The director of the cult classics Verses and Battlefield Baseball, Yudai Yamaguchi, teams up with rookie filmmaker Jun’ichi Yamamoto to create Meatball Machine, a work which stands as an a testament that the only thing more repulsive than plagiarism is the absence of a entertaining (or existent) plot.
When one outcast, Yoji (Issei Takahashi), saves another, Sachiko (Aoba Kawai), from being raped, the two attempt to form a romantic bond. Before they can consummate their affections, a biomechanical alien life form zombifies the latter, thus creating a killing machine of biomechanical proportions. Shortly thereafter, Yoji is also transformed and, as the law of “necroborgics” decrees, the two must know battle to the death so that the victor may feast on the loser’s corpse.
As wildly intriguing as the premise might seem, it merely serves as the arbitrary springboard for Yamaguchi and Yamamoto to shoot an extremely protracted battle sequence. However, what is most insulting is not the gratuitous duration of the fight itself but the unabashed manner in which the directors flippantly placate their audience in respect to a storyline. If we are willing to ignore that fact that the external form of the alien menace was taken directly from the Clark Nova torso in David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch and that its internal form all-too-readily smacks of David Lynch’s baby in Eraserhead, we cannot dismiss the fact that the poor man’s version of Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man unapologetically presents a mouthpiece to dispense with the silhouette of a plot (and most of the idle chit-chat, i.e. dialogue, for that matter) before proceeding to the filmmakers’ true interest: the final battle scene. If such lethargic screenwriting weren’t enough, at each stage of the brawl a voiceover of the plot explication reiterates what is taking place before us, ad infinitum.
Granted, the throwaway picture does host a barrage of lovingly crafted F/X and gore but, as many critics of the genre justifiably proclaim, these two elements, though helpful in the fashioning of horror, does not automatically result in a sound, appeasing feature. As such, the only purpose which Yudai Yamaguchi and Jun’ichi Yamamoto’s Meatball Machine serves is as a document as to what the two filmmakers have within their DVD collection, nothing else. It is works such as this which lend fuel to the harsh criticism that the horror genre is fraught with gratuitous violence and bloodshed and is subsequently devoid of concern or respect for its audience. Sadly, if Meatball Machine where the figurehead of the field, such detractors would be right on the money.
-Egregious Gurnow
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