After writing part 1 of this post, I realised I'd forgotten about those 'crazy-ass Japanes movies' - so i'm back to change my argument slightly. After watching - and thoroughly enjoying - a film like Machine Girl where a yakuza boss's wife uses a drill-bra to utterly wreck a japanese highshoolers tits, its pretty hard 
to act like there's absolutely no appeal in silly, cathartic, over the top violence. The truith is, perhaps I was a little hasty with my thirst for reading human expression into everything. Sometimes, seeing blood spray is the point of all the scenes where blood is spraying.
I will maintain that violence for it's own sake is just tedious and, in the case of those 'crazy-ass japanese movies' (especially when body horror comes into play) a lot of the appeal is the creativity of the matchup. It's far better to see a one-armed, serafuku-clad, tJapanese girl minigun her way through hordes of middle aged ninjas than it is to just watch two people beat the snot out of each other - even if there's comparable gallons of blood.
You should watch machine girl, by the way. It's good shit.