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YES! FINALLY! There's only one movie I've really been champing at the bit to do a Consciousness Stream for, and I think we all know what it is at this point. Particularly since the title's already right up there and all. We start off as more movies should, with someone rocking out on the shamisen. Then that raspy announcer voice from the trailer goes all Electric Company with the title. "Robo! Geisha! RoboGeisha!" Oh, and like everything else in this vein of Insane Japanese Things, we have a really really great dub. Netflix tends to throw things up on streaming subbed only. I've gone back and watched Tokyo Gore Police that way since. It's not nearly as good that way. Anyway, there's plot going on apparently, but, I so don't care. Some creepy guy is hitting on this here Geisha, who is of course secretly a robot. He squeezes her boob, which causes her to go berserk and uh... split open revealing a guy in crazy tengu underwear and mask... and then it closes, and does it again, so we now have 2 full sized human beings, plus the now closed robo-shell, all of roughly the same size. Since I'm watching the dub, they actually say goblin, not tengu, but on the other hand they give a speech which, I'm sorry, I have to rewind this and quote. "You bastards don't know about goblins? They're Japanese monsters of old and they have penises." "Yes we do. And we've also been charged by a special important someone with the assassination of [so-and-so]. We are called..." GOBLIN SQUADRON! Bleh! Bleh!" Then a sword fight breaks out, while our RoboGeisha here abducts President Lechery. It's a pretty awesomel ridiculous sword fight too. Mainly since one guy won't get off his phone and keeps Matrix dodging.
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So evil President is all "I always knew you were a monster" and RoboGeisha is all "I'm not a monster, I'm a robot." and suddenly has a mouth buzzsaw. And... back in the fight we have two people killed by phallic nose stabbing, one of which results in a really cartoony caved in face, and then they kill the last guy with by shooting a series of throwing stars out of their butts. Oh and President gets his nose kind of cut in half and says "hey, that hurts! And it's really stressful!" But then Good RoboGeisha comes in. She's clearly the actual main character, in that she has a shamisen/sword and metal hair and a love in justice speech and is officially NAMED RoboGeisha. "Geisha missile!" Hair opens and spams missiles. Evil RoboGeisha's head is cut in half. President offers RoboGeisha a job as his new secretary, she's indignant, he asks who are you anyway? She goes into a hilarious angsty mysterious past bit. I think we might actually be officially spoofing Memoirs of a Geisha word for word in this flashback, but I can't say since I never saw that. Anyway, apparently she's not really a robot, or is a human brain in a robot body, or whatever, but she has a flashback with an evil older sister and mother in it, so there's that.
So yeah, as punishment for being the unfavored younger sister, she's only allowed to eat a flavorless rice ball, so she puts pepper on it, but sneezes, causing her to knock down a wall with the back of her head, causing a weird chair reaction of people choking on their sushi. Non-fatally. I love that I need to clarify that. Anyway though, she hates her sister and vice versa. Robo rips a phonebook in half after being smacked with it, impressing Guy. Guy then apparently recruits her to be turned into Robocop, I mean Megaman, I mean, RoboGeisha. They go to have a nice talk in the woods, when up runs a nurse with a knife. "Oh, it's you from the hospital I was in earlier," says Guy. Then she charges with the knife, in slow motion, and Robo knocks it out of her hand, and jumps up, and kicks her in the back of the head half a dozen times. Then the tengu girls attack. "With Hell's breast milk! DOUBLE BREAST MILK!" Now, I know what you're thinking, this is the third paragraph, but no, they're just shooting acid from the noses of the tengu faces on their boobs, melting the face of attack nurse. Nothing dirty going on here.
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Back home, sister is drunk and feeling sentimental. "They made fun of me and called me Ugly Orphan Four Eyes." In this CS, and probably only this CS, I'm reserving quotation marks for honest word for word quotes. Anyway, the next day, Robo and Sister go to visit Guy in his totally out of place pagoda. Sister is in full geisha costume, Robo hasn't passed the exams or whatever yet. Guy's dad is creepy. "My company is also like a geisha. On the surface it only manufactures steel, but if the government requests it, we also manufacture military weapons." Yeah, just like a geisha. Then the wall opens to reveal a giant goofy zeppelin shaped golden bomb, and zither music. Then he snaps his fingers and the tengu girls pop out from behind them to hold them still, and a giant tube comes down from the ceiling to suck up Sister (and that tengu), and then Guy has another wall open to reveal his army of hot pink sports bra and shors wearing geisha army, training in martial arts and cheesy flirting, in unison. "They are... The Hidden Geisha!" Who they're training to assassinate foreign dignitaries and such. That's actually something I could see in a sane movie. Robo is all "No! Anything but this outfit!" when being forced into their training pinkness, and now has to fight her sister, presumably to the death. Oh and she gets crazy robo-gauntlets that apparently release secret weapon-ness when sufficiently angry. "She changes when the dormant energy within her awakens. The key to that is her older sister," exposits Guy. Oh, and since they're new recruits they have special newbie frilly underwear, apparently. Ah, when angry, we get an arm sword sorta deal. And uh... I think it's older sister with the sword? When you have one voice actress doing everyone's voice in a different inflection, and everyone is wearing identical full-face makeup and hairstyles, it's... really pretty hard to tell who's who. Ah, thanks for confirming that. Older evil sister pulls a sword first, almost kills Robo, and finally pushes her into fully Angry mode, where she gets a sword on both arms, totally pins her to the wall, retracts'em and punches her in the chest then walks away. So no, not a fight to the death, and both I guess are now entering training. Training montage time! Plunge hands into boiling water 3000 times! Pull out the piece of meat dropped in there earlier! Meanwhile, since sister lost, she's just forced to dust and stuff.
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I should hit return shouldn't I. Anyway yeah, Robo is now the alpha, while Sister has to do all the grunt work. Robo is totally enjoying this. So... does all their training involve boiling water? Oh, this is someone else training, thinking this is crazy, and pulling a gun. Sister is determined to excel, and volunteers to uh... become the executioner of anyone trying to quit. This works, and she gets all cyborgified as part of her promotion. Now comes firearms training. Shooting around a couple guys that are tied up. Sister now has gatling boobs. Well, just the one really, the left boob is the trigger apparently. Robo is all Hey, can I be a cyborg too? Yes, yes she can. Get equipped with... "Swords!?! From your armpits!?!" "I strike a sexy pose, and out they come."
No here's the geisha assassins after their first target, some samurai dude. He has goons with awesome face covering straw hats, and metal claws. The geisha squad are all in schoolgirl uniforms for uh... some reason. One geisha is stabbed in the butt, as in that unfortunate trailer scene. Another is stabbed like 30 times in the torso within 3 seconds. Robo used panty shot! Samurai was distracted! The guys with the claws are secretly robots. Sister kills their leader with butt shurikens. Oh, and it was revealed that claw guy was an android because Robo cut his head in half, and it was a robot head, and then a third arm popped out from between the two halves. Sister makes a valiant sacrifice and takes a hit for her. "I don't want to join the goblin squadron. No matter how mechanized my body becomes, I wish to remain a geisha." The tengu girls are annoyed by this, reveal their masks, and brag about how they've got metal skulls and bone marrow and stuff. Now Sister is going all tsundere. "I didn't save you because it's you!" and such.
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Time-skipping some, here's Robo doing some cyborg geisha assassinations. By which I mean, serve someone tea, get sexually harassed, shoot a katana out of her mouth to stab target in face. "Why do I have to eliminate these old people?" The context is, in fact, being asked to assassinate a random pair of old people. Now here's awesome robot-y head move sounds. Now here's awesome Terminator Vision. Here's someone translating old guy mumbles "hraruraruh." "He's asking if you'd like to eat with him." "Ga, rarara?" "He's asking if it's good." She asks what they do, and it turns out they're the secret good guy group, a secret organization whose goal is to rescue all their granddaughters who were kidnapped to be trained as cyborg geisha assassins. "This is the only topic he can talk about normally." Oh and they all wear T-shirts with their grandkids' pictures on them, triggering many flashbacks. Oh and they have a dorky protest song. Old lady says "don't be so focused on your family that you forget what's truly important" Out come the missile launchers. End of the awesomely bad song- "Let them go, Evil Guuuuuuuuys! Please." So yeah, she decides not to kill them, and is beaten up by the tengu girls as punishment. She's all, So... you know you're punishing me for not killing your grandparents, right? They are unmoved. She's given one more chance to not suck, or they'll execute sister. Oh and I guess the rocket launching robo-hair is actually equipment, not bolted to her hair.
Loyalty test- Kill these two scummy bomb-making terrorist brothers. She taunts Sister by radio on how she's getting to be all properly geisha-ish. Oh and we have a big ol' communications room with an all pink underwear geisha staff. "My hands are sticky and gross, but that's OK right?" says scumbag. "Mr. [so-and-so], for the man who has no delicacy... FRIED SHRIMP!" Which are, you know, stabbed into his eyes. Begin silly fight scene. Which ends with karate chopping the other guy's head into his torso like a turtle. Twice. No, three times. He keeps popping it back out, covered in soup, and expositing. Four now. Shrimp eyes also is still alive. "You punched my stomach just now didn't you! You've activated the fuse of my terrorist suit bomb!" So yeah, they explode. Clearly, Robo is dead. I mean, yeah, she's the main character, and this is still all technically a flashback she's narrating, but there was an explosion! Anyway, Sister is now giving a speech to Guy about what it's like having a sister. "It's just your bad luck that you'll never know such terrible sadness!" There's a lot of dorky lines going back and forth. Short version is, yeah, I grew up emotionally stunted, but it works out because I can mind control girls into loving me. Anyway, turns out the top half of Robo survived and... no I guess she does always have robo-hair, and just sometimes hides it with a wig.
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Fortunately the old people resistence finds her, and builds her robotic replacement legs. One of them was a former employee of Evil Co. so this makes sense. Anyway, they're all gearing up top head over to their headquarters in force and uh... sing hippie protest songs. Robo offers to sacrifice herself for the cause, Old Lady snaps and cuts her power off. Meanwhile here's Sister with her brain exposed and Guy fiddling with it with a screwdriver to make her his slave, as previously foreshadowed. And I seriously love how the giant pagoda of evil is just towering over a normal steel mill. Oh, and the old guys aren't that naive. They're secretly all packing guns, and threatening Guy's dad. Anyway, still recovering Robo is limping to the rescue. She can't walk so good, but hey, the old Yoda-ish lady DID give her this robotic looking shamisen. So she stops to play it to gain inner strength. Which, naturally, leads to "Incredible! I never thought I'd turn into a tank!" See, this is perfectly logical. Her legs are progarammed to turn into a tank when she plays the shamisen. Same person made both. And uh... now they're just blaring the Robocop theme as she zooms down the highway.
So yeah, Guy and dad are all, OK, yeah. We're sorry we kidnapped your granddaughters and transformed them into cyborg geisha assassins. Then they bow, exposing their... SECRET SHOULDER MACHINE GUNS! With terrible accuracy. The three lead old people escape, and the rest really take a while to be hit and die. "Go forth o Ambition! Become the monster that you are named! Desire, and move!" At which point the giant paoda sprouts arms and legs and goes on a rampage. It's pretty much the goofiest thing ever. And it roars. Meanwhile, here comes shamisen playing tank legs RoboGeisha. OK, so I guess it isn't the goofiest thing EVER, or even, you know, within the last few minutes. The three surviving old people all start having heart attacks. "My heart!" "My heart too!" "And mine!" "So, you've never seen a castle shaped robot, have you!" Chief old mumbly guy however has a secret attack! "I went ahead and put a gun in my knee." "Prepare to receive an appology from hell! WE ARE VERY SORRY!" Silly silly gunfight.
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So now comes what I really came to see. The pagoda robot is punching buildings, which emit blood geysers. Which just keep errupting, long after they should. Uh... not that they ever should to begin with. So now here's 3 geisha gunners standing on the pagoda's hand and shooting at Robo, who counters with hair missiles. And here's chief oldguy going on a killing spree with his knee gun. "Was that one my younger sister?" asks his translator? "Who cares! Blam!" Then he gets injured some and translator wants to flee. "Don't worry about me, just go!" "OK!" Then he's... crushed to death under the weight of dead geisha bodies. Now outside Robo is driving up the side of a skyscraper, dodging fire breath and parrying gunfire with her shamisen pick.
OK yeah, now it's totally past time for the epic showdown with the tengu girls. "I really want to kill you, but for the sake of your families I'll just kick your asses!" "Then maybe it's time you see the goblins' hidden weapon! THE ASS SWORD!" "You two taking such an embarrassing stance? I have no choice but to answer in kind!" Shnikt! "I too have an Ass Sword!" Then they... fight, kind of. By which I mean they wiggle their butts in eachother's general direction, because they uh, can't actually see what they're doing. Eventually they all kinda give up and fight in slightly more sane fashion. By which I mean swinging off stripper poles and using armpit poles and such. Translator and his sister, tengu A, accidentally kill eachother in silly fashion. Old Lady Yoda kills her granddaughter, the other one. "You're a bad person now please die." Then she, too, dies. Of... plot convenience and grief. She gives dying encouraging words to Robo, who is now the uh... only living character besides Guy and Sister I think.
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Oh, and did I mention the evil plan to have the Robo put the giant bomb from before in Mt. Fuji and blow up Japan? Because that was the evil plan. Guy is now controlling the robot through direct neural interface tentacles jammed in his arms. You know, I don't even see why I had to explain that. Oh and here's Sister with a new silly metal mouth and nose. And robo-hair. And she's brainwashed. Or, brain-screwdrivered really. So yeah, they're forced to fight. Oh and the top half of her takes off on rockets. Again, shouldn't need to explain this. Her legs still running around kicking I do though, and top half sprouting a big spike to stab Robo in the throat with. Naturally this isn't fatal. I love how goofy this bomb looks by the way. Guy stops before tossing it into the volcano for uh... plot convenience I guess.
Anyway, Robo is losing and getting a sword twisted around in her gut, and flashbacks words of advice, and goes all power of sisterly love. Oh. No. She's using power of sisterly hatred. She basically says- You're actually adopted and totally screwed everything up when we were kids and mom and dad didn't like you. "If we have to die, why don't we die together? If we do that, we can keep fighting in the afterlife." But yeah the power of sisterly... uh... love? Allows them to ... split apart spin around and combine into spinny double faced combined form. OK, I did not see that coming. So now there's this silly martial artsy fight with combined-sisters and Guy, which of course is causing the pagoda to just kinda juggle the bomb and accidentally activate its rocket boots and fly off. Then they punch him in the stomach and he vomits, so so does the pagoda. Naturally. "SISTERRRR, UPPERCUT!" And so yeah, then the pagoda explodes, into an elaborate fireworks display. And they somehow survive and be nice happy geisha sisters. "Look, the fireworks we set off are bringing color to the night sky. And to the future." So uh... that flash forward we started off with? Where Robo was fighting with and killed Sister and the tengu girls? When... when did that take place exactly? Oh wait, they weren't killed, Sister's head was just cut in half, that's totally survivable in this context.
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So yeah. This one was kind of a join effort between Machine Girl guy and Tokyo Gore Police guy, but Machine Girl guy wrote the script. Hence no wrist cutting gags or totally baffling insanity. If I had to rank this whole lot, I'd probably have to go VGvFG, TGP, RG, MG, and... does Meatball Machine even count as the same odd little genre? I don't think it does. That top 3 though are all pretty closely packed. Ooh, and we have some special features! OK, real quick before I wrap it up here. We've got GeishaCop, which is... some weird alternate univerrse version of the movie where we went the other way with ripping off RoboCop, and have Robo as a cop infiltrating a... slightly more realistic version of the Evil Geisha Steel Company, without the cyborgs. They're just mean and beet up corporate rivals, and make them commit sepuku and drink their blood from wine glasses too I guess. "Drinking the blood of men at lunchtime? That's strange... something about this is strange." Uh... OK how long is this going to go on for? Oh hey, more Ass Sword "It's... the legendary blade that brings the greatest of embarrassments and is most difficult to wield!" Oh and when fully revealed, as GeishaCop, we see her special cop shield bra. Of course. OK really. How long is this? Is this secretly a whole second movie? Anyway, GeishaCop rescues her brother, but "the ornament in the room was Mini Castle Robot! Will they be captured? To be continued..."
DEAR GODS! "Previously..." starts GeishaCop episode 2... So yeah, fight scene, ight scene, revelation of Vice Preisdent Girl who can revive he dead as zombies by kissing them... Wacky antenae robo-brother, super-cheesy inner conflict. SUPER-cheesy. "If you defeat [badguy[ I'll give you a kiss! A french kiss, even though it's taboo!" And then she totally makes out with evil girl, to absorb her power, "Now I can release a beam of power from my ass." Which... yeah, cures (so, kills) all the zombies. OK, that was frelling LONG for what it was. Worth watching though. And... otherwise it's just trailers. Boring.
