Burst City
Asia Extreme • Sci-Fi, Action, Adventure
Burst City is an explosive Molotov cocktail of dystopian sci-fi, Mad Max-style biker wars against yakuza gangsters and the police, and riotous performances from members of the real-life Japanese punk bands The Stalin, The Roosters, The Rockers and INU. In a derelict industrial wasteland somewhere on the outskirts of Tokyo, two rival punk bands and their unruly mobs of fans gather for a Battle of the Bands-style protest against the construction of a nuclear powerplant, bringing them head to head with the yakuza industrialists behind the development of their turf. This extraordinary celebration of Japan's punk music scene of the early 1980s thrust Sōgo Ishii (now known by the name of Gakuryū Ishii), the underground filmmaking wunderkind behind such works as Half Human: Einstürzende Neubauten (1986), Angel Dust (1994) and Electric Dragon 80,000V (2001), to the next level and is regularly cited as an early landmark in Japanese cyberpunk cinema.
Up Next in Asia Extreme
-
Graveyard of Honor (2002)
Miike's 2002 retelling transplants the story to Tokyo at the turn of the millennium. Less a direct remake of Fukasaku's film than a radical reimagining of the same overarching premise, Miike's film captures both the hedonism and nihilism of the modern Japanese crime scene in deliriously stylish f...
-
One Missed Call
Tapping into the same brand of terror as the Ring and Grudge movies, visionary director Takashi Miike ('Audition', 'Blade of the Immortal') presents a modern, high-tech twist on that mainstay of Japanese folklore, the yurei or vengeful spirit, in the form of its own iconic antihero - the terrifyi...
-
Terra Formars
2016 ･ Japan ･ Directed by Takashi Miike
In an attempt to colonise Mars, 21st-century scientists seed the planet with algae to absorb sunlight and purify the atmosphere, and cockroaches who in turn spread the algae as they feed. 500 years later, the first manned mission to Mars loses contact wit...
