There are few more significant Japanese films of the 1970s and 1980s, and fewer still who wear their significance with such gleeful abandon, as Crazy Thunder Road. Began as a student graduation project in 16mm and ultimately given theatrical distribution, a 35mm make-over and international cult acclaim, this punk, dystopian, quasi-science-fiction trawl through the detritus of a post-industrial wasteland in which rival biker gangs face off both against one another against those representing ostensible societal conformity is a blistering critique of Japan’s post-war economic miracle.

The so-called Jishu Eiga, or no-budget, independent amateur films, began to proliferate as the extant studio system was crumbling in the 1970s and 1980s. These works provided a fertile breeding ground for talent in Japanese filmmaking, and the anarchic visions that increasingly found their way into specialist festivals and independent screenings before ultimately onto cinema screens through studio distribution and exhibition served to adumbrate a new generation of directors who would go on to leave their respective mark on Japan’s national cinema.

Crazy Thunder Road is often referred to, though little substantiated, as a Japanese iteration of Mad Max (1979). This is presumably for its study of outlaw bikers in a seeming post-apocalyptic space of lawlessness and violent turmoil; yet there is in truth little else that validates any close comparison with George Miller’s Australian cult classic. If there is a Western parallel here, then perhaps Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1972) is a more apposite companion piece.

It is a clash that seemingly animates ideological as well as physical skirmishes between opposing factions, though they become mirror images rather than markedly oppositional forces. The frenzy of these battles directly echoes Ogawa’s personal and professional immersion in the politics and physicality of the Narita airport battles. These scenes of struggle and violence, themselves echoing the widespread leftist unrest and youthful public protests, demonstrations and riots of the late 1960s, feature a visual and visceral intensity replete with hand-held camerawork and montage editing to evince a quasi-documentary verisimilitude.

The film is thus perhaps more misanthropic than specifically suggestive of homophobic or misogynistic attitudes. As a consequence it is difficult to really engage or empathise with anyone onscreen. The character who wavers between different political and social factions is throughout a rather bullish figure who, and indeed this is suggestive of Ishii’s treatment of a nationally prominent sub-culture. The Bosozoku, or biker gangs/speed tribes, at the heart of Crazy Thunder Road would continue to occupy Ishii in his subsequent work.