Barmy, perverse and demented Japanese retch fest which carries it’s beating heart in the bloodied grip of a schoolgirl’s mutant claws.

Brimming with gooey, grisly imagination and a macabre sense of humour, there is something to be said for the film’s complete lack of restraint. No idea is wasted or deemed too ridiculous. In fact, there are very few films which outwardly revel in so much sublime ridiculousness. Couple this with fantastical prosthetic alien effects and the whole thing starts to resemble a John Carpenter movie being put through a blender.

Told in three chapters – with each third made by a separate director seemingly attempting to top the previous absurdities – we are introduced to the bullied yet compassionate Rin (Yumi Sugimoto) who discovers on her 16th birthday that her father is a Hiruko – a mutant with a somewhat supernatural deformity, who has been living covertly as a human being despite large, rotating life forms emanating from his chest and groin.

Within seconds of his reveal, a cyber clan of futuristic Samurai with strap-on artillery stuck to their noses tear through the home, blowing her parent’s heads off. For a brief moment, her father still manages to fend off the assailants by controlling his headless body with his mind, which now rests on top of his daughter’s birthday cake. And to give you a vague idea of the sort of film we’re dealing with here, this sequence is one of the film’s more sensitive moments.

Rin is born part Hiruko and part human, with the unfortunate stigma (and subsequent blessing) of possessing a deadly mutant claw, capable of quite extreme levels of dismemberment. In a distorted X Men routine, Rin aligns herself to a resistance group of mutants led by Mr. Kisaragi (Tak Sakaguchi), a sort of Toshiro Mifune meets Pete Burns figure whose fetishist superpower involves conjuring up some form of bizarre stomach erection.

His revolutionary schemes involve assassinating prominent anti-Hiruko governmental figures and taking over the world, although the directors are seldom interested in motives and are quite rightly preoccupied with Rin’s mutant associates. These include (and there is no polite way of putting this) the so-called ‘mammoth tit maid’, who possesses giant extendable blade nipples, and a girl with a, well, ‘ass-chainsaw’. Blimey.

Rin teams up with Yoshie (Suzuka Morita), who wears a nurses’ uniform and can spit-roast adversaries with her facial trunk mutation and squid-like tentacles, and the two form a spirited kung fu alliance to take down the demented Mr. Kisaragi who, by this stage, has transformed into a monstrously giant, large breasted, wretched deformity shouting the eternal line, “My belly sword’s got a hard on!”

Obviously, you either like films where people’s heads explode or you don’t. And even if you’re already in the former category, this film is still particularly gross. Thankfully, it’s grossness is only offset by its sheer inventiveness.