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 and 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 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: 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 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