I came across Robogeisha while poking around the Netflix suggestion lists and figured I'd give it a chance. I wasn't sure about it; honestly, I thought it looked painful. But boyoboy was I wrong. This movie turned out to be way more fun than I could have imagined. It is a difficult movie to describe because there are a lot of plot twists and because I'm bad at names.
The story starts off with two sisters, one of whom is a geisha and the other of whom is a geisha wannabe. The geisha is arrogant and treats her younger sister (the wannabe) with contempt. Both are kidnapped by a corporation that is turning women into geisha assassins, replacing parts of their bodies with robotics whenever needed. For example, the older sister has her breasts replaced with a machine gun (gatling style)--she hits the trigger breast to fire the gun in the other breast. Then the younger sister has swords which shoot out of her armpits (she strikes a sexy pose, and then WHOOSH! Her target is impaled). These "upgrades" continue until the little sister is sent to assassinate a group of elderly people. She learns that they are just a group of people whose daughters have been kidnapped by her corporate bosses and who want to rescue the girls. She doesn't have the heart to kill them and so is targeted by the corporation. She also learns that the corporation's master plan is to use their giant pagoda-shaped robot to drop a bomb into Mt. Fuji that will somehow destroy all of Japan. Restored to health by the group she had been sent to destroy, she goes into battle against the giant robot. You can guess how it all ends.
The effects in this movie are over-the-top gory, but in a very silly way, so they are not gross but fun (a little like the gore in
DeadAlive, but not nearly as realistic). The writing uses understatement to enhance the silliness of the plot. For example, when the resistance group confronts the corporation to try to force them to free their assassins (who, by the way, do not want to be freed), violence breaks out. One of the little old ladies in the group corners one of the corporate execs with a gun and says, "You are not a nice person. Please go away." Then she shoots him repeatedly. Most of the blood effects are simple computer animations, so many times throughout the movie someone is shot, bleeds profusely, and then moves a little bit to reveal a clean shirt. Also, when the giant pagoda robot hits a building, instead of exploding, it, too, shoots blood.
I'm not really doing this movie justice here. If you have Netflix, it is available on instant streaming. Watch it. It is weird. It is fun. It is Japanese. It is bloody. It is Robogeisha.
