From the Rental Vault (2005): Death Trance

Bear with me. Way back in 1984, Walter Hill directed an odd sort of movie called Streets of Fire. He called it a "rock and roll fable" and used the license implied by the word "fable" to mix elements of 1950s and 1980s culture in ways they never existed in real life. I've no idea if Death Trance director Yuji Shimomura ever saw Streets of Fire, but he owes a lot of his movie to the concept of mixing modern mythologies together to create something with parts of each.

A man named Grave (Tak Sagakuchi) steals a mystic coffin from some monks because he believes it will grant his wish to fight against the most powerful warrior in the world. He drags it after him around the countryside, fending off those who try to steal it and accompanied by a strange little girl. The monks send one of their few survivors, Ryuen (Takamasa Sugi) to retrieve the coffin, because what will actually happen when it's opened is that the Goddess of Destruction will emerge and destroy the world. A wandering fighter named Sid (Kentaro Seagal -- yes, he's Steven Seagal's son) also seeks the coffin because of his belief in its wish-granting power. Different dream spirits appear to the different men during the movie as well, communicating their own strange messages.

Although the characters mostly dress like they lived in feudal Japan and most of the fighting is done with swords, we also have a variety of guns employed against opponents, including a rocket launcher. One group of marauders owns a motorcycle. Sid sports a pompadour-mohawk hairdo that would have looked just fine in a Bow Wow Wow video, but the strange young girl accompanying the coffin wears traditional Japanese dress. The way the characters slip in and out of old-fashioned stylized dialogue into more modern speech patterns is amusing, and everyone does look like they're enjoying themselves. But that's probably limited to their side of the screen. 

Death Trance is three-fifths martial arts movie, one-fifth Mad Max and one-fifth A Canticle for Liebowitz, dropped into Quentin Tarentino's blender and served up with some dynamite cinematography, haunting images and first-rate fight choreography. But like Tarentino's own hyperbolic mix of movie genres, Kill Bill (vols. 1 and 2), it is at the same time almost wholly a stylistic exercise only lightly seasoned with real story. Characters, ideas and themes both visual and plot-related appear and disappear without much warning or reason.

Some of that's probably on Shimomura's tab. Death Trance is his first movie as a director. He was previously the action sequence director on the move Versus (also starring Sagakuchi) and the video game Devil May Cry 3. He may have been too used to having a movie's primary director carry the storytelling part of the job and simply not recognize when that hasn't been done. Watch Death Trance and you'll probably wow at some of the way it looks and moves (as well as sounds -- Japanese metal band Dir En Grey gives it a soundtrack pretty much unique among martial arts movies that rely on swordfighting scenes). But you'll probably forget pretty quickly what story or idea tied any of those images together, since it was lightweight at best and more than likely nonexistent.