System96 - Dissipation

Quest for Fire

A tragi-comic adventure from the dawn of human history. Following an attack by prowling, bloodthirsty apes, a beaten and diminished tribe of Neanderthals relocate from their once cosy cave to a sodden marshland, losing their access to a crackling campfire in the process. Like the hirsute maniacs who attacked them, this collective of proto-people cannot craft fire on their own, they must steal it from somewhere, or someone, else. Quest for Fire is set on an unusually expansive plain that is home to several distinct species of human being, each at wildly different stages of evolutionary progress: from ogres who gobble up other hominids to a waning settlement of Homo sapiens who cover themselves in ash and, culturally, prize Rubenesque women. We spend the most time with the flame-seeking Neanderthals, a not particularly bright subset who are just smart enough to know that they should lightly toast any animal flesh they consume. 

This tribe's purchase on civilisation, such as it is, revolves around tending their great campfire. When not hunting or gathering, the younger males jab their penises at anybody that dares bare their backside. This propensity for coitus more ferarum is actually a trackable plot point in director Jean-Jacques Annaud's film. Rae Dawn Chong's Ika, a member of the cinder tribe who falls in with three of the Neanderthals after they kill several of the cannibals, has an Eve-like tendency to dispense knowledge. First she imparts the gift of laughter, a hitherto unknown ability to recognise and respond to the slapstick ill-fortune of others. Later, and perhaps more crucially, when she tires of Everett McGill's Naoh - the film's Cambellian striver - roughly mounting her from behind, Ika demands a stake in the sex act, manoeuvring herself so that she is face-to-face with the man penetrating her. By establishing this (slightly more consensual) connection, Ika slows Naoh's bestial rutting, a development that eventually leads to a pair-bond not seen anywhere else on this primitive Pangaea. 

Graham Coxon - That's All I Wanna Do

Marshal Law by John McCrea

Forhill - Iridescent

UNKLE - Rabbit in Your Headlights

Exorcist II: The Heretic

Seemingly the deliberate stylistic inverse of its William Friedkin directed predecessor, John Boorman's Exorcist II: The Heretic is built around dream states and somnambulic suggestion rather than documentary-style staging and methodical plotting. Immediately, faults are apparent in this sequel: there are enormous, unannounced leaps in both distance and behavioural intent; the film repeatedly thwarting any audience member who expects successive scenes to have connective tissue between them. This is especially troublesome given that Heretic takes great strides away from William Peter Blatty's concept of Jesuit priests as a last line of defence against satanic possession. Heretic, in fact, deliberately turns its nose up at Catholic interpretations of theology. The American branch of this church is portrayed here as a corrupt and moneyed institution that toils beneath gauche effigies of their departed prophet. The appointment of Richard Burton's Father Lamont to investigate the first film's exorcism even plays like a pointed act of obfuscation, given how obviously oafish he is.  

The Cardinal who issues Lamont's orders is also happy to damn the sainted sacrifice of Max von Sydow's Father Merrin (Jason Miller's Dr Damien Karras isn't even mentioned) if it suits the church's current political objectives. Chosen for his familiarity with Merrin's more abstract teachings, Burton's sozzled-looking Lamont is, as it turns out, a pale imitation of the men who killed themselves saving Linda Blair's Regan. The prologue exorcism that he attempts to conduct ends with the afflicted woman burning to death while this priest dithers uselessly, unable to steel himself in the face of the babbling unknown. In Boorman's film these priests are often just men, cursed with indecisions and desires that contradict the vows they have made with their God. Celibacy is clearly the biggest sticking point for Lamont: the priest and Louise Fletcher's Dr Tuskin flirt awkwardly to no clear outcome, while the entire finale revolves around Lamont's literal desire to physically inhabit a young woman's body. Over and over again we are assured of this priest's uselessness, that Merrin's extraordinary power came from his strengths as a person rather than his allegiance to any particular sect. 

Finding himself at odds with his superiors, Lamont - actually attempting to conduct a proper investigation rather than reverting to whichever judgement is politically expedient - journeys around the world, retracing Merrin's steps. He finds himself in a mountain-top church in Ethiopia. To even set foot in this house of prayer, revellers must climb up a tall, vertical passage that has been carved into the rock. The path is well worn but treacherous, an act of supplication that must be performed before worshippers can speak to their God. Although Christian, this church couldn't be more different from the ostentatious power displays that Heretic aligns with Lamont's gilded faith. It's secretive and remote, chipped into the Earth itself. Unlike Catholicism, which is unduly obsessed with depicting Christ in his death throes, this Ethiopian orthodoxy seeks to represent the human man who brought mankind the word of God. So rather than a blue-eyed, bone white figure writhing on a cross, the images of Jesus here portray his sun-like brilliance in terms of someone who actually lived in this region. The frayed relief that flickers - breathes - when a breeze passes through this space has olive skin and massive brown eyes. Not so much a westernised Christ then, but Jesus as a Palestinian Jew. 

Although never explicitly clarified, Boorman's intent here seems to be illustrative and strangely, in the context of the feats performed in The Exorcist, equitable. Holiness, and the attempt to communicate with higher powers predates the founding of the Roman Catholic church by millennia. Why then should they have the only solution to the foul and ageless beasts who crawl from the pit? The war for humanity's soul rages on a cosmic timeline, frustrations and their solutions should therefore by mapped in ways that defy any specific epoch. Heretic isn't always precisely (or even clearly) communicating these ideas; the film repeatedly besmirches its central conceit of mankind as a constantly evolving vessel of (potential) divinity with strange, pseudo-scientific explanations. The Synchronizer gadget that allows third-parties to tune into the thoughts of Regan and, by extension, the squatting demon Pazuzu, isn't much more complicated, in practice, than the Washington-based Ouija board that first attracted this horror. Both mediums facilitate a kind of group hypnosis, one that makes their users open to the power of suggestion. In Boorman's film though, the application of these devices is either leaden or outright baffling, asking audiences to believe that repetitive chanting of the word 'deeper' (rather than, say, a detailed description of the expected scene) can conjure up a fourth-dimensional space so potent that it can trap unwary trespassers.  

Heretic's finest qualities are speculative then, or even metatextual. The wealthy, showbiz adjacent life this young adult Regan enjoys in lower Manhattan could just as easily be that of a Linda Blair fresh off a blockbuster movie. She has a personal assistant-cum-disciple in Kitty Winn's Sharon and her days are filled with the kind of bewildering theatrical performances beloved by teenage drama students. Her presence at Dr Tuskin's sliding door facility even allows Regan the opportunity to dip in and out of charitable work. Although Regan's cosseted existence is thanks to her film star mother, the lack of financial tension could just as easily be ascribed to the Blair's recent, real-world successes. That Boorman's film is, in some part, about using psychotherapy techniques to dredge up memories that this woman has pointedly forgotten also seems to indicate an intertextual conversation between the first two Exorcist instalments. Boorman attempting to exorcise the experience of having seen (or, in the case of Blair, having starred in) the first film by ascribing meaning and detail where none were previously inferred. So, instead of revelling in the base and repulsive cruelty required to so thoroughly debase the body of a child, Boorman, and screenwriter William Goodhart, reimagine their heroine as a being of incredible, other-worldly value. Couched in the language of seventies New Age nonsense, Regan is recontextualised as a nascent prophet so important that the forces of evil have despatched an Old Testament pestilence to extinguish her flame. The boorishly male Lamont then is fit to be nothing more than her burly protector while Sharon, Regan's lovelorn former tutor, is the fallen Apostle who has, unlike Judas, failed to halt the rise of this new messiah. 

Ennio Morricone - Regan's Theme

ALISON, VIQ & Krosia - Pulsar

RoboCop Rogue City by Quasimodox

vintageverb - Retronova

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross - Intruder // The Killer

The Killer

Notionally, David Fincher's The Killer is premised on revenge, with Michael Fassbender's unnamed button man hitting back at the layers of people who have conspired to end his life after he botched an assassination attempt. The difference is in the telling. We don't simply sink into the offbeat, English muffin-discarding routine of this paid murderer; a bored methodology so snappily explained that it is immediately arresting, even when very little is actually taking place. We are instead bombarded with his thoughts. Andrew Kevin Walker's screenplay, adapting Alexis Nolent and Luc Jacamon's braggadocios comic series, leverages the kind of posturing inherent to filmic voice over, tuning the all-knowing device to a frequency that is much more private and protective of the subject's ego than is usual. Fassbender's relentless, repetitive rules are transformed over the course of the piece from a mechanical statement of calculated intent into the failing mantra of a person who is losing grip on their sense of self. This Killer wants to be considered calm and collected but his contrived detachment is tempered by a squirrelly need to distance himself from personal danger while always maintaining a constant, situational control. 

His retaliation then is typified by a neurotic need to remain anonymous and untouchable. Passports, phones and pistols - really any of the expensive products that are used in the service of his day job - are relentlessly junked or discarded after only light use. This wastefulness judged essential, lest these gadgets upset the deliberately bland affect that The Killer's paper personalities strive for. Whether or not this chameleonic approach to his stated identity really benefits the flights in and out of danger is less relevant when judged against the extraordinary risks this character is willing to take when he feels, definitively, like he has the upper hand. Really, his career as a contracted murderer has become subservient to the ways in which he is able to spend his ill-gotten riches. The self-storage units packed with criminal bric-a-brac are his juice; carefully catalogued spoils that prefigure this punitory reaction and go some way to indicating that this war against his former colleagues is one that he has always intended to fight. The Killer takes the hobbyist tendencies of bored, middle-aged men and maps them over a personality that has coalesced around the most efficient means of ravenous consumption. Although his enemies found a cold trail when making their own attempts on his life, by trashing his beach house and putting his tight-lipped girlfriend in hospital, the people who came to kill The Killer performed an even greater outrage: as far as he's concerned, they attacked his possessions. 

The Beatles - Blackbird

'Til All Are One by Daniel Warren Johnson

hello meteor - Crescent Lanterns

V/H/S/85

Conceptual, the lion's share of the short tales in the V/H/S/85 anthology focus around the portability of these analog cassettes and their cameras, a selling-point that allows them to be absolutely anywhere. The relative lightness of the equipment also affords sustained, point-of-view framings to be used as the primary means of revealing, or even withholding, horrors located within this middle-chapter of the 1980s. Mike P. Nelson's segments, No Wake and Ambrosia, are broadly similar in that they both detail camcorded, home video clips that slowly slip out of the amateur videographer's control, with Ambrosia's firearm-focused cotillion being the stronger of the two. Gigi Saul Guerrero's God of Death follows a television studio cameraman as he, along with a dwindling rescue team, attempt to escape a collapsing building. Here the manoeuvrability of the format, in increasingly outlandish developments, becomes a joke in of itself thanks to a bleeding technician's stubborn refusal to stop rolling. 

Director David Bruckner's Total Copy is the wraparound, bleeding in and out of the other stories. VHS is utilised here as a cheap library fodder by egotistical scientists as they chart the development of an amorphous, mucus monster. Natasha Kermani's TKNOGD also makes overtures to personal posterity, with the titular tapes employed to capture a community theatre performance. Kermani's segment, although often visually striking thanks to its static set-ups, is the least convincing largely because it invokes consumer-level VR, a uniquely 90s obsession. As if to underline this incongruity, passage into the realm of a digital deity is also achieved using only lightly dressed, and very obviously modern, augmented reality devices. The largest amount of the film's runtime is apportioned to Scott Derrickson's Dreamkill, not only the most dramatically satisfying segment but also the episode that best grapples with the unintended consequences of video tape: these anonymous black cassettes were the perfect way to smuggle any kind of visual contraband. This intrusive, ever-present technology could enter even the most unassuming family home, concealing genuinely transgressive material. From films that had bypassed the censor's scissors altogether to duped pornography or even Mondo documentaries, spliced with footage of genuine atrocity. 

SineRider - Vermillion

Taeko Onuki - Tokai (Live)

Soundblaster and Astro Magnum by Rui Onishi

Powercut - Nova

When Evil Lurks

In some respects When Evil Lurks, the latest film from writer-director Demián Rugna, makes the case for opening legends. Those clumsy information dumps placed upfront, before the credits have cooled, in which the audience is spoon-fed just enough unmolested data to make sense of the skewed normal we're soon to experience. If nothing else these solemn stanza do unburden the characters inhabiting the piece from having to regularly regurgitate unnaturally precise sentences that are, very obviously, directed out through the fourth wall at the audience, rather than anyone actually sharing the frame with the speaker. Perhaps the briefings in When Evil Lurks stand out more because the rest of the film is so purely dedicated to orchestrating mayhem? Doubly puzzling when this creeping disorder is founded upon a genuinely unfathomable rule-set, designed by devils. We see glimpses of broken exorcism devices throughout When Evil Lurks. They look like heavily embellished sextants - brass curvature and telescopic apparatus accessorised with thin, stiletto blades - but there's almost zero sense of how they will actually be used to banish the squatting spectres. That's not important here. Although the possessions themselves are primarily deployed as violent accelerants in frayed, human relationships, the real meat in When Evil Lurks is the film's ever-growing sense of despondency. Ezequiel Rodriguez's Pedro, the shattered man at the centre of the piece, is consistently placed in hopelessly complicated situations that demand a nuanced response that this poor unfortunate is completely incapable of delivering. 

hello meteor - The Evergreen Prefecture

Faker vs Man E Faces by Chris Faccone

cc0 music - lil beat #1

Prince - Gold

Lupin the 3rd vs Cat's Eye

Although co-directors Hiroyuki Seshita and Kobun Shizuno's Lupin the 3rd vs Cat's Eye isn't the first time that the storied cat burglar has been recreated using computer generated animation, it's truly a bizarre experience to see Monkey Punch's inky, elasticated thief rendered here as such a stiff, immovable marionette. Whereas a comparable feature like Lupin III: The First trapped its expressive, polygonal models in beautifully lit dioramas, this crossover instead attempts to ape the flatness inherent to traditional animation but without any of the stylistic flourishes that bleed in when somebody has to draw then re-draw a moving figure over and over again. These figures are baked and manipulated; subject to only the lightest of stresses and never smearing. As a result then, this streaming special ends up registering as a cheap example of previs that has somehow made it off Amazon's internal servers. Really all Lupin the 3rd vs Cat's Eye can offer is a kind of unblemished, trundling uniformity; a commitment to dangling playsets and basic replication that might appeal to avid collectors of articulated action figures. Little more than an unusually stern guest star in this piece, Kanichi Kurita's Lupin brushes up against the ongoing adventures of Tsukasa Hojo's Cat's Eye art thieves, a trio of sisters who (when not appearing in 80s issues of Weekly Shonen Jump) are attempting to secure the lost masterpieces of their dearly departed Dad.

The Beatles - Now and Then

Alien by Marc Aspinall

YOUTH 83 - Wave Rush