When I was 12 I thought the movie parodies in "Mad" magazine were hilarious. Now I suppose I'm harder to please — or just older — but parodies that self-consciously mock their source, while cutely paying homage to it, quickly put me in a trance.
What to make of Noboru Iguchi? This prolific director of splatter horror, robot action and other exploitation pics creatively looks, walks and quacks like a parodist, with his more obvious reference points being 1970s "pinky violence" films featuring miniskirted, ass-kicking heroines, and old Hollywood slasher films with screaming teenagers and fountain-like blood sprays.
Like Quentin Tarantino, Iguchi has moved beyond straight parody to make these magpie borrowings his own. The big difference is that while the American director takes himself more or less seriously as an auteur, his Japanese counterpart is having naughty, trashy fun — good taste and political correctness be damned. This sense of bad-boy enjoyment is infectious, if Iguchi's many foreign festival invitations and overseas DVD releases are anything to go by.