DVD: Yûdai Yamaguchi & Jun'ichi Yamamoto's MEATBALL MACHINE

Here's a description of Meatball Machine (2005) from the website of the Fantasia Festival: "It's always nice to encounter a film whose psych-out sensibilities go further than most audiences could possibly demand, expect or enjoy. This skull-smashing cyberpunk horror freakout from filmmaker Yûdai Yamaguchi and Jun'ichi Yamamoto (creator of the 1999 cult short [note: according to numerous Japanese sources, the running time of Meatball Machine (1999) was 70 minutes] that inspired this semi-remake/expansion) is exactly that kind of beast. The film's absurdist premise concerns the less-than-happy arrival of alien life on our planet, not quite new terrain for cinema but... wait. The good news is that the aliens have not come to Earth with grandiose plans for world domination or anything of that magnitude. No, these particularly bent extraterrestrials have come to our planet with only one purpose - to eat each other! The bad news, as far as citizens of Earth are concerned, is that in their quest to do this, the aliens violently (and very invasively) take control of human bodies in order to mutate them into shrieking, bleeding weapons of mass destruction through which to wage street fights with one another! ¶ Hyper-loud, hyper-violent, hyper-perverse, hyper-everything, MEATBALL MACHINE's all-guns-blazing cavalcade of grotesqueries do not make for a passive filmgoing experience. Coming from a similar universe as Shinya Tsukamoto's TETSUO films, with surrealistic body-horror elements reminiscent of David Cronenberg, Sogo Ishii, William S. Burroughs and , this film is a very literal assault on the senses and, mark our words, it will leave your cortex begging for mercy. Is that a bad thing? Of course not, silly rabbit! But do proceed with caution because this is cinematic edgeplay, and it does stain. Buzzsaws and hand cannons sprout from infested bodies as semi-organic weaponry, eyeballs are drilled into aerosol, the 'Necroborgs' themselves look like something that might transpire if HR Giger designed a GWAR concert and, perhaps nastiest of all, the audience is treated to numerous internal shots designed to show us exactly what is happening inside the film's parasite-possessed characters. As you may suspect, things get messy and proceed to get... messier, making for an astoundingly gross experience that never fails to impress. Did we mention it's also a love story?!"

For more information on Meatball Machine (2005), see Twitch's eleventh, tenth, ninth, eighth, seventh, sixth, fifth, fourth, third, second, and first articles on it.

Yamaguchi's previous directing credits include Tebana Sankichi and Twice Shiroh Strikes! (Tebana Sankichi to 2 (tuwaisu) Shirô ga yuku), Sakigake!! Cromartie High School: The Movie (Sakigake!! Kuromati Kôkô: The Movie), Present (Purezento) - one of the movies in the Kazuo Umezu's Horror Theater (Umezu Kazuo: kyôfu gekijô) hexalogy - and Battlefield Baseball (Jigoku Kôshien).

Amazon.com: Meatball Machine (2005) DVD
Meatball Machine (2005) trailer (Japanese w/o subtitles; downloadable 4.5 MB WMV file)
Meatball Machine (2005) clip - opening (Japanese w/ English subtitles; downloadable 7.1 MB MOV file)
Meatball Machine (2005) official website
GOMORRAHY.com: Meatball Machine (2005) (w/ trailer, clip, & stills)