I recently saw Guitar Wolf perform at a crowded, raucous dive bar and was impressed by the band’s continued ferocity.  The Japanese garage-rock trio has been around for as long as I have been alive, but they’re rocking and rolling as hard as ever, shredding & crowdsurfing through neighborhood venues the size of living rooms.  Meanwhile, it took me two full days to recover from just one of their shows, suffering both headbanger’s whiplash and tinnitus from standing too few feet away from their overcranked amps.  I am convinced that a single week of touring with Guitar Wolf would literally kill me, especially since they insist on continuing to wear their black leather pants & jackets (the official Jet Rock n’ Roll uniform) in the Gulf South heat.  I left the show with a reignited excitement for the band, though, so I spent more time with them by revisiting their most prominent cinematic showcase to date: the late-90s splatstick horror comedy Wild Zero, in which they fight off a local breakout of astrozombies between playing gigs.  Despite only currently being accessible via YouTube, Wild Zero has a sizable cult following—partially due to Guitar Wolf’s Ramones-style rock n’ roll superheroes presence in the film, partially due to its surprisingly progressive queer themes—and it was without question my first introduction to the band.  That cult doesn’t account for all of Guitar Wolf’s audience, though, as evidenced by a recent failed Kickstarter campaign to crowdfund a sequel titled Wild Zero 2: The Strongest Blood of Humanity.  There’s apparently a disparity between the ecstatic enthusiasm of rock n’ roll maniacs who show up to see Guitar Wolf in concert (basically anyone who’s familiar with the phrase “Goner Records”) and the dimmed enthusiasm of schlock gobblers who’d show up to see Guitar Wolf onscreen again (aged internet nerds who used to trade zombie schlock recommendations on long-defunct message boards).  There’s obviously plenty of overlap between those two groups; there’s just not enough.

Fear not, Jet Rockers! There’s already another Guitar Wolf movie out there waiting for anyone who’s seen Wild Zero a few too many times but wants to spend more time with the band while the buzzsaw feedback from their most recent tour fades from your eardrums.  The 1997 indie cheapie The Sore Losers featured a small onscreen role for Guitar Wolf years before Wild Zero entered the chatroom.  The band appears as The Men in Black (Leather): a mysterious trio of villainous space aliens who frame a rival alien gang for intergalactic murders.  They’re introduced chugging beers in a Mississippi graveyard about halfway into the film, then randomly materialize at arbitrary points in the plot to wield swords, ogle strippers, and shoot CGI laser beams out of their eyes.  They’re very much like the Guitar Wolf of Wild Zero, except they have yet to learn how to use their powers for good.  The Sore Losers traffics in that kind of continued-adventures comic book storytelling throughout, directly referencing EC horror comics in its guiding iconography just as often as it references 1950s drive-in B-movies.  Guitar Wolf is only one faction of local garage-rock royalty who parade across the screen. Members of The Gories, Oblivians, and New Orleans’s own The Royal Pendletons appear alongside them to make it clear this is the document of a specific, contemporary scene just as much as it is a nostalgia piece about vintage schlock media.  Specifically, The Sore Losers is scuzzy, D.I.Y. exploitation trash starring hyper-local celebrities of the Memphis garage punk scene – a lost broadcast from the non-existent film division of Goner Records.  Given that Goner was initially established as a means to book & distribute Guitar Wolf in America just a few years before this film’s production, it fully has the credentials to back that up (even if competing garage label Sympathy for the Record Industry initially released the tie-in soundtrack, as advertised in the credits).

Like Wild Zero, The Sore Losers opens with CGI UFOs invading planet Earth, except in this case the UFO transforms into a hotrod the second it lands.  We’re told in voiceover that our antihero alien lead (Jack Oblivion) has been in exile from Earth for the past 42 years, punished for failing his 1950s mission to kill a dozen Northern Mississippi beatniks.  He immediately picks his mission back up again in a scheme to get back into the good graces of his alien overlords on The Invisible Wavelength, finding it much easier to locate & kill hippies in 1990s Mississippi than it was to locate & kill beatniks there four decades prior.  There are a lot of convoluted negotiations around hitting the exact dead-hippie metric that would earn his freedom, but narrative coherence isn’t among the movie’s priorities anyway.  Really, the hippie hunt is just an excuse for the intergalactic assassin to go on a short road trip to Memphis, so he can pose in vintage rock n’ roll gear along the way with redneck farmers, astrozombies, heavy-leather dominatrixes, and Betty Page pin-up girls.  The cinematic influences on this episodic adventure are clear: John Waters, David Freidman, Gregg Araki, Russ Meyer, etc.  The vintage sexploitation bent to that reference material leads to a lot of onscreen nudity, but not a lot of genuine horniness, giving the whole thing the feel of a rockabilly-themed Suicide Girls strip show.  It’s all mugging & posing, which is perfectly fine for a movie that’s clearly designed for an insular group of musician friends to celebrate how cool the scene they created together is by mimicking the cool the vintage media they grew up with.  It feels appropriate, then, that the end credits scroll includes the organizers of The Sore Losers Bash, since the local premiere & party for the film was almost more important than anything that actually happens in it.  As of yet, you cannot time travel back to that party to experience it for yourself, but you can order a reissue of the accompanying garage-rock soundtrack from Goner and blow out your eardrums in an attempt to recreate it.

It says something that the reissued Sore Losers soundtrack currently has a better at-home presentation than the film it promotes.  I rented The Sore Losers for $2 on VOD and was shocked by how gorgeous the digital restoration of its 16mm footage looked streaming at home.  The cranked-up color saturation vividly highlighted the vintage comic book influence of its guiding aesthetic, whereas just a few years later it likely would’ve been filmed in a grim, grey DV format.  However, the version I rented via Amazon had sound mixing issues that made the garage-rock soundtrack barely audible as a background whisper, as if those tracks were accidentally muted in export.  There are much fuzzier copies of the movie uploaded to YouTube where you can hear that the songs are supposed to be much louder in the mix, but a lot of the visual & aural details are lost in the lower quality of those transfers, so it’s really a matter of picking your poison.  The reason it’s worth mentioning is that the entire draw of the movie is watching cool people model outrageous leather outfits to loud rock n’ roll music (especially if you know those people personally), so a major component of that is experiencing missing if you can barely hear the rockin’ tunes.  The best way to view the movie, then, is likely to buy a physical copy on disc.  Better yet, don’t watch it at all.  Just go to the next garage rock show at your local dive bar and do some covert people-watching while the amplifiers cause irreparable brain damage.  From what I can tell, not much has changed on the scene fashion or personality-wise since the 90s.  You’re just likely to see more people wearing earplugs now, and I wish I was smart enough to be one of them.

-Brandon Ledet