Kekkô Kamen

I'll admit I picked this one up as a guilty pleasure – it's dumb and campy and cheap and every 13-year-old's wet dream but it's still a fair amount of fun. Kekko Kamen is a female super-heroine who rescues the abused girls of a draconian news announcer's finishing school. Thing is: she is completely naked except for a bright red, floppy-eared hood she covers her head with – which has a long cape-like sash that also tends to obligatorily obscure her region-of-hidden-delights. It's a comic book comedy for nerds (it is based on Japanese manga) whose heroine's attire may be the film's primary attraction – but even in its intentional inanity (at one point, a character convinces another to do something because "it is the right thing to do, and because it advances the plot…"), the story remains a lot of fun – like an old fashioned Republic serial, with Asians, and a cool pop theme song, and in color, and with no clothes. The film's low budget is also very noticeable, but the film's charming innocence (even in the fashion of a mostly naked protagonist) works in spite of that.

This is the first of the second series of Live Action Kekko Kamen films. The fourth overall. It is not required you to have seen the previous films.

Girls at a school for future anchorwomen are sometimes subjected to torture or sadomasochist things in the school's basement as lessons. When it gets too extreme the hero Kekko Kamen comes to the rescue.

Kekko Kamen is a masked hero who wears only boots and a hat that extends down to conveniently cover her private parts. She fights mainly using nunchucks but has a special power from her vagina. Only really her bar breasts are seen. Even though there are a number of other actresses, none get naked. Only Kekko Kamen.

This is definitely not one of the better Kekko Kamen movies but still fun to watch except for a few slow spots. No heavy story. Very low-budget. The last ten minutes is the best. I won't give away some of the surprises as they're what help you get thru much of the movie.

When you don't want a story that requires any thinking, this is a decent movie to watch. A few laughs and I do mean just a few.

This Japanese manga-based comedy superhero film is very bad. Off course a surrealistic B-movie with poor visual effects may be good, and even the bizarre idea of a naked super heroine with an rabbit-eared red mask and scarf who fights with her beautiful body (and has a special strike in which she performs an epic jump, opens her legs and strangles the enemy between her thighs) and with a nunchaku (that she uses quite well) is not the problem (and could also be funny). The drawbacks are that acting and dialogs are awful and poor, and the story is ridiculous, campy and somewhat misogynous: evil and powerful TV journalism training school owners torture the students (who are all girls) in a childish but also sexual way, and the superheroine Kekkô Kamen saves the day fighting them in order to allow the victims to "accomplish their dreams". Villains are purposely the most ridiculous possible, and it was not funny but just one more reason to hate the film. Anyway, an important lesson everyone may learn by watching it is that sexual sublimation in real life is not a good motivation for creating sane movies. Sexual harassment is not a topic suitable for jokes. Close-ups on breasts and panties give the impression that teenagers who are just discovering sex are responsible for direction and cinematography. By its weirdness and theme, the film could be nothing else but Japanese.

What looks good on the pages of a comic book or in animated form does not always translate well into live action, and this version of "Kekko Kamen" might be one of those cases. The film is extremely bizarre, asking you to abandon all logic and accept it on its own terms; but even if you're willing to do that, the script is dull and repetitive, the prolonged "lighthearted" scenes of torture and humiliation are not much fun, and the "action" scenes are poor - though the woman who plays the title character does handle her nunchucks pretty well and has one cool scene where she twists a guy's neck between her thighs. The "good girl" heroine is adorable and has a wonderful smile, but that's not enough to get this film a recommendation. *1/2 out of 4.