PopHorror Let's Get Scared
Recently I had the pleasure of reviewing Kurando Mitsutake’s Karate Kill, which I absolutely loved. After looking up the trailers to his other films, I decided that I needed to check them out ASAP, so I ordered them both immediately. The first one to come in was his 2014 Gun Woman which stars the amazingly beautiful and talented Asami. Check out the trailer here.
Gun Woman is a 2014 Action Revenge film directed by Kurando Mitsutake from a script he wrote with Chiaki Yanagimoto. The film stars Asami (Machine Girl 2008), Kairi Narita, Noriaki Kamata (Karate Kill 2017), Matthew Floyd Miller and Dean Simone.
A brilliant doctor vows revenge on a crazy sadistic killer following the murder of his wife… and devises the perfect assassination plan by turning a young woman into the most lethal assassin the world has ever seen. This outrageous plan will unfold in the killer’s heavily fortified underground lair. The lethal assassin will be placed into a temporal state and sent into the facility as a dead body… but when she wakes, it is everyone else in the compound who will be deprived of their lives.
But there is one catch. What will she use as a weapon? The staff of the underground facility is armed with weapons that have fingerprint authentication systems so it’s impossible for her to use their weapons. The doctor’s genius plan is to surgically hide the gun parts into the woman’s body, so she can rip off her stitches when she wakes, take out the parts, assemble the gun and become the ultimate Gun Woman.
From director Kurando Mitsutake, who dazed genre fans with his “Samurai Avenger: The Blind Wolf” comes an original kick-ass film, Gun Woman, starring rising Japanese action star Asami (The Machine Girl, Dead Sushi). Watch crazy meet crazier in this no-holds-barred revenge flick!
When I watched Karate Kill, I thought that film was pretty crazy. That film has nothing on this one. Gun Woman includes human trafficking, rape, murder, necrophilia, cannibalism and a fuck ton of nudity and gore. Some of the violent bits include several people shot in the head, a woman getting her neck snapped, a man getting his knee kicked backwards, a man eating flesh from a corpse, a woman forced to watch another woman bleed out, a nude fight scene, a woman pulling a gun from inside of her body, a man getting his hands blown off. The fight scenes are very well done with the highlight of the movie being when Asami fights a man 3 times her size barehanded and completely nude.
I thought the story was fantastic. While it didn’t immediately catch me, it slowly pulled me in and made me care about the characters. There were some nice twists and turns that I didn’t see coming and things I thought wouldn’t be connected were. I thought going in that I had the ending figured out but I was way off but I definitely loved the ending that they went with.
Asami is an absolute badass as Mayumi, the gun woman and this role goes to show how wonderful and fearless she is as an actress. Her character suffers from withdraws, is put through rigorous training, has a gun surgically implanted in her body and that’s all before she spends the last act of the movie fighting off a room full of people in the nude while bleeding out. Asami, judging from the making of documentary, did all of her own fight scenes, including the fully nude fight scene. I’ve loved her in everything I’ve seen her in thus far but I was highly impressed with her dedication to this role and I would love to see her return to play the character in a sequel.
The other acting is badass as well. Noriaki Kamata delivers a sick and twisted performance as the subject of the Masterminds revenge. He spends every moment he is on screen engaging in multiple sick fetishes and takes sadistic glee in hurting those around him. Kairi Narita delivers an intense performance as The Mastermind, the man behind the revenge plot that Mayumi is supposed to enact. I sympathized with the character as if I lost a loved one, I would want to do everything in my power to get revenge, but I think he took it too far. He literally buys a woman that nobody would miss to train to get his revenge and he doesn’t care who he has to kill to get it, even going so far as to slash a woman up in front of Mayumi and let her bleed to death just to show the effect it will have when it happens to her. He lets his quest for revenge turn him into a monster and he winds up almost, but not quite as bad as the people he is after.
Final Thoughts
Gun Woman is a fun, sick and twisted revenge story that is an absolute blast from start to finish. The story ties everything together nicely and features some nice and unexpected twists and is grounded by a powerhouse performance from Asami. If you like bloody revenge films, martial arts films, or Japanese gore films than I highly recommend you check out Gun Woman.
