Geishas with Power Tools

Robo Geisha, Noboru Iguchi’s 2009 splatter exercise, arrives from the same fever dream that produced The Machine Girl and Tokyo Gore Police—that brief era when Japanese exploitation directors seemed to be competing over who could bolt the most hardware onto a human body. The premise is exactly what it sounds like: geishas retrofitted with concealed weapons, deployed by a corrupt industrialist to conquer Japan through sheer aesthetic violence. Buttock swords. Armpit katanas. A functioning cannon where a face used to be. The effects are intentionally cheap and cheerfully fake, which is the point—this is exploitation cinema that knows precisely what it is and leans into the absurdity until something almost touching surfaces from the wreckage. Almost. Mostly it’s geishas killing people with their own anatomy, and there are worse ways to spend ninety minutes.