Rape Zombie: Lust of the Dead 2 (2013)

I'm not quite sure what director Naoyuki Tomomatsu is trying to say with his Rape Zombie films, if, indeed, he is trying to say anything at all. Are the films a condemnation of Japan's rape culture or a celebration of it? Are women responsible for such a culture, as one male character suggests, or is this outlandish opinion a satirical swipe at misogyny? Who knows?What I am sure of is that Lust of the Dead 2 delivers enough sex and violence to please those who simply love Japan's more outrageous cinematic efforts. This second helping of deviant weirdness continues on directly from the first film, which ended with the nuclear devastation of Tokyo and the birth of a glowing baby to lesbian couple Momoko and Nozomi (Alice Ozawa). Married couple Shinji and Maki (Ren Miyamura) are forced to leave the safety of their home after an attack from a zombie, and wander the apocalyptic city landscape, where they are hunted by platoons of Otaku (virginal Anime fans who are unaffected by the zombie virus). Fortunately, the couple find sanctuary with an armed group of women who are keen to run tests on Shinji to discover why he is not a zombie. Meanwhile, a sexy American robot sent to aid the survivors does battle with the Otaku.This chaotic plot serves up quite a lot of cheapjack but very messy gore and a fair amount of female nudity, as per the first film, with lots of Asian cuties being abused by the zombies and a completely gratuitous lesbian tryst. There's also a steamy scene in which Nozomi satisfies herself while looking at pictures of Momoko, her hand going to work on her boobs and under her gusset. The gore is, once again, a mixture of real effects and shoddy CGI, but it's wonderfully over-the-top: an early decapitation and emasculation of a zombie is suitably blood-drenched, while a man cut in half by the robot's laser results in lots of slippery internal organs hitting the floor. Also rather memorable: a really manky looking zombie with a huge sperm cannon, and another that talks to the female survivors, explaining why it rapes (in a manner not too dissimilar to the chatty half-zombie from The Return of the Living Dead). On the downside, the visual effects are even worse than the first film, with the ruined city backdrops looking particularly awful.

The first Lust Of The Dead despite being ridiculous, misandric and crass was certainly memorable if nothing else. Horny zombies and nerdy zen virgins vs a female militia. The sequel actually continues the lore quite well, you simply wouldn't expect a franchise like this to have lore at all let alone this good! Equally crass but a bit tamer overall you can tell this had a lower budget as the sfx have gone from bad to truly dire. Like going from the original Sinbad movies to something Blue Peter would make.The originals charm is missing but though the franchise is bad there is something about it I find endearing even though I have no idea what.Zombie movies simply have never been weirder than this. If George Romero and Ron Jeremy ever made a movie together it would look like this. Come to mention it am I the only one who thinks that would be a great idea? Trouble is Hollywood wouldn't dream of touching a franchise like this, too risqué, too controversial and too damn messed up.Just when I thought Japanese cinema couldn't raise my eyebrow any higher than HK: Forbidden Superhero (2013) we have this.So hide the feminists, prepare for sfx that makes the scyfy channel look like professionals and brace yourselves for groin shooting action once again.

Following the outbreak of the virus, a group of survivors trying to survive in the world with the zombie rapists finds that a greater threat might soon be lurking from a cult that intends to follow through the zombie actions and forces them to fight off both threats.This was a decent and overall enjoyable follow-up to the original. Much like that effort, a lot of the positives here dwell from the ability to focus and feature the rather explicit and extreme material with real ease. The way this one exposes the opening shots of the woman getting attacked and the zombie getting dispatched by the group makes for a stellar introduction as to what's going on in this one, and with the later scenes involving the one zombie with the engorged and comically-large private region getting involved in the action or scenes of the cyborg going through the group of soldiers in grand fashion let this play with that kind of familiar sleazy thrill quite easily. There's other good stuff in this section away from the action, with the talking captive head revealing the nature of their desires and dreams while the various softcore romps including the new lesbian sequence or the reminiscing through the photograph come off rather well in their sleazy thrills, yet the scenes at the rally following the exhibition of the survivor and her demon baby come far closer to reveling in the rather depraved atmosphere present here which really goes quite a long ways towards making this one watchable. There's only a few zombie swarm scenes here which still provides the gore and bloodshed rather nicely, which along with the explicit nudity really gives this one all that it has to like about it. There's a few problems here, as the film's biggest problem is the same with the first in the fact that there's such a hard subject matter to take into account here as the film attempts to support the theory that women are there simply to have men have sex with them as the chemical only affects men. Turning them into sex-crazed maniacs rather than flesh-eating hordes who will attack any and all women as often as they want wherever they want sends quite a strong message and the continuous sequences showing multiple men abusing and raping women in incredibly explicit and sexual means doesn't come off in the best light. Even still, the low-budget nature in the enhanced amount of obvious CGI during a large part of the scenes does hurt this one somewhat which looks cheap and out-of-place in the rest of the film, and they don't really seem as necessary as it should've been. The other flaw to this one is the rather low amount of zombie action in here which is even more overt due to how quick the film really is, as it barely cracks an hour and yet doesn't have too many scenes with the zombies in action, giving this one a much more dragged out pace than it really needed. It's still enjoyable, but there are some obvious flaws to it.Rated Unrated/NC-17: Continuous Full Nudity, Explicit Rape, strong sex scenes, Graphic Violence and Graphic Language.