I have watched a slew of these Tokyo Gore movies, and I don’t think many of them have been as weird and disjointed as this piece of cinematic lunacy. This may even outdo the bananas ending of Attack Girls Swim Team vs. The Undead.
Life in modern day Japan can be hard. Especially if you are a single “salaryman” with no real prospects in life. Yuji Noda is living his life paycheck to paycheck and isn’t having any fun doing so. He’s recently turned 50, he’s single, he’s broke, and everyone around him disrespects him and only wants to take money from him. His only real escape is going to a local bookstore and seeing his unrequited love Kaoru. As a debt collector, Yuji walks around town trying to get the money owed creditors with very little success. One day on one of his usual walks he has a terrible pain in his stomach. Yuji goes to the doctor only to find out the terrible news that he has cancer and likely only has a couple months to live. This is the breaking point for Yuji. He goes back to all the people that have put him off for money and basically threatens them into paying.
After getting quite a bit of his money from his debtors, Yuji is feeling good about himself, in spite of knowing that he will die sooner rather than later. To top that off, he has to break up an attempted abduction of Kaoru outside of the bookstore. Kaoru starts to show a bit of interest in him and wants to take him to her church. It’s there that a boy in the congregation named Jiro becomes jealous of Yuji. After an altercation with Jiro, Yuji is thrown in lockup. That’s when a giant glass enclosure falls on the city and aliens turn the majority of inhabitants into mutated freaks bent on the destruction of everyone around them.
That is almost exactly how the movie starts. There is a 30min, let’s call it “exposition” period before the title card is even shown. That’s where the movie really gets going/falls off the rails. I can’t stress enough how bizarre this film is. As far as I can tell there is no connection to the first Meatball Machine movie other than the title and the way the aliens take over the victims bodies and minds. It’s like an arthouse Japanese gore-fest with a love story thrown in there somewhere.
Meatball Machine Kodoku is not, I repeat NOT for everyone. Hell, it’s barely for me and I like these kinds of movies. It’s chockfull of blood, guts, and sexualized monsters. There is even a Jackie Chan look-a-like in there that fights with two stools, and then when those are broken he gets drunk and uses “drunken style”. By the end of it, I was watching it with my hand in a permanent facepalm simply because it was so god damn crazy, I didn’t know how to process what I was seeing. I don’t know that I can actually recommend anyone watch this, especially for someone that hasn’t been exposed to these types of films before. If you do end up watching Meatball Machine Kodoku, try to keep a count of the number of times you have a big WTF moment.
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