Today’s challenge is to see how much of 1996’s Megalopolis Expressway Trial Max you can watch before you lose your mind and/or become a master of the touge.
A couple months back I started wasting all of my time watching old Japanese drifting videos from the mid-2000s. I do not know how many hours I have spent catching up of the lower-tier D1GP Street Legal’s 2008 season event coverage, hours I will never get back.
The benefit, however, of all of this dedicated viewing is that the all-powerful algorithm has started recommending me various other old Japanese car videos, including this one.
It’s a complete upload of the sixth and final installment in the Megalopolis Expressway Trial series of movies.
“I watched all of them,” my boss Patrick George told me when I brought up this movie in our office chat room. “Now every weekend I blast an R33 down the Wangan.”
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I can’t say that I am greatly familiar with these films, but they’re all about street racing and, after some controversy surrounding the first movie, are all getting off the street and onto the track.
Because I am lazy, I would like to rip the film synopsis off of Wikipedia, mostly because I am entertained by how the film lists characters and cars together, as if they are getting equal billing. But I am determined, so I’ll do it myself.
The plot goes that our main character, Shikiba Tatsuya, is a street racer on the way up, but after a highway race sends his opponent into the hospital, he reconsiders. That is, until Shikiba’s friend encourages him to get into just one more race…
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We flash forward to find our hero more bitter than before. But we get a flashback that in his “final” race, his friend had been killed. Our hero tries to street race again, but the memory of his friend prevents him from going on.
None other than Keiichi Tsuchiya, the drift king, appears in this film (as he does in others of the series), challenges our hero Shikiba to a race, defeats him, and then chides him that being fast on the street is nothing compared to being fast on the track.
Our hero is once more set into various bouts of manly screaming and moping until he gets roped into one last race (again) in which he emerges triumphant. The film concludes with him and Keiichi Tsuchiya drifting together on track.
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Both from the Wiki entry and from watching the movie, I get the sense that people watch this movie more for seeing old footage of Nissan Skyline GT-Rs wheeling around rather than the acting.
All this is to say that if you thought the acting was bad in the original Fast and the Furious movie, prepare to have your mind blown with even more wooden performances, and even better cars. Well, maybe not better than the Evo in 2 Fast 2 Furious, but what could be?
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