Wild Zero (2000) We've seen movies where zombies take on bikers, zombies square off against
cannibals, and even a zombie fighting a shark in the middle of the ocean. Wild Zero, a Japanese production from 2000, answers the ages-old question of what
happens when the undead take on rock and roll! As you would no doubt expect,
rock and roll is forever and the zombies all end up getting rolled by a guy
with a guitar that turns into a sword.
In spite of this, you can't really call the movie a success since it wraps up
its classic good rock band versus bad space alien-controlled living dead story
in a package that looks like a Christmas present my one armed, autistic
half-brother had a go at after an afternoon in the eggnog. The movie has a
tendency to bounce from plot line to plot line, a bit like it was being made up
as it went along and for the first hour, some of these plot lines don't make a
whole lot of sense. In the movie's defense, they eventually manage to bring all these characters
and their stories together, but even when they do very little of it is actually
understandable. In fact the movie is rife with characters that are introduced,
but not drawn in any depth so that you don't even bother to wonder whether
they'll survive. Even Ace, the guy we spend most of our time with, comes off as
a doofus who is more interested in rock and roll posing than he is in
surviving the zombie invasion. Of course, I may be biased against Ace because
he made out with this girl, only to find out that she is actually a boy, and
then ends up staying with her/him because his rock and roll idol tells him to!
Dude, you don't have time to be playing the Crying Game! You've got a pack of
flesh-eaters banging on your door! I'm usually all for new angles in zombie movies since the genre is prone to
some degree of repetition, the only real variance being how we all got turned
into zombies in the first place. (And then you only have your choice of either
meteorite or government experiment.) The problem though is that the movie
alternates between straight ahead zombie mayhem and quirky story developments
and whacky characters and none of it works. Kind of like when I decided to
make my own homemade cheddar bratwursts and mixed some macaroni and cheese
powder in with the brats. Separately, these two foods were fine, but when I
tried to stir them together, all I got was a clumpy failure. So it is with
this film. Ace is a wannabe rock star who listens to Japanese punk rock music in his
little apartment while he puts on his leathers and greases his hair up into a
gigantic fifties-style pile before heading out the club where his favorite band
is playing. This band is made up of three guys: Guitar Wolf, Bass Wolf, and
Drum Wolf. It should be noted that this movie is a bit like the Beatles' A Hard Day's Night, since the boys all play themselves. Of course this movie isn't like A Hard Day's Night, because it isn't very good and you've never heard of the Wolf family or know
any of their songs. (Though their "Jet Generation" song has a nice beat that
you can dance to. I'd give it a four.)  Though Ace loves Guitar Wolf, he wants to be a rock star as well and is
determined to tell the manager of the club where Guitar Wolf is playing (we
call that a "gig" in the biz) that he wants a try out. When he finally sucks
up enough courage to do so, Guitar Wolf just happens to be in the middle of an
armed stand-off with the pervert club owner. I wasn't too sure what this guy
(known as the Captain) was up to other than having women beaten, using them,
and taking drugs, but I'm guessing that Guitar Wolf objected to the Captain's
penchant for running around in really tight, short shorts that lace up the
sides!
As you might expect between a rock band and a club owner, a melee ensues and
the Captain gets a few of his fingers shot off, Ace gets knocked out, and
Guitar Wolf shows his thanks to Ace for his aid (he distracted everyone with
his inane prattling about rock and roll) by making him a "rock and roll blood
brother". This means he cut his and Ace's hands and mixed their blood
together. Uh, I'm sure that Guitar Wolf is a really swell guy, but I'm not
sure I'd like to be co-mingling my blood with a guy who lives the rock and roll
lifestyle. Who knows where those groupies in places like Osaka have been! Even cooler than exposing himself to various blood-borne diseases though is
that Guitar Wolf gives him a little keepsake of their encounter. It's a
whistle for Ace to wear around his neck that he can use to summon Guitar Wolf
whenever Ace is in trouble! Somehow I can't help but think they could have
come up with a better gimmick than a glorified dog whistle. At least
Superman's pal Jimmy Olsen had a signal watch for crying out loud! Okay, I know that even though it's clear that Guitar Wolf took this part mainly
because it portrays him as some sort of rock and roll superhero, we got this
movie because of the promise of zombies, so where are they? The zombie part of
this movie may just have something to do with the fairly poor computer
generated flying saucer fleet that is zipping around Earth as well as the
mysterious meteorite that landed in some nearby province. Guess what province
Guitar Wolf's next big show is in? Guess which rock and roll blood brother is
en route to that show? Guess which guy masquerading as a girl is hanging out
at a gas station in that province?  After our introduction to Guitar Wolf and Ace, the movie moves over to this
infested province where we meet people like this she-male (Tobio) and three
friends who are on a drive to see this meteorite. If the set up for the movie
was acceptable, then the middle part of things is not. The director really
seems to lose his grip on things as we spend way too much time with the three
foul-mouthed and dimwitted dolts that cruise around looking for the meteorite.
Working just about as well is this deal between Tobio and Ace. He seems sweet
on her (it?) but then drives off to his concert without her. Then he sees
zombies in the roadway, has a vision of Guitar Wolf telling him to go save
Tobio and returns to find her. That's another thing that doesn't work like
they would have hoped - the visions Ace has of Guitar Wolf, though it does
provide the best moment of the movie. When Ace finds out that Tobio is a guy
(after he was kissing on him), he is repulsed and leaves Tobio to face the
zombies all alone. Guitar Wolf appears suddenly and tells Ace that love has no
genders or borders! Who is this guy? Boy George? Did I mention that there is also a female weapons dealer mixed up in all of
this? And that she wears an outfit that looks like a one piece bathing suit
with fur cuffs? She didn't seem to have any reason to be in the movie other
than to give us someone else to kill zombies with, since Ace ends up driving
around on a moped trying to rescue his sometimes girlfriend, sometimes
boyfriend, and Bass Wolf and Drum Wolf don't get involved other than at the
end when they use a bazooka to blow up the superpowered Captain. Superpowered Captain? Now how did that happen? The Captain is still irritated
that Guitar Wolf shot off some of his fingers, so he's tracked him down and is
intent on killing him. During a climatic struggle with Guitar Wolf, the
Captain gets jolted by some electricity and even though you might have assumed
this would toast him, what it actually does is gives him the power to shoot
green energy beams out of his eyes! Well, that would have been my second guess.  A movie like this ends just like you expect it to. Guitar Wolf stands on top
of a building, takes the neck of his guitar which doubles as a hidden sword and
holds it up as the mother ship flies over his head. The sword cuts the mother
ship in half causing all the zombies to cease operations and rock and roll has
defeated evil yet again. Ace isn't sure whether any of this really happened,
never saw Guitar Wolf again and stays with Tobio forever, thus bringing to a
satisfying conclusion one of the cinema's great love affairs.
The movie is a rather undisciplined affair as the film makers seem intent in
throwing everything in that they could think of. Some of it story-related and
some of it just there to slather on the coolness. It tries way too hard to be
hip and odd and the painfully amateurish script doesn't do anyone involved any
favors. There were some amusing moments, such as when someone points out that
their situation is reminiscent of Night Of The Living Dead, but no one has actually seen the movie so they don't know what they should
do. Then there was the time that the Captain was trying to use a zombie as a
human shield, the Captain so thickheaded that he never caught on to the fact
that all these people running around with glowing paint on their faces were
anything other than regular freaks. On the whole though, the bad outweighs the good substantially, with problems
ranging from the poorly developed characters (except Tobio who turned out to be
a little too developed) to some of the technical issues that hampered the film
(poor transitions for the most part - scenes would kind of peter out and there
would be a fade to black and then the next scene would start - almost like
there was supposed to be a commercial break there or something). The story
wasn't anything new except that they tried to marry the zombie movie with the Kiss Meets The Phantom Of The Park movie, which seems quite questionable when it's put like that. I know that
when you see Guitar Wolf kill a bunch of zombies with his magical guitar picks,
you shouldn't take any of it seriously, but it still doesn't make any of it
entertaining.
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