Deddo sushi [Dead Sushi] (2012)

(In French, On Cable TV, September 2020) If I have properly understood the dynamics of the Japanese film market, there is a minority of movies out there that are made to be excessive, even by Japanese standards. Unfortunately, those are the films that are distributed widely in North America, skewing our perception of what’s happening over there. (Still, you can’t convince me that there’s not a secret clause in the Japanese Constitution that mandates that the country should set a proud world standard for weirdness.) Dead Sushi would clearly be in that tradition: A horror comedy featuring nothing less than homicidal sushi reanimated from the dead thanks to a nonsense serum; it’s clearly a joke writ large. There’s nothing subtle, nothing serious, nothing profound here: just gore effects used to execute a comic premise. I’m not always convinced by gory horror comedies, but Dead Sushi does manage to keep the balance between horror and humour: it’s ridiculous more than anything else, and that makes the dismemberments, impalements and general mayhem easier to take. Curiously enough, the film does spend some time discussing the intricacies of creating sushi, and the good form for eating it—adding substance to the film, but also, paradoxically, making it even funnier once it takes into account the seriousness of the characters about their sushi. I would be wary of showing Dead Sushi to just about any audience, but fans or horror comedies should have a great time watching it.