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YES! Netflix gave me Helldriver for Christmas! Third movie by just the Tokyo Gore Police guy! I am so happy! It starts with a really insane production company logo with exploding sushi, then nice happy music plays as someone with red gloves and a crazy outfit is scaling a wall. He takes a seat on top, and throws a severed head down to attract some zombies. One has a periscope skull thing going on. It's pretty great. Oh hey, he's a zombie fisherman it seems. He chums the field up a bit, then starts tossing down a hook on a line to tear their heads off, with his ultimate goal being to harvest their antennae. Which these zombies have, for some reason. Then a truck gets thrown at a tower of zombies. Um... Wow. OK, let me just watch this for a while and try to work this out in retrospect. It... just kinda turned into Bayonetta here.
So OK. Antenna harvester gets blindsided by periscope skull zombie, and is about to be killed by a giant human pyramid of zombies. But then said pyramid is smashed by the main character's truck, apparently launched by some offscreen catapult colliding with it. Then she gets out, and starts killing zombies with her chain-katana (as in, it's a chainsaw blade on a katana)... and when she gets to periscope skull, she does this crazy Bayonetta style pole dance around its spine for a while before killing it. End of obligatory Japanese movie flash-forward.
Now, getting to the chronological start of things not yet cool main character comes home one day to find her father being cannibalized by her serial killer Mom and uncle. A rather elaborate set piece causes her to burn a swastika into Uncle's forehead, then Mom is about to kill her, when a meteor crashes through her chest. She is rather upset by this, and rips the main character's heart out of her chest, shoves it in the whole, and regenerates. Mom is then coated in weird yellow meteor amber, which also spreads to the main character. Main character gets tossed away, right before a Starmy latches onto Mom's head. Also, a mysterious ash cloud from all this turns a significant portion of Japan's population into weird... we're saying antler? OK, antler spouting zombies. Most people have the sense to grab gas masks and evacuate, and they build a wall separating the zombie filled half of the country from the now crazy overpopulated half.
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So... now we've got a bunch of amusing info-dumping about stuff like people immediately forming zombie rights groups, and talking about how zombie antlers are A- their only weak point, B- a new drug craze, and C- Highly explosive. I feel compelled to make a Futurama "Human Horn" joke here, but, I got nothing. Also, between this movie being highly amusing and me having promised someone I wouldn't watch it without him, I'm lagging way behind on this explanifying.
So... anyway, we've got a really crazy fight involving a bunch of chainsaw wielding zombies, and the main character slicing their hands off, and then their hands still gripping the chainsaws waddling along on their wrist stumps having a super goofy chainsaw duel with the main character... who totally needs a nickname. Chainsword works I guess.
Now let's see... some evil guy running for prime minister wants to repeal zombie civil rights, we get a flashback to Chainsword's childhood with Mom and Uncle generally being crazy psycho weirdos picking on her and her dad, and being incredibly impressed by caramel pudding. There's these guards along the wall with totally awesome crescent moon pyramid head helmets who are specifically there to keep people from killing zombies. Like, the wall gets breached during a speech by the prime minister, and he's screaming or help, and they're all "We can't! They're normal humans with full civil rights who are just being compelled to attack by a disease!"
Now here's the opening credits. Uh... wow, really? We're like, halfway through the movie aren't we? You uh... you really missed your cue their credits. Guess we wanted to get all this backstory established first. Anyway, the main character, and this guy with a fedora who I think was fishing for zombies in the flash forward, and some other people are all arrested for zombie poaching. After a really hilarious puppet show propaganda explanation by the new Prime Minister, who is AWESOME, they're given an Escape From New York deal. "Press O to be declared innocent, go locate and kill the zombie queen, and win BIG CASH PRIZES, or press X to be tried for your crimes." Everyone who presses X is crushed into a bloodsplosion by their iron maiden sorta things, the rest pile into a truck, and drive into the forbidden zone through the gate with the big neon "Zombie Area" sign as the PM's flag clad floozies wave them on.
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In the forbidden zone, suddenly our heroes find themselves under attack by.... one zombie rapidly cutting the heads off other zombies with a giant sword, sending them flying over a forest to rain down hundreds of heads from the sky, either biting people, leaving one headless and another a skeleton, or just to explode when they hit the ground, because, again, explosive antlers. It's pretty great. Eventually though, the three not dead people are rescued by a random cowboy, shooting heads out of the air to cause chain reaction explosions like in missile command.
It turns out the zombies have actually built themselves quite a nice little society here. They've got open air markets with caged humans to sell, and a nightclub while they gather around and do the thriller dance to festive accordion music. No, seriously. Also.... uh... here's some random boobs... uh... well, it's the third paragraph since he opening credits. Do we count that? Anyway, night club zombies bie the nipples off, I guess it's the sister of Cloak Guy. I haven't mentioned Cloak Guy yet because other than having a pretty cool cloak, meh. Meanwhile, Cowbow is having a ig epic deal with zombie Uncle on the hood of their truck, and Chainsword is being confronted by this hilarious fighting game looking boxing zombie girl, who she unceremoniously punches in the horn causing head explodey. This kicks off a strong candidate for the greatest scene from anything ever. We are cutting around between three set piece fights against special zombies here.
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1- A topless zombie girl who has extra arms attached to her in various places (most amusingly two little baby arms on her cheeks holding a knife and fork, first grabs like 12 katanas and is just leaping all over the place in this crazy stop motion ridiculous fashion. At one point it starts slapping Chainsword with the little baby hands in what may be the most ineffectual attack ever. Later, it loses these, and grabs an AK-47 in each hand instead.
2- A zombie with a baby zombie starts swinging it around by the umbilical cord and throws it at Hat and Cloak, who, are pretty much outmatched. I guess you kinda have to be there, but it is comedy gold.
3- We have a tremendously epic sword fight between a zombie that's just kinda... full of swords, and the truck, being driven by Cowboy. As in, there's this big bladed thing on the front of the truck, and somehow it's up on two wheels, bobbing and weaving and feinting and parrying. It's... really something to see.
All three of these fights eventually come together in a fantastic explodey good times fun conclusion. It's super super great. Then Uncle starts chasing after everyone as they get in the truck, they drive through a crowd of zombies. Uncle grabs all the various hands and feet and such and quickly sticks them together, building himself, well, "Zombie car! Attack!" Zombie Car is pretty darn great. So... this leads into another really great over the top prolonged action sequence. It uh... culminates with Fedora having to do a big self sacrifice thing which ties into his elaborate kamikaze grandfather backstory some, and he tells Chainsword to "Take care of no-name!" before stapping on his headband and driving Zombie Car over a cliff.
Now as a brief intermission from all the unbridled awesome, where a charity worker reunites some parents with their zombie child and they give her a severed arm to eat in a real touching heartwarming scene. Then... then we build up to the real amazing stuff.
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So OK, Zombie Queen Mom has a giant robot made of zombies. Well, not robot, but, it's a humanoid pile of zombies several stories tall. She tortures Chainsword by tickling her heart. The one she ripped out of her chest and stuck in the big gaping hole through her own. I mentioned that right? Because that was a thing. At one point exposition explains how the totally awesome looking chest motor powering the chainsword is also an artificial heart she was fitted with. Anyway, seeing this, Cloak, whose official name apparently canonically does not exist, fires the locator beacon for the orbital missile launcher array at it. The first missile misses, but PM Awesome fires a couple more. And then, the little starfish alien thing on the back of her head peels up, two big sharp things grow out of its arms, and as the nice happy classical music starts up, these prove to be... conductor's batons! This little muppety space starfish is conducting the soundtrack to the movie, as the zombie giant robot dances about, grabs the two rockets out of the air, turns them around, and uses them to fly away, while transforming into a plane. HELL. YES.
So... this was apparently all an elaborate plan here, as a means to get a bunch of zombies up and over the wall. That is just fantastic. Anyway, Chainsword is climbing up the thing to fight Zombie Queen Mom, ripping peoples heas and spines out as she goes (they really don't seem to be held in to well. But then Uncle, down where the car crash bit happened, sees the big zombie with the sword, and asks him to decapi-fling hum to the zombie plane, where his head and spine land in a recently vacated neck, at which point he takes a couple off the ground, double checks their names and how they're doing, and starts using them as flails.
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Meanwhile, down on the ground, the a few hundred zombies breach the wall, by just kind of unceremoniously punching through it all at once. The wall guards are ready of them though, and I guess giving up their no zombie killing policy. They're all armed with artificial heart chainsaw katanas too. Also, their totally rad helmets have additional chainsaw blades, and can split in half. So... yeah, we're really really getting our money's worth from the blood fire hoses in this movie. Also, zombies are raining down from the plane over Tokyo, causing further chaos. At one point the priest running the little... zombie mission there gets eaten by his wards, but he's really really happy about it.
And... now here's the PM dying in ridiculous fashion. Half a zombie breaches his office, skittering around on exposed ribs like little centipede legs. She bites off half his face, bites off his tongue, and somehow manages to wedge a corkscrew in his temple. So... when guards come rushing in, they mistake him for a zombie. Then back to the head flail fight, Uncle is actually pretty much winning, but eventually his two friends/hands/heads/flails get way too exhausted to keep swinging around, and there's this very weirdly edited quiet soliloquy of him being all disappointed with how they apparently don't want to hang out anymore. Man... Uncle's dialog is all so weirdly great, and even if I quoted it directly, I don't think it'd come across why. Anyway, Chainsword knocks him into the turbine of one of the missiles, so he's dead now, and also the zombie plane is kinda spiraling out of control back up towards Iwate and Hokaido.
Chainsword and Zombie Queen Mom end up just kinda having a bloody faced bare knuckled brawl, with Chainsword all Gimme back my childhood! And dad! And birthday pudding! (I mentioned the birthday putting, right?) Mom is all "I'm sorry. I was kind of a jerk, but you forgive me, right?" Chainsword does not, and rips... well, her own heart, back out of the big chest hole it's been sitting in the whole movie. She decapitates Zombie Queen Mom, and leaderless, the zombie plane falls apart... with zombies forming elaborate sky diving formations as they drop. Chainsword seems pretty doomed, but then the truck comes flying out of nowhere to rescue her. I sill have to wonder how it gets up there, and she's rescued by Cloak and Cowboy. We see them all standing in front of a giant mountain of corses, with Chainsword just kinda holding her heart out in a pose like from the end of Tokyo Gore Police. Then she crushes it, because I mean... she's got an artificial heart, and this one's been sitting in a zombie for quite a while no.
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Then comes the end credits, which start off with the explosion of the other missile launching Zombie Queen Mom's head (with Starmy still attached) into space. It floats around all through the credits, passing various planets, drifting farther and farther through space, passing galaxies and such, before finally entering the atmosphere (pretty much as a meteor, all cyclical like) of a planet inhabitted by... goofy Dragon Ball aliens. Seriously. We've got this fat blue guy with big pointy ears and one of those goofy propeller-less beanie hats and bright colored robes looking up screaming at it. That's awesome.
So wow. That movie was great. I don't think I had time to mention it mid-movie, but we've constantly got the firehose blood geysers going in more scenes than not, the Ju-On director/Chinese teacher from Vampire Girl Vs. Frankenstein Girl gets a cameo (very clearly wearing a shirt with his own movie's name on it) somewhere in the middle, and the soundtrack to the whole thing was just really fantastically upbeat and fun. Really, everything about this movie was fantastically upbeat and fun. Now that it's over I'm stuck looking at the little Netflix summary of the plot which just sounds lame and likely encouraged all these people to watch it who completely missed the point and gave it negative reviews for being too silly for a zombie movie. See, this isn't a zombie movie. This is a Yoshihiro Nishimura movie. That's all you need to describe it, and that's the only way you can describe it. Well, I guess you can also ramble for two hours like I just did, but seriously. Shine on you crazy owner of a blood filled fire hose.
