009-1: The End of the Beginning (2013)

Today on Movie Russian Roulette, Alex watches the strangest softcore porn/spy thriller he's ever seen.

Yes, it's another weird film from our friends in Japan.

Overview: 009-1 is a sexy cyborg agent for the Western Bloc in a future where Japan is cut in half and at war with itself. This femme fatale superspy is tasked to rescue one of the West's foremost scientists by the name of Dr. Klein. Along the way, she finds out more of her conveniently amnesia'ed past.

This movie is apparently an adaptation of an anime I've never heard of. As a result, I have no idea how faithful this movie is, but the basic world is laid out quickly and we aren't bogged down in too much exposition, so I have no problem judging it as an independent work.

Notable moments/quotes: Almost immediately after an opening narration from 009-1, the movie cuts to some good ol' fashioned T&A to get the male audience engor-ENGAGED.

Never had an Asian fetish, but by God I'll take this

Thug at the strip club, to waiter: "It's overdone! A steak should be so rare it drips blood." After the waiter apologizes and offers to fix it, the thug shoots him in the head and watches the blood splatter onto his plate. "This'll do just fine."

As it turns out, this thug is a member of a human trafficking ring that harvests organs, and 009-1 shows up on the scene to stop him. We get treated to the movie's downright stunning, stylish choreography, paired with brutal, bloody kills. Unfortunately, the blood effects look terrible (they were fans of the "quick spray" school so I wasn't able to get a good screenshot), but for the most part the action is top-notch.

It doesn't hurt when our sexy lead strips and uses her boob guns, either

After our heroic Fembot takes down the thug, she goes after his girlfriend and co-ringleader, "Butterfly." She announces her presence by kicking in the doors and throwing a severed arm in.

Butterfly: "What have you done to Stinger?!"
009-1: "He went on ahead. Going down to hell."

After the fight, our miniskirt-and-pump-shoe-wearing heroine discovers a prisoner, an amnesiac like her, who she forms a fast friendship with. She names him Chris, because his eyes look like "beautiful crystals."

Gee, wouldn't it be awkward if they turned out to be related?

IT SURE WOULD, WOULDN'T IT

Afterwards, Nine runs into another sexy cyborg who wipes the goddamned floor with her.

I have a weakness for ass-kickin' ladies. I'll admit it.

We're then treated to a chase between a helicopter with a seemingly infinite amount of missiles versus our hero on a motorcycle.

009-1, whose real name is revealed to be Mylene Hoffman, reports back to her boss after failing to rescue Dr. Klein. She has to hand in her badge, but escapes and goes rogue, after mourning the apparent death of Chris.

After that scene, the movie cuts immediately to a scene in a rich guy's mansion, where Mylene causes an... interesting distraction to mask getting information out of one of the maids.

Said maid becomes a sort-of love interest

Creepy rich guy, sniffing Mylene's hair: "What a lovely fragrance... the smell of money."

Shortly thereafter, the crazy lady called Butterfly breaks in and shoots up the place, taking the rich guy as a human shield. Mylene, giving zero fucks, shoots through him. His reaction?

After the compliment, he awkwardly staggers back and dies.

After some recon gone bad, Mylene wakes up chained to a table, wearing a boob gun-blocking metal bra, with the evil cyborg from earlier licking nearly every inch of her body. It's at this point the true villain appears and reveals said cyborg's design is based on Mylene's mother while the now very unsettling sensual torture continues.

OH, JAPAN

As it turns out, "Chris" from earlier is actually the evil Paul Hoffman, who wants to "combine bodies" with his estranged sister and light the goddamned world on fire. He also has a army of zombies at his command, because... why not.

Gotta love that coat, though.

Paul: "All you and I have to do is become one. [...] The perfect cyborg! Our bodies merged. Never to be separated again."

Creepy bastard: "I ask you again. Become one with me."

At the movie's climax, Mylene kicks the evil mom-bot into Paul's escape helicopter, which explodes. She then tricks the bot into shanking Paul with a katana, then destroys the robot with her nipple guns. For good measure, she blows up the building on the way out, and you better believe she walks slowly away from the explosion.

Mylene, returning from the mission with Dr. Klein's brain in a jar: "My orders were 'to rescue one of our greatest brains,' correct?"

My thoughts: This movie is one of the most bipolar things I've seen since the last weird Japanese film I watched for the blog. On one hand, it clearly wants to be taken seriously as a spy thriller, with twists and turns coming fast and furious in its final act. But on the other hand, there's an awful lot of fanservice of the girl on girl variety, and a major subplot revolves around Mylene's interest in Cherine, the young maid with an innocent young boy. At one point, Cherine even says she can't wait for all of this to be over so she can live a normal life with her brother... and Mylene. It's rather ambiguous until almost the final scene, where Cherine is captured and turned into a zombie. Mylene's mercy killing of her is pretty much the most emotional we see her become the whole movie. Hell, she isn't even that fazed by the fact that she had sex with her brother!

I'm with ya, Cherine.

On that note, the movie's biggest twist (revealing Mylene and Paul are siblings) is not given nearly the weight it should. Much ado is made about how Mylene finally knows her past and how Paul has sort-of reunited his family blah blah blah. But the movie clearly shows earlier in the movie that Mylene and Paul had sex. At the time, our hero didn't know the shirtless dude she was hopping in bed with was her brother, but it is made abundantly clear that Paul knew from the start who Mylene was and what he was doing. Now, I know Japan has some... different views on incest (from my possibly incorrect understanding, getting it on with your cousin isn't really that big of a deal), but I know for damn sure brother-sister is crossing a line. I'm sure there are some sick fucks out there that are into this kind of thing, but I'm not one of them and frankly, I hope none of my readers are. The movie even makes this a one-two punch to the boners they work so hard to induce by reminding us that not only did Mylene have sex with her brother, but the lesbian molesting she's enduring is coming from a robot that is designed to look exactly like her dead mother. Seriously, what the fuck, movie?

On a less offensive note, I found myself questioning the accuracy of Netflix (yes, this delightful gem is available on Netflix as of this post's date)'s translation. I don't speak Japanese with anything approaching fluency, but I do know a few terms and tidbits picked up from being a hopeless anime enthusiast. So when the movie's subtitles didn't bother to include (or even acknowledge) a few terms I recognized, I raised an eyebrow.

In example, in an early scene, Mylene is ordering around some army troops as she's preparing for an extraction mission to rescue Dr. Klein. The squad leader comes across as very disrespectful, outright calling her a monster, but eventually does follow her orders. Now, in the subtitles this comes across as grudging, but when I listened to the audio, the soldier actually used the -sama honorific for Mylene, which implies a great deal of respect and completely changes the context of their interaction. (An example I've had used to explain it to me is that a secretary at a company might address the company's CEO with a -sama suffix.) Perhaps even less forgivable than that is a scene where Mylene is hiding out in Cherine's home, and we get to meet her little brother, Kai. Except that the way the movie is subtitled into English, it's never made clear that Kai is related to Cherine. The Japanese audio, meanwhile, uses the correct term for "older sister" from little Kai's mouth. So, given all this, I have no idea what other major points they may or may not have fucked up. For all I know, in its intended context, the story is a masterfully written thriller, but given what I had to go on, it's a trashy, predictable, obsessed with incest sort of picture.

But hey, sexy ladies kicking ass!

So, in brief, while the fight scenes are well-shot and the actors appear to be putting heart and soul into this and do a fine job acting (Mylene specifically is just the right amount of inhuman for a cyborg), I find the script so banal and the juxtaposition of incest and titillation so repulsive that I regret ever seeing this movie. If you do give it a watch, do yourself a favor and skip the last 20 minutes or so. I still wouldn't recommend it. Then again, hey, it's a free world. If you crave a creepy movie that glosses over a practice that nearly the entire world has a taboo against that can easily result in malformed retard babies and just keeps the awkward sexiness coming, by all means, go right ahead.

Just don't tell me you enjoyed it. I will think less of you.

I give this movie a Nicolas Cage Wants Cake out of five. Facebook. Patreon! MySpace (hahahah what is this 2002).