I used to love watching these balls-to-the-wall gorefests from Japan. Meatball Machine, reviewed on this site, and the excellent Tokyo Gore Police are fun, wacky splatter fests with fx ranging from cheap to transcendent. The problem with this new gore genre is that it is exploding by leaps and bounds and whenever you turn around there seems to be another weirdo Japanese blood-fest coming down the pike. This movie falls into that category and despite a few promising elements, the film manages to tire when it should excite.

Jyugon is your typical dashing Japanese male, the kind that all the girls in class wanna go steady with. He's not your typical cute guy, though. Jyugon is quiet and reserved, and really just a nice guy who comes off as kinda shy. His life is simple until one fateful valentine's day when he receives a chocolate from Monami, the new girl in school. Traditionally, in Japan, Valentine's day means the girls give chocolates to the boys they like, so now we know that Monami (a cutie played by Yukie Kawamura) has the hots for our pal Jyugon. Jyugon bites into the little bonbon and finds it filled with a tasty red liquid, which turns out to be Monami's blood. Before you can say "creepy stalker girl", Jyugon starts having hot flashes and seeing people walking around as only blood-filled veins. The next day Monami reveals that she is a vampire and she liked him so she decided to turn him into vampire so they could be together, however she only gave him a taste with the chocolate, so to fully turn he must feed on her directly. She's also a special kind of blood sucker because she can walk around during the day (over-exposure to the sun makes her only weak), she has a servant named Igor who doubles as the school janitor, and her jaw unhinges crazily when she feeds. The good news is that Jyugon likes Monami, the bad news is that the school vice principal Mr. Furano wants to be the successor to Dr. Frankenstein and is looking to discover the secrets of life!

He manages to come across a sample of Monami's blood, which bounces around like a Mexican jumping bean, and decides to experiment on it. Meanwhile, his daughter, who is madly in love with Jyugon as well, finds him and Monami on the roof. She fights the vampire for Jyugon's affections, and gets her ass thrown over the railing. She lands with a healthy splat far below on the campus parking lot. As luck would have it, her father gets the shattered remains of his daughter and uses her mangled corpse to experiment with Monami's blood. He goes around killing students, harvesting their best assets (like strong black legs, uncuttable wrists, super smoker lungs) like a good Dr. Frankenstein wanna-be would do and puts his daughter together into a super powerful monster. Monami is called out and vampire girl and Frankenstein girl meet up in the school auditorium to have their big ultimate battle and the prize is good old Jyugon.

What follows is an exhausting (not in a good way), and creative bloodbath that features a rib-cage weapon that rips faces apart, live, squirming nails used as bullets, and swords made out of solidified blood. The mostly CG battle goes on for way WAY too long as the gals trade blows and blood and the movie devolves into near anime status. The entire third act is the battle that culminates in a blood bullets rainshower that manages to decimate Frankenstein girl. Now Jyugon and Monami are free to be together forever, but she throws in a last minute bit of info that whenever she turns someone into a vampire they only live for 100 years and turn to dust. Igor, her servant, just puffed away into dust and now it's Jyugon's turn. Does that mean she wants him to be her assistant or lover? We never find out because the film ends as Monami heads into battle one more time with a new monster.

This massively blood-drenched movie does not have the ingenuity of Tokyo Gore Police or the plot, for that matter. The main problem is that there is nothing really going on except for a love story that is very easily consummated. So to make the movie run longer, which even now only runs about 80 minutes, they pad it with scene after scene of pointless characters doing silly garbage that bores when it should entertain. This is not one of the best of the Japanese splatter films, but it's not one of the worst. It gets such a low coffin score because I was expecting so much and got so very little. If you can find it, it's worth a watch, but don't plan on watching this again, it's by no means rewatchable.

- Jose Prendes