September 17, 2012

'Tebana Sankichi: Snot Rockets' to premiere at Fantastic Fest 2012


This is the sort of news that makes Monday mornings seem a little more tolerable! Yudai Yamaguchi's Tebana Sankichi: Snot Rockets, which has to be the best film title in years, is all set to have its world premiere at Fantastic Fest 2012, in Austin on September 22nd. The film is a feature length remake of his earlier short film, and you can read more below.


(AUSTIN September 17, 2012) – Worsal has announced that TEBANA SANKICHI: SNOT ROCKETS, the new action comedy from Japanese director Yudai Yamaguchi, will World Premiere at the renowned Fantastic Fest film festival in Austin on September 22nd. Director Yamaguchi will attend the screening.
“Since first appearing on the scene as one of the key creative team members behind the cult hit Versus, Yudai Yamaguchi has been one of the great, largely overlooked talents of the Japanese film scene,” saysFantastic Fest programmer and Twitchfilm founder Todd Brown. “Enormously playful and unpredictably inventive, Yamaguchi brings his unique creative energy to everything he touches. And unique is certainly the word for TEBANA SANKICHI: SNOT ROCKETS. It's a ridiculous explosion of absurd humor that proves that there is always room to push a joke farther.”
The film features Japanese action superstar Tak Sakaguchi reprising a role he originally performed in Snot Rockets and Super Detective, a 1995 independent short film written and directed by Yamaguchi.  Now, seventeen years later, Tak and Yudai have joined forces again to reboot a new, feature-length version of the short, even more lunatic and unpredictable than the original.
Tak stars as Tebana Sankichi—lover of women, rescuer of the fallen, sometime private detective, wayward son, homeless bum, celebrity, bullied child, spoiled rich kid, and fighting master. In what can politely be described as a “loose episodic comedy,” we follow Sankichi’s increasingly bizarre adventures across space and time, and his long-suffering partnership with “Twice” Shiro, his bespectacled, put-upon partner, as well as the efforts of a hard-working postman trying to deliver a very important letter to him. 
Shot across the globe in Tokyo, Yubari, Philadelphia, New York, and Austin, TEBANA SANKICHI: SNOT ROCKETS is now bigger, longer, and packs more power per inch than ever before. Careening recklessly from suicide humor and Tora-san parodies to traditional New Year’s Day television greetings, horror homage, and yakuza movie references, it’s a film guaranteed to wear the audience out with its relentless pace and make them cry mercy! A radical departure from anything the filmmakers have done in recent years - and produced on a shoestring budget - TEBANA SANKICHI: SNOT ROCKETS is a demonstration of how much Yudai and Tak continue to push the boundaries of the action / comedy film, and is their latest shot across the bow of good taste and proper judgment. 
Director Yudai Yamaguchi is Japan’s top specialist in the field of deranged and bizarre cult comedy films. After graduating from film school, Yamaguchi turned out a number of award-winning short films, some of them with Tak Sakaguchi. They were spotted not long after by filmmaker Ryuhei Kitamura, who hired Yamaguchi and Tak to work on his film, Versus, with Tak starring and doing the action while Yamaguchi wrote the screenplay and directed the second unit. Soon after, Yamaguchi made his own directorial debut with the zombie baseball flick, Battlefield Baseball, which starred Tak and became a surprise word-of-mouth hit in Japan after winning the Grand Prize at the Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival. Yamaguchi followed that up with Meatball Machine and the live-action adaptation of the manga series, Cromartie High School. A few years later he was back with the 80's horror tribute Tamami: The Baby's Curse and then directed several of the fake in-movie commercials for Tokyo Gore Police. More recently, Yamaguchi co-directed the genre TV series Soil with Takashi Shimizu, director of The Grudge, and joined the upstart genre film label Sushi Typhoon with Yakuza Weapon (co-directed with Tak) and hisBattlefield Baseball follow-up, Deadball, again starring Sakaguchi. He also contributed an episode to the international horror omnibus The ABCs of Death, produced by Magnet Releasing, which will receive its U.S. Premiere at Fantastic Fest.

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