The Adventure of Denchu-kozo + Isolation of 1/8800

Director: Shinya Tsukamoto

1987 / 95min / DCP

Finished two years before his cyberpunk opus Tetsuo: The Iron Man, Tsukamoto’s The Adventure of Denchu-kozo is a clear precursor to that later film in its assaultive editing and film speed manipulation, a far-out story about a bullied high schooler with an electric rod growing out of his back which goes on to introduce a homemade time machine, a plot by the “Shinshengumi Vampire Gang” to sink the world into eternal darkness, and a plentitude of perversion. Winner of the Grand Prize at the PIA Film Festival, this berserk sci-fi comedy brought fresh attention to Tsukamoto, who’d been making Super 8 films when he was a teenager but had almost given up his filmmaking ambitions in order to work in live theater when he adapted one of his stage plays into Denchu-kozu, and took Japanese cinema by storm.

Ishii, who would direct that ne plus ultra of Japanese punk cinema, Burst City, a few years after Isolation of 1/880000, was already an instinctive, iconoclastic stylist in his 8mm days, as is abundantly evident in this mournful character study of a disabled young man, Takemitsu, whose pent up anger rises towards boiling point as he’s submitted to the endless exams required for admission to a prestigious Japanese university. A delicate, ruminative treatment of “examination hell,” which would receive a more antic treatment in Ishii’s feature debut, Panic High School.