BEHOLD: ROBOGEISHA

As soon as I saw the trailer for RoboGeisha I got excited. It's one of those rare films that come along once, maybe twice in a lifetime that leaves you feeling about as imaginative as a piece of cardboard. I mean, just watch the trailer.

Do trailers get any better than that? That's not a rhetorical question. The answer is no. And the film, which was recently released on DVD, delivers 102 minutes of that. It's without a doubt one of the most absurd, ridiculous things I've ever seen, and by things I do mean all things. And I know a man with a vagina.

I did ponder, as I watched RoboGeisha for the second time, why I like this so much when I was so down on the also ridiculous Mega Piranha. The fact is, where Mega Piranha relies on one stupid idea to carry the whole film (OK, two stupid ideas if you include casting Tiffany), RoboGeisha throws stupid ideas at you for the entire running time. It's a live-action cartoon that doesn't stop to breathe.

Concerning two warring sisters who get transformed into highly modified kill machines, it starts off nuts and then gets more nuts and doesn't stop until a castle comes alive and tries to throw a bomb into Mount Fuji. There's lots of blood, lots of decapitations, women with Clockwork Orange penis noses, machine gun tits, swords that pop out from armpit vaginas, and a man getting shrimp inserted into his eye sockets. Here are some notes I jotted down as I was watching it:

1. Wig napalm
2. Butt swords
3. Killer (acid) breast milk

I've been trying to find out more about the director Noboru Iguchi. He has a cushy day job directing porn films, including Beautiful Girl On The Toilet 2 - Secret Excrement, The Neighbour's Sister Has F-Cup, and Golden Enema 2. He's made a few horror comedies, including A Larva To Love, about a man who scars a woman's face then has to keep giving her his blood to keep her alive, and one called Cat-Eyed Boy, which looks like this:

He once kind of kidnapped an actress, according to an interview he did for New York Magazine:

Q: What's the craziest thing that's happened on one of your sets?
A: There was one actress who had a part in my film Sukeban Boy. Nobody--not even her manager --had told her what her part would be in the film. They just told her she'd be in a scene set at a hot spring. But she actually had to do a number of action scenes completely naked. So she turned up on set, and once she found out what the scene was, she said, "I don't want to be a part of this" and started running away. We had to calm her down, capture her, and convince her to do the job.
Q: Capture her?
A: We made it so she could not leave the set. I'm sure if we had the same legal system as America we would have been sued.

Prior to RoboGeisha, he made a film called Machine Girl, which is OK, although his next film, Mutant Girl Squad, looks promisingly unstable:

He has the imagination of a six-year-old, and by that I mean completely unrestrained and uninhibited. His thought process seems to be: "So the temple turns into a Godzilla robot and starts walking around and smashing up buildings and then the buildings bleed and so the geisha lady turns into a tank and drives up the walls and they have a fight and the other geisha lady turns into a robot and spins around and comes in half and turns into a drill." And then he films it.

ALEX GODFREY