Ishii’s career divides into two distinct halves: the brash early films, which earned him a reputation as a punk filmmaker, and the slower, pictorial, sometimes meditative work of his mature period. His early features were the fruit of the amateur short films he directed, while still a student, on 8 and 16mm; at Nikkatsu’s invitation, he remade one of them, Panic High School (Kōkō daipanikku, 1977; remade 1978) in feature-length form. Dramatizing a rebellion by students after one of their number commits suicide because of academic pressure, this revealed anti-establishment leanings sustained in Ishii’s next features. His graduation film, Crazy Thunder Road (Kuruizaki sandā rōdo, 1980), which also earned theatrical distribution, was a rowdy account of gang warfare in the streets of Tokyo; its raw intensity was some compensation for its lack of finish. The success of these student films earned Ishii the opportunity to direct two further features in the same wild style. Burst City (Bakuretsu toshi, 1982) intertwined the story of a group of punk rockers protesting against the construction of a nuclear power plant with that of two bikers seeking revenge for a murder. Crazy Family (Gyakufunsha kazoku, 1984) was a scattershot satire on the Japanese nuclear family, whose characters respectively personified the underlying militarist tendencies of the elder generation, the materialism of the postwar generation, and the academic pressure on the young. Ishii’s best-known film abroad, it was certainly subversive, but suggested the limitations of the director’s early manner. The apparent madness of the family made them seem too extreme a case to be representative, and while superficially arresting, the film was less penetrating than Yoshimitsu Morita’s similarly themed Family Game (Kazoku gēmu, 1983). Its domestic failure left Ishii unable to finance further features for ten years, but his comeback, Angel Dust (Enjeru dasuto, 1994), was an eerie thrill Watch drama online for free.