Nope, it’s not the food counter at Ikea – Tetsuo meets the Power Rangers in this schlock horror from the creators of Versus, Kabuking Z: The Movie, Battlefield Baseball, Tokyo Gore Police and The Machine Girl…
On the streets of Tokyo a bizarre battle is taking place as parasitical beings take over humans turning them into biochemical weapons. Their hosts are turned into maniacal killers who attempt to destroy each other, furthering their own existence by consuming the loser alive.
In the midst of such chaos we find a love story between shy Yoki (Issei Takahashi, Kill Bill Vol. 1, Detroit Metal City) and equally bashful Sachiko (Aoba Kawai), just about to finally make a move on each other. The only trouble is those pesky parasites are about to pit them against each other. Love doesn’t get much messier then this…
Co-directors Junichi Yamamoto (Kabuking Z: The Movie) – who directed the original short that inspired Meatball Machine in 1999 – and Yudai Yamaguchi (Battlefield Baseball, co-writer of Versus) pull from a raft of references, from David Cronenburg’s Scanners and eXistenZ, to John Carpenter’s The Thing, from Lucio Fulci’s Zombie Flesheaters to Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead – but most obvious of these is Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo. Reflecting not only the mechanical fetishism, but the use stop-motion and even, arguably, the plot – it’s just delivered in a less ‘arty’, more coherent fashion (at least for this sort of thing!)
Like Tetsuo it tugs heavily on a long history in Japan of transforming heroes, from Ultraman to (what became in the West) the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers blended with a fascination with mechanisations that goes back nearly as far. It also mirrors the repressed sexuality that was so much a part of Tetsuo – though it arguably takes the fetishism angle further, and despite the more exploitative nature of one scene in particular (which if anything reminded me of Andrzej Zulawski’s cult early 80s horror Possession for some reason), it somehow seems a lot more wholesome. However, even with the more comic book styled-action it never truly escapes Tetsuo’s shadow.
There’s plenty of stylised bloodletting on show, what with eye gouging, human cannons, saws and nasty (laughing) parasites and so on. It’s all good, low-budget, old school horror fun, and with special effects by Yoshihiro Nishimura – who went on to direct Tokyo Gore Police and supervise effects on The Machine Girl, the film can be seen as the nucleus of the new wave of Japan’s splatter-punk horrors. It’s clear the filmmakers were still learning their trade, and even by the end of the film had come a long way from the start. Even the short film made for the original DVD release, Meatball Machine: Reject Of Death (also included on this DVD release), manages to be a lot slicker in production (as well as being more racially and sexually offensive than the original).
Though likeable, the film lacks the naïve charm of the original short that inspired it – also included on the DVD – even if that has all the finesse of a Screen Test young filmmakers entry (and probably wasn’t far off being that). What it comes down to is even with the addition of an unlikely love story, there’s still not quite enough to propel the story over its 90 minute running time, it lacks the tightness of more recent splatter-punk horrors. The films rather drawn out confrontation between the two lovers eventually starts to drag – but perhaps that’s a symptom of filmmakers finding their feet, and a comparably larger budget!
Meatball Machine is an enjoyable romp for those of us brought up on those (ahem) wholesome horror movies of the 80s…
Meatball Machine is released by 4Digital Asia on Monday 6 July 2009.
DVD details
Distributor: 4Digital Asia (UK)
A solid DVD release from 4Digital, with a good transfer of the film and plenty of extras, including the afore-mentioned mini-sequel (of sorts) Meatball Machine: Reject Of Death, and the original 1999 short. There’s also a fab little mockumentary, What about Doi?, which only goes to prove how under-utilised that character is.
There are also loads of ‘making of’ and behind-the-scenes documentaries, making this one occasion when a UK release is by no means second best in to those already available.
