Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		2.0
Overall		3.0

Deadball Blu-ray Movie Review

Baseball, Nazis and lots and lots (and lots) of blood. What's not to love?

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 23, 2013

Anyone who has seen any given Sushi Typhoon offering will probably already have a great idea of what to expect in Deadball, and that anticipation will no doubt be seriously whetted with the happy little family outing that begins the film. In a beautiful green field a father is playing baseball with his son while another child looks on in rapt wonder. Okay, when does the mayhem begin? That is more or less the salient question in any Sushi Typhoon release, and the good news is, there’s not much a wait here. When the father insists that the son throw the ball a little harder, the boy goes into what can only be termed a weird trance like state where he does an impossible yoga move that might be termed One Legged Flamingo, and then blasts off into outer space courtesy of rocket propelled force emanating from his feet. He hurls the ball at his father where it shatters the man’s skull. Returning to Earth (and to himself), the boy in a panic runs to his father, who is lying prone on the ground, his skull agape and with little pieces of his brain plopping out every time his rapidly diminishing heartbeat gives them a little shove. It’s gross and hilarious in equal measure, exactly the stew that Sushi Typhoon fans have come to love over the past few years.

Baseball may be trumpeted as America’s Favorite Pastime (arguable, but there you have it), but there’s little doubt that the sport has become perhaps even more of a phenomenon in Japan than it is in the United States. What’s funny about this situation is how the so-called “splatter horror” genre has taken the sport to its bloody little heart, with Battlefield Baseball and now Deadball combining completely peculiar elements culled from both the sports and horror idioms. There’s a decided through line from Battlefield Baseball to this film, courtesy of director Yudai Yamaguchi and star Tak Sakaguchi, but also of course due to the same sport being featured and a certain similarity between the characters played by Sakaguchi. If anything, though, Deadball is even bloodier and messier than Battlefield Baseball. And if you’ve a certain skewed sensibility, it’s considerably funnier as well.

The prologue sets up the fact that Jubeh (in his more or less adult form played by Tak Sagakuchi) is deeply troubled by killing his dear old Dad with an errant superpowered pitch, and the film quickly careens into a montage showing that Jubeh, as an older teenager, has lost his moral compass and devolved into a life of crime, and has in fact been held responsible for a series of felonies. Jubeh is obviously an unrepentant thug, and he has no problem flipping off a news camera when he’s hauled in to serve his time.

Once he’s imprisoned in what might be termed a cross between a reform school and a POW camp, Jubeh is introduced to the hilariously over the top warden, Ishihara (Miho Ninagawa), who it is revealed has a rather direct ancestral line back to Nazis (yes, she’s Japanese, but these films rarely make much sense), and has in fact inherited the Nazis’ quest for “racial purity”. In Ishihari’s formulation, that also involves athletic superiority and she insists that her inmates form a baseball team to take out a neo-Nazi rival’s team, who turn out to be a bunch of S&M dominatrixes.

It’s absolutely ridiculous to try to afford any serious critical analysis to a film that is this relentlessly senseless. The film is unequivocally unabashed about pushing all sorts of buttons and responses will vary dramatically based on how squeamish and/or insistent upon political correctness each individual viewer is. Do you shirk at the thought of masochistic elements like bottom walloping or (to put this as gracefully as possible) the penetration of the fist into various naughty orifices? Does the sight of Nazis as comedy relief amuse or disturb you? How do you feel about supercharged baseballs devastating various craniums? Deadball makes no bones about being as provocative, even intentionally offensive, as possible, and so enjoyment comes down to whether you’re going to spend an hour and half lurching from one aghast reaction to the next, or simply surrender to Deadball’s patent lunacy.

If you can get past the more gag inducing moments in Deadball, there is some very funny material here, albeit material that’s childish and lacking any sophistication whatsoever. In one over the top scene, Manit is involved in a knock down drag out fight with Ishihara in her office. This included Ishihara being skewered with every pencil and pen in sight, which penetrate her skull and in once case goes completely through her head. Of course as in any good cartoon, this has next to no effect on her. But things get totally ridiculous when her phone rings, and it’s Manit on the other line (which is in the same room—figure that one out), at which points he starts punching her “through” the phone (i.e., his fist hits the mouthpiece of his phone and then comes out the ear piece of Ishihara’s repeatedly pummeling the woman’s face). It’s like something you’d see in an old Looney Tune, which is often exactly the ambience this film offers.

There are some fairly objective criteria that one can at least attempt to judge Deadball by, divorced from the overtly objectional content that will probably be foremost in many viewers’ minds. Aside from the cartoonish performance styles, which may or may not be to various people’s liking, the film does have some serious pacing issues, where it seems to take forever to get to the showdown baseball game that will decide several characters’ fates. Some will be willing to coast along with the film, lurching from one outrageous little moment to the next, without much caring for what comes next. Others may be wondering if this film repeatedly bunts when it really could have been a grand slam homerun.

Deadball Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Deadball is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Well Go USA with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. Technical data on the film is hard to come by, but my hunch is this was shot on HD video, and it looks about what you would expect it to, with a kind of glossy sheen but not much in the way of depth. Some of the footage has been pretty vigorously tweaked in post, including segments like the opening scene, which has extremely pushed contrast which gives everything a kind of luminescent glow and fuzzy softness. There are some issues here with crush and lack of shadow detail, especially since so much of the middle section of the film takes place in the dark environment of the reformatory, but when the film ventures outside, things pop rather well, with good, well saturated color and appealing fine object detail. The special effects are just completely outrageous, with both practical effects and CGI well blended into the overall carnival like ambience of the film.

Deadball Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Deadball's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix is surprisingly well done for such a relatively low budget affair. The mix is awash in surround activity, not necessarily limited to the baseball scenes, but certainly more prominently featured in them. There is nice differentiation between the ambient sounds in the outside sequences and the dank confines of the reformatory, but the sound designers have done a really good job in providing discrete effects throughout the film that create a nice sense of immersion on a consistent basis. Fidelity is excellent, and LFE lovers get several blasts of subwoofer activity that should delight them. Dynamic range is very wide, though the film tends to be on the manic side of things from a sound mixing perspective, with a lot of aural information being presented fairly relentlessly.

Deadball Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Spinoff Short: Final Deadball (1080i; 20:43) is another completely peculiar little piece, this time with a Kabuki character and virtually no baseball whatsoever. You expected anything different?


• Making of Deadball (1080i; 12:18) is comprised almost entirely of behind the scenes footage.


• Cast Interviews (1080i; 7:36)

Deadball Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

If you're a Sushi Typhoon fan, you will no doubt get a massive kick out of Deadball, a film replete with spectacularly gory (and completely goofy) effects, an utterly silly plot line (if you can even call it a plot), over the top characters and the general fun house gone mad atmosphere that is part and parcel of this imprint's raison d'être. If you haven't yet experienced the decidedly weird "pleasures" of any given Sushi Typhoon offering, you'd be well warned to go back and reread the penultimate paragraph of the main review for a brief (and completely inadequate) parsing of some of the elements of this film before venturing into this particular looney bin. I frankly get an odd and unapologetic kick out of many of the Sushi Typhoon offerings, and Deadball is no exception. It has absolutely no redeeming qualities, which is part of its peculiar allure, at least for me. I honestly can't give this a recommendation for the general viewing public, but for you "discerning" few who love this sort of madness, Deadball, despite the excesses that this genre regularly indulges in, is quite a bit of fun.