Review for Geisha Assassin

Introduction

There's this geisha…


… who wants to avenge her murdered father.


She's hunting the samurai who killed him…


… but first she has to deal with his flunkies…


… some ninja…


… the ninja queen…


… a priest…


… have some flashbacks…


… then fight a monk…


… a red Indian (Ainu)…?


… before she can fight the Samurai.

The Disc

Yuck! Geisha Assassin gets a 1.85:1 anamorphic transfer, which as you would expect is an NTSC-PAL standards conversion. But you probably won't be expecting one as murky as this one. Everything that you can associate with a bad conversion appears here, ghosting, softness, juddering to the point where you think that it's a flick-book that you are watching, a lack of detail, and blacks that are greyer than John Major. It looks like a cheap '80s imported US television series.

The audio is a bog standard DD 2.0 Japanese stereo track, which does just what it's supposed to. Sadly the subtitles are of the player forced variety. You can't turn them off. You'll also find trailers on this disc for this film, Cutie Honey, and Dororo.

Ooh, look. Killing makes geisha girl happy!

Conclusion

It's Double Dragon, or half of it anyway. Double Dragon was an arcade game, a sideways scrolling beat-em-up, where you had to fight a whole bunch of flunkies, mid-level bosses, end-of-level bosses, to get to the end of the game and rescue the girl, the twist being that you wound up having to fight your brother for the maiden fair. Geisha Assassin only has one protagonist, it's revenge not rescue that motivates the mission, and there are no flunkies, only a series of end-of-level bosses for the geisha to defeat. The big problem is that I'm not playing this game; I'm just watching the demo. Unless you watch a demo to learn the moves, then it's a deathly dull experience I can assure you. Geisha Assassin is a tiresomely monotonous action film, which proves that you do need a story and character development to make an action movie. Worse, it's a mediocre film made shoddier by a horrible disc. With detail levels so bad that you can't make out what is happening in the darker scenes, there's not much point even watching this film. The disc is good for resting your coffee on though.