Mini Review: Electric Dragon 80000V.

Electric Dragon 80000V is a tokusatsu film directed by Gakuryu Ishii and stars acting legend Tadanobu Asano in lead, along with Masatoshi Nagase.

The film revolves around Dragon Eye Morrison (Asano), a guitar playing electricity conducting lizard detective who underwent electro-shock therapy as a result of being extremely aggressive, who crosses paths with Thunderbolt Buddha, a similarly powered half man half buddha who was struck by electricity in his youth.

Electric Dragon 80000V is one of the most insane films ever and it blew me away with how much they packed into a barely 55 minute runtime. It's one of the most unique films ever.

It's essentially a comic book (as described on it's wikipedia page), it's full of these flashy and hyperactive shots and weird camera angles that, when paused, feel more like a comic panel than an actual part of the film.

Not to mention, the film features a superhero-like narrator who introduces Dragon Eye Morrison and Thunderbolt Buddha in a manner akin to the famous "It's a bird! It's a plane! It's Superman!" phrase as it's accompanied by a title card with their name written on it in huge text.

There's also a load of, eccentric, sound effects throughout the film. Most notably when this one thug guy twirls his phone around like a revolver, which is accompanied by cartoony gun twirl sound effect whenever he does it that sounds nothing like the rest of the film.

The soundtrack is where the film truly does shine though, as it's interwoven with it to level that without it, the film falls flat and loses a lot of it's substance and becomes a nonsensically bland film.

Both the film and the soundtrack are loud, incoherent, distorted, and noisy and it works. It's noise rock, it's not a genre that makes sense, there's a handful of scenes of Asano just going absolutely ham on the guitar, making ear bleeding and non-nonsensically noises with it that just somehow make sense listening to it. 

Which is much like how the film is easy to follow but hard to understand, as it's almost 90-95% just looking cool with only 5% actually going towards the story. And, once it reaches the climax, both the film and the soundtrack are much more digestible for the average film-goer.

The climax is also easily the best part of the film as it cranks up the craziness to the max and was outright mind blowing.

If I had to attribute it to a genre, I'd pick Jet Rock n' Roll. It's loud, it's crazy, it's sweaty, the energy is so palpable that those final 15 minutes were some of the best I've seen so far. It felt like listening to heavy music at a loud volume, my eyebrows were raised so high up throughout it it felt like they were gonna disappear into my hairline.

I had to just sit there, and process that sequence just thinking about it, and it led me to the conclusion that this is easily one of the best films ever.

Electric Dragon 80000V easily slides perfectly between other high energy "shut your brain off and watch the action" movies at the time like Hakaider and Wild Zero, making an honestly perfect unconnected trilogy in my opinion.

I highly highly recommend Electric Dragon 80000V purely so you can see the final 10-15 minutes, just for that alone you should watch it.

That's all for now, Love and Peace!