a review of 人肉机器

Hooptober, Night Twenty-One: (CW for this review and the movie: Mention of rape, anti-trans stereotypes) I won't say that I had particularly high expectations for this one, but for some reason I expected it to be maybe a few notches above some of the Japanese gore comedies that have appeared on streaming in the last 10 years or so, like "Machine Girl" or "Tokyo Gore Police" or what have you. Perhaps it was the comparisons I've seen here on Letterboxd and elsewhere to Shinya Tsukamoto's "Tetsuo" series, which easily exists at least two or three aesthetic levels above this movie. If the original "Tetsuo" was the Japanese cyberpunk equivalent of an artsy midnight movie like "Eraserhead," then "Meatball Machine" is basically just "The Toxic Avenger" for hentai fans. There's a lot in this movie that feels questionable: The decision to shoot almost all of the action in shaky digital video and broad daylight, making the creature effects and costumes look more like a GWAR cover band than anything truly disturbing or terrifying, for one. There's also the generally unpleasant gender politics, like the scene where the hero gets assaulted and then beaten to a pulp by a deep-voiced trans woman, or the scene in which the female lead (a survivor of child abuse, we learn) is forcibly transformed into a cyborg through a degradingly depicted tentacle rape. It all feels pretty juvenile, in the way that things marketed to teenage boys as being "for grown-ups only" tend to be. I guess I'm just disappointed that folks outside of that demo seem to be falling for the bait too.