6.8 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 3.0 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
Deadball is a 2011 Japanese splatter comedy film directed by Yudai Yamaguchi. The film stars Tak Sakaguchi as Jubeh Yakyu, a seventeen-year-old who accidentally kills his father with his extra powerful baseball arm. Years later, he is a juvenile delinquent and is sent to a reform school after killing over 50 people within a week. To escape the school, Jubeh agrees to join the baseball team, even though he had sworn off the sport since his father's death.
Starring: Tak Sakaguchi, Mari Hoshino, Miho Ninagawa, Takamasa Suga, Jyonmyon PeHorror | 100% |
Comedy | Insignificant |
Sport | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Japanese: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
Japanese: Dolby Digital 2.0
English
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (B, C untested)
Movie | 2.5 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 4.5 | |
Extras | 2.0 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
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.
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'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.
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.
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