RoboGeisha

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
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"Geisha is... Japanese girl. Geisha is... beautiful. Geisha is... wild. Geisha is... ROBOT."

RoboGeisha is the story of two sisters: Kikuyakko "Kikue" Kagusa, a geisha who is renowned for her beauty, and Yoshie Kagusa, who works as a servant in the same teahouse as Kikuyakko. Yoshie suffers near constant abuse at the hands of her elder sister, who derides her lack of grace and potential for becoming a Geisha at every opportunity. While Yoshie for the most part tries to take this treatment in stride, at times her rage boils over and manifests itself in almost-superhuman feats of strength.

Their lives change when the young heir of the Kagano Steel Manufacturing corporation notices one of these feats, and forces the sisters to become part of his private army of geisha assassins. Accepting their fate, the sisters quickly rise through the ranks of the geisha corps, constantly replacing their human flesh with ever more deadly and bizarre mechanical body-parts and weaponry, each hoping to out-do the other in their ongoing rivalry.

However, when Yoshie is given the order to eliminate the family members of the other girls that have been kidnapped and forced into servitude by the corporation, she has a change of heart. Vowing to bring down the company and its cadre of cybernetically enhanced assassins once and for all, she puts her nearly unmatched skills in the arts of death-dealing to use in an effort to avenge the lives the corporation has taken in its mad rise to power. This decision puts Yoshie on a path that will inevitably lead to a final confrontation with her now more-machine-than-human sister, and to uncovering the secrets of the men who have been pulling their strings all along.

RoboGeisha is a Japanese splatter-horror/action/comedy film directed by Noboru Iguchi (The Machine Girl). It stars Aya Higuchi as Yoshi, Hitomi Hasebe as Kikuyakko , and Takumi Saito as Hikaru Kageno. Originally released in Japanese theatres in 2009, it was later licensed for distribution in English by FUNimation. See James Rolfe review it here.

Tropes used in RoboGeisha include:
  • Action Girls: Yoshie and Kikue, and, well, the entire geisha army.
  • Animeland / Hollywood Japan: There is not a Japanese stereotype in existence that this movie does not portray. Yakuza, Geisha, Ninjas, Samurai, Sailor Fuku, Kaiju, Tokusatsu... you name it.
  • Ass Shove: Shows up with the cybernetic AssSword, which is exactly what it sounds like. Considering the rest of the film, it's surprising when the girls point out that using a sword protruding from your ass is not only embarrassing, but also really awkward to use. It doesn't stop them from having a sword fight around a conveniently placed stripper pole.
  • B-Movie
  • Badass Grandpa / Cool Old Guy / Handicapped Badass: Kanai.
  • Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Both played straight and subverted - the most damage Yoshie gets to her face is having the skin of her cheekbone torn off, revealing her cyborg implants, and it doesn't look too bad, but poor Kikue has the skin on her face removed from the bridge of her nose down as part of her full transformation.
  • Beware the Nice Ones: Yoshie.
  • Black Bra and Panties / Stocking Filler: Essentially what the Tengun wear.
  • Blade Below the Shoulder: An interesting take on this trope, as one of the many hidden weapons in Yoshie's arsenal are a pair of retractable katanas that emerge from her arm pits.
  • Black Comedy
  • Bloody Hilarious
  • Body Horror: Kikuyakko, by the end of the film.
  • Brainwashed and Crazy: Kikuyakko, towards the end. Also the Tengun.
  • The Bully: Kikuyakko starts out as one towards Yoshie.
  • Calling Your Attacks: Happens often.
    • "Wig napalm!"
    • "Breast milk from hell!"
  • Camp
  • Corrupt Corporate Executive: Both Hikaru Kagano and his father, Kenyama. They kidnap and force young women into becoming their personal assassins, attempt to murder anyone and everyone who gets in their way, and they ultimately desire to destroy Japan to achieve their goals.
  • Dark Action Girls: The Tengun.
  • Dirty Old Man: Kanai has shades of this, notably during his death.

This is paradise!