Emergency! Living Dead in Tokyo Bay... finally... coming to non-VSoM DVD!!!

You: How... but... huh... wha'??? Say again?!?!?!

Me: Relax baby, cool it, all is good. Hahaha.

I know, I know, you don't capisce this, do you. Nah, you don't. It's not capisce'able for you ordinary folk out there to comprehend the greatness of this so lemme try and explain, slowly.

Yes, it is true; Kazuo "Gaira" Komizu's EMERGENCY! LIVING DEAD IN TOKYO BAY (original title: Batoru gâru: Tokyo crisis wars) is finally going to be released by a legit video company!!! (I'm sure it's redundant that I mention Gaira is also behind such classics as ENTRAILS OF A VIRGIN and ENTRAILS OF A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN). No longer will fans of exotic zombie flicks have to pull out the ol'e DVD-R from Video Search of Miami (or 3rd generation dupes off the VSoM boot, haha). Sounds amazing, aye!

It's the good people (well, Don May jr.) over at Synapse who are putting LIVING DEAD out on DVD. Street date: February 23, 2010. It's already listed on Amazon. It must be something like 15 years ago since I got hold of this film the first time; on that aforementioned bootleg VHS from VSoM. Or rather on a video tape from a tapetrader in Finland copied off a boot from VSoM, haha. Then much later, very recently like one or two yrs ago, I re-bought the film on DVD-R from that thar boot company in order to get a slightly better picture quality. Their version is pretty decent enough, good picture and comes with English subtitles provided by Thomas Weisser & Co. but needless to say getting a proper DVD is gonna be so much better, not least cos for the first time it'll be presented its original letterboxed format. [EDIT: actually it's in fullscreen. Thanks Jayson]

So what's EMERGENCY! LIVING DEAD IN TOKYO BAY all about I hear you ask. Well, a deadly green meteor crashes in the middle of Tokyo harbour and panic ensues partly because the rays from the green meteor turn dead people into... zombies! (you didn't see that one coming, eh). And our heroine battle chick has to... ehh... I forget... do some stuff I guess. But very entertaining. hmm, maybe I should go and watch my boot again. :/

Anyhoo, this new spiffy DVD will contain:

SPECIAL FEATURES
- New Digital Transfer from Original Vault Materials
- Presented in the Original Filmed Aspect Ratio of 1.33:1
- Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo Sound
- Newly Translated Removable English Subtitles
- All-New Video Interview with Director Kazuo “Gaira” Komizu (53 mins.)

Oh, and as you can see on the cover there's also a slight re-titling as Synapse have added the "Battle Girl" moniker from the Japanese video. Personally I think they should've left the old VSoM title as it were but, hey, that's a minor gripe.

Over on DVDManiacs Don May jr. said this about the interview:

At 53 minutes this interview on BATTLE GIRL is also quite brain melting. I think the guy must've smoked about 9 packs of cigarettes in that hour. It's so odd and crazy, we decided to just not edit it at all and have the entire thing on the disc! LOL!

PS: Synapse are (most likely) also going to release a VIOLENT SHIT box set!!! More on that later.