Thursday 23 July 2009

DVD Reviews

Meatball Machine
Yudai Yamaguchi and Jun'ichi Yamamoto
4Digital Asia

Review by Blake Harmer

Have you ever come up with an idea for something, be it a video game, a movie or just some crazy scheme or invention, but you haven’t been able to think of a good name for it, or actually been able to find the money to make that said dream a reality? Well it hasn’t stopped the creators of Meatball Machine, a film so fantastic, that they don’t get round to the plot until about half way through the film, and throw up a very clumsy excuse to call it Meatball Machine in the last two minutes of the film.

The plot begins very confusingly as almost two different films, the first follows the main protagonist Yoji, a lonely virgin who sits on his own during his lunch break at his job in the factory and watches the girl next door the factory, another young lonely virgin called Sachiko, and then goes home and masturbates about her. Whilst this is going on another man, who appears to have some futuristic looking laser sword on a pole goes around fighting monsters and feeding bits of their bodies to his daughter in order to keep her alive as it later transpires that she was almost turned into a monster once and this is her only way of staying alive.

The plot does get coherent later on, saying that the monsters are humans who are taken over by parasites who wish to fight each other and eat each other’s parasite as part as some sort of sport, and once the protagonists finally meet properly, Sachiko is attacked by a parasite and Yoji must find a way to kill her, but by then you are past caring. The acting is terrible, with most of the characters showing hardly any emotion during the film. The monsters, whilst being covered in gore and looking quite menacing, do look like bad guys from a Power Rangers episode, and the fighting is even worse than that.

The only good things I can say is that the gore in it is good and plentiful, although not gruesome enough to make you squirm. That and the main protagonist gets kicked in by a lady boy, which whilst random, was shitting hilarious to watch.

The Emotionally Fourteen Rating:
Violence:
Some very gory scenes, especially the parasite taking over by drilling holes into the host’s eyes. Fighting is pretty poor though.
Swearing: Realistic amount of swearing for a horror film, nothing to really get excited about.
Sex/Nudity: None to really comment about, you do see an obviously fake boob on the monster version of Sachiko but that’s about it.
Summary: A truly terrible J-horror film, that doesn’t know whether it wants to be a Guyver style monster action film or a true splatter horror fest. It really fails on all levels, but hey, what do you expect from a film that felt like it came up with the title at the last minute. 3/10

1 comment:

  1. I WANT TO SEE IT... I WANT TO SEE IT.. I WANT TO SEE IT..

    ReplyDelete