DEAD BALL (2011) review

Deadball (2011) (1st viewing) d. Yamaguchi, Yudai (Japan)

The brains behind such Japanese splatter titles as Battlefield Baseball, Tokyo Gore Police, and Meatball Machine teams up with the maniacs at Sushi Typhoon for this over-the-top earth-shaking goregasm. More a collection of set-pieces than any kind of coherent plot, the storyline follows former baseball prodigy turned juvenile delinquent Tak Sakaguchi as he is forced to join the prison’s ball club. Given that Sakaguchi’s fastball explodes his father in the pre-credits sequence, this can only lead to a red sauce cornucopia, and Yamaguchi keeps the mayhem running at high speed and volume. (Even so, the slight story and exaggerated characters grow a little tiresome over the course of the 100-minute running time.)

BIFFF Day #6 (Wednesday, 4/11)

Okay, full disclosure: Some of the events that I’ll be chatting about in today’s entry actually occurred the day before, on Tuesday. As anyone who has walked this path before me can attest, it’s easy for everything to run together. “It’s the BIFFF!”

It’s easy to see why I was initially confused, however, since my interview with Father’s Day’s Jeremy Gillespie would have made sense to have occurred the morning after the midnight screening, right? Instead, for whatever programming and/or scheduling reasons, the interviews with Gillespie and Troma head Lloyd Kaufman took place the same day, before the film had actually screened. (In hindsight, this is less insane than it actually appears to be – it’s just that I was unaware of the upstairs press screening room computers when I made my appointments, and besides, I had already seen Father’s Day back in March courtesy of a DVD screener.) All this to justify why your sleep-deprived narrator got his days mixed up.