Yello - Of Course I'm Lying

Lalo Schifrin - The Wave // Insensatez

MadS

With the Days and Weeks series failing to progress to 28 Mois Plus Tard, despite an epilogue from the latter that saw Britain's infected traversing the Champ de Mars in Paris, it falls to David Moreau's MadS (or was it Yannick Dahan and Benjamin Rocher's The Horde?) to describe how France might deal with catching ferocity. Told as if filming was accomplished in one continuous take, MadS tracks the worsening fortunes of a group of teenagers attempting to celebrate a birthday. First up is Milton Riche's Romain, a rich kid who dabbles in blood-red cocaine and drives around in his absent father's sports car. Idling back from a hurriedly concluded connect, Romain comes across a bandaged, bleeding woman who offers up a brutal-looking recording device by way of explanation before emptying the car's glove compartment for something to stab her unfeeling body with. 

An increasingly distressed Romain makes it to the house party thrown in his honour, inadvertently transmitting his full-body freak-out to his friends and lovers. Romain may be difficult to care too much about but MadS has a secret weapon in the form of Laurie Pavy's Ana, his jilted girlfriend. Initially dressed in a billowing shirt, presumably Romain's, and positioned as something of a nag in her boyfriend's self-indulgent life, Ana's fortunes change when she takes a crimson bump and discovers that Romain has gotten her friend, Lucille Guillaume's Julia, pregnant. Chased from her taxi by the trigger-happy liquidators policing the spread of this contagion, Ana begins to change both physically and psychologically. She sheds her voluminous outer layer, tearing it from her person, to examine her chewed-up torso. Ana runs her fingers over seeping bullet holes that, quite obviously, have not proven to be lethal. Suddenly armed with an invincible body, Ana does what anyone experiencing the twitching malevolence of a cellar ghoul from The Evil Dead would do: she steals a pedal bike then races after her love rival so she can, as she puts it, eat her face. 

Lalo Schifrin - Jaws

Revenant by 炒菜 (oochan_25)

billy woods - Corinthians (feat. Despot & El-P)

Phases - Estate

28 Weeks Later

Although hardly the central thrust of Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, in teddy bear cab driver Frank, Brendan Gleeson was given room to essay an atypical sort of father figure, at least in terms of the genre he found himself inhabiting. Unusually, Frank was on the level. A good man who only ever wanted the best for the people he had taken under his charge. Despite Naomie Harris' Selena and Cillian Murphy's Jim being adults themselves it's Frank who assumes a higher level of responsibility for the group, be that driving the taxi in which they escape London or deferring the contents of Selena's medicine bag so he can stand guard all night, soothing restless sleepers. Despite his size and the strength inherent to that, Frank behaved with gentleness in basically every moment but the one where he foolheartedly barked at a pecking crow, sealing his doom. 

Physically and emotionally, Robert Carlyle's Don, a discarded viewpoint character in director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's 28 Weeks Later, is the opposite. Slighter and happy to lord his all-access pass to the American shock-and-awe occupation of this partially reclaimed London, the brief time we spend with the conscious aspect of this man imparts a sense of someone flawed who is desperate to transmit importance. By the time he's contracted the long-dormant rage virus through a stolen kiss, Don might as well be a continuation of Francis Begbie, the wiry pub-fighter that Carlyle played in Danny Boyle's Trainspotting. Although the kind of agency required to lead a film is lost when this disappointing father is transformed, Carlyle's magnetism demands that we linger on his actions, ascribing intent or recall to his agitated fog. 

Previous passes at these adrenaline soaked plague carriers prioritised shaky close-ups of their gnashing teeth or the torrents of blood that issue from every orifice. Carlyle though, and in fairness he's given more time onscreen to make a more lasting impression, takes his cues from the depressed chimpanzees seen in 28 Days Later's prologue. Don lingers, apparently plotting, and perhaps even directing his more mindless underlings. When it arrives his violence is overwhelmingly and absolutely destructive; be that balled fists clattering down on his wife's ruined face or sinking his crooked teeth into his youngest child's throat. The self-centredness (or good sense, depending on your perspective) that saw him flee when his wife found herself cornered in a seething cottage becomes the motivating factor for this character, one which curdles into a rolling familicide in which Don attacks, not to bring his loved ones closer into his contagious bosom, but to annihilate the less interesting characters who are gobbling up all of his screentime. 

John Murphy - In the House In a Heartbeat

HEAVY METAL #2 by Jim Mahfood

Godspeed You! Black Emperor - East Hastings

28 Days Later

Shot using standard definition digital video cameras, director Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later plays like a degraded, interlaced despatch from a fork in the post-millennium road that was never actually taken. What was once a forward-thinking solution to the problem of low budget, but still highly disruptive (in a civic sense), filmmaking is, viewed twenty three years later, now a blurred, amber document that struggles to hold onto visual information with the stringency we are now used to. Lines are obliterated by competing data; colours resolve into bleeding clouds of undulating compression; and light lingers on the landscape of human faces like radioactive dapple. It's beautiful precisely because it's so outmoded and atypical, an analogue visual design that is suggestive of something captured then transmitted rather than drilled on a backlot. Cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle adopts perspectives that stress surveillance - that of the film's creeping, slathering infected or the viewpoint of indifferent, now unmanned CCTV cameras. In this way the film's audience is kept at a constant remove from proceedings, we are agitated observers then rather than the shoulder-bumping participants that the hand-held production would seem to anticipate. Happily, even the mannered, novelistic dialogue that screenwriter Alex Garland assigns to his stressed-out characters (still in evidence in last year's Civil War) adds to the unearthed effect. That wordiness, not to mention the street-level budgeting and several less than incredible acting performances, anchors our expectations for 28 Days Later in the realm of television. This weakness actually assists the production though. It allows Boyle's film to consistently understate the level of twisting terror in a piece that often seems like a BBC serial spiralling further and further out of control. 

Brian Eno - An Ending (Ascent)

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