Dead Sushi (2013)

Horror is a genre where anything goes.  If there is an idea of something that could possibly scare someone, that idea can be made into a movie.  That’s why there’s such a wide range of concepts within each of the horror subgenres.  Slasher movies have leprechauns and dolls attacking people among other things.  Horror comedy has meta movies where slasher villains are killing people based on the movies they watch, or people end up in one of the horror movies they love.  Then there are the movies where food starts attacking people, causing them to fight back against whatever they would normally be snacking on.

One of the food based horror movies that fit perfectly into the Sunday “Bad” Movies was Dead Sushi, a 2013 Japanese film about sushi coming to life and attacking the people visiting an inn.  Keiko (Rina Takeda) was the daughter of a sushi maker.  She couldn’t live up to her father’s expectations, however, and ran away.  Her need for money took her to a job at an inn.  When the heads of a research business showed up at the inn, a disgruntled ex-employee decided to spoil the party.  He injected some sushi with a serum that turned them into flesh-hungry, human eating snackables.  The employees and guests at the inn had to defend themselves and try to survive.

Dead Sushi was one of the most balls-to-the-wall, no-holds-barred movie experiences.  It never held back on the insanity, instead choosing to lean into it with every moral of its being.  Writer/director Noboru Iguchi knew exactly what he was doing with every beat in the movie.  There were no wasted moments as the film’s cavalier, winking tone upped the insanity with every minute.  The whole movie was a contest of trying to figure out if it could go any further, and every time, it did.  The action and comedy blended together to create an hour and forty minutes of entertaining mayhem.

That tone came early in the film when a couple stumbled upon the disgraced researcher as he was eating his sushi.  The young man in the couple began beating the researcher, who countered with a squid.  The squid was already alive without the serum and chased the couple.  The woman was decapitated, and her head was stuck to the man’s by way of the squid.  They made out a little bit before the squid impaled the man.  If that didn’t get a person into the movie, nothing would.  It only gets crazier with that tone from then on.

Other highlights of the absurd heights that Dead Sushi went to were that a man transformed into a fish, and a bunch of sushi merged to form a giant sushi battleship.  There were many more moments, of course, but rather than list them off, there’s some deeper things to get into about Dead Sushi.  It was more than mere lunacy.  That was a large part of the movie, and most of the reason that it was made in the first place.  There were, however, bits and pieces to the storylines that added some depth.

There was a storyline mentioned above where Keiko was a disappointment to her father and left to work at the inn.  That storyline was the emotional core to the lead character.  She was missing the confidence that she needed to make the perfect sushi.  Throughout her experience fighting off the vicious sushi attacking the inn, Keiko became more self-confident.  She learned to believe in her abilities, and that translated from fighting to sushi.  The two went hand in hand, as she said in voiceover during the opening scene.  They were tied together in a way where her improvement in one would improve her in the other.

Another character with a deeper story than simply trying to survive was Sawada (Shigeru Matsuzaki), the caretaker of the inn.  He was a former sushi chef who had been disgraced and left his position to take up what was basically the janitor role at the inn.  He had an accident during his sushi days and ended up harming someone with his knives.  He vowed to never pick up a knife again.  It was another story of confidence, in which Sawada had to realize that it was an accident and he didn’t need to be afraid of it happening again.

One other story of confidence was in Dead Sushi, and it wasn’t from a place that would be expected.  Even within the zombie sushi, there were confidence issues.  Many of the characters did not respect the egg sushi.  They wanted fish.  That disrespect existed within the sushi as well.  When the sushi came back to life, there was a hierarchy.  The fish sushi bullied the egg sushi.  That’s probably why the egg sushi connected with Keiko.  Both of them felt like outcasts in their respective worlds, so they teamed up.  The egg sushi wasn’t an evil, human eating sushi like the rest.  It found its confidence later in the movie when it fought all of the other sushi during the final major battle.

Those stories about the characters finding their confidence in a crazy situation supplemented the comedy, horror, and action that took up the rest of Dead Sushi’s runtime.  They brought the audience into the characters as they had to chop, kick, and all around beat into submission a bunch of flying pieces of sushi.  The stories made the characters more relatable than the stars of a ridiculous action movie.  The audience could connect with them while seeing sushi suck a man’s face off.

Dead Sushi was a movie that knew exactly what it was: a food based horror movie.  But at the same time it was so much more.  A bunch of mostly unlikeable characters were picked off by sushi in increasingly bizarre ways.  The comedy worked.  The action worked.  It all came together in an entertaining goofball horror movie.  There are few like it, and no other group of filmmakers could have captured the same magic.  Noboru Iguchi made something special.  It might not be considered good by most standards.  It captured the fun that the people clearly had making it, though, and that fun came through the screen making for a great experience.  It showed that anything can go in horror.  That was Dead Sushi.

Now that that’s done, let’s get to the notes:

• Another food based horror movie that was watched for the Sunday “Bad” Movies was Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (week 84).
• Dead Sushi featured Kanji Tsuda, who was in Funky Forest: The First Contact (week 182).
• Have you seen Dead Sushi?  Are you interested in seeing it?  What do you think about the movie?  Use the comments section below if you want to talk about it.
• If there’s a movie that you think should be covered for the Sunday “Bad” Movies, let me know.  You can do that in the comments, or you can get a hold of me on Twitter.  Either one works.
• When I watch bad movies, I like to share clips of them on Snapchat (jurassicgriffin).  Add me if that sounds interesting.  If not, whatever.
• Looking ahead to next week, there’s a pretty big bad movie coming up.  This one has a reputation as being one of the worst.  It brought a television show to the big screen in a way that nobody appreciated, except for my childhood self.  Having rewatched it for next week’s post, I kind of still like it.  That movie is Wild Wild West, and I’ll see you in seven days with another post.