It could hardly be simpler. There's a MacGuffin and assorted people want it. FIGHT!!!

THE MACGUFFIN: a coffin, about which stories are told. Some say it grants wishes. Some say it'll bring about the end of the world. Some say it contains the heads of all the people killed by the thief who stole it from a monastery. Also, there's a little girl who follows it around and will cry if it's attacked.

THE PEOPLE WHO WANT IT: 1. There's a samurai played by Tak Sakaguchi, which is all you need to know. (He rarely bothers using a sword, preferring fists, kicks and a wooden stick.) 2. There's a bloke called Sid, played by one of the children of Steven Seagal. (He looks completely Caucasian despite being only half and speaking perfectly normal Japanese.) 3. A monk played by Takamasa Suga (best known for Kamen Rider) who can't fight but has been ordered by his abbot to recover the coffin. 4. everyone else, because it's treasure.

The film's set in samurai times, but with the odd gleeful anachronism. Guns are historically okay. Samurai didn't like them (for obvious reasons), but they were introduced to Japan in the 13th century. Rocket launchers and motorbikes probably aren't... but hey, the film also has spider-vampires and some indeterminate, black-clad figures in the same undead-haunted bit of forest where the trees have faces growing out of them. I'll provisionally call them zombies, but that's speculative. They don't bite, they're tough as hell and they know martial arts. There's no explanation for the tree-faces, by the way.

The film isn't non-stop fight scenes, but they're the point of it. The non-combatants make things slightly more interesting, though. That little girl and the monk. (There's a gag moment early on with Sakaguchi and the girl that made Misaki laugh. This is a Tak Sakaguchi film, so again she watched it with me.)

It gets weird at the end. There's a sort of medieval Japanese TARDIS door and we're told that the coffin can end the world, which doesn't bother Sakaguchi's character. This is normal for action movies, of course. High stakes, big fight, the end. That's how it always goes, right? One hardly pays any attention to the threatened doom... except that here it happens. There's a bewildering post-apocalyptic ending with fallen angels in the desert and the reveal that one of the characters we'd met previously seems to have been another angel, but with the wings ripped off.

The director's going further than most with colour correction. Many scenes here are so desaturated as to be monochrome, but the goddess ending has been super-saturated to resemble a certain kind of 1950s film.

Do you need to watch this film? No. I prefer this kind of silly Japanese nonsense when it makes me laugh. This isn't a comedy, despite one or two gags and a merry disregard for historical accuracy. It is, though, passably entertaining and does nothing stomach-turning or offensive. I'd sooner watch this than your average samurai film. Misaki thought it was fine.