Nihon bundan: Heru doraibâ [Helldriver] (2010)

(In French, On Cable TV, December 2022) I don’t particularly like that there’s a movie subgenre best described as “Japanese gore comedy,” let alone that I’m familiar enough with it to call it as such, but writer-director Yoshihiro Nishimura’s Helldriver is clearly part of it. Any discussion of the film has to start with that, because if you don’t, most of the review will talk about the film’s Grand Guignol tone, in which blood sprays with the force of a firehose, horror tropes are used as a comic tool, and the film has an aggressive disregard for anything that would remind you of reality. Here we have a post zombie-apocalypse half-Japan overrun with people reanimated with an alien parasite that causes antlers to grow out of their heads, and a young cyborg girl rampaging across the landscape in the hunt for an alien zombie queen of sorts. There’s a long, wildly implausible and tortured familial backstory to it that involves someone being killed by a meteorite, but let’s not focus too much on that—because the film doesn’t. The point here are numerous scenes of comic gory deaths, extreme splatter and weirdness piled upon more weirdness in a tower of schlocky sleaze. It’s lively, if nothing else, although you need to be a gore-hound to enjoy much of it. In my case, I’ve seen enough of them to be passably jaded—I found Helldriver to be somewhere in the honest middle and too wild-and-wacky to be interesting. The comedy doesn’t fly particularly high, and the lousy special effects are underwhelming. In the end, despite gallons of blood, towering humanoid towers of alien zombies and hearts punched out by meteorites, the film is curiously average for that subgenre, squandering ideas (zombie-limbs off-road vehicle?) in a frantic one-upmanship of feverish concepts. In keeping with the too-much-is-too-much tone of this review, I’ll note that the Japanese gore comedy subgenre seemed to have its heyday around 2008–2010, and that recent examples seem sparser… unless it’s the translation delay at work.