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

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