Dead Sushi (2012)

Keiko is the daughter of a sushi chef who runs away from home when her father’s demands to combine martial arts and sushi making proves a bit too much for her. Landing at a remote resort hotel, she finds a job as a waitress where one of her first customers is serving for a president of a pharmaceutical company and his colleagues. Unknown to all of them, Yamada, a former researcher at the company who was framed and thrown into jail thanks to the president is also in the area and living as a vagrant. He’s angry at what happened to him and thanks to his research has found a way of creating killer sushi. Soon a horde of flying killer sushi is let loose in the hotel and the only people who can fight back is Keiko and former sushi chef Mr Sawada plus an unlikely little ally named Eggy!!

To be perfectly honest, when I first saw the trailer for Dead Sushi many months ago I immediately dismissed it as a load of crap and I didn’t have any intention of watching it. However, when the opportunity arose to buy the DVD I did hesitate at first whether I was doing the right thing but seeing as Noboru Iguchi has entertained me in the past I thought what the hell and went ahead in purchasing it. I wasn’t really expecting much with this movie but I have to eat my words as this is such a fun nonsensical movie which had me laughing a lot. It’s completely insane and I didn’t expect to be entertained quite so much. Iguchi pulls out all the stops in this low budget movie to create a hilarious OTT camp gory comedy horror movie which has to be seen to be believed. So inventive with a lot of incredibly bizarre sights and great gags! If you’ve seen his other works you know by now what to expect. We get to see flying sushi with sharp teeth which have squeaky voices and start attacking staff and guests at the hotel, two sushi having sex and producing offspring, sushi rice zombies, a sushi armed with a flame thrower, a sushi battleship and even Yamada being reborn as a human sized tuna after eating sushi which has been injected with a serum. Then there’s the added pleasure of hearing an egg omelette sushi singing!!!!! As expected with this kind of movie the cheesy CG blood is spurted around like there’s no tomorrow with some eye popping, exploding facial skin, a chef hacking off his own nose and half his face with a kitchen knife, a decapitation and a woman being eaten alive by mini sushi until only her bloody bones are left!

I really don’t know how the cast managed to keep a straight face on whilst filming this movie but one can imagine there was much merriment going on during the production. A lot of why this movie is so good is down to the wonderful Rina Takeda as Keiko who is fantastic. She’s such a likeable, cute and endearing actress. Rina has said in the past that she’s a big fan of Jackie Chan and his movies. Here she gets a chance to demonstrate his style of comedy with her acting in this movie. I’m not sure if Rina didn’t want to be typecasted in just serious martial arts roles so that’s why she’s shifted recently to comedy? I do hope that she’ll go back to doing a serious martial arts/action movie in the future. She does have some fight scenes in this movie and even gets a chance to making fun of Bruce Lee in one scene with the climax seeing her square off against Yamada the mad axe tuna man and his secret weapon. She even gets to use sushi nunchakus!! The rest of the cast are obviously well up for the silliness of the plot with the women walking around in various stages of undress and one couple parodying a moment from the classic movie Tampopo specifically the egg kiss scene.

Those that love these kind of Japanese splatter comedy movies will find this movie very enjoyable and director Iguchi really delivers on gore and laughs. I thought Dead Sushi was hilarious. Highly recommended.

Sadako’s Rating: 4 stars out of 5

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