Low-budget Japanese sci-fi/horror movies occupy the WTF niche once occupied by dada and surrealism. One thinks of the 1989 classic Tetsuo the Iron Man, which was kinda sorta about a dude with metal cancer who turned into a kinda sorta cyberpunkborg and killed people. For 67 minutes.
This disdain for such infantilizing bourgeois niceties as plot and character development is echoed in the newly released Meatball Machine—a Frankenstein-on-steroids-meets-Highlander romp that might best be described as Tetsuo with squishy bits.
There are actually three versions of MM on the DVD—each insaner than the last. There’s the original, super-low-budget short in which a courting couple are attacked by malignant space worms that turn them into constantly mutating two-legged flesh-panzer contestants in the alien equivalent of WWE Smackdown.
Then there’s another short—Reject or Death—which starts with a mind-bogglingly overlong wrist-slashing sequence and climaxes with a sexily dressed, weapon-spitting frankenslut cornering and savagely gutting three rubber-masked tourists—an African, a Native American and a Chinese fellow. Why? I have no freaking idea. And nor, I suspect, does the director.
The main feature has budget and plot. But not enough to spoil the awesome final shoot-out where the lady MM grows a cannon, garden shears and a flamethrower in her attempts to gut the male MM who won’t fight back ’cause he lurvs her. Aw.Family-friendly films don’t come any cuter than this. I wholeheartedly recommend Meatball Machine to any parent looking for a nice change from The Lion King or Finding Nemo.