Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (Optimus Prime) by IBI

YOUTH 83, Forhill & Lucy in Disguise - City Sleeper

King of New York

Christopher Walken's Frank White is a spectral presence in Abel Ferrara's gorgeous gangster film. He's a wraith, recently exorcised from Sing-Sing prison, who attracts an almost fanatical level of loyalty from his grinning subordinates - including a never better Larry Fishburne as two-fisted stick-up artist Jimmy Jump. Quite apparently this pallid mob boss is a long established rallying point for the up-and-coming criminals who fail to meet the recruitment requirements of the racially segregated syndicates that otherwise rule the city's drug trade. This King of New York is tall and narrow; he betrays a searching, reptilian demeanour with a shock of hair permanently blasting away from his temples. People flock to this phantom though, and not just the lost boy crews looking for a figurehead. 

White moves and shakes across his island's entire social strata, equally at home in resplendent dining rooms gently manipulating local dignitaries as he is staring into space in one of cinematographer Bojan Bazelli's smoked-out crack dens. Fresh from his Hudson Line lock-up, and consolidating his power base, White sends Paul Calderón's Joey Dalesio, a wavering consigliere, to sit in a cinema alongside a chatty Triad boss watching FW Murnau's Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. We see glimpses of Max Schreck's verminous Count Orlok creeping across the decks of a schooner, preying on a startled sailor. This mocking insinuation from Joey Chin's drug smuggler, presumably arranged within the context of the film as a power play designed to ridicule his absent rival, does have deeper merit than a simple jab.

White is vampiric. Beyond his lifeless countenance and an affinity for the night, it's clear that he bewitches everyone he encounters, charming them with a directness that is itself rooted in a strange, complicated morality. He's Midtown Manhattan's very own prince of darkness. Like Dracula, he even has three brides, all unwavering in their loyalty. Theresa Randle's Raye and Carrie Nygren's Melanie are his bodyguards, never far from his side and willing to place their own bodies between White and bullets, while Janet Julian's Jennifer is his greatest treasure: a successful upper-middle class attorney whose very presence implies some level of propriety. Unlike his rivals in the city's law enforcement, who argue over a wife at her own wedding, White isn't possessive. These women pursue extracurricular entanglements with a variety of other men. Their fluid sexuality an extension of White's own corrupting spell. 

Schoolly D - Am I Black Enough for You?

PG-13 by Jack Davis

Max I Million - On My Mind

System96 - Propulsion

Wes Craven's New Nightmare

Comparatively restrained, especially for such a late sequel, Wes Craven's New Nightmare renounces tick 'em off teens to focus on torments with real weight and pain attached to them. This seventh outing for Fred Krueger defies its more formulaic predecessors by really spending time soaking in the anxieties and trauma generated by a killer who is, innately, supernatural. The marks he leaves demand to be explained away, to be attributed elsewhere by victims ashamed to even be considering this phantom's existence. Where previous instalments have careened from teenager to teenager, as they drift off towards oblivion, New Nightmare attaches itself to 30 year old actress Heather Langenkamp, playing herself as a widowed mother, as she slowly loses her grip on reality. Langenkamp, who starred as Nancy Thompson in the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, is assailed throughout New Nightmare by a variety of terrors that can be broadly defined by the tabloid-baiting idea of disreputable media having physical purchase in, and a pollutant effect on, the real world.

This notion goes beyond a badly made up Robert Englund (this time wearing leather pants and sporting a plastic looking bone claw) crawling all over a hospital ceiling, dragging a bleeding babysitter behind him. Miko Hughes plays Langenkamp's son Dylan as a sleepwalking preschooler gripped by what appears to be sustained abuse. Craven's New Nightmare forgoes presenting Krueger as the quipping serial killer of its immediate predecessors, here he's monstrous in ways that defy deification. A series of telephone calls in which Langenkamp is taunted by Freddy culminates in an episode in which the phone receiver transforms into a tongue to lick Langenkamp's face while the voice at the other end of the line gloats that it has touched her child. Craven then does not shy away from the paedophilic aspect of his creation: Krueger revels in the degradation and corruption of children. Indeed much of the New Nightmare's third-act is built around teams of nurses and paediatric doctors trying to separate a Freddy tainted Dylan from a mother who has, they believe, conjured up genuine obscenity by starring in a video nasty. New Nightmare pivots on the idea that, in the wider cultural conversation, these films - Craven's life's work - are often seen as so contentious as to be mind-altering. 

Noriko Sakai - Active Heart

Somebody Wanna Call a Goddamn Paramedic?! by Gavin Mitchell

Wellside - Rainy Daze

The Super Mario Bros. Movie

Even setting aside the Famicom-era nostalgia and a licensed song selection that leans heavily on the dwindling decades of the twentieth century, The Super Mario Bros. Movie is a still a feature dripping with throwback thinking. Specifically, the film makes it its business to explain (or attempt to bring some kind of logical order to) the deliberately surreal flourishes that 8-bit video games are built out of. Matthew Fogel's screenplay is pointedly pre-Marvel then, in the sense that it doesn't trust the audience to not get caught up on the minor details that power this technicolour fantasy. So not only is Mario's beloved Brooklyn a building site riddling with rising platforms and gloomy pipes - the film even adopts the flat two-dimensional perspective of a buzzing CRT television when Mario begins hurdling through one set of hazards - but the mushroom power-ups, that we know Mario will soon have to gobble up, are given an apprehensive dimension. In this way Chris Pratt's pixelated plumber is given an opportunity to overcome the minor fears associated with dinnertime fussiness - a note that may well have some resonance with the film's intended audience of children - as well as the more obvious peril associated with an enormous, fire-breathing dinosaur. 

Arooj Aftab - Inayaat

Grimlock vs Death's Head by Geoff Senior

Vengeance!

Released in May 1970, Chang Cheh's Vengeance! occupies its own, distinct, space between the halting nausea of John Boorman's Point Blank and the suited-and-booted vendetta powering a certain British crime film directed by Mike Hodges. Chang's film even seems to anticipate certain elements of that latter piece: both Vengeance! and 1971's Get Carter feature the immaculately tailored brother of a murdered man wading, almost effortlessly, through a nest of small-time crooks while pursued by a deadly sniper. Curiously, Vengeance's Hong Kong cinema release came just three months after the publication of the book Carter was based on, Ted Lewis' Jack's Return Home, so it's conceivable that someone at Shaw Brothers Studio was taking notes on the novel's broad plotting when outlining this feature. All that said, the crisp mod lines of David Chiang's buttoned-up suits - both black and a funereal white - definitively prefigure Carter's luxuriant three-piece. 

Chang uses these outfits to differentiate his stylish subject from the unbuttoned heavies that flank his enemies. They accentuate the actor's lither lines. The contrast is clear: David Chiang is a matinee idol in a sea of unremarkable slobs. Unlike the aforementioned Michael Caine classic, Vengeance! though finds space to detail the killing that incites such a bloody, single-minded response. The film spends time with Ti Lung's Guan Yu Lou, a theatrical performer who believes himself as tough (mostly with good reason) as the Chinese folk heroes he portrays on stage. After tangling with a local mobster over an unfaithful wife, Guan Yu meets a bloody end thanks to the small army of amoral retainers that the crime lord keeps on payroll. Chang and editor Chiang Hsing-Lung employ a sickly dreaminess to describe this killing, drawing a clear line between the death throes of this bloodied brother and the twirling acrobatics of his earlier, operatic, performance. When Ti Lung's character finally submits to the punctures stamped all over his body, Chang inserts a shot of the actor lying dead on stage, the curtains open and appalled before an unmoved audience. 

Revenge in this film then is demonstrably motivated by a collective indifference to the murder of a slighted individual, one who had found himself powerless when attacking the corruption that upholds the establishment. This grudge must then be resolved by the actor's younger, meaner brother. Vengeance!, much like Chang's previous hit The Wandering Swordsman, is comfortable literalising the thoughts that prickle across the minds of these dying men; the fantasies and flights of fancy that hint at a life beyond whichever suicide pact that have, willingly, sunken themselves into. Although Chiang's Guan Xiao Lou proves himself far more capable than his older brother - equalising a feud that, eventually, seems to encompass an entire province's worth of violent belligerents - the end result is no less fatal. Bleeding out, he imagines himself in the company of his older brother, a cheery connection perhaps missing in the lives these men actually lived. This hallucinogenic quality reaches out into the rest of film, even encompasses the depiction of violence. Pivotal maulings are slowed to a crawl, luxuriating in eerie music and ghoulish sound cues that seem to denote an episode of profound mania - an aesthetic flourish, incidentally, copied to great effect to describe the bloodlust felt by Bruce Lee in 1973's Enter the Dragon. 

ALISON - Far from Home

Tech-Noir by Gavin Mitchell

Zane Alexander - More

Madonna - What It Feels Like For A Girl (Above & Beyond 12" Club Remix)

Eraser

For some inexplicable reason, director Chuck Russell's Eraser is unusually interested in presenting Arnold Schwarzenegger in ways that are incongruous to the star's, by now long-established, screen image. Unfortunately this disharmony has nothing to do with the kind of character or emotional wavelength Schwarzenegger is being expected to play. John Kruger is not a stretch for the actor, the character an only lightly evolved version of the cyborg bodyguard seen in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Rather than stand between James Cameron's futuristic Christ and incoming bullets, this T-800 has been assigned (programmed?) to protect Vanessa Williams' Lee Cullen, a senior executive at a weapons manufacturer who has snooped too deeply into her company's extra-legal affairs and caught the attention of a government hit squad. Russell has woven a different kind of friction into Eraser then, one specifically to do with the outrageous physical feats being mapped onto Arnold's forty nine year old body. 

The film's opening action sequence sees Schwarzenegger entering a blown FBI safehouse to rescue a former charge from an army of prowling mobsters. In the melee, a masked Kruger delivers an unusually high roundhouse kick to the shoulder of a snacking assassin before using a refrigerator door to twist the stunned man's skull away from his neck. Spine snapping may be standard for this era of tape cinema but the spin-kick that stuns the heavy comes off as lightly comical, especially given that this too-athletic turning strike follows a gormless close-up of Schwarzenegger's face bursting out of a black balaclava. Doubling isn't anything new for an action star like Schwarzenegger - True Lies from the previous year is riddled with physically smaller men hurtling around in cranium expanding wigs - but Russell's application is the first time where it begins to feel deliberately farcical, as if the director is sending up the limping machismo of his ageing hero. 

A later sequence in which Kruger pirouettes off a docking crane then drops thirty feet onto a group of gangsters isn't just laughable though, it's risible. the feat completely incongruent with a persona built around unusually cunning musculature. With Schwarzenegger seemingly being boxed off to the knacker's yard, it falls to James Caan as treacherous US Marshal Robert DeGuerin to generate the film's stranger, but much more memorable, situations. A hostage rescue sequence in which DeGuerin shows his true colours - while Schwarzenegger is busy using an enormous knife to pin creeping stunt players to hardwood doors - has a surprising level of cruelty to it. After executing a bewildered (and obviously conspiratorial) kidnapper, DeGuerin embraces the heavy's sobbing captive. While soothing the shattered woman with baby talk, his hand inches towards the pistol held by the man DeGuerin has just shot. The Marshal seizes the death-gripped side arm then thrusts it up into the lady's chest, blasting a hole through her. 

While the hostage chokes and drowns on her own blood, DeGuerin begins miming his way through a CPR routine; pinching the dying woman's nose, to obstruct her dying gasps, while blowing uselessly on her cheek. His eyes dart to the nearest doorframe, willing it to be filled by some clueless rookie who can then go on to corroborate his version of events. The impressive thing about this sequence, in an otherwise rote action extravaganza, is that Caan is unafraid to be seen as truly vile in these moments. His demeanour is scurrying and venal as he powers through a charade that is both opportunistic and breathtakingly callous. The gurgling hostage is treated as a prop in DeGuerin's collapsing fiction. She is physically manipulated, in her death throes, by a man who has killed her for his own immediate (but hardly far-reaching) benefit. Caan doesn't shy away from the rape subtext in this scene either - the actor doesn't attempt to play this sequence in ways that are clinical or expert, he slobbers all over his victim, twisting and turning her in ways so obviously objectionable that the British film censor hacked the sequence to pieces for the film's UK release. 

Eagle Eyed Tiger - Clockwork

Ryuichi Sakamoto - Energy Flow