Electric Dragon 80.000 V

Director: Ishii Sogo Duration: 55 minutes

Imagine if you will, a young boy climbing up a towering metal structure that supports dangerous electrical wires while his family down below pleads for him to come down. The imagine one tiny sweat drop on the boy's cheek attracting an electrical bolt from the transformer that strikes him and knocks him from his perch. One would guess that the boy would be fried through, but in the world of _Electric Dragon 80,000 Volts_ this is definitely not the case. Instead the part of the boy's brain that controls emotions is damaged. The boy has a hard time releasing his emotions and when he does it usually results in folks being knocked out cold. The doctors try to keep him in line by shock treatment, but this only keeps him subdued for short periods of time. However, he finds a way to calm his inner demons and this is through an electric guitar, and so Dragon Eye Morrison, Asano Tadanobom is born!!

This movie is quite odd. It is in black and white which makes it feel quite gritty and low budget, but it does make the film's atmosphere quite striking especially when Morrison's anger builds up to overflowing. There is very little dialog and most of the film is spent watching Morrison hunt for lizards. His profession is hunting for lost lizards. However, the scenes in which he fights his arch enemy, Thundrerbolt Buddha, are quite well done. This is a fun film for a bit of mindless entertainment. It should be noted that Asano is in a band with the director Ishii and he also did the calligraphy for the film.

A 55-minute hyperkinetic descent into electro-charged madness, Electric Dragon 80.000 V is a virtually plotless, overly-extended music video playing like a punk rock shock to the brain. Championing kinetic anarchy and raw aggression, the film's underground visual style with its high contrast black and white cinematography and bizarre imagery set to an overwhelming eardrum-shattering industrial noise soundtrack will certainly have its fans. I can't deny that the film is a wildly unique piece of eye candy, often with fast-cutting sequences filled with flashes of electricity and surging power within our characters, not to mention the wild guitar-playing sequences. Having that high contrast crisp monochrome look, Electric Dragon plays like a manga come to its fullest realisation, a visual and aural marvel, shot and edited with boundless energy and style, and yet I'm still left wanting more.

Electric Dragon 80.000V is a striking black-and-white raunch through Tokyo, with an extremely simple plot line to accentuate the force of the film. It's about a troubled man who was shocked by high voltage wires when he was young. When his anger rises, he starts releasing electricity uncontrollably. The only thing able to calm him down is his... electric guitar.

The director, Sogo Ishii, is well known for his high-energy pieces, and began his career well before current highly regarded directors such as Takashi Miike and Shinya Tsukamoto, and produced bloody critiques on society even before Shinya reached for his first drill. Most notably, Sogo Ishii worked with Einsturzende Neubauten to produce Half Man, part documentary, part music video, and very good.

Electric Dragon 80.000V doesn't let you go, even when you're following in the footsteps of the main lead as he trawls through endless alleyways with pounding music in the background. Part of that is because of Tadanobu Asano, the relentlessly talented actor who has singlehandedly created a new sort of stardom in Japan, and it's no surprise he is called their Johnny Depp. The mastery over the direction is breathtaking - left deliberately rough to jar your senses, to neither keep you on the edge of the seat nor let you relax, you are driven to contemplate what exactly this is all about. The movie's fun to watch too!

The storyline reaches its conclusion none too soon, and none too late either. At just over 60 minutes, you get the feeling that there's going to be more of these, and you would be right. A sequel was produced which I'm dying to see.

With "Electric Dragon 80.000V", director Sogo Ishii brings homage to ... himself, really! Who else could he pay tribute to, because HE is the one man who single-handedly started the wild and anarchist Japanese punk-cinema and, even though other directors may have had a lot more success with it (for example Shinya Tsukamoto with "Tetsuo"), Ishii is and will always remain the pioneer of punk. That being said, "ED8kV" is an extremely weird accomplishment and it's probably the type of movie that spontaneously causes people to suffer from epilepsy & twitching. It feels like a 55 minutes long industrial videoclip, with chaotic camera movements, extremely loud noises and the most unique use of black and white photography you'll ever see. Ishii also put quite a bit of wicked imagination into the script, as he revolves his film on an unorthodox type of super-hero named Dragon Eye Morrison. The young punker-protagonist survived a massive electro-shock as a kid, but the accident somehow sparked severe aggression and powers. He sleeps with chains around his wrists and boisterously plays on his electric guitar to control the anger. Eventually, he's allowed to let out all his furious anger in a battle against his oddly masked nemesis Thunderbolt Buddha. Crazy film, a lot less nightmarish than the aforementioned "Tetsuo", but definitely an unforgettable visual attack on pretty much all your senses. Ishii's direction feels genuinely hostile and aggressive, as if he wanted to take revenge on big studios and meddlesome producers who always interfered with his personal visions and ideas, resulting in final cuts the director didn't even like. "Burst City" is the ideal example of that. As said, the film is only 55 minutes long, but personally I thought it was more than long enough! A couple of minutes extra and I probably would have started hallucinating about talking lizards and malicious Buddha's myself. And my tympanum membranes probably wouldn't have survived a longer version, neither.

Waauu... you gotta love this visual stunning,loud and berserk jewel of a movie. Sogo Ishii has created a masterpiece with obviosly influences from

Shinya Tsukamoto's "Tetsuo" spiced with a bit of "Wild Zero"

Tadanobu Asano last seen in "ichi the killer". plays the hero "Dragon eye morrison", a punk with a mad history of violence.He was heavily overdosed with electro-shock therapy throughout most of his life to try and eliminate his over-agressive kickass animalistic tendencies,which has now left him with a charged 80,000 volts of electricity body!! And when he gets p***ed... His only outlets for his violent frustrations are his guitar..

Masatoshi Nagase is the villain "Thundebolt Buddha"who as a kid was struck by lightning whilst climbing a pylon... He got charged up with 20 million volts of electricity,and half of his body is now encased in gold/metal to earth him. For some reason "Thundebolt Buddha" decides to pick a fight with

"Dragon eye morrison" and starts winding him up to the max of the voltmeter, wich leads to the big clash of electric power on top of tokyo. Electric Dragon 80.000 V is a hillarious,intense very loud and visually flawless piece of work.And it seems theese two guys are tailermade for the role's....It comes highly recommended and in my opinion an instant modern cult classic!