Own “Big Boobs Buster” on Blu-ray Home Video!
Masako is well-liked amongst her high school peers, has an above average grades, and is a cyclist athlete with a killer body. The one thing Masako doesn’t have but desperate wants is the popular boy Bando to be her boyfriend. When Masako asks Bando to be his girlfriend, Bando rejects her requests on the account of her washboard chest. Assigning blame to all her well-endowed classmates beyond a B-cup, Masako transforms into the chesty vigilante, Big Boobs Buster, by subduing targets from a pervert’s stolen list of girls with large breasts and making spray casts of their chests to blackmail them with exposure if they ever date Bando or any other boys on campus. When she’s finally caught and discovered by a track and field competitor with big boobs, one who also might like girls more than boys, Masako is ironically herself blackmailed into being a substitute in a sprint competition her competitive blackmailer can’t compete in due to injury. During vigorous train, Masako begins to develop friendship feelings and questions the reasons for her body image crusade.
For all you flat chested women out there, don’t fear! “Big Boobs Buster” is here! Hailing from Japan, the adult-oriented comedic has a superhero Marvel has yet to call to the frontline! Director Hisashi Watanabe embraces his debut directorial with burlesque eroticism that touches upon the breast of society’s biggest problems – body shaming and body positivity. Watanabe pens the script based off a Manga by Kôichirô Yasunaga of the same title with the film adaptation and its sequel, “Big Boobs Buster 2,” released the same year, 1990 directly onto home video, or what’s called in Japan, V-Cinema. Released by the Tohokushinsha Film Corporation, the company behind the anime-turned-live-action film “Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl” and produced a feature film out of the Android Kikaider series with Mechanical Violator Hakaider, as well as being a part of video game series, such as Sonic and Final Fantasy, the producing team consists of “Appleseed’s” Tarô Maki and “Wild Zero’s” Katsuaki Takemoto.
The live-action OAV, aka Live Action Original Animated Video, has a game cast of lesser-known actor and Japanese AV idols that really perk up the story. Harumi Kai leads the charge as the titular character, and the “Oona Rambo” actresses pulls off the sugar-and-spice Masako by being an all-around good schoolgirl scorned by a superficial boy named Bando (Masakazu Arai, “Shigatsu kaidan”) who moonlights is in a tight outfit and disguise being a shakedown artist against girls a C-cup or larger. In the process of snaring them and spray casting a mold of their chest, she inadvertently turns them on denoting a bit of homoeroticism between the women that continues when she meets field and track star Kyoko Mitoizumi who calls her bluff and becomes uncomfortably touchy-feely with Masako. Played by Uran Hirosaki, Kyoto is a form of positivity and no fear that puts Masako in a corner of uncertainty but the two eventually become friends with quid pro quo arrangements both will benefit from. The rest of the case, which in this case are the big-chested highschoolers Masako seeks to humiliate because of her own insecurities, are comprised of Japanese AV idols with Mariko Itsuki (“Groper Train: Push It Deep!”), Marina Matsumoto (“Stepmother Slave”), and Natsuko Kayama (“Big Boobs Sisters: The Yellow Panties of Happiness”) as well as a few AV actors in the sought after and large breast-loving role with Masakazu Arai and Tôru Minegishi (“Godzilla vs. Biollante”) and Aya Katsuragi (“Evil Dead Trap”) as Masako’s parents who have this unexplained odd relationship in the peripheral that doesn’t contribute much, or anything at all, to the core elements.
With a title like “Big Boobs Buster,” audiences can expect an outrageous comedy that lives up to live-action anime standards with an off-the-cuff superheroine on a crusade against one of the most arbitrary and non-threatening to society foci that only affects a flat-chested girl’s ego – big boobs. Having never read Kôichirô Yasunaga’s manga and with only director Hisashi Watanabe’s film to provide my Johnny-Five Alive input data center, “Big Boobs Buster” is intoxicated with Masako’s character arc of self-deprivation toward body positivity through a minefield of scorn-driven retribution against the wrong and innocently lot of larger than C-cups. Through this zany premise, that’s about as innocently wanton as cold be, director Watanabe and cinematographer Jun Abe spruce and polish this knob with mood abstracting backlighting and vivify scenes with power poses and interesting framing to closely resemble manga panel moments and the editing by Shigeru Okuhara (“Orgasm: Mariko”) is multifaceted to tell a quick action narrative with ease of scene cuts and transitions that make “Big Boobs Buster” a breeze to digest it’s melon-sized mania. The story doesn’t glide through with a single flightpath of the superheroine picking off well-endowed girls one-at-a-time only to be discovered to enact a plot point problem with the antagonist; instead, the story takes a 180 degree turn toward a whole new level of thematic dilemma in trying to win a sprint race for an enemy-turned-friend. Summarized with a montage of tough exercises that culminate toward Masako being a beast at sprinting strength, the “Big Boobs Buster” campaign goes into hibernation until the race is done, a subplot that insidiously takes over as the main plot, cleaving the already less than a full-length feature film in half.
Catalogued at number four on the Whole Grain Pictures label, “Big Boobs Buster” is one large cup size of comedic body positivity done in the style of live action anime. The new 4K remaster is pulled stems from the original camera 5mm negative and AVC encoded on a single-layered BD25, decoding at approx. 30Mbps. Presented in high-definition, 1080ps, and in an European aspect ratio of 1.77:1 widescreen, “Big Boobs Hunter” is like being motorboated from your television screen with the rich look of a converted celluloid transfer that elevates Jun Abe’s luminous fogged night scenes, a glowing arura around the titular titillating heroine, and a contrasting shots of day time that offer warmer, slightly yellowis-tan tinted tones. Skin textures and tones are reflected within the same softer glow but the rigid-contouring, around what can be delineated when shooting close up on a pair of breasts, do define a nice bulging image. There are scenes, mostly a result of the cinematographer, that look flat between the foreground and background, suggesting possibly an aspherical lens that provides less curvature and less compressed, stretched image. The release comes with two lossless DTS-HD 2.0 tracks with the original Japan mix and an English dub. Clarity and a solid amount of punchiness come through nicely enough on the Japanese track that’s review covered but there’s not a ton of depth here with mostly frontloaded dialogue and action and nothing to note in the background or any environmental ambience. Special features include a blooper reel that doubles as a behind-the-scenes featurette done in a traditional pop culture Japanese style with a gameshow announcer overlay track and translucent title cards in Japanese. Also included are the original Japanese DVD trailers. What catches the eye is the very pinku film and retro stylized cover with an in-your-face panty-covered butt overtop thigh high boots set in the foreground framing a scared schoolgirl between the legs. Who wouldn’t want to watch this based solely off the cover!? The reverse side of the sleeve contains an enlarged image still of another character and the backside acts humorously like “nutritional facts guide” superimposed onto the back cover. The release comes in a standard Blu-ray Amaray. With a runtime of 45 minutes, “Big Boobs Buster” is a breezy microfeature for a region free encoded Blu-ray that is not rated.
Last Rites: Busting out with body positivity and sexual orientation themes, “Big Boobs Buster” brings out the big guns on a new Blu-ray release, animating manga to life on the big screen to experience Japan’s wildest cinema at its finest.
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