The title, The Girls’ Rebel Force of Competitive Swimmers, could easily be considered a Rorschach test for what one would expect from a title.  Maybe you conjure up the image of Olympic juggernaut Michael Phelps and his crew of amphibious bro’s rockin it pretty hard as well as screaming and flexing super-hard when one of them swims fifty yards in a straight line.  Maybe even a cabal of swimmers in a dystopian future who use their breast-stroke to take down an oppressive corporate regime who categorically deem that swimming is for pussies and rocket-powered motorboats are the way of the future.  But leave it to the Japanese to think that this would be an appropriate title for a zombie splatter fest.

 This little gem of a film centers around the new kid at school Aki.  Aki seems to be the center of focus amongst all the gossiping girls. The most they can really say about her is “She looks pretty but is quite fierce” and “she seldom talks”; suffice to say the Michael Bay school of character development by hammer-headed explanation is still going strong.  While the rest of the school ruminates on Aki’s mysterious persona, a truck from “The Clinic” arrives and does mandatory inoculations of all student and staff at the school.  And what do you know, but everyone who’s inoculated turns into a stark-raving mad zombie.  Needless to say, hijinks ensue and is the main cause for forward movement throughout the rest of the flick.  All the while, a subplot simmers with overt homoerotic tension between Aki and similarly birth-marked Sayaka.  I’m not too sure if this implies something incestuous or some kind of messianic message of lesbian lust, either way it’s not in terribly good taste.  Also, there’s a strange flashback with Aki being abused by a water terrorist(?!) and somehow this flute-playing weirdo is tied to the zombie outbreak.  In the end, it’s up to the titular squad to save the day, but at what cost?

 Truthfully, if you’re not interested after reading the synopsis, then there’s zero redeemable quality in the movie for you.  The movie’s brilliance shines through by a series of set pieces that’s guaranteed to fry your brain and soil your soul…just a little bit.  While the movie is quite fun, the gory set pieces and the moments in between coalesce into a whole that is far inferior to the sum of its parts.  The movie as a whole is a remarkable mess composed of a tangential backstory, unnecessary character twists, and a complete lack of forward progression.  The movie moves like a rusty truck, herking and jerking all the way to the end of its 90 minute life.  When the movie intermittently bursts to life it’s a veritable carnival of carnage, but the movie manages to grind to a halt almost immediately afterward.  Although, this dead space sometimes consists of a lesbian  sex scene or some other manner of exploiting the main starlet.  While this might seem like a welcome change of pace, most of the scenes would be titillating if they weren’t so patently bizarre.  Maybe the filmmaker expects the viewer to pop a boner but switching from mind-bending bloodbaths to raunchy sex crosses the wire in the brain leaving me too baffled to be titillated by a dude playing the flute so that Aki can be sexually submissive enough for him to bang.  Luckily, in spite of itself, this manages to be a hell of a fun movie.  It’s just delirious and inventive enough to burn a cubby hole in your brain and leave you with images that’ll have you chuckling for years to come.  There aren’t many movies out there that leave you with the image of a math teacher juggling razor sharp rulers while hacking students to pieces or a chainsaw wielding English teacher who only speaks in what is affectionately known as “engrish”.   At the end of the day, would you rather come away from a movie with self-affirming feelings of victory, unrequited love, or catharsis…or a laser being shot out of a girl‘s hoo-ha?  I thought so too.

- Jacob