Star Ballz

All right, look. Here's the situation. My sadistic colleague gave me the assignment to revue Star Ballz. She had seen it years ago, so she should have known better, but she told me to do it anyway, and hearing that it was a hentai parody of Star Wars, Sailor Moon, and a bunch of other pop culture, I thought it might be fun. I knew it would be a bad movie, but I thought maybe I could enjoy it ironically or at least have some laughs making fun of it. I was young and foolish then.

I'm reluctant to even write this revue, because I just know that some poor fool will read it and make the same mistake I did. Don't do that to yourself! I am perfectly aware that some movies are "so bad they're good;" trust me when I say that this is not one of those movies. It goes so far past "so bad it's good" that not only does it go back to being bad, but it reaches new levels of badness that scientists haven't been able to classify yet.

You might also think, "well, I'm not looking for Hamlet here; porn's porn." All I can say to that is that if you actually get off on this movie, you're probably not the kind of person I ever want to meet. The character designs look like they were drawn in some horny fat kid's Trapper Keeper during sixth-grade social studies class. The animation for the sex scenes is the same few frames cycled over and over again in each shot, and then each shot is repeated several times (even in different scenes), so there are probably about seventeen total frames of animation in all of the sex scenes.

The voices sound like they were recorded over VoIP on dial-up using the built-in microphone on someone's iBook with the gain turned up too high. The best thing I can say about the audio for the sex scenes is that it's consistent with the animation, in that it's a few moans and phrases sampled on someone's Casio keyboard and played over and over again. Everything's mixed all wrong so you can hardly make out the dialogue most of the time, but that's probably for the best. In fact, if you must watch this movie, you should probably just turn the sound off. And the video.

The touted "hilarious parody" consists of including a character for no reason other than to say "look! We are aware of the existence of this character of whose existence you are also aware! Isn't that hilarious?" If you're lucky you might get more value for your buck when the character makes some sort of ass joke. It's the Family Guy school of comedy.

To add insult to injury, the movie includes no fewer than two fake-out endings before it finally does end. I'm letting you know ahead of time in case you ever get kidnapped and tortured by someone who shows you this movie, so the first time the phrase "THE END" comes up, don't get your hopes up, because you still have a good ten minutes left. Er, well, you have ten minutes left, but they are by no means good. The best thing I can say about this movie is that it is only forty-seven minutes long, but then, that's forty-seven minutes too long, and I assure you it feels like much longer. (That's what she said! (And I make that terrible joke only to point out that it's much funnier than any of the ones in Star Ballz.))

My initial reaction to this movie was the desire to punch everyone involved in the production in the mouth, but over time that feeling gave way to a sort of melancholia, and I started to worry about what kind of circumstances in people's lives could have led them to make a movie like this, and how many of them have killed themselves since then. And if they haven't, why the hell not?