Futureworld

Futureworld, director Richard T Heffron's inert Westworld sequel, eschews any of the onscreen pleasures associated with barging around a theme park that caters to violent, randy divorcees to spend the majority of its screentime sneaking around in dimly-lit back-of-stage locations. These pipe-packed caverns look less like the credibly advanced maintenance and service tunnels you might expect to be threaded through a futuristic retreat and more like the leaking interior of a massive aircraft carrier. Somehow able to bounce back from the lawsuits implied by the complete extermination of its customer base a few years earlier, the android manufacturing Delos Corporation have actually increased their prices and expanded the operation. As well as the criminally underutilised Medievalworld and Romanworld, the restort now offers - just in time to host Peter Fonda and Blythe Danner's snooping reporters, as well as Soviet and Japanese dignitaries - a woozy Spaworld and an antwacky attraction called Futureworld. The latter of which demands that guests be packed into padded outfits then tasked with miming some half-hearted space exploration. 

Despite utterly failing to work up a similar sense of chilly inevitability as its Michael Crichton directed predecessor, Futureworld does manage a few stray notes of interest, largely due to this viewer's overfamiliarity with The Terminator. It's difficult not to wonder if James Cameron's film (and its sequel) were working both with and against this piece. Cameron has spoken in interviews about being disappointed with the FM radio transistors powering these improbably lifelike robots; the implausibility of their blinking circuits and wiring splayed on hospital beds leading him to speculate what kind of skeletal machinery would actually be required to ambulate the muscles of an artificial human. Even the top-of-the-line T-800 designation assigned to Arnold Schwarzenegger's cyborg seems to have some root in the models described in this film: the primitive, unconvincing 500 series and the laser-focused 700s, who fill out the Delos rank and file and pass for human. A third act in which Fonda's Chuck Browning is followed through a factory by an emotionless duplicate foretells Leslie Hamilton's role in the climax of Terminator 2: Judgment Day while Futureworld's bizarre, revisionist use of Yul Bryner's stalking cowboy - he's the centrepiece in a televised sexual fantasy in which Danner's Tracy is protected then bedded by a reprogrammed gunslinger, who kisses with his blazing eyes open - anticipates the rehabilitation ascribed to Schwarzenegger's leather jacket wearing assassin. 

Seven Samurai by Tony Stella

Cocu* - Universal Friends

The Fantastic Four by Peach Momoko

Nia Archives - Boys in Blue

David Matthews - Main Theme from Star Wars

They Will Kill You

If Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is the Dante's Peak of action comedies based around rich elites kidnapping women for Satanic sacrifice, then this piece - director Kirill Sokolov's They Will Kill You - is the slightly later, much goopier Volcano. All of which is to say that neither film is particularly good but at least one of them (this one) is extremely interested in depicting hot, red liquids blasting out of ruptured structures. At the outset, Sokolov's film uses ornate buildings and inky, rain-lashed voids to prickle memories of Italian horror films directed by Dario Argento. When battle is joined though, Sokolov's reference points are instead the engorged violence and fitful flashbacks seen in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill. 

Although Zazie Beetz maintains an impressive physical presence throughout, these stray notes of reproduction invite a level of comparison that does this film absolutely no favours. Sokolov's genre cross-fading plays photostat and Beetz is never given the opportunity to play anything like the plucky, Falconettian vulnerability that underlined Uma Thurman's signature performance. They Will Kill You is to The Whole Bloody Affair as 2 Days in the Valley is to Pulp Fiction then. As well, the crunchy invulnerability bestowed upon the hooded devil worshippers that hunt Beetz's vengeful housekeeper not only rob the audience of any satisfaction associated with a well-earned dispatch but this impermanence even undermines some cracking body detonations too. Still, Heather Graham's enucleated eyeball creeping around, while her headless trunk clatters about in an air vent is, at least, pretty funny.

Hi-Posi - あと何日

The Punisher by Frank Miller

Ayako Udagawa - Just Fallin' Love

3mitsu x Suyo - Pt.2

Ballad of a Soldier

At the height of The Great Patriotic War, a boyish Soviet soldat is given limited leave from the frontline to journey across a war-torn nation and help his mother fix her leaking roof. This unexpected and unlikely boon issued in recognition of the soldier's bravery in facing down, and wounding, a column of advancing German tanks. Writer-director Grigory Chukhray (co-writing with Valentin Yezhov)'s Ballad of a Soldier initially wrongfoots thanks to the sheer earnestness of Vladimir Ivashov's Private Alyosha Skvortsov. He's a guileless, likeable youth who cannot resist mucking in and helping all those who cross his path. From injured veterans to elderly truck-drivers, Alyosha is such easygoing sunshine that he either nudges these people away from self-destructive actions or he literally plants his feet and physically lifts them out of the mire that traps them. 

All too quickly, Chukhray's film expands its tonal scope from Children's Film Foundation pleasantries to consider warfare in starker, far less celebratory terms: how uniformed men present as inherently threatening to unaccompanied women or the ways in which solemn vows, made during peacetime, might then crumble in the face of the brutal, day-to-day realities of industrialised conflict. Beautifully composed by cinematographers Vladimir Nikolayev and Era Savelyeva - the blocky, black and white Academy screen is equally at home examining Zhanna Prokhorenko's luminous face as it is peering at the twisting, urban wreckage that has been wrought by aerial bombardment - 1959's Ballad of a Soldier proposes that, in lads like Private Skvorstov, something deeply precious to the Soviet Union has been lost forever. An entire generation of gallant young men have been claimed forever by the foreign lands in which they fought and died. 

Vince Staples - Blackberry Marmalade

GF13-049NM Tequila Gundam by Ikka Niiro

Beck - Everlasting Nothing

Action Bronson - Triceratops (feat. Lil Yachty & Paul Wall)

Youth of the Beast

It could be a quirk of the English subtitles stamped on the viewed video but, at one point in director Seijun Suzuki's Youth of the Beast (and following a lengthy cab ride in which Joe Shishido's ex-cop Mizuno lays out his suspicions about a blackmail ring to a former colleague), our hero leaps from the still moving vehicle with an instruction to the driver to take 'him' home. We presume Mizuno means the policeman that he has just spent the last couple of minutes outlining a conspiracy to. However, as Suzuki and cinematographer Kazue Nagatsuka's jittery camera bounces around, facing into the back seat of the taxi, we notice - through the rear window - that the policeman has already darted out of the car. He silently keeps pace with Mizuno, leaving us behind with the camera, rocking uselessly and forlornly as we recede from this renewed meeting. We have, ever so briefly, been dismissed from the unfolding proceedings. The pervasiveness that we, the audience, enjoy has been thwarted. This sort of textual playfulness is all over Youth of the Beast, a film in which malevolent pimps are transformed into receding optical effects in the mind of despairing junkies or a scene in which an interlude of sadomasochistic foreplay is presented as the swirling eye of a tumultuous dust devil. At the film's outset, Joe Shishido's Mizuno reads as expert and conniving, a front he largely manages to maintain when dealing with two opposing gangs of uneducated, low-level street toughs. However, when his investigation expands to include women from a variety of backgrounds - from weeping widows to scheming madams - Mizuno's control over the unfolding counter-crosses quickly slips away. 

Takuya Nakamura - Liquid Nice

Zabolo - Cálida Tarde

Ken by Kandoken