Wild Zero (2000)
Wow, yet another Japanese no-budget punk-rock zombies-and-UFOs love story/music-video/splatter flick. It seems like two of these come out every week. Seriously, though... this film's pretty kooky. It's about a guy named Ace and his tentative new paramour Tobio and the band Guitar Wolf and a bunch of zombies and UFOs and explosions. It's crude and amateurish, but then that's kind of the fun of punk rock -- anyone can do it pretty well. So this is punk-rock filmmaking, man. The movie is, however, extraordinarily frustrating for more or less the same reasons that it's a gas. The patchwork DIY ethic gives the film a kind of scraggly charm, but it also hamstrings a lot of the film's better ideas. Plus, the plot is all over the damn place with too many unnecessary characters and useless scenes and whatnot. You're left with a sense of "That was pretty fun, but if a director with a little more restraint and a little more talent had done this, it woulda been fucking phenomenal." Then again, even the director doesn't take his film seriously. At all. (I mean that, too -- read an interview with him about the film sometime.) However, this film does make a case for Guitar Wolf (leader of the band Guitar Wolf) as the single coolest dude to walk the Earth today. The music's great too. I need to find the soundtrack CD now. Just remember -- love knows no boundaries, race or gender! ROCK AND ROLL!
Grade: C+
Wow, yet another Japanese no-budget punk-rock zombies-and-UFOs love story/music-video/splatter flick. It seems like two of these come out every week. Seriously, though... this film's pretty kooky. It's about a guy named Ace and his tentative new paramour Tobio and the band Guitar Wolf and a bunch of zombies and UFOs and explosions. It's crude and amateurish, but then that's kind of the fun of punk rock -- anyone can do it pretty well. So this is punk-rock filmmaking, man. The movie is, however, extraordinarily frustrating for more or less the same reasons that it's a gas. The patchwork DIY ethic gives the film a kind of scraggly charm, but it also hamstrings a lot of the film's better ideas. Plus, the plot is all over the damn place with too many unnecessary characters and useless scenes and whatnot. You're left with a sense of "That was pretty fun, but if a director with a little more restraint and a little more talent had done this, it woulda been fucking phenomenal." Then again, even the director doesn't take his film seriously. At all. (I mean that, too -- read an interview with him about the film sometime.) However, this film does make a case for Guitar Wolf (leader of the band Guitar Wolf) as the single coolest dude to walk the Earth today. The music's great too. I need to find the soundtrack CD now. Just remember -- love knows no boundaries, race or gender! ROCK AND ROLL!
Grade: C+
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