#05 Wild Zero (Tetsuro Takeuchi, 2000)

“ALCOHOL MIXED THROUGH MY BLOOD / BABY IS THE ONLY ONE I SEE! / GOT AWALLET ON MY ASS WITH A ROCK N’ ROLL LICENCE / THIS IS THE ONLY PLACE I’LL EVER DIE!”, sing Guitar Wolf in a deafening concert sequence midway through the endlessly amazing exemplum of punk rock filmmaking that is ‘Wild Zero’. “LIKE ROARING BLOOD, LIKE ROARING BLOOD, EXPLODING BLOOD, LIKE ROARING BLOOD!”, they continue. What can the likes of you and I do, but look on in awe?

You may find it difficult to accept that a shot on video Japanese comedy-gore movie could really hold the power to change people’s lives for the better, but then you presumably weren’t there to see me in 2002, holding my newly-acquired VHS of the movie before me like a holy relic, recent witness to an experience less like a motion picture, more like some deranged dream I might have had after falling asleep drunk listening to Iggy & The Stooges on my headphones.

When you read some posting on the circa-2002 internet about some crazy new movie in which Guitar Wolf fight alien-zombies, it is easy then as now to declare “wow, that sounds amazing – I’m gonna watch that”, knowing that you are setting yourself up for a certain degree of disappointment. So god bless director Tetsuro Takeuchi for delivering not only the anticipated tornado of crazy trash-horror tomfoolery, but something that surpasses even our wildest expectations – a potent and elegiac coming of age tale that exultantly proclaims the gospel of rock n’ roll (sorry, ROCK N’ ROLL!!!), leaving agnostic viewers in little doubt as to its status as the benevolent guiding force of the universe.

Ok, so maybe that last bit was just me projecting a little, the result of too many student days spent drinking too much coffee and listening to too much thundering amphetamine madness, but whatever – fact is, I’ve not been quite the same since.

How could I not take to heart the tale of Ace (Masashi Endô), feckless avatar of all nervous teenage rock n’ roll fanatics, who inadvertently helps to save his favourite band Guitar Wolf during a tense backstage shootout and finds himself initiated into their blood brotherhood by way of thanks, as the band present him with a magic whistle that he may use to summon these nigh-on supernatural rock n’ roll warriors to assist him in his hour of need?

How could I not feel for our hero, as the strange sensations brought on by both a new love and the UFO-birthed flesheating zombies who now roam the Japanese countryside drive him first to euphoria, and then to the point of existential despair, as he finds himself alone and surrounded by the undead, his noble fantasies of romantic intimacy with his new beau Tobio thwarted by unforeseen gender confusion and his own cowardice and self-loathing made cruelly clear?

“THERE IS NO GOD HERE!!” screams Endô at one point, giving the performance of a lifetime as he curses the empty heavens. Ace has all but given up on life, is ready to surrender to the pressures closing in around him, when suddenly, Guitar Wolf himself appears, glorious as an apparition of the Virgin Mary, to point him toward the light: “ACE! - LOVE KNOWS NO BORDERS, NATIONALITIES OR GENDERS! - DO IT!!!” (Never has the maligned art of the multiple punctuation mark been so righteously and unrepentantly employed as by the English sub-titlers of ‘Wild Zero’.)

And DO IT Ace does, crow-bar in hand, rescuing himself and his love from the very brink of oblivion, achieving a state of blood-drenched cosmic transcendence, as Guitar Wolf sets out on his flame-spewing motorcycle, guitar upon his back, beer in his hand, to get this zombie/UFO shit sorted out once and for all. (Bass Wolf and Drum Wolf follow at a respectable distance, in a small car.)

Bullets rain, gore flies, zombies howl, bikes roar, shit blows up, beer is chugged, flying saucers blacken the skies and a selection of odd and engaging secondary characters get busy, as The Oblivians, Bikini Kill and The Zeros blare across the soundtrack, mixed so loudly it makes the speakers on my cheap-ass TV go kaput every time.

Action-packed, hilarious, inept, beautiful and demented, full of love and flames and blood and deafening, holy feedback, “Wild Zero” represents everything that is great about punk rock and everything that is great about trash cinema, combined for all eternity. Hallelujah! ROCK N ROLL!!!