Baby Assassins 2 Babies

Perhaps aware that the chemistry shared by his two layabout leads far outweighed any of the first instalment's amoral appeal, writer-director Yugo Sakamoto's rapidly produced sequel, Baby Assassins 2 Babies, contrives to dispense with pitiless contract killing almost entirely. Suspended by their stickler crime syndicate bosses for their extra-curricular activities (they violently foiled a bank robbery), Akari Takaishi's Chisato and Saori Izawa's Mahiro find themselves even more cash-strapped than usual. While Chisato attempts to bolster her dwindling funds with some ill-advised gambling, attention shifts to a rival group of assassins: brothers played by Joey Iwanaga and Tatsuomi Hamada. These Kamimura lads, who have been tricked into believing they can kill their way into the good graces of the underworld and therefore secure themselves regular employment, have (given their line of work) a surprisingly sweet disposition. 

Pistol-packing murder aside, the pair largely behave like characters who have been lifted out of a high school sports serial. They jokingly repeat their basketball coaches slogans, fret about asking girls out on dates and spend most of their time dreaming about ordering the higher value items on the menu in their local café. Even their response to the weapons they are issued with is strangely appreciative. The boys noting their graduation from ancient, Soviet surplus to the more photogenic, Italian firearms you expect to see in movies like this. As with Baby Assassins, 2 Babies is as much a jaundiced look at freelance hardship as it is a piece packed with martial arts throwdowns or shrieking shoot-outs. This sequel narrows its focus further, taking aim at the complete lack of opportunities available for underqualified school leavers in the overly regimented workplaces typical of a stagnant economy. Often, it seems, the next rung up on the corporate ladder is really only available to you when your (equally trapped) superior dies. So, do you wait them out or bumble after their job, guns blazing? 

Charli XCX - The girl, so confusing version with Lorde

Death from Above 1979 - Turn It Out XX

Baby Assassins

Baby Assassins comes on like a V-Cinema adjacent slacker comedy in which two teenage girls, who moonlight as contract murderers, are pressured into co-habiting by their surprisingly fussy employers. As well as living together in the cramped, one couch quarters provided by their criminal overlords, the duo must also work a string of anxiety-inducing part-time jobs. Presumably, their recent graduation from high school - and lack of interest in higher education - demands they maintain a kind of cover? Some level of plausible deniability should the (otherwise completely absent) authorities come calling? For this first instalment, writer-director Yugo Sakamoto leans more heavily on the concept of capricious, baby-faced killers and the gallows humour they inspire. Akari Takaishi's Chisato and Saori Izawa's Mahiro are oblivious fantasists, like basically every young adult, but this self-absorption takes on a real layer of horror when there's a bound hostage in the room, screaming through a gag while their executioners bicker about household chores. Izawa, a stunt performer by trade who has worked on American productions such as John Wick: Chapter 4 and the recent GI Joe movie Snake Eyes, is the obvious stand-out: morose and mumbling in repose but, when battle is joined, she bobs and weaves in such a way that you cannot help but think of vintage Hong Kong action cinema. Much like, say, Jackie Chan in Wheels on Meals, Izawa isn't just telegraphing the damage she can inflict upon her enemies, she's portraying a specific headspace within the fight. The actress battles fluently, uphill and against physically imposing foes, all while soaking up some serious punishment. 

You Notice Too Late That There Are No Cobwebs On The Corpse by Goran Gligovic

Cassandra Jenkins - Petco

VIQ - Faded Dream

Lumberjack the Monster

There's a genuinely wonderful moment about half-way through Takashi Miike's latest, Lumberjack the Monster, where Kazuya Kamenashi's Akira appears to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown whilst watching his beautiful, heiress fiancé sing to a gang of appreciative orphans. Akira, parentless himself, spent part of his childhood in exactly this orphanage, recovering from the experiments performed on him by a pair of deranged kidnappers. Akira has grown up confident and self-assured but acutely emotionless, a state of being that has allowed him to bully or strong-arm his way into a life of privilege. An inconclusive run-in with the axe murderer that the film is named for has him spiralling: his head injury has upset his brain chemistry, allowing long since silenced emotions to bubble up to the surface. 

The horror he experiences when watching his would-be wife behaving maternally then isn't one predicated on all that Akira has missed in life, rather it is premised on the coming adjustments that he is now loathed to make. Plotted like an airport potboiler, that is crammed with twists and counter-solutions, Miike's surprisingly austere Lumberjack entertains thanks to its principle lunatics: both killers maintain surface-level presentations and behavioural patterns that bely their true nature. Their entire lives are immaculately composed pantomimes. When a fractured skull upsets Akira's bad wiring, Hiroyoshi Koiwai's screenplay (adapted from Mayusuke Kurai's novel) does not focus on the joy of his reawakened humanity. Akira is instead inundated with information that upsets the delicate equilibrium he has fought so hard to establish. Relationships, even with other sociopaths, have taken on fresh and inconvenient meaning. 

Valmont - Un Carré

Quasimoto - Blitz // Axe Puzzles

Ultraman Rising by Mike Mignola and Dave Stewart

Cassandra Jenkins - Delphinium Blue

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire

If nothing else, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire really highlights the disconnect experienced when viewing extended sequences of animation that are no longer designed to be purely gestural. When it finally gets going, Adam Wingard's latest computer generated monster mash takes a photorealistic, simulation style approach when describing the collapsing, human component in enormously scaled fights that batter into, then over, our fragile dwellings. Action, when it escapes the confines of an otherworldly, subterranean paradise, hops from continent to continent, smearing everything in sight. Cities and ancient monuments alike are pulverised as these mountainous beasts grapple for supremacy. Obviously blocked and styled to prickle a sense of awe in its audience, The New Empire delights in the minutiae of demolition, filling the screen with enough sparks and embers to frustrate the bitrate of any streaming service. 

The (presumably) unintended consequences of all this mathematically plotted carnage is an acute revulsion though. One that, in June 2024, is informed by months and months and months of social media images detailing the systematic extermination of Palestinian children. That New Empire works so hard to avoid a sense of horror taking hold unfortunately tallies with a real-world permissiveness when considering Arab babies buried beneath rubble. Wingard's film then, although keen to depict bridges packed with family sedans as fleeting points of interest in Godzilla's oblivious churn, never engages with any human perspective other than the passive delight of a removed and appreciative crowd: one that cheers on the cataclysm from the safety of a green screen set and, apparently, feels no connection to the trampled citizens of Egypt or Brazil. King Kong taking on a scarlet slave master who, in a 2001: A Space Odyssey-style conceptual leap, has styled a bleached spinal column into a lash may be an exciting flight of fancy but there's precious little entertainment to be extracted from the relentless, reference-level reproduction of imploding apartment buildings.

Madara 1000 - Zipper

Death's Head, Thunderwing and Galvatron by Geoff Senior

ALEX - System Shock (Kick Puncher Remix)

The Cars That Ate Paris

A bone-dry comedy that only manages the lightest bit of snooping around when considering the real malevolence lurking beneath its callous, central premise. The Cars That Ate Paris, from writer-director Peter Weir, opens with the kind of aggressively idyllic scene typical of advertising: a good-looking couple speed around in their Datsun, smoking Alpine cigarettes and drinking Coca-Cola. Branding fills the frame, calling attention to itself. Is this part of the feature? Before long though the driver runs out of hands to comfortably juggle these commercial considerations. A wheel comes off. The driver loses control of the vehicle. The duo hurtle away from the dirt track road, their car crumpling and rolling in such a way that there's little doubt that these photogenic, would-be stars are now dead. Eventually, we learn that this was no accident. That the residents of a remote, dilapidated Australian town called Paris run their economy, and get their jollies, from arranging these kind of 'accidents'. 

Our guide through Cars is Terrance Camilleri (a Maltese-born actor who would go on to play Napoleon in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure)'s Arthur, a softly-spoken fella who is himself a victim of these crimes. His passivity radiates out into the film, slowing events to a crawl to match his own lack of resistance. Perhaps because he is so unthreatening and ineffectual, the townsfolk forgo the drill-bit lobotomy they usually dole out to survivors and allow Arthur to roam around as an adoptee. Eventually, following a few fruitless idles around a decommissioned bus stop, a Parisian played by Bruce Spence greedily oversteps when claiming a ride. In the panic the townsfolk turn on each other. Battle lines are drawn between the middle-aged murderers, who demand a certain level of prim propriety be maintained, and the young punks who rebuild the wrecks Paris accrues. Left to their own devices, these bored youths cover their cars in porcupine bristles or swastikas and sauvastikas, before crashing them into each other. Once angered, they retaliate by driving through private premises. Arthur's role in the resulting carnage isn't at all heroic but it is transformative: the whispering amaxophobic overcomes his fear of driving by repeatedly crashing the sharp point of a Chrysler tailfin into the head of a stunned, bleeding teen. 

Hiyakeshita Sakura by Hungry Clicker

Faye Webster - Kingston

Endless Withdrawal - Temporary (Emil Rottmayer Remix)