Feature Presentation: Cutey Honey (Japan)

[Tamia]

Cutie Honey is a frenzied, cutesy, fantastical superhero movie dealing with a very human-like android (the girl Honey) trying to make her way in a world that doesn't quite understand her. Of course, it helps that she's gorgeous - the opening scene of the film shows her first in the bathtub and then running down a Tokyo street in her underwear - and she has incredible super-powers by way of 'the I System', basically a choker on her neck that can transform her and anything around her. She touches two fingers to the little heart on the choker and shouts, "Honey… Flash!" and becomes her super-heroic self.

Honey's uncle has been kidnapped by a group of weird super-villains and their fanatical followers called Panther Claw; the group was also responsible for her father's (that is, creator's) death some time before. Panther Claw is led by Sister Jill (played by a man, giving an extra odd dimension to the character), an immortal, flesh-and-plant hybrid with incredible powers. Honey teams up with a super-straight-laced female police chief and a wacky male investigator to bring down the villains and rescue her uncle, and presumably the rest of the world also.