DEAD SUSHI: Exotic, Spicy, and Wildly Entertaining

Today’s dish is exotic and spicy, drenched thick in gore. Cheap sushi for lovers of bad taste. Sharp, unusual, biting. Thankfully, it’s not hard to digest. If you’ve trained your palate with us, in the Z-grade cinema section, you’ll definitely pick up a wealth of familiar notes and a multitude of nutrients for a brain. Dead Sushi.

Keiko works for her father, a grand master of sushi. He claims, however, that a woman’s scent negatively affects the food, and on top of that, the girl is not as skilled as he is. Feeling defeated, Keiko runs away from home and takes a job as a waitress at an inn. Important guests have just arrived – employees of a pharmaceutical corporation. Nearby, their former colleague also appears, a geneticist equipped with a serum that reanimates dead tissue. Burning with hatred toward his former coworkers, he brings an entire swarm of sushi to life, turning it into a man-eating, aggressive organism that transforms those it bites into zombies.

Keiko will have to face her demons. The same goes for the inn’s janitor – a former cook with a phobia of knives. Fortunately, an unorthodox egg sushi, rejected by its predatory brethren, will also stand on the side of humans.

The sushi attacks both individually and as a swarm. As it happens, the dish can fly. It will also change forms, copulate, and cackle maliciously like demonic emanations in The Evil Dead. In addition to the animated rolls, we get plenty of other attractions: rice-vomiting human zombies, a tuna-man with an axe, a sushi warship firing cannons, numerous karate clashes – both between Keiko and the corporate buffoons, and along the human–animated food line.

On top of that, there’s lots of cheerfully splattering blood, ultra-cheap explosions, pathetic speeches by hopeless heroes, some nudity, and a romance between Keiko and a company employee – almost like Jack and Rose on Titanic, except instead of an iceberg, their happiness is threatened by sushi.

Dead Sushi is cinema that is ostentatiously infantile and delightfully exaggerated. The world presented here thrives on grotesque and absurdity. The filmmakers take us into territories associated with the works of Troma or Braindead or Meet the Feebles by Peter Jackson. Already at the level of the concept, we have a blatant disregard for good taste, and of course dirt-cheap special effects proudly emphasizing their low-budget origins.

We’ve already written several times in this section about how wild Japanese entertainment cinema can be (for example: Meatball Machine Kodoku). So I think most readers are fully aware that this won’t be like Netflix. Or… anywhere else. The director of Dead Sushi has titles like Robo-Geisha to his name, where female characters had machine guns instead of breasts, shrimp were shoved into eyes, swords into backsides, etc., as well as porn films, and the kind that feel like what if you brought a camera into a toilet. So it must be said clearly that Noboru Iguchi likes blunt solutions and takes us on a ride through a wild playground.

And here the question arises: does his approach work? After all, many films have tried to charm us by shocking, only to end in the viewer’s boredom. A good example is Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead – an earlier film by the creator of Dead Sushi. A scatological horror that must have pleased connoisseurs of the subject, but exhausted the regular viewer and encouraged a quick flush down the drain of memory. Sometimes filmmakers try to hook us with an effective title (a flagship example: Surf Nazis Must Die), which ends up being the best thing about the work itself.

That’s not the case here. Sure, Dead Sushi wants to seize our attention by force – if only through its original and risky premise. But also through its form. On screen we get a kind of loud cartoon for adults, full of typically Japanese overexpression, shouting, and chaos. Bitten-off lips, noses, running back and forth like in Scooby-Doo, a hyperactive camera wildly charging at objects…

But the director of Dead Sushi wins us over primarily with the atmosphere of unrestrained fun. To a lesser extent with gore. There’s no shortage of it, but it’s so comic-book-like that no one’s skin will crawl.

I give the creators a lot of credit for the fact that with such an unreal central idea and such a concentration of grotesque, they manage to maintain our level of enjoyment. We don’t feel overfed; we absorb the attractions until the very end. And we remain in a good mood through the finale. The humor may be quite crude at times, but the overall vibe can resemble an episode of Rick and Morty (minus the intelligent dialogue – you won’t find that here).

Of course, some viewers won’t see any positives in this work, but who develops a taste for sushi and who sticks with dumplings will be decided within the first fifteen minutes of the screening. You’ll either eat it with pleasure or switch it off quickly; I don’t really believe in a third option.

The special effects – rustic CGI without a shred of dignity – are exactly what’s needed here. They perfectly complement the presented world, which looks like a manga that crawled out of some energetic postmodern sludge. The same goes for the acting. The characters seem carved with a blunt samurai sword – probably during a heavy drug trip and out of possessed wood.

And maybe somewhere in this mess, the real Japan resonates. Because the corporate people here are limited hedonists, and the trembling inn staff are a submissive addition to the service, so you can eat sushi directly off their bodies. Meanwhile, the heroine is aware that it will be hard for her to gain her father’s respect without being a man. Cheerful, colorful, and lively – an hour and a half flies by in a flash. It’s not cinema for repeated savoring, but one of those enjoyable screenings that shove a big flaming banana into your mouth.