Who payed the critics

Very well executed

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

Viewed on DVD. Sound-track rock = four (4) stars; subtitles/translations = three (3) stars; scenario = two (2) stars; cinematography/editing = one (1) star. Director Gakuryû Ishii has foisted on movie audiences a low-budget TV-style music video consisting of unrelenting, meaningless (and repetitious) violence. This plot-less, overly-long, eye sore starts with some okay rock music which dissipates as the film moves along (thereby losing the movie's excuse to continue!). Ishii drums up a future Tokyo where streets are always filled with rock concert riots and gang warfare at night. Sometimes the police and, of course, Yakuza join in the rampage. "Acting" consists of mugging and shouting. Rock-music "score" is pretty good. Exterior sets (city dumps and abandoned industrial buildings) are strikingly original. Interior sets pretty much look the same because they likely are. Subtitles (which can not be turned off) capture about half of the song lyrics and dialog. Both translated dialog and lyrics appear in white at screen bottom with lyric text italicized. (Use of two colors would have prevented confusion as to what was what.) Signs are not translated. Cinematography (semi-wide screen, color) and editing quality is what one might expect from precocious children of five using their cell phone cameras! Shots (using super jerky hand-held cameras) are mostly monotonously limited to: out-of-focus somethings; repeats of accelerated street-level scenes from motor cycles; and in-your-face close ups of "actors." Wear lines turn up occasionally. Just turn off the video garbage and enjoy the punk rock bands on the sound track! WILLIAM FLANIGAN, PhD.

I have seen a lot of Japanese Movies, and this must have been one of the worst i have seen in all those years. The Punk Music might be appealing to some people, but the rest of the film is awful. The so called Camera-work looks like they just ran around with the Cam, the "violent" scenes some People liked are cut fast and filmed with an extremely unsteady Camera so you don't see anything at all. Weird Gangs fighting each other makes it looks like an extremely cheap "The Riffs" aka "Bronx Warriors" RipOff, which was originally released 1982 as well. All in all the movie just was a mix of pointless and bad fights, mixed with punk music... Even for a giant Musicvideo the Visuals are extremely bad. Don't let yourself fool you by People how compare this to work by Miike or Kitano, because even their worst movies look like Oscar-winners compared to this waste of material.

A shame few will get the chance to see this movie. It was suggested to me as a Japanese Death Race 2000. Oh, but it is so much more. A dystopian future against a backdrop of angry Japanese punk rock. Burst City is a raw look at an overamped society with its frantic, hyper camera work and loud brash music. As a fictional peek into punk rock, Burst City is still leaps and bounds above any other attempts. Well worth the look. Be prepared to search, however, and I don't believe there is a subtitled or dubbed version in existence. This is a shame as the film deserves greater exposure.

Without the work of Sogo Ishii there would be no Takashi Miike or Shinya Tsukamoto. That becomes quite clear in the opening minutes of BURST CITY. The hyper-kinetic beginning of the film with its lightning fast editing and violent images together with the use of music were obvious influences on Miike's DEAD OR ALIVE and BLUES HARP as well as a number of other films. And the camera-work, use of black and white photography and cyberpunk imagery were later recycled in Tsukamoto's TETSUO films as well as SNAKE OF JUNE.BURST CITY is essentially a feature length punk rock music clip. The film is set in a kind of post-apocalyptic Japan where everyone is a punk, a freak or a brutal cop. There are non-stop riots in the streets, non-stop punk concerts, non-stop gang warfare, non-stop police brutality and non-stop car chases. This film is one hell of a wild ride and it left me feeling spun. The soundtrack is made up entirely of awesome Japanese punk rock and fits the images perfectly.BURST CITY is powerful, frenetic, feral, rabid cinema that feels like a transmission from the gutter of the future.