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Comments on Wednesday 4 August 2004:
Now for something completely different - a movie review! Wild Zero being the movie. "Trash and chaossss!!!!" according to the box.

I think one of the IMDB reviewers says it best, with "best japanese-punk-rock-zombie-alien-gay-love-story ever". I'm inclined to disagree with the reviewer who suggests "I think this movie might set the world record for amount of exploding heads". Even my head has exploded more often than heads in the movie. It's far from an exploding-head-fest. Sure, it has exploding heads, but it's no Scanners. The heads don't even explode of their own accord. You don't have to shoot my head with a gun to make it explode, so I'm more fun than this movie in that respect.

Tobio
The quite pretty missing half of the gay love story
That's not to say the movie isn't fun. It starts out a bit slow, up until the middle of the mexican stand-off, which could also be described as "the point at which the first head explodes". Then it catches up with what should be happening, as zombies and aliens start to be introduced to the story, pleasingly inexplicably. It also introduces the quite pretty missing half of the gay love story, a female arms dealer who we later see naked in the shower shooting at zombies, a couple who argue incessantly and seem to hate each other but later find true love as zombies, and ... well, by then we've already had Guitar Wolf introduced as the spirit of Rock'n'Roll, and an evil club manager who manages to be exceedingly creepy, mostly by wearing very short very tight shorts.

The zombies are very blue, and very stumbling, the way zombies should be. None of this knees-bent running-about malarkey we see from zombies nowadays thanks to 28 Days Later and new Dawn of the Dead, but proper arms-outstretched legs-straight stumbling, and even falling over. That's how I like my zombies. Also blue.

As for the aliens... Well, we never actually see any aliens, but there are lots of alien spaceships which fly around over the town going mostly unremarked until the evil club manager shoots a couple of them with his newly electrically charged eyeballs, and Guitar Wolf leaps onto a rooftop to destroy the mothership with a Guitar Sword. I'm not making this up.

The twin moral of the story is that "Love has no boundaries, nationalities or gender" and "Rock'n'Roll has no boundaries, nationalities or gender". Presumably a corrolary to this, but unstated in the movie, is that Rock'n'Roll is love. Or vice-versa.

Edit: I forgot to mention that the movie contains a song with the lyrics "roaring blood, blood blood blood, exploding blood", and also forgot to mention the conversation between four of the characters when they realise they're up against zombies, which goes something like "oh, so these are zombies." "Like in that movie." "I haven't seen it." "I don't watch that sort of movie." "What?!" "Well I haven't seen that one." "I'd have watched it if I'd known this was going to happen." Which makes a nice change from the usual zombie movie quirk of everybody inexplicably not knowing that you smash zombies' heads. [00:08]

Aaron
This movie sounds amazing. Almost as good as The House Of The Dead. Wait, did I say "almost as good"? I meant "most definitely better by amounts uncalculable by human imagination."
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