SAMURAI PRINCESS

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS AND BLOOD (AGAIN)

The sub-genre of senseless gore movies from Japan continues, and this week's addition to the DVD racks is Samurai Princess (that's the on-screen title card, but it's called Samurai Princess Devil Princess in the subtitles). It's set in the Forest Of Infinity, presumably some time in the future, where a maniac is merrily chopping people to pieces and rebuilding them as androids for no particularly good reason (or at least no good reason made clear to us poor viewers); his bonkers henchpeople hack up a party of schoolgirls, but the girls' souls are transferred into the robotically augmented body of the sole survivor. Who is, obviously, out for revenge.

Equally obviously, it's rubbish. It's barely equal to last year's Vampire Girl Vs Frankenstein Girl, and that wasn't as good as Tokyo Gore Police. Which in turn wasn't as good as Machine Girl - and Machine Girl wasn't much more than okay, so we're now three stages down from something that was just about acceptable. The "acting" is ridiculously broad and the plot is gibberish, but then the plot in only there to string together the outrageous gore scenes. Some of those are undeniably enjoyable in their bloodsoaked squishiness, but the truth is they're all the movie has going for it. Beyond the severed limbs, ripped intestinal tracts, mashed brains and spurting blood arcing across the screen, there's nothing going on.

Ultimately, it's not any good. It gains a few smiles with its cheerily relentless splatter effects which, as with the likes of Tokyo Gore Police, are gleefully excessive in the Braindead style. But Braindead spent time making you care about characters before unleashing its zombie hordes. Samurai Princess doesn't know how to make you care, so I didn't.

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