ROBO GEISHA

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND VERY MODERATE SWEARING

Along with the classy and spooky Japanese horror movies, the wave that began with Ju:On The Grudge (which I wasn't that keen on, to be honest) and the first Ringu, we've had a few of the more demented Japanese splatter movies. Films like Machine Girl, Tokyo Gore Police, Vampire Girl Vs Frankenstein Girl varied from watchably dumb ultraviolence through to unwatchably incoherent ultraviolence, tricked out with geysers of blood arcing gleefully across the screen and CGI gore effects that look to have been thrown together on Microsoft Paint by nine-year-olds. Plot? They quite literally don't know the meaning of the word. What counts is the splatter, the dismemberment, the decapitations, the entrails strewn across the set and ankle-deep streams of blood. (Against these, a film like Alien Vs Ninja looks absolutely sane.)

As a splatter movie, Robo Geisha certainly delivers the goods in terms of blood, death and severed limbs. As far as plot is concerned, it's absolute bollocks. A wannabe geisha named Yoshie and her bitchy geisha sister get involved with a shady businessman who has an army of cybernetically enhanced women who run around in their underwear and can shoot samurai swords from their armpits and bottoms, and/or fire machine guns from their breasts. He also has two even tougher cyborg assistants called Tengu who wear masks with dildos for noses for no adequately explored reason. Can Yoshie save the day when she discovers that the shady businessman is seeking to destroy the whole of Japan by turning his castle into a giant robot stomping across the city (hey, a Gojira nod!) and dropping a giant bomb into Mount Fuji?

None of this makes a blind bit of bloody sense and the only thing it's got going for it (apart from the fact that it's done and finished with in about 83 minutes) is the deranged violence. Sadly, it's almost all done in CGI and this time looks like Microsoft Scribble as used by three-year-olds. Even The Asylum's idiotic mega-monster mash movies have better effects than this, and The Asylum movies are abysmal. Robo Geisha is utter rubbish: boring, stupid, illogical even by the standards of the Japanese nonsense splatter epic and absolutely not even slightly worth watching.

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At your own risk: