Czleb - With Care

Project Wolf Hunting

From the outset, director Kim Hong-seon's Project Wolf Hunting plays around with the idea that criminals, and the sinewy bodies they have cultivated, are physically distinct from those who obey or attempt to enforce the law. This otherness is most obviously exemplified by Seo In-guk's Park Jong-du, an amoral gangster who leads a squadron of equally photogenic sociopaths aboard a rioting cargo ship. Covered in inky, peacock feathered tattoos that flicker up his neck then across his cheek, Park's painted skin takes on a reptilian quality; a cold-blooded affectation further reinforced by his casually murderous behaviour and an ability to summon up stringy lockpicks from secret compartments within his mouth. Set on a freighter transporting dozens of deadly prisoners through stormy weather, Wolf Hunting transmits tension with its constantly seesawing power dynamics. Initially, the police are in charge: a group of buttoned-up men and women, armed with snub-nosed pistols, who are (mostly) prepared to play by the rules, no matter how desperate the situation. Once Park and his allies are free, Wolf Hunting becomes drunk on the savagery of young men who take sexual delight in drawing knives across shrieking throats. Unfortunately for all involved, there is a third party; one whose grotesque, superhuman strength subordinates all other factions. Choi Gwi-hwa's ogre-like Alpha is, like Park and his cronies, unrestrained in his violence. Everybody he comes across is slowly and deliberately pulverised, be they cop or criminal. His feet splinter ribcages; his fingers sink into oozing skulls; everything that comes to hand, including limbs no longer attached to their bodies, are weapons. Faced with the dehumanising brutality of the jailor and the deranged cruelty of the jailed, Alpha levels the playing field. In his domain everybody is simply bleeding meat. 

Mishio Ogawa - Hashire Jitensha

Enemy by Francine Bridge

Crystal Cola - Eclipse

Resident Evil: Extinction

While Milla Jovovich's commitment to catwalk cataclysm has never wavered, each of the Resident Evil films has tackled the concept of video game adaptation in remarkably different ways. The first instalment, directed by Paul WS Anderson, was premised on the ways in which the root survival horror games revealed themselves, both spatially and visually. So as well as investigating the big business malevolence (literally) lurking beneath old money estates, Anderson's film also lifted the locked perspectives of the game's fixed camera angles. Only now the omniscient point-of-view was not that of the players steering these characters through the rotting dangers but that of the impassive computer intelligence calculating how to exterminate this biological infestation. In its best moments - particularly an opening sequence where offices packed with corporate climbers are ruthlessly liquidated - Anderson's film plays like a covert adaptation of Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream; the pillar on which all tales of seething, mechanical hatred are balanced. 

Resident Evil: Apocalypse, obsessed as it was with lionising the minutiae of Capcom's work, seemed to be more of an attempt at big screen veneration for this already successful brand. Despite its ambition, Alexander Witt's workmanlike idolatry proved to be less exciting than that managed by George A Romero (originally in the frame to direct his own big screen Resident Evil) with his 30 second long television ad for the second game in the series, Biohazard 2. The approach taken by Russell Mulcahy's consistently good-looking Resident Evil: Extinction differs again, marked by a willingness to translate the grammatical experience of video games rather than just broad events or fan-pleasing iconography. Extinction cross-contaminates bleached glimpses of an infernal, post-apocalyptic desert with pastel make-up interiors and creative inflections lifted from Japanese, post-humanist animation. Dramatically, Extinction revolves around dangerous encounters with various undead hordes, all visited on the film's dwindling collection of human survivors. These enemies all originate from an unclear or flimsy source, as if spawning in thanks to some unseen trigger. In the case of a setpiece that takes place in a Las Vegas that has been reclaimed by the desert, sprinting horrors issue ceaselessly from a shipping container that couldn't possibly contain this many creatures. 

The Smashing Pumpkins - Hooligan

Spinister by Christopher Wilson

Black Sabbath - War Pigs

ADMO - Bird Song

Resident Evil: Apocalypse

Despite an increase in budget that allows the filmmakers to make good on the rotting city glimpsed during the conclusion of the previous instalment, Resident Evil: Apocalypse is a one hundred minute long fumble. Instead of a blood-splattered laboratory, Alice (Milla Jovovich) and her disposable friends now have an entire city staffed with grinning mercenaries and the stuttering undead to creep through. Unfortunately, excitement-levels are not similarly bolstered. If anything the inverse is true: the more guns and wobbling, Mardi Gras titans that Apocalypse reveals, the more excruciating the viewing experience becomes. The first Resident Evil film was knowing enough not to gum its gears with this kind of consumptive sightseeing. That piece was more of a conceptual adaptation; one that took fragments of the original PlayStation game then used them to engineer sequences and situations based around the unblinking attention Paul WS Anderson paid to his leading ladies. Anderson's arrangement of bisected bodies (more than a little bit inspired by Vincenzo Natali's Cube) was even arresting enough to reinspire the developers back at Capcom. 

Lauded video game director Shinji Mikami, in a canny bit of call-and-response, translated Anderson's celebrated laser corridor set-piece back into an interactive obstacle for his own Resident Evil 4 (an encounter memorable enough to make its way into an expanded version of this year's remake). Less original by design, thanks to a fanbase that demanded fidelity when considering their polygonal adventures, Alexander Witt's Apocalypse is content to dutifully slog through the kind of material previously deemed extraneous. Witt's day job as a second-unit director for multiple Ridley Scott projects is only really detectable here in terms of a chopped-up intermittence that worms its way into the film's threadbare action sequences. Even when Apocalypse settles into a situation that should lend itself to an entertaining fracas, we are chased away from that moment by either harried cuts that explicitly take us elsewhere or a style of combat coverage best described as a spatial collapse. The only person able to portray fun under these galling circumstances is Sienna Guillory as deputy heroine Jill Valentine. Somehow the actress has managed to tune her performance into the strange frequencies and confident nonsense inherent to compact disc gaming. Her Valentine has bled off the CRT screen; every utterance clanging with the inelegance of tough talk translated from English into Japanese, then back again. 

The Smashing Pumpkins - Rhinoceros

Vampire by Nicole Rifkin

Adieu Aru - Violation (feat. Elati0n)

Resident Evil

Time has been kind to the films of Paul WS Anderson, particularly those he made in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The writer-director's preference for expansive, often maze-like sets and dwindling human resources no longer registers as a shorthand cribbed from James Cameron and John Carpenter simply because no-one, not even those namechecked directors, are making films like that anymore. Compared to the digital costumes and endless computer-generated vistas on display today, Resident Evil is surprisingly tactile. David Johnson's camera is a member of the crowd, jostled by the leads and experiencing the strange, claustrophobic intimacy of a packed lift. These sweaty anxieties, of course, couldn't be further away from the polygonal purgatories found in the Capcom video game series that Anderson is adapting. There the player is very much alone; silence and isolation indicative of a win state that they have fought hard to achieve. 

That which was deemed undercooked or second-hand when this big screen blow-up was released is now easier to celebrate, in large part, because of how Anderson has woven a constant sense of physical (even chemical) vulnerability into the piece. Dramatically and stylistically, Resident Evil is built around hangovers; specifically the inconvenient memories that bubble up out of particularly oppressive narcotic funks. Visually though, Resident Evil is a film preoccupied with faces: Anderson and cinematographer Johnson shoot Milla Jovovich and Michelle Rodriguez in ways that are intimate and adoring, focusing on the soft hairs on their necks as much as their tousled fringes or pouting lips. In Resident Evil the halting rhythm of this male gaze is also a tool that tracks fatigue and the transformations creeping inside the film's more photogenic subjects, with Rodriguez the victim of the most drastic metamorphosis. Repeatedly chewed-on by grasping, yuppie zombies, her character eventually succumbs to the same snarling hungers. The pink mouth that the film previously lingered on is now presented as cracked and pale; peeled back to expose yellowed, snapping teeth. 

Ratboys - It's Alive!

The Crystal Method and Filter - (Can't You) Trip Like I Do

Spawn by Dave Rapoza

Spawn - Director's Cut

Prior to an infernal makeover that buries his sneer beneath blistered prosthetics, Michael Jai White's Spawn is an unthinking and unrepentant agent of American imperialism. He's a CIA operative who mechanically infiltrates allied nations to (unnecessarily) shred civilians with submachine gun fire before racking up further scores of jet-detonating collateral damage. This wet work is sloppy too, instantly acknowledged by cable news reporters then beamed around an unappreciative world. White carries himself in and around these exterminations like a keyed-in prize fighter, outwardly portraying both a mirthless impatience and a palpable loathing for everyone around him. It comes as no surprise then that White previously essayed an intense, unblinking take on boxer Mike Tyson for an HBO TV movie. To director Mark AZ Dippé's credit, even when burned to a crisp and sheathed in a shining carapace bristling with spiked protrusions, White's superman retains these testosterone-fuelled frustrations. Trapped in the middle of a cataclysmic war between heaven and hell, Spawn simply couldn't care less. 

This occult anti-hero doesn't even flinch when John Leguizamo's drooling Clown more-or-less tells him that he's The Antichrist; a monstrous psychopath designed then steered through a lifetime of extrajudicial murder to better prepare him for his afterlife leading Satan's armies in The Battle of Armageddon. Spawn's too busy stockpiling chopped-up, boutique assault rifles (on loan from Bad Boys) so that he can perforate anonymous henchmen. Dippé's film is unashamedly adolescent in this respect. It's not that this comic book adaptation fails to imbue its characters with any real depth or dimensionality, it doesn't even try. Spawn is best contextualised then as the vehicle through which a certified gold CD soundtrack (featuring contributions that united disparate entities like The Prodigy with Rage Against the Machine's Tom Morello) was sold. Truly a moment for teenage boys everywhere. The pin-up art style of Spawn creator Todd McFarlane does carry over from the printed page though, translated here into flowing, computer-generated effects that range from still impressive to excretable. Often the problem is simply execution: the technology and mid-range special effects budgets available in the mid-1990s completely failing in their attempts to manufacture sustained, third-act showdowns premised on enormous, abyssal vistas. 

Slayer and Atari Teenage Riot - No Remorse (I Wanna Die)

SPAWN HAS ENTERED THE RING by Daniel Warren Johnson

The Smashing Pumpkins - The Aeroplane Flies High (Turns Left, Looks Right)

The Prodigy - Android // The Trick

Nightmare City

Umberto Lenzi's Nightmare City is wildly and absurdly discursive: a dream logic horror that picks at an idea of mounting tension before either smashing everything to pieces or simply losing interest in these situations altogether. Lenzi's film begins with an unmarked military freighter landing at an Italian airport. From its guts spill an army of suit wearing savages, their faces glued with filthy radioactive scabs, who use hatchets and chain flails to butcher the heavily armed police who meet them. Unusually, for really any zombie film, Lenzi is constantly calling attention to the respective ages of his scratched-at subjects. The irradiated zombies are, predominantly, middle-aged and middle class presenting men. Conversely, their prey are the young and nubile. While the throats of younger men are slit then lapped at, these bloodthirsty brutes take great delight in stripping then stabbing the twentysomething women they come across. Blouses and leotards are shredded; breasts exposed and leered upon, before knives are plunged into these heaving chests. Obviously, this clawing procedure is thanks largely to Nightmare City emanating from the sleazier end of the filmmaking spectrum but it seems notable that this caste system, one largely based on physical attractiveness, holds throughout a film in which we are told (but don't really see) that victims are rising up to swell the ranks of their maulers. Other than the revenge of the sexually impotent, we're left with the deranged deductions of Laura Trotter's Dr Anna Miller, a traumatised physician who contextualises this plague of atomic madmen as a metaphysical plea for mankind to reject the automated niceties of post-industrial settlements. 

Hotel Pools - Projection // Comebacksoon

Splatterhouse 2 by Sean Kiernan

My Head is Empty - Again,

Body Snatchers

Abel Ferrara's take on Body Snatchers, the third big screen adaptation of Jack Finney's science fiction novel, is set on a military base in Alabama being investigated for polluting the surrounding swampland. Unbeknownst to Terry Kinney's Steve Malone, the Environmental Protection Agency worker dispatched to make the ecological assessment, the soldiers living on this camp have dredged up and disseminated alien seed pods capable of growing into perfect physical replicas of people. Up front, there's an obvious parallel to be drawn between the hive-minded extraterrestrials and the violent, right-wing conformists usually found in any nation's armed forces. Ferrara's film (with a screenplay credited to Stuart Gordon, Dennis Paoli, and Nicholas St. John) probes deeper still, examining basic familial relationships from a mocking, alien perspective. Steve's daughter Marti, played by Gabrielle Anwar, is the Generation X teen suffering through all manner of minor and massive indignities. Before the occupation becomes violently obvious, this displeasure comes from feeling like the spare person in her father's new family. Marti is a young adult, on the cusp of college, forced to tag along when she'd rather spend her Summer spreading her wings. Marti's stepmother Carol, played by Meg Tilly, is the first person in the family to be assimilated; the unashamed, hirsute nakedness of Carol's newborn facsimile more horrifying to the family's snooping pre-schooler son than the bubbling, stinking mess his father eventually becomes. Carol's transformation upends the established power dynamics within the Malone household too. She's no longer the awed, younger woman. Carol is now the cold, reproachful mouthpiece of an unfeeling invasion. 

Faye Webster - But Not Kiss

Fantomah by Ian Higginbotham

Blur - Russian Strings

Rocky II

Rocky II steers corrective, immediately re-telling and re-contextualising the climactic moments of the first film with the obvious benefit of a weightier approach to sound design. The fifteen round war that concluded John G Avildsen's Rocky was unusual in terms of how it described impacts: while we were privy to the exchange of in-ring grunts and whispers, the clubbing sound of fists colliding with flesh was so absent that, as a viewer, you weren't always sure if either man was actually being struck. The welts that had swollen Rocky's eyes shut told their own story but the lack of thwacks - not to mention the stage strikes that often very obviously failed to connect and a style of boxing from the Philadelphia native that completely elided any sort of defensive posture - left the concluding boxing match feeling strangely perfunctory, and even a little bit ridiculous. Writer-director Sylvester Stallone uses this sequel then as a way to race back to that moment; restaging the same conclusion in such a way that he can finally be happy with both the telling and the outcome. 

In fairness, Rocky II's centrepiece boxing match is a more engaging revision of the same basic premise. Where Avildsen's film opted for an observational stance on the two pugilists, Stallone places the viewer inside both boxer's heads. We see through their eyes: Rocky's cloudy point-of-view as he gazes out on bloodthirsty fans, his periphery struggling to focus thanks to an injured eye. The perspective of Carl Weathers' Creed is likewise swamped by his bruised and bloody opponent. Stallone's artfully distressed mug bobs raggedly, inches from Apollo's face. The language of Rocky II's fight does not ape the once-removed quality of a television broadcast, instead we have slow motion shock and angles that evoke a debilitating, cranial trauma. It's a style of communication designed solely to appraise the scale of Rocky's (eventual) victory and, in that respect, it works wonderfully. Unfortunately this aggressive sort of shorthand extends to the ways in which the rest of the film is structured and written. Rather than examine the next step for this flawed hero, Stallone feels obliged to tear all the goodwill down - in increasingly strained and unconvincing ways - as a route to returning his Rocky to same starting point as before. Talia Shire's Adrian suffers terribly under this new direction, reduced from a person who completes and compliments her partner to a horizontal fulcrum deployed to leverage a crass kind of sentimentality that actually ends up making the Balboa family seem emotionally alien. 

Bill Conti - Redemption (Theme from Rocky II)

Sleepscreen - Lost But Found

Spawn by Rico Renzi

Bill Conti - Philadelphia Morning

Rocky

Actor-screenwriter Sylvester Stallone's breakthrough role, at least in this first instance, feels very of a piece with television's Arthur Fonzarelli. Like the Happy Days Casanova, Stallone's Rocky is welcome everywhere and beloved by all. Unable to walk down the street without running into acquaintances or general well-wishers, Rocky enjoys a kind of social cache that goes beyond the basic fear that would likely be associated with a guy who works as muscle for the local loan shark. Although Burgess Meredith's growling gym trainer Mickey makes reference to legs having been broken in pursuit of payment, there's no evidence within this film that Rocky does much more than propose the idea of a beating when recouping cash for Joe Spinell's Mr Gazzo. Rocky's popularity instead motors on the ineffable respect of the neighbourhood main character; a quality that, in of itself, implies past glories. 

Set in Philadelphia in the 1970s, Rocky is practically Dickensian in its depiction of poverty. Stallone's motor-mouthed pugilist batters the film forwards as a throbbing oaf with a heart of gold, striving to make positive and long-lasting connections, despite his unjust and surprisingly squalid circumstances. In the early goings director John G Avildsen and cinematographer James Crabe seed their frame with empty beer bottles and crushed cans; an environmental clutter that speaks to how trapped and tranquilised Rock and his friends have found themselves. Mouldering apartments are lousy with stained doors that hang off their cabinets, each one peppered with dart pricks. Everything's breaking or broken anyway, so why take any pride in your surroundings? Although the opportunity to fight Carl Weathers' heavyweight boxing champion is the lottery win-level boon that ends up broadcasting Rocky's finer qualities to a larger audience, the real making of this man is his relationship with Talia Shire's pet shop clerk, Adrian. 

Shire's performance as Adrian, the way she communicates Stallone's thinly written role, is a greater success than anything that takes place inside a boxing ring. Shire allows the audience to see and experience the transformative effects of being in Rocky's orbit. At first Adrian and Rocky's relationship is based around pursuit: Rock repeatedly finding himself in her place of work, rambling ceaselessly and without prompt. Adrian, cowed by her colleagues and her brutish older brother, struggles to string a sentence together. Is she even interested in him? After a few run-ins with her thoroughly miserable sibling Paulie, who seems unduly interested in his sister's virginity, Adrian and Rocky find themselves in the boxer's rundown apartment. He corners her as she tries to leave, his pale muscular body dwarfing hers. He kisses her and she actually kisses him back, greedily even. Adrian wraps herself around Rocky, taking on his self-assurance and literalising Rocky's idea that the pair each have something that the other lacks. This assumption of an adult, interpersonal identity is the making of Adrian: she fights back against Paulie's venomous haranguing; she dresses to be noticed; and, at the film's conclusion, she has the confidence to push through a crowd to embrace her bleeding man. 

Deadly Avenger - We Took Pelham

Johnny Jewel - The Witch

Mutant Mayhem by Kyle Beaudette