That title kind of reaches out and grabs you, doesn’t it? If it’s 2 a.m. and you’re laying on the sofa, flipping through cable infomercials, slowly eating the handful of Doritos piled on your chest, and you stumble on an ultra-low-budget Japanese horror film entitled Attack Girls’ Swim Team Vs. The Undead, how can you not pause and check that shit out?

After a bout of mandatory “vaccinations” from the nurses’ office, the students of a Japanese high school begin turning into blood-thirsty zombies. Luckily, any students that swam in the school pool following the zombie injection are immediately cured. Something about the chlorine or whatever. And you guessed it, this renders most of the girls’ swim team immune to zombification. With the assistance of trained assassin Aki, the new girl in school, the girls band together to take out the zombie threat.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Trained assassin? Yeah, that’s right, Aki was trained as a “water assassin” by an evil mustached dickhead named The Doctor before transferring to the local high school. Flashbacks reveal that The Doctor utilized methods of brainwashing that eventually forced Aki to pleasure herself every time he played a flute, and these horny flute-playing sessions invariably led to some really…goofy-looking rape scenes. Even as Aki kicks zombie ass alongside the girls’ swim team, she begins to speculate that her ex-trainer/rapist The Doctor might be the source of the mysterious zombie injection.

Kawano’s film essentially has two modes: Soft-Core Lesbian Porn Mode and Kick-Ass Zombie Killin’ Mode. First off, let it be said that trained assassin Aki loves getting topless with her new best friend Sayaka and throwing some wet tongue around. There’s nothing wrong with that, really. They get together in the showers, in the cafeteria, wherever they can be alone, and Kawano shoots their lesbian love scenes with obvious relish.

But just as things are getting interesting between the two ladies, Kawano mixes things up with a neck-breaking change in tone as he switches gears into Kick-Ass Zombie Killin’ Mode as sudden zombie carnage reigns supreme for a scene or two: blood gouting on walls, rubber limbs flying everywhere, throat-slashings, a veritable montage of dime-store zombie movie fun.

And then we jump-cut back to another long, languorous lesbian make-out scene. Sure, it can be a little jarring. But does it work? Yeah, ultimately, it does. Although the tone of the movie is never quite cohesive, the gore is cool, the lesbian sex scenes are cool, and the flashback rape scenes are strangely hilarious. Attack Girls Swim Team Vs. The Undead isn’t an example of ground-breaking Japanese horror by any means, but it certainly gets the job done on a lonely Friday night.