Kekkô Kamen: Surprise

By this fourth installment of the campy naked super-heroine saga, the novelty is pretty much wearing off. The third film switched the locale from a celebrity school to a swim school; this one moves it yet again to a music school – but the rest of the proceedings are still pretty much the same. The young girls are still tortured by the masochistic instructors and principals, and Kekko comes to their rescue with her nunchakus and magic muff. Added for no real reason is an outside agent come to investigate the school but who never really figures in the plot. The third film has some honest comedy that was genuinely amusing beyond the overall campiness of the idea and its execution; this fourth film just stretches the concept into the obligatory and its lack of creativity lends little interest to the adventure.

The fourth and (thankfully) last in the mid-2000s live-action "Kekko Kamen" series. And by "thankfully last", I mean by THIS film-making team - if another set of writers, directors, choreographers, etc. got around to it, the results might be much better (they can even keep the same schoolgirls and the same Kekko Kamen actresses - there was no problem with them and they were probably the only bright spots of the movies). I suppose we should be grateful that the title character appears a little more in "Surprise" than in the previous two films, however when you consider that during her appearances she spends more time singing her own theme song rather than fighting the bad teachers, maybe we should not be so grateful after all. As before, the film seems to have practically no script, the "action" scenes are very brief and unsatisfying, and the comedy is silly and unfunny. The self-referential gags have been done much better in such films as "Naked Gun", etc., while the extended fart gags hit a new low point of desperation. 0.5 out of 4 stars.