Primate

After years of pixel perfect reproductions of aggro chimpanzees, specifically in the recent Planet of the Apes phases, it's a pleasant surprise to be treated to a suit-acted Primate. Miguel Torres Umba plays Ben, a chimp living in glass house captivity with a family comprised of a deaf father named Adam, played by Troy Kotsur, and his daughters, Johnny Sequoyah's Lucy and Gia Hunter's Erin. Bitten by a rabid mongoose offscreen, Ben glowers and froths, eventually transforming into a bone-breaking monster. Obviously prompted by a similar simian attack in Jordan Peele's excellent Nope, director Johannes Roberts' Primate is a feature-length extrapolation shot digitally on London sound stages and cast in blazing reds and powdery cobalt that suggests a, presumably absent, temperature. Neither as tense or oppressive as the POV Nope interlude, where Primate does impress is how it suggests some level of thwarted agency or even interpersonal jealousy behind Ben's destructive acts. 

Rabies here is used as a way of unlocking a kind of interspecies bitterness that has simmered in a creature that lives amongst, but cannot truly connect with, people. Ben takes bites out of the thigh of his nearest contemporary, youngest daughter Erin, apparently a demonstration of possessive, consumptive intent. A frat boy love interest played by Charlie Mann, who appears much later in the film, is trapped than examined by Ben. His simpering white boy features pored over and collated, before Ben begins tugging aggressively on his jaw, obliterating his agreeable, human face. Primate is thinly written, with shallowly realised characters (the absolute limit of communal jeopardy is the forwardness with which Jessica Alexander's Hannah behaves around a friend's crush) but there is something unexpectedly sad about the performance generated by a man playing a simian who lashes out at his human owners because a viral infection has turbo-charged his grievances. His diminished, childlike stature, within a family that has already begun to grow apart, has become intolerable for this superhumanly powerful simulacrum. 

Adrian Johnston - First Bite

Thee Sacred Souls - Any Old Fool

Ultraman & Ultraseven by Rariatoo

Flying Lotus - 1983

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie

A markedly different experience from The Super Mario Bros. Movie, despite sharing directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic (co-directors Pierre Leduc and Fabien Polack, as well as screenwriter Matthew Fogel, are back too), The Super Mario Galaxy Movie dispenses with any of the tiresome, relatability scaffolding previously applied to this Nintendo juggernaut. Judging by the first instalment, the decision makers behind that film were convinced that audiences wouldn't be able to swallow the adventures of a stout, video game plumber unless the character overcame some trivial personal difficulties within your standard ('90s vintage) big screen adaptation. This galactic chapter though dispenses with similarly shallow attempts at insight, the film constructed as a rolling incident machine that does a better - or perhaps just more honest - job of repeatedly showcasing forty-odd years of iterative, Kyoto design. In that sense, Illumination and Nintendo's film is completely given over to the presentation of obsessively layered and rendered landscapes that suggest some, faltering means of progression. So, the industrialised swamp of Peter Jackson's Isengard is transformed into a volcanic theme park that sears cheering lackeys to the bone; a repulsive golden casino - perhaps a nod to Nintendo the company's beginnings as a playing card manufacturer - becomes an Escher etching that can be traversed in every, counter-intuitive direction. Plotted to be little more than diverting noise, this Mario Galaxy simulates something of the proudly illogical progression seen in the vintage video games that inspired it. A mode of communication in which relentless invention trumps a more careful means of ascension. 

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)