Fantasia CR: Meatball Machine

Co-directed by Yudai Yamaguchi and Junichi Yamamoto, Meatball Machine is low budget Japanese sci-fi with tongue planted firmly in cheek.

Aliens have invaded earth with the sole desire to play a twisted “game” of fighting each other to the death and consuming the loser. Why Earth? Roughly the size of a tennis ball, these aliens want oversize human bodies to inhabit and transform into urban fighting machines.

MBM is an overt cross between Robert Heinlein’s seminal sci-fi novel The Puppet Masters, Shinya Tsukamoto’s mind-blowing Tetsuo films, and the WWF. If your not into any of those three, this film probably isn’t for you. Then again, the film’s final scene, a bizarre chiaroscuro conversation between two chillin’ aliens was worth the price of admission alone.

Feeling somewhat overextended, MBM rises slightly above it’s interesting but thin premise by incorporating a saccharine love story to add emotional weight to what otherwise would have been a tedious exercise in clunky street combat.