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Product Detail |
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Audio Format: Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Video Format: Widescreen 16:9 (anamorphic) Languages: Japanese Subtitles: English Region Code: 2 Year Made: 2001 Running Time: 55 / 101
 The year 2000 must have been Sogo Ishii's year. Not only did he release the eye-filling Gojoe, he shot a 50-minute black-and-white experimental movie, Electric Dragon 80.000V, that is commanding its fair share of followers. It's not anywhere nearly as good as Gojoe -- its barely hour-long running time is one of the biggest strikes against it -- but it's funny and has a lot of striking images done on a nickel-and-dime budget, plus a blasting rockabilly soundtrack thanks to Ishii's own band.
Ishii is no stranger to tiny budgets. His first movies, Panic in High School and Crazy Thunder Road were high-school and college 16mm shoestring shoots. Road so impressed Toho with its Mad Max biker-gang punk anarchy, they bought the rights and exhibited it in 35mm nationwide, turning it and the director into an overnight cult sensation. After a long period of no feature films, he resurfaced with Angel Dust in the late Nineties, then went on to turn out Gojoe and Electric Dragon in a burst of self-assured creativity. Ishii has described this movie as his homage to comic books and video games, and it seems to make sense. It bears some comparison to Tetsuo: the Iron Man, the earlier black-and-white SF-themed indie from Japan that made people realize there was a hell of a lot more to Japanese SF and fantasy filmmaking than Godzilla.
 
Electric Dragon's story is simple enough. Tadanobu Asano plays "Morrison," a young fellow with a curious affliction -- when he was a child, he climbed an electric tower and suffered an electric shock that unleashed the animal part of his brain. Bouts of violence as an adolescent and a failed stint as a boxer only made things worse, since they gave him electroshock therapy in an attempt to offset his growing aggression. Now he's a "human electrical conductor," and his favorite hobby is to plug in a lizard-skin electric guitar and play it until the PA explodes. Since the animal part of his brain has been awakened, he's developed a peculiar empathy for lizards (which helps him earn a little money as a lost-pet finder).
Then the screen flashes "ENTER THE CHALLENGER!", and we are introduced to Morrison's opponent: Thunderbolt Buddha (Nagase Masatoshi), who was also electrocuted as a boy -- but through a lightning bolt, as his moniker would indicate. He fixates on Morrison as an enemy, and has a weird arsenal of weapons that use electricity. There's also a cute Dr. Strangelove-style in-joke where the machine half of his body keeps trying to attack the human half, or something.
One day Morrison comes back to his apartment to find his pets dead, his lizard missing and his guitar dissected into neat pieces. This leads to a very funny moment where he futilely tries bolting the guitar pieces back together to make something halfway playable. No prizes for guessing who's responsible, and in a wild effects-laden sequence he hunts down Buddha and fights him.
 
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