RoboGeisha
Director: Noboru Iguchi
Writer: Noboru Iguchi (screenplay)
Starring: Asami, Yoshihiro Nishimura and Naoto Takenaka
Once again Japan brings us a classic piece of the “What the Fuck?” cinema at which they excel. Noboru Iguchi, the director of The Machine Girl, which was your typical “girl picked on and humiliated, girl gets machine gun grafted onto her arm, girl racks up serious body count” film, is back with a film that makes that one look like an exercise in good taste and restraint.
After an insane beginning of RoboGeisha-on-RoboGisha combat, we jump back to a flashback that, it turns out, will take up the entire rest of the movie. Two sisters, one older, pretty, and working as a geisha, the other younger-and-even-prettier-but-we’re-going-to-pretend-she’s-homely-for-the-sake-of-the-plot who gets bossed around, exhibit the usual sibling rivalry. Then they get kidnapped by your generic evil corporation and are forced to train as geisha assassins. Oh, as you just might possibly be able to surmise from the title, they sport all sorts of deadly robotic devices implanted in their body.
The biggest difference between this and Machine Girl is that that film was (with a few allowances) a reasonably realistic, conventional film until it went all machine gunny in the third act, while RoboGeisha is pure WTF from start to finish. Just in case you were worried that RoboGeisha would be a deep, introspective examination of sibling rivalry in modern Japan, the shurukens flying out of the female penis goblin guard’s asses and the circular saw blade popping out of another robogeisha’s mouth should convince you of the film’s pure over-the-top, mutant cinema goodness. Swords pop out of deeply unlikely places (as in the quote in the title), breasts sport guns, shattered buildings bleed digital blood (albeit more convincing than the digital blood than found in Ugandan action films) and a cyborg geisha tank takes on a giant robot. Add off-balance dubbing, the hilariously maudlin sister story, and a ridiculously small cast (the same guy gets killed at least four or five times), and you have a strong candidate to show at your next party.
Here’s the trailer, which pretty much puts all the virtues of the film (such as they are) on display:
And it beats the hell out of Wild Zero or Kibakichi.
