Japanese filmmaker Koji Kawano is on his Skinemax Cinema grind.

His recent American releases Cruel Restaurant (Zankoku hanten) and Attack Girls’ Swim Team Versus The Undead (Joshikyôei hanrangun) are essentially soft core porn films with extreme gore mixed in for good measure. Packaged as horror films, there’s nothing remotely scary about either and as fact they lean more toward absurd comedy.

Like Minoru Kawasaki he shoots his films in what I call the “Telenovela-style”, over-lit, crisp video with extreme camera angles + over-loud bargain basement sound design and royalty-free score. Kawano is a generic brand version of Takashi Miike - same ingredients at a cheaper price. When a severed arm washes up on the shore at the beginning of Cruel Restaurant the arm is so clean and shiny you can see the prop-house rental sticker. A dumpling chef hacks away at bloody meat. Two undercover cops are savagely beaten in the alley behind the restaurant for asking too many questions about  the ingredients in his delicious, would famous dumplings. But as Cruel Restaurant continues it becomes obvious the story and characters are just framework for the real point of the film - the soft core sex scenes, all featuring the super famous porn star Mihiro (so famous and revered her impressive Wikipedia page lists not only her exact measurements - in centimeters & inches - but her blood type).

Attack Girls’ Swim Team Versus The Undead aka The Girls Rebel Force of Competitive Swimmers is the more enjoyable of the two. The film operates on the exact same framework - the two films would make a great double bill at a repertory cinema - but Attack Girls dabbles in the girl-on-girl realm more and the plot is utterly incoherent. I get a headache just thinking about how to describe the story. It’s not a zombie film as it purports to be. Students at the high school are inoculated for an unknown virus. The teachers turn into zombie-like creatures and try to kill the students. The swim team posses-up to save the school. Cue cheap gore and topless girls making out in locker room showers. Repeat. Over and over for 75 minutes. As in Cruel Restaurant, Attack Girls’ leading lady is a famous Japanese porn star - but this time Sasa Handa - the Tera Patrick to Mihiro’s Jenna Jameson.

These are films to be watched on fast forward - just like the best of Skinemax Cinema of the 80’s and 90’s. And both films sport terrific, wildly bizarre endings. Kawano is definitely the only filmmaker in cinema history to end not one but 2 films with the heroine shooting something out of her vagina. Unfortunately in the case of Cruel Restaurant, the final reveal is more like a punchline to a joke than the great surprise twist that it could have been. But at that point the viewer doesn’t really care what was in those dumplings, 75 minutes have passed and Kawano has succeeded in his mission of doling out generous portions of T&A and some of the most oddball soft-core sex in recent memory.