In 2014 Kurando Mitsutake directed Gun Woman, a Japanese grindhouse action film starring ex AV actress Asami Sugiura. It follows the tale of a mysterious doctor who trains a broken woman to exact his vendetta on the rapist that murdered his wife.
Gun Woman is a simple but entertaining take on revenge stories. It’s rough around the edges, sure, but it manages to stay engaging throughout its runtime. The biggest issue is its pacing, the buildup to the action is long and pretty slow, which can feel rewarding if you’ve been engaged with the characters and their motivations, but a bit underwhelming if you came in expecting to see more action. Most of the movie sets up what feels like a wildly dangerous and impossible mission, but when it finally plays out, the actual threat doesn’t hit quite as hard as the buildup suggests.
The decision to present the story as a tale recounted through flashbacks adds an interesting sense of inevitability to the events, and it helps cover for some of the plot omissions that the film doesn’t fully develop. Visually, the cinematography is pretty straightforward most of the time. Some shots are genuinely stylish, while in others, the low budget becomes more apparent. That said, it’s clear the team behind the camera did the most with what they had. The practical effects are convincing enough, but strangely, during the final scenes where you’d expect the most carnage the quality drops. The bleeding becomes oddly restrained, almost like they ran out of fake blood when it mattered most). The editing also starts showing some not-too-subtle cuts during action moments; these aren’t overly distracting, but they do take a bit of the punch out of the climax if you’re paying close attention.
The acting is also a bit of a mixed bag. The Japanese cast delivers the strongest performances overall, especially Asami showcasing an impressive physicality in the choreographies. Another standout is Noriaki Kamata’s with his portrayal of the rapist, he makes the character feel genuinely unsettling with a demeanor that seems inspired by real-life infamous cannibal Issei Sagawa. In contrast, some of the American actors and extras feel stiff or under-directed in some scenes, as if they didn’t have the luxury of multiple takes or enough rehearsal.
Overall, Gun Woman is pretty entertaining if you’re okay with something a little r. It’s over-the-top at times, but self-aware and quite fun. It’s worth checking out if you’re into pulp or grindhouse cinema, or if you’re dipping your toes into more extreme genre films. The effort is clearly there, and I had a good time with it. I’d rate it a solid 7. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Plot summary
(Spoilers Ahead)
The film opens with a hitman breaking into a house to assassinate a woman while she showers. Once the job is done, he slips away and gets into a car with his partner. As the two hitmen drive through the desert toward an extraction point in Las Vegas, the driver (Dean Simone) tries to start a conversation about the job they’ve just done. The more experienced hitman offers only a vague response: it was “a job an old friend left unfinished”. To kill the silence, the driver brings up the story of Hamazaki’s son (Noriaki Kamata), a wealthy psychopath with a dark legacy. After the death of his father—a powerful businessman who constantly bailed him out of legal trouble—Hamazaki’s son inherited the family fortune, on the condition that he’d leave the country and avoid tarnishing the family’s business further. He used this newfound power and wealth to travel the world committing depraved crimes while evading justice.
One of those crimes marked the start of a vendetta: he kidnapped and raped the wife of a respected doctor, then forced the doctor to watch as she died. Afterward, his men beat the doctor, leaving him crippled and blind in one eye. Hamazaki’s son taunted him, bragging that he was untouchable and wanted his crimes to be remembered. In the aftermath, the doctor became consumed by revenge. He knew Hamazaki’s son was heavily guarded and untouchable by normal means. But he also uncovered a possible weakness: the heir frequented a secret necrophilia club known as The Room, a facility run by elites where clients were left alone with corpses, unguarded. It was the only place the man let his guard down.
To exploit this, the doctor paid a trafficker to obtain a woman he could turn into a weapon. He chose Mayumi (Asami), a junkie in a pitiful state. He took her to a secluded basement and forced her through brutal a withdrawal. When she refused food or resisted, he’d douse her repeatedly, breaking her until she obeyed. As the hitmen narrate, we learn Mayumi’s tragic backstory of how years of abuse and toxic relationships led to addiction, prostitution, and eventually being trafficked to another country by her own boyfriend.
During the discussion, the driver wonders why the doctor didn’t just hire mercenaries. The hitman explains: no one could get near Hamazaki’s son under normal conditions. The only way was through The Room. The plan was to sneak Mayumi in pretending to be a corpse, with a gun hiding inside her body. She would awaken mid-session and assassinate the target. Mayumi’s training begins, as we see a montage of Mayumi undergoing physical conditioning, martial arts, and firearms training. She’s beaten every time she fails by the doctor and a martial arts instructor she must eventually defeat (Seems like everyone here enjoys beating up this poor woman). When she finally succeeds, the doctor murders the instructor, although his motives remain unclear, perhaps out of fear or premeditation.
To erase her fear of death, the doctor forces Mayumi to watch another woman bleed out from a similar wound she herself will endure. This causes Mayumi to finally breakdown and attack the doctor, the confrontation leads to a strange emotional climax where they end up having sex, possibly out of frustration or a warped sense of connection. After the intimate moment between the too, the doctor feels remorse haunted by what he’s become, he offers Mayumi a choice: walk away, or go through with the plan as he explains her the motives behind his actions.
She sympathizes and chooses to continue. The doctor performs the surgery, concealing the weapon inside her abdomen. Mayumi is sedated and smuggled into The Room. When she awakens, she begins her rampage. Her first battle is against a massive guard where she emerges victorious after she’s tossed around the room repeatedly. As she’s attacked again, she retrieves the weapon from inside her own body and kills her second attacker, as she begins to bleed from the wounds. The commotion draws Hamazaki’s son’s personal bodyguards to the facility. Outside, the doctor intercepts them in a shootout, managing to kill two but ultimately losing his own life. Inside, Mayumi—weak from blood loss—patches herself up using her own hair and limps toward her target.
She’s out of ammunition, and Hamazaki’s son mocks her, thinking she’s finished. But Mayumi had one bullet left, hidden in her mouth. She spits it out, loads it, and kills him. Bleeding and exhausted, Mayumi staggers outside with Hamazaki’s son’s severed head in hand and collapses on top of the doctor’s body. A truck arrives to rescue her as planned, just in time before she bleeds to death. The driver is revealed to be the hitman who has been narrating the story all along.
Back in the present, the conversation between the two hitmen takes a sudden twist: the driver pulls a gun on his partner. He reveals he was hired by Hamazaki’s grandson to find and kill the doctor’s ally. Just as he’s about to pull the trigger, Mayumi appears and kills the driver. In his final moments, the hitman tells the truth: he helped the doctor out of gratitude, years ago, the doctor saved his son despite impossible odds. And explains that the woman assassinated at the very beginning of the film was the last surviving bodyguard from the battle with the doctor.
The film ends with an aerial shot of the city. In a final post-credit scene, Mayumi finds the trafficker who originally sold her to the doctor and puts an end to his operation—signaling that Gun Woman will return.
