In a career spanning three decades, Yoshihiro Nishimura has done about every job on the credit crawl — 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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