A trailer for writer-director Go Ohara’s upcoming chambara B-movie GEISHA VS. NINJAS is now available. As purely genre entertainment, it depicts some of the more promising fight work from Japan’s beleaguered action film industry yet seen in the last decade. Why they had to go and spoil the moment with syrupy J-pop I don’t know.
Newcomer Minami Tsukui stars as a geisha named Kotono who seeks revenge on a clan of ninjas for the murder of her father.
GEISHA VS. NINJAS is Go’s directorial debut and by the looks of the trailer, he’s striving to bring Japan’s action output up to world-class standards even if the budget obviously isn’t there to fully support it.
Having started out as a stuntman under Donnie Yen’s action direction in THE PRINCESS BLADE, Go has emerged as one of Japan’s few up-and-coming action directors with credits that include DEVIL MAY CRY (the video game), DEATH TRANCE and CHANBARA BEAUTY (2008 – trailer), a live-action adaptation of the OneChanbara video game.
Japan’s action film industry has been in steady decline ever since their studio system fell apart in the early 1970s, about the same time that audiences finally lost interest in the chambara/samurai movie. Sonny Chiba and the Japan Action Club became virtually the sole savior of Japan’s martial arts-fueled action genre but even that faded away by the mid-1980s.
Since then, martial arts action from Japan has been relegated either to a few high-brow award contenders like THE TWILIGHT SAMURAI or a small but steady stream of cheesy, effects-filled B-movies with sci-fi themes and marketed directly to anime and video game fans, films such as YO-YO GIRL COP and VERSUS. A few exceptions that have managed to find middle ground have been RETURNER, IZO and THE PRINCESS BLADE.
Sources: Twitch, Nippon Cinema
Related Topics:Go Ohara • ninja • upcoming • Videos
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