The Girls Rebel Force of Competitive Swimmers (2007)

Another day, another oddity from Japan. This time, it comes in the form of trashy, low-budget mayhem under the title The Girls Rebel Force of Competitive Swimmers. Well, at least that title wouldn’t have you think you were getting yourself into anything other than something off the wall. It’s how off the wall the film is however, that you may not be prepared for. You’ll get soft-core lesbian scenes, a juggling fire-breathing zombie that keeps mumbling about apples and bananas, and a pussy laser…yep, a pussy laser.

Rating:

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Aki has transferred to a new school at the worst possible time. There’s some unknown virus spreading throughout the school, and all of the students and staff are being rounded up to get an injection to prevent being infected. Problem is, the people that have come to give the injections have their own purpose: to turn everyone at the school into mindless, flesh-craving zombies. Lucky for Aki, she ignored getting the shot. The swim team caught a break as well, as it seems that a chemical in the pools water effectively neutralizes the injection. Even luckier still for the ones that haven’t been infected, is that Aki was held as a prisoner some years back and trained to be an assassin, by the same people that are now injecting the schools population. Coincidence? Of course not!

So let me get one thing out of the way; as you can see from my rating, this is far from a great film. In fact, it’s pretty bad. Oddly enough though, it’s somehow strangely entertaining. Maybe it’s the inept nature of the acting, maybe it’s the laughably bad fight scenes, maybe it’s the awful FX….I can’t decide, however I never found myself looking at the time or twiddling my thumbs during the films 76 minute runtime. It sure as hell isn’t on the same level as the insane and wildly entertaining Machine Girl (or most other energetically nutty low-budget Japanese films), but it does effectively bring the sleazy, C-level goods. There is a pussy laser, after all.

Maybe its most redeeming factor is that among all of its shortcomings, it does find ways to be rather inventive. No where else have I seen a swim team take up arms and battle a horde of zombies (with nose plugs and flippers turned into weapons, no less), nor have I ever seen a person nursed back to health by someone transferring food to their mouth via their own mouth, like a bird feeds its chicks. The person being nursed back to health isn’t even injured in the mouth, so theoretically she can chew, and that wouldn’t matter anyway because the food we’re talking about here is soup! Oh wait, did I mention they were both girls and this was just an excuse to introduce a lesbian love-scene? Now it makes sense! Speaking of the sexual nature of the film, there’s a few soft-core scenes to be had, including the crazy guy behind all the mayhem using a flute like some insane piper to get chicks to take their clothes off so he can bang them. If the US could only make soft-core stuff like this, I’d probably stay up and watch Cinemax more regularly!

I suppose I should now touch on some of the films shortcomings, even though I doubt I’ll have the sort of time to go into all of them, as they’re numerous. Outside of what I’ve already mentioned (bad acting, terrible fight scenes, and 8th grade FX work), the film looks like it was shot for $100 on someone’s widescreen home video camera. The story makes ZERO sense, and absolutely nothing is explained. The music is cheesier than a Journey video. Some of the editing makes no sense. Shall I go on? But as I’ve already said, like some of Earth’s greatest mysteries, these all seem to help add to the trashy charm of the film. All the boobies and panty-shots didn’t hurt the proceedings either.

So yeah, as you can probably surmise by this point, The Girls Rebel Force of Competitive Swimmers is definitely not for everyone. If any of this sounds appealing to you however, it’s worth a look. Fans of trashy exploitation or wacky Japanese cinema will certainly get some degree of entertainment out of this one. Did I mention the film has a pussy laser?