Japanese Rock And Roll Legend Guitar Wolf Joins Bizarre Apocalyptic Movie Fonotune

By Brent McKnight | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

Guitar WolfWild Zero is the best movie ever made. The over the top Japanese rock and roll zombie explosion is where cinema peaked in my opinion, and if you haven’t seen it, you should take great and immediate pains to rectify that situation. What really encapsulates everything you need to know about the movie is that the DVD comes with a drinking game. Every time fire shoots out of anything, someone combs their hair or says rock and roll, or a zombie’s head explodes, a little icon appears in the corner of the screen telling you to drink. You don’t need to drink in order to enjoy the film, I’ve watched it countless times dead sober, that tells you what kind of raucous adventure you’re getting yourself into. Wild Zero stars Japanese garage trio Guitar Wolf, and now the leader of the group, Guitar Wolf Seiji, will appear in his first movie since the 1999 release, and it is definitely a weird one called Fonotune.

FonotuneFonotune is a hard movie to describe. As near as I can tell it’s a kind of post-apocalyptic, musical fairy tale from German writer/director Fabian Huebner. It is a combination of all of the things he loves, including Japanese popular culture, graphic design, comic books, and music. Whatever this is, don’t go in expecting your traditional narrative film, this definitely skews towards the avant garde, and compares itself to both George Lucas’ THX-1138 and Daft Punk’s Electroma. That should be an interesting combination to be sure. In addition to Guitar Wolf Seiji, the cast also includes Kazushi Watanabe (Visitor Q) and Yuho Yamashita (Amakarashan).

Fonotune is currently filming and is approximately half finished, but they’re still looking for funds for that final push towards completion. Check out their Kickstarter if you’re interested in contributing. If nothing else, this video illustrates exactly how bat-shit crazy this movie is going to be.

Fonotune is set during a single day, a day that just so happens to be the last day on Earth, a fact that appears to have escaped most people. Electricity fills the sky, and everyone wears antenna headphones that blast them with an endless stream of music. The story follows a drifter named Mono (Huebner), a “teenage street hooker” called Stero (Yuho), and a “lo-fi cowboy” named Analog (Watanabe). Their journey takes them through an “apocalyptic urban landscape” on a mission to deliver a package of strange cassettes to Blitz, a wild rocker played by Guitar Wold Seiji. Along the way, they have all kinds of unusual encounters as the world goes to hell. I am totally on board for this weird, weird ride.

FonotuneIf you contribute, you can get all kinds of cool swag, including props, tickets, and even producer credits if you kick in that much. Photography is going down in Japan and Berlin, and Fonotune should wrap up production sometime this summer, with an eye for a release in early 2015. Even if you don’t contribute, this has our attention and you can bet we’ll be keeping an eye on this. We’ll let you know how things are going.

Fonotune
Fonotune