Primate

After years of pixel perfect reproductions of aggro chimpanzees, specifically in the recent Planet of the Apes phases, it's a pleasant surprise to be treated to a suit-acted Primate. Miguel Torres Umba plays Ben, a chimp living in glass house captivity with a family comprised of a deaf father named Adam, played by Troy Kotsur, and his daughters, Johnny Sequoyah's Lucy and Gia Hunter's Erin. Bitten by a rabid mongoose offscreen, Ben glowers and froths, eventually transforming into a bone-breaking monster. Obviously prompted by a similar simian attack in Jordan Peele's excellent Nope, director Johannes Roberts' Primate is a feature-length extrapolation shot digitally on London sound stages and cast in blazing reds and powdery cobalt that suggests a, presumably absent, temperature. Neither as tense or oppressive as the POV Nope interlude, where Primate does impress is how it suggests some level of thwarted agency or even interpersonal jealousy behind Ben's destructive acts. 

Rabies here is used as a way of unlocking a kind of interspecies bitterness that has simmered in a creature that lives amongst, but cannot truly connect with, people. Ben takes bites out of the thigh of his nearest contemporary, youngest daughter Erin, apparently a demonstration of possessive, consumptive intent. A frat boy love interest played by Charlie Mann, who appears much later in the film, is trapped than examined by Ben. His simpering white boy features pored over and collated, before Ben begins tugging aggressively on his jaw, obliterating his agreeable, human face. Primate is thinly written, with shallowly realised characters (the absolute limit of communal jeopardy is the forwardness with which Jessica Alexander's Hannah behaves around a friend's crush) but there is something unexpectedly sad about the performance generated by a man playing a simian who lashes out at his human owners because a viral infection has turbo-charged his grievances. His diminished, childlike stature, within a family that has already begun to grow apart, has become intolerable for this superhumanly powerful simulacrum. 

Adrian Johnston - First Bite

Thee Sacred Souls - Any Old Fool

Ultraman & Ultraseven by Rariatoo

Flying Lotus - 1983

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie

A markedly different experience from The Super Mario Bros. Movie, despite sharing directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic (co-directors Pierre Leduc and Fabien Polack, as well as screenwriter Matthew Fogel, are back too), The Super Mario Galaxy Movie dispenses with any of the tiresome, relatability scaffolding previously applied to this Nintendo juggernaut. Judging by the first instalment, the decision makers behind that film were convinced that audiences wouldn't be able to swallow the adventures of a stout, video game plumber unless the character overcame some trivial personal difficulties within your standard ('90s vintage) big screen adaptation. This galactic chapter though dispenses with similarly shallow attempts at insight, the film constructed as a rolling incident machine that does a better - or perhaps just more honest - job of repeatedly showcasing forty-odd years of iterative, Kyoto design. In that sense, Illumination and Nintendo's film is completely given over to the presentation of obsessively layered and rendered landscapes that suggest some, faltering means of progression. So, the industrialised swamp of Peter Jackson's Isengard is transformed into a volcanic theme park that sears cheering lackeys to the bone; a repulsive golden casino - perhaps a nod to Nintendo the company's beginnings as a playing card manufacturer - becomes an Escher etching that can be traversed in every, counter-intuitive direction. Plotted to be little more than diverting noise, this Mario Galaxy simulates something of the proudly illogical progression seen in the vintage video games that inspired it. A mode of communication in which relentless invention trumps a more careful means of ascension. 

Angine de Poitrine - Fabienk

Takuya Nakamura - Solar Flame

I Wanna Draw Like Trigger! by Phil Knott

THG - I Will Always Dub You (feat. Takuya Nakamura)

Doppelgänger

Ostensibly a comedy, writer-director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (co-writing with Takeshi Furusawa)'s Doppelgänger is, true to form, threaded with moments of skin-prickling, domestic horror. Premised on the sudden (not to mention inexplicable) appearance of several unusually determined dead ringers, who behave as if they powered solely by the feelings and desires that repressed people regularly choke down, Kurosawa's film largely concerns itself with Michio Hayasaki, a floundering robotics engineer, played by Koji Hashimoto. Middle-aged, single and socially timid, Hayasaki suffers beneath the kind of corporate deadlines that the clapped-out mechanical wheelchair he's obsessed with cannot possibly hope to meet. Quite unable to complete this extremely ambitious project, Hayasaki does eventually welcome the spitting image that lingers around his apartment into the fold, operating under the assumption that his productivity will now, effectively, be doubled. As it turns out, this mirror Hayasaki isn't particularly scrupulous or overly concerned with interpersonal niceties, preferring to live his strange little half-life in enormous, violent sweeps. The battle of wills between these two, clashing aspects steers Doppelgänger further and further into an amusing absurdity, one in which the film's otherwise firm sense of reality begins to buckle and break down the closer its characters limp to their finish.

Napoleon Demps - It's So Hard

US Girls - You've Got Everything-But a Smile

Trap Jaw by Mizmaru Kawahara

Horse Lords - Brain of the Firm

Scream 7

Hastily retooled and rewritten after production company Spyglass accused actress Melissa Barrera of being antisemitic for her pro-Palestinian social media posts, writer-director Kevin Williamson's Scream 7 (Williamson co-writing with Guy Busick) is, at least in terms of its structural identity, exactly as rushed and misbegotten as you might expect. The firing, not to mention slandering, of Barrera resulted in a collapse of this modern Scream phase: Jenna Ortega, citing commitments to Netflix's Wednesday, exited this sequel during the development phase and Happy Death Day director Christopher Landon (who was drafted to replace Scream and Scream VI directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett) walked, stating that the project he signed on to steward was no longer possible. Presumably, this speculative seventh Scream would have dealt with the increasingly frayed psyche of Barrera's schizoaffective Sam Carpenter. 

Williamson's Scream 7 then largely dispenses with the accrued baggage of latter-day Scream sequels to focus on Neve Campbell's Sidney Prescott, a character that had become something of an afterthought in these newer films. Sidney was reduced to little more than a cameo in the fifth Scream, chatting away with Courteney Cox's Gale Weathers at a safe remove, and completely absent from Scream VI, reportedly because Paramount Pictures were not interested in paying Campbell an amount that she felt comfortable with. All of which is to say that the mercenary, behind-the-scenes throat-cutting that underwrites this particular sequel is a lot more exciting than the film Williamson has served up. Despite writing the reasonably well received Peacock Original, and John Hyams directed, Sick - basically a pandemic-themed Scream spin-off - Williamson utterly fails to construct a satisfying or even diverting whodunnit here. 

When the killers are finally revealed, unfortunately the centrepiece moment in every episode of this franchise, there's no sense that several disparate details or dangling insinuations are, finally, locking into place. Instead we're faced with two underwritten nobodies suddenly promoted into positions that their previously minor screentimes cannot hope to support. So farcical, or even contemptuous, are these reveals that all interest in proceedings immediately evaporates. Although hardly a series highlight even before this grinding gear shift, Scream 7 does betray a certain conceptual continuity with earlier sequels, specifically a pair of kills that, like Scream 2, indicate some trace knowledge of violent, Italian thrillers. A fake-out involving Joel McHale, as Sydney's unconvincing beat cop husband, and wreaths of tarpaulin doesn't quite dispense with the geography of a suburban garage enough to truly sing but the murder of Mckenna Grace's Hannah, dressed as Tinkerbell and suspended in a harness she cannot unclip herself from, cannily combines the cruelty and inevitability of giallo in an era where such dismemberment frequently takes on absurdist or even darkly comedic notes. 

Moby - First Cool Hive

Jessie Ware - Ride

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles by Frank Miller and Vic Malhotra

Nina Simone - I Got It Bad (And That Ain't Good)

VIQ - You Could Be The One

Urotsukidoji II: Legend of the Demon Womb

Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend concluded with a teen pervert transforming into a homicidal super God then laying waste to Tokyo, having united several dimensions of violently opposed reality into a swirling concrete vortex. So, naturally, Urotsukidoji II: Legend of the Demon Womb begins with a flashback to the European theatre of World War II. At Hitler's behest, a cackling clockwork scientist has built a gigantic demon-summoning machine powered by energies that are extracted from women being sexually tortured. As is to be expected, everything goes wrong and the clockwork scientist's son swears vengeance on the world, waiting half a century for the opportunity to present itself. Despite retaining director Hideki Takayama, Demon Womb is a diminished, discursive follow-up. The film an insulting interquel that makes very little effort to weave itself into anything like the established continuum. 

Akemi and Nagumo's relationship, previously brimming with all manner of nightmarish personal danger becomes a repulsively chummy, sex comedy counterpoint to this film's central couple, Megumi and Takeaki. The former remains beastman (and Chojin superfan) Amano Jyaku's flirtatious sister, the latter Nagumo's previously unmentioned cousin who arrives via a soul-sucking plane crash and, after receiving a blood transfusion from his relative, becomes the main suspect in a spate of violent sex crimes. Quite apart from the nonsensical allusions to Nazism, Demon Womb actually manages to appear both gratuitous and ill-considered even when judged against a prequel famous for popularising the animated depiction of phallic tentacles. Whereas Overfiend at least built its story around a peer group beset by demonic possession, thus ensuring that the audience had some sense of purchase on the unfolding scatology, Demon Womb is a succession of barely connected, pornographically animated assaults. The treatment of the Megumi character, in particular, leaves a bad taste: the poor woman set upon by a series of muscled monsters who subject her to sustained, eroticised rapes. Not just unpleasant then but outright repellent.

Blu & Exile - Crumbs feat. ICECOLDBISHOP

Venom #1 by Sam Kieth

Suyo - Fuji

Masamachi Amano - Charmer and The Half Beast Amano Jyaku

Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend

Originally issued as three separate video cassettes by JAVN, a distributor of pornographic films operating under the umbrella of Bob Guccione's Penthouse brand, director Hideki Takayama's Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend gained notice internationally as a re-edited theatrical presentation. This pruning, in which much of the more overtly gynaecological material was either aggressively reframed or excised entirely, was something of an attempt to tidy up this sexually violent, disreputable animation into something, in this case a feature, that could be sold around the world. Picked up and released by Manga Video in the UK, after the BBFC had approved their cut, Urotsukidoji broadly fits an acquisition brief (presumably) put in place by the crossover success of Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira with readers of comic anthologies like Deadline, Crisis, or Judge Dredd The Megazine - this is a teen-focused story in which impuissant bodies deform and distend against an apocalyptic backdrop. 

Although furnished with an 18 certificate in Britain (and an NC-17 in the United States), Urotsukidoji has clearly been designed to cater to a much more adolescent perspective than the live action films it was initially released alongside in Japan. Whereas The Devil in Miss Jones or Behind the Green Door at least allude to an idea of female empowerment, if for no other reason than either film is sunk without their subjects Georgina Spelvin and Marilyn Chambers, Urotsukidoji largely reduces its female cast to malleable, and frequently pulverised meat. Really, the only point of connection with Akemi, the weeping female lead, is an acknowledgment that even consensual sex requires a physical vulnerability that can be taken advantage of in the moment. That beloved partners can, quite literally here, transform into something repellent without warning. Instead of an adventurous woman then, attention largely rests with teenage boy Nagumo, an onanistic insert for socially awkward virgins everywhere who, somehow, houses the spirit of a reality-bending super God. 

For a significant portion of the film's running time the realm-crushing power plays that encroach from the metaphysical periphery are illustrated through situations familiar to an arrested audience: bullying, familial abuse, sexual inadequacy, and failing attempts to action personal fantasy. The execution of these themes is, naturally, catastrophically exaggerated. Bodies, usually female, are battered and torn apart by the demonic energies that these young men submit themselves to. In Urotsukidoji the assumption of manhood transforms boys into unfeeling, muscled brutes happy to exert their newfound power over weaker bodies. The film's overt concession to splatter violence plays especially nasty in a piece designed purely as visual stimulation then. As with most other pornography, there is no attempt to depict a realistic interpersonal framework; set-pieces exist within a nightmarishly permissive society in which adults, here most vividly represented by a monstrous, rapist teacher, are basically absent. Therefore (even before Nagumo mutates into a demon that can fell skyscrapers with its explosive ejaculate) dozens of people are dismembered without even notional alarm or repercussion. Rather than work against the whole, this pitiless approach to human suffering ends up foreshadowing the film's conclusion - a particularly despairing, and spectacularly animated, denouement in which a long-heralded messiah fails to deliver paradise, instead reveling in city warping destruction. 

Black Country, New Road - Strangers

Eagle and Battle No. 310 by Ian Kennedy

Turnstile - Never Enough

Chainsaw Man - The Movie: Reze Arc

Even without much prior knowledge of the Weekly Shōnen Jump strip (other than a query if the original writer-illustrator, Tatsuki Fujimoto, has ever come across Kevin O'Neill's work on Nemesis the Warlock or, perhaps, looked at Henry Flint's Shakara), Chainsaw Man - The Movie: Reze Arc is still enormously entertaining. Unlike a lot of other big screen spin-offs, which (at least in the shōnen space) tend to riff on manga movements, imagining concurrent adventures that otherwise fail to fit into a wider storyline, director Tatsuya Yoshihara and MAPPA animation studio's film directly adapts tankōbon volumes. So, instead of this manga being reduced to a television schedule filler, where wheel-spinning intrusions can interject and dilute the overall piece, Fujimoto's prized pages are elevated into an adaptation that, inherently, benefits from the larger spend applied to a ticket-printing medium. The really wonderful thing about Reze Arc though is that, at least to this Manga Video obsessed viewer, the film takes two disparate frequencies from the second Devilman OVA, Devilman 2: The Demon Bird, and combines them into one, city-warping hindrance. The shy, teenage love interest and the monstrously powerful adversary are, here, one and the same; an amalgam that mirrors our saw-toothed hero and complicates his ability to compartmentalise his clashing identities. The inching prickles of a first love - and the stinging rejection that often follows - are therefore scaled up into the pitched, apocalyptic battle befitting of these bubbling hormones. 

Ninajirachi & daine - It's You (underscores' "It's U" Remix)

Batman: Gargoyle of Gotham #3 by Jamie Hewlett

Suyo - Flowers

System96 - Reflexion

Back to the Future

Viewed from a point in time that comfortably outpaces the gap between the past and present in writer-director Robert Zemeckis' Back to the Future (co-written with Bob Gale), it seems notable how dilapidated this film's vision of the 1980s is, at least before Michael J Fox's Marty McFly has had an opportunity to meddle with the time-stream. Even more so than the ramshackle burg seen in Amblin Entertainment contemporary Gremlins, Marty's home town, Hill Valley, is a graffitied Pottersville that is packed with crumbling buildings and porno theatres. Barely remarked upon within the piece, this (then) present appears as crushed and aimless as Marty's parents: one a bitter drunk wondering where it all went wrong and the other still a passive target for Thomas F Wilson's oafish (but still enormously entertaining) Biff. This initial 1980s is balanced on a precipice then, ready to tip into the gauche dystopian version seen in Back to the Future Part II, when the bullies rebuild the town in their own image. 

Even Marty is affected by this malaise. Although commonly understood as being unyielding and scrappy, thanks almost entirely to the innate charm that Fox brings to the role, Marty suffers the same dithering lack of confidence as his father. His problems are communicative: he and his band mates don't share the unified image (or, presumably, sound) of his closest, new wave-presenting rivals; and the school board presiding over the talent show seen in the film's first act (which is never revisited) don't want to hear him play anyway. Although he enjoys some level of self-possession, largely as a frustrated reaction to his wet father figure, Marty frets about how has talents will be understood by others. In conversation with his girlfriend, played in this instalment by Claudia Wells, he worries about his creativity being crushed if he is forced to face up to a real, stinging rejection. The breakthrough with his parents - who he had previously looked upon as almost Martian in their dissimilarity to him - is when, having been blasted back in time to the 1950s, he realises that his mother, played by Lea Thompson, was a firecracker and that his browbeaten father, played by Crispin Glover, had his own creative ambitions. 

The instant Marty learns that George McFly is precious about his writing, Marty is both excited to discover this fact and reflective about what that means for his own ambitions. It's natural for Marty to be both friendly and effusive when faced with another person's precious creative endeavors, so why not extend that courtesy to himself? In a film made for and about teenagers, it's an acknowledgement that everybody - even parents - are three-dimensional human beings with their own, closely guarded frailties. In one of Back to the Future's many, superbly arranged climaxes Marty is pressed to play lead guitar for a doo-wop band. Following a rendition of Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Goode, Marty launches into a long, masturbatory rock solo in which he completely loses his audience. Unlike the Battle of the Bands try out seen much earlier in the film, in which an indifferent reaction prompted soul-searching in this teenager, here Marty has achieved a level of self-mastery that allows him to just shrug off the lack of adulation. His performance spoke for itself, in effect. And if that doesn't satisfy you, a successive sequence in which Christopher Lloyd dangles off a clock tower is so perfectly assembled from images of a speeding sports car and fumbling, cack-handed frustration that even on your fifteenth viewing you worry that Doc Brown might not be able to connect those cables in time. 

Chuck Berry - Johnny B. Goode

Gorillaz - The Mountain (feat. Dennis Hopper, Ajay Prasanna, Anoushka Shankar, Amaan Ali Bangash and Ayaan Ali Bangash)

Hot Rod by Phil Knott

Les Rallizes Dénudés - Wilderness of False Flowers

The Face of Another

Director Hiroshi Teshigahara's The Face of Another, adapted from a novel of the same name by Kōbō Abe, is a claustrophobic and unsettling experience. As well as a style of photography, courtesy of Hiroshi Segawa, that stays in close proximity to its subjects and appraises their faces (or even the webs of bones and muscle that flex underneath) like alien topography, the film's soundtrack repeatedly stresses a sense of unusual intimacy. The film's dialogue is a cacophony of aside and whisper. The crackling, single-channel audio dominated by the voice of actor Tatsuya Nakadai, playing a middle-aged engineer who has accidentally destroyed his face during a workplace experiment. In its earliest passages, before Nakadai's Mr. Okuyama is presented with handsome replacement features by an inquisitive psychiatrist, this voice is at its loudest. Okuyama talking his way through the abstracted existence that comes with having a countenance so ruined that it must be bound up and concealed from everybody else. 

So close is this voice that we often feel as if we've been bandaged up and trapped inside the mask with him. Thanks to his catastrophic injury, Okuyama has become unstuck in a post-Second World War society that turns away from deformity and the maimed, preferring to pretend that they don't exist. Okuyama's mummified face, and the frequent meetings he takes, immerse him in the strange, disconnected privilege that is foisted upon the pitied. He can rant and rave with impunity, basically. If anything, these diatribes are expected from such a creature. Not only does Okuyama resemble The Invisible Man in James Whale's film then, he even talks like him too - an aggrieved ego who chatters in violent fantasy about the anonymity that has been forced upon him. In one cackling aside he reveals to a shocked wife, who now cannot bear to touch her husband, that he has considered disfiguring her too, as a kind of redress for her sudden physical coldness. This bubbling mania is curtailed somewhat when Okuyama receives his mask. 

Retreating to a rented apartment, Okuyama busies himself by launching into the kind of superficial lifestyle that he believes befits his new face: spending money on clothes and sunglasses; drinking with the similarly good-looking, and curiously amoral, psychiatrist who cast his mask. As with John Frankenheimer's Seconds, released the same year, The Face of Another considers a person's sense of self in terms of curtailed possibilities. How the assumption of a new, even idealised identity doesn't necessarily override the confused, human longings that it now conceals. Concurrently with Okuyama's middle-class thrashing we see brief interludes that follow actress Miki Irie as a young woman marked by, presumably, the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Unlike the comparatively affluent Okuyama, Irie's unnamed character is not only shunned for her facial scarring but quite unable to buy her way out of her predicament. Her despondency then does not revolve around the petty grudges and marital trickery that Okuyama blunders into but an all-consuming, screaming sadness that can only be silenced by crashing surf. 

Electronic Visions - Tundra

Mitski - If I Leave

Ram Man by Mizmaru Kawahara

Pulp - Begging for Change

The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie

One of the few projects spry, or low profile, enough to escape a recent trend at Warner Bros in which the sickly studio permanently shelved completed (but potentially unprofitable) films for a tax write-off, director Pete Browngardt's wonderfully energetic The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie finally makes it to these shores, courtesy of Vertigo Releasing. In fairness then to the shark-eyed and dead inside executives determined to transform all media into an easily digestible grey mulch, The Day the Earth Blew Up is, absolutely, an anachronistic offering. Neither Daffy Duck nor Porky Pig are voiced by bored, slumming celebrities and the overall shape of the comedy on offer is far more indebted to the Golden Age animation of Bob Clampett, and gazing askance at Red Scare science fiction films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, than the instantly dated attempts at tapping into the zeitgeist seen in far more shameless, texture-mapped features. Even the specific characterisations of the Lonney Tunes cast on offer here are frozen in a fixed moment. Daffy, in particular, is locked into the elasticated screwball persona, seen in his early shorts, that allows for the kind of innate sabotage required to keep a ninety minute story about living chewing gum chugging along. The Day the Earth Blew Up is, strangely enough then, emblematic of the sort of niche and inexpensive artistic expression that streaming seemed to be promising, when the giants were setting out their stalls, before everybody realised that their business models were actually based around an ability to assemble agreeable background noise for people paying more attention to their phones. 

Ryan Lott - Code Race (Extended)

The Andrew Oldham Orchestra - The Last Time

Metal Gear Solid 4 by Alexye

Derek & The Dominos - Layla

Frankenstein

Following an attention-grabbing prelude in which Jacob Elordi's beragged Monster stalks the North Pole, pummeling Danish sailors with an inhuman ferocity that is strikingly similar to that exhibited by Luke Goss as Nomak in Blade II, Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein, very obviously a dream project for the writer-director, decamps to its namesake's childhood. Rather than lay any foundations for a romance (or domestic intrigue) that never quite materialises, del Toro proposes, in Charles Dance's Baron Leopold, a father so completely awful that he ruins his first son's ability to successfully interpret love. The harsh, disciplinary teachings designed to shape a young Victor into a physician worthy of his father's name instead fosters an intense, combative arrogance. 

Oscar Isaac's Victor, now grown and determined to establish a dominion over death, is callous and unfeeling in this pursuit, an aristocrat who uses the bodies of his social inferiors as both jerking experiment and repulsive adornment. This, in del Toro's telling, is key to understanding the relationship between Victor Frankenstein and the childlike creature he manufactures. Once molded from the bodies of criminals and the pulverised soldiers of The Crimean War, Elordi's gaunt, Bernie Wrightson inspired Monster is expected, by a reproachful Victor, to instantly demonstrate an adult's grasp of their unfathomable situation. That the Monster can only mutter "Victor" back to his parent is viewed in purely mechanical terms: this new gizmo has failed to meet its creator's impossible expectations. Victor then channeling the stinging resentment wielded by his own father, broadcasting it at the generation of Frankenstein that he and his towering, tiled womb have begot. 

The gentleness and innocence present in Elordi's early performance is underlined by Mia Goth's Lady Elizabeth who instantly twigs that there is no continuity of mind or soul from the cadavers that Victor has used to construct this man. The Monster is, in all possibility, a new kind of life. She accepts this stitched-up child for what he is rather than what his parent wants him to be then; holding an amorous Victor at arms-length for his failure to console the innocent that has been brought into the world. Big screen adaptations of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus are steeped in the idea that their Victors are all playing God by creating life - their Adam - out of dust. Del Toro's addition to this pantheon is to view this creation in human or, maybe more accurately, biological terms: a twisted act of procreation that has been accomplished, solely, by an unbalanced and exacting male. It's a tweak that recasts the central child as a product of pure, spiteful ego rather than, at the very least, the outcome of physical affection. There's a crushing sadness in the fact that this Monster is assembled, like a kit, to be dispassionately assessed by an uncaring father rather than nurtured and adored by a loving mother.  

Angine de Poitrine - Mata Zyklek

The Most Dangerous Man in AEW by Daniel Warren Johnson

By Storm - Zig Zag

Madara 1000 - ɟןıdzz vol.2

Return to Silent Hill

Strangely fitting that director Christophe Gans' long-delayed Return to Silent Hill often resembles a misaligned memory of a PlayStation 2 playthrough that was completed decades earlier. In the quarter century since, all of the characters have become smushed together in the player's head; their fictional motivations and backstories interconnecting then overlapping until we arrive at a misinformed, misreading of the video game's sprawling events. This is a hundred minute adaptation of a fifteen hour game though, isn't it at least economically laudable to retain all of the principle personalities? Even if this can only be accomplished by making each of them some stained aspect of either Hannah Emily Anderson's Mary or Jeremy Irvine's James? Perhaps I'm just sympathetic to this reorganisation because, when playing Bloober Team's recent remake of Silent Hill 2, I was convinced that Maria, the scantily dressed doppelgänger of a dearly missed wife, was being positioned as a flickering, vulnerable reincarnation.

Instead, as it turns out, this tattooed duplicate is a temptress dreamt up or manifested to lock your in-game character into a disappointing ending. That human recollection is both unreliable and frequently misleading is a key attribute in any (re)telling of Mary and James' story though, so why shouldn't these inconsistencies turn in on themselves, altering our understanding of these dreamlike events? Return to Silent Hill's somnambulist acting and gobbledygook dialogue even serve to accentuate this sense of detachment then, registering as fragments that have been pushed and pulled across several text translation tools. The boldest shake-up offered by Gans (co-writing with Sandra Vo-Anh and Will Schneider) though is the decision to map the revolting, familial abuse experienced by the mousy Angela character onto Mary. This particular revision not only allowing for much more miserable, even shameful, notes of secrecy to creep into a central relationship that was previously only experienced from a male perspective but also aligning this otherwise disconnected story with the child endangering doomsday cults seen in Silent Hill and Silent Hill: Revelation 3D. You know, for people who enjoy lore. 

Akira Yamaoka - The House That Breathes

Nhatminh - -2°C

Flash Gordon by Artyom Trakhanov

Father John Misty - The Old Law

Bugonia

Obviously a completely different experience if you've already seen Jang Joon-hwan's Save the Green Planet!, director Yorgos Lanthimos' Bugonia is then, under those circumstances, transformed into a feature-length query. Are these filmmakers prepared to go quite as far as Jang's film did? As before, Bugonia details the kidnapping and torture of a pharmaceutical executive by a mentally ill conspiracy theorist who harbours a grudge that is rooted in the experimental treatments that have placed his mother in an unending coma. Aside from the minutiae of this global subjugation, as espoused by Jesse Plemons' apiarist turned abductor Teddy Gatz, the biggest point of departure in this telling is the amount of time and space apportioned to the chained-up CEO, played here by the Academy Award winning Emma Stone. In this Lanthimos telling, written by Will Tracy, Stone's Michelle Fuller is a much more magnetic and conniving presence than her South Korean predecessor - Baek Yoon-sik's much more conspicuously reptilian Kang. Perhaps this decision to give over so much more of this film's focus to Fuller unbalances the overall piece? 

Certainly, the extra layer of context provided by the Bugonia's closing minutes are jealously guarded; a pointed refusal to allow the audience's perspective or expectation to truly align with Teddy's paranoid outlook. Stone, a gifted physical comedian, plays Fuller as irritating and disingenuous but never quite odious or even, really, gloating. Her attempts to reason with her kidnappers may be communicated in the patronising double-speak of American office culture but even this achingly neutral invective signals an attempt to reassume the upper hand she expects rather than outright offend. Stone's performance is such that Fuller could be an extraterrestrial, or a robot, or even just a sociopathic businesswoman attempting to navigate the violent moods of the unwashed chuckleheads who have locked her in their basement. Stone's innate ability to confer depth on her CEO, and the fact that she plays a certain kind of melancholy in the decision that closes Bugonia, actually ends up framing this remake in much more alien and nihilistic terms. As cinematographer Robbie Ryan's camera glides over beatific images of extinction, rather than the tiny fragments of happiness that closed Save the Green Planet!, it's Fuller's sadness and thwarted sense of ambition that we the audience (including any potential Oscar voters catching up with their screeners) are being asked to consider. 

Angine de Poitrine - Sarniezz (Live)

Landcross by by びー (@samhoshi7)

Daughter - Not Enough

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance

Viewed in the afterglow of last year's No Other Choice, writer-director Park Chan-wook (Lee Jae-soon, Lee Moo-young and Lee Yong-jong are credited as co-writers)'s earlier, 2002 film Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance seems oddly familiar. Although Mr. Vengeance was retroactively positioned as the first instalment in director Park's vengeance trilogy, none of this film's participants exhibit the well-drilled expertise seen in either Oldboy or Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. Instead, you discover that No Other Choice is the closer relative, with both pieces betraying a similarly grim fascination with the trials and tribulations of fairly normal people pressed to pursue a ferocious and, at times, darkly comic kind of criminality. Shin Ha-kyun's Ryu, a deaf-mute who finds himself out of work with a terminally sick sister to fend for is uniquely unsuitable for this new career trajectory. Alarmingly naive, even childlike, in his dealings with a gang of ruthless organ traffickers who pocket both his severance pay out and one of his kidneys, an increasingly desperate Ryu is then pressured into an ethical kidnapping by his girlfriend, played by Bae Doona, as a way of making up for their monetary shortfall. 

The ten million won idea being that since they won't mistreat the child they abduct then there can be no lasting ill-feeling or trauma for any of the participants. Obviously, this fantasy quickly falls apart in the face of brutal reality. Mr. Vengeance, photographed by Kim Byung-il, lacks the luxurious, lace bow touch of its vengeance trilogy stablemates, often reading - in terms of set-ups and the visual contrasts therein - as a particularly despairing kind of comedy. The tragedies that unravel here are excruciating, both in strict, blood-curdling event and the ways in which these horrors are all, plainly, preventable. There's a real boldness in the very deliberate decision to spend so much time in the company of Shin's Ryu rather than focus solely on Song Kang-ho's righteously savage father. Like the character Shin played in Save the Green Planet!, Ryu is uniquely alienated and disconnected from both his surroundings and the audience that are sat observing him. His deafness and inability to communicate vocally, coupled with his participation in Park's carefully arranged catastrophes, creates an innate and uncomfortable tension. Although sympathies do largely align with the film's bereaved parent, Mr. Vengeance refuses to portray Ryu as an evil monster to be vanquished at the story's climax. He's a vulnerable person, chewed up by an uncaring money-hungry system, who is ill-suited to navigate the life-or-death schemes he has blundered into. 

Viagra Boys - Therapy II

Mitski - I'll Change for You

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

The second part of a planned trilogy, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, from director Nia DaCosta and screenwriter Alex Garland, arrives hot on the heels of its predecessor, 28 Years Later, forgoing the customary leap forward in time to stay settled-in with the cast of characters that were introduced in this previous instalment. We are, very briefly, presented with a small, croft settlement of brand new survivors at one point but these creeping foragers scarcely amount to much more than superficially detailed victims for Jack O'Connell's devil-worshipping Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal, and his mob of track-suited tearaways, to brutalise. The Bone Temple then isn't particularly interested in these kinds of perspectives - the barely sketched people who allow the filmmakers to burn minutes in repose while offering up a repetitive sense of discovery. And why would you be, when you have Ralph Fiennes on call as the iodine-stained Dr. Kelson? 

The interlaced inferno of 28 Days Later flash froze a specific moment of post-millennium anxiety, one that prodded at that era's mounting sense of horror that the endless prosperity predicted in the 1990s might not, actually, materialise. That, in actual fact, the human race was becoming unstuck and reverting back to patterns of behaviour that are more outwardly violent and base. The rage virus that galloped through these British isles brought that country to a screeching halt, trapping its surviving citizens inside a pantomime performance anchored to the thoughts and feeling of a receding century. The United Kingdom was, essentially, pickled. So, not only does O'Connells' cult leader behave like some nightmarish recollection of a disgraced light entertainment personality but cottage-dwelling fathers dote on their children, singing lullabies about a world in which fascism has, definitively, been vanquished forever. Their world may have collapsed in on itself but, barring any contradictory transmissions beamed in from the outside world, somehow the UK's immolation seems to have righted the sinking ship that we, in reality, have all found ourselves on. 

These strange, nostalgic pangs for the comfort and certainty promised by history's end extends to the aforementioned GP, a job role that is itself now a deliberately diminished position within modern, British communities. Kelson, unburdened by the slashed funding of austerity or orders to direct the sick and needy to privatised care, is patient and delicate in his dealings with the damaged people that come before him. He sits with them and listens, getting to know them and tailoring his therapies to the individual rather than fobbing them off with a one-size-fits-all treatment path. His serene, non-judgmental demeanor is itself a potent tonic; enough to dispel all manner of simmering anger. Unusually then, Bone Temple rejects any of the fantastical underpinnings of this specific zombie virus to examine how a valorous doctor might attempt to provide treatment for such unapologetic, mutative violence. Danny Boyle's first instalment may have ended on the promise of bewigged nutters somersaulting over the camera in a Super Sentai flurry - a mode of action that, funnily enough, the much younger DaCosta has no interest in replicating here - but this Bone Temple is instead a sort of inverse of Aleksei German's Hard to be a God. Specifically, a film premised on the idea that a knowledgeable man steeped in (now) deeply foreign art and technologies can be a force for radical change in this sunken world. 

Iron Maiden - The Number of the Beast

Eagle No. 279 by José Ortiz

Duran Duran - Ordinary World

Spider-Man by Sal Buscema

Paul McCartney - Take It Away

About a Place in the Kinki Region

It probably sounds absurd to describe a film in which terrified journalists are visited by their bleeding, mutilated doppelgangers as cosy but writer-director Kōji Shiraishi's About a Place in the Kinki Region is so steeped in curated creepiness and abandoned, old-world rhythms that it cannot help but evoke these strange notes of comfort. When a writer for the Japanese equivalent of Fortean Times goes missing with an important deadline looming, freelancer and friend to the departed Chihiro, played by former pop idol Miho Kanno, is brought in to complete the ailing magazine's centrepiece feature. This salvage job demands Chihiro sink into a well-stocked basement and rummage through notes and dusty physical media, each containing fragments of apparently unconnected paranormal phenomena. Cinematographer Futa Takagi's camera then returning, again and again, to beatific images of CD-Rs adorned with post-it notes and VHS tapes that clatter into video cassette recorders connected to rolling, blue screens. In an era of algorithms and high-definition streaming, where all the world's horrors feel so close and instantly (or unwittingly) attainable, that these short, eerie episodes - the viewing of which accounts for a significant portion of this film's first half - are physically constrained and therefore denied that kind of free-flowing accessibility actually feels unusually comforting. This case unravels in such a way that our snooping leads have to deliberately access each individual breadcrumb if they are to advance to the next stage of this haunting, implicating and endangering themselves by the specific act of trying to understand any overarching objective. With that in mind, Kanno's Chihiro is the perfect character to centre this kind of story around - a fearless reporter who is not only unusually determined to see this story through but behaves as if she is, actually, completely immune. 

MidPoint - Time

The Olympians - Strawberry Kiwi

Red Sonja

Although executed as a feature film, director MJ Bassett and screenwriter Tasha Huo's take on Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith's Red Sonja plays like a couple of episodes of mini-series television stapled together. A midpoint break, in which Matilda Lutz's horse-girl turned gladiator strikes a status quo altering blow against a slave master, played by a gleeful Robert Sheehan, feels oddly conclusive, as if the film had suddenly come to an end fifty minutes sooner than expected. This conceptual or structural oddness crops up elsewhere in the film too. Rhona Mitra's Petra, an old hand within the film's arena setting (a position that reflects the actress's familiarity with the action-fantasy genre) is very quickly organised away from the mentor role she seems primed to fulfil. A move that, if anything, underlines the human wastefulness that really should be associated with something as terrible, but reflexively deployed in sword and sandal films, as big screen bloodsport. Elsewhere, an injury suffered by Sonja - before she's had a chance to vanquish her foes - registers as grievous and alarming, rather than simply the kind of wound that forestalls climax. This note perhaps sharpened by Lutz's presence, an actress who, in Coralie Fargeat's Revenge, was subjected to all manner of grisly and sustained abrasion. In comparison to its Brigitte Nielsen starring predecessor, this Red Sonja suffers and thrives in opposite ways then. The production looks distinctly underfunded, especially when compared to the cut-rate opulence provided by Danilo Donati in the mid-1980s but, while Nielsen was eclipsed by her Austrian co-star, this red-headed barbarian is only ever upstaged by infrequent appearances from an extremely well-trained stallion named Vihur. 

Kim Gordon - Not Today

Madara 1000 - ıןןosıouǝ dǝɹɟɟǝʇɐ

Optimus Prime by Daniel Warren Johnson

Gorillaz - The Hardest Thing // Orange County (Feat. Tony Allen, Bizarrap, Kara Jackson, and Anoushka Shankar)

Space Warrior Baldios

Space Warrior Baldios, directed by Kazuyuki Hirokawa and Hisayuki Toriumi, was the The End of Evangelion of its day, a feature-length, big screen release designed to tie up the loose ends for an early 80s television series that had attracted a small but dedicated following. Hacked together from 30-odd TV episodes and capped with material rearranged from unaired instalments, Baldios may trudge moment-to-moment but the plotting covers enormous ground, picking up on a seemingly alien planet choked with pollution and ending on an Earth facing a similarly destitute future. In this telling, Baldios seems notable for being a version of a super robot show that barely features its gleaming mechanoid. Although extraterrestrial sorties and transforming spacecraft are frequently deployed, the story's despondent destination means our heroes are always presented as being on the backfoot - assailed by a dimension-hopping civilisation, originating from the dead planet S-1, who will stop at nothing to claim Earth as their prize. As the conflict grows to include nuclear detonations and city swallowing tsunamis, leaders on both sides of the conflict tune into this apocalyptic death spiral, completely unwilling to take stock or exercise restraint. This mania is complimented by the film's two main characters: the S-1 refugee Marin Reigan, who fights on behalf of Earth and Aphrodia, the adopted daughter of the invading Fuhrer. Although clearly lovestruck from the second they meet, this strange pair bicker across a canvas of human extermination, constantly inventing reasons to prolong, but never consummate, their demented flirtation. 

Black Marble - Far

Khruangbin - White Gloves ii (Live)

Lensman

A fast and loose animated adaptation of EE 'Doc' Smith's science fiction novels that is, really, best understood, contextualised and appreciated through the enormous success of another work that drew significant inspiration from the series, George Lucas' Star Wars. Cyberpunk supremo Yoshiaki Kawajiri's feature-length debut, co-directing alongside Kazuyuki Hirokawa, seizes on this antecedent work - originally serialised in the magazine Astounding Stories beginning in 1937 then concluding in 1948 - and reimagines it using the Campbellian shorthand so beloved of Lucas. Lensman's Kimball Kinnison then is, accordingly, transformed from a plucky service cadet to, like Luke Skywalker, a farmhand with a knack for daredevil aviation. Although Kinnison is thinly sketched here, really only a blank surrogate for young audiences yearning for adventure, Lensman actually does do a better job of describing his hotshot pilot credentials than the earliest passages of A New Hope. 

If anything Kinnison's impressive ability to seize control of a decaying star cruiser and safely land its crumbling body anticipates a similarly entertaining setpiece from 2005's Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. As Lensman reaches further and further out into space, Kawajiri and Hirokowa's film applies a grungier, biomechanical aspect to its planets and alien lifeforms - the villainous Boskone Empire are, seemingly, formless energies trapped in shell-like carapace; heroic alien Worsel is the spitting image of Pat Mills and Kevin O'Neill's Nemesis the Warlock, so much so that you wonder if odd issues of 2000 AD actually made their way to Japan. Together, Worsel and Kinnison find themselves key players in a galactic theatre of war that combines fleets of spacecraft locked in battle; the rescue of an endangered loved from the clutches of a formless monstrosity; and a worker's uprising on a planet choked with mining machinery. Obviously, again, this tiered action is a storytelling technique clearly patterned after Lucas' blockbuster episodes but Lensman does at least deliver on the suggestion of a slave uprising, a concept thwarted by reflexive drag racing in Lucas' prequel chapters and teased, then abandoned, in the more recent Disney sequels. 

Isobel - Limn

Looking Glass Knight by Ryan F

Acen - Trip to the Moon (Part 2) The Darkside

Dry Cleaning - Evil Evil Idiot

Red Sonja

Based on a Marvel comics character created by Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith, director Richard Fleischer's Red Sonja is an odd adjunct to Arnold Schwarzenegger's barbarian films in which the Austrian oak does not even play everyone's favourite Cimmerian. Sold in the Italian market as Yado (a choice that, bizarrely, implores immediate comparison with Yoda, the amphibian guru from The Empire Strikes Back), complete with a ghostly poster image of Schwarzenegger swirling in the mists of time, Red Sonja is instead a star vehicle for Brigitte Nielsen, a model-turned-actress who is striking and statuesque but otherwise lacking in any of the kind of experience required to carry such a project. Since this is a production of the Dino De Laurentiis Corporation, Red Sonja is pretty lavishly appointed though. The costume and production design, courtesy of the Academy Award winning Danilo Donati, far outstrips every other aspect of the picture. Outfits are suitably baroque, seemingly drawing inspiration from Windsor-Smith's beautiful detailed pin-ups of these mythological characters. Sets are likewise well appointed, with the cavernous, steaming throne room of Sandahl Bergman's evil queen a particular highlight. Despite all this wonderful dressing Red Sonja is a lifeless trudge that often seems to be poking fun at its own limitations. A prolonged battle between Schwarzenegger's Lord Kalidor and a mechanical fish is so repetitive that it becomes clear that every scrap of coverage containing this nascent (and increasingly bankable) superstar is being used. And, not long after, a slow treacherous creep along what looks like a sheer rock face for the principal adventurers is suddenly revealed to be a few feet from the floor when Paul Smith's bodyguard rushes into the frame to help his bratty princeling hop off the hazard. 

Ennio Morricone - Main Title from Red Sonja

Venom by Michael DeForge