This movie’s very very very cool. I watched it mistakenly thinking it was chronologically the first of the Sogo/Gakuryu Ishii movies I’ve accumulated to watch (I should have gone with Crazy Thunder Road) and I was very taken with it, although the surprisingly long runtime wore a bit with the general aimless feeling of the plot and I think I watched it in two sessions. While I didn’t do amazing watching this without subtitles, I get a strong impression that this movie runs on vibes much more than it does on words and plot. And the vibes are very strong! It presents this bewildering conflagration of black and white punk scene aesthetics, and there’s a lot of time spent on things like shaky cam footage of streetlights in the night leaving trails as you motorcycle down a highway. It’s oddly entrancing and makes it feel timeless, especially considering it’s 1982 when you might have figured it was contemporary with Tetsuo and the like 7 years later. The emphasis on music and punk rock isn’t necessarily my specific bag, and so there was a little bit of the Phantom of the Paradise effect where I find it more impressive and cool than specifically up my alley, but it really is a neat artifact. It somehow makes a lot of sense that Makoto Tezuka was in the mix somewhere in there in the movie, since it feels like there’s a lot in common with this and Legend of the Stardust Brothers even though they’re completely different movies.