Big Tits Zombie 巨乳ドラゴン 温泉ゾンビVSストリッパー5 (2010)

Big Tits Zombie   

Japanese: 巨乳ドラゴン 温泉ゾンビVSストリッパー5

Romaji: Kyonyū doragon: Onsen zonbi vs sutorippaa 5

Release Date: May 15^th, 2010

Running Time: 73 mins.

Director: Takao Nakano

Writer: Takao Nakano (Screenplay), Rei Mikamoto (Original Manga),

Starring: Sora Aoi, Risa Kasumi, Mari Sakurai, Tamayo, Saori Ando, io Aikawa, Daisuke Iijima, Tamayo,

With a title like Bit Tits Zombie you can banish any thoughts about this film having serious artistic pretensions. Despite the fact there are plenty of zombies and the lead actresses bare plenty of flesh it fails to become a consistently entertaining ride.

Lena Jodo (Aoi) is a party-girl back from a trip to Mexico who is desperate for money so she calls on an old friend and gets a gig as a stripper. Unfortunately it’s at a joint in a dead-end town and the audience consists of one old man. Bored and not earning money, Lena and the other girls, goth-loli Maria (Sakurai), former convict Ginko (Kasumi), Filipino Dana (Aikawa), and mother-figure Nene (Tamayo) stumble upon a secret door in their dressing room which leads to a building where the owner recently committed suicide. The girls discover that as well as being a businessman he was dabbling in necromancy and Satanism. Maria finds a Book of the Dead and a Well of Spirits and summons an army of zombies who attack the town and the girls are forced to fight them off.

Big Tits Dragon exists in a well-worn genre of gory low-budget horror b-movies. These are splatter films where girls’ with swords battle through bad guys with blood spurting everywhere but Big Tits Dragon doesn’t match the levels of absurdity or inventiveness of superior titles like Tokyo Gore Police (2008) and Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl (2009).

This is a low-budget T&A title that relishes playing up its slim story, its ridiculousness and having/making fun of its terrible CGI and physical effects but the direction lacks the steam and anarchism to really make the humour work. I feel like you have to throw as many gags, fights and as much weirdness as possible at the audience to keep them from thinking too hard about events and I had expected gouts of blood and jokes in this film but it was more like a trickle. The body horror is reduced to a few decapitations and a flame-spouting vagina, and the zombies are given a simple lick of makeup and sent off to play ping pong with an eyeball. Speaking of the zombies, the same six turn up in every scene – samurai, policeman, geisha, top hat wearing guy – and when there is a zombie invasion scene it looks like the crew are press-ganged into shambling on screen.

I know part of the point of the humour in these films is to play up the zero-budget (including not hiding the strings) but this sort of film has been done before and better as I mentioned previously. It’s puzzling that the visual effects feel dull because they are by Tsuyoshi Kazuno who worked on the aforementioned films plus Samurai Princess (2009) and Cold Fish (2010) and this year’s Deadman Wonderland (2015).

There is no spectacle so we are reduced to seeking entertainment in the writing and while living up to its dumb premise by being totally dumb the script isn’t devoid of some intelligence. There are lots of knowing nods to the genre and the atrociousness of what the audience is watching and writer/director Nakano, through the bits of dialogue spouted by goth-loli intellectual Maria, displays his knowledge of horror movies like Night of the Living Dead but it only goes so far to making this film a fun experience.

The girls, given broad characters to play, do their best to bring them to life but within a film like this, characterisation is an unheard concept and, apart from Aoi and Sakurai, they reel of boring dialogue. With little in the way of gore or convincing action the film is mostly dull enlivened by a few scenes but they don’t really hang together because each sequence features too much downtime between them where the girls bicker or laze around. The violence doesn’t satisfy and the nudity is also a bit lacking despite the director zooming into the breasts of the strippers at nearly every possible moment.

The one bright spot is lead actress Sora Aoi who is a sassy and funny presence and displays more life than her co-stars and the legion of zombies. As the hard-drinking Lena she gets most of the gags.

Ultimately I didn’t particularly like this film. While aiming to poke fun at bad movies it does just become bad especially with a script that fails to come to life.

The careers of the people involved in this film sounds more interesting than the actual title. The film is adapted from a manga written by Rei Mikamoto who is probably more famous for his series Reiko the Zombie Shop. It’s directed by Takao Nakano, a man with a long career in AV movies of all stripes (pan-sexual, multi-genre, writing/directing and even starring in them) and he has used his connections to collect together a group of AV performers and gravure idols for the main roles, the most famous beng Sora Aoi who put in an excellent performance in Revenge: A Love Story.

In playing up the fact that it’s a bad movie, Big Tits Dragon becomes the thing it mocks. There are better splatter films out there and I recommend Tokyo Gore Police and Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl.

2.5/5

Nakano has made a nice little sideline in raunchy horror titles like this

Stay tuned for the next review which shows how these splatter films should be made. The next set features some of the same technical team but it looks like they grew in confidence.