Chanbara Beauty

Introduction

Zombies! Why'd it have to be zombies? Horror isn't exactly the first genre I go to when picking a movie to watch, but my arm can be twisted, and if forced to, I'll even admit to liking the odd slash-em-up, but if there is one niche of this genre I do despise, it is the zombie movie. It's what you get when the producers lack the money for actors, and have to make do with extras instead. Lurching and lumbering across the screen, disintegrating like some sort of carnivorous leper, they lack personality, elegance, style, they're nothing more than humanoid Rotweillers, only not scary. Chanbara Beauty is a zombie movie… based on the Onechanbara videogame series. Well, it worked for Resident Evil. But, it is a zombie movie with a difference, and if I keep telling myself that, I may even believe it by the end of this review.


In an unspecified future, the D3 Corporation started resurrecting the dead. Not long after, the world turned into a desolate post-apocalyptic nightmare, where the remaining humans are hunted by hordes of ravenous zombies. But there are three plucky heroes fighting the undead threat, armed with sword, shotgun, and penknife?! They have a mission to complete, a world to save, the only problem is that there are three different missions, and thousands upon thousands of zombies.

The Disc

Well, better get the NTSC-PAL conversion out of the way first. Not that it makes much difference. Chanbara Beauty looks as if it was shot digitally, and the prevalence of dark and murky scenes hardly allows for any sort of clarity in the first place. It's also worth comparing the feature to the trailer, as it reveals that the feature has had some sort of obscurity filter applied, so that the cheesy effects aren't even more apparent (It doesn't work). It's shot in the rough and ready Blair Witch shakycam style that has been de rigueur for horror for the last ten years, and it makes you look forward to the daylight scenes so that you can take a better look at that bikini.


Sound comes in DD 5.1 and DD 2.0 Japanese flavours, along with an English subtitle track. It's a nice enough bit of immersion, the dialogue is clear enough, but it's nothing to write home about.

The disc offers you the aforementioned trailer, as well as a 35 minute Making Of, which with its behind the scenes footage, and copious interview soundbites, does just what it sets out to.

But look at that DVD cover. Now there's a thing of beauty. One to keep and frame, or set as your PC wallpaper.

Conclusion

What's not to like. You have a schoolgirl, with the traditionally short uniform skirt carrying a big sword, you have a biker chick, in form fitting leathers carrying a shotgun, and you have a girl wearing a cowboy hat, boots, and bikini, carrying an even bigger sword. You have a chubby comedy sidekick, an evil mad scientist, and you have hordes and hordes of zombies. You have lots of action, and believe me, if you're looking for something different in a zombie movie, then a bikini clad female samurai scything her way through the undead, with sprays of gore and body parts is certainly different. And just as they should be, the effects are cheap and cheerful, horrendous CGI overlaid on laughably bad prosthetics and obvious make-up. It's just what you want to watch when lager and curry are on the menu, and less of the curry and more of the lager. It's even got the obligatory ropy acting. It's the sort of movie they used to show clips of on late night Channel 4, in shows like Eurotrash, where we could point and laugh at the naffness of foreign cinema, while secretly harbouring a desire to watch it all the same.


I fall outside of that group though, and freely admit that this type of movie isn't my thing. Even though I don't watch them, I recognise the clichés all too freely, and if a beloved family member turns zombie, requiring a loved one to kill them, or someone faces the dreadful choice of either becoming a zombie, with only one bullet left in their gun, and making the ultimate sacrifice, well you won't be surprised if my attention starts to drift. But I have to balance that with the eye-opener that is a bikini clad, sword wielding heroine, and Eri Otoguro is even more of a heroine when you learn that they filmed this movie in winter. I'll be stoned if I could find any goose bumps though. I know, I checked. There is also a slight diversion of an ending as well, which takes this away from traditional zombie territory, and into manga and anime country, with a story of clans, bloodlines, and channelling a grand lightshow of chi. In a bikini and hanging from a wire harness as well, in the middle of winter. The girl is a trouper!


Chanbara Beauty is naff, it's cheesy, and it's not my cup of tea at all. If it weren't for the… ahem, physical attributes of the main cast, I probably would have ejected the disc long before it finished. But I freely recognise that for fans of zombie movies, there is a lot to appreciate here, and it isn't every such film that has the faceless masses of undead despatched by something as elegant as a samurai sword. Normally it's massed gunfire, so you do have something different in this film. And truth be told, I enjoyed Chanbara Beauty a lot more than I did Resident Evil. From a loather of zombie movies, that's practically a ringing endorsement.