A (World) SFF Film Odyssey: Mutant Girls Squad (2010) and Anime’s Excesses
Warning: there are some graphic images in this post. NSFW. Not too long ago, I set myself the goal of viewing every SF/F film released in 2010. It figures that the first non-American film I decided to view would be one of the most ridiculous, violent, and bizarre films I have seen in a while. After being bullied by her classmates, high school student Rin (Yumi Sugimoto) returns home to discover that her father is actually a humanoid mutant known as a HILKO (or hiruko — the subtitles use HILKO, but descriptions of the film use “hiruko,” so I’m not sure which one is correct). But before she can take in this surprising news and its implications for herself, she and her parents are attacked by an anti-HILKO military unit. What follows is an all out bloodbath as Rin tries to escape not only the military, but the blood-thirst of her home town. Later, she is picked up by other HILKO members and trained and indoctrinated into a violent counter-revolutionary force run by Kisaragi (Tak Sakaguchi), who believes his pack of teen girl HILKOs are the perfect fighting force for making Japan a human-free zone.
