There are those who believe that even the worst kind of vulgarity seems to sound better when it plays out in a foreign language ... for instance, it seems classier when Jean Reno says "merde" instead of Harvey Keitel saying "shit". Maybe I'm a little guilty of that, because there are a lot of things in Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs that I probably would have hated in an American film, but in Japanese it seemed, well ... classier.

Some of that could be the skill director Yukio Noda shows in his widescreen staging (like most Japanese films, Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs takes amazing advantage of the 2.35:1 aspect ratio) and the little touches he puts in his scenes, like a brown stain running down the back of a rapist's underwear or the fountain of blood gushing out of a man who's just been shot in the crotch.

Or maybe it's the considerable screen presence of star Miki Sugimoto, who manages to exude the kind of apathetic sociopathology that a good action star should wear like a comfortable outfit.

Whatever its charms, they were enough to make me forgive a plot that ranges from illogical (at one point in the film the villain has Ms. Sugimoto dead to rights for about fifteen minutes of screen time and yet never kills her) to downright incoherent (there is another point when, even though the main character can be bruised by a beating she apparently becomes bulletproof), because in a movie like this the plot is really beside the point -- assuming, that is, that there is supposed to be a point to all this.

Renegade cop Rei (Sugimoto) is put in prison after killing a diplomat who killed a friend of hers, and assumes she's going to spend the rest of her life rotting in prison when a shady federal agent shows up to offer her a deal. The daughter of a powerful politician has been kidnapped, and if Rei can bring back the daughter alive and kill off the kidnappers, she'll receive a full pardon for her crime.

(I couldn't help but think of Escape From New York when this plot point came up, and since this film pre-dates Carpenter's by a good seven years, I have to wonder if he saw the film when he was writing his script.)

The title of the film comes from a pair of seemingly magic handcuffs Rei has from the beginning of the film (she first employs them when she kills the diplomat) possessing powers like a more psychotic version of Wonder Woman's golden lariat. They won't get you to speak the truth, though -- they'll make it so you won't be speaking much of anything, true or otherwise. Since the film is based on a popular comic book in Japan, I have to assume that her superpowers are probably taken more for granted by Japanese viewers.

The other part of the title, Zero Woman, comes from the fact that Rei is working outside the law and is neither a cop nor a criminal ... a zero on both sides. She manages to infiltrate the gang of rapist/kidnappers when she helps its most psychotic member, Yoshi, escape from the cops.

Up to this point, I should say, the movie played out as stylized but certainly logical in terms of its plot. Once she arrives at gang headquarters, however, all logic goes out the window.

For starters, even though Yoshi seems to think she's all right since she helped him escape, the other members of the gang aren't so quick to agree, so they beat her and rape her (there is a very cool shot in this sequence, in which the background around Sugimoto seems to run blood red) but then, a few minutes later, when she manages to escape and kill one of their members, they decide to let her stick around and live.

As the film goes on and it becomes more and more apparent to the kidnappers that someone is selling them out to the cops, they still don't really hassle Rei very much. Maybe it's because she looks so badass in that long red trenchcoat of hers. Or maybe it's because if they do kill her, the movie will be over.

Either way, they even let her tag along when one hideout becomes too hot for them to remain in, and they make their way to a farmhouse. And from this point ... well, if a viewer is hoping that some semblance of coherent (or cohesive) plotting will return to the film, then that viewer is going to be very disappointed. This is the point I mentioned earlier in my review in which Yoshi has Rei chained up at close range and he has a loaded shotgun in his hands that just left me scratching my head and asking myself WTF?

Since we know there are a whole series of Zero Woman movies made in Japan (though the next film, Zero Woman: Final Mission, wouldn't come out until twenty years later and is related to this film only in the way that the 1960's version of Casino Royale is related to the other James Bond films) we can surmise that Rei will kick some ass.

I've pounced on other films that had shorter leaps in logic than this film (this film doesn't just have plot holes -- it has plot chasms), but there is so much craft going on in terms of its visual design that I actually wasn't that bothered by them, and once I resigned myself to the fact that the film wasn't really going to make any kind of sense, I was able to just enjoy the ride.

I also liked the title tune (although the lyrics are subtitled and I think I'd have been better off not knowing what they were) and I imagine it's only a matter of time before I hear it on the soundtrack of a future Quentin Tarantino movie. Maybe Kill Bill Volume III -- The Bride Goes Black.

The dvd itself is called a "limited collector's edition", which would normally lead one to believe that it's loaded with special features. In fact, you just have the theatrical trailer (which manages to show the death of just about every one of the main characters in its brief two minute run time) and a trailer for another film, Lupin III, which looks hilarious. There's also a promise of a "collectible booklet", which is a four-page insert inside the dvd that has a one page essay, some photos and reproductions of what I assume are the Japanese posters for the film, and the list of chapter stops.

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