Meatball Machine   Starring: Issei Takahashi, Shoichiro Masumoto, Toru Tezuka and Ayano Yamamoto 4Digital Asia RRP: £14.99 ASIA3753 Certificate: 18 Available 06 July 2009

A shy young man who works as a machine operator, regularly eats his lunch alone outside. He is attracted to a young woman he sees through the fence, and later prevents her from being assaulted. Beaten-up in the process, she helps him back to his apartment. This looks to be the start of a relationship; however, a strange artefact he had found on the street days before suddenly becomes active, and the couple are attacked and individually joined by symbiosis to alien parasites. These parasites convert their hosts physically and turn them into mindless killers bent on seeking-out and destroying each other for the sake of research...

I have seen so many outstanding Japanese supernatural horror films that I was intrigued to discover what they could do with a cross sci-fi/horror story. The opening minutes of the young man at work and alone at home establish the character quite well, but from the moment the parasites take him and his new love over the entire films loses its intimacy. There is no focus, and the film immediately degenerates into a low budget science fiction Transformers or Wrestlemainia, which I had to fight hard to remain awake in.

I found it impossible to justify how the parasites are able to turn the possessed human bodies into biomechanical weapons, particularly those which can shoot destructive energy. Unfortunately, the script for Meatball Machine conveys no intelligence and very little logic. The promotional write-up describes the film as splatter-punk, utilising the body horror shock tactics of John Carpenter’s The Thing. Well, let me tell you, this film is far from being worthy enough to be mentioned in the same breath as Carpenter’s The Thing. Very disappointing.

2

Ty Power