Wild Zero-2000

Wild Zero is a Japanese zombie film that plagued my "movies to buy" list for quite some time. The price didn't go down much anywhere, so I finally broke down and bought it. Well, this turned out to be one of the most bizarre zombie flicks I've come across.

Synopsis: Well, this might be difficult to explain. A metorite crashes near a Japanese city. Some UFOs start hovering above the Earth. Zombies start walking the Earth in search of human flesh. Oh, and a Japanese rock band pisses off a crime kingpin. I think that covers the main aspects of the story.

Gore: Well, this film has plenty of gore. We have exploding heads and torn out internal organs. Well, the head shots look kind of crappy. There is one in which part of the head remains, which does look good though. The other gore looks pretty damn good though.

Zombies: The zombies in this film are slow and eat flesh. It seems a bit inconsistent, as the zombies seem to gain intelligence and the ability to talk and reason later in the film. At another point, they seem to ignore humans and not be trying to attack them, after trying to kill and consume them for the first half of the movie or so.

The zombies are blue. Some of them look terrible. Others look alright. On the darker scenes, they look good. Perhaps more night time zombie attacks would have improved this a bit.

Score: Well, most of the score was Japanese rock and some English-lyriced rock. Not bad though. Some of it fit the mood well.

Characters: I think the characters n this film helped it a lot. There was the Japanese greaser rock/metal band, Guitar Wolf, the misguided cowardly rocker named Ace, three traveling weirdos with no money, the criminal kingpin Captain (who wears very homoerotic clothing), a transvetite, and a female arms dealer. Very interesting ideas in the characters of the film to say the least.

Overall, I rate this film 3 1/2 out of five skulls. It was quite original and had some very campy and strange aspects to it. Definitely worth seeing, but it won't be for every one.

Review by hatefuldisplay (Ron Clark).