Monster Seafood Wars, which screened virtually at Fantasia 2020 is the latest by Japanese writer/director Minoru Kawasaki, who most will remember as the director as such Far East man-in-suit weirdness as Executive Koala and The Calamari Wrestler. Unlike the previous films, Seafood Wars is more your straight forward Kaiju beat’em up fueled by camp and cliche, and I mean that in the best possible way. The film begins as young Yuta, whose father is one of the best sushi chefs in town is on his way on his way to drop off his father’s yearly offering at the temple. Yuta is ambushed, and the live ingredients for the sushi mysteriously disappear when he crashes his bike. Soon after, monster versions of the offerings attack Tokyo and it’s up to Yuta and the S.M.A.T., The Seafood Monster Attack Team to stop them.
Monster Seafood Wars is fun, albeit a bit forgettable, the film lacks the bite of Executive Koala and just feels too shallow and low budget. The film’s pseudo documentary style further compounds this feeling since it allows the filmmaker to further hide the seams of an incomplete narrative he didn’t get around to shooting. To me it felt like this at one point this was a solid 20 minute short that just got padded with 60 minutes of documentary footage to fill it out to a feature. The monster designs here look fine, but a little too homemade for my taste. They were very reminiscent of early Kaiju Big Battel and just looked cheap, but this could easly have just be the harshness of the digital cinematography. Sometimes it’s hard to tell where the camp begins and the budget ends and this is compounded with a cast who are doing their worst impressions of anime characters stuck in a Kaiju film. Sometimes this combination gels, but most of the time it misses the mark.
If you‘re a fan of Kaiju films, Monster Seafood Wars is at least worth a watch. While it’s extremely superficial and kind of tedious, at times it’s kind of fun, especially the film’s final climactic battle when the monsters are turned into dinner for the city. You’re reminded this is going to play out just as you expect it would every 15 or so minutes or so when a talking head reminds you, just in case you forgot. While Minoru Kawasaki does pull out all the stops to actually make this bit worth the viewers time, with a veteran of the genre like Kawasaki behind the camera, you kind of expected more. Being a fan myself, I honestly have to say Monster Seafood Wars may not be for the more casual festival fans since its shortcomings may test their patience, because it no doubt started to to test mine.