From here on out the story becomes a bit confused. Yes, it is easy to follow, but when it comes to any sort of explanation you need to mine what you can and fill in the rest. The aliens, the mystery metal, the in-fighting between the aliens, the bugs that seem to follow them around and heal injuries, the metal sphere's thirst for blood, the nature of the Makaraga creature that comes from the sphere, there are all sorts of things here that fit together like a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle.
What it all comes down to is whether or not you want to work through it. For my money, I liked the movie. The story is a mish-mash of genres, bringing the samurai film into close proximity with an alien movie, and even tossing in the monster movie. While the movie's personality suffers from multiple personality disorder, director and co-writer Keita Amemiya keeps things interesting with his unique visual flair. Yes, the performances are fine too, nothing much to talk about on that front.
All of this movie's problems lie with the screenplay and the execution of said screenplay. It almost feels like two screenplays were in a nasty, twisted metal car wreck and the result is what became the shooting script. An intriguing mess, but still a mess. Fortunately, the visual style and always surging pacing keep the viewer interested.
Audio/Video. Like the other films in the set, the transfer is soft and fine detail is lost. Still, it does the job. The biggest issues come during scenes shot day-for night, which look utterly ridiculous here and have no detail. The audio does not have a lot of life to it, but is considerably clearer than the video, this goes for both the dub English and original Japanese tracks.
Extras. None, aside from a couple of trailers for other Tokyo Shock releases.
Bottomline. Is Keita Amemiya a good film maker? Yes and no. In the big picture, probably not, but within the realm of low budget film making, he does a lot of interesting and worthwhile things, better than most. It makes me wonder of he got a big budget and a quality script what he could do. I enjoy his films and am glad to have them in my collection, with this likely being the pinnacle of what he has achieved.
Recommended.
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