Nightmare Fuel 2018: Day 17 – Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl

Day 17 of this year’s Nightmare Fuel continues the international tradition of the past couple of entries, heading off to the Land of the Rising Sun.  Where else would you expect to find a live-action adaptation of a manga that keeps many of the stylistic fingerprints of the source material?  Hell, where else are you likely to come across a title like Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl?  (I mean, there’s worse titles, like Filthy McNasty (and its grammatically correct sequels) or Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead, so…)

If you’ve read more than one of my entries over the past couple years, you may have noticed something of a template forming: I say something vaguely attention-grabbing (see, I paid some attention in speech class in college!), then I go into a short plot summary or synopsis, then continue talking about the film on structural or artistic or symbolic levels or something.  Well, I’m gonna deviate ever so slightly from that flight plan (can’t completely, I mean, that would just be crazy!), ’cause I think the best way to get a feel for this film is a description of its first two scenes.  Yuppers.

So, we start off with a young couple wandering the land.  They come across a trio of strangely scarred girls, who show their true colors when they turn on our couple:  They’re Frankenstein’s monsters, assemblages of corpses made animate!  A battle ensues, with our initial girl removing her eye covering and going to work.  She dispatches the Frankenstein girls with alacrity, glee, and fathoms of blood.  She tears their flesh from their bones with her powerful teeth, she stabs them with sharp accouterments, and she rends them asunder.  Did I mention the blood?  Yeah, there’s a comical amount of blood gushing forth from these hapless Frankenstein girls, more than all of Tarantino’s entire canon just in this opening scene.  Yipes.  Our vampire girl (did I not make it clear that this victor was a vampire?) leaves her prey’s skulls, tinted red by the massive geysers of blood around them, stacked neatly on top of one another, their eyes stuck in place, as she saunters off.

Then we shoot into a classroom setting, wherein a hyperbolically manic and authoritative teacher confiscates the chocolate gifts the kids have received from Valentine’s Day.  They are all rather upset at this infringement of their rights (as they see it, anyway), and they all vocalize it in their own ways.  This includes the usual grunts and squeals, as well as some hideously cartoonish caricatures of African people (we’re talking Fleischer-era, spear-chucking caricatures here, kids, complete with blackface and facial accessories, and it ain’t pretty in the slightest).  Mugging reigns.  Keiko, who will eventually become our titular Frankenstein girl (spoilers?), wails for her father, the chemistry teacher and assistant principal, and he comes a-running to make sure his baby girl is okay.  He’s a bit on the early side of the Nutty Professor narrative, so he’s intimidated by the forceful teacher and kind of just buggers off without being useful.  More mugging.

That’s what you’re in for with this flick, kids.  It’s a live-action cartoon (or manga, I guess) in every sense, from the angles and the histrionics to the speed and ludicrosity.  I was introduced to this thing by Alex Jowski’s Crasian Videos series a while back (along with K-Pop great Hyuna’s “Bubble Pop”, which has consumed my brain ever since for reasons I shudder to enquire after) and couldn’t help but wanna see it for myself.  And what better time to do so than Nightmare Fuel, eh?  This thing lives up to the “crasian” title, being decidedly crazy and definitely Asian, and it pretty much never lets up from the get-go.  It’s not really my thing, but if it sounds like your taste (or if you’re as morbidly curious as I was), it’s certainly a sight to behold.