DEAD SUSHI

I AM COMPLETELY UNDONE BY THIS FILM, LADIES.

COMPLETELY UNDONE.

Dead Sushi (originally Deddo Sushi), directed by Noboru Iguchi and released in 2012 to no special fanfare, is simply the BEST SQUIDMAS MOVIE YOU ARE EVER LIKELY TO SEE.  It has all the necessary ingredients (she chuckled) -- vinegared short-grain rice, toasted nori, vengeful mad scientists, toro maguro, office politics, salmon roe, karate kicks, hot springs, knife and axe mayhem, Big Pharma, Shrimp, French kissing, drooling zombies, sliced Alligator pears, robot dancing, and of course flying Squid.  For a hundred and one reasons, this movie is a sort of Miracle on 34th Street -- for fish.

PLOT SUMMARY:  I have to dispense with this section of the review.  The director crammed so much stuff into this story (see the paragraph above) that if I tried to describe it, it would sound like the dog's breakfast.  I will tell you this much: it's about a failed sushi chef who finds herself when faced with an unexpected challenge -- FLYING KILLER SUSHI.  But telling you that is like telling you that Eraserhead is a story about a printer named Henry who has a baby with his girlfriend Mary.  I just can't cover the story properly in print.

CLIFFIE'S NOTES:

>> This is technically an action comedy, by human reckoning, with a lot of blood in it.  By OUR sort of reckoning, FISH reckoning, it is a heart-warming tale of fish coming together with the humans who appreciate them most, in the most unlikely frame imaginable -- a gory comedy.  It's so incongruous, it could make a Catfish laugh.

>> This movie could only have come out of Japan.  Nobody else -- not the Norwegians, not the Inuit, nobody -- feels this way or understands this much about fish.  And with all their deep communion with the piscatorial race, only a single Japanese filmmaker came up with anything like this story.  And he made it into a comedy!  I can't get over that!

>> I really think that humans must find the whole idea of a fish merger with the human race more palatable -- you should pardon the expression -- if it's framed as a violent takeover of THEIR race by OURS.  This is why so many of these movies have to be horror pictures.  (Almost all of them, actually.)  Shaved Monkeys cannot seem to work and play well with other species, at least not since the introduction of the flush toilet.  But the director manages to use their typical monkeycentric, "us & them" thinking against them, demonstrating that the only people who really have a shot at winning this war are the ones who willing to communicate with their frenemies, the fish.

>> AND IF WE'RE NOT THE BEST FRENEMIES THE HUMAN RACE EVER HAD, WHO ARE WE?

>>  They also made this story more palatable to the Naked Ape viewer by bowing to the constant, ravening human need for STATUS.  The bipeds squaring off against each other in this story are a brilliant research chemist, a gifted sushi chef and the president of a corporation, backed by his flunkies.  For a human watching this movie, the sushi are only pawns in a personal human revenge scheme, and only the superiority of the greatest competitor in the HUMAN contest can be the winner. 

>>  For a fish viewer, it's obvious that the only real winners are the FISH.  They come back from the dead (this time in a way even humans can understand), they take over any human they come in contact with, and in the shattering climax, THE RECRUITING LANDFISH STEPS RIGHT UP TO THE CAMERA, REVEALS HIS TRUE IDENTITY AND SAYS HOWDY-DO!  I have to tell you that two of the landfish operatives watching this movie with me last night BURST INTO TEARS during this scene.  We all wish we could do what this guy did.  We all dream about it at night.  THIS GUY UPPED AND DID IT.  It was overwhelming.

>> And then he did something else we all wish we could do:  get back at those who fail to follow us into the sea.  Wait'll you see that scene.  Dang!

Don't just SEE this movie.  You need to OWN it.