Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #88: Dead Ball (2011).

One day in rural Japan, young Jubeh is playing baseball with his father and younger brother Musashi when, by some tragic miracle, he performs a super-powered fireball pitch that kills his father. After then vowing to never play baseball, Jubeh grows up (Tak Sakaguchi) into a career criminal. When he's then captured and sent to a juvenile reformatory he falls under the supervision of Principal Ishihara (Miho Ninagawa), whose grandfather's Nazi allegiance is something she wears as a badge of honour. Naturally, she's not much kinder. When she forces him to join the centre's baseball team or face witnessing the execution of fellow prisoner Four Eyes (Mari Hoshino), Jubeh must rally the ragtag team against the sexy but merciless Psycho Butcher Girls of the St. Black Dahlia High School. Now he's not just having to win the game, but save his and his team's lives.

Let me offer this warning again, after giving it for numerous Japanese films I've reviewed here: Dead Ball is intentionally ridiculous and tacky throughout. If you've hated any of the other such movies I've covered here, obviously pass on it. But if you welcome deliberate (albeit good-humoured) artistic and tonal mockery, dig in. There is, however, quite a knowing commentary here on modern-day Japanese culture and sport under all the unhinged and warped blood-splattering. Writer-director Yudai Yamaguchi turns Japan's perhaps unlikely obsession with this most Western of sports into a subversive metaphor for the internal culture clash it (like most countries) has now: the old and the new. The rural setting inevitably enhances this, along with providing some very lush locations. He also manages to objectify and yet empower women simultaneously here, with the ever-kind and increasingly strong and resourceful Four Eyes as a counter to Ishihara and the Psycho Butcher Girls. But of course, the real point of this is the shamelessly over-the-top and excessive action, which he and his cast and crew stage with aplomb. There's also a relentlessly energetic and exotic score from Nobuhiko Morino. I wouldn't be caught dead watching a baseball game even were it popular Down Under, but I'll happily go in to bat for Dead Ball.