To quote the inimitable tagline for Mortal Kombat II, "Nothing, Nothing Can Prepare You."

I'm sure that there's already a few of you scratching your heads, or your mouse pointer is slowly gravitating towards your browser's "back" button, wondering what the hell I'm talking about. I'll tell you. In my years being a Monster, I thought I had seen some of the weirdest shit Asian cinema has to offer. I've watched many of Takashi Miike's incredibly varied works, from Gozu to Full Metal Yakuza to Ichi The Killer and back again. I've snuck a surreptitious peek at the Guinea Pig series (oh, what gore-soaked guilty pleasures those are!), and have just recently started dabbling in a bit of anime. Much like Frank in Hellraiser, I ignorantly thought I had seen it all.

Well, apparently those wacky Cenobites-in-training at Subversive Cinema have such sights to show me. Distributing such off-kilter overseas efforts as Living Hell and The Witch Who Came From The Sea, they've decided to pad out their rather sober (but excellent) catalog with an outright slice of Japanese insanity called Battlefield Baseball. Mixing just about every genre that it possibly can into its 97 minutes, from horror to musical to slapstick comedy, its very busy and very fun.

Starting off much like David Zucker's BASEketball, our narrator extols the beauty of baseball. He tells of the lovely crack of ball kissing bat, of the thrill of sliding into home just under the catcher's eager mitt, of the exhilaration of not knowing if the next ball you're going to catch will blow your carcass into smoldering chunks that will rain over center field...

Yes, our national pastime has been thoroughly corrupted, not by steroid-juiced, overpaid lunatics, but by the bloodthirsty zombies of Gedo High who use a series of scare tactics and rulebook trickery to turn the pitcher's mound into a warzone...the dugout into a charnel house...the ball field into a battlefield!

Unfortunately, despite the involvement of the athletically inclined Matsui Gorilla (who's got an underbite to rival Mike Mulligan's steam shovel), the team of Seido High has their soon-to-be-fatal season opener against the monstrous Gedo High. Under the gruesome guidance of their whiskey-swilling cowboy coach (who's got a chin that would make John Carradine blush), Gedo High plans on using the loopholes and exceptions to the rules of baseball to cut a bloody swath all the way to the national championships.

The Headmaster of Seido High has other plans...plans for Jubeh, the new transfer student. Jubeh has a special baseball pitch that cannot be beat (called Super Tornado), but refuses to use, as it was this mystical pitch that killed his father years before. Unfortunately, Jubeh has little choice, as his love of baseball, coupled with Seido High's slaughter at the hands of the Gedo players, forces him back into the game. Along with a new team comprised of chubby cheerleaders, his mallet-wielding mother, and cybernetically enhanced players with slick moves that would make Ultraman proud, he just might be able to take Seido High to the championships...or at least make sure that stay alive for a game.

Sound crazy? You don't know the half of it. In 97 minutes, we're given a few impromptu musical numbers, extreme violence against latex dummies, giant catcher's mitts, "fighting baseball" (which results in one of the combatants, Bancho, being reincarnated in no less than three different bodies), flaming balls (not those kind...ouch!), ear-chomping, the homeliest trio of cheerleaders in the Pacific, a giant syringe-bat, Jubeh-on-mother combat (with steel mallet!), neck-snapping, dumptrucks, an unnecessary rain of cherry blossoms...and more! Ladies and gentlemen, this movie is about as busy as they come! Unfortunately, this overly kinetic, hyperactive nature comes at the expense of logical narrative. Sure, you're bound to be left scratching your head wondering just what the hell is exactly happening at times, but you'll be laughing the whole time. At times, its wild, over-the-top stylings reminded me of Stephen Chow's Shaolin Soccer, but without that film's sense of mysticism or almost Warner Bros. grade shenanigans. For a fairly low budget feature (but by design, it seems), it wears its over-the-top goofiness on its tattered uniform sleeve. There's no attempts at masking just how ridiculous many of its scenes are: acupressure charts are handed to actors from just off-frame, one of Gedo High's players is obviously a rubber dummy being manipulated by another actor on screen, and there's a priceless scene snatched right from Benny Hill's book of tricks. Being produced by Ryuhei Kitamura, director of Versus, has left an indelible mark, as his "Non-Stop Freefall Ultra-Violence Action Entertainment" is stuffed into every frame. Hell, it even features Tak Sakaguchi (a.k.a. The Mega Badass from the aforementioned Versus), striking an all-too-familiar pose in the film's poster...

I'll admit, when I went through the menu system of the DVD, which is chock-full of clips from the feature, I was worried. The movie looked washed-out and blurry. Thankfully, Subversive proved me very, very wrong. The print quality was quite nice, with solid color saturation and very little damage to be seen. Nice little details, like the blood on the skulls at the "dropout hideout" or the plumes of smoke from Jubeh's Super Tornado pitch, showed up nice and clear. Audio is available in either Dolby 2.0 or a newly remixed 5.1, with both sounding nice and clear, and with the 5.1 using the surrounds sparingly, but quite effectively.

Now let's talk extras, because the rest of the world could learn a thing or two from Subversive. We're given a slew of goodies to wade through. There's three short trailers, two making-of documentaries, commentary, a karaoke music video for the song "Cherry Blossoms," trailers for other forthcoming Subversive releases (including the exploitation classic The Candy Snatchers), and a bucketload of other short clips. Best of all, there's an additional short film about a little boy trying to get the perfect bowl of ramen for his dying grandmother, which is shot in an even more absurd style than even Battlefield Baseball! Wowsers!

While certainly not for every taste (I can imagine those into more "serious" cinema will find its lowbrow nature almost offensive), Battlefield Baseball's bean-bashing brutality and blatant buffoonery is balls-to-the-wall brilliant. For a good time, gather a group of friends, a frosty 30-pack, and a copy of this movie.