Terrifying Girls' High School: Animal Courage

This series of films was just so damn enjoyable. In this installment, five new girls have just transferred into a private Catholic high school famous for its study-abroad program in the US. Four of the girls are easy targets for the dominant girl gang in school, but the fifth girl is badass Reiko Ike. The hazing is pretty typical high school hazing -- selling the girls as prostitutes and the like. Well, typical for this genre of film, at least. Reiko impresses the other dominant gang in school, the athletes who field a top-notch fencing club. Reiko joins the fencing team, but refuses to join either gang outright. Instead, she is on a mission to discover what happened to her older sister, a former model student who disappeared after traveling on the study-abroad program.

If you know the genre, I don't need to tell you that the school officials are corrupt, the girl gangs fight, and 20 minutes don't pass without topless women on screen. The plot is predictable, but it's not the point. The point is to show a group of beautiful young women being badass, fighting each other, and ultimately fighting a corrupt system.

This whole series is long overdue for an official English-subtitled release, I have to believe the English-speaking world would eat these up if they got a similar release to Arrow's Female Prisoner Scorpion (Sasori) box set. I only wish there had been more than four films in this series. I strongly recommend watching this entire series.