I have a guilty pleasure: I like to watch B flicks. It is a side effect from growing up watching Mystery Science Theater. Meatball Machine caught my eye one day when I browsed Netflix. It sounded terrible. Boy, I was right! It wasn’t even terrible in a good way.
Meatball Machine is a Japanese B flick that takes a lonely factory worker and a lonely female co-worker and turns them into “necroborgs.” Necroborgs are a weird mishmash of mecha and cyborg. An alien device takes over a human in a strangely tentacle porn style way. After the alien inside the device has control, they take their human-mecha out to fight each other. The winner gets to eat the “pilot pod” of the vanquished. Well, Yoji has been eying Sachiko for awhile. When he finally gets to meet her (after he is beat up by his boss who was trying to have his way with Sachiko), one of the alien devices Yoji found in a trash heap activates. The alien turns Sachiko into a cyborg just before Yoji could have some “action.”
Yoji soon falls in with a rough guy who hunts the aliens to feed his daughter who is also infected but not completely turned into a necroborg. The father tries to turn Yoji into a cyborg, but Yoji breaks the control of the alien and escapes. His goal: to save Sachiko. Never mind the fact they only met each other for a few moments.
The film is crude. There is a lot of overt, twisted sexuality with how the aliens interface with their human hosts. The special effects are the best…erhm…worst part of the show. The special effects made me laugh at their ridiculousness.
Meatball Machine is one of those movies you watch to see just how bad it can get. Once you think it can’t go any lower in ridiculousness, it pulls out a large…uh… gun to up the ante.
This bloody, violent, crude, and dopey movie isn’t one to watch unless you like that sort of thing. I asked myself several times why I was watching something this terrible, only to laugh at another outlandish scene. This film isn’t for teens or children or even a rational adult. It is just bad. Avoid this one.
