HARD REVENGE MILLY (Japan, 2008)
Directed by: Shimako Sato
Starring: Takeshi Kaneshiro, Takako Matsu, Toru Nakamura, Yuki Imai

Writer/director Takanori Tsujimoto (KIRU) delivers a one-two punch with HARD REVENGE, MILLY and HARD REVENGE, MILLY: BLOODY BATTLE, an accurately killer double feature that turns the revenge film genre on its head – and then splatters its grey matter across the walls.

In the near future, weapon control laws are deregulated and Asia becomes the world’s epicenter of violent criminal activity; with its cities abandoned and in ruin, Japan is quickly overrun by marauding bloodthirsty gangs. When Milly’s husband and infant child are killed before her eyes by one such group (led by CROMARTIE HIGH’s Mitsuki Koga), she becomes a one-woman killing machine, fueled by unstoppable revenge. 

In the series’ first chapter, our hard-boiled heroine (portrayed in both features by CARVED’s Miki Mizuno) sets off to confront her family’s murderers, turning the gang’s dilapidated warehouse hideout into a killing field that literally leaves every wall caked in crimson hues. Then, picking up immediately after the original’s finale, BLOODY BATTLE has Milly taking on a protégé with her own dark secrets as they knock the local crime syndicates down a couple notches – in their own gruesome way.

The inventiveness in both films shines through as Tsujimoto has crafted not only a series of wonderful characters, but a truly compelling world for them to inhabit. A cross between MAD MAX’s barren windswept landscapes and the trampled future of FIST OF THE NORTH STAR, Milly’s Japan is anything but ordinary, while still exuding an eerie familiarity that somehow makes us believe what we’re seeing.

Both films’ hooks, however, are the moments their audiences simply won’t believe they’re witnessing. After Milly watches her husband impaled and her infant child lit on fire, she equips herself with a retractable arm-sword, replaces her femur with a shotgun (featuring a buckshot-firing kneecap), brandishes a pain of gun-chucks, and fills the multiple gaping holes in her chest with… well, the less known about what surprises hide under her coat, the better.

Viewable as two separate short films but best enjoyed as a single two-hour bloodbath, HARD REVENGE, MILLY and BLOODY BATTLE are top-caliber revenge films cleverly disguised as action gore. Featuring a bevy of surprisingly clever martial arts sequences and a handful of truly great characters (most of whom end up with huge, sangue-spurting holes punched in them), this two-pack is exactly what free-for-all cinema is all about.