Original title: Robo-geisha

Noboro Iguchi’s RoboGeisha is one of those crazy, logic-defying Japanese gore/horror films of the mid to late 2000s – see also the equally bonkers Meatball Machine (2005), Tôkyô zankoku keisatsu/Tokyo Gore Police (2008), Kyûketsu Shôjo tai Shôjo Furanken/Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl (2009), the charmingly titled Kyonyû doragon: Onsen zonbi vs sutorippâ 5/Big Tits Zombie (2010) and many others besides. RoboGeisha is one of the best of the breed, somewhat more coherent than most and certainly a huge amount of very messy and morally dubious fun.

It opens with an extraordinary sequence that may owe something to Mamoru Oshii’s classic 1995 cyberpunk anime Ghost in the Shell (1995) as a Geisha who turns out to be a robot attempts to assassinate a political candidate accompanied by two young women in Tengu masks. The scenes sets the bar for the rest of the film with phallic symbolism everywhere and bizarre vaguely sexualised images like the women firing shuriken out their backsides. The gory party is crashed by Yoshie (Aya Kiguchi), who is one of the eponymous robogeishas who trounces the attacking machine. In flashback, we learn that Yoshie had once served as a servant for her sister Kikue (Hitomi Hasebe), a geisha in training something that has caused a rift between the two once close siblings. At an audition for Kageno Steel Manufacturing heir Hikaru Kageno (Takumi Saito), Yoshie accidentally ruined Kikue’s performance but Kageno is impressed by Yoshie’s beauty. The sisters are taken in by Kageno and forced to fight to the death, though neither can land the killing blow. Yoshie is trained to become an assassin for the company while Kikue is reduced to lowly servant training. Eventually, the company decides to force the sisters to become cyborgs, the Robogeisha of the title, with guns implanted in their breasts. And that’s when things start to get really weird…

Noboro Iguchi started his career in “AV” (“adult video, straight-to-video pornography), often dabbling in the more extreme forms, before switching to more mainstream films, enthusiastically embracing horror with Koi-suru Yōchū/ A Larva to Love in 2003 and barely looking back since. He never really left his “AV” roots behind, his films liberally peppered with sex, nudity, scatological references and lashings of gore. You certainly don’t go into his body of work looking for subtlety (Zonbiasu/Zombie Ass (2011) anyone?) and even by the outré standards of many Japanese genre films of the period, his films are odd, more cartoonish than transgressive perhaps, but there’s plenty of amusement to be had here for the increasingly outrageous violence and gore.

There are attempts to flesh out the characters and even an effort at something like a plot, but they’re cock-eyed in the extreme. Welcome but probably, under the circumstances, unwarranted and unwanted. It gets a bit too bogged down ion the sibling rivalry business and is rarely less than full throttle melodrama. There’s plenty of humour too, some of intentional, a lot of it silly (“Unbelievable! I’ve turned into a tank now!”) and some of it unfathomable – were the soundtrack cues during the fight with the samurai/yakuza meant to be an homage to the Bod film Live and Let Die (1973) or just a shameless rip-off?

As you might expect from am Iguchi film, it’s all in highly dubious taste (that obsession with grown women in school uniforms that runs through much of Japanese horror from the time shows up again, though Iguchi was particularly fond of these moments) and it’s frequently puerile. But when the action scenes kick in and Iguchi’s imagination runs wild, it’s brainlessly entertaining on a grand scale. The madness reaches its apotheosis in the climax when a corporate castle/headquarters/pagoda turns out to be a Transformer-style robot in disguise (“it was a giant castle robot!”) which goes on a destructive rampage causing other buildings around it to spray showers of blood as it attacks. Which brings us neatly to the film’s special effects which one might charitably describe as variable. It showcases some extremely poor CGI and the physical effects are only a tad better.

So, is it any good? By any reasonable standard, not in the slightest. The effects are rubbish, the humour hit-and-miss, the acting over-the-top and the story increasingly unhinged. But that’s all what makes it so weirdly charming. It has energy to spare and is certainly never dull – you’ll be hugely entertained buy all the silliness even while you’re shaking your head at just how ridiculous it all is.

Iguchi would continue in similar vein with titles like Sentō Shōjo: Chi no Tekkamen Densetsu/Mutant Girls Squad (2010), Tomie anrimiteddo/Tomie Unlimited (2011), the eighth instalment in the long-running Tomie series, the aforementioned Zombie Ass and Deddo sushi/Dead Sushi (2012) and also dabbled in “tokatsu” (special effects film) with Nuigurumaa Z/ Gothic Lolita Battle Bear (2013) and live action manga adaptations (Aku no Hana/The Flowers of Evil (2019)). If Robogeisha does little to impress you, then very little else in his extensive body of work is likely to appeal.