Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Mouldy Sushi

Cinemania has my reviews of Dead Sushi and Mold. They're both deliberate attempts to make "good bad" movies, and both unusual in that they (mostly) succeed.

Mold is a homage to 1980s cheapies that manages to pretty much nail the tone (and horrifying-yet-hilarious practical effects) of its terrible source material and riff on it at the same time. The framing device about an American government desperate for a new weapon in the War On Drugs is an almost total red herring, but that's actually no bad thing as the real issues tied up with America's relationship with Colombia would probably have either been mishandled or have detracted from the film's manic go-forward energy.

Dead Sushi is the most-recent full movie* from porn-director-turned-total-insanity-director Noboru Iguchi who seems to specialise in this sort of thing. It's completely nuts from start to finish and, aside from a weird sense of permanent slight misogyny, is a lot of fun. All you need to know is that it involves zombie sushi and climaxes with a flying sushi battleship and an axe-wielding tuna-mutant.

*He directed the "F is for Fart" sequence in The ABCs of Death more recently. This appears to be entirely in character, if you look at his non-porn filmography. Actually, looking at his porn filmography on Wikipedia is pretty fun too, if only because the totally-functional-and-descriptive titles that pornos get are hilarious when translated from one language to another.