Meatball Machine Kodoku (2017)

 

Director: Yoshihiro Nishimura

Screenplay: Yoshihiro Nishimura and Sakichi Sato

Cast: Tomori Abe, Kensuke Ashihara, Yurisa, Satoshi Eishima, Goki, Yôta Kawase, Riri Kôda, Rima Matsuda, Masanori Mimoto, Maki Mizui, Seminosuke Murasugi, Takashi Nishina, Takumi Saitoh, Ririne Sasano, Eihi Shiina, Kentarô Shimazu

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #201

 

In what is effectively a larger scale remake of the 2005 Meatball Machine, by Yudai Yamaguchi and Junichi Yamamoto, we begin with an analogy of placing all the most toxic creatures in a jar and using what survives for the poison. Thankfully, whilst demonstrating this onscreen, you get the real frogs and scorpions etc. being handled but with no animal cruelty. There was an offer of something immediately interesting, imaging if aliens decided to recreate this metaphor over an entire urban area of a Japanese metropolis, with bio-mechanical parasites to turn human beings into death machines.

Our lead is a fifty year old man Yuji (Yoji Tanaka) which has to be a rarity, especially as he is not an action hero, but actually a regular older man. He works, is wary of his health, and is a JBA debt collector, so not in a great job either. Baring an odd figure, the woman with a white line roller for streets in an odd green and white stripe get-up, Kodaku in the beginning offered a legitimately compelling narrative for a splatter Japanese pulp film by following a sympathetic lead with his humdrum life for effectively a prologue. Our lead himself is compelling, looking his age with whiting, balding hair and awkwardly police in his manner. His potential love interest Kaoru (Yurisa) is significantly younger, but she looks like a shy woman working in a bookstore, whilst he is merely the polite customer who orders comedy audiotapes from their store, so it does not come off as creepy.

My issues with Sushi Typhoon will be a question I will ponder on throughout the review, but this quiet prologue is good, following a sympathetic figure with money problems and confirmed with cancer, drastically changing his view of the world immediately as there is now a sense he should try to live his life whilst he can. The first really weird thing in this long prologue is the cabaret, a place of eccentricity which just leads to him being tricked out of the debt money he was collecting, the final insult before thirty minutes in the real title screen appears. In this time, the film cuts to a giant glass jar floating towards Earth in space repeatedly, the change to the actual film after this emotional build-up when its falls eventually over the district Yuji is in, trapping the residents inside and preparing them to become bio-mechanical monstrosities to fight each other for nefarious alien forms. He himself is turned, but because of the cancer cells in his body, he retains his humanity as he goes on his way to find Kaoru in the ensuing chaos.

The film takes a tumble immediately from this, as maybe a black fake savage character for a loan parody was not well advised especially in the 2010s. The film, as mentioned, is a fleshed out version of a 2005 film, which here is what happens if Power Rangers villains fought in gory fights, the director Nishimura very much taking the Tokusatsu genre and providing its extreme version, having actors in elaborate body horror costumes, from severed head bolas made from freshly acquired victims, and a literal multiple fist punch, to another character, a stalker of Kaoru, becoming a stalker turned car hybrid.

The practical effects, especially the costumes, look rubbery and fake but they are impressive and in mind of Nishimura being as known as a practical effects designer, his craft is on hand. Originally this was meant to be as much a review asking why I had been so cold to the work of Sushi Typhoon, the collective under the studio Nikkatsu that Nishimura has worked with, but the irony is that they had only really started to produce work officially under that name by 2010. The films from before, like Nishimura's own Tokyo Gore Police (2008), always fell under their banner for me, and still do at heart, even if they were not officially part of them. The best way to go forth then is thinking of these latter gorier live action genre films from these specific figures as their own category, a period of these Japanese films with a self awareness and especially of Western viewers, at least in that we briefly used to be gaga about these films for a short while. Figures from eclectic backgrounds, such as Noboru Iguchi who originally started in adult cinema, all journeymen and working creators who I have nothing against, and all going in varying directions.

This period from the West started as a trend briefly in the late 2000s and dissipated into the mid-2010s. And most of the films I saw, honestly, I did not really like at all, even though their combination of hyper elaborate pulp with these practically effects and usually a lot of gore could be appealing. There was however, the issue, which I had with many of those films and this one, is that they always fell into the same manic tone, of throwing about many interesting and bizarre moments but never finding an unpredictability to them until it all blurs together. A film like Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), arguably, follows the exact same tone but was an entirely different and intense experience with a distinct aesthetic and a varying tone.  The same is to mind in wondering why I can enjoy anime with this exact tone, and other absurd Japanese genre films, but not this.

Honestly, after a while Kodoku became a drudge to sit through, the fake blood split in buckets and all the mad practical effects eventually losing their impact. It is inventive and perverse, from the body transformations to the bio-mechanical infectors actually being little cockpits for aliens, acted out with cute evil puppets, with arms for eyes to steer their infected hosts. The issue is the sense that Yoshihiro Nishimura likes to just barrage you with chaos of actors bashing into each other and gore, but with it all bleeding into each other. Whilst I have enjoyed films far more cheaper looking than this from Japan, in this same ballpark, there was always those moments where the pace slowed down to let one breath, always something truly inspired even in average work, or if you watched a film like Attack Girls' Swim Team vs. The Undead (2007), something legitimately bizarre and not contrived.

This is all in mind I am covering a film where topless car man horse riding transpires, as is a brawl in the cabaret with breast machine guns, but it bleeds together with a numbing effect as happened with Tokyo Gore Police. It is a case that, tonally, you need to relay more on gore and practical effects, even in terms of mixing them up or even slowing the film down, which it never does once it completely ditches the promising start. Ultimate this left the film on a sour note for me. [Major Spoiler] A cynical one, where everyone dies for an alien brand of energy drink made from the strongest. [Spoilers End]. One frankly, after the initial promise of its first thirty minutes, disappointed me more.