Neo Action double feature: “Hard Revenge, Milly” and “The Masked Girl” coming in August

By kevin on June 24, 2008 at 4:09pm EDT

When I first read up on Takanori Tsujimoto’s Hard Revenge, Milly last month it seemed odd that it had a run-time of only 44 minutes. Well, it all makes sense now, because it’s actually being packaged with Isao Kaneko’s The Masked Girl as part of the “Neo Action” double bill premiering at Q-AX on Saturday August 9, 2008. It’s pretty good timing, considering The Machine Girl will be going public in Japan on the previous Saturday and they might be able to piggyback on whatever new found interest in senseless violence that generates.

In Hard Revenge, Milly, abolition of gun control laws at some indeterminate point in the future causes Yokohama to become a lawless bastion of violent crime. The worst of the new breed of criminals, “The Jack Brothers”—named for their leader, Jack (Mitsuki Koga)—brutally murder the husband and baby of Milly (Miki Mizuno) in front of her eyes and leave her for dead. Milly survives the incident and vows to get revenge. After visiting a master craftsman named Jubei to have a special sword gauntlet repaired, Milly infiltrates the abandoned factory the Jack Brothers use as their base of operations and murders Jack’s henchmen one by one, leading to a final bloody showdown.

In The Masked Girl an ordinary high school student named Ai Hoshino (Yuki Shimizu) is kidnapped on her way home from school. She later wakes up and finds herself held captive in the hideout of “Joker” and the evil Black Maria (Aiko Sato). Luckily she’s able to escape with the help of her gym teacher Aoyama (Tsuyoshi Kida), but not before being genetically altered by Joker—giving her super-human powers. After being pursued by black-suited agents of Joker, Ai confides in her friend Yumi (Shizuka Nakamura), but discovers Yumi has also been altered by Black Maria and brainwashed into swearing allegiance to Joker. Ai is forced to fight Yumi, but more powerful enemies will soon arrive. Eventually Ai gets a superhero outfit from Aoyoma and becomes “The Masked Girl” to confront Black Maria’s minions.