Bakuretsu toshi

A shame few will get the chance to see this movie. It was suggested to me as a Japanese Death Race 2000. Oh, but it is so much more. A dystopian future against a backdrop of angry Japanese punk rock. Burst City is a raw look at an overamped society with its frantic, hyper camera work and loud brash music. As a fictional peek into punk rock, Burst City is still leaps and bounds above any other attempts. Well worth the look. Be prepared to search, however, and I don't believe there is a subtitled or dubbed version in existence. This is a shame as the film deserves greater exposure.

I went into Burst City not knowing what it was. I hadn't seen footage or read much about it, and I hadn't seen any of Sogo Ishii's other films, to get a sense of the director. But from a glance at some of the director's filmography, posters and screenshots I may have seen out in the ether, I could tell there was a punk aesthetic in some of his films, that I personally found immensely intriguing, and there's a few of his films that I know by name and by poster art if nothing else and have long desired to see. I guess the reason I went this long without watching any of his films, was because I couldn't find any of them in any kind of half-decent quality.

Burst City it turns out, is some kind of insane 1980s Japanese punk rock concept album music video. Like "Tommy", but with ridiculous teenage Japanese punk songs with lyrics that make no sense, directed by way of a young Shin'ya Tsukamoto. What skeleton of a plot there is, you might sometimes sense occasionally, like an underdeveloped V-cinema Takashi Miike dystopian Mad Max sci-fi script, bobbing just below the surface, drowning under the enormity of the film's aesthetic. Basically, the story of the film, or the "concept" in the sense of the concept album music video, boils down to being about youth rebelling against "the man". But when Burst City is at its best is when it blocks out all pretence of a plot and with seeming effortlessness, becomes pure aesthetic perfection.

The first scene of Burst City, the first song on the album, which has no lyrics and sets the mood for the album to come, would be, from a directorial perspective, a masterfully brilliant opening to any film with a genuine narrative script that might be able to accommodate such an opening. Many of the other scenes in Burst City, too, feel like they could make really heart-pumping moments in a more conventional film. But the fact is that they're all together in this one nonsensical film, which may make the whole thing feel somewhat hollow in the end - like there's no substance here - OR it could be seen as freeing the film up from slavish adherence to a narrative that would diminish its aesthetic credibility.

The best comparison for Burst City would be another 80s cult Japanese musical film that was curated out of obscurity recently, "The Legend of the Stardust Brothers" released on blu-ray by Third Window Films. Another film that's more a full album music video than a narrative feature film, Legend of the Stardust Brothers, like Burst City, is also an extremely campy strange cultural artifact - or time capsule - of a film. I think the main difference is, where Stardust Brothers' camp is just funny, Burst City's camp, while undoubtedly funny, is, to be honest, kind of pretty cool at the same time. Kind of satisfying. How liberating it would be to be a ridiculous Japanese punk in the 80s. I'm kind of really really endeared to this aesthetic.

The Arrow blu-ray release, I have no doubt, presents this film looking true to how it was intended, and shown in theatres. Given the limitations of the source material, the blu-ray could frankly have been an upscaled DVD a lot of the time, and I probably wouldn't notice the difference, but I am confident nonetheless that this represents an enormous upgrade over any previous home release this film may have had. This is a hell of a gritty film all shot handheld at night in high-ISO high-noise super-grainy 16mm film, and watching it in any kind of digitally over-compressed, bad transfer, or compromised way, would murky and confuse the aesthetic and greatly diminish the experience, so I think it's fantastic that Arrow is offering this restored version.

The allure of discovering Sogo Ishii's punk rock aesthetic on blu-ray persuaded me to blind-buy the Arrow blu-ray when it was announced, but I wasn't in a hurry to watch it, as I had no particular expectation for it. As it turns out, this is the surprise blu-ray release of the year, and the best film I've newly discovered in some time. I hope some of Ishii's other films like Crazy Thunder Road and Electric Dragon 80,000V get similar releases soon.

Roger Ebert once said of the 1995 film Fallen Angels by Wong Kar-Wai "It will appeal to the kinds of people you see in the Japanese animation section of the video store, with their sleeves cut off so you can see their tattoos. And to those who subscribe to more than three film magazines. And to members of garage bands. And to art students." Well, none of those examples describes me exactly, but maybe I would fit right in with the types of people Ebert was talking about, because Fallen Angels is one of my most beloved movies. I wonder how he'd describe the hypothetical target audience for this film...

Without the work of Sogo Ishii there would be no Takashi Miike or Shinya Tsukamoto. That becomes quite clear in the opening minutes of BURST CITY. The hyper-kinetic beginning of the film with its lightning fast editing and violent images together with the use of music were obvious influences on Miike's DEAD OR ALIVE and BLUES HARP as well as a number of other films. And the camera-work, use of black and white photography and cyberpunk imagery were later recycled in Tsukamoto's TETSUO films as well as SNAKE OF JUNE.

BURST CITY is essentially a feature length punk rock music clip. The film is set in a kind of post-apocalyptic Japan where everyone is a punk, a freak or a brutal cop. There are non-stop riots in the streets, non-stop punk concerts, non-stop gang warfare, non-stop police brutality and non-stop car chases. This film is one hell of a wild ride and it left me feeling spun. The soundtrack is made up entirely of awesome Japanese punk rock and fits the images perfectly.

BURST CITY is powerful, frenetic, feral, rabid cinema that feels like a transmission from the gutter of the future.

I have seen a lot of Japanese Movies, and this must have been one of the worst i have seen in all those years. The Punk Music might be appealing to some people, but the rest of the film is awful. The so called Camera-work looks like they just ran around with the Cam, the "violent" scenes some People liked are cut fast and filmed with an extremely unsteady Camera so you don't see anything at all. Weird Gangs fighting each other makes it looks like an extremely cheap "The Riffs" aka "Bronx Warriors" RipOff, which was originally released 1982 as well. All in all the movie just was a mix of pointless and bad fights, mixed with punk music... Even for a giant Musicvideo the Visuals are extremely bad. Don't let yourself fool you by People how compare this to work by Miike or Kitano, because even their worst movies look like Oscar-winners compared to this waste of material.

I'd like to start this comment section by first off saying I do enjoy and appreciate to a certain extent the cinematic agenda of "cyberpunk cinema". I really enjoyed Fukui's "Rubber's Lover" and I appreciate the aesthetic genius of films like "Tetsuo", "Pinocchio 964", even the recent "Bottled Fools". But with that said and done, that is basically what all these films are, simply aesthetically pleasing. That statement reaches its height with this earlier film called Burst City by cyberpunk pioneer Sogo Ishii. With so clever, innovative and kinetic cinematography Ishii just creates a clash between Mad Max and Rock n Roll High School. There is no substance to this style, not even some of the obscure images that one may be used to from seeing Tsukamoto's earlier films. And actually in some ways, Burst City's style obstructs the viewer from any type of cohesion so what ensues is total anarchy. I was really excited about seeing this early film from Ishii too because I first really enjoyed the psychological thriller "Angel Dust" and then came to enjoy his return to form in "Dead End Run" but "Burst City" turned out to be a major disappointment.