Gantz: 0 is an incredibly well animated CGI Japanese action movie which tells the story of a group of dead teenagers who wake up inside a violent game where they are made to fight grotesque and frightening monsters, or else face death all over again.
According to its Wikipedia page, this weird ass flick was directed by Yasushi Kawamura, produced by Digital Frontier, written by Tsutomu Kuroiwa and based on the manga series Gantz, which was written and illustrated by Hiroya Oku. It was released in Japan by Toho on October 14, 2016.
Now I don’t know what any of that means because I don’t read manga and, aside from a few exceptions (like these ultra violent anime movies) I hate anime. But I do know cool fucking movies when I see them and MAN this is a cool ass flick!
So what’s so cool about Gantz: 0? Well, for starters this flick just throws you right into the madness. It opens with a hot Japanese chick and some flowy haired dude wearing skin tight leather costumes that would give The Matrix a run for its money in terms of ridiculousness. They have these bizarre blue-light weapons and they’re wasting cool ass monsters left and right until the flowy haired dude takes on what I assume is the big bad, dying in the process. The girl mourns his death as they’re both teleported away from the city streets.
Boom, just like that, we’re in. Then we cut to another flowy haired dude (there are a lot of flowy haired dudes in this flick, which is fine because there are enough hot chicks and monsters to balance it out) who gets savagely murdered by a knife wielding maniac at a subway station.
Our new flowy haired dude then wakes up in a room with a giant black ball and several other dudes who all seem to have a WAY better idea of what’s going on than our new dead dude (or us as audience members who don’t watch anime or read manga, for that matter.)
This small team is then transported to another city where they are tasked with eliminating every monster inside some arbitrary perimeter inside an allotted amount of time. They are each equipped with a different badass weapon for the job. Of course our flowy-haired dead guy has no idea how they work. Essentially they’re some kind of sonic weapon that has a slight delay after they’re triggered and then a small cooling-down period giving each shot tension as we don’t know if the shots hit or miss for a second or two after they’re fired.
So then the monsters show up and HOLY FUCKING SHIT ARE THESE MONSTERS COOL AS FUCK!
We get everything from winged demon looking things to goblins, ghouls, zombies, lovecraftian tentacle terrors, bipedal creatures, doglike beasts, insectoid creepy crawlers. You name it. And this CGI is top-knotch as an animation style. These things might look cartoony and goofy in a live-action movie, but since everything in the film is CGI, the monsters just look super fucking badass.
So our dead peeps slaughter these monsters and then run into another team of players. It is then explained that each monster kill is worth points. Anyone who scores 100 points in the game can choose between resurrecting a dead teammate, taking a weapon upgrade or they can leave the game.
And so for the next 90 or so minutes we just follow these motherfuckers as they kill crazier and crazier monsters. At one point they engage with the final boss of the level who appears first as a tiny old man and then in increasingly deadlier and larger forms, over and over again each time they kill it. The whole batshit crazy thing culminates with tons of dead players, monsters, decapitations, eviscerations, mutilations and even a giant mech!
Fundamentally this kind of movie is for weird fat white guys who jack off to anime girls with big dicks, but with all of the insane monsters, mechs and cool weapons flying about, I think horror and sci-fi lovers can also find something to appreciate here.
Last I checked this was available to watch on netflix, so it ain’t gonna cost you anything extra to check it out if you’ve got a subscription.
I give Gantz: 0 a solid 4 out of 5 Strangeheads for super-gory monster action.
