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I don't recall if I had a reason for throwing Meatball Machine in my netflix queue besides it being clearly some kind of depraved Japanese pile of weird. Was it by the guy who did Tokyo Gore Police? Machine Girl? Uzumaki? I mean, it was PROBABLY one of those, I'll have to check later. There's a whole pile of these that have been a long time boiling up to the top of the queue though. What I can say is that on first popping the disc in, two weird monsters doing a vaguely Beavis and Butthead sort of schtich talk about all the special features. Let's just jump in though. Here's some salaryman about to hang himself when some sort of tentacly monster kills him. Here's the title, here's two weird bloated beefy cyborks killing eachother. Here's I guess the main character killing the winner with some sort of awesome home made electro-spear. It's gonna be one of those movies. Now here's some girl with a missing eye and a throbbing bandaged neck showing up. We still aren't through the opening credits here I should stress. Now I think we are though.
OK, so we have some guy at a green tea flavor colored factory, seeing some kinda cyborg hunt floating in the water before going back to work and uh... movie? You going to dub things, or subtitle'em or something for me? Huh. Turns out the weird monsters in the beginning really were just speaking english, not bad-dub ease. Our options are just subtitles: Yes or no, with no being the default. OK, we'recaught up, and now I can understand the inconsequential factory worker dialog. Anyway, I need to break my habit of assuming anyone is the main character in this sort of movie until we're a ways in I think. Electro-Lancer is just Electro-Lancer, and Factory Guy can just be factory guy for now. He's one of those losers who lives in one of those little rooms where the manga shelf takes up about an eighth of the total available floor space... and we're moving on to something else now I guess! I know I've said this before but the biggest difference between a movie I watch for this feature and a movie I watch because I think I might enjoy it is how jarring the scene transitions are. Anyway though, here's some little kid etting attacked by tentacles, they wrap all over him, he goes all zombie-like, and... wanders into oncoming traffic. Here's his arm wrapped around the tire of a van, here's his intestines strewn about, here's his feet still in their shoes, here's the tentacle mass that grabbed him tackling a new victim while he's aghast at the sight. This is good clean wholesome gore by the way. I know that's a weird thing to say, but there's this certain approach to insane gore, where you just take some foam rubber guts, wet'em down with a bucket or two of red corn syrup, and it just has this quaint charm.
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Meanwhile, here's these factory workers again. Factory dude is all whistful at the girl doing her laundry next door. Why is your back yard with your clothesline directly adjacent to an industrial machinist's workspace? Oh and now we're back to something like the opening credits. OK, I think I'm getting a handle on the plot now. So we've got these tentacle masses, right? And they latch onto people, andd turn them into crazy bio-bulgy cyborg monster men. They're just covered in fleshy protrubances and metal pipes and this guy here has a drill hand AND a vestigial windshield with wiper. So they're going around and taking people over and then... fighting in the streets, with the winner eating the loser's heart. Because that's how tentacle monsters roll I guess. Then electro-lancer goes around killing them, because, that's just what you do.
Anyway, back with Factory Guy, he goes to see some porn at the local theater, but is accosted by some random crossdresser who really wants to give him a hand job. He's totally not down for that, and the crossdresser just follows him outside, screams all "What, you think you're better than me?" and totally beats him up. Then he gets half-attacked by a heavily injured tentacle monster, which, really is prety much harmless. So he takes it home to study. Really, they're more like some kinda alieny turtle, that can just spit out a big ol' mass of tentacles. And has a drill-proof shell, some experimenting reveals. He invites a friend over to check it out, but he isn't really impressed, and they ust go out to wander around some. Maybe hit on that girl he likes... or get a hooker for Factory Guy. He chickens out, and then heads outside to conveniently see Girl He Likes about to be raped by some jerk in a suit she was apparently out with. They fight in very tropey fashion. Which is to say he has his butt handed to him but then the would-be-rapist wanders off anyway. Girl helps him home and tends to the wounds he uh... actually didn't even suffer defending her. That cut on his cheek was from the crossdresser beating him down earlier.
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You know... going off fiction it really does seem like Japan is populated almost exclusively by complete losers with no confidence who just stare at other total losers wishing they had the confidence to actually talk to them or something, with nobody ever getting into a relationship until both get beaten up a bit by a member of the minority population, comprised of hardened yakuza thugs, and foreigners. Oh and a few just total full-on perverts who don't care about ever getting a date, and are content to just embrace weird crazy porn. Anyway though, girl shoes off her horrible scars from her abusive boyfriend but says she did at least eventually build up the confidence to beat him into a coma with a crowbar. Good for you girl. Your reward is getting into a new relationship with an attempted rapist, and then attacked by this nice guy's tentacle monster. That's not a karma thing though, this is just the sort of movie where getting tentacle raped by space turtles is a common occurrence. Eventually it ges on with sprouting all the proper rubber hose tentacles and growing out the external heart thing and... what the HELL was that just now? I think while simultaneously turning her into one of these beefy cyborg freaks, it also impregnated her with this little baby monster thing, which, upon quickly growing into a little humanoid muppet in her womb, was then ALSO RAPED. Apparently this is just the particularly nasty looking process though by which it installs the cockpit and interface for the little monster dude piloting the turtle thing to start controlling her body like it's a giant robot. So we see the little womb monster thrust forward with it's little hand, then see this causing her to stab Factory Guy's friend with a giant drill. Anyway, this whole process takes a WHILE and the first like, minute or so is just this turtle thing pinning this girl to the ground. What does Factory Guy do during all this? He just kinda sits in the corner watching. I mean, you can say he's in shock, but I say he's just a creepy weirdo who's into tentacle porn.
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Anyway, Electro Lancer and his daughter with the missing eye and neck thing shows up to give him some exposition after she gets her eye bits drilled in quite graphically and is sent out into the streets. "Some of them came from deep in the ocean, others fell from the sky." So... yeah, we've got two warring species of tentacle turtle monsters here it seems. Or just one that really like killing each other. Oh, and the little heart things are ac tually their cockpits... and yeah, apparently there's no teams. It's like, the Highlander of little muppet monsters who pilot cyborgified people like mecha. That's a heck of a premise you've got there movie. I approve. Not so much of the specifics, but the premise, sure. So, asks Factory Guy, is there any way to rescue my girlfriend from this horrible fate? No, she's pretty much just doomed. Sucks for her. My daughter is only partly infected with cyber-weirdness though, so she's cool. And now we flashback to how he met his sorta girlfriend. You know, like... 10 minutes ago. This is literally the previous scene. Except now with new dialog where he's imagining her judging him for being repulsed by her nasty boob scar. Anyway, Daughter shows him around the crazy lab of studying captured alien bits. Dad isn't cool with that. Turns out he breeds the things in captivity because his daughter, being half-zombified and all, has to eat beefy cyborgs to survive. That's kinda really messed up, but, OK. So... here goes Factory Guy getting himself all infected. And that means we have to watch the weird sequence again with the maturing muppet monster getting it on with the interior of his pod again. No tentacle raping though, only the girl got that step going on. Also, our hero manage to smash one of the eye drills before it can do it's thing, and then crushes his little pilot pod. He also crushes Electro Lancer's skull, because turns out that dude's a jerk. Then he wraps himself in a blanket to conceal the freakiness and heads out into the street.
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Man, remember when I first started going out of my way to watch incredibly @#$%ed up movies how much more I reacted to this sort of thing? I'm sorry I've desensitized myself to such a point where my reactions are less funny. Anyway, hiding in the gutter, a little girl comes over to see if he's OK or some kinda groovy spaceman or what. He goes to toss a handful of dirt at her to scare her off, but underestimates his new cyborg strength and kinda accidentally uh... fatally pierces her stomach with high velocity dirt. Meanwhile her sorta girlfriend is out wrapping random dirtbacks in sheet metal. He meets her and uh.... burns off his blanket of shame with the power of love evidently. Oh wait that's the guy that almost raped her. So yeah, he goes right ahead and helps beet him to a plup for a while, then smashes Girl's cockpit. He gets one of his guilt flashback sorta deals going again, which I don't mention but come up a lot, and she gets up, smacking him across the face with metal coated rapist.
Now here's Daughter just kinda... hanging out. OK, back to the fight scene. She is totally usinga metal plated dude as a club. That's awesome. Factory Guy gets tossed into a fence, coughs a lot of blood out, Girl gets ready to kill him with kinda phallic rocket punch, rapist accidentally gets in the way and is reduced to a puddle. We have a moment of introspection, and now more fighting. This fight here? Pretty nice. We've got some pretty awesome looking weirdos, they're fighting in a junkyard, and the production values are just SLIGHTLY above a super sentai show. Oh and the missile launching arm also sprays acid, fun. Oh, and fire covered spikes! And... wow, just wow. This is the best arm cannon this side of Mega Man. It's just total coolness shooting out in all sorts of flavors. This mode is actually some kinda flame propelled bone spikes which spray out huge amounts of blood when they impact with anything. We're done with that though now. Off sloughs the gun arm, to be replaced with a buzzsaw arm. This movie is really speaking my language now. Factory Guy catches it with his hand, but.... it's his normal hand, so.... basically this just amounts to him turning his hand into hamburger. He shouts sappy stuff at her though and after chewing through it for a while she starts crying begging for death, and he rips it off and starts punching her in the cockpit a while.Man, why don't you grow yourself any cool weapons? It's just punch punch punch all day long with you.
Her pilot is bleeding to death from internal injuries it seems, but still has the strength to grow another gun with which to blow her brains out. Our hero however has a big no moment and grows a gigantic chest cannon with which to uh... what? Very carefully fire a laser right at the cockpit before he the pilot can do so? Yup. Apparently. Might have worked better to use a less ridiculously huge gun for that though. She's kind of uh, as the FPS kids say, "gibbed" as a result. Plus he didn't take the cockpick out, just, you know, it's one of the resulting chunks. He smashes it by hand though... oddly with the normal human hand. Did he magically heal that or what? Oh and now here's Daughter showing up and unwrapping her neck, revealing another such cockpit, which she just kinda ris out and sticks where his was. I guess these are modular. So now he gets his other eye screw, loses his free will, and can uh.... oh, explain that he grew himself an internal bomb to kil this little bugger with. So, our movie ends with the main character exploding. Oh, then we have some of the little critters talking with each other about humans are seriously tough Mofos mentally, and this whole experiment of letting someone keep his free will makes him honestly a way more awesome thing to fight proxie battles with. So they just clone him and Girl He Likes, install partial control pods in them, and have them fight to resolve their future differences. I guess. And that they're calling this new join project Meatball Machine. OK. Yeah. That was a thing I watched. It was pretty good on the silly visuals and depraved pointless violence, but it really just kinda lacked the raw CHARM of say, Tokyo Gore Police. Needs more Hand Gun.
