In short: Chanbara Beauty (2008)

You would think it's impossible to complain about the lack of quality in a movie about a young woman dressed in boots, a bikini and a cowboy hat killing zombies. You would be wrong.

I was watching Chanbara Beauty in the hope of some low-brow, gory fun. I didn't expect a second Machine Girl, but I didn't expect to be bored, either.

The movie's road to boredom is paved with the following things:

• The unbelievable inability of the lead actress to achieve the only thing she has to do besides wearing the already described get-up (which doesn't look all that hot on her, either): Looking as if she doesn't care
• A script that's even to flawed for this style of movie: There are zombie apocalypse survivors who belong to the last few percent of humanity and are still not barricading the rooms where they are sleeping, melodramatic moments that would hardly work even if anyone here could act, and a downright insane insistence of playing the damn thing straight like a real movie with real actors, instead of a shoddily thrown together piece of crap. Where silliness could actually lead to something amounting to fun, we are tortured by a painfully humorless script
• Locations that consist of a warehouse, a few square feet of studio backlot and approximately one and a half sets, made by the apprentice of the apprentice of a set designer who got his job because all of his predecessors were killed by long-haired ghosts
• Bad zombie make-up. I mean the kind of zombie make-up an amateur movie would be ashamed of. Especially painful during daylight shots
• An overabundance of (badly done) digital special effects where they don't belong, including digital blood, digital melee weapons(!), digital muzzle flashes, digital sparks

How could anyone get this wrong?

 

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