As a young lad, baseball player Jûbei tragically realises the destructive force of his powerful pitching arm when he accidentally cracks open his father's head with the ball during practise. Years later, Jûbei (Tak Sakaguchi), now a crime-fighting vigilante, is placed in a correctional institution for violent juveniles run by a Nazi headmistress, who convinces the young man to join the prison baseball team, while conveniently neglecting to mention that the next game will be played to the death against the evil Saint Black Dahlias (a baseball team consisting solely of unfeasibly sexy but extremely brutal young Japanese high-school girls in almost non-existent outfits).
For many years, the Japanese have been at the forefront of demented movie-making, but in the past decade or so, their 'anything goes' approach seems to have attained new levels of insanity. Deadball, for example, is a micro-budgeted comedy/horror that purposely defies all logic and sense of realism from start to finish in order to cram in as much deranged splat-stick nonsense as possible, including such mind-boggling strangeness as elbow-deep rectal cavity searches, Loony Tunes-style cartoon violence, vomit eating, a pair of cute Idol singers named Poo-poo, the rough removal of one poor guy's testicles, Jûbei thrusting his hand so far inside a villain's head that his fingers emerge from the nostrils and poke out the eyes (!!!), and an armoured steam-punk Nazi cyborg wearing a metal skirt that reveals his skinny human legs.
Some of this craziness works (the film gets more and more bonkers as it progresses, so hang in there for the best bits), much of it fails dismally (sometimes due to budgetary limitations that results in a lot of poorly executed CGI, but often 'cos it was simply a crap idea in the first place). Either way, though, it's hard not to admire the imagination involved and the film-makers' gleefully manic approach.
For many years, the Japanese have been at the forefront of demented movie-making, but in the past decade or so, their 'anything goes' approach seems to have attained new levels of insanity. Deadball, for example, is a micro-budgeted comedy/horror that purposely defies all logic and sense of realism from start to finish in order to cram in as much deranged splat-stick nonsense as possible, including such mind-boggling strangeness as elbow-deep rectal cavity searches, Loony Tunes-style cartoon violence, vomit eating, a pair of cute Idol singers named Poo-poo, the rough removal of one poor guy's testicles, Jûbei thrusting his hand so far inside a villain's head that his fingers emerge from the nostrils and poke out the eyes (!!!), and an armoured steam-punk Nazi cyborg wearing a metal skirt that reveals his skinny human legs.
Some of this craziness works (the film gets more and more bonkers as it progresses, so hang in there for the best bits), much of it fails dismally (sometimes due to budgetary limitations that results in a lot of poorly executed CGI, but often 'cos it was simply a crap idea in the first place). Either way, though, it's hard not to admire the imagination involved and the film-makers' gleefully manic approach.