Kekkô Kamen: Mangurifon no gyakushû

Kekko Back In Action With Mask, Red Cape, & Rabbit Ears First sequel (of three) to the live-action KEKKO KAMEN story about the naked superheroinne who rescues the abused students at an exclusive Japanese celebrity college. The film seems to ignore the fact that it's the second in a series, and has the characters all starting out new as if the events from KEKKO 1 never occurred. Extremely silly, abounding with overacting, the film loses much of the novelty of the first live-action version (the series is based on a manga from prolific writer Go Nagai which was also made into an animated series in the 1990s), although it's a little tighter in terms of production quality. It has a charm of its own despite its over-the-top campiness. Approaching these films with anything less than a healthy suspension of disbelief and tolerance for obnoxious absurdity is a prerequistite; there's plenty of eye candy to make up for the film's lack of sophistication. The actress who portrays Kekko in action (Shino Saitô) gets a better opportunity to have a real role in the story (as a government agent posing as a teacher to get the goods on the corrupt and perverted school staff), and she does quite well; Jyuri Inahara is OK but tends to become overly cute as Kekko's main rescuee; the rest of the cast is acceptable but way over the top – as they clearly needed to be. Consider it a Saturday NIGHT LIVE skit – with a tastefully naked heroine. At best the film is pure fluff (or, to quote the film itself, pure "muff")...

Well, since this sequel has pretty much the same problems as the first film, I'm gonna have to make pretty much the same comments: a) the story is repetitive. Perverted schoolteachers torture and humiliate young schoolgirls whenever they feel like it. The almost-fully-naked superheroine Kekko Kamen comes to their rescue. Repeat. By the way, if she's so powerful and good-hearted, why does she let the girls suffer for so long before she comes to help them? b) the action scenes are poorly done. It's a pity, too, because the woman who plays the title character again shows some expertise with her nunchucks, but things like the "Kekko Flash" make the action scenes borderline unwatchable. This time, Kekko Kamen is almost a guest star in her own movie: she does not appear for more than 10 minutes in total, while the rest of the movie is taken up by largely successful attempts to be weird and largely unsuccessful attempts to be funny. Here's to hoping the next one is better! * out of 4.