A mod-sixties Japan emerges on the screen in Shinoda's visually exciting exercise in style. It is not realistic in any sense, but completely theatrical, a film in which the rituals of youthful Blues are played out on a grid of moody set-pieces and witty montages. The film fits nicely into our noir series in telling of a gang of young killers-for-hire--a poet, a doctor, a soldier, a girl with a goat named The End--whose pride in work is played out in shooting contests and whose private despair comes out, oddly, in song. A cross between The Three Penny Opera and Gun Crazy, between Pierrot le fou and Kubrick's The Killing, it is an existential musical that epitomizes an era we call the New Wave, even if, in The End, it will not be pronounced Shinoda and scriptwriter Terayama's most incisive comment on alienated youth. We are sorry that the color has faded to red in our print of Killers on Parade.