Despite the lurid title, Tsukamoto finds himself in decidedly low-key territory with this unusual yet striking character piece. True, guns certainly do figure into the plot quite prominently, with the violence to go along with them, but despite the usual trappings of the Tokyo underbelly and a return to glorious 16mm black & white film, much of the film plays very internally. Indeed, key sequences of the film play with a minimum of dialogue, if any, and lets the drama do all the talking for itself, letting the industrial hum and drum of the city and the disquieting white noise of living spaces fill in the gaps. Even Chu Ishikawa's score is used sparingly to maximize the impact of when it does show up, giving a strange amount of comfort to hear his work in either its more standard pounding format or even the more atmospheric pieces he contributes. The ultimate effect is one that puts one on edge throughout, knowing just the extent of how bad things get in Goda's quest to obtain the handgun that he has obsessed over in a truly demented kind of coping mechanism, particularly as the scrappy gang of hoodlums he enters into the orbit of demonstrate their complete lack of restraint with non-firearm weapons long before the real thing enters into the picture. Tsukamoto zeroes in on the frustration and desperation of clinging onto objects to help folks refocus sad and angry emotion in a very striking way, backloading the eventual violence in a kind of cathartic awakening as those who do manage to survive the cycle of hurt, both self-istered and externally, do find a way out of their own loops. It's a very challenging film to watch even beyond the normal level of anxiety and disgust that Tsukamoto so expertly handled on his previous projects, representing a very strong artistic statement that is very much set in its own ways, regardless of whether or not the viewer might be more keyed into the shock value he had traded in here for something a lot more damaging that metallic corrosion and broken skin. Some wounds, this film convincingly demonstrates, need a whole lot more than patching up.