Review: Black Test Car

Black Test Car
Yasuzo Masumura

Fantoma
Street: 05.22

The Fast and the Furious, Red Line, Days of Thunder… all these movies deal in one form or another with cars and racing them. Most of the time, these movies involve babes with tons of cleavage, outrageous, impossible cars and the people who drive them. Interestingly, Black Test Car takes this same genre that is drenched with awful amounts of testosterone and turns it into a critique of Japan’s wayward Westernized transformation without all the Calvin and Hobbes characters peeing on logos. The movies flashes the story of two car companies trying to get the one-up on each other through corporate boardroom politics, greed and lying all while trying to make a rad sportscar. Told in a straight-forward way with no irony or campiness, Black Test Car is tense, if not a little out-dated. -Erik Lopez