Battlefield Baseball (DVD)

Battlefield Baseball is a somewhat difficult movie to review; mainly because it’s really, really bad. But it’s so bad it’s good, which is a definite plus. The movie was made in 2003 and since then has seen a couple of disc releases; this one, from Subversive, is due out on May 31.

Conjure up an image of The Natural meets Rocky Horror Picture Show meets Dawn of the Dead, then hold onto your baseballs because this is one wild ride of a movie — not without its wrong turns, but in the end it’s a trip worth taking.

Flowing-haired and handsome Tak Sakaguchi plays Jubei Baseball, a young man with uncanny pitching talent who has just been transferred to a new school where the principal has but one goal in life: total baseball victory. The principal believes he is about to achieve his dream, but his hopes are dashed when he discovers his school’s adversaries in the big game are a team of killer zombies who always leave the baseball field looking like a battlefield. Coached by a particularly sadistic undead green man sporting Bruce Campbell’s chin (or maybe Jay Leno’s?) this terrifying team will stop at nothing to win.

Jubei is talented, but he has made a solemn promise to the cosmos never to pitch again after he accidentally killed another human being with a fastball. Can he be persuaded to join the team and help them beat the killer zombies, once and for all? (And if the unstoppable undead weren’t bad enough, Jubei has to fight a harridan in a housecoat; contend with an incontinent old man; and deal with an ever-changing nemesis who is not on the opposing team.)

Based on a popular manga story by Gataro Man that ran in the top-selling Monthly Shonen Jump magazine, Battlefield Baseball really defies description — it’s a movie that was a huge box-office hit in Japan, but most of the humor won’t translate Stateside.

Battlefield Baseball is gory and gross, but the horror is all very cartoonish and the props (such as severed heads conveniently place on spikes, and cyborg hearts that go pitter-patter) are so fake they are part of the comedy. It was actually kind of dull in places and too low-budget looking for its own good, but overall Battlefield Baseball is worth seeing — this movie together with Gory Gory Hallelujah would be a perfect double creature-feature because in the end, both movies are actually about the power of friendship and unity. http://www.horror.com/php/article-708-1.html

Additional release material includes some strange making-of featurettes in which have Sakaguchi being interviewed by a Cliff’s Notes carrying kid, and go into the stunts and special effects. There’s also some short theatrical trailers and a series of outtakes and bloopers.

Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson