ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph Perry writes for the film websites Gruesome Magazine, The Scariest Things, Horror Fuel, The Good, the Bad and the Verdict and Diabolique Magazine; for the film magazines Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope and Drive-In Asylum; and for the pop culture websites When It Was Cool and Uphill Both Ways. He is also one of the hosts of When It Was Cool’s exclusive Uphill Both Ways podcast and can occasionally be heard as a cohost on Gruesome Magazine’s Decades of Horror: The Classic Era podcast.

Official press release synopsis: “Girl power” takes on a new meaning in Girl’s Blood, the erotic action drama based on a light novel by award-winning writer Sakuraba Kazuki (My Man). Set in the seedy underbelly of Tokyo, the film by director-former action choreographer Sakamoto Koichi follows the lives of four women who join an underground MMA fight club in an abandoned elementary school in Roppongi. Every night, the women escape their mundane lives and troubled pasts — Satsuki (Yuria Haga) suffers from a gender identity disorder, Chinatsu (Asami Tada) ran away from an abusive husband, Miko (Ayame Misaki) is an S&M queen, and Mayu (Rina Koike) has a Lolita face — by stepping into the ring under unique personas and take on brutal fights in front of a spectacle-hungry audience. However, the women face a real enemy when two of the fighters fall in love.

If you’ve been hankering for a live action film combining Dead or Alive-style fighting action with both softcore scenes and drama addressing social issues, director Kôichi Sakamoto has you covered with Girl’s Blood (AKA Aka x Pinku). If you’re averse to fetishism and fan service cliches, this is not the movie for you.

The drama involving gender identity, psychological and physical childhood abuse, and domestic abuse is actually quite good, and though the fights involve a sometimes bewildering mix of MMA fighting with joshi professional wrestling costumes and gimmicks, these sequences are impressively staged and choreographed — although the mud wrestling scenes are on the lurid side of matters.

The pacing is questionable at times as the proceedings flow from fights to drama to sapphic softcore, but for the most part Sakamoto juggles things quite well. Girl’s Blood seems to be a film that wants to appeal to almost everyone by trying many different approaches. It means to entertain, and it does just that, though it will do so for different reasons depending on what the viewer likes — in other words, mileage will vary greatly.

From January 31, Girl’s Blood will be available on FILM MOVEMENT PLUS, which can be found on its own site at filmmovementplus.com or via Amazon Prime Video.