Electric Dragon 80000V

Dragon Eye Morrison was struck by electricity as a child and something stayed inside him. He is grown now and his body carries eighty thousand volts. He plays the guitar to hold down his rage; when he turns the volume up the charge inside him discharges. By day he looks for lost reptiles, finds lizards and returns them to their owners. There is another man in the city: Thunderbolt Buddha, half his face metal, broadcasting from the rooftops and running on electricity too. The two men hear each other. The meeting is inevitable and when they meet they do not talk. Gakuryu Ishii writes and directs; at the time the director was known as Sogo Ishii. Tadanobu Asano plays Dragon and Masatoshi Nagase plays Thunderbolt. It is a Japanese production. The film is short; it runs under an hour and does not build a full length narrative. The image is black and white and the contrast is deliberately harsh. The narrative gives almost no room to dialogue; the story moves through sound, music and cutting. Music is at the centre; the guitar is the narrative itself and the actors play. The matter it treats is suppressed energy; the film takes it not as metaphor but as a directly physical condition. It is a mixture of kinds; the superhero shape, punk aesthetics and experimental cutting together. The narrative explains nothing and establishes its rules by showing them. Its limit is accessibility; there is next to no story, the form is tiring, and the ending abrupt. Who it is for: viewers who like Japanese experimental cinema and punk aesthetics. Who it is not for: it has no story, it is loud, and the ending gives no closure.