Deadball (デッドボール Deddobōru) is a 2011 Japanese comedy horror 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.
In modern-day Japan, the young Jubeh Yakyu practices his pitching and catching with his father only to discover that he has super powers by accidentally killing his father with the ball. This is seen by his younger adopted brother, Musashi Nakagawa. Some time later, Jubeh (Tak Sakaguchi), now 17, has become a juvenile delinquent responsible for 50 murders within a week.
After being caught for his crime, Jubeh is sent to the Pterodactyl Juvenile Reformatory, run by governor Mifune (Ryosei Tayama), until his trial date. Jubeh shares a cell with the 16-year-old killer Shinosuki Suzuku, (Mari Hoshino) and also comes gets into conflicts with the chief warden Ishihara (Miho Ninagawa), who is the granddaughter of a World War II collaborator in the Nazis’ genocide programme.
In prison, Jubeh finds out that Musashi was also a prisonmate at one point but died there. Ishihara organises the prison baseball Juvie League and wants Jubeh to take his place in the prison’s team, known as the Pterodactyl Gauntlets. Jubeh has not played baseball since the accidental death of his father, but after Ishihara threatens to kill Shinosuki he agrees to play on the condition that the prison food is improved and all the players are pardoned of their crimes.
Next day, the Pterodactyls take on the St. Black Dahlia High School team, composed of young female psycho-butchers…
“Keita’s screenplay adds some satirical bite to the schoolboy humor with send-ups of both extreme Right and Left […] While sets and props are on the crude side, costume designer Masae Miyamotobrings flair to the picture by daringly crossing sexually vamp Goth fashion with the aggressive militaristic pomp of Nazi regalia.” The Hollywood Reporter
“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 … 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.” Blu-ray.com
“All the while, the script is filled with quick one liners and subtle points of hilariousness (I laughed quite few times during this one) Such as “your ring-wormed infested genitals stink so bad, you’ll die”!” And if that’s not enough for you all, wait till you get a load of the Nazi super weapon “Glockenheim”…a cybernetic body fused with a human neural system…aka one bad-ass ass-stomping robot annihilator.” Horror News
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Release:
Deadball premiered at the Fantasia Festival in 2011.
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