Death Powder (1986)

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Awesome Movie

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

The credits at the end read "ALL directed by Shigeru Izumiya". That's a fitting way to phrase it because it seems like filmed material from several projects were thrown together somehow, barely even attempting to make it all form one consistent work. It more felt like one of those music clip things that are marketed as feature films to cash in on those video commercials, just that here we have the marketable music and the live performances missing, except for one scene, which may as well be marketed as a weird music video clip in Japan. Whatever.It makes zero sense. Visually it isn't too special either, although it has its moments (for example the female creature with the "death powder" who is strapped onto a bed base and some morphing sh!t throughout) and it certainly has an industrial-y feeling to it. Usually I'd call the effects dilettantish but what this film offers in this regard is baffling more than anything else. You remember those cheap video effects from 70's and 80's music videos that make them look so dated, like a picture within a picture flying through the screen? There is quite a lot of these kind of effects in this, and without any apparent reason. The most half-assed seeming effort comes in the form of a picture collage. The pictures sort of look like album covers. Whatever.I don't know what's up with the subtitles of the version I saw. The Chinese ones (or whatever those hieroglyphics are) sometimes seem to show up when nothing is even said and the English ones often show up without the Chinese ones. The English subs talk much about life without death (is it possible?), and a mind without a body, which provides what comes closest to a comprehensible conflict between characters in this film. One guy (a scientist dude) says that life without flesh is death while another guy (a metamorphosing dude) who claims his mind is beyond his body now that he got the "death powder" blown into his face and that he now knows the secrets of the flesh and whatnot; metamorphosing dude is visibly p!ssed off about the scientist dude's claim. Whatever.Erm, The End - All Written By Perception de Ambiguity

This film is a one of a kind gem. If you want to see what Pinnochio 964, Tetsuo: The Iron Man, Meatball Machine, Electric Dragon 80000v, Rubber's Lover (etc., etc., etc...) would be like if they were even MORE insane... then, here's your movie.Combining extremely bizarre and nightmarish imagery (ever seen an image of a gigantic eyeball from a slime monster superimposed over a bizarre doorway that sorta looks like it was made from line-drawing?) with a noisey soundtrack and TONS of surrealism and just an overall bizarre atmosphere, this is one of the best films I've ever seen. Really, it's the epitome of a perfect film: Never gets boring, a perfect length, and you'll always find something new to love every time you watch it.I've noticed in recent years, there's been a renewed interest in this film. Hopefully I will live to see the day when this will officially be released on DVD in America. This is a lost classic, to be certain, and there's certainly an audience for it (albiet a small, art-house audience.. there's still an audience). Whatever means you can do to find yourself a copy of this now, though, don't hesitate to do it, especially if you're concerned with cinema that places emphasis on weird visuals over a coherent story. There, uh, isn't really that much of a story to speak of, I think, but that doesn't matter. There's so many weird parts in this film you won't mind (what's the deal with the random mosaiced faces?). Love it.

This film is hyped as being in the same sub-genus of film as Tsukamoto's 'Tetsuo' or Shozin Fukui's '964 Pinocchio.' It is, however not as focussed or crafted as either of those films. Still, it warrants a degree of attention.The story, as I understand it: Three conspirators steal a secret android. In their warehouse hideout, the android secretes a reality-altering substance, which casts them into a frightening nether-world of interconnected subjectivity.Meanwhile, in the real world, workers enter the warehouse, only to find that the occupants within have mutated into a huge, protoplasmic organism.Some aspects of this film are more successful than others. The protoplasm being is great, it reminds me of some kind of Kroft-type Saturday morning special effect creature gone really, really wrong. On the other hand an extended montage of stills to ironically loungy music badly overstays it's welcome.Still, it all seems in good fun; during one of the hallucination sequences, the scientist who designed the android is revealed in a bizarre music video sequence---as a singer for an 80s hair-band.

Shigeru Izumiya's underground classic Desu Pawuda aka Death Powder (Japan, 1986) is definitely among the weirdest, most bizarre films I've ever seen. It reminds me of David Lynch' Eraserhead, Shinya Tsukamoto's Tetsuo and some other extremely memorable and unique exercises in cinematic magic and limits beyond imagination. Death Powder has very little to do with plot or story, and what's there is extremely hard to follow and seems not to make any sense. One character says at one point to another: "Try to pretend that you're understanding what it's all about. Like life itself, this makes no sense." That line really tells something what to expect from this low budget gem from Japan, the land of many great film makers.There are three mercenaries/soldiers who go to some mysterious storehouse in which even more mysterious figure is lying on a bed without any mattress. Suddenly, the figure blows some dust/powder on one of the soldiers and then the nightmare begins. It soon turns out, that one of the soldiers (played by the director Izumiya himself) has already been "infected" by this powder and now the question is what will happen to these two hapless victims, the other being a female by the way. The newly "infected" mercenary starts to have severe hallucinations into some netherworld, a universe unknown to us and a place never depicted on film before, and soon it is revealed that the powder has still many more victims to "dust".At this point I want to say that the plot is extremely hard to follow and I had to watch the film twice in order to be able to write about it. The story and plot are not the things this film has to offer and thus the audience for this kind of film becomes even smaller. The film is also extremely slow moving and has many "dead" moments (the film runs mere 62 minutes, though) so don't watch this when you're tired since this film requires your full attention. These are not necessarily bad things if one can enjoy and appreciate this kind of different and very personal and independent cinema. If you thought Tetsuo was way too irritating and hard to understand in its madness, then forget Death Powder right now because this is perhaps even more bizarre experience.The message is the same as in Tetsuo: The fear of technology and to what extents it will grow. The camera angles at the beginning where we are in the city among other people are very weird and twisted and they depict the same fears and menaces as Tetsuo does. "Only you can save the world from itself" says one voice during the nightmarish hallucination segments to one character. Besides these themes, Death Powder is one incredible exercise in low budget film making and ultra menacing and mind altering imagery to haunt the viewer days to come, and nights, in my case!I had very weird dreams (or nightmares, more correctly) after watching Death Powder for the first time last night. I saw dreams I hadn't ever seen, as I hadn't seen a film like this earlier either. This film drills into one's mind and stays there like an acid trip. The imagery at the end is extremely horrible as we "see" what's behind that door.. The effects and make ups are of course cheap, but very greatly created and look as effective as possible for a production like this. Some of the segments are very gruesome and surreal so again this cannot be recommended for any other than a jaded Asian/underground cinema lover. The soundtrack consists of different sounds, whispers, echos, rock, pop and so on, so the atmosphere created by sounds is also very impressive. Still, I don't love this quite as much as I love the definite underground "cyberpunk cinema" classic Tetsuo from the great film maker Shinya Tsukamoto. Death Powder (coloured) has similar elements and same menacing and crazy atmosphere, but lacks the strongest visions of Tsukamoto and is never as striking, explosive and nightmarish as Tetsuo (black and white). Death Powder has also elements from films like Videodrome and other Cronenberg films but they are handled here with the personal touch of Izumiya, not in a rip off way.Death Powder is highly recommended for all those interested in underground and hyper bizarre cinema experiences and it would be great if this had some official VHS/DVD release with English subs at some point. Hopefully some underground distributor pays some attention on this gem in the future. 8/10