Sukeban Deka (1995) * * * A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright 1998 by Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: Violent and bizarrely entertaining anime, part 21 JUMP STREET and part Russ Meyer, that somehow works despite its limitations.
SUKEBAN: n., Jap., "bad girl". DEKA: n., Jap., slang for policeman, "cop"; possible corruption/contraction of English "detective".
I tried to imagine SUKEBAN DEKA as live-action, and somehow I wound up with the blueprint for a Russ Meyer movie, Meyer, king of American Sixties exploitation cinema, would probably have loved to direct a picture about a teenage ex-con who beats up juvenile delinquents and assorted upper-tax-bracket scumbags with a yo-yo. I am not leaving out very much here. And yet I watched SUKEBAN DEKA with a crooked smile; it's a perversely entertaining movie that, if it HAD been live-action, might not even have worked.
The plot: Saki Asamiya is a juvenile convict who is given a shot at freedom by the police. Theyt want to infiltrate a private high school overrun with crime, and she makes a good mole: fast with her fists and good-looking. Saki eventually takes the assignment, but only under duress, and every scene she's in has her under pressure from one direction or another. Aside from the yo-yo (they can't give her a gun), she has a sidekick of sorts -- a dippy fellow named Sanpei who latches onto her like a barnacle, and has his head shaved to prove his devotion to her. (This leads us to one of the best lines in the picture: "If you don't stop hanging off me like crap out of a carp's butt, I'll beat you senseless!" Sanpei, however, takes this as an invitation to S&M, and is even more turned on.)
Movies like this either work or they don't, and most of the reason they work is style. SUKEBAN DEKA has its over-the-top-ness right about 80% of the time. One of the evil girls in the story wears cammo fatigues underneath her negligee; another dresses like a walking bondage outfitter's ad and hides snakes in her cleavage. (The fetish for snakes bleeds over into the intercollary images that flash up between scenes: when someone gets double-crossed, we see flash shots of one snake sinking its fangs into the other.) One fight is punctuated with a passing train, which conveniently hides all the screams.
But there are parts of the story where the plot is just stretched too thin, and could have used some extra writing -- maybe even some over-writing. There's a whole brainwashing subplot that surfaces about two-thirds of the way through, which feels suspiciously plastered on, as if the scriptwriters were desperate for something to spin things in a new direction. Also, Saki's enemies -- three sisters who control the school's illegal activities -- are also patchy: the most villanous of the bunch is not really the most memorable, and vice versa. A little more work in this department, and they would really have had something here. As it stands, it's not bad at all, just limited and inconsistent.
FOOTNOTE: Part of the reason for the patchiness of the story may be its source material. SUKEBAN DEKA was adapted from a manga which ran for eight years and twelve volumes, and the movie borrows its story from the first and part of the second volumes. Shinji Wada, the original writer and artist, had a hand in the production and the script, but there's still been a great deal of condensation and collapsing. I went back and read the entire series myself -- the scope of the whole story is staggering, to put it mildly -- and can see why they might have had trouble packing even the first story into a two-hour movie.
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