I like the apocalypse and I love rock ’n’ roll, so the Japanese flick Burst City already has a lot going for it. Set in the decimated outskirts of Tokyo, here we find dystopian punkers fighting the dapper yakuza in a war of loud, noise-crunching guitars and repeating guns in a low-budget battle for … well, I’m not exactly sure — control of the nuclear power plant they live near, maybe?
Every night, sullen teens gather to hear the music of bands like The Stalin, The Roosters and so on, in a somewhat peaceful assembly of fans looking to tear shit up. When the yakuza comes around aiming to start trouble — as well as two Mad Max-like weirdos on a motorcycle — all hell breaks loose and something of a war is started, with the corrupt police coming in for a rip-’em-up finale.
Listed as a landmark in “cyberpunk cinema,” Burst City has not much of anything “cyber,” but there’s plenty of punk as these underground hooligans with soul-destroying glares whip chains and sling guitars in an epic showdown I imagine Japan, at the time, was craving.
Burst City is the cinematic debut from the director of the enjoyably insane Electric Dragon 80.000 V, Sogo Ishii, who kinetically manages to capture the manic aura the punk scene in Japan had at the time, with a setting far ahead of itself. It’s an unique stroke of filmmaking mishmash that America would try to copy with numerous films in the 1980s, none of them very good. —Louis Fowler