AV actress Maria Ozawa headlines this 2012 Japanese take on the 1995 sci-fi horror Species…
As the name suggests, Tokyo Species is a 2012 Japanese take on the enduringly popular 1995 Hollywood sci-fi horror Species, which basically revolved around the concept of a beautiful shapeshifting female alien coming to earth to have sex with men before killing them, with AV actress Maria Ozawa taking over from Natasha Henstridge. The low budget V-cinema production was directed by Nozomu Kasagi, who’s had a varied career that’s seen him directing music videos and stage plays as well as the likes of the 2007 youth drama Tokyo Real and the 2012 live action Kekko Kamen adaptation Mask the Kekko: Reborn.
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Ozawa plays Michikio, the film opening with her committing suicide by jumping off a bridge after being bullied at school and then being brought back to life by an alien parasite. Driven by a desperate need to reproduce, she returns to the school and starts selecting guys to mate with, killing them after sex and leaving a growing pile of bodies in her wake as well as an alarming number of gooey eggs. At the same time, Michikio’s classmate Rika, who’s understandably confused by her friend’s out of character behaviour, meets a new transfer student called Mayumi, who turns out to be some kind of rival alien and is hunting the parasite.
Given its exploitation premise it’s perhaps surprising that it took Japan, or indeed anywhere, nearly two decades to do an even schlockier take on Species, though to be fair Tokyo Species is a revisioning rather than a remake, and one which draws equally from the three sequels which ran through until 2007 and the made-for-TV Species: The Awakening. Nozomu Kasagi’s film delivers exactly as expected, and rather than trying to ape the Hollywood franchise goes the cheap and cheerful route, sticking to a limited collection of locations and ditching any pretentions or delusions of narrative grandeur. Maria Ozawa is the main draw here, the film coming after she’d been one of Japan’s most popular adult performers for several years, and Kasagi spends most of the running time simply following her around as she gets up to her business.
To her credit, although saddled with playing a mute and clearly overaged school girl, and one who really only does the same thing over and over again throughout, Ozawa turns in a decent performance, the film coming at a time when she’d been branching out into more respectable fare and had been appearing in the likes of Erotibot, Geisha of Death and Kevin Ko’s 2009 Taiwanese slasher Invitation Only. Whereas Natasha Henstridge’s Sil in Species had at least some kind of character development, here the blankness of Michikio seems to have been a deliberate creative decision, though Ozawa still shows a reasonable amount of screen presence, and actually comes off better than the other cast members, most of whom are only in the film to die after sex or to fill in the gaps between set pieces.
Unsurprisingly, this isn’t anywhere near enough to make Tokyo Species engaging in the traditional sense, but Kasagi is thankfully smart enough to keep things moving at a fast pace, and though the film is basically a series of fairly random sex scenes and a sudden final battle it’s more coherent than many others of its type. On that score the film certainly does deliver, packing in a great deal of sex and nudity, though at the same time it’s not particularly clear who it might be aimed at, as fans of Ozawa’s work will have seen her in far more graphic scenarios, to put things politely, and Kasagi doesn’t seem to be interested in making things actually erotic, which is probably for the best given the awkwardness of the schoolgirl angle. Similarly, while there’s a fair amount of post-coitus gore, the computer FX are generally pretty poor and consist of sudden and brief shots of tentacles bursting from Ozawa and impaling her victims in an unconvincing manner, meaning that the film doesn’t have the kind of visceral impact that might have helped it work as a sci-fi horror.
With this in mind, Tokyo Species is probably best approached as a curiosity piece for anyone interested in seeing a properly low budget Japanese version of Species, or diehard Maria Ozawa fans who want to see her spend at least some of a film with her clothes on. While V-cinema genre aficionados will likely have endured worse, this in itself isn’t much of a recommendation, though on the plus side the 70 minute running time means Nozomu Kasagi’s film doesn’t outstay its modest welcome.
Join us every Thursday for the latest in James’ #cineXtremes series.About the author
James Mudge
From Glasgow but based in London, James has been writing for a variety of websites over the last decade, including BeyondHollywood in the US and YesAsia in Hong Kong. As well as running film consultancy The Next Day Agency, James is also the Festival Director of the Chinese Visual Festival in London, an annual event which showcases Chinese language cinema… More »
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