Films 2022

Writer-director James Cameron has a knack for writing chimera: characters who combine, or who are at least attempting to reconcile, two disparate forms of identity. His Terminators are the most obvious example of this psychological discrepancy. They are futuristic machinery wrapped up in a sheath of human flesh that either rots in place after being shot full of holes or transmits such a convincing camouflage that the deception begins to turn itself inwards, inspiring a dot matrix approximation of heroism. Stephen Lang's motion-captured shade of Colonel Miles Quaritch is an abomination, a high-and-tight infiltrator who makes no attempt to assimilate or even disguise his Earthly origins. He is the memories and prejudices of an American imperialist, inscribed on the eve of what he believed to be his career-defining victory then wired into another massive cobalt clone. Jake Sully's eager symbiosis in the original film is caricatured in Avatar: The Way of Water by a team of colossal photostats who refuse to let go of their branded sunglasses and tactical apparel. Quaritch and his thugs only speak the language of conquest, clinging on to the possessions and hang-ups that defined their (now extant) human lives.

Original review

Although we are told that pain and infection have been eliminated in the oddly Mediterranean present seen in Crimes of the Future, Viggo Mortensen's Saul writhes in agony throughout David Cronenberg's latest film. Unlike his partner, Léa Seydoux's Caprice, who can hold steaming skillets and must voluntarily alter her appearance, Saul's body is constantly undergoing a twisting transformation. His insides give birth to new, unknown organs that are assumed to be vestigial and potentially tumorous. Saul submits himself to Caprice's surgical tinkering for the amusement of the champagne and canapés set, earning them both a fainting notoriety. Even the performance artist's attempts to feed himself primary-coloured mush requires a soothing, swishing, skeletal apparatus - one designed to simulate the movements that a body locked in choking dysphagia has otherwise grown unaccustomed to. 

Original review

A stop-motion animation project decades in the making, Phil Tippett's Kickstarted shorts have - finally - blossomed into a full-length feature. Far longer than the constituent parts drip-feed over the tail-end of the 2010s, this Mad God pulls apart those three previously released episodes then stitches them back together around deeper, meaner, digressions. As always, a sturdy looking fellow in a gas mask is airdropped into a Hell of scratch built rot from the skies above, tasked with making sense of a crumbling map and the relentless gnashing around him. His journey excavates dozens of extinct, and still-functional, realms; all fixated on cruelty as an industry with no clear outcome. These wanders take the gas masked assassin to the centre of this sunken creation to set a bomb that has no hope of detonating.

Original review 

Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Memoria is built out of held frames, the director and his cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom using a flattened space, unmotivated by camera movement, to create vignettes. Tilda Swinton creeps across these frames. Her Jessica is always reticent, a trespasser slowly prodding further and further into places she doesn't seem convinced that she should be occupying. Weerasethakul also cranks up diegetic sound far beyond typically acceptable levels. The audience prodded to tune into the cacophonies that accompany this stillness; understanding these rhythms as extant incident rather than a plotted bread crumb. Weerasethakul never betrays this somnolent trust either. He allows his audience to abandon their search for obvious meaning or direction, sinking into scenes and situations to the extent that they are then able to conjure up a sense memory - a smell, maybe - associated with their own experience of having existed within similar moments. 

Original review

Yoshikazu Yasuhiko's Mobile Suit Gundam: Cucuruz Doan's Island defies the simplistic morality of heroic fantasy by having its lead child use his towering white robot to step on and crush fleeing, helpless, enemies. The act, a grim necessity with a nuclear weapon in play, 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 this formerly peaceful space 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. The viewer is left with an overwhelming impression that they have experienced a short but profound moment in Amuro's life. An alternative to an existence spent fighting was briefly available to him but, ultimately, forgone. 

Original review

Amleth escapes but never recovers from the outrages he experiences as a child. The Northman's identity and outlook are frozen in the moments when he watched, helpless, as his father was slaughtered and his mother carried away as plunder. Amleth therefore never quite shakes off the spell that was cast over him in a smoke-choked hut in the days leading up to this event. His passage into adulthood was inadvertently stunted; the animal aspect that was summoned by shamanic ritual is never corrected by a return to the patterns and rhythms of a normal, albeit courtly, life. The oath he swears during his flight - to avenge his father and free his mother - becomes an all-consuming ideological fulcrum. A desire for correction now burns within Amleth. The emotion has swallowed him whole, feeding the slathering, amoral might that lurks within. 

Original review

Deciphered as camp by cackling YouTube nit-pickers, who are themselves mired in the digital language of an American action cinema that demands everybody present as indifferent, SS Rajamouli's RRR is instead a self-consciously mythic folk tale, one that isn't afraid to bend real-life revolutionary leaders to its own demented will by dreaming up the exciting fictions that tested these men while they were experiencing their own (Christ-like) wilderness years. Set during the brutal reign of the British Raj, Rajamouli's film concerns the fast friendship between two men from opposite ends of the Indian sociopolitical spectrum - Ram Charan's chiselled matinee idol cop and Nandamuri Taraka Rama Rao Jr's rather more cuddly tribal tracker. Discussion of Rajamouli's film has largely lasered in on its earnestness: the unashamed chumminess of the twin leads or the wave of computer generated animals that gobbled up the slow-on-the-draw colonisers. Far more affecting than either though is the scourging of Rama Rao Jr's Bheem, a sequence that generates a frequency similar to religious revelation, in which the captured man is whipped bloody by his best friend before his body is torturously manipulated by chained contraptions. Rather than kneel before the sadistic occupiers directing this outrage, Bheem straightens his flayed, oozing body and begins to sing through the barbed lashes. This immaculate defiance carries over the weeping crowds, drawn from Indian society's clashing castes, inspiring Bheem's countrymen to rise up then bite out the throats of their white tormenters.

Shin Ultraman impresses in its ability to constantly update both the stakes in play and the genre language used to decode them. The film's early passages set up a scenario straight out of the Silver Age Superman comics with Takumi Saitoh's Shinji Kaminga as the Clark Kent-like human alter-ego for Ultraman and Masami Nagasawa's Hiroko Asami as the Lois Lane analogue snooping into his affairs. This section contains delirious super-fights between the androgynous otherworldly defender and a radiation gobbling monster who has, in this instance, been spewed up from a revolting Earth. Viewpoints on these clashes are both observational and intimate. Whereas some shots are clearly derived from the locked perspectives available to awed human bystanders, other glimpses use an explicitly hand-held language, as if an equally massive cameraman has wriggled in-between these gigantic, steaming, participants. The lancing computer generated protrusions of these battling titans are also, clearly, rigged with (ginormous) GoPro cameras as they jab at Ultraman's indifferent alien face.

Original review

A technological gap between the United States of this film and a fictional Soviet-presenting superpower is a key building block in Top Gun: Maverick, one that allows the film to trespass into even more exciting and fantastical realms than its prequel. When the chips are down, Tom Cruise's Maverick is so supernaturally talented that he is able to render any advantage wrung out of next-gen aeronautical innovation effectively null. He doesn't just pilot his aircraft, he has a symbiotic relationship with the machinery. This concept is hammered into the audience via IMAX footage of a purple, straining Cruise riding billion dollar planes so hard that they seem to be about to fall apart. 

Original review

Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash takes place in an Indonesian underworld where an unquenchable desire to square up allows men to exert themselves on a landscape lousy with bull-headed machismo. Beginning in the 1980s then jumping back-and-forth in time with little heed, the film chronicles the relationship between Marthino Lio's Ajo Kawir and Ladya Cheryl's Iteung. When the couple first meet Ajo is impotent, attempting to cure his uncooperative penis through, by turns, righteous and trivial violence. Iteung is no stranger to combat either, acting as the bodyguard for a man who Ajo has judged to be morally dubious. The two fight, an even match that is captured from an observational distance then conveyed to the audience in an unhurried edit that naturally tracks fatigue and frustration. Their back-and-forth is a flurry of palms and elbows; a series of twisting embraces in which the two briefly conjoin then detach. Naturally, they quickly fall in love. 

Original review

Also Liked:

Ambulance // Barbarian // The Battle at Lake Changjin II: Water Gate Bridge // Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe // Belle // The Bob's Burgers Movie // Decision to Leave // Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness // Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero // Everything Everywhere All at Once // Halloween Ends // Jackass Forever // Licorice Pizza // Lost Bullet 2 // Nope // Prey // Scream // Thirteen Lives // Thor: Love and Thunder // Turning Red // X

Video Games 2022

Andro Dunos II is a scrolling shooter steeped in the pastel aesthetic of SNES-era cartridges, less the crippling slowdown. Players are tasked with nudging a chubby yellow space craft around a series of futuristic backdrops on the way to meet the customary great big boss with a flashing weak point. Picorinne Soft's game doesn't set out to redefine its host genre but it is an immediately and consistently fun game. Controls are crisp and responsive, while the weapon system and in-game currency are centred around a suite of beam types instantly selectable during gameplay. One might fire at enemies creeping in on horizontals, while another blasts out of the ship's exhaust system, shredding the ships that are attempting to ambush from behind. 

A throbbing twin-stick shooter, packed full of shrieking pinks and calming blues. Devastator is a locked-60, neon everything, update of ancient Atari cabs. Amber coloured virus vectors spill into the cramped, one-screen stages; their successive, escalating detonations tapping out a chorus of percussive pops. In their self-replicating midst are bolder coloured infections that chase down the player ship, crowding them until their think-fast reactions fail them. Radiangames' release is anything but tranquil, demanding players arc their craft in harried circles and issue split-second responses to their constantly evolving cage. 

Open world games follow a very specific formula, one that sees massive sections of the map consigned to the semi-useless state of travel scenery. There might be the odd roaming beast or item-packed cave hidden away somewhere in the scrub but, for the most part, these spaces present like physically playable loading screens; inflicted on the user as a way to stall forward-momentum between a world's more detailed gameplay destinations. FromSoftware's Elden Ring succeeds a series of games designed around a (reasonably) linear in-world progression. Players may be able to travel against the currents, so to speak, when exploring but any serious intrusion into late-game realms is prevented by the sheer weakness of the player's under-levelled character. 

So how do Hidetaka Miyazaki and his development teams approach their own open world game? While there are summits, scattered about the stained world map, that do offer the familiar experience of creeping through a dungeon-cum-barracks, for the most part Elden Ring provides players with a genuinely curious sense of exploration, one so multi-layered and rewarding that, in truth, the act of snooping around in this world is a closer experience to that of an archaeologist excavating a series of beautiful-but-fallen kingdoms. Elden Ring is actually kind of staggering in its ability to constantly, and meaningfully, reward the desire to ignore the obvious path forward. For the truly inquisitive, Elden Ring is a curated paradise of ever-expanding grottos and underworlds: bone dusted oubliettes conceal black chapels attended by praying secret bosses, while the death mask of a rotting, deposed, God lies calcified beneath a rioting castle. Elden Ring is an astonishing achievement, the kind of game that offers loops so purely captivating that it's struggle to work up much enthusiasm for anything else. 

Deconstructive in terms of its character-driven intent, God of War: Ragnarök actually does an excellent job of describing to the player why Kratos was always bubbling with rage back in those PS2-era games. Tag along sidekicks and secondary characters will not leave you alone. They're constantly in your ear, immediately describing how to accomplish any task placed in-front of you. You know, the checkpoint push you're currently and conspicuously ignoring because the game is laid out with dark corners that conceal the game's stingy power-ups. Still, when combat is joined, at least you can order your chatty little pals to riddle your enemies with arrows. 

The King of Fighters XV is the latest sequel to SNK's (used to be) annually released Street Fighter alternative, a series that I've slept on since the first few 2000s releases trickled out to the Dreamcast grey import scene. Although it very much does look like the game is happy to walk new and returning players through the more recent mechanical updates (in a dedicated training mode), I'm satisfied just navigating straight to Arcade mode, selecting the Garou team and letting Terry Bogard's burn knuckles do the talking. 

A decade and a half since the first game, No More Heroes III entertains thanks to a structural model that is, similarly, completely out of time. Grasshopper Manufacture's sequel is a PS2-era open world adventure by way of a neutron bombing - there are things to do in Santa Destroy but they are blips and outposts in a vast expanse of rubble. When set against modern waypoint chasers, No More Heroes III is simplistic and gimmicky; constructed around a combat system that feels puny until several special actions have been unlocked. By the end of the game though, every input and action is being juggled and exploited. Battles are transformed from inching attrition into an interactive checklist of ways to sap or undermine the massive health bars in play. If that doesn't do it for you, end-of-stage cutscenes dispense with cataloguing your effect on this invaded world, preferring that the player sit opposite two de-tuned movie maniacs as they discuss the filmography of Takashi Miike instead. 

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge, aside from being a fun and surprisingly detailed scrolling beat 'em up, prickles strange nostalgic affections for characters that have long since dropped off anyone's internal radar. I'm not talking about the Ninja Turtles themselves or their feature pals like Splinter, April or Casey Jones. Rather it's your Irmas or your Punk Frogs or even your Vernon fucking Fenwicks. Characters created specifically for the 1987 children's TV series that have enjoyed no purchase or presence on pretty much anything Turtle-flavoured that has followed. These spectres appear throughout Tribute Games' pixelated fairyland, instantly transporting unsuspecting credit depositors back several decades to their local video shops, browsing the shelves to see if they have any tapes to rent that don't revolve around those dreadful Pizza Monsters.  

Remarkable in the sense that developers Witch Beam have taken an incredibly mundane (even frustrating) daily task, in this case de-cluttering, and managed to wring out an experience that is acutely heart-breaking. Yeah, Unpacking is little more than a series of screens and objects to organise, but the passage of time these scene shifts imply is alarming in terms of how quickly they are speeding through a young person's life. Box rooms in family homes give way to student accommodation then tentative steps towards co-habitation. Totems and trinkets stick around for a few successive levels then drift away, lost to the void invoked by regular transit. You feel like you're wishing someone's life away. 

Even when played on a clapped-out old iOS phone, Vampire Survivors' merits are completely obvious. Players take control of a tiny collection of pixels, striding about a flat field while inundated with increasingly macabre enemies. Upgrades come thick and fast: sometimes crucial, equally as often they are useless. Before long the whole of playing area is alive and seething with bubbling necromantic threat; an entire fantasy bestiary tracking in on your kiting, vulnerable little figure. Luca Galante's self-published marvel is as compulsive as games get. 

A vertical scrolling shooter built around the idea of a replenishing smart bomb. Typically, in games of this type, screen clearing power-ups are strictly rationed out, usually only available to players when they've just pumped another coin into the greedy housing cab. Z-Warp traps players inside the intestinal tract of some enormous cosmic beast, battling bosses named for gastro-oesophageal disorders and collecting spinning, toxic waste coloured skulls. The aforementioned explosive is on a timer, counting up as the player dodges distress; nervy deployments will inch out an immediate path through the onslaught but a fully charged detonation will clear a significant portion of the screen. 

Music 2022

Aisus - Sundown Trauma // Amber Mark - Bliss // Arcade Fire - Age of Anxiety II (Rabbit Hole) // Eagle Eyed Tiger -  Matador // Electronic Gems - Never Say Always // Forhill - Liminal // Jessie Ware - Free Yourself // LAVNDR - Elden Ring Synthwave Remix // Let's Eat Grandma - Happy New Year // Magic Sword - There is Still Good in You // Midnight Drift & VIQ - Stuck in Time // Nas - Ghetto Reporter // The Northern Boys - Party Time // Rosentwig - Daydream // Sharon Van Etten - Headspace // Simon Franglen - A New Star // Sky Ferreira - Don't Forget // Taylor Swift - Anti-Hero // Tom Skinner - Quiet As It's Kept // Thom Yorke - 5.17 // VIQ - Girl from Nowhere // Weyes Blood - It's Not Just Me, It's Everybody

snaer - Wintr

Marvel vs Capcom 2 (Preorder Sample) by Yung Khan

The Specials - Do Nothing (Live at BBC's Top of the Pops)

Simon Franglen - A New Star

Avatar: The Way of Water

Writer-director James Cameron has a knack for writing chimera: characters who combine, or who are at least attempting to reconcile, two disparate forms of identity. His Terminators are the most obvious example of this psychological discrepancy. They are futuristic machinery wrapped up in a sheath of human flesh that either rots in place after being shot full of holes or transmits such a convincing camouflage that the deception begins to turn itself inwards, inspiring a dot matrix approximation of heroism. In the first Avatar, Sam Worthington's futuristic conquistador, Jake Sully, dreamt himself into a life in which his withered battle-scarred body had been replaced with that of a towering feline alien. This new flesh and carbon fibre bone allowed him to run and leap then, finally, soar with dragons. Sully willingly plugged into this transformative experience, consciously deciding to let his waking - human - life fade away and, eventually, die. 

Cameron, co-writing with Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, dedicates no small part of Avatar: The Way of Water to re-examining this process from the perspective of a less enthusiastic participant. Stephen Lang's motion-captured shade of Colonel Miles Quaritch is an abomination; a high-and-tight infiltrator who makes no attempt to assimilate or even disguise his Earthly origins. He is the memories and prejudices of an American imperialist, inscribed on the eve of what he believed to be his career-defining victory then wired into another massive cobalt clone. His arrival on the satellite planet of Pandora is marked by cataclysm. The enormous retrorockets decelerating these unwelcome visitors obliterates the forest setting from the first film; animals and trees alike are shattered then consumed by bubbling firestorms. Simon Franglen's score - which otherwise builds itself around the themes and motifs of the late James Horner - seizes on this apocalyptic, mechanised imagery, quoting the pounding percussion and shrieking strings of Gustav Holst. Mankind's arrival is likened to that of a Martian invasion force. Terraforming on this habitable moon is to be achieved through extermination, a plan of envy straight out of HG Wells' The War of the Worlds. 

The Quaritch thing is always aware that it is a facsimile, it embraces the designation, allowing a video recording of its (somewhat dismissive) clone father to appoint it as a creature of pure vengeance. With very little information regarding its parent's passing - this is reproduction as the purely technological duplication of the hopelessly macho - the zipped-up Na'vi decides to retrace Sully's steps, to experience this planet as he did. Jake Sully's eager symbiosis is caricatured by a team of colossal photostats who refuse to let go of their branded sunglasses and tactical apparel. Quaritch and his thugs only speak the language of conquest, clinging on to the possessions and hang-ups that defined their (now extant) human lives. We are told a couple of times in The Way of Water that Na'vi bodies can easily survive in the oxygen rich environments mankind has created on Pandora. The Quaritch copy though remembers being human, it's fixated on its vulnerability in this harsh extraterrestrial environment. So, rather than breathe shallow in a false climate, it clings to an artificial breathing apparatus, supping on it greedily. 

HPSHAWTY - SHIT OUTTA LUCK

Angelo Badalamenti - Red Bats with Teeth

2000 AD & Starlord Prog 125 by Mike McMahon

YOUTH 83 - Limbo

Detective vs. Sleuths

Detective vs. Sleuths follows Sean Lau's Jun Lee, a former police inspector haunted by a series of cases in which - he feels - the wrong people took the fall. Jun, resplendent in a patched-up yellow raincoat, frequently beats Hong Kong's finest to the punch when investigating murders, able to tune into the heckling spirits of the soon-to-be-departed (that are screaming inside his head) to make enormous deductive leaps; second-guessing the criminal gang who are terrorising the island. Directed by Wai Ka-fai, Johnnie To's co-director on Fulltime Killer and Mad Detective, Detective vs Sleuths works best when Jun is heedlessly racing ahead of his bewildered accomplices. A cramped shoot-out in an apartment complex is given another absurd level of danger thanks to Jun's delusional belief that he is both carrying a pistol and a crack shot with it. 

In reality, Jun has raced ahead of his former colleagues with nothing more than a finger gun, wildly cocking his thumb at pistol-packing youths while Charlene Choi Tsoek-jin's heavily pregnant lieutenant inspector chases after him. Entertaining when trapped in Jun's company - the disgraced detective a kind of homeless, paranormally gifted Columbo - Wai's film starts to stumble the further we have to stray from his perspective. The level of churning exposition required to make sense of the denouement sadly means that Jun is often side-lined for the ravings of sleeper cell psychopaths. The decision to resolve all interpersonal threads through endless gunfire doesn't help either. That key characters must be slowly rationed into the film's final moments means that their passage to these events is lousy with ineffectual computer-assisted shoot-outs. Teams of well-trained experts line up across from each other to mindlessly blast away, the scenery alive with puny CG squibs that make no physical impact on anything or anyone. It's as if the case has been temporarily turned over to Leslie Nielsen's Police Squad!. 

The Beatles with James Richards - Four Guys // Jenn

AKKA ARRH - Cascade

Jeff Minter's latest psychedelic screen-wiper is a remake of an unreleased Atari cabinet demo. By all accounts, the original code of Akka Arrh was pushed out to a small test market in 1982 only to be deemed 'too difficult' by the assembled consumers. The junked version of this failed coin-gobbler was recently made available on the Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration; Minter's delirious take on wave shooting is, we are promised, coming soon. 

Radiohead - You (Drill Version)

The Complete Judge Dredd #23 by Mike McMahon

Kupla - Seven Seas

DavZ - Untethered

Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash

A martial arts film in the sense that the ability to fight fluently carries a disproportionate amount of socio-political currency (when compared to the real world), Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash takes place in an Indonesian underworld where an unquenchable desire to square up allows men to exert themselves on a landscape lousy with bull-headed machismo. Beginning in the 1980s then jumping back-and-forth in time with little heed, the film chronicles the relationship between Marthino Lio's Ajo Kawir and Ladya Cheryl's Iteung. When the couple first meet Ajo is impotent, attempting to cure his uncooperative penis through, by turns, righteous and trivial violence. Iteung is no stranger to combat either, acting as the bodyguard for a man who Ajo has judged to be morally dubious. The two fight, an even match that is captured from an observational distance then conveyed to the audience in an unhurried edit that naturally tracks fatigue and frustration. Their back-and-forth is a flurry of palms and elbows; a series of twisting embraces in which the two briefly conjoin then detach. Naturally, they quickly fall in love. 

Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash, directed by Edwin and co-written for the screen with Eka Kurniawan, the author of the book on which this film is based, often plays like a magical realism reimagining of Lo Wei's The Big Boss; specifically the idea of a self-sufficient working class hero who becomes (or already is) compromised by their dealings with criminality. Triumph in Edwin's film drips out over decades, captured slowly by people defying destructive impulses and surrendering themselves to genuine vulnerability. Ajo and Iteung share a similar damage; Iteung apparently less apt to share the horrors that have been visited upon her. The revenge she takes is not necessarily even her own, in terms of the specific actors or situation, but the power dynamics that have wrought life-long damage on her beloved are all too familiar. Ladya Cheryl is captivating throughout, grappling with co-stars and contradictory emotional frequencies with a swaggering confidence. Edwin's deliberately anachronistic film constantly defies expectation, able to juggle sequences that terminate using the kind of soundtrack swing deployed to smooth transitions in televised spy serials with hurried glimpses of screeching human horror. There's a sustained and insidious sense throughout that the women and children crammed into the piece are all at the mercy of men who can only express themselves through the barbarous application of force. 

Weyes Blood - God Turn Me Into a Flower

Rosentwig - Daydream

Ultraman by Eli Minaya

Let's Eat Grandma - Happy New Year

Kupla - Reflection

Shin Ultraman

Although not strictly a sequel to 2016's Shin Godzilla, director Shinji Higuchi's Shin Ultraman does go further than a few vague allusions to its predecessor. The film begins by painting The King of Monsters' name in the swirling extradimensional emulsions familiar to fans of Tsuburaya Productions before a bristling re-design of the monster Gomess from the 1966 Ultra Q television series - in its original incarnation a lightly dressed Godzilla suit inherited from the Mothra vs Godzilla and Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster shoots - puts in a bunker busting appearance. This spiked variant recasts Higuchi and Hideaki Anno's flayed take on Toho's monarch, and the film that detailed his landing, as an inciting incident: the first clash between mankind and this kind of cataclysmic kaiju. Shin Ultraman then is the light-hearted follow-up, one in which, rather than simply see Japan wither under radioactive fire, humankind is slowly beginning to take possession of these incredible powers for themselves. 

Whatever the film's lineage, Shin Ultraman impresses in its ability to constantly update both the stakes in play and the genre language used to decode them. The film's early passages set up a scenario straight out of the Silver Age Superman comics with Takumi Saitoh's Shinji Kaminga as the Clark Kent-like human alter-ego for Ultraman and Masami Nagasawa's Hiroko Asami as the Lois Lane analog snooping into his affairs. This section contains delirious super-fights between the androgynous otherworldly defender and a radiation gobbling monster who has, in this instance, been spewed up from a revolting Earth. Viewpoints on these clashes are both observational and intimate. Whereas some shots are clearly derived from the locked perspectives available to awed human bystanders, other glimpses use an explicitly hand-held language, as if an equally massive cameraman has wriggled in-between these gigantic, steaming, participants. The lancing computer generated protrusions of these battling titans are also, clearly, rigged with (ginormous) GoPro cameras as they jab at Ultraman's indifferent alien face. 

Shin Ultraman then discards its secret identity intrigue, using a giantess (that staple of atomic age science fiction) to introduce the idea that the human body is - in this universe - a rich and endlessly modifiable resource. The extraterrestrials that follow the silent and stoic Ultraman to Earth, although not above toppling skyscrapers to get their way, largely engage with a bemused mankind by employing a delinquent form of political brinkmanship. Several successive wheeler-dealers - the most distinctive of which is Alien Zarab, a well-spoken metallic creature with a cosmically powered smartphone who conceals its blue pinhole eyes (and two-dimensional body) under a black coat and tipped fedora, an appearance not unlike Hiroshi Fujimoto and Motoo Abiko's The Laughing Salesman - ingratiate themselves with the Diet, offering Japan all manner of magical boons that, on the face of it, should allow Ultraman's adoptive country to definitively take its place amongst the world's superpowers. Japan's political class are portrayed as greedy, power hungry and hopelessly out of their depth. They fail to consider a perspective beyond their own planet; what these technological gifts then mean for an unseen, and apparently uneasy, intergalactic détente. Shin Ultraman then honours the intent behind the grasping humanoid mutations seen at the conclusion of Shin Godzilla, if not necessarily the strict circumstances of how they came to be. 

The Transformers: The Movie by Florey

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

The Battle at Lake Changjin II: Water Gate Bridge

The Battle at Lake Changjin II: Water Gate Bridge hurtles straight into pitched battle, dispensing with the first film's magic hour propriety and the gleaming computer generated landscapes that awed their bumpkin witnesses. The absence of these obviously falsified vistas, and the one-note nationalism they were designed to inspire, is an immediate boon in this sequel. Although positioned to evoke an expansive cinemascope awe, The Battle at Lake Changjin's adoring gander at The Great Wall of China was so golden and artificial that it actually more closely resembled those animated multi-channel audio trailers that would cue up before the main feature on certain region 3 DVDs. The nostalgic affection that pulsed through the previous episode has been almost completely hacked away then, leaving something rugged and monolithic in its place. 

Our sole glimpse of China in this episode is across snow-capped mountaintops; a distant and unreachable summit spotted by men whose bodies have already begun to rot. The sumptuous agitprop bent of the previous piece has been chiselled away - Changjin I's chivalrous affectations replaced with a two hour ode to gnarled noses and fingertips shattering by gunfire. The direction of this instalment is credited solely to Tsui Hark - Dante Lam and Chen Kaige are relegated to Executive Producer posts - this change in billing reflected in a film that, unlike its predecessor, does not feel like it is subject to umpteen clashing tones. Changjin II's focus is despairing combat, the film using furious montage and time-slice photography (emphasis on slice) to detail the pyrrhic bloody-mindedness required to push a human body past its breaking point. 

Water Gate Bridge's plot revolves around an enormous concrete complex that houses a mountain pass that will allow the American armed forces to flee the war in Korea, and the desperate efforts by People's Volunteer Army's 7th Company to detonate it. Frost-bitten Chinese soldiers, dressed in rags and wielding confiscated grease guns, hurl their bodies into hopeless, repetitive, conflict. This hair-raising martyrdom is backed by diegetic bugles and non-diegetic orchestra; a sweeping and anthemic chorus to match the film's euphoric expression of (fatalistic) patriotism. No-one escapes the meat grinder: matinee idols are penetrated and pulverised; teeth chip on flash-frozen rations; and a slumming boy bander (Jackson Yee) wears gashes all over his T-Zone, the marks burned into his face by the metal googles he has worn to protect his eyes. This deliriously photographed body horror peaks with a Chinese soldier being slowly crushed by an American tank. His flesh and bones gumming up the caterpillar tracks, rendering it still and, more importantly, vulnerable. This apparently dauntless machine of imperialist might is trapped in place by the literal body of the people. 

Rosentwig - Rapid Eye Movement

Savaged Regime - Toad Man (YM2612 Cover)

Batman by Daniel Douglas