Verdict
Summary
Star Sugimoto is very attractive and puts herself completely out there on film in situations that – while simulated – are awful, and she somehow manages to keep herself going, but this is truly a crazy movie full of deranged psychos intent on stripping, raping, and degrading every woman they come across, and the tone is deadly serious, so the experience isn’t “fun” or come across as escapism the way I’d hoped it would. That said, it’s wildly in-your-face and has a breakneck pace, and I know there’s an audience for this.
Plot:
An undercover female detective goes deep when she allows herself to be kidnapped and raped by a band of cutthroat killers in order to try to rescue a politician’s daughter.
Review:
Undercover cop Rei (Miki Sugimoto) is a gorgeous woman, but her methods at “getting her man” riles the fury of her superiors on the force because when she allows herself to be raped and degraded by her targets, she completely unleashes her full force as a woman who’s been stripped of her dignity. She’s known for killing her targets, but on her latest assignment she totally blows it when she kills the man the department has been trying to apprehend and interrogate for a long time. For her hard work, she’s viciously reprimanded and thrown into the slammer alongside many of the hookers and lowlifes she’s put behind bars, which makes her an easy target. Meanwhile, a band of cutthroat rapists and yakuza killers is on the loose, and they “break in” a young new member by forcing him to rape a young woman and be an accomplice to murder to her boyfriend. They kidnap the girl and then they find out the girl they’ve raped and kidnapped is the daughter of a well-known politician who wants his daughter found before the media is aware that she’s been abducted. The police department go to Rei to offer her a last chance to redeem herself: Allow herself to be kidnapped and raped by the same gang that has the politician’s daughter, but in accepting the task, Rei will be completely stripped of her dignity once again, but only worse because the gang that takes her are totally depraved and crazed and without consciences. When Rei sees her chance to save the girl, she’ll unleash hell upon her captors, without a thought or care for the future of her career as a detective.
Zero Woman is a no-holds-barred rape / revenge thriller that doesn’t spare the viewer any amount of on-screen mayhem, sexual assault, and total anarchy, and while some viewers will relish the over-the-top-violence, others will be repulsed by it all. On the one hand, it’s exactly the sort of grindhouse, sexually explicit and insane movie such fans would crave, but on the other it’s disgusting and numbing and not fit for human consumption. It’s a highly stylish exercise in excess, but it’s also vividly off-putting with garish directorial flourishes (there are geysers of blood, comic-book-type weapons characters use, and deliberately cut and many staged rape scenes that show only as much as the sensors would allow), and so this film targets a specific audience that goes for this sort of thing. Star Sugimoto is very attractive and puts herself completely out there on film in situations that – while simulated – are awful, and she somehow manages to keep herself going, but this is truly a crazy movie full of deranged psychos intent on stripping, raping, and degrading every woman they come across, and the tone is deadly serious, so the experience isn’t “fun” or come across as escapism the way I’d hoped it would. That said, it’s wildly in-your-face and has a breakneck pace, and I know there’s an audience for this. From director Yukio Noda.
Neon Eagle / Cauldron’s recent standard Blu-ray edition comes in a crystal clear and sharp 4K restoration with an audio commentary by a film historian, a featurette about the Japanese “Pinky Violence” subgenre that Zero Woman falls into, an image gallery, and a dual-sided cover artwork. There was a limited edition with a slipcover, but that has now gone out of print.
