battlefield baseball 地獄甲子園 [movie]

yeah its not funky forest but its still pretty weird. 

ok, this movie... what can i say. 

im putting in some quotes here and there just to try and give you a sense of how random this movie is.

i just dont think i can do it justice.

also, i think a *spoiler alert* is needed. but this movie makes less sense the more you know so it wont ruin anything. 

dear god, aside from this guy's face, where to start...

Jube is a highschool delinquent, he moves to a school who's team is about to play an insanely violent team who usually leave all the opposing players in a bloody dismembered mess on the pitch and sail through their victories straight to the cup. 

Jube is suffering at the memory of killing his father with a baseball pitch on the beach one day - which we are loving told through the medium of song ballad and purple camera filter. reminded me of the stock videos that accompany japanese karaoke songs.

*#father died, the pitch was too fast...
and thats the story of a boy and baseball#




eventually after some fights, persuasion, and a round of applause from the suddenly appearing entire school, Jube joins the team in the hopes to defeat the violent Gedo zombie-inmate-psychopath-mutant-whateverthefucktheyare baseball team in the coming match.

there is a guy that is played by 3 different actors because he dies so many times - actually pretty much all of the characters die at one or more times throughout and come back again in various states of alive-ness. 





this particular pitch that everything is riding on doesnt actually ever really rear its head in the match! 
they just beat the crap out of each other for a while, shaolin soccer style, and with a team of re-encarnated robotised half assed cobbled togther left overs of teachers, students, and Jube's mum, we get the final showdown with the big chinned blue skinned cowboy coach of the Gedo team, and i have no idea what the sh*t is going on.

*but Jube-kun, can we win?
*yes! with the deadly bullet pitch we can definitely win! the ball... the deadly bullet that killed my dad...
*you were hiding a pitch like that?
*no i dont actually remember how to do it, but when i was dead ten minutes ago my dead father told me to throw it.



i was surprised how funny this movie was. its weird enough to be totally crackers, but its not so stupid that it just leaves you thinking you just wasted 2 hours. and it is 2 long hours of nonsense. 


All, we come to find, is really something to do with that old drunk guy in his long johns with his dog watching on the side lines. 

and there's always an old drunk guy in his long johns with his dog watching on the side lines isnt there?

*who are you? who stopped my super tornado?

i watched this thinking "man this movie feels familiar" then found out it was a Kitamura Ryuhei film. 

I watched the whole thing thinking "Jube looks really familiar too" then i realised it was Sakaguchi Taku from alive and versus etc. 

man, he was super pretty in this.

*indeed, i died, but ive been reborn, of course, my face changed too.
*youve been reborn?
*i heard everything while i was dead, its time to get even with Gedo!
*ok, weve both died once, lets do it!

and if you think these quotes might make more sense when you watch the movie, youre wrong. they wont. im more confused now than before i saw it. i read a review before watching, it looked interesting and suitably stupid enough for my want at the time, but it was funnier than i expected it to be. those stupid but subtle nods of earnest agreement, the furrows of worry, Tak had me in fits. and yes, even though it was bonkers, i think the humour in it was more subtle than the outset would have you think.

*thanks to advanced technology, im mega gorilla!

maybe not.

i cant be arsed to do a cast list, look it up. by the way the title means Koshien Hell, not battlefield baseball, in case you get stuck. looking through the screen shots it actually looks pretty tame, i mean, its no funky forest but its still up there in the top leagues of weird ass japanese movies. its one for a group of people to enjoy. wish i had found this while i was still living back at the flat and the gang could have come over to watch this. damn funny.

Alive アライヴ [movie]

They're not the only one being eaten alive by bugs.

So it seems Kitamura Ryuhei (director of zombie flick Versus) made another weirdo movie I hadn’t seen with a bunch of his favourite people. It has a lot of nice camera shots, gorgeous surreal stuffs, and smokey weird sets, and for a while its all about the psychotic minds of murderers being experimented on in some crazy secret prisonish human-experimentation lab thing.

It feels kinda familiarly stylized – especially when the witch enters the story and the crazed fighting starts. It is pretty messed up, but is so shiny and Kitmuralised (cant think of a better way to put it) it doesn’t feel as gritty as its plot synop would suggest.

Sakaki Hideo and Sakaguchi Taku are both also in Versus though this time swapping their good guy /villain roles around – actually there are like 10 actors from Versus in this movie. A swirly grey fight scene between the two is aptly entitled “Versus” for the nice homage to his own movie.

And yes, his cell mate is such a f*ckin d*ck. Right from the get go. All I want to do I punch him in the face, like, every time he speaks. Just ignore him, he f*cks off after a while. Just in case you were wondering.

So, a bit about the plot would probably help right? Well i will start from the middle and work to the begining - it actually makes more sense that way.

In order to save her sister, a witch with some weird bug inside her, Saehusa Asuka (Koyuki – yay! We all know how much I love her) and Matsuda (Sugata Shun) are conducting some weird ass experiments on psychotic prisoners who escaped the electric chair’s doomy deathness by being the perfect specimens for the cause.

The sister, Yurika, played by the wonderful Ryo (Zeni Geba, Casshern, JOKER Yurusarezaru Sosakan, Ryusei no Kizuna, Suppli, Azumi, code blue, Iryuu, Welcome to the quiet room, should I go on?) is some waaaaay crazy cool mental weirdo with this thing that the military want as a weapon – this bug thing called isomer. She plays with everyone’s minds and in the hope that their prisoner-specimens will lose the plot and try to kill her.

The bug will leave its host for another with a stronger anger or savage will, but as of yet it has never left little miss crazy witch. She will be saved if only they can find someone who is more messed up than her.

Enter stage right: Tenshu (Sakaki), messed up by the memories of killing his girlfriend and her attackers after she had been horrifically assaulted. The transfer of the bug thing from Yurika to Tenshu is the plan behind the experiment. At least, it is to her, Asuka, and Matsuda, but there are others with ulterior motives they had not expected.

I wasn’t expecting to like it – for some reason I always do this with Kitamura films, even though I tend to really enjoy them, I never expect to. I really don’t know why.

His direction is really recognisable and seeing actors I know well from other things (Koyuki for example) I can fully see it in action. Don’t mistake the stylised nature for over acting or anything like that, it is a specific feel explored by a few really interesting Japanese directors and it has become a technique in itself. It isn't over the top enough to be really manga style, but it is just enough to make it feel sci-fi and arty..  

We have no unnecessary constant flashbacks to his girlfriend’s assault, a blessing for sure, and the story does lovingly twist up and go all crazy fighty nut bar with Sakaguchi, which was more interesting than all the arguing with the crazy cell mate dude at the start.

I do think they should have painted Sakaguchi’s skin rather than it being material (because I think it is meant to be his skin but it clearly creases like fabric) but it is no great mortal destruction of the movie. No great loss, just something i noticed. Sakaguchi, as usuall, was all hardcore-fighty man - this time some sort of weird isomer bug / human clone hybrid thing, looking like a cyber punk who would have felt at home in the goth club i used to go to as a teenager. But, y'know, actually cool.

F*ck sake, if you could see all the bugs I’m getting attacked by right now, I’ve got moths and crane flies flying at me from everywhere while I’m trying to f*cking write this. I just want to watch this film for god’s sake! Snoop totally just ate one that made the mistake of landing on the floor next to him. Hahaha good one my little puppy. Eat him. Eat him up.

*Sigh* back to the film.

So anyway, it is all dark and grey, so don’t get a sh*t copy, you’ll never know what the hell is going on.

But it is very shiny and swirly ooo trippy fighty type stuff, and is what you could expect from typical Kitamura’s direction and of course his cheesy chums.

Check out Versus if you haven’t seen it, and Azumi (just the first one though), and also I liked Sky High – I really liked that one actually. He also directed the series of Sky High which I quite desperately want to see but haven’t gotten around to tracking it down yet.

I don’t know if this review has made any sense at all, but I can’t compete with the feckin’ bugs I have to contend with tonight. September sucks when you live outside.

movie poster:

~