Directed
by Jôji Iida, 1990, 96 min. starring Akira Emoto, Pappara
Kawai, Goro Kishitani, Shigeru Muroi, Sanplaza Nakano, and Yasuko
Tomita.
Sadly, Jôji Iida, director of
Battle Heater (aka Battle Heater: Kotatsu), has
up until this point been one of Snowblood Apple’s least favourite
directors to date, having been responsible for two (in)famous flops,
Another Heaven and
Rasen (both of which could have been decent,
given the great plot of Rasen (written by Koji Suzuki)
and the interesting and left-field concept behind Another Heaven,
were it not for the piss-poor visuals and badly interpreted material).
However, believe it or not, with the advent of Artsmagic's
release of Battle Heater, this is all about to change,
I promise you. It would seem that with this movie, Iida has found
his directorial niche, and it doesn't lie in either the medical
chills of Rasen, nor the featherweight gore'n'guts pseudo-psychology
of Another Heaven. Rather than visual flair, Iida has been
gifted with... comic timing. Yes, dear friends, it's true:
this unassuming little horror-comedy is probably the best thing
Iida has ever made... because it is genuinely funny. Real
laugh-out loud moments abound from start to finish.
I’ll be absolutely honest with you: right
from the outset I really didn't want to watch Battle Heater,
given my previous track record with Iida and how much I’ve
disliked his other films. However, this time, I'm very glad to have
had my prejudices proven completely wrong. For once, I'd like to
shake Jôji Iida by the hand (rather than by the neck) and
tell him that all is forgiven, and that we won't take the mick out
of his oeuvre any more (well, not until he makes another
terrible flick, anyway). Yep – in my opinion, it’s really
that good. ;-)
There’s a whole host of ker-azy characters
featured: for example, an old couple who are tired of life and rig
up a wonderfully Heath Robinson-esque suicide scenario; Bloody
Savie (no, I have no idea what that's supposed to mean either),
the world's least convincing punk band ever (and I do mean
ever - visualise, if you will, a kind of Rod, Jane and
Freddy take on Guitar Wolf); a duo of hapless murderers lugging
around a corpse they don't know how to get rid of; Hama, a repairman
so risibly incompetent he manages to blow up every TV he's ever
supposed to fix, and who prays to "The Lord of Electricity"
to not break quite so many items; and as for the so-called
half-dismembered 'corpse' in the apartment about Furuchi's, I've
never seen a dead person move quite so much, either ;-) - not to
mention, of course, the central hero, Furuchi (Pappara Kawai), the
clichéd wuss who unknowingly unleashes the curse of the Battle
Heater upon the earth and who becomes embroiled in trying to save
his girlfriend, not only from the unwelcome advances of the punk
band's dopey lead singer (Goro Kishitani), but also from being chomped
by a crazed piece of demonic heating equipment ;-)
The story is engagingly funny and dunderheaded:
it may well have been informed by Stephen King’s 1978 short
story The Mangler (a tale which originally appeared in
his short-story collection Night Shift, but which has also
been fairly recently made into a full-length movie, directed by
Tobe Hooper of Texas Chain Saw Massacre fame); although
in this case, the central focus of the plot is not a huge monolithic
industrial laundry-press which turns into a remorseless killer,
but the infinitely less scary and infinitely more funny transmogrification
of a tiny little Kotatsu heater (of the kind which is shaped like
a small table and which the Japanese put a blanket over to keep
their knees warm in the winter), which also turns into
a remorseless killer... just, maybe, er, not quite such
a scary one... ;-D
As you might expect if you've already seen any of
Iida's former outings, the visuals are still predictably crappy
and flat, with no change to his (lack of) style – if anything,
they're actually worse here. But it's no huge loss. This isn't the
kind of film that requires poetic imagery and a haunting soundtrack,
which is just as well, because it ain't got one. ;-) The music,
it must be said, is utterly hideous and seems to have been nicked
from an old 60's Carry On movie – it's tacky beyond
belief. And the monster imagery looks like a cross between Audrey,
the man-eating plant in Little Shop of Horrors, and Power
Rangers – a mecha Venus flytrap on legs that glows in
the dark and makes deep growly munching noises. It's every bit as
silly as it sounds, and again, in this case that's not necessarily
a bad thing.
As for the special effects, they're frankly anything
but special – but again, that actually works to the movie's
advantage. Take, for example, the yellow van which appears in the
film's first five minutes as the focus of a horrible accident: you
don't need to watch the scene twice to work out that it's actually
a Tonka toy on strings, filmed from the side in close-up ;-D (Actually,
on second thought, it's probably a Bandai toy, since it
was their production company responsible for this film!)
And that's a great example of what makes this movie
such a success, as far as I'm concerned: Battle Heater
self-deprecatingly knows the limits of its strengths and uses its
weaknesses to its own advantage. It is, by definition, taking the
piss of itself for being so rubbish, and that is thoroughly endearing.
It's no work of art, and neither does it want to be. Where Another
Heaven lost Brownie points for taking itself way too seriously,
Battle Heater wouldn't even dare try, so it goes right
to the other end of the scale.
Synopsis
The main storyline isn't very complicated –
in fact, even if you've never seen the movie, you could probably
write it yourself given a few choice elements ;-)
Furuchi (Pappara Kawai) and Hama (Akira Emoto) are
partners in a repair business, collecting electrical junk to fix
up and resell. However, Furuchi isn't very good at finding stuff,
and Hama is even less good at repairing it. One day Furuchi finds
a Kotatsu heater, which he decides would be a great fixture in his
apartment as he needs a heater for his room. Unfortunately, as Furuchi
and Hama are driving home after finding the heater, Hama rolls the
van and 'kills' Furuchi, but manages to resuscitate his colleague
with a novel use of a stun gun. But the resulting electrical blast
is not merely enough to shock Furuchi back to life, it also gives
life, Frankenstein's-monster-style, to the Kotatsu heater, which,
when no-one's looking, begins to act rather oddly...
This strange event is compounded by an even stranger
event – the joint suicide of the apartment block's owners,
utilising such a ferocious electrical shock that the sheer force
of the energy supercharges the possessed heater, giving it even
more power to transform itself into something nasty.
As the movie progresses, it becomes obvious that
once the machine's terrible transformation from harmless bottom-warmer
into slavering robot killer is complete, only one thing can stop
it from killing people – a little silver seal, which would
normally release the heat, but which in this case keeps the diabolical
forces well and truly locked into the motor.
Naturally, being the pair of hopeless cases Furuchi
and Hama are, they've lost the seal, Furuchi having given it to
his ladyfriend – and so begins a frantic chase to get it back,
continually foiled by Furuchi's arch-nemesis, the lead singer of
a crappy punk band who wants to steal Furuchi's girlfriend and mess
up his life. Will the pair of them find the seal in time, before
something awful happens? (Well, what do you think?! ;-D)
Of course, this movie isn't going to appeal to everyone.
There are plenty of po-faced "professional" critics who
are too snobby and humourless to see the funny side of a film like
this; and it'll undoubtedly disappoint anyone who was hoping for
the usual buckets o' blood and gore-and-innards approach –
despite a few killings, I can't recall having seen a single drop
of blood spilled during the entire movie! The comic element might
not be enough for some, but we here at Snowblood Apple appreciate
a good laugh, and this movie does the business quite admirably.
As far as the (admittedly limited) genre goes, this
film stands right up there with the best comic-horror titles we've
seen. Like Bio-Zombie
and even (to a certain extent) He
Never Dies (aka Za Ginipiggu: Senritsu! Shinainai no otoko),
Battle Heater is, in every way possible, a movie whose
intentions are to make you giggle rather than gag. The acting is
on the money – there are pretty much no stand-out superstar
names here, but the comic performances are very tight and well-executed.
My one problem with the story would be that it's
a bit incoherent in places. There's not much in the way of explanation
given for some of the sub-plots, for example, the side-story involving
the murderers living in the apartment above Furuchi's isn't really
ever explained satisfactorily, which does then appear to be completely
irrelevant and makes the story a little cluttered and non-cohesive
at times.
Battle Heater is no Citizen Kane,
but it is a great Saturday evening popcorn flick –
a lunatic cross between Carry On Screaming, Tetsuo:
The Iron Man, The Mangler and The Little Shop
of Horrors, it's hilarious, cartoony, daft as a brush, endearingly
silly and delightfully awful - all at the same time. Kudos to Iida
for stepping right into the left-field and making such a mad little
movie. If you loved Bio-Zombie, as we did, don't hesitate
– go and buy Battle Heater and enjoy it for what
it is – a funny, wacky, charming comedy.
Snowblood
Apple Rating for this film:
Entertainment value: 8/10
Chills – 0/10
Laughs – 8/10
Violence – well, there's a huge man-eating heater. What more
do you need to say?/10
Sex – one flash of the heroine's bottom in smiley-face knickers/10
Music – that's what mute buttons were invented for ;-)
Actual Tagline – Putting the Kill into Kilowatts
Snowblood Apple Alternative Tagline – I'd Rather Be Cold
Than Dead, Ta Very Much
Would You Move Into This Apartment Block? – well, I guess
the rent's probably pretty cheap, thanks to the murderous occupants,
fried owners and giant man-eating heaters. Oh, and a piss-poor
punk band upstairs
***Highly Recommended!***
Discuss this movie here at the Snowblood Apple Forums!
This
film is released by Artsmagic
Snowblood
Apple Filmographies
Joji Iida
Akira Emoto
Pappara Kawai
Links
http://www.artsmagic.co.uk/-
Battle Heater is available direct from Artsmagic, who very
kindly provided us with the screener copy used for this review
http://www.metamovie.de/film/battleheater.html
- Metamovie, as ever, bang on the money, with some choice images
http://www.terroraustralis.net/reviews/dvd/battleheater.html
- another positive review, with DVD technical details and ratings
http://www.rumourmachine.com/Reviews/Battle_Heater.htm
- another great review at The Rumour Machine
http://www.fjmovie.com/horror/t0/48.html
- full cast details at Fjmovie
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