Meatball Machine Reject of Death: A Brilliant Exercise in Weirdness

Meatball Machine: Reject of Death is ten minutes of your life you'll never get back. Thankfully Reject of Death is such a glorious, transcendent experience that you're not going to want to hand those minutes back. If anything you'll be coming back for seconds or thirds of meatball-y goodness.

Reject of Death is a 2007 short film which, according to IMDB is directed by Yoshihiro Nishimura, the special effects artist who worked on The Machine Girl. Outside the Internet it can be found as an extra on the DVD for Meatball Machine, a feature length film that tells a blood soaked tale of a budding romance interrupted by parasitic aliens. Presumably Reject of Death is supposed to in some way connect to Meatball Machine, but the only similarities I could find between the two movies are stylistic and not narrative ones. So it's entirely possible to enjoy Reject outside of the context of Meatball Machine and vice versa. Still, if you're the type of person to likes this sort of stuff (gore cranked to the highest level mixed with Japanese flavored eccentricities), then you're going to want to indulge in both films eventually.

Alright, so what's Reject of Death about? Good question. I haven't a clue. The most appealing thing about Reject of Death is that it follows a sort of music video logic. There is a loose plot, but mostly it seems to exist to showcase a series of striking and hilariously offensive images. The film begins with a forlorn schoolgirl slicing her wrist up with a box cutter. Cutting seems to be a reoccurring theme is these bizarre Japanese gore movies particularly those directed by Nishimura. Take, for example, the wrist cutting commercial in Tokyo Gore Police or the wrist cutting competition in Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl (in which the loser accidentally hacks her own arm off!) A schoolgirl with a box cutter isn't the only aspect part of Reject that would later be incorporated into Tokyo Gore Police or Vampire Girl. There's the whole schoolgirl with a giant blade for an arm that reminded me of both the engineers in Tokyo Gore Police and the title character of The Machine Girl. The squirm-inducing yet hilarious make-up used in Reject to create the black tourist was then later used to create a satirical clique of Obama worshiping ganguro girls in Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl.

So perhaps there really are no original ideas left in this world. Who cares? I dare you to walk away from Reject of Death without an emotional reaction, whether that reaction be pure delight or complete and utter confusion. Now a video that gets reactions like this? That's entertainment, my friends.