OneChanbara
A samurai girl clad in a fur bikini and cowboy hat takes on hordes of zombies with a sword. If you've been looking for all the excitement of a Uwe Boll video game movie but without the Uwe Boll and with an even lower budget, look no further!
My expectations for this film were fairly low. You can't expect too much from a flick about a bikini-wearing samurai assassin girl. On the other hand, you should be able to expect at least a minimal amount of gratuitious mayhem, action, and excitement. You won't get that here.
OneChanbara makes the astonishing decision to take its world populated by ridiculous characters (which include a Go-Go Yubari ball & chain wielding rip-off, a kung fu zombie with pimp-style gold chains, school girl samurais, and more) and play the whole thing as a completely straight-faced melodrama. The worst part is that it's generally so slow-paced and dull that you won't even be laughing at how inept the acting is during the supposedly sad scenes.
The fight scenes are mostly wretched. They're apparently modeled directly after the video game the movie is based on, so there are lots of poorly digitized effects and stupid looking special moves where the cowboy samurai girl Aya will spin around in a circle and kill everything in the room while some bad looking CGI blood splatters the camera. This happens over and over. Aya herself isn't very convincincing as the deadly bikini samurai girl, not that she's given much of anything to do except look expressionless for most of the movie. Aside from the special moves she seems about as badass as a marshmallow.
Her companions have slightly meatier roles, but with a story this bad that's not really a good thing. Her chubby male comrade spends most of the movie being useless. Reiko, the hot mom gunslinger, is the most likable of the bunch but she's still saddled with a pointless backstory that you'll be sick of before long.
Don't even get me started on the incredibly bad zombie makeup, pitiful warehouse sets, and the rest of the special effects.
It seems nearly impossible to take a movie set in a post-apocalypse with hordes of zombies, bikini-clad babes and schoolgirls with swords, a MILF gunslinger, and mad scientists and make the whole thing boring. Somehow OneChanbara has pulled it off. Dr. Boll would be proud.
