For all our coverage of SXSW Film 2017, click here.
What a great South By Southwest it was. There were some truly incredible premieres, some mild disappointments, and a truly excellent television pilot shown at this year’s festival. Here’s almost everything else I saw there this year (we’ll have some reviews of the SXSW films showing at the Boston Underground Film Festival coming later this week), excepting the one movie I walked out of, A Critically Endangered Species, whose first 30 minutes had experienced a combo of pretentious and boring that I didn’t exactly find palatable.
Meatball Machine Kodoku
What do you get when you cross Kurosawa’s Ikiru, the last 30 minutes of Akira, and two tons of fake blood? This nutty Yoshihiro Nishimura splatter-fest of a sequel, that’s what. Basically, a whole bunch of tiny alien creatures enclose a section of Tokyo in a giant glass thimble, and proceed to possess the bodies of the inhabitants and transform them into hideous cyborg monsters who must fight each other to the death. One of these poor bastards, a collections agent who’s having the worst day possible (the girl he’s in love with is getting harassed by jerks, his employer’s cracking down on him, and he gets diagnosed with stomach cancer) becomes an unlikely hero, and must rescue his love interest and others from death itself. Nishimura is the best at what he does, though what he does will probably cause those with less-fortified stomaches to toss their cookies at some of his imagery. It’s incomprehensible, incredibly loud and stupid, and a lot of fun. Hell, I could practically hear the bong rips of its target audience throughout the runtime. It’s also got the silliest final-minutes pivot towards a message since the end title card of Miami Connection, so that’s an extra bonus.