GUN WOMAN (2014)
If Luc Besson’s Nikita was badass, then we need a whole new term for Gun Woman. Kurando Mitsutake’s (Karate Kill, Samurai Avenger: The Blind Wolf) take on the theme. This takes the original idea and makes up for what it lacks in budget with outrageous amounts of blood, gore and sheer bad taste. It’s not for everyone, but if you can take it, you need to see it.
Mastermind (Kairi Narita, Into The Sun) lives, for one thing, revenge on the man who raped and killed his wife. Referred to only as Hamazaki’s Son (Noriaki Kamata) this isn’t your average psycho. He’s rich and well connected with a fetish for not only violating the living but the dead as well. To get past his bodyguards he devises a plan as twisted as his target.
Buying a meth-addicted hooker Mayumi (Asami, Machine Girl, Sky Sharks) and trains her to be a lethal assassin. That’s the easy part. The hard part involves faking her death. Then killing her target with a gun whose parts are hidden in her body. That and escaping before she bleeds to death.
Gun Woman isn’t exactly your typical revenge film. This is an over-the-top gorefest that repeatedly pegs out the bad taste meter. Rape, murder, and necrophilia are all central to the plot and they are shown full on. The UK distributors actually had to edit a money shot during one of the rapes to get it past the censors.
In another scene, the Mastermind slices a woman open where the parts of Myami’s gun will be hidden. Just so she can see how badly she’ll bleed and how soon she’ll bleed out. Nobody in this film can really be called good, some are just less bad than others.
Kamata is a perfect villain, worthy of the extreme measures needed to take him down. He’s repulsive in both his actions and his appearance. He really makes your skin crawl as the totally deranged villain. The fact that he’s never given an actual name just makes him seem even eviler. Narita is icy and chilling as Mastermind. All we know of his background is he was once a respected surgeon. Then he failed to save the gangster Hamazaki and his son took vengeance on him and his wife. Now he lives only for his own revenge.
But Gun Woman really belongs to Asami. She has only one line of dialogue in the whole movie. And spends the last half of it doing her own fight scenes. Doing them naked and covered in blood. She makes the transformation from junkie to killing machine a very convincing one.
If Gun Woman does have a downside it’s the framing device. The film is related to a conversation between an assassin (Matthew Floyd Miller) and his driver (Dean Simone, Exit In Red). Their scenes break the flow of the action and really could have been done without. However apart from that, Mitsutake keeps the action flowing, not letting logic, plot or taste get in the way.
Gun Woman is available from Scream Factory and on a variety of streaming services including Amazon and Tubi.