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'What am I? A Robot? Or a Geisha?'
When a couple of megalomaniac Japanese businessmen get their heads together to come up with the ultimate killing machine, they come up with the idea of geisha assassins.  

 
Recruiting two sisters into their ranks, the girls continuously try to get one over on each other as they climb the ranks of killer gang until they are both more machine than… well, geisha.

Going rogue after refusing to kill, one of the sisters, Yoshie (Aya Kiguchi) decides to use her robotic enhancements and bring down the very group that created her.

I honestly don’t think I’ve said 'What the fuck?' quite so much within the space of eighty-seven minutes as I did with RoboGeisha. From the opening fight that has weird ass dialogue, a robotic geisha with a spinning saw for a mouth and the introduction of two mental girls dressed in stockings and phallic masks and breast plates, it was just a wash of absolute bat shit craziness.

The story and action sequences are so badly overacted and ridiculous that I couldn’t shake the feeling that at any point this could very well slip into being a porno but rather than going down that route, RoboGeisha opts for fight sequences that have girls being shot in the ass, having acid milk firing breast weapons, sword popping armpits, machine gun implants breasts and firing ninja stars from the geishas' bums. Oh and of course the three way battle between three girls with ass swords.

 
Now I’m all for crazy Japanese movies, I ate up Kamikaze Girlsearlier this year, but this one was just that little bit too over the top for my tastes. There were massive chunks of time where it was filled with visual gags that I just didn’t find that funny (I mean there’s only so many times you can find ass ninja stars funny, right?) and the entire segment with the building that came to life and RoboGeisha transformed her legs into tank wheels, controlling the speed with a musical instrument she was playing was just ridiculous, and that’s not even mentioning the god awful CGI work trying to sell the whole mess.

RoboGeisha just proved to be a little too stupid for a week night's viewing for me and while there were moments that had me grinning it’s so weakly put together that I couldn’t help feel sorry for all the screenwriters and wannabe movie makers out there struggling to get their work made while this gets distributed around the world.

 

Video

The bright, colourful transfer initially looks pretty great with the Geisha’s clothes popping out of the screen with its brightly presented patterns and the sprays of fake CGI blood streaking proudly across the screen. However there’s a fair bit of digital noise to the lower lit shots that spoil the overall effect in places and after a while all the relatively sharp image does is show how cheaply made the movie is.

Small details like the layers of the geisha's white face make up are very well captured and when the CGI heavy shots take over they look very clean when compared to the filmed elements but really this doesn’t do much more than look like a TV show or even porn stylistically and the HD transfer really shows off the limitations rather than celebrating them.

 

Audio

With a DTS-HD Master Audio 4.0 track there’s a noticeable lack of bass, especially with that terrible, terrible, terrible score rattling through the back speakers. It was a mix of incidental fighting game music with hints of the exciting bit in Live and Let Die and honestly it grated after about the sixty minute mark.

Dialogue and sound effects sit mostly in the front speakers and are pretty strong with the dynamics of fight sequences doing their best to use what they have but really it comes off as a little bit of an all volume and no real thought type of track and once again shows the cheapness of the movie.

Extras

The only thing you get here is a heap of other Cineasia titles previews and the trailer for Robogeisha.

 

Overall

This release is a little undercooked, with okay visuals and a passable audio track. Features are non existent and really the movie itself isn’t going to float anyone but die hard crazy movie fan's boats.

Once in a blue moon I’ll get sucked into these crazy ass Japanese flicks and other times I’m just baffled by how they continue to not only get made but get distributed worldwide. This time out, RoboGeisha falls into the latter category and while the 18 certificate and 'extreme' logo on the cover are really over selling the relatively tame nature of the flick, it’s still an offensively bad movie.