CRUSHBALL was a movie I first stumbled upon the existence of back when compiling the first ever B-WARE article back in 2005. It sounded like a nifty enough concept: a Japanese-American co-production combining live action with anime and manga with a plot centered around a violent futuristic form of dodgeball. Aside from a listing on the Eleven Arts website (where you can also view the trailer), I hadn't heard a peep about the film until I came across a Hong Kong DVD of it for sale on eBay. I now fully understand why so little has come of CRUSHBALL and why odds are it will never cross the Pacific. I'd go so far as to argue its unreleasable altogether. It definitely borders on being unwatchable. A 71-minute failed experiment, technically only an hour with an extra 11-minutes of making-of footage intercut with the closing credits, that simply does not work on any conceivable level. CRUSHBALL really is, sad to say, one of the absolute worst things I've ever watched.

It's not that I have anything against a director trying to be stylish by using a lot of gimmicky camera and editing tricks, but what I do have a problem with is when they do it with little rhyme and reason, as if they're doing so as a substitute for anything resembling substance or, as I've increasingly noticed to be the case with low budget filmmakers, to overcompensate for what's lacking budgetwise. In this case, the visual gimmickry isn't even well done. The convergence of live action and anime proves to be as ungainly as it is unspectacular. The live action scenes are ineptly staged and the anime action isn't much better. The other camera and editing tricks merely detract from the proceedings - not that there's much of anything proceeding here. By the time the pre-title sequence alone had concluded I already felt like I had watched Tony Scott's attention deficit disorder vomit all over my television screen.

For all the visual style and surrealness, nothing changes the fact that CRUSHBALL is one seriously ugly-looking movie. The basic production values are cheap looking and ungarish to begin with. Then there's the lighting that is needlessly murky with colors that are washed out - not in a Michael Bay sort of way, more of an "Oops, we left the negative out in the sunlight for too long and it's started to fade" sort of way. Even the anime footage looks like it came from a low rent late Eighties anime production. I've said it before and I'll say it again, just because your film was made on a miniscule budget doesn't mean your movie should look unpleasantly cheap.

I suppose if the makers of CRUSHBALL were trying to mimic the kind of anime that's dreary in tone, creeps along at a remarkably slow pace with not a whole long going on and a simplistic yet still hard to follow plot, with actors delivering banal dialogue in the flattest manner humanly possible, and features plenty of awkward pauses, then, yeah, they pulled off a stunning achievement here.

CRUSHBALL's grossly underdeveloped plot is based around a young Asian-American woman named Kay who, unbeknownst to her, is the sole descendant of the organized crime clan that controls the uber popular sport Crushball. Turns out her dad diddled with the daughter of the clan leader, knocked her up, and things then turned ugly. Her Caucasian half-brother, Mike, is a champion dodgeball player who has gone missing after taking part in the big money bloodsport. She'll then get taken away by the clan running the sport and forced to compete in order to save Mike's life. What they don't tell her is that the real reason why they want her to compete is so that her body will produce whatever it is in the family blood that they use to produce this wonder drug that gives all the Crushball players their superhuman abilities. Or something along those lines. In true anime form, little of it makes sense. Her blood is described as containing the essence of the top Crushball players there's ever been. Whatever. Who really cares? I know I wasn't given any reason to. Just awful.

Another major faux pas is that even after watching the film I still wouldn't be able to explain to you the rules to the sport of Crushball if my life depended on it. I can tell you that balls hit with the impact of a shotgun blast and characters possess Dragonball Z-like powers when the action goes from live action to anime (and even to manga-style black & white stills). Nothing whatsoever is done to establish the personalities of Kay's opponents outside of their gimmicky costumes and varying degrees of grunting. The playing field for this, supposedly the most popular spectator sport of the future, looks to be a predominantly empty warehouse. This venue wouldn't even make for a decent Lazer Tag location.

Just the atrocious acting alone renders CRUSHBALL unwatchable. Even the best acting in the film is stilted at best. The guy playing Mike delivers the flattest-sounding line readings you'll ever hear. Stephen Hawking's voice box sounds like Robin Williams by comparison. Even when in the midst of a life or death struggle the girl playing Kay speaks every line as if she were bored of out of her mind. Honey, you think you're bored playing it, try watching it!

Kay is initially guided in the game by a computerized voice that sounds like Alpha from Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers after inhaling helium. The voice is so high pitched anything it says is virtually indecipherable. That I could barely understand a word it said still made it the best vocal performance of the film.

There's just nothing positive I can say about this failed experiment. Nothing about CRUSHBALL works. Nothing clicks. Nothing gels. A complete waste of one hour of my life. Don't let it waste an hour of yours.