Halloween by Tony Stella

Ex:Re - Am I Even Real? (Live)

MD スプラッターハウス PART2

A Replay Burners blast-through of Splatterhouse Part 2 on the Sega Mega Drive for Halloween. As this is a high-score rush the player, AZK-BAC, chomps through spare lives when facing bosses; triggering player and enemy deaths at the same time to reap the maximum amount of points. Hopefully, given that the arcade original Splatterhouse is already a part of Hamster's Arcade Archives, we can expect these home system releases to (eventually) make their way into the ranks of their Console Archives sister series.

Street Fighter

Much too long and convoluted to deliver sustained entertainment, director Kitao Sakurai's Street Fighter is, at least, an honest attempt to organise decades of contradictory video game tournaments into the kind of franchise-launcher not seen since Marvel Studios was in its ascendancy. Capcom's incomparable arcade hit, Street Fighter II, offered up a basic competition framing with blips of a background story rationed out based on a player's ability to clear the game with their favourite character. As far as adaptations have gone then - and there have been many - much has had to be invented to cater to the various and differing mediums that cashed-in, with more notable themes and ideas even being rolled into latter interactive instalments. 

Despite a large cast of characters then, one that largely favours the second game in the series, the key texts for this Street Fighter have turned out to be Masahiko Nakahira's Street Fighter Zero manga, a two volume black-and-white series that first introduced the concept of a murderous power lurking within Ryu, the Japanese all-rounder who is as close as the series gets to a default character, and Street Fighter Zero 2, the 1996 arcade cabinet that allowed a corrupted palette-swap of this what-if character to be selectable. Pushed aside for the all-American Guile in Steven E. de Souza's 1994 Street Fighter and AWOL from 2009's Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, Ryu is an unusual dramatic proposition largely because he avoids human connection within the various texts, partly to better serve as pure utility for a player's pre-adulthood imagination but also because this wandering warrior fits a particular (and popular) Japanese cultural archetype: the rōnin. 

So, although Gisaburo Sugii's animated Street Fighter II Movie successfully centred around a deliberately blank character with little personal desire, there's a sense that an American blockbuster audience might want a little more meat on their bones. Screenwriters TJ Fixman and Sakurai again (with Dalan Musson and Gary Dauberman sharing a story credit) invert the relationship of Ryu and Ken from Sugii's pass, trading an easygoing Ken transformed into a violent pawn of a psychotic dictator with a Ryu that, underwritten by coin-pumped lore, looks set to be similarly claimed. Noah Centineo's Ken is diminished by the trade though, losing his marionette fiancée Eliza (and subjected to ugly AI reproduction for prop photographs) to be crowbarred into the role of a comedic understudy for Andrew Koji's surprisingly conceited Ryu. This is perhaps the most glaring issue with Sakurai's Street Fighter then. By altering characters to fit roles that differ from their more simplistic, video game functions the film must apportion space or dramatic axis to justify these changes. This strained scaffolding is then compounded by inheriting such a massive ensemble, all of whom demand at least a certain amount of attention. As a result Guile, as portrayed by pro-wrestler Cody Rhodes, vanishes into a series of amusing YouTube skit-style asides and Callina Liang's Chun-Li - the character with the clearest filmic motivation - forestalls her revenge for no clear reason, allows her body to be mutilated, and is fobbed off with a moment of triumph in which she beats the shit out of her Interpol colleagues. 

Soundgarden - Black Hole Sun

Canonically Accurate Huffer by Duggertron

My Bloody Valentine - Drive It All Over Me

Evil Dead Burn

Although director Sébastien Vaniček's sequel makes further appeals to an overarching organisation of these belated, Sony Pictures instalments - specifically, credit stinging developments that no-one could possibly care about - in the main Evil Dead Burn is a fine addition to the long-running spook house series originated by Sam Raimi and his elastic pals. This latest episode, set in a crumbling holiday getaway, revolves around an acute, interpersonal cruelty; a not-so-passive aggression that is premised on the poor fortune of having married into an extremely dysfunctional, middle-class clan. Like Evil Dead Rise before it then, Vaniček's film proposes the decay and destruction of a family unit as the framework for a seething, locked-up horror film. Trapped with her in-laws inside what is, essentially, a decaying mansion following the funeral of her overbearing and abusive husband, Souheila Yacoub's Alice braves dangling accusations about her suitability as a wife (and failure to become a mother), while supernatural menace takes hold in her ageing tormentors. 

Despite being the third part of this new phase, Burn is bleakly humorous as opposed to slapstick funny. The film preferring to extrapolate its chills from the moment when a pencil is plunged into a bare ankle then waggled around from Raimi's original The Evil Dead rather than the massing hordes of prop skeletons seen in Army of Darkness. Vaniček and editor Maxime Caro channel the visually inventive, not to mention boundlessly energetic, mania of their dentist-hustling predecessor, depicting a human body that can become unencumbered by gravity or able to power through grievous, life-snuffing injury based on little other than pure spite. As the bodies pile up, francophone Alice slowly sloughs off the withering expectation that has been heaped upon her. She ceases her whispered English and reverts to her mother tongue, delivering scornful assessment in machine-gun bursts around dithering affines while decrepit demons saw at their trapped limbs. Burn then, through bloody violence and an equally oppressive intrafamilial brutality, comes to suggest something of the bigger budget films that followed in the wake of the New French Extremity. Vaniček's film sitting alongside works such as Alexandre Aja's The Hills Have Eyes remake, both pieces being audience-alienating updates on distinctly American properties. 

Double Danger - Without Your Family, You're Nothing

Ex:Re - Sleep (Live)

The Pink Panther by Bernardo Reitich

Death from Above 1979 - Private Lives

Onslaught

Not sure why you'd want your film, in this case director Adam Wingard's Onslaught, to arrive plastered with the Albertus font, that white text on a black background so beloved of John Carpenter (the typeface also enjoyed a previous life as the basis for all signage in Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner television series). Presumably the decision is partly affectionate and partly to anticipate, even acknowledge an obvious stylistic debt to the work of that director. A shame then that, despite aping something of the high-contrast photography of Dean Cundey and Carpenter's trademark electronic score, all of this scraping replication is in service of a piece that treads water until the fifty minute mark then skips an entire second act to instantly arrive at an unsatisfying finale. Premised on an idea of invincible, fascist super-soldiers, Onslaught curtails any hope of excitement by denying its monsters either a voice, by which they might puzzle through their undeath or, really, any truly impressive kills to hang their hat on. Instead, they simply glower outside Adria Arjona's trailer. A shoot-out in a bright, uniformly lit supermarket instantly recalls a similar situation in Universal Soldier where Dolph Lundgren's ear collecting zombie screamed at baffled shoppers while his underlings rotted on the floor beneath him. There's nothing in Onslaught even remotely as entertaining. Similarly, if viewers truly value muteness in their muscled murderers then, while neither are perfect, both Project Wolf Hunting and In a Violent Nature are light years ahead of this would-be watchable The Guest spin-off. 

Justice - Flower in a Hurricane (feat. Tame Impala, SZA, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard)

Darth Vader by Daniel Warren Johnson

Mike D - Secrets Pt. I & II

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

Strip away the synthetic, screensaver backgrounds and an, at times, overbearing affection for an anachronistic slasher series that has never actually existed and you're left with a gentle inquiry into sexual intimacy. Written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, at least initially, details the attempts made by a festival darling filmmaker, Kris played by a blushing Hannah Einbinder, to get a handle on a destitute horror franchise that has collapsed into diminishing, straight-to-video claptrap. Hired by a Blumhouse-style production company, in the hope that her queerness will somehow dispel the franchise's transphobic undertones, Kris arranges to meet with the star of the first entry, Gillian Anderson's actress Billy Presley. Kris finds Billy squatting on the ramshackle sets used when filming the original features; the actress perhaps even more obsessed with the ghostly child murderer, who stalked this scenery, than the dialogue-reciting Kris is. 

The promise of a film reel viewing of Billy's starring role prompts discussion of the piece with Billy dismissing Kris' description of Camp Miasma's cultural relevance as being overly cerebral, as if the young filmmaker is applying academic language to thoughts and feelings that are rooted in something less reputable: that the faltering, rape-tinged sex and bloody murder present in the film turns Kris on, basically. Although mixed in with the supernatural and a truly triumphant massacre, the meat of Camp Miasma is a gentle goading between two women who have each dismissed themselves as being sexually dysfunctional, only to find another person that they can be truly, truthfully intimate with. The awkward, shy Kris can, at last, realise her fantasy of flowering into a blood-drenched victim, running in her underwear while a deranged killer pursues and a camera lingers on her nakedness. Billy's arc is similarly therapeutic, the actress finally able to die in the arms of someone who adores her rather than a score-notching creep who is leveraging a delicate situation in order to take liberties. Beyond all of that though, the real victory for these women happens later, when the playact is complete, and the pair are covered in dried viscera. They saunter to a well-stocked gas station to merrily chat and shop for snacks, by now deeply embedded in a loving relationship. 

Counting Crows - A Long December

The Mummy Walks by Tom Scioli

Father John Misty - The X-panded Universe

Coyote vs. Acme

Exhausted after decades of running afoul of malfunctioning gimcrack, Wile E. Coyote decides to, at long last, sue the Acme corporation. It's a concept so purely wonderful and imaginative that, obviously, the soulless, dead-eyed hatchet men who recently ran Warner Bros into the hands of a monopoly merger were determined to burn the negative in return for a modest tax rebate. Rescued from oblivion by Ketchup Entertainment, who also distributed The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie in the United States, director Dave Green and screenwriter Samy Burch's Coyote vs. Acme (based on a beautifully written The New Yorker article by Ian Frazier) doesn't even have to be especially good to feel like a tiny victory against the rampant corporatism that has consumed a once hallowed film studio. Thankfully then, the film is not only great but actively engaged with the outright corruption on display in America's corridors of power. 

The rot is so pronounced that beloved cartoon characters find themselves warped in its presence: Elmer Fudd appears as a winking, big business-friendly Senator; Tweety is recast as a bagman, forced into mercenary servitude to protect his beloved Granny. Worst of all is Foghorn Leghorn as Acme's good ol' boy CEO who, in a congressional address, speaks on behalf of his cel-animated kind, making the truly repulsive point that his people are a malleable, physically invincible underclass who deserve nothing more than to be experimented upon. The speech is so close to the knuckle that it seems reasonable to presume that David Zaslav and his cabal of wax-faced media executives felt that issues of medical apartheid were a little too strong for their Merrie Melodies movie and that this was a deciding factor in the film's engineered non-existence. If Coyote vs. Acme has a flaw it's that (nearly) every animated character is rendered and moves with a jittery, computer-generated outline that prevents them from registering as purely beautiful. The exception to this minor disappointment is Bugs Bunny - presumably a late addition to the piece - who, in a move befitting his inexhaustible super stardom, is illustrated with a character and fluency that is outrageously in advance of his peers.

Grimes - Accelerando

Twisted Teens - Stalks

Another Dracula by Mizmaru Kawahara

M83 - Siren / Behold... Beasts