Cold Fusion Video Reviews

aka High School Ghostbusters

• Written and directed by Yoshinori Nishikiori
• Starring
  • Senna Matsuda
  • Yuko Kitamura
  • Yuka Nakamori
  • Daikichi Sugawara
  • Minami Kurihara

If you’ve been browsing around here for very long, you’ve probably found reference to the fact that I spent two years in Japan, from ‘90 to ‘92. And not just on some American military base on which the denizens try to create a pocket of America in a foreign land; I lived in Japanese apartment houses, shopped at Japanese supermarkets, and spoke Japanese with Japanese people all day long. The only reason I haven’t been back since is economic; I’d dearly love to immerse myself in the country again for a few weeks, even though my command of the language has deteriorated enough that I’d be one step up from a geeky tourist mispronouncing phrases out of a cheap guidebook. (Fellow B-Master Keith at Teleport City has a trip to Japan planned in a few weeks, and I dearly wish I could stow away in his luggage.)

And even though I do review some Japanese movies around here, most of the ones I run across have been dubbed for your convenience. And so if I have seemed to enjoy High School Ghosthustlers more than I should have, credit it to the fact that the edition being distributed by TokyoPop is subtitled, leaving the Japanese dialog intact. And that gives me the opportunity to confirm something almost unbelievable to people who watch these movies: You know that excessively sing-songy, overly cutesy manner in which Japanese schoolgirls talk in movies? It’s not an affectation, a cinematic stylization; they actually talk like that.

Our heroines. Ain’t they just adorable?

In this case, the high school girls are Kyoko (Senna Matsuda, the unbelievably cute one), Mayu (Yuko Kitamura, still pretty dang cute), and Emi (Yuka Nakamori, the “ugly duckling” of the trio, who is nonetheless very easy on the eyes), who are the three members of their high school Supernatural Phenomenon Research Club. (An aside: Given that there are three hotties alone in this club, why the hell aren’t the geeky boys breaking down the door to join up? Sure, they’ve got no chance with the cheerleaders, but here are girls that might actually appreciate your encyclopedic knowledge of X-Files trivia!) And it’s lucky that there is such a club around, because their high school has been plagued by a string of odd suicides among the female students, and there have been rumors of strange piano music late at night. Ghosts? The club’s faculty advisor, Mr. Shimada (Daikichi Sugawara) asks the girls to investigate. (Note: There are policemen in Japan. They wear green uniforms and funny white helmets. I’m telling you this because the fact that three students are being asked to investigate a string of suspicious suicides might imply that there are no policemen in the country. There are.)

Thus, the three make a midnight expedition to the school, complete with a “ghost detector” whipped up by Mayu in her spare time. She’s the smart one, by the way. Kyoko’s the ditzy but exuberant one, and Emi’s the marginally psychic one whose dad is a professional exorcist. (Hmm, think that’ll come in handy?) They do hear the ghostly piano music, and follow it to its source, only to find the after-hours janitor tickling the ivories. Ha, mystery solved, they think. But then, as they visit the little girl’s room before going home, the janitor comes back for them, wearing a hockey mask. Seems he’s been “sexually harassing” girls at the school (that’s what the subtitles say, but probably “assaulting” would be more accurate), and then using his hypnotic powers to persuade them to kill themselves so he wouldn’t be found out. Didn’t your high school janitor have hypnotic powers? What kind of dumbass school did you go to, anyway?

Of course, the girls easily overpower Captain Hypno-Clean, solving that mystery. Mr. Shimada’s so overjoyed that he asks them to help at Onin high school, where the kids have been playing with Ouija boards, and the girls are somehow entering a trance state and, ah, giving up more to their boyfriends (in less discreet locations) than they otherwise might. On this one, Shimada’s got an ulterior motive; one of the teachers at the Onin is Miss Yuki (Minami Kurihara), a college acquaintance for whom he has the undeclared hots. So, you know, help with the possible possession rash at her school, maybe invite her home for some drinks…

These slugs remind me of something, but I can’t quite put my… Oh.

The girls agree to help, and get a firsthand demonstration of one of the students taking it off for her nonplussed boyfriend. (Note: There are a respectable number of breasts exhibited in this flick. However, none of them belong to our heroic trio. So if you’re here because your a Senna Matsuda groupie, I’m sorry, but you’re just going to have to cool those jets.) Emi immediately declares that the school’s got some bad feng shui, and undertakes to exorcise the place of whatever’s been called up by the ouija boards. She dresses in a little white robe and headband, positions herself outside, and does one of those chants that, you know, drives such things out. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to her, in a small shrine hidden in the woods behind the school, there’s a ribbon-wrapped rock that doesn’t like her praying, and splits down the middle in a gout of steam… (We’ll come back to that.)

From here, the girls embark on a scaled-down version of the publicity whirlwind from Ghostbusters; headlines and newspaper photos whirl past us, as the girls solve mystery after mystery and exorcise ghost after pesky ghost. (What’s funny here is that all the “journalists” following them here are student reporters for high school papers.)

But all is not well back at Onin High — in fact, the same hijinx are starting up again. Shimada again graciously offers the services of his girls to Yuki. But before they get there, Yuki has a little supernatural encounter of her own: She finds a girl screaming in the girls bathroom, and enters to find the place infested with slugs. Really weird slugs. Slugs that look like they’ve got foreskins and scrotums. (Scroti? Whatever.) One of them crawls up her leg, under her skirt… and that’s how the girls get possessed, you see.

That’s right, they’ve got spiritual vaccuums. Sort of dustbusters for ghosts — they must be ghostbusters! Ha! (Eh, whadda you know from funny…)

So when Shimada and the girls show up, Yuki (who now has her hair down — how wanton!) dismisses them all, saying it was nothing — and invites Shimada to take a little walk with her. Wink wink, nudge nudge. The girls decide to investigate anyway and follow their beeping ghost detector into the bathroom to discover the friendly phallic slugs. They fight them off, but while Kyoko and Emi are cleaning out the bathroom, Mayu gets possessed while waiting in the hall — so that when the three are reassembled, Mayu starts trying to get the other two to “cross the tracks,” if you know what I mean. Emi, the psychic girl, can see that she’s possessed by some dead guy who just, you know, wants to have sex; she exorcises the spook, and the three of them go to find out what Shimada’s up to.

Well, what he’s up to is actually what he’s down to — specifically, down to a mattress in the middle of the gymnasium floor, and down to his scivvies thanks to the possessed Yuki. Emi can see that she’s possessed by a fat, repulsive old Japanese man who looks like he’s straight of the Henson Creature Shop, but the spirit is too strong for her to exorcise. In fact, it takes over Kyoko and Mayu, pushing them to prepare to, uh, mount Shimada — but before it can be accomplished, Emi’s dad shows up for backup (you remember, he’s a professional exorcist). Still possessed, Yuki flees the scene.

The girls finally do what they should have done in the first place: Research. It turns out that Onin High was built on the site of a former red light district, whose particular patron had been one Bunbei Echigoya (there’s a pun in there — “echi” is Japanese for “horny”), the fat old guy, who had been obsessed and insatiable (the phrase “ten girls a day” came up). He died on-site still unsatisfied, and his unfulfilled spirit had been a magnet for similarly obsessed spirits. When the land had been slated for high school construction, an exorcist had confined Echigoya’s soul to the rock out back, but when Emi had exorcised the Ouija board spirits, she had accidentally freed Echigoya and friends.

I don’t even want to tell you what this is.

What’s left to do but go back and kick some ethereal tail? So the girls, suit up, Ghostbuster-fashion, with ghost vaccuums on their backs. No, really; they’re special vaccums doctored up with talismans and such, so that they suck in the ghosts, brand them with special symbols, and send them on to the next life. Emi’s got her exorcism getup on, and Dad gives each of them a special protective icon, plus a “secret weapon” in a box for Emi.

And off they go, vaccuuming up spooks right and left. They even suck up the phallus slugs — all but the one they missed. They then confront the possessed Yuki (now dressed all skanky, naturally), and manage to drive the spirit out of her — but then their troubles get worse. See, that leftover phallus has grown and become prehensile, with teeth at the end. That’s right, we are now talking about a prehensile, fanged, hissing penis. And what, you may ask, is worse than a prehensile, fanged, hissing penis? That’s what the girls discover when they go to the roof and discover two girls covered in latex growths, and the latest incarnation of the penis: A prehensile, fanged, hissing penis with eyes, little clawed arms, and two companion tentacles, all emanating from a large pod attached to the electrical outbuilding on the roof. (I really want to call it a scrotum, but there’s very little resemblance.) Between the three of them, they exorcise and beat it into submission, and then finally defeat it with Emi’s “secret weapon” — an ebony phallus model, which they plunge into the head of the monster. All done.

In retrospect, this may seem like an excessively silly movie. It is, but there’s a distinct feeling that it’s all in good fun (a notable achievement, especially for a movie that draws heavily on the tentacle-sex traditions of hentai anime). It was also made very obviously on a minimal budget; everything was done in digital video, and the superimposed ghosts are very cheap-looking. On the other hand, it was well-shot for video; when most people complain about how a movie looks on video, what they’re really complaining about is the lighting, the shot composition, and all the other flaws that would still be there if the director had been shooting on film. In this case, we’re dealing with people who knew how to treat video right, with the result that it looks as good as any of the British sci-fi TV series (you know, Doctor Who, Red Dwarf, Blake’s 7, etc.)

Senna Matsuda as Kyoko. (I’m a married spud, I’m a married spud, I’m a married spud…)

It’s meant as a piece of bubblegum, and it’s enjoyable as such. My major complaint would have to be… No, not that there wasn’t enough nudity, but there wasn’t enough innuendo. I mean, this is basically a high school sex-comedy version of Ghostbusters here, and everyone knows that jokes about sex are a lot funnier than sex itself. There should have been off-color references, sight gags, and such galore. Instead, everything was played pretty straight. Hell, the climax (har, har) involves shoving a black dildo into a predatory penis creature — and it’s all done so matter-of-fact that you have to remind yourself of the joke involved.

But hey, it was great to spend a little bit of time in Japan. I guess I need to watch more subtitled Japanese movies so that I don’t get so nostalgic. Especially more involving gorgeous schoolgirls.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 1
• breasts: 14
• explosions: 0
• hallucinations: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 3
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: none, but I think that “a gorgeous all-female, all-Asian crew in short skirts” is a great idea for the next franchise