Junior Parker - Tomorrow Never Knows

Electronic Gems - Never Say Always

Cozzilla by Brett Marcus Cook

Sky Ferreira - Don't Forget

Midnight Drift & VIQ - Stuck in Time

Halloween Ends

Despite the poster space dedicated to the twin pillars of this franchise, Halloween Ends is not particularly focused on either Jamie Lee Curtis' Laurie Strode or Nick Castle and James Jude Courtney's Michael Myers. Instead the film largely revolves around Rohan Campbell's Corey, a hapless babysitter who has become the town pariah following the accidental death of a child in his care. Corey's lot in life as an aimless twentysomething is so diminished that he is routinely set upon by a group of teenagers that, judging by their clothing, are members of the local school's marching band. He doesn't even rank high enough to attract the ire of nearby jocks. Intimidation and violence instead coming from the layer of secondary school most likely to suffer bullying themselves. Even the misfits hate Corey. 

This unusual bubble of cruelty is emblematic of the ways in which Ends attempts to define the concept of evil and its potential to be transmitted. Michael Myers is portrayed here as a malignant root that has grown into the earth, polluting Haddonfield and everyone within it. The town itself hasn't moved on from the killer's recent sprees; even going as far as blaming Strode and her family for provoking Myers' violence. Buildings within Haddonfield have visibly decayed too, no longer resembling the dreamy Californian suburbs of the original John Carpenter film - this ancestral imagery clearly important to director David Gordon Green as a point of contrast since it is threaded into the framing device that follows the Halloween III: Season of the Witch inspired credit sequence. Instead of a comfortable incubator for the American middle-class, Ends gives us a division expressed spatially; terrifyingly vertical McMansions at one end of town and a poverty row junk yard at the other. Corey, the film's transformational component, employing the machinery of the latter to exorcise the trauma he has experienced thanks to the former. 

Green's film then, co-written with Danny McBride, Chris Bernier and Paul Brad Logan, offers up hints that it intends to be a character piece, one not dissimilar to the damned path beaten by Rob Zombie and Scout Taylor-Compton in their excellent Halloween II. Although an unexpected diversion for a sequel whose ad campaign demands it be received as a conclusion, Corey's hold on the film, and his increasing willingness to wield violence as a way of getting what he wants is, at least, a kind of development for Green's misfiring sub-series. Unfortunately, Corey's halting hold over the desiccated Shape is neither definitive nor lasting, allowing the subterranean memory to bubble up out of the ground and resume their own slaughter. Given the rejection of Terminator: Dark Fate by YouTube's finest film critics, it's unlikely that anyone bankrolling a series that relies on nostalgia will want to see their legacy toys subordinated by new characters or ideas but, that said, there's nothing else in this film as good as a brief interlude in which we see a manic Corey mugging a mummified Myers and, triumphantly, seizing his mask to go on his own killing spree. Youthful, sexually actualised venom finally overcoming the virginal corpse who has become the black mould in the water pipes.  

John Carpenter, Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies - The Procession

Frank by Michel Fiffe

Magic Sword - There is Still Good in You

John Carpenter, Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies - The Junk Yard

Violence Voyager

Violence Voyager is an animated feature that uses neither a succession of photographed cels nor computer animation to tell its tale of children battling inside a lethal amusement park. Writer-director Ujicha's film is instead told with a kind of simplistic puppetry. Painstakingly detailed figures bob then collapse on painted backgrounds, their motions and movements the work of an unseen hand. This two-plane presentation imbues the film with a basic sense of dimensionality, a tactile physicality not unlike that of a pop-up book. This off-kilter nostalgia is accentuated further by the film's plucky tone. Although the pre-teen adventurers are subjected to incredible physical harm, their determination does not waver. They soldier on, the heroes of a horror show children's comic, careening towards its conclusion. 

Trauma in Violence Voyager is relentless but the young persons wading through the goo never pause to consider their losses. Instead it's up to the (likely adult) viewer to witness, aghast, as children's faces melt off or their bodies are transformed, by an industrialised womb, into grotesque skinless gnomes. The permanence being enacted on these pre-adolescents is a nightmare all of its own. Occasionally Ujicha interjects in ways that defy the otherwise flat theatrical staging: real fluids ooze between the paper layers or an explosion is enacted, and accomplished, by lashing firecrackers to flat cut-out figures. These moments are reflective of an acute vandalism, one that motion pictures, as a medium, are fluent in - artists and technicians spend their working lives erecting sumptuous facades which are then, summarily, detonated by the pyrotechnics team. Violence Voyager represents these two spheres of intent working through a concert of one; Ujicha making then un-making his own painted world. 

Devilman by Francesco Iaquinta

Weyes Blood - It's Not Just Me, It's Everybody

The Smile - You Will Never Work in Television Again

Mega Final Fight - DIPSWITCH

After having successfully shrunken arcade Final Fight down to a Mega Drive-sized cart file, fan devs CFX have, quite apparently, gotten drunk on their power. Not only have they added a scroll feature to the character select screen that reveals two brand new player options - Captain Commando and Maki from Super Nintendo exclusive Final Fight 2 - but extra moves have been added to the three original selections. Cody inherits elements of his Street Fighter Alpha 3 move-list while Haggar gains a meaty double axe handle-style strike. 

Ace Duck by Jeremy Brooks

Aisus - Sundown Trauma

Voyage - Shift

Hellraiser

Clive Barker's extradimensional sadomasochists are given a new lease of life thanks to a Disney streaming platform. Landing at Hulu (or whichever lackadaisical digital delivery giant is squatting on the film's distribution in your region) is a big step up for a series that has spent the last decade or so in a purgatorial rights-retention phase that saw new instalments barely screened beyond cast and crew parties. David Bruckner's Hellraiser is neither a sequel nor the long-promised remake of the 1987 original though, it's a rethink. A slasher slanted reboot with a tick 'em off structure further embellishing the A Nightmare on Elm Street-isms that crept into Hellraiser's less serious sequels while also switching the central relationship with Hell's emissaries from invitational (no matter how accidental) to sacrificial. This deliberately cruel adjustment allows the film to tease out another layer of power dynamics in a franchise that worked best when it burdened women with the sins of their self-indulgent men. 

Odessa A'zion plays Riley, a former addict struggling to get her life back on track while she squats in her brother's apartment, subjecting the tightly-packed household to the sights and sounds of her love life. Hellraiser deploys this idea of chemical or psychological dependency with no real intention to derive insight. Instead it's shorthand for the Riley character to remain lightly scorned by her peers and just unreliable enough that these same acquaintances meet increasingly sticky ends. Bruckner's film, written for the screen by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski, dangles an idea that the mission of Jamie Clayton's Hell Priest is self-perpetuating - that they find clueless marks then ruthlessly exploit their emotional vulnerabilities - but a third-act realignment pivots proceedings back into the realm of predatory billionaires. Goran Višnjić's Voight, the owner of a mansion riddled with red rooms, occupies a curious place in this story. He's a middle-aged voyeur who pays desperate twentysomethings to meddle with the occult on his behalf. The (strangely passive) monsters who stalk his estate then would seem to reflect the tastes he nurtured solving the central puzzle box - young bodies flayed and stripped of their identity. We assume they are the human grist ground on Voight's path to rapturous pleasure. 

HPSHAWTY - TO YOUR DOME W/TENNGAGE

Cooler by Francine Bridge

Mobile Suit Gundam: Cucuruz Doan's Island

Since it's based on an episode of the 1979 television series Mobile Suit Gundam that was deemed too poor - by series creator Yoshiyuki Tomino - to be included in any of the North American licensing agreements made in the early 2000s, surely Mobile Suit Gundam: Cucuruz Doan's Island should then be supplementary? Little more than a fanciful feature-length interlude that cannot play into any larger story or thesis specifically because of its apparent, ancestral, disposability? As if to hammer home this point, Yoshikazu Yasuhiko (the director of Crusher Joe: The Movie, the Sight and Sound feted Arion and early Manga Video UK release Venus Wars)'s film even disregards a time-sensitive mission given to the heroic faction, while the piece is rolling, to concentrate on Amuro Ray, a child soldier who has been uprooted from his warship habitat then deposited on a desolate island that is home to an enemy deserter and the war orphans under his protection. 

Injured during a battle with a weather-beaten but expertly piloted Zaku, Amuro awakens, not as a captive, but as a guest in Cucuruz Doan's household - a shattered lighthouse without the means to power its torch. While his host spends his time scratching away at blueprints from a lost age, the rest of the family, children of various ages, farm a small plot and dutifully tend to each other. Amuro slowly heals and eventually mixes in, earning the respect of the other children by repairing the pipes that carry their water supply. Although apparently low in its stakes, the power in Yasuhiko's film is that there is very little underlying tension between Doan and Ray. They are warriors from opposing sides but, unlike say John Boorman's Hell in the Pacific, there is little obvious animosity between the two before a truce can develop. The two characters barely even talk. It's not that Doan does not know that Ray is the pilot of the terrifying white Gundam either. Doan, we are shown, rescued an unconscious Ray from that stalled mobile suit. It seems that Doan has simply accepted that Ray is a child then treated him accordingly. 

When Amuro recovers enough to go searching the island for his giant robot, Doan gives him a water flask and a cap with a Zeon insignia stamped onto it. Amuro's acceptance of this cap is critical in terms of understanding how the boy is behaving in this space. Although the hat is adorned with the faction symbol of his enemy, Amuro accepts the gift purely in terms of its intended function: to keep him from getting sunstroke whilst out searching. He wears it without shame or complaint. He has seemingly disconnected from a theatre of war that, currently, exerts very little power on this place. When a crack Zeon commando unit - the Southern Cross Corps, Doan's former unit  - do arrive on the island, Doan again climbs inside his mobile suit in an attempt to vanquish the invaders. While Doan battles his one-time allies to a stand-still, Amuro finally locates his robot, nearly drowning in the process. Once encased in his Gundam, the teenager is forced to fight two of these commandos. The first he kills mech-to-mech, Amuro plunging his laser sword into the cockpit of the enemy mobile suit, vaporising his opposite. 

The second enemy pilot is out of his armour though, just a person snooping around. Amuro cannot afford to let him flee and either raise the alarm or resume piloting his robot though. Ray must press his advantage. Yoshikazu Yasuhiko's film again defies the simplistic morality of heroic fantasy by having this child use his towering robot to step on and crush this fleeing, helpless, enemy. The act registers first as disgusts then abject horror on Amuro's face; Yasuhiko's boyish draft of the character accentuating this acute, overwhelming, distress. The unspoken spell of Cucuruz Doan's island has been broken. Ray forcibly disconnects from the fast friendships he has made in this place; the safety and comfort of a childhood lived amongst other children. He resumes being a soldier. Later, having beaten back the remains of the Southern Cross Corps, Amuro enacts a kind of mercy on Doan, one he cannot give himself. Using his white Gundam, Amuro picks up the remains of Doan's ruined Zaku and casts it into the ocean, finally and completely severing Doan from a responsibility to fight. The children fret but their guardian understands. As Amuro and his White Base allies are waved off from the island, the viewer is left with an overwhelming impression that they have experienced a short but profound moment in Amuro's life. An alternative to a life spent fighting was briefly available to him but, ultimately, forgone. 

Muckman by Jeremy Brooks

Voyage - Align

Krosia & VIQ - Cloud Travel