The Beach Boys - In My Room // Don't Worry Baby // All Summer Long

Guile by Michiko Umezawa

The Beach Boys - All I Wanna Do // 'Til I Die

Eyes of the Spider

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Eyes of the Spider, shot for the home video market in tandem with the writer-director's first take on Serpent's Path, is similarly concerned with themes of bereavement and how misshapen and ungainly revenge can become. Sho Aikawa's Nijima is a middle-aged father mourning, and attempting to move on from, the brutal murder of his daughter. Obviously, the event is indelible: we are shown flashbacks in which Nijima sleepwalks into the crowd of onlookers who have gathered on wasteland around her body. He pushes through these gawkers and, before a pair of listless police officers can react to his crime scene disturbance, Nijima has scooped up his lifeless child in a desperate attempt to return her home. Years pass and, completely understandably, this moment never leaves Nijima's thoughts. In an attempt to expel this pain, Najima kidnaps the man who he believes murdered his baby. Taped to a chair in a derelict building, the accused suffers beatings with promises of worse to come. 

Before Nijima can really begin to turn the screws though, this person - who consistently pleads his innocence and never agrees to any of the accusations levelled at him - dies, seemingly because his captor never thought to provide any food or water to prolong the torment. Nijima's reaction to this development is a disconnected kind of disappointment rather than full-blooded catharsis. However he imagined this scenario playing out in his head has now been lost to circumstance. Nijima returns to his wife and a deskbound nine-to-five job, but struggles to engage with either. Before long he runs into a childhood friend who offers him nondescript work that, at least initially, demands Nijima stamp stacks and stacks of paper to no clear purpose. Eventually it becomes clear that this is a criminal gang who specialise in corporate, honeypot assassinations and, before long, they themselves are at odds with the scheming, suited figures who constitute their head office. Eyes of the Spider, at least in this discursive middle-section, displays a similar sort of stoic absurdity as a Takeshi Kitano crime film, with Aikawa filling in for Beat as the unfeeling agent of violence and gallows humour. 

As the film moves into its final stages though, with Nijima ordered to liquidate his allies, Eyes of the Spider reveals a truly vivid ability to transmit revulsion, specifically in terms of how its doomed central character behaves. Having failed to exorcise the horror he himself experienced by losing his child, Nijima, eventually, finds himself almost re-enacting the incident, only this time from the perspective of the murderer. You see, central to the corporate compromise that Nijima's gang specialises in is Moe Sakura's Miki, the woman who lures unsuspecting marks to their demise. When Nijima begins killing his former allies, Miki elopes with Dankan's Iwamatu, the school friend who talked Aikawa's salaryman into this line of work in the first place. Having killed her lover, Nijima chases a distressed Miki through a forest, pelting the wheezing, shrieking woman with rocks. Cinematographer Masaki Tamura's alternates between a dispassionate glide that tracks alongside the sprinting pair and a hand-held camera that rocks back-and-forth in close pursuit. Untethered, the film's perspective aligns with the revolting energies bubbling away in a fortysomething man who is indulging himself in the most sickening sort of power imbalance. Aikawa plays the scenes final, crushing moments as if struck by acute but nauseating insight: a childish, taunting game has suddenly aligned with horrifying, permanent reality. 

The Beach Boys - Sloop John B // Child is the Father of the Man // Heroes and Villains

Ryu (START) by Kandoken

My Bloody Valentine - When You Sleep

Madara 1000 - pill2

In the Lost Lands

Adapted from a very short George RR Martin story, director Paul WS Anderson's In the Lost Lands is a slight piece concerning comeuppance that find itself distended and swollen thanks to the action-packed demands of the medium it is being transposed into. Milla Jovovich's wasteland witch Gray Alys, of course, knows far more than she lets on about the expected outcomes of the magical rites this fallen future's royalty have her perform, but her wry perspective is never allowed to feed back into the finished film. Anderson and his co-screenwriter Constantin Werner jealously guard any debriefs, saving them all up for a conclusion that twists in ways that would be pleasant enough following forty-five minutes of television but end up being too little too late when playing at feature length. Very much a digital backlot film, In the Lost Lands is often handsome but desperately static. Establishing shots are packed with beatific, computer-generated rubble and straining light sources that recall similar apocalypses from video games, Zack Snyder pick-ups or even bubble-era anime but, whenever the film is in (slow) motion, Lost Lands very much fails to match the sublime notes of that latter, elasticated inspiration. Given that this is yet another Anderson and Jovovich team-up, it's hard not to let your mind wander when watching, wondering if the pair intend for this film to function as an unofficial cap on their Resident Evil entries, a series that has long since been handed off to other filmmakers. The evidence is flimsy - Jovovich plays another superhumanly capable woman named Alice who battles against awful men who have allowed greed to so completely sink into them that it has physically mutated their bodies - but it beats giving Lost Lands your full, undivided attention. 

Rosentwig - Neurobloom

Spawn by Max Pinelli

Nas - Made You Look

Endless Withdrawal - Pyre

Replicant

Jean-Claude Van Damme, already no stranger to inhabiting dual roles within his films, gets to play two extremely different takes on the same man in director Ringo Lam's Replicant. Firstly, as a greasy haired serial killer who beats young mothers to death with twirling kicks, before setting them and their homes on fire. Secondly, as a freshly hatched clone of this murderer, cooked up by the American government and suffering through intense flashbacks of outrages that this photostat man did not commit. Michael Rooker is on-hand as the cop investigating these slayings, forgoing his nautical retirement plans to babysit the childlike version of Van Damme. Despite this copy never having harmed anyone (well, a few irritating G-men aside), Rooker's Detective Riley largely treats the film's second Van Damme horribly: handcuffing him to any stray pipes; pushing and prodding this simple-minded man to stand before bulletin boards teeming with charred bodies; and even battering away at him with the flimsiest of provocation. Although their connection does (eventually) skew in an unconvincingly paternal direction, Riley's first instinct is to seize on this opportunity to bully and browbeat a reduced reproduction of his quarry. That the fully-realised Van Damme character, known as The Torch, seems to be choosing victims based on their willingness to be brusque with their children in public seems to mean something but the faulty parenthood framing is a stray note rather than a full-on symphony. Since this is a Van Damme film, entire sequences revolve around his boyish, Airwalk wearing clone winning the heart of a working girl by prematurely ejaculating in his sweats then beating up her pimp. And, since this is also a Ringo Lam film, we are treated to an all-time demolition derby, featuring Rooker and the evil Van Damme squabbling over a seat belt in an out-of-control ambulance that strikes every single stationary car and light fixture in a multi-story car park. 

Smerz - You Got Time and I Got Money

King by BirdHatter

Alfredo Bontempi - City Ruins (Avaron)

Voyage - Mosaic

Chasing Amy

Remembered as the film in which Ben Affleck is so irresistible that he turns a lesbian straight (and hailing from a time period in which distributor Harvey Weinstein was behaving like a rabid animal in hotels all over the world), Chasing Amy is probably best understood now as writer-director Kevin Smith trying to make sense of why a beautiful woman with much more life experience than him might then find his comparative naivety appealing. Joey Lauren Adams is the subject both in front and behind the camera: the actress luminous onscreen as Alyssa and, presumably, at least a little bit bewildered offscreen as the real-life girlfriend who had prompted Smith to so fully excavate his personal inadequacies. Of course, a handsome actor on the verge of superstardom being cast as Smith's avatar likely took a little of the sting out of this public splaying. If nothing else Affleck, who incidentally sounds uncannily like Smith when the pair share audio commentary tracks, is able to wring an endearing lovesickness out of his writer-director's overwritten dialogue. Affleck's performance here flatters Smith and the writer-director knows it. 

Similarly, in terms of aspirational tweaking, it's difficult not to wonder now if the framing of Alyssa as being much more fluid in her affections than the popular memory suggests is actually a misguided attempt at chivalry? If the character had instead only slept with a great many men, would Smith then be expecting his viewers (particularly a mainstream American audience back in 1997) to value her perspective even less? To side with the jealous and venomously bigoted Banky, as played by Jason Lee? Perhaps such a move might even generate disquiet for Adams the actress, since Smith was never shy about sharing his film's autobiographical underpinning? Gayness in this specific context, and this is discussed within the piece itself, is exciting rather than intimidating for Holden, Alyssa's prospective partner. He, foolheartedly, believes that his maleness confers on him some heteronormative advantage that the world's women lack. Sexuality then, especially in terms of promiscuity, is a recurring hang-up in Smith's work. An earlier embodiment of the writer-director, Brian O'Halloran's Dante Hicks from Clerks, blanched at the idea that his current girlfriend had been intimate with dozens of men before he entered the picture. Chasing Amy then reworks this comical overreaction, perhaps attempting to reassure Smith's now growing audience that, actually and under very specific circumstances, it doesn't matter to him if a potential life partner has slept with more people than he has. 

Low Roar - I'll Keep Coming