Powerful

Let's be realistic.

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

You don't need to be a pro with Japanese humor to appreciate this film. However Deadball is really one of those films that is not for everyone. If you enjoy extreme comedy films like Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie then this one is up your alley. I saw a Japanese review of this movie on Youtube just to gather some more info and apparently this film is the 4th one of the Typhoon Festival series of splatter films for the world market. Yes this is a comedy movie with splatter mixed together, it's not meant to be taken seriously in anyway.The baseball aspect is quite small. Far less baseball compared to the Major League films. And the appeal of this film is that the story doesn't really make sense, it's a baseball film where they don't really play baseball, but instead they kill each other. Probably the best part of this film occurs after viewing, when your trying to tell your friend all about the insanity that is this film! Something interesting to note is that there is another film called Battlefield Baseball which was originally a manga titled Jigoku Koushien. Battlefield Baseball was made in 2003, roughly 7 years before Deadball and oddly enough it has the same actor Tak Sakaguchi starring in both films. I don't know if Deadball is an unofficial remake of Battlefield Baseball, it would not surprise me if it were. I own the original manga that Battlefield Baseball was based off of. Deadball reminded me a lot of the manga Jigoku Koshien. I haven't seen Battlefield Baseball so I don't know how similar it is to Deadball but I'm guessing they are gonna be pretty similar.

Jubeh (Tak Sakaguchi) has a killer fastball...literally. He has some strange abilities such as being able to kill people with a blazing fastball and being able to pull a lit cigarette from out of the air that is off camera. He uses his talents to kill members of the Japanese mafia and chain smoke. He goes to prison for his vigilante crimes and is forced by his neo-Nazi warden to play baseball for the prison team against the St. Black Dahlia High School girl's team is what amounts to a set up we haven't seen since the likes of "Rollerball." The film is campy funny. It has Troma style blood squirts as well as some dark comedy. It is a silly Japanese grindhouse with subscripts. Clearly a film not for everyone.Parental Guide: F-bomb (written in English subscript). No sex. Male rear nudity. Worst cavity search scene.

The Japanese Baseball Riki-oh who dresses like Clint Eastwood in 'The Good, The Bad and The Ugly' to a prison school is Nazi-Germany-Japan where Juvenile halls have now been indoctrinated as prison schools led by sadistic Nazi commandants who resemble Ilsa from 'Ilsa She-Wolf of the SS'. The inmates are forced to play to the death in a 'Death Race 2000'-esque game of baseball where the winners of the game is released from the prison school. All the while these wacky, weird, lovable, and absolutely insane characters having to deal with amazingly over the top and at times hilarious cheesy gore, American pop culture references, bad puns, absurdist humor and sight gags galore. Its like if someone threw Riki-Oh and The Sandlot into a blender and hit puree. I mean what else can I say about this movie, if it sounds right up your alley chances are you'll dig it. 8/10

As a young lad, baseball player Jûbei tragically realises the destructive force of his powerful pitching arm when he accidentally cracks open his father's head with the ball during practise. Years later, Jûbei (Tak Sakaguchi), now a crime-fighting vigilante, is placed in a correctional institution for violent juveniles run by a Nazi headmistress, who convinces the young man to join the prison baseball team, while conveniently neglecting to mention that the next game will be played to the death against the evil Saint Black Dahlias (a baseball team consisting solely of unfeasibly sexy but extremely brutal young Japanese high-school girls in almost non-existent outfits).For many years, the Japanese have been at the forefront of demented movie-making, but in the past decade or so, their 'anything goes' approach seems to have attained new levels of insanity. Deadball, for example, is a micro-budgeted comedy/horror that purposely defies all logic and sense of realism from start to finish in order to cram in as much deranged splat-stick nonsense as possible, including such mind-boggling strangeness as elbow-deep rectal cavity searches, Loony Tunes-style cartoon violence, vomit eating, a pair of cute Idol singers named Poo-poo, the rough removal of one poor guy's testicles, Jûbei thrusting his hand so far inside a villain's head that his fingers emerge from the nostrils and poke out the eyes (!!!), and an armoured steam-punk Nazi cyborg wearing a metal skirt that reveals his skinny human legs.Some of this craziness works (the film gets more and more bonkers as it progresses, so hang in there for the best bits), much of it fails dismally (sometimes due to budgetary limitations that results in a lot of poorly executed CGI, but often 'cos it was simply a crap idea in the first place). Either way, though, it's hard not to admire the imagination involved and the film-makers' gleefully manic approach.