‘Lollipop Chainsaw’ absurd, fun, uneven

Video game culture, usually deservedly, takes a lot of flak for the way it treats women. Whether it’s chauvinistic cretins talking smack online, so-called “booth babes” at trade shows or in-game cameras that ogle an otherwise strong female protagonist, gaming can feel as welcoming to women as an all-male country club.

Even though “Lollipop Chainsaw,” in which a high school cheerleader slices up zombies with a power saw, stars a character who could launch adolescent fantasies, the game portrays Juliet Starling as an assertive, independent-minded no-nonsense hero.

As it stumbles and lurches, “Lollipop Chainsaw” frequently comes close to being gaming’s equivalent of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” — a fun, campy celebration of butt-kicking femininity that reveres rather than leers. But Juliet’s girl power is undermined by the way secondary characters relate to her. Specifically, the taunts of the enemies Juliet mows down sound like they were penned by a committee of sex offenders pumped full of coffee and locked in a closet for an all-night dialogue-brainstorming session. Little of it is printable in a family newspaper.

That misogyny is balanced out, if such a thing can be balanced out, by Juliet’s relationships with her quirky family of zombie hunters and her boyfriend, Nick, a talking severed head who wears a collar and attaches to Juliet’s hip by a chain.

Nick begins the game as a dreamy high school letterman, but in the prologue stage, he’s bitten by a zombie. The quick-thinking Juliet uses her chain saw and a bit of magic to separate his head from his infected body before he turns into a shambling brain-eater.

Japanese game designer Goichi Suda, aka Suda 51, and American screenwriter James Gunn do a fantastic job turning “Lollipop Chainsaw’s” absurd setup into an asset. After the bubbly Juliet mows down a gaggle of zombie cheerleaders, she quips, “That was sad killing my friends, but also sooo fun!” Running down the hallways of a high school, slicing up zombies while Sleigh Bells’ “Riot Rhythm” blared through my speakers, was one of the most refined moments of gaming joy I’ve felt this year. Suda pulls off the cheerleader with a chain saw, in the same way Robert Rodriguez stuck a gun on Rose McGowan’s leg and made it work in “Grindhouse,” a movie Suda obviously reveres.