capsule : violent and bizarrely entertaining anime , part 21 jump street and part russ meyer , that somehow works despite its limitations . sukeban : n . , jap . , " bad girl " . deka : n . , jap . , slang for policeman , " cop " ; possible corruption/contraction of english " detective " . i tried to imagine sukeban deka as live-action , and somehow i wound up with the blueprint for a russ meyer movie , meyer , king of american sixties exploitation cinema , would probably have loved to direct a picture about a teenage ex-con who beats up juvenile delinquents and assorted upper-tax-bracket scumbags with a yo-yo . i am not leaving out very much here . and yet i watched sukeban deka with a crooked smile ; it's a perversely entertaining movie that , if it had been live-action , might not even have worked . the plot : saki asamiya is a juvenile convict who is given a shot at freedom by the police . theyt want to infiltrate a private high school overrun with crime , and she makes a good mole : fast with her fists and good-looking . saki eventually takes the assignment , but only under duress , and every scene she's in has her under pressure from one direction or another . aside from the yo-yo ( they can't give her a gun ) , she has a sidekick of sorts -- a dippy fellow named sanpei who latches onto her like a barnacle , and has his head shaved to prove his devotion to her . ( this leads us to one of the best lines in the picture : " if you don't stop hanging off me like crap out of a carp's butt , i'll beat you senseless ! " sanpei , however , takes this as an invitation to s&m , and is even more turned on . ) movies like this either work or they don't , and most of the reason they work is style . sukeban deka has its over-the-top-ness right about 80% of the time . one of the evil girls in the story wears cammo fatigues underneath her negligee ; another dresses like a walking bondage outfitter's ad and hides snakes in her cleavage . ( the fetish for snakes bleeds over into the intercollary images that flash up between scenes : when someone gets double-crossed , we see flash shots of one snake sinking its fangs into the other . ) one fight is punctuated with a passing train , which conveniently hides all the screams . but there are parts of the story where the plot is just stretched too thin , and could have used some extra writing -- maybe even some over-writing . there's a whole brainwashing subplot that surfaces about two-thirds of the way through , which feels suspiciously plastered on , as if the scriptwriters were desperate for something to spin things in a new direction . also , saki's enemies -- three sisters who control the school's illegal activities -- are also patchy : the most villanous of the bunch is not really the most memorable , and vice versa . a little more work in this department , and they would really have had something here . as it stands , it's not bad at all , just limited and inconsistent . footnote : part of the reason for the patchiness of the story may be its source material . sukeban deka was adapted from a manga which ran for eight years and twelve volumes , and the movie borrows its story from the first and part of the second volumes . shinji wada , the original writer and artist , had a hand in the production and the script , but there's still been a great deal of condensation and collapsing . i went back and read the entire series myself -- the scope of the whole story is staggering , to put it mildly -- and can see why they might have had trouble packing even the first story into a two-hour movie . 
