Mutant Girls Squad

A mix of schoolgirl-bonding drama, mutant-superhero action, extreme gore spectacle, and tongue-in-cheek comic book, filmmaker Noboru Iguchi's Mutant Girls Squad is a cheerfully cheesy exercise in self-aware bad taste and outrageous antics. Rin (Yumi Sugimoto), a bullied schoolgirl, celebrates her 16th birthday by growing a scaly lizard-like arm with Freddy Kreuger claws and watching a ninja attack team massacre her parents in front of her eyes. She's adopted into a team of schoolgirl mutants who have embraced their "treasures" (such as a chainsaw that shoots out the butt of one excitable teen) and declared war on humans that hunt their kind. The whole thing plays out like a live-action manga pushed to crazed extremes—an audaciously excessive gonzo gorefest in bright candy colors sporting cheap special effects as heads explode and geysers shoot from the stumps of severed limbs while teenage girls in sailor suits bond and bicker between perverse attacks. More adventurous collections may want to consider, but this mostly incoherent bloodbath is optional elsewhere. (S. Axmaker)