Steampunk Samurai Biker Chick

If I could give this movie zero stars, I would. I watch a lot of bad movies. I've seen both classics and the unheard of. I made an IMDB account to give a different perspective on bad movies, to break down the elements of each film and rate them purely based on how fun they are. Unfortunately the next movie I saw was Steampunk Samurai Biker Chick. This is half a movie at most. Half of the film is blurry stock footage. It's more than a little vague, but I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be the general state of the post apocalypse? It's mostly of a military nature, but also frequently too vague and blurry to be certain. In between the stock footage bulk of the film, there's a vague plot about fuel pirates trying to steal fuel from a comparably vague company. You can tell they're pirates because they wear tricorne hats from Party City. One of the main pirates has a possibly real relationship with one of the fuel drivers. Anyway, on to what there isn't: There is no "steampunk." There is an ostensible post apocalypse, in that way where a cheap "post apocalypse" means chain link fences and sheet metal warehouses. There are no samurai. There are two mall/flea market katanas. There are a few bikers, but our titular chick is not one of them. There are a handful of shots where they use a greenscreen and pretend she's on a motorcycle. You can give it a maximum of half the title if you ignore compound nouns and count any woman as a "chick." On the plus side, this is my new low bar. Every movie, no matter how bad, will always be compared to just over an hour of alternating blurry stock footage meaning nothing and furious hot nonsense that wishes it could be Mad Max in the city.

For the uninitiated, "steampunk" is a literary movement in science fiction and fantasy literature that embraces retro-futurism, a technical aesthetic based on how people of the past saw the future, particularly in the Victorian era where steam power was the motive force of industry and transportation. It recaptures the imagery and style of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, filtered through modern sensibilities.

Steampunk makes money, in books, fashion, prop design....even architecture and music. Which is probably why the makers of this movie put the word "steampunk" in the title. There's just one small problem: there's nothing even remotely steampunky about this movie. It's set in the future, not the past, with a post-apocalyptic aesthetic that is vaguely more cyberpunk than steampunk, while still lacking the budget to visualize anything more complicated that dime store chic.

There are also no samurai in the movie. Oh, there are some women who run around in white geisha face paint and carrying katanas, which they can use to stop laser beams but not someone attacking them with a two-by-four. But they don't exhibit any kind of samurai code or sensibilities. They're just another "theme" biker gang seen in a million Mad Max rip offs.

The plot is an incomprehensible mess, with "fuel pirates" stealing gasoline from...someone. It's really just a bunch of scenes of various groups of people with goofy wardrobe choices and face paint, with some of the "pirates" actually wearing tri-corn hats, and others with painted-on sideburns that reach into areas where the human face doesn't actually grow hair. Most of the cast just opts for random black or white stripes across their faces, like they just wandered in from an Adam Ant video.

The filmmaking is a absolute mess. I would advise not watching film if you have epilepsy or some other neurological disorder that is triggered by visual over-stimulation. There are more blur filter and pixellation than a Japanese porno film - probably to hide the cheap backgrounds - and enough shaky-cam to give a circus acrobat vertigo. The fight scenes are uninspired and done back actors with no combat training. The worst fights are in slow motion in a futile attempt to hide how bad they are.

If you're looking for a good steampunk movie, try The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes movies or Christopher Nolan's The Prestige. Or seek out one of the better steampunk-themed TV shows like The Wild Wild West or The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne. And the only good samurai movies come from Japan.