Crew
Director – Yoshihiro Nishimura, Screenplay – Daichi Nagisa & Yoshihiro Nishimura, Producers – Yoshinori Chiba & Hiroyuki Yamada, Photography – Shu G. Momose, Music – Koh Nakagawa, Visual Effects Supervisor – Tsuyoshi Kazuno, Visual Effects – Studio Buckhorn Inc. (CGI Director – Hidenobu Sasakura), Makeup Effects – Amazing Studio JUR & Nishi-Zo Co., Ltd, Production Design – Nori Fukuda. Production Company – Something Creation Inc./Nikkatsu/Sushi Typhoon.
Cast
Yumiko Hara (Kika), Eihi Shiina (Rikka), Yurei Yanagi (Taku), Kazuki Namioka (Kaito), Mizuki Kusimi (No-name)
Plot
The teenager Kika comes across her mother Rikka and uncle having tortured and killed her father. Kika flees, pursued by her mother who rips her heart out. Just then, a meteorite appears, covering both of them in cocoons. Rikka’s cocoon emits vast clouds of black ash that covers the countryside and turns everybody infected into a zombie with a strange fleshy antenna from their forehead. One year later, Kika emerges from her cocoon to find that Japan has been cut off by a wall between the north and south to contain the zombies. However, the zombies break through the wall and kill the prime minister. Kika and others are believed responsible. They are spared execution if they will agree to go over the wall and stop Rikka.
The Japanese Meatball Machine (2005) was a remarkable film that was premised around a series of over-the-top makeup effects that involved characters being transformed into bio-mechanoid creatures and battling each other. The plot made no real sense, but the makeup effects proved highly entertaining. Over the next few years this became the basis of the Gonzo Japanese Splatter Film with the likes of Hard Revenge, Milly (2008), The Machine Girl (2008), Tokyo Gore Police (2008), Robo Geisha (2009), Samurai Princess (2009), Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl (2009), Big Tits Zombie (2010), Gothic & Lolita Psycho (2010), Mutant Girls Squad (2010), Dead Sushi (2012) and Bloody Chainsaw Girl (2016), among others. These are films that specialise in bio-mechanoid transformations, bizarrely over-the-top gore and splatter, a surreal sense of humour and an obsession with schoolgirls wearing panties.
The effects in many of the abovelisted were conducted by Yoshihiro Nishimura who has worked on films such as Suicide Club (2002), Death Train (2004), Noriko’s Dinner Table (2005), Strange Circus (2005), Exte: Hair Extensions (2007) and a number of efforts amid the gonzo splatter cycle such as Machine Girl, Robo-Geisha and Samurai Princess and of course Meatball Machine. Nishimura made his directorial debut with Anatomia Extinction (1995) and is co-director on other Gonzo Japanese Splatter films such as Tokyo Gore Police, Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl and Mutant Girls Squad. On his own, Nishimura has made Speakerman: The Boo (2004), Ninja Torkage (2014), Meatball Machine: Kodoku (2017) and the Z is for Zetsumetsu segment of The ABCs of Death (2012).
The Gonzo Japanese Splatter genre had tackled the Zombie Film on several previous occasions – indeed, it predated the major revival the genre underwent in the mid-2000s – with the likes of Stacy (2001), Tokyo Zombie (2005), Attack Girls’ Swim Team vs. the Undead (2007), High School Girl Rika, Zombie Hunter (2008), Big Tits Zombie, Schoolgirl Apocalypse (2011) and Zombie Ass: The Toilet of the Dead (2011).
The zombies in span>Helldriver are different to usual – they come with a T-shaped fleshy antenna (?) on their forehead and seem to be created by the spread of ash from some type of alien parasite that attached itself to Eihi Shiina – the hows and whys things are happening are not at all well explained. This has led to a scenario, not dissimilar to the then recent Doomsday (2008), where the northern half of Japan has been walled off to contain the threat.
There is a bizarrely weird opening where we see a man abseil up a wall and then throw a head from a bag/box (?) over and see it mobbed by the zombie creatures, while he uses a hook to behead them and collect their antennae, only for him to be attacked by the zombies. His rescue comes with the arrival of a vehicle and the emergence of the chainsaw-wielding Yumiko Hara who proceeds to slaughter all present.
Helldriver comes utterly drenched in gore – there are even times the spray covers the camera lens. It is a frequently deranged film that Nishimura serves up, including rains of severed heads used as cannonballs as zombies step up to have their heads batted off and sent flying through the air. Or where the character of Ando is attacked and left as a head attached to a flesh-stripped skeleton still staggering about. A girl has her breasts sliced off and left jetting gouts of blood. We get zombie babies; a zombie boxer that gets its head punched off; and a figure made of long elongated arms each outfitted with a sword.
There is no real plot to Helldriver. Indeed, the entire last half of the film is just one extended scene with the various characters being pursued and fighting off zombies. It is Yoshihiro Nishimura doing what he does best to the exclusion of almost everything else. Here we get a duel with a character with multiple arms all wielding swords; a duel between another creature and a pick-up truck (!); the truck being pursued by a vehicle that is made of zombie bodies with the heroine hanging over the end of the truck, held onto by Yurei Yanagi as a zombie on the zombie-mobile grabs her other end at the same time as Eihi Shiina saws through Yurei Yanagi’s ankles with a sword; and climactic scenes where the zombie vehicle turns into a zombie plane and people boarding fighting in mid-air on its outside.
Trailer here