Brightlyme i know i wasted 90 mins of my life.

Raymond Sierra The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Dana An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Cristal The movie really just wants to entertain people.

suite92 An object from outer space strikes Hokkaido. This kicks up a cloud of ash which makes people fall to the ground, only to rise again in an hour as zombies.A large wall was erected across Honshu north of Tokyo to keep the zombies out. Refugees flood Tokyo.There's a banner: Protect the infected. Support human rights.Unfortunately, the infected eat the uninfected, but the government does not care.The zombies have an odd shaped horn; the only way to put a zombie down permanently in this film is to cut off this horn. Horns have psycho-active effects, so drug dealers collect them. The horns are volatile and explosive as well. This is all explained in a newscast/paid advertising TV session.There is social dissension about the issue: the pro-zombie rights advocates versus the Japan is for the living advocates. From the political to the gore fest: zombies with chain saws, heroes with bizarre weapons, strange eyes, spewing gore, sudden costume changes. That's in the first 30 minutes.Kika meets Taku and No-name, the last of the members of the Kamikaze Orphanage. Taku and No-name hunt for zombie horns, and the money is getting bad.Amazingly, there is formal public debate about whether or not to exterminate the zombies before they exterminate the living. The zombies eventually settle the debate by eating the prime minister.The opening credits start at 49 minutes into the film. Clever.After the credits, death row inmates are given a chance at having their sentences dropped. They are to find the woman who is the source of the zombie infestation and kill/destroy/whatever her.Kika is the daughter of the zombie queen, so Kika might be able to help locate her. They meet a skilled hunter in zombie country who helps them evade the flying heads.There's an effort to rescue No-name's sister Maya, who's been captured and sold at the zombie bar. Lots of fighting, lots of blood, but this is not the ultimate battleground.How might this turn out? Will any of our heroes survive? Will they get the zombie queen? Will the help promised by the Tokyo regime actually arrive?------Scores------Cinematography: 2/10 Ugly, badly done. Poor colour, shaky camera, and so on.Sound: 4/10 Out of sync, voice to speech. Bizarre choices for incidental music. Subtitles for the jaunty, pleasant singing would have been nice. Even more ridiculous choices of Western classical music.Acting: 0/10 I did not recognise any acting in this one. There were many people in the film who were on camera for under 30 seconds, and had few if any lines.Screenplay: 0/10 The time line is dicey, the characters are not developed in a coherent way, the visuals are poor, and the effect of the thing from outer space on Kika never made sense to me. The flashbacks are not well organised. Incredibly stupid armour, incredibly stupid mustache, ridiculous amount and presentation of blood splatter, flying heads as ammunition, heads flying with no physical reason for their movement, a stolen heart used as a voodoo instrument, and some of the stupidest fights I have ever seen. These were all part of the nonsense of the screenplay. Enough continuity errors to torpedo a hundred films that had any reasonable governance.

Alucard Venom I love Asian cinema. I love gore from time to time, but I am not big fan of gory flicks.... but this one is damn entertaining. Fans of the genre will surely love it (as well as gorehounds) but other more mainstream audiences will hate it and get confused most of the time."Helldriver" is what could be considered "new wave of Japanese grindhouse" and it has everything good grindhouse needs: little to no story, weird moments, lot of gore, violence and blood. There's not much nudity in this one, but gore and blood splatters go over the top in every possible way.Plot is rather simple: meteor (!?) falls to Earth, turning nearly all people in Japan into some kind of zombie mutants. Kika (Yumiko Hara) is sent to chop the heck out of them and kill mutant leader. Other folks join her in her mission. Now, first part of the movie is bit awkward (in a good) way, having nice amount of social\ politics\religious satire (but gore and action scenes still happen here) and somewhere around the half of the movie, title shows up (not kidding). After that, the movie "really" begins, which is pretty much hack'n'slash after that.What makes HELLDRIVER great is that movie doesn't take itself very seriously (I was laughing most of the time, even in bloodiest scenes), gore FX are well done, and what impresses me the most are makeup effects on some "boss" monsters. I swear, at least half of the budget must have gone on makeup and fake blood (and this movie has insane amount of blood, maybe even more then Peter Jackson's "Braindead"). Some really cool villains (and original) and great fight scenes (and hilarious at the same time!) with them. Most of the time you'll keep asking yourself "how the heck they are gonna top the last scene" in terms of (un)logic, visuals and action.Yumiko Hara is also very pretty and looks like Japanese action heroine. Hope we'll see more of her in future. Eihi Shiina (from Tokyo Gore Police, Audition) plays main villain, and she's wonderful as usual. Her scenes are over the top most of the time, but they fit movie perfectly, since Helldriver itself is way over the top in every possible element.Turn off your logic and remember "it's just a movie". Enjoy the mayhem that happens on screen, and you'll surely like Helldriver.

mmushrm Another Yoshihiro Nishimura and Sushi Typhoon production, Helldriver has all the elements that are the mainstays of the producer and studio. You will find gore and horror mixed in with an abundance of absurdity.I personally enjoy the absurdity of the Yoshihiro Nishimura and Sushi Typhoon movies and this was no exception. This movie is a cheaply made exploitation B movie. The producers know this and don't try to foist it off as anything other then what it is. This is what makes it watchable.Helldriver does start off rather slow. It took me several attempts to finish this movie. In fact I would say the setup, the starting 1/3 of the movie was rather dull. Then the action starts.Once the action gets going it really gets going zombies, exploding zombies, zombie gangsters, flying zombies, transformer zombies and the good guys fighting them.The acting is minimalistic, probably because no one could act but then again its a zombie action movie. The girls all look good showered with blood and screaming/shouting in anger.Im only giving this movie a 6 due to its slow start. I started watching the movie then got pulled away and it took me months to get back to this movie again. However the 2/3 made up for it. Im looking forward to more movies from these guys.

trashgang I liked so many extreme gory flicks coming from Japan in the eighties and nineties because they were full of gore and red stuff. But times are changing and lately flicks coming from Japan aren't my cup of tea anymore. It started with Takashi Miiki's Yattâman (Yatterman). I loved the man and every gorehound has at least seen one of his flicks. The last one I liked was from Masters Of Horror 'Imprint' which I even bought uncut on Blu Ray. But Yatterman was something weird, it contained too much of CGI and had a strange story. It failed completely for me and I hoped that this new kind of shooting was a one in a kind.Was I wrong, I saw this due Asami being in it who I met at a convention and tried to talk with, she only understood Japanese, luckily Kurando Mitsutake (Samurai Avenger: The Blind Wolf) was there to translate everything. Another reason was that Eihi Shiina (Audition) was in it, she's back in business and Asami is a new star in her native land. What we have is an extremely gory flick but it made me think of Yatterman. So much CGI and weird things like zombies with horns. And the scene with the mother tearing out the heart of her child is indeed gory but it's full of CGI and exaggerated things that I disliked it.If this is the new way of making Japanese flicks then I guess I will leave that scene. For the moment things I liked was Vampire Girls vs Frankenstein Girls or Alien vs Ninja but Helldriver wasn't my thing. I can dig weird story lines but this was over the top. But I won't give up, I would like to see Erotibot with Asami, let's hope this is old school HK III. Maybe Yoshihiro Nishimura, the director, should better staid at his make-up department (Tokyo Gore Police or Machine Girl).Gore 5/5 Nudity 1/5 Effects 4/5 Story 2/5 Comedy 1/5