Godzilla Minus Zero

Given the rapturous critical and financial response that greeted Godzilla Minus One in the United States, you might expect that writer-director (and visual effects supervisor) Takashi Yamazaki's follow-up would feel the need to kowtow to this unexpected international benefactor. Perhaps this debt of gratitude could be repaid by including benevolent American voices in the film's collective, people-first response to the rampaging, radioactive monsters that plague Japan? A role not unlike that of Nick Adams in the pugilistically similar Invasion of Astro-Monster? Happily, the cacophonous Godzilla Minus Zero performs no such bowing or scraping. Indeed the encroaching American empire of the late-1940s is positioned within this piece as a horror above horrors: a technological behemoth that playfully distributes incredibly destructive weaponry almost as a lark, assured that none of their service men or civilians will be cooked alive during their deployment. 

Although Ryunosuke Kamiki and Minami Hamabe return as Mr and Mrs Shikishima, this sequel doesn't quite foreground their post-traumatic or domestic struggles in quite the same way as its predecessor. Koichi remains an almost incomprehensibly good pilot but, of the pair, it's Hamabe's scarred Noriko who is pushed to the fore, with threads of intrigue woven around her unlikely, even supernatural ability to recover from a point-blank nuclear detonation. Fully healed and returned home to look after the couple's adopted daughter Akiko, Noriko strains under an unlikely and alarming metamorphosis. Beneath her cotton eye-patch burns a golden eye conferred upon her by Godzilla's irradiated DNA, this mutation portending an involuntary, lineal line of descendency between the largely absent King of Monsters and this housewife. Noriko isn't alone either. Masami Nagasawa's Makoto Aoyama, a meteorological prodigy attached to the Large-Scale Disaster Response Bureau headed up by Hidetaka Yoshioka's returning director Noda, seems to possess unusually intuitive, if not outright psychokinetic abilities when considering the turbulent weather patterns that attract the alien dragon Ghidorah. 

Minus Zero then uses its female characters as ambassadors of the Atomic Age. They are humans who have, after the fissile Pandora's box has been thrown open, found themselves changing into something distinct; an unusual new form of life that is then better able to adapt and thrive in this upturned world. In a sense they are something of a feminine alternative to the transformed men seen in Ishiro Honda's late 1950s and early 1960s work, films such as The H-Man or The Human Vapor. Neither are they alone in their contamination. The haunted, elderly biologist Murakami, played by Min Tanaka, represents a human aspect that would demand control over these dangerous new energies. Motivated purely by revenge, this shattered grandfather cannot shake images of his family - especially his beloved grandson - all charred beyond recognition by the pika-don of the Hiroshima bombing. He turns the memories over, again and again in his mind, before arriving at a fantastical interlude in which a swollen Godzilla crosses the Pacific to maul Lady Liberty. Murakami cackles to himself as his heart's desire is revealed: American commuters weeping melted eyeballs out of their bubbling faces; New York cracking and boiling in the Hudson. 

Human cataclysm, both real and imagined, is at the forefront of Minus Zero. The film making claim to be the conceptual inverse of the sanitized disaster seen in director Adam Wingard's recent Godzilla vs. Kong or Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. Despite entire tectonic plates trembling beneath the feet of the Legendary Pictures monsters, any sense of civilian wreckage is either completely glossed over or hand-waved with news of a last minute evacuation. In Yamazaki's film battered and bloodied bodies are everywhere. Screaming parents mourn their lifeless children while untethered mothers plunge, along with their infants, towards their doom. The howls of terrified people and the shrieks of straining machinery are deployed as instrumentation, perfectly complimenting Naoki Sato's earsplitting score. The film's mood is surging and apocalyptic throughout. When Godzilla does finally make an appearance he isn't portrayed as heroic either. In fact, in this moment, it actually seems as if man's world is coming to an end. Similarly, the dragon Ghidorah isn't always depicted as a gilded gun platform. In an early, one-headed form this barbed wyvern scurries over rubble, seizing and smashing individual persons rather than expelling lightning indiscriminately. For a creature usually depicted as a thoughtless avatar of alien invasion, Minus Zero's interpretation is strikingly malevolent. 

Although the Cold War was barely underway by the time of this film's setting - in 1949 the People's Republic of China was still 15 years away from their own atomic bomb (the real-world event that prompted an allegorical response in the form of the original Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster motion picture) - it does seem notable that this King Ghidorah is portrayed as an exaggerated example of a pod person. Those extraterrestrial parasites, so beloved of Red Scare-era filmmakers, were flexible enough to embody a variety of disparate sociopolitical movements - from the unthinking, mob nationalism evident in McCarthyism or the emotionless collectives that Americans associated with Marxism. Oozing from a meteorite, Monster Zero's first earthbound form is a gelatinous slime that ensnares then copies its victims, adding together the most powerful traits of Japan's unsuspecting fauna to arrive at its own preferred form of an enormous, crackling hydra. This is Ghidorah as The Thing from Another World, only reproduced on a truly volcanic scale. If Yamazaki's film has a flaw then it is that precious little attention is directed at the unmaking of this duplicated beast. Locked in a beam struggle with an injured Godzilla, Ghidorah is washed aside to make way for one last stab at familial hysteria. Didn't the filmmakers realise that we actually wanted to see scale and tendon unknit from this creature's borrowed bones? This disappointment is mitigated somewhat by Murakami's concluding notes though. Despite, theoretically, possessing the means to realise the sinking of Manhattan, the mad scientist instead demurs, destroying his research. In this decision Minus Zero joins the Slipstream segment of the Leiji Matsumoto OVA anthology The Cockpit as works in which (former) Axis powers imagine themselves as uniquely noble when faced with the temptation of a decisive, nuclear solution. One last dig at America then. 

Naoki Sato - Eclipse

The Flaming Lips - God Will Control the Werewolves

Pixies - Punk Loop

Tomorrow's Joe by Sassine Saïd

Vangelis - Yin & Yang

Charisma

Koji Hashimoto stars as Yabuike, an overworked policeman who dwells in the same paint-peeled, pre-millennium municipal buildings as his Cure doppelgänger, detective Takabe. Following a disastrous hostage intervention, in which Yabuike hesitated to shoot a man holding a politician at gunpoint when the opportunity presented itself, the dishevelled cop is driven out to a forest by a colleague then abandoned at a rusting bus stop. No connecting service ever materialises so Yabuike presses on into this decaying, autumnal wood, eventually encountering a three-way dispute regarding a dying tree named Charisma. Before becoming embroiled in the various factions that spit and snipe at each over a sapling wrapped in scaffolding, Yabuike encounters the skeletal remains of a salaryman, dangling from a tree. The man, quite apparently dead for some time, has been completely claimed by the forest - transformed into an unlikely planter for a particularly verdant moss. Similarly, the withered tree Charisma, festooned with IV drips and therefore literally on life-support, seems to take its nourishment only from the surrounding plants and trees. Around the trunk there is a blasted semi-circle of death, the peers that have been sacrificed to maintain what little life remains to this arbor. Charisma, described as a mutant import from the mainland, is sucking this environment dry then. In writer-director Kiyoshi Kurosawa's film, an absurdist comedy that slowly sinks into a kind of apocalyptic dementia, life and death are held in strict balance. No element can truly prosper within the piece without explicitly taking something, often violently, from another.  

Kittridge - Root Rot

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.