Dragon Head (Doragon heddo/ドラゴンヘッド-2003)

Starring:
Satoshi Tsumabuki - Teru Aoki
Sayaka Kanda - Ako Seto
Takayuki Yamada - Nobuo Takahashi
Naohito Fujiki
Yoshimasa Kondo - Iwata
Kyusaku Shimada - Minila
Minori Terada - Andou
Jinpachi Nezu
Yutaka Matsushige
On a field trip to Kyoto, the train the students are on crashes horribly while in a tunnel, brutally killing all but three students, and horribly wounding the teacher. Teach doesn't suffer for long however, as Nobuo (Takayuki Yamada), a bullied student, beats him to death with a bamboo sword as retribution for him not intervening when he was getting pushed around. Getting the taste for violence, Nobuo builds a little den for himself among the corpses, and begins terrorizing the other two survivorsTeru and Ako (Satoshi Tsumabuki and Sayaka, respectively).

Teru and Ako eventually escape the tunnel through a collapsed pipe, but find themselves in a lifeless wasteland, where food and water are scarce, and everything is covered in snowy white ash from some unknown catastrophe. The two students begin looking for other survivors, but soon run afoul of crazed, homicidal townsfolk who seem to think that mass suicide is the only recourse...whether Teru and Ako like it or not.

Wow! This was better than what I thought it would be. I've had this movie saved for about a month now and just kept putting it off. So I finally just decided to watch it.

This is a very moving, thought provoking kind of movie...other than exciting. I sat there imagining what Earth would be like if I were to experience the "apocalypse". I can imagine people going crazy, nuts, psycho. I can imagine the suffering it would cause. I can imagine the plague of mass execution. I can imagine the self-destruction. I can imagine the abrupt shift in chaos.

This movie never truly clarified the cause of the destruction. My opinion....meteor onset then the Earth's shift plate shift that causes massive volcanic destruction. During the movie, I thought the "snow" was nuclear snow. But as the movie went on, it was more abundantly clear that it was volcanic ash. That is my uptake on that situation.

As the mass confusion set on for Ako and Teru, the struggle to survive became more apparent. People foolishly dying right and left surrounding them. Teru almost becoming a casuality to psychosis (Nobuo, a fellow train rider who survived but went nuts haunted him.) Ako surviving for Teru's sake amidst fellow survivors who ate tainted "survival food." All this........surrounded by an Earth bound and determined to die.