Kaiju Big Battel: Terebi Sento 
(2003)
review by Big McLargehuge

If you like amateur (in some cases extremely amateur) wrestling, giant monster movies, fighting games like Tekken, manga, or Ultraman, Kaiju Big Battle is custom made just for you. I first encountered the lads from Kaiju Big Battle when I stumbled on their hilarious website www.kaiju.com a couple of years ago.

Written in certified Engrish and featuring a plethora of insane character bios, video clips, whacked–out merchandise, and reams of backstory, Kaiju Big Battel’s site became a weekly, if not daily, destination for a break from my otherwise mundane life.

Terebi Sento is their first DVD release, hitting the shelves in 2003, and featuring a scant four battles between such luminary characters as Kung-Fu Chicken Noodle, Dusto Bunny, Dr. Cube, and American Beetle. Shot in what appears to be a college student lounge, Terebi Sento’s matches fit between some painfully bad inter-sessions with the referee Jingi and announcer Louden Noxious, a host of Dadaist commercials, some for real products like the Kaiju tee-shirts and some completely fictitious ones like Midori Punchu… er… at least I think they’re fictitious…

The matches contained on this DVD are:

• Soup or Sandwich: Kung Fu Chicken Noodle fights Club Sandwich

• Golden Banana Award for Tag Team Excellence: villains Sky Deviler and Mota Naro steal the coveted Golden Banana Award from Los Plantanos (a pair of mutant Plantains).

• Dancing of the Three Way: Dusto Bunny, American Beetle, and Mung Wun wail on each other.

• Battling for the Belt Champ: Dr Cube vs Uchu-Chu and a host of guest stars.

Unfortunately, the matches in Terebi Sento don’t show off the best of the Kaiju Big Battle gang, and compared to the previews where they characters beat each other senseless in a steel cage, the setting and lighting of the student lounge give Terebi Sento a real “back yard wrestling” vibe that, while initially humorous, wears off quickly.

But this isn’t supposed to be about how well the “arena” is decorated, it’s all about the giant monster wrestling vibe, and Terebi Sento has that in abundance. Every hit has digital sound effects, and in many cases visual effects, added to emphasize the power of these battling behemoths. All of the post-production effects are REALLY well done too (especially Uchu-Chu’s lightning punches).

The first three matches are very short, which isn’t so good, and maybe total twenty minutes of wrestling, the last match is longer, about fifteen minutes. The Louden/Jingi stuff and the commercials round the whole experience out to about an hour, but if you take the time to explore the DVD and read character bios or the long Kaiju Big Battel back-story, it offers a solid 90 minutes of entertainment.

Don’t get me wrong, I laughed my ass off watching the lunacy that is Kaiju Big Battel, but I couldn’t help but wonder why they’d chosen this appearance and not some of their others for this DVD.

Kaiju Big Battel makes frequent appearances at colleges and concerts around the New England area, and if you can catch some of their live madness, then by all means do it looks like a hoot of a time, but if you aren’t in their vicinity the DVD offers a pretty good representation of what you’d see live. But, you have to get the joke otherwise this is little more than a latex encrusted exercise in stupidity.

I get the joke, so I appreciated the little things like the cardboard buildings in the ring, the complex and often-hilarious costumes, and the live action homage to my favorite genre of fantastic films.

The DVD offers some extras including trailers for live appearances, character bios taken directly from the website, commercials, and chapter stops. The box also says there’s a music video, but I couldn’t find the damn thing anywhere. Inside the box are pins of Dr. Cube and American Beetle, a list of Dr. Cube’s rules, and a Kaiju sticker.