Tuesday 21 March 2023
Monday 20 March 2023
Super Peitou Fist
Hair-raising nonsense that only notionally adapts Tetsuo Hara and Buronson's Fist of the North Star saga for its 1980s Taiwanese audience. Director Wu Chung-Wan's Super Peitou Fist dispenses with the shattered post-apocalyptic landscapes of its source material, preferring instead to stage its action around concrete infrastructure or a sculptured greenery that frequently reads like a botanical garden. Water features cram into the frame, adding layers of twinkling movement to the deathly dull meetings of the terminally rigid principle cast. This nonsensically metropolitan grounding has a knock-on effect in Super Peitou, one that demands a conceptual re-evaluation. The mutant raiders, born from a massive exposure to swirling nuclear radiation in the original manga, now require an alternative explanation. This film's solution is a gang of drug-pushing imbeciles who kidnap children then pump them full of growth hormones.
These injections transform the kids' racked, underdeveloped bodies into the tanned sinew of adult gym rats - instant henchmen wrapped in military fatigues and topped with deathhawk hairstyles that look like a cloud of chlorofluorocarbons has settled upon a startled raccoon. Lacking both the budget and filmmaking ability required to accurately translate the Japanese comic that inspired it, Peitou frequently abandons danger and physical intrigue to stage lengthy slapstick vignettes. Following one confrontation a masked villain finds himself spinning out of control on a speeding ambulance, an eye-catching distraction that builds into a wave of crashing physical comedy that (if we're being extremely generous) recalls the lurching blunders seen in Richard Lester's Superman sequels. Produced without the permission of absolutely any licence holder, Super Peitou Fist's humdrum aesthetic anticipates a couple of similarly bootlegged pictures from the period: Chun Liang Chen's Dragon Ball: The Magic Begins (another slapdash comedy from Taiwan) and Wong Jing's Future Cops, a feature-length follow-up to the scene in City Hunter where Jackie Chan bumps his head on a Street Fighter II arcade cab then takes on a variety of pixelated personas.
Saturday 18 March 2023
Tuesday 14 March 2023
Resident Evil 4 - STEYR POWER
A couple of weeks out from a full release, Capcom have pushed a demo of their long-awaited Resident Evil 4 remake to online stores. Presumably the first ten or so minutes of the final game, this preview code allows players to steer a lumpy, drunken-feeling Leon S Kennedy towards an even creepier break-and-enter incident, before urging him on to a one-sided shoot out with an army of creeping Nannas. Fans of ancient GameCube trial discs might recognise this segment as being broadly similar to the teaser packed with a special Capcom edition of Japan's Famitsu magazine. Published back in 2004, that miniDVD allowed extra curious players an opportunity to break the innate loop of the sample level, spawning two distinct chainsaw maniac encounters. These double-leggers, and the currency their defeat conferred, were crucial if the player wanted to unlock the TMP machine pistol. Here, Steyr fans simply have to discard the contents of their menu-bound attaché case before entering the fateful village, then drop down into a refuse-packed cave.
Tuesday 7 March 2023
Sunday 5 March 2023
Society
At least initially, Brian Yuzna's Society plays with a similar psychosexual disquiet as John Carpenter's Halloween. Billy Warlock, playing the 17 year old Bill Whitney when he was himself in his mid-20s, paces around a dark household whilst someone - presumably his parents and their friends - are having sex in a bedroom upstairs. Bill's response to this disconnected swinging is to to rifle through a kitchen drawer and seize on a knife, holding it close to his chest. Where a young Michael Myers felt empowered enough to sweep upstairs and kill his sister, Bill remains trapped downstairs. The teenager is frozen, intimidated by whatever it is that is taking place in his parent's bedroom. This fear marks Bill as the odd one out in his family. His parents openly flirt with his sister, and she with them. These three relations are happy to openly paw at each other, while wearing very little, much to Bill's obvious and understandable alarm.
Warlock's teenager is surrounded by strange sexual energies, all aggressively inappropriate and played at a pitch, in this upper middle-class American suburb, that seems to denote an incestuous conspiracy. In its beginnings, Yuzna's film appears to be using the stilted pageantry of coming-out parties or debutante ceremonies as a way to denote a passage into the secrets of the cultish adulthood that rules this neighbourhood. Patrice Jenning's Jenny, Bill's older sister, has gone on ahead, joining her parents in their grown up world and leaving her little brother behind. In spite of this obvious point of allegorical friction, there's precious little connective tissue between Bill and Jenny. If anything she seems to regard him with a light curiosity rather than any familial affection. They are always distinct parties, each never taking the other into their confidence. Bill, for his part, nurses a desire to inspect his sister, watching agog as her body contorts in a masturbatory ecstasy behind frosted glass.
Nakedness is linked with terror throughout Society, the human body twisting in ways it shouldn't be capable of. Sometimes this happens willingly, equally as often not. The finale, in which the rich and powerful of Beverly Hills are revealed to be an extremely callous sub-species of human able to combine their ageing bodies into a massive ravenous goop, appears to be premised on the childlike panic of witnessing a sexual act with no prior frame of reference. Screaming Mad George's glistening special effects work depicts the prolonged and violent rape of a teenage boy by a cackling country club set. They gleefully invade the young man's body, digesting him alive. As a viewer we are forced into the position of being an innocent, observing these blubbery bodies as they fuck and intertwine in alien intercourse. We judge them to be inherently violent, cannibalistic entities, rutting away with abandon. After all, they are all plainly feasting on each other. Yuzna's film even goes one step further: as horrifying as it would be to witness your parents locked in a strange or aberrant embrace, it would be truly nightmarish to then be expected to join in.
Friday 3 March 2023
Wednesday 1 March 2023
Guyver: Dark Hero
Revisiting Guyver: Dark Hero, for the first time in nearly three decades, it's a surprise to learn that the edit of the film that found its way onto UK tape rental shelves was twenty-odd minutes shorter than the original (straight-to-video) US release. Aside from the usual hair-splitting deletions demanded by the BBFC, Steve Wang's second stab at the bio-booster armour also lost a few instances of somnambulant exposition, as well as some much needed belt-tightening in the film's long-winded first act. These demands for expediency, presumably made by Dark Hero's British distributors 20/20 Vison (a division of RCA/Columbia Pictures), does ensure that the unconvincing acting that drives the human element of the story is pruned, in effect compressing Wang's film around its better qualities; specifically, acrobatic battles featuring a variety of rubbery, bleeding monsters.
These infrequent bursts of mayhem are reminiscent of Tsuburaya Productions' Redman, a short TV schedule filler from the early 1970s that recycled costumes from the Japanese studio's more prestigious properties. A typical episode might revolve around the crimson superhero wrestling with a couple of crumbling creatures in a quarry and very little else. Once the woodlands-set Dark Hero has chewed its way through clanging archaeological intrigue, the film is able to strike a similar wobbly-but-exuberant tone. This Guyver - whose costume is now notably trimmer and less agreeably nauseating than the draft seen in Mutronics - The Movie - pummels his adversaries in over-edited, but still legible fight sequences that tend to end with our transmuted hero serving up cranium cracking trauma. Gore aside these set-tos, choreographed by Koichi Sakamoto and performed by Anthony Houk (with Akihiro Noguchi performing a flying feint kick that would later be bequeathed to Scott Adkins), also wear a Hong Kong influence on their sleeve. The gravity-defying flurries of Jet Li, as seen in Tsui Hark's Once Upon a Time in China series (or, for that matter, Wong Jing's supernatural spin-off Last Hero in China), are quoted liberally.
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