Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

It’s probably time someone in Japan gives this genre a name or something, like Godzilla and them are called ‘Kaiju’, some kind of moniker needs to be passed down to the ‘robotic, android, biologically enhanced, revenge minded, badass, insanely bloody, crazy violent, super sexy Japanese bitch’ genre. Get on that. Today’s sexy, biologically enhanced revenge minded violent bitch is crazy cute Japanese AV actress Aino Kishi in director Kengo Kaji’s completely insane and nonsensical ‘Samurai Princess’.

In this bizarre alternate Japan where the citizenry walk around wooded country sides in bizarrely colored, albeit traditionally styled sixteenth century Japanese garb while still possessing cell phones and digital cameras, eleven young women are splashing around a lake minding their own damn business when they happen upon a team of bug-eyed thugs who spend their time licking stuff, having rape parties and dismembering people. These evil doers are Mecha, or the creation of an insane scientist who takes spare body parts… and there are plenty of those lying around in this alternate universe… and makes new mechanically enhanced completely insane ‘devils’.

So we have this huge pile of body parts lying in the middle of the woods with this crazy scientist happening upon them along with a Buddhist nun. It’s complicated. One of these body parts is still semi-conscious and she begs this scientist to turn her into a Mecha so she can get her revenge. To complete this transformation she will also need the help of this nun who will, against this nuns better judgment, infuse her with the souls of these eleven dead women which will further drive her to her revenge and thus the Samurai Princess is born. How she came up with that name is beyond me because she is certainly no samurai, and as far as I know she’s not a princess but the title does look cool on the box cover and I think ‘Cyborg Ninja’ has been used already. If it hasn’t I got dibs.

So our newly named Samurai Princess cruises the Japanese country side extracting her brutal revenge, along with a young man she picked up along the way who carries a guitar and possesses a Mecha arm who is looking to extract his own measure of revenge against the crazed scientist for his own personal reasons. In addition to this all of the mecha in this movie are being hunted by mecha hating samurai, even though they completely suck at mecha hunting. Unrelenting blood splatter, detachable breasts and forty foot retractable penile implants with razor teeth shall ensue. Enjoy.

Now for my money the movie ‘Machine Girl’ would be the penultimate film experience for this yet to be named genre of films. Sure ‘Machine Girl’ took the term ‘over the top’ to ridiculous heights but I thought that particular slice of nonsense balanced a pretty decent narrative along with its high gore level. ‘Tokyo Gore Police’ had more gore and Eihi Shiina in it but I just didn’t think that movie was as ‘balanced’ as The Machine Girl, and now we have ‘Samurai Princess’ which is about as lopsided as this genre can probably get.

Whatever narrative Kenji-san has crafted for his movie, go ahead and throw that out window because as we said earlier it is complete, total and utter nonsense in addition to being incredibly sketchy at best. Plus ‘Samurai Princess’ lacks the high gloss production values of those previous films which shows itself in the spotty look of the film and the inexpensive set pieces. A good sign that you ain’t got a lot of money for your movie is when you shoot the majority of your movie in the woods.

But while the effort might have been somewhat suspect in crafting a narrative that made a little bit of sense, a lot of effort went into making this movie as gorrific as possible, and gorrific it was. I do hope you don’t have a problem watching a woman being split in two via chainsaw vagina first. I’ve seen folks read minds before in movies but I’ve never seen a mind reader use the Braille method to read a mind as the Samurai Princess used in this movie. The erratic pace of the movie does slow down every once in a while to give us some back story ala flashback or to allow us to watch a completely unnecessary sex scene featuring our soft and slender adult video actress or to allow us to watch a pair of silly Mecha hunters traipse through the woods but inventive gore effects are never far behind.

Even though I didn’t find ‘Samurai Princess’ nearly as entertaining as some of the other films I’ve seen in this yet to be named genre, I still couldn’t turn it off… and I tried. I think most of us know that either you’re gonna watch this stuff or you are going to avoid this stuff no matter what anybody has to say and as it turns out I am incapable of avoiding these kinds of movies. Even ones that really aren’t all that good such as this one.

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