“Tennen Shojo Man” was a strangely successful TV product of 1999 that served as the inspiration for a TV movie follow-up “Tennen shojo Man next: Yokohama hyaku-ya hen“, released in the same year. The latter differs strongly from the original story as a completely fresh chapter of Man's fight against a different type of evil. Both the series and the film are adaptations of a popular manga by Tetsuya Koshiba.
The very format of the TV series is unusual – it's not episodic and it works as a three-and-a-half-hour long film intersected by short comedy sequences played by the show's “moderator” Mijayi. Surrounded by plush toys and with neon letters pulsating across the screen, she's either acting as “the cheerleader” motivating the main protagonists to some mean a**-kicking or demonstrating trivial knowledge related to the story itself. At one point, she'll give a tutorial on how to clench fists for a proper fight. That particular knowledge happens to be of great importance for the plot itself, as the story centers around the gang of high-school girls who fight over the dominance over certain parts of Tokyo, more specifically – Shibuya. Only when the common enemy in form of a fashion agency appears, the war between gangs stop, and the other against the organized mob begins.
It's deliciously funny to watch the actual business worth so much fighting and plotting becoming the thing between the fashion industry, an unspecific mob clan and the group of popular, martial-arts trained high-school girls. Actually, the fun would be even greater if the plot made any sense, and if the TV series was turned into a classical episodic format, with each episode running for the max of half an hour. And because this isn't the case, following the thread is a challenge in itself, without being boring, just plain strange.
Obviously filmed on slim budget, “Tennen Shojo Man” focuses on as much fighting as possible – its most entertaining part – to distract from big holes in its script. There are lose ties between the criminal organizations very difficult to grasp, as well as many side-plots not easy to put into perspective. Some of them are amusing, some of them actually more salty, especially when a rape gang appears. How those things aged since the 1990's we know too well.
Man (Jun Matsuda) is being followed and filmed around the city by a man working a mysterious mafia-controlled industry Higashi Chiba which is trying to push a new chocolate on the market. It's basically M&M being turned into something new and exclusive, and the popularity of Shibuya high-school girls, so called “Flapper” magazine girls, should help it become a nationwide hit.
Although the series is named after Man, she is not the only strong girl to dominate the screen. A gang of girls equipped with a powerful teaser, scams perverted middle-aged men by pretending to be sexually interested in them, and then robbing them of money without providing any intimate services. It is a well-oiled machine, and so is the one promoting the young models to dominate popular teenage magazines.
In all of its demanding 210 minutes runtime, no pervert gets away with unsolicited touching. Their bleeding noses are being called “renaissance” by Man. In a way, that's a well-deserved compensation for a couple of stomach-turning scenes in which the very young women get humiliated and raped.
There are some undeniably hilarious scenes surrounding Man's Karate-Kid-like type of training by her accidental male friend, or the music numbers hard to forget – like the song “Whimsical Today” when she gets all heart broken about her friends turning their backs on her.
Although the cinematography was handled by none less than three DOPs, there is nothing memorable about it. “Tennen Shojo Man” is one of Takashi Miike's weakest directorial works that is aimed at Koshiba's fans only.
