I didn't find this crazy little film quite as good as many have and I think it was probably, what I would call the MTV sequences, that seemed to distract from the story and exaggerate the silliness. For the most part this is a well put together, extremely OTT film where everything is taken to extremes and the blood spurts and flows more than I have ever seen before. There are some innovative special effects, hand with a head, 'living' screws and various limbs used for extraordinary and imaginative uses. The interaction between the various school kids and others is good and a welcome relief from the madness, its just that every now and again the soundtrack seems to go all J-pop and we get a continuation of the effects without dialogue. Having said all that, this film is certainly engaging, different and very violent without being too distressing, more like a cartoon, in fact. I suppose, I'm saying this is very good without being as brilliant as it might have been.

"Frankenstein Girl vs. Vampire Girl" was scheduled at the Belgian International Festival of Fantastic Films on a Saturday night at 2 o'clock in the morning, in other words when the horror crowd is at its most numerous and wildly enthusiastic to see bloodshed, dementia and extreme sickness. And what an excellent choice it was! The people went berserk along with the absurd and totally eccentric characters in this 200% bonkers movie from the creators of "Tokyo Gore Police" and "The One-Armed Machine Girl". The emphasis more than obviously lies on the splatter orgies and nefarious sense of humor, but there's actually also a decent storyline hidden underneath all the mayhem, with interesting lead characters and the craziest bunch of sub plots you've ever witnessed. Monami, the beautiful new girl in school, falls in love with the shy school stud Jyugon and immediately makes him hers by offering a Valentine's Day chocolate with her own blood as filling. For you see, Monami is a vampire girl and pretty much demands Jyugon to happily live with her for all eternity. Jyugon is already the boyfriend of schoolgirl gang leader Keiko, but she obviously cannot compete with the vampire powers of Monami. That is to say, until Keiko dies and her deranged principal father transforms her body into Frankenstein girl; composed of bits and parts of other students. The best and most entertaining things about "Frankenstein Girl vs. Vampire Girl" are the extended introduction of the supportive characters. We have a gang of Japanese girls that desperately want to be black ghetto girls, the girls preparing for the annual wrist-cutting tournament, the creepily hunchbacked janitor and a nymphomaniac school nurse. The first half of the film is non-stop outrageous, but naturally the tempo and level of viewer's engagement drops down a little after that simply because you're adapting to the weirdness. The climatic battle – fought out on top of the school's very own imitated Eiffel Tower – is sublimely over the top again. The gore and splatter effects are extreme and brutal, but simultaneously very campy and light-headed. It's not exactly the type of movie that is out to shock or offend people, merely just to entertain them in the most tasteless, pulpy and brainless fashion.

This movie grew on me as it progressed. A lot of the characters and their sub stories seems manic and disjointed. The wrist cutters, the ganguro girls (sorta like whiggers) etc. I have to admit I nearly gave up on the movie part way through.

The way the director ties the sub characters together actually works though...basically Frankenstein girl - body parts. The action is badly done as usual with fountains and fountains of blood. The comedic elements so-so.

The acting was actually OK, Vampire girl (Yukie Kawamura) does seem alittle old to be playing a high school girl but she has a certain cuteness and charm in her scenes. She also looks good splattered with blood.

This movie isn't as dark and gruesome as some of the gore movies out there. It also isn't as fun as some of the "comedic" gore movies as well. I give this movie a marginal pass 'cos I found Yukie Kawamura to be cute and it was a slightly different slant to the usual gore plots.

And then some. This movie is definitely not something for the faint hearted. It also is not politically correct and some might call it on some racism issues (especially how Africans are depicted in this movie). But that wouldn't be what this movie is about. It makes fun of everything it gets it's hands on (even suicide gets a "stab", no pun intended).

And this will define, how much you dis/like the movie. Can you handle all that craziness or do you want your movies more straight forward? If you are one of the latter kind, you shouldn't really watch this movie or at least not expect too much from it. Some crazy ideas and almost entirely over the top, this is made for fans of Machine Girl and other recent Japanese Horror fare/thrillers (or those who are on the verge of becoming one)