Burst City

1982 ‘爆裂都市’ Directed by Gakuryû Ishii

Set in a barren, futuristic Tokyo of highways and wastelands, a rowdy group of punk bands and their fans gather to protest slow, boring, Japanese living.

Michiro Endo Shigeru Izumiya Takanori Jinnai Kou Machida 室井滋 Hitomi Tsurukawa Maro Sekiji Hiromi Hiraguchi Mayumi Ohbayashi Ken Yoshizawa Umanosuke Ueda

Alternative Title

Bakuretsu toshi

action music science fiction

115 mins More details at IMDb TMDb Report this film

Popular reviews

Review by CinemaVoid 🏴‍☠️ ★★ 4

If I wanted to endure 2 hours of angry grown men yelling at each other in Japanese I would just have logged to a MMORPG.
Review by Evan ★★★★

Like an insane, (barely) narrativized Japanese take on The Decline of Western Civilization that's been shot back in time from some alternate Neo Tokyo, and with a Liquid Sky-by-way-of-Mad Max aesthetic. Pure punk energy and decapitation by crash cymbal.
Review by Benjamin ★★★★ 4

Day #22 of Japanuary!
Continuing with the theme of watching Japanese films throughout January, I decided to watch a Punk/Rock film directed by Gakuryû Ishii (formerly known as Sōgo Ishii).
Punk/rock films are a big part of Japanese cinema. One needs to look no further than Tetsuo: The Iron Man, Electric Dragon 80.000 V, Akira, and Ghost in the Shell in terms of some notable and influential Japanese cyberpunk films. What makes Burst City such a special film is that it is basically a precursor to cyberpunk films. It is a lot less cyber and almost all punk. I am not sure any other film rivals it in terms of being the rawest and most authentic cinematic punk experience. It's…
Review by MikeyMalibu ★★★★★ 2

Inside of every rioter, anarchist, rocker and rebel exists a Burst City.
This is one of, if not THE, best punk films ever made and definitely the definitive one for all things Mentai Rock. If you want a visual representation of what being punk in spirit is really all about; look no further.
Review by Michael ★★★★

Daily Horror Hunt #31 (January 2021) 5/31
Watch a horror movie featuring rock n roll themes.
I haven't seen this movie since I was 10 when I watched it on a fansubbed VHS tape and I finally got the Blu-Ray released by Arrow Video. Arrow Video has done a wonderful job of releasing Japanese movies on Blu-Ray that other companies such as Criterion would never bother with. Burst City still holds up and it is a pretty awesome movie to watch. Burst City is a crazy movie with a story that is all over the place. It is almost hard to explain the story of this movie without going into spoilers. This movie is set in a post-apocalyptic cyberpunk Japan…
Review by Finny! ★½

''Squirt! Squirt further! Take a shower in my piss!''
How can a movie so manic be so deathly dull?
Burst City is incredible for the first 15 minutes.
The opening is great fun, and a 5 minute long flashback sequence an hour in perfectly shows off that beautiful, impressionistic, messy style that Sogo Ishii's known for.
There are also some music videos in the first hour that are powerfully cool—and the music is great.
But about an hour and half of this film is just 100 dudes running around—screaming ''AAAAAAAAA'' and ''KURRRRRRRAAAH!'' at eachother—and brawling, while the camera shakes around making it impossible to see what's even going on—that said, it would be impossible to see what's going on even…
Review by Kevin Almroth ★★★★

Dungeonskramz Movie Challenge
A cyberpunk movie
This is definitely not a film for everyone, as it suffers from a messy narrative that pads out the runtime a bit too long, but if you're looking for some angsty cyberpunk mayhem with intense cinematography and music, you can't go wrong with this. Makes for a wild ride that leaves you feeling exhausted by the end.
Review by Laurie ★★

The 2016 Cult Movie Challenge!
Week 1: Jan. 1-Jan. 7
Biker Movie Week

Burst City essentially works on three levels that it repeatedly cycles through for the duration of its running time.
Level 1 - Furious dispute.
Level 2 - Violent brawl.
Level 3 - An out of control riot bordering on open warfare.
And repeat...and repeat...and repeat...
Sound like fun? Well in that case Burst City may be the film for you, but please be aware that the camera is placed within this maelstrom of chaos at all times and the barest hint of a story is buried so deep in all of the ensuing confusion, so as not to be at all relevant.
It's like being stuck in…
Review by Michelle ★★★★ 1

Burst City (1982) starts out zooming through the streets of Tokyo at night, the lights whizzing by, forming an abstract and dazzling assault to the senses. The aim is to get the audience's blood pumping, to prepare them for the hyper-chaotic experience that director Sogo Ishii AKA Gakuryū Ishii has in store for them. Part experimental film and part music video, Burst City is a rowdy piece of art that encapsulates the independent "don't fuck with me" spirit that punk music embraces. This film was also part of the jishu eiga or "self-produced" era of Japanese filmmaking in the early '80s where potential auteurs not only had to make movies outside of the failing Japanese industry with no money, they…
Review by cineurbe

A post apocalyptic Tokyo indulgence in a display of decadent punk chaos and distorted mayhem, splattered
in anarchic vibrant colors and unfiltered discordant sounds,
that burst genuinely with violent confidence, and then fizzles, only to self destruct into the void.
Review by Jimmy R ★★★★

Burst City is significantly better second time around, my tastes have changed a lot in 6 years. 2.5 stars was definitely too low. It's not as exciting or intense as the first 15 minutes or its reputation might lead you to believe. Punkish kinetic filmmaking gives way to some sort of chilled out post-apocalyptic mood piece. There's not really a plot or defined structure to grab hold of here, feels like a collection of short scenes with thematic similarities.
Gakuryû Ishii (formerly Sogo Ishii) made one of my favourite films in August in the Water, his Asia Strikes Back was pretty good too (although I had to watch the later remix cut). He's got a cool eye and mind for…
Review by Marc-André ★★★★

Japanuary Challenge 2021
Hey, guys, let's take it up a notch!
Dit-il après plus de 90 minutes d'assaut punk sauvage ininterrompu...
Brûlot expérimental crinqué au triple maximum et complètement brutal et hystérique du début à la fin, Burst City est un document essentiel de la scène punk japonaise du début des années 1980. Clairement une influence majeure pour de nombreux cinéastes nippons, à commencer par Shinya Tsukamoto, Takashi Miike, Sion Sono et Toshiaki Toyoda, jusqu'à Zigrail d'André Turpin au Québec qui en est un descendant direct, c'est une expérience post-apocalyptique musicale extrême et sans queue ni tête sur le plan narratif, confondante jusqu'à la saturation et l'épuisement tant elle se vautre dans tous les excès tonitruants, avec sa musique frénétique…

Recent reviews

Review by Andrew Gray ★★★

The Decline of Japanese Civilization.
Review by João

...
Review by Jae ★★★

I'll be honest, I had absolutely no clue what was going on for a good part of this film.
It was still somehow kinda fun to watch though, and even more interesting to read about how the director helped birth the techno-punk movement in Japan.
Definitely a strange film, and it's one that you really have to read about as well as watch it, but it's a cool experience to watch.
Review by Rocco Boschetti ★★★½

scritto molto a scolapasta ma lo spirito c’è e anche l’atmosfera
che basta e avanza
Review by Chris ★★½

More like a long series of music videos with some shades of story between.
Review by Ryan Allbaugh ★★★★

A spectacular mess. Abrasive, loosely structured cyber-drool made on a shoestring budget. Its ambition surely outpaces the skill of those involved, but the spirit is so strong and the visual style so stunning that I’m willing to overlook almost all negative aspects of Burst City. It belongs in the rarefied space of films about punks that actually get the subculture, like Repo Man and Suburbia. This film climaxes in a 30-minute long nonstop riot between mutants, punks, cops and yakuza — if you can’t dig that I don’t know what to tell you.
Review by Ed Gutteridge ★★★★

This is absolute mayhem. Cross Kinji Fukasaku with George Miller add in a bunch of Japanese punks and strip away pretty much all narrative and you get somewhere near this. What a riot
Review by JNAB84 ★★★★

Cyberpunk 1982
More a DIY document perhaps than a film, Sogo Ishii’s seminal cyberpunk experiment is a hugely divisive experience. It’s more an extended music video, peppered with loose narrative elements and held together with spit, gasoline and guitar strings; an anarchic nocturnal freak-out powered by its own craziness.
Set in an almost myopically dark future Tokyo (there are literally scenes so lo-fi you can barely see them), punk bands and biker gangs fight against corporate Yakuza attempting to build a power plant on their turf. It’s less a plot and more of an excuse to showcase punk bands and wildly unchoreographed mass brawls. Can you always tell what is happening? Fuck no. Is it’s impressionistic chaos undeniably both feral…
Review by BjorkShandy ★★★½

Wild City
Burst City is a wild film!, it's a Cyberpunk film without the Cyber... it's purely punk!. Burst City is my fourth Ishii film and I didn't expect to see a fourth Ishii film because I had blacklisted him along with the Coen Brothers... god I hate the Coen brothers. Ishii would of remained floating in the black abyss if it wasn't for my friend Clara who wanted me to give the film a go so I reluctantly did... it was good.
Burst City is a good film but still very much an Ishii film and I have the exact same problems with it that I have with all his other films. Like all Ishii's other films the first…
Review by John_Kitchen ★★½

The music is great and I'll probably like this more on future viewings, but I'm gonna need a minute because this movie is EXHAUSTING
Review by denizrudin

More punk than Crazy Thunder Road, but less surprising, in part because there's no narrative throughline to twist and turn. There's only so much unalleviated Punk Rock Chaos you can shove on screen before it starts to feel like there's no reason for this to be feature-length.

Much respect, though, for the frenetically eclectic technique. Really bending over backwards to find new ways of wringing every last drop of visual interest out of the monotony.
Review by fritzindahouse ★★★★★

Forgot to log from last night. What a feverdream of a film