David Lee Roth goes ‘Kill Bill’ in Tokyo

When hard rock icon David Lee Roth revealed to Rolling Stone earlier this year that he'd been living in Tokyo since last May, our immediate thoughts were: well, what the hell has he been doing here? All has been revealed – kind of – in a new video uploaded to the singer's YouTube channel today, in which he plays the starring role in a Kill Bill-esque yakuza drama. Boasting slick production values (co-director Kentaro Hagiwara picked up the Sundance/NHK International Filmmaker Award earlier this year), tongue-in-cheek jokes and a cameo by former sumo wrestler Konishiki, the four-minute clip depicts Roth as a monosyllabic hitman whose encounter with a trio of gambling hoodlums at his local bathhouse ends rather messily. Valuable lesson learned: you don't throw fried chicken at Diamond Dave.

We'd be lying if we said we had any idea what's going on here. According to his Wikipedia page, Roth joked after appearing in The Sopranos in 2004 that, ‘Mom says I'm going to look like Lee Marvin in 10 years whether I'm in movies or not, so I might as well get after it!’ So is he about to grace us with his very own Point Blank? The latest clip works as a standalone film, but the title suggests that it might be a taster of a longer movie – one, presumably, that would showcase all the training he's has been doing in the Japanese martial art of iaido recently. If we were Steven Segal, we'd be starting to get very worried indeed. Watch the clip below and let us know what you think.