The story is pretty odd. It begins in 1628 with a small, hidden Japanese community secretly and illegally practicing the Christian faith; when agents of the Tokugawa shogunate find out, they infiltrate and accidentally shoot a child named Shiro, but he miraculously not only walks away unharmed but uses miraculous powers to restore the icon of the Virgin Mary they smashed. Turns out he's the miraculous second coming of Christ, but a prophecy states that if he's prevented from fulfilling his destiny as Christ, he'll be reborn as Satan. Once he grows to manhood, his people start using "Christian sorcery" (???) to wipe out the Tokugawa. Enter Ninja Scroll protagonist (and Japanese folk hero) Jubei, who heads to Shiro's compound with a group of improbable ninjas (one carries a rocket launcher, while another can turn into an armored mini-jet) and slaughters everyone in sight.

Before long, Shiro is attacking him with a magical dragon made of roof tiles and getting his arms cut off. Jubei wins the battle, but some dark sexual sorcery ensures that Shiro will be coming back later—in Satan guise, of course—to go on a massive kill spree of his own, alongside some mysteriously resurrected martial-arts masters who live for rape and slaughter. Why did Shiro's second in command engineer all this? Apparently for revenge on the Tokugawa, though why he thought a kill-happy demon was better than a benevolent Christ is anyone's guess.

All the appeal of an abattoir

About all that can be said positively about Ninja Resurrection is that it pulls off some really striking imagery once in a while: When one of the resurrected mass murderers is attacked by ninjas and pincushioned with swords, for instance, a particularly striking shot catches his horrified attackers standing well back, reflected in the sword that's magically sliding free of his eviscerated body. Jubei's origin story is choppy and comes out of nowhere, but it looks pretty impressive. And Shiro's violent, grotesque rebirth, as he claws his full-sized-adult body free of a blood-spraying, dying woman, is ghastly but certainly creative and memorable.

But all such moments of visual bravura come scattered haphazardly around in a story that's all over the place, stylistically, tonally and narratively. Long, dry explanations of barely necessary history start both OVAs, as if they're setting the tone for a historical series rather than a gutty bloodbath. A lengthy sequence where Jubei goes home and relaxes among friends feels like it was cribbed from Ruroni Kenshin, and it looks completely different from the rest of the two-part film, which inconsistently and poorly looks like it's trying to ape the style of Ninja Scroll creator Yoshiaki Kawajiri. While the second episode ends with Shiro and his allies murdering a vast crowd of festival-goers for no evident reason, that's far from the only thing these episodes leave unresolved; most of the story feels patchy, poorly connected and generally not very well thought through.

Which basically leaves a bunch of animated murders and rapes, given some questionable historical value with tie-ins to actual historical events. (The wars and mythic figures of the time, not the transforming airship-ninja.) It comes across as a clumsy attempt to imitate the sex-and-violence-and-history of the original Ninja Scroll, but it follows in its predecessor's footsteps poorly, and it winds up feeling like a cash-in that isn't much worth the cash.