[Who better to review Sushi Typhoon's Helldriver than the girl who ran her ass off so much organizing the last few Rue Morgue Festival of Fears that she recently underwent a controversial surgical procedure to give herself robot legs?]

Drive Hungry
HELLDRIVER Blu-ray/DVD
Starring Yumiko Hara, Eihi Shiina and Kazuki Namioka
Directed by Yoshihiro Nishimura
Written by Yoshihiro Nishimura and Daichi Nagisa
Sushi Typhoon

If you’ve ever wondered what a Romero zombie movie would look like through the eyes of Yoshihiro Nishimura (The Machine Girl, Tokyo Gore Police), Helldriver is your chance to satiate that pondering. But be forewarned! Even by my low standards for goopy Japanese splatter flicks, the experience is a little like watching Sushi Typhoon collapse under the weight of its own prosthetic boob cannons. (Okay, there might not actually be boob cannons in this particular title but you know that they probably tried to fit them in there somehow.)

The plot gets a little abstract at times but the basic premise is that an asteroid hits Earth, which causes the release of a toxic ash that turns half of Japan into zombies. The rotters seem to possess pretty normal intelligence and exhibit – among other things – malevolent intent, and the abilities to organize and brandish chainsaws, however. (The rules are somewhat murky.) Anyway, a wall is built to quarantine the zombies to one half of the country while the survivors on the other side are left to reform society, now in a perpetual state of political turmoil and economic chaos. There is a revenge plot wrapped up in all of this too, the Helldriver part, which involves the Zombie Queen (yes, they have a zombie queen…played by Audition’s Eihi Shiina) and her daughter (Yumiko Hara), who is also undead, but not in the zombie kind of way. More like in the “my-mother-ripped-my-heart-out-and-is-now-using-it-for-herself” kind of way.

Expect plenty of slow-motion close-up profile shots, endless pre-fight shouting and intimidation matches, bloodcurdling screams of hatred stemming from an unquenchable thirst for revenge, a car chase where one of the cars is made out of…zombies? There is also an airplane made of zombies and a mountain of zombies and seeing as there is no way the production budget could keep up with these particularly ambitious ideas, you can imagine how terrible the CGI turned out to be.

Why is this not an animé? Then we’d all want to bow down to the Zombie Queen From Outer Space! But since this is live action on an over-extended budget, any inspiration in the kooky plot is simply lost in translation.

Jessa Sobczuk