Showa Kayo Daizenshu (2003)
The terrible English title of this movie is “Karaoke Terror: The Complete Japanese Showa Era Songbook”. It’s about a group of slacker dudes in their mid-20s and a completely separate group of middle aged divorced women who both enjoy singing karaoke renditions of Showa-era pop songs. Both groups go on leading their largely unsatisfying lives as usual, until one of the more unstable dudes brutally murders one of the older women in a chance encounter, sparking a back-and-forth bloodbath of revenge murders between the two generations.
Even though my favourite Hiroyuki Ikeuchi starred as one of the boys along with Nana’s Ryuuhei Matsuda and the rad Masanobu Ando from Battle Royale in a pretty decent group of ikemen actors, I was staunchly cheering for the old ladies’ team the whole time. I’ve got a weird interest in films and dramas based around women from this generation, and besides, who doesn’t love an obasan with a rocket launcher.
I was expecting this to be kind of a B horror movie with lots of blood and gore since Linda (my zombie-loving mother) bought the DVD, but it’s nothing of the sort. Based on a controversial novel, it’s really kind of a sad criticism of how two different generations are both marginalized by contemporary Japanese society. The hollowness of their existences is the primary theme, wrapped up with a lot of very dark humour, 50s and 60s pop songs and the absurdist escalation of heavy weaponry. There are some pretty powerful scenes that I’d do a poor job of describing (and would probably get my site flagged by pr0n bots) so I definitely recommend you just watch it for yourself if you get the chance. It’s “edgy”, it’s wicked funny, and it’s got one hell of a soundtrack.
