ALIEN VS NINJA
DVD region 2. Revolver.

Japanese genre cinema has always had a tendency to be rather mad, and in recent years, the insanity has been deliberately ratcheted up to new – albeit rather knowing – levels in films like Machine Girl, Tokyo Gore Police, Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl and others, piling on the gore, the excess and the humour, and in the process finding a whole new audience.

Production company Sushi Typhoon – formed precisely to make whacked out films like this, have certainly triumphed with AvN – Alien vs Ninja, a non-stop collision of entertaining lunacy that should have you cheering with approval.

Plot-wise, the title says it all – after a meteor containing alien spawn lands, a small band of Ninjas find themselves battling the most ridiculous looking monsters to grace the screen in some time. After a surprise attack in which many of their number are killed, the survivors track the surviving alien down, only to also find themselves facing the reanimated zombies of their former colleagues, brought back to life thanks to alien foetuses that have crawled into their bodies!

There’s no subtlety here, thank God. Whether it’s the very un-PC shots of the alien’s tail sliding between sexy female ninja Mika Hijii’s legs, the creepily squelchy alien babies, the crass humour, a level of wackiness that just keeps increasing or the wonderfully cheesy rubber-suited monster and hilariously dreadful CGI effects, this is spectacularly, relentlessly good fun – less gory than some other OTT Japanese flicks perhaps, but no less demented!

Fantastic!

LES DE MONZE

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