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