Zero Man vs the Half Virgin is a wacky feature from Japanese director Sakichi Sato (scripted Ichi the Killer) about a guy who realizes he has probably the oddest superpower ever. Kenichiro Sakuragi (Chihiro Itakura) is a man who wakes up in a police booth with some form of amnesia. Unsure of whom he is, he plays a game with his partner Goro in an attempt to find out his identity. As he tries to piece everything together, Kenichiro eventually gets horny and that’s when he notices something out of the ordinary, a giant zero appears on his head as well as numbers on the heads of other people. Realizing that this only happens when he gets erect, he deduces that it must be the number of sexual partners that person has had. While he has a lonely zero on his forehead, there is a girl who sits outside his police box with a 0.5. Determined to get rid of his virginity and figure out how a 0.5 is possible, Sakuragi makes it his mission to bed this half virgin claiming “screwing a virgin is my ultimate duty.”
Just an FYI, from here on out I will be writing with spoilers because I can’t explain anything otherwise
Though I didn’t really know what to expect from Zero Man, my guess would have not been nearly as close to what I actually saw. I expected this film to be a zany comedy which is what it started as, but as the movie pressed on it got a little bit darker and turned into this creepy sci-fi Japanese comedy of sorts. Let me give you a few examples:
The movie starts out as a film about a guy trying to screw a virgin, simple enough. He uses the numbers on the forehead to figure out whom to targe, but in order to do so he has to keep masturbating, which he does, all the time. He puts his hand in his pocket and starts rubbing and somehow nobody seems to care or notice, it must be a common thing in Japan. Once he screws the Virgin, that’s when things get twisted.
Once deflowered she eventually tries to get him to hate her and tells him that her brother molests her, which would explain why she was a half virgin. At that point Kenichiro gets pissed at her brother for his incestual ways. Cue darkness. In actuality, both the brother and sister loved each other and for a year were having an intimate relationship but then the brother cut it off and so the sister stabbed him. So really, the numbers on the forehead means the number of people a person has killed. This means that her brother is dying somewhere in Japan. Hell, at one point, Kenichiro talks to his ghost.
There is no denying it, this is one weird movie. Forget the molesting and the strange super power, it’s the god-like dream sequence and the last five to ten minutes of the film that left me dumbfounded. When the credits rolled I turned to the guy next to me and said “wtf just happened? How did an ending like that even come about?” The movie gets out of hand and seemed to forget its purpose. There were a lot of really cool ideas sprinkled throughout but none of them were fleshed out enough or executed well resulting in 
a large, semi-comedic mess with jokes that ran too long.
My favorite part of the film has nothing to do with the central plot but rather a side character that appears for maybe five minutes. There is a white guy that comes to the police booth to practice his Japanese with Goro and every time he talks it’s in a very slow and American way. It’s like listening to a middle school kid speaking Spanish so you have to giggle it. To top it off, the number on his head was, I believe, 45, so you can imagine Kenichiro’s reaction when he realized its true meaning.
I wish I could be a bit more coherent with this review but I think this messy structure is appropriate because that’s exactly how the film was. Zero Man vs the Half Virgin is simply an odd film that had the potential to be a zany cult flick that people would hunt down but instead it falls victim to having too many interesting ideas and not picking the best ones to explore further.
Rating: A very odd film with some humorous ideas but no clear direction (4/10)
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