Deadball Blu-ray Review
Baseball, Nazis and lots and lots (and lots) of blood. What's not to love?
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, March 23, 2013
Anyone who has seen any given Sushi Typhoon offering will probably already have a great idea of what to expect in
Deadball, and that anticipation will no doubt be seriously whetted with the happy little family outing that begins
the film. In a beautiful green field a father is playing baseball with his son while another child looks on in rapt wonder.
Okay, when does the mayhem begin? That is more or less the salient question in any Sushi Typhoon release, and
the good news is, there's not much a wait here. When the father insists that the son throw the ball a little harder, the
boy goes into what can only be termed a weird trance like state where he does an impossible yoga move that might be
termed One Legged Flamingo, and then blasts off into outer space courtesy of rocket propelled force emanating from his
feet. He hurls the ball at his father where it shatters the man's skull. Returning to Earth (and to himself), the boy in a
panic runs to his father, who is lying prone on the ground, his skull agape and with little pieces of his brain plopping out
every time his rapidly diminishing heartbeat gives them a little shove. It's gross and hilarious in equal measure, exactly
the stew that Sushi Typhoon fans have come to love over the past few years.
Baseball may be trumpeted as America's Favorite Pastime (arguable, but there you have it), but there's little doubt that
the sport has become perhaps even more of a phenomenon in Japan than it is in the United States. What's funny
about
this situation is how the so-called "splatter horror" genre has taken the sport to its bloody little heart, with
Battlefield
Baseball and now
Deadball combining completely peculiar elements culled from both the sports and horror
idioms. There's a decided through line from
Battlefield Baseball to this film, courtesy of director Yudai Yamaguchi
and star Tak Sakaguchi, but also of course due to the same sport being featured and a certain similarity between the
characters played by Sakaguchi. If anything, though,
Deadball is even bloodier and messier than
Battlefield
Baseball. And if you've a certain skewed sensibility, it's considerably funnier as well.
The prologue sets up the fact that Jubeh (in his more or less adult form played by Tak Sagakuchi) is deeply troubled by
killing his dear old Dad with an errant superpowered pitch, and the film quickly careens into a montage showing that
Jubeh, as an older teenager, has lost his moral compass and devolved into a life of crime, and has in fact been held
responsible for a series of felonies. Jubeh is obviously an unrepentant thug, and he has no problem flipping off a news
camera when he's hauled in to serve his time.
Once he's imprisoned in what might be termed a cross between a reform school and a POW camp, Jubeh is introduced
to the hilariously over the top warden, Ishihara (Miho Ninagawa), who it is revealed has a rather direct ancestral line
back to Nazis (yes, she's Japanese, but these films rarely make much sense), and has in fact inherited the Nazis' quest
for "racial purity". In Ishihari's formulation, that also involves athletic superiority and she insists that her inmates form a
baseball team to take out a neo-Nazi rival's team, who turn out to be a bunch of S&M dominatrixes.
It's absolutely ridiculous to try to afford any serious critical analysis to a film that is this relentlessly senseless. The film
is unequivocally unabashed about pushing all sorts of buttons and responses will vary dramatically based on how
squeamish and/or insistent upon political correctness each individual viewer is. Do you shirk at the thought of
masochistic elements like bottom walloping or (to put this as gracefully as possible) the penetration of the fist into
various naughty orifices? Does the sight of Nazis as comedy relief amuse or disturb you? How do you feel about
supercharged baseballs devastating various craniums?
Deadball makes no bones about being as provocative,
even intentionally offensive, as possible, and so enjoyment comes down to whether you're going to spend an hour and
half lurching from one aghast reaction to the next, or simply surrender to
Deadball's patent lunacy.
If you can get past the more gag inducing moments in
Deadball, there is some
very funny material here,
albeit material that's childish and lacking any sophistication whatsoever. In one over the top scene, Manit is involved in
a knock down drag out fight with Ishihara in her office. This included Ishihara being skewered with every pencil and
pen in sight, which penetrate her skull and in once case goes completely through her head. Of course as in any good
cartoon, this has next to no effect on her. But things get
totally ridiculous when her phone rings, and it's Manit
on the other line (which is in the same room—figure
that one out), at which points he starts punching her
"through" the phone (i.e., his fist hits the mouthpiece of his phone and then comes out the ear piece of Ishihara's
repeatedly pummeling the woman's face). It's like something you'd see in an old Looney Tune, which is often
exactly the ambience this film offers.
There are some fairly objective criteria that one can at least
attempt to judge
Deadball by, divorced from
the overtly objectional content that will probably be foremost in many viewers' minds. Aside from the cartoonish
performance styles, which may or may not be to various people's liking, the film does have some serious pacing issues,
where it seems to take
forever to get to the showdown baseball game that will decide several characters' fates.
Some will be willing to coast along with the film, lurching from one outrageous little moment to the next, without much
caring for what comes next. Others may be wondering if this film repeatedly bunts when it really could have been a
grand slam homerun.
Deadball Blu-ray, Overall Score and Recommendation
If you're a Sushi Typhoon fan, you will no doubt get a massive kick out of
Deadball, a film replete with spectacularly
gory (and completely goofy) effects, an utterly silly plot line (if you can even call it a plot), over the top characters and the
general fun house gone mad atmosphere that is part and parcel of this imprint's
raison d'ętre. If you
haven't yet experienced the decidedly weird "pleasures" of any given Sushi Typhoon offering, you'd be well warned
to go back and reread the penultimate paragraph of the main review for a brief (and completely inadequate) parsing of
some of the elements of this film before venturing into this particular looney bin. I frankly get an odd and unapologetic kick
out of many of the Sushi Typhoon offerings, and
Deadball is no exception. It has absolutely no redeeming qualities,
which is part of its peculiar allure, at least for me. I honestly can't give this a recommendation for the general viewing
public, but for you "discerning" few who love this sort of madness,
Deadball, despite the excesses that this genre
regularly indulges in, is quite a bit of fun.
