Wrong Subtitles: Galaxy of Rabbits

Wrong Subtitles: Recalsablanca

RoboGeisha

RoboGeisha is a collaboration between Noboru Iguchi and special effects man Yoshihiro Nishimura (i.e., the director of Tokyo Gore Police and co-director of Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl).

With a team like that you sort of know what to expect going into this one... but as with their other titles, knowing the sorts of things you can expect does not mean that everything you're about to see isn't still going to be completely mind-blowing.



The story opens by introducing us to Yoshie (Aya Kiguchi) and her older sister Kikue (Hitome Hasebe, Battle Royale II).


Kikue is a an ambitious geisha while Yoshie is her supposedly "uglier" younger sister who is basically just a servant in the house where Kikue works. Kikue is hoping to impress the young head of Kageno Steel, but as it turns out he actually prefers Yoshie... So of course the conflict between the sisters just escalates rapidly from this point on.

Both girls eventually end up at the young guy's rural home, which is where he's apparently been essentially kidnapping and brainwashing young girls into a personal army of cyborg ninja geisha assassins.


The girls begin training there and competing for success as assassins. This quickly leads to both of them getting mechanical enhancements of their own and it's here that things really take a turn for the wacky.

Exhibit 1: Killer socks

Exhibit 2: Breast-cannons

And, last but not least,
Exhibit 3: Ass-shurikens.

Apparently Iguchi was asked to tone down the violence and gore a bit for this one, so the weapons are a bit more ridiculous and cartoony than usual, and all blood effects are done in CGI. CGI blood almost never looks good... or even remotely passable... and this case is certainly no different, but then the silly cartoon blood is not exactly pulling you out of an otherwise believably realistic scenario, so it bothered me less than I expected it to.

Yoshie eventually emerges as the top "clockwork cortesan" and at this point decides to abandon the robogeishas in order to stop the evil steel corporation and save Japan from them.

With a name like Yoshie, this understandably has to happen by way of a Mario Kart battle.

The final showdown, the climax of the movie's absurdity, is a battle between Tank-Yoshie and a robotic building with an atomic bomb necklace, during which blood spurts from destroyed bystander-buildings in a way that it absolutely should have been doing in monster movies since the very beginning.


If you're a fan of the sort of surreal absurdist gore that's come from Noburu Iguchi in the past, you're likely to enjoy RoboGeisha. Even if you've been hesitant to see the more extreme things like Tokyo Gore Police, this is a pretty tame introduction to his style. While the premise does start to stretch a bit thin at times, overall I still really had a lot of fun with this one.

Trailer: