In a career spanning three decades, Yoshihiro Nishimura has done about every job on the credit crawl ¡ª from gaffer to director. He is best known, however, as a mad master of effects and makeup, spewing blood sprays that achieve a certain demented grandeur and building fantastic creatures that resemble raging piles of medical waste with body parts attached.
His low-budget movies may get labeled as sci-fi or action, but they¡¯re little like the films of those genres that at least attempt to maintain a veneer of sanity. Many, such as ¡°Tokyo Gore Police¡± (2008) and ¡°Hell Driver¡± (2010), have played at international festivals and been released on subbed DVDs. Despite this recognition, Nishimura rarely strays outside the exploitation ghetto.
His latest film as a director, ¡°Meatball Machine Kodoku,¡± shows why. A follow-up to Yudai Yamaguchi and Junichi Yamamoto¡¯s 2005 film ¡°Meatball Machine,¡± which in turn reworked a 1999 film by Yamamoto, this sci-fi actioner is also high on blood showers and low on real-world cause and effect. But the setting is clearly today¡¯s Tokyo, not a figment of Nishimura¡¯s over-heated imagination.
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