The Heroic Warriors by Oliver Patricio

FEAR WALKEN

How in fuck is this getting slated on release? Gotta nab me a region free Blu-Ray player and this Criterion disc.

MOGWAI FEAR SATAN

Transformers #75 by Geoff Senior

FRANKENSTEIN

via

Anibots by Kishiaku

The Anibots were an Autobot combiner team described in early drafts of The Transformers: The Movie scripts. This unit of wild, robotic animals dwelt in the Roboto-Zoo portion of Autobot City, seemingly created by Wheeljack to act as a desperation deterrent in times of crisis. When threatened the Anibots can combine into a gigantic, monstrous form called Dragon-Beast.

Although the sub-group never made it into the final film, the idea of a band of predatory hunter animals turned up the following year in Season 3 of the TV series as the Predacons, a Decepticon combiner team. In the draft written by Ron Friedman, dated April 27th 1985, no alternative modes are described for the Anibots. Instead the team are characterised as beasts of lower-order intelligence - Wheeljack's pets essentially. Unlike the humanoid modes the Predacons feature, these pieces by Kishiaku embrace this apparent lack of sentience by conceptualising the Anibots as being able to shift back and forth between vehicle and animal modes.

The Beatles - Blue Jay Way

PREDACONS

HEY WHAT'S WRONG BABY?

007 - Casino Royale (Climax!)

Barry Nelson's Jimmy Bond isn't the frenzied, sexually aggressive, thug we might expect. This American draft doesn't navigate his adventure with the detached indifference synonymous with Ian Fleming's British super-spy. Bond is tense, even jittery here. When his ex-girlfriend's life is under threat he's panicky and shrill; careening back and forth between telephones and allies, desperate for some sort of update. This lack of emotional control is intensified by Nelson's breeze block head and cherubic features. He looks like a safer, television friendly, alternative to Ralph Meeker. Nelson, friendly and approachable where Mr Meeker reads as louche, even dangerous. Screened live as part of CBS's Climax! anthology television series, this Casino Royale is a creaky, but intimate, run around the broad outline of the first 007 tale. 

Fleming's characters are broken down and reconfigured - James Bond becomes Jimmy Bond, a Combined Intelligence operative with a supernatural flair for the obscure card game baccarat. René Mathis and Vesper Lynd are roughly combined into a composite identity named Valerie Mathis, a French spy and former lover of Jimmy's. Perhaps in recognition of this Bond's national identity change, Felix Leiter is transformed into Clarence Leiter, a British counterpoint for the nervy Jimmy who has been blessed with a roaming, chilly, arrogance. It's interesting then - in light of the subsequent Eon film franchise - to note that zero effort is expended to portray this character as a brutal snoop. Instead Jimmy plays more like a desk guy drafted solely for his card smarts. So while he might be able to resist a round of toe torture, his subsequent break out is marked by an inexpert application of violence and, most disappointing of all, mercy.

Transformers #85 by Geoff Senior

SPECIAL CHAMPION EDITION

Das Racist - Girl

Aliens Versus Predator by Mike Mignola

Manic Street Preachers - No Surface All Feeling

2025

Pre-ordered up Call of Duty: Black Ops II fans can look forward to thumping around this future-pop reinterpretation of Treyarch's most cherished multiplayer map. Nuketown 2025 is less Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (how fucking long is that stupid title?), and more Googie architecture by way of The Jetsons. Given Modern Warfare 3's maddening ring a ring o' roses map design, and what that might mean for the future of the franchise, it's nice to see this sequel at least has the claustrophobic symmetry of Nuketown going for it.

007 - Skyfall

After a brush with friendly fire and atomic bullets, an injured, despondent Bond retires to an exotic beach to sleep around and court danger. Neither seems to make him happy. He's numb, unable to create any joy for himself. It's a brief window into Bond's thoroughly miserable downtime. He's rootless and restless by design. 007 lives to work. He's a company man through and through. Take that away from him and he's just a loose jumble of self-destructive drives searching for purpose. He needs direction. He wants a parent, basically. Skyfall explicitly noodles around with the idea of Bond as a lost, damaged little boy seeking approval. It's a reading that Ian Fleming frequently stressed in Bond's relationship with his taskmaster M. Bond wanting to please the only authority in his life that he respects. 

It's an idea that hasn't been particularly well mined in any of the previous films. The various M characters are typically defined as anonymous, interchangeable, desk jockeys; fit to issue orders and not much else. Here though, there's history. M's importance to Bond is a central conceit, underpinning the spy's war with a shade, an earlier agent that didn't quite measure up to the MI6 taskmaster's impossibly high standards. Raoul Silva is a discarded child. GoldenEye introduced Judi Dench's M as a kind of joke - could an irredeemable misogynist handle taking life-and-death orders from a tiny middle-aged woman? That was 17 years ago. In the interim this M has transformed from Bond's idea of a meddling accountant into a dispassionate iron lady entirely comfortable with feeding her agents into the meat grinder. Naturally, he adores her. She demands complete sacrifice in pursuit of results, something Bond willingly gives. 

M allows Bond to test his limits and abilities in pursuit of something he trusts is worthwhile. He almost wants to die, and lacking any workable value system of his own, defers agency to her. Mother knows best. Silva, M's other child in Skyfall, although superficially similar, thinks too much. In an aside M reveals the fallen agent outlived his usefulness when he began to make his own moves, gathering his own intelligence. He sought to impress his master with ingenuity and external action. It got him deformed and stricken off. Conversely, Bond wins his girl's heart by retreating into himself, forcing everyone else to contend with a physical manifestation of his own internal dilemmas. Skyfall doesn't play the blockbuster game. It doesn't attempt to top the last multi-vehicle pile-up. Instead the action contracts, getting smaller and tenser, until you arrive at a man prowling an abandoned space - his cold, childhood home - protecting that which he has made his own.

Devil Dinosaur by Dan McDaid

CASTLE GRAYSKULLMAN

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Masters of the Universe toys, Mattel held a Create-A-Character contest that gave the winner the chance to see their design immortalised as part of the super-sized Classics range. Winner Daniel Benedict killed it with the delightfully ludicrous Castle Grayskullman, a generic buff-man body dressed up to resemble the playset fort's boney battlements. For a wheeze, Mr Benedict also knocked together this vintage style trailer.

PUDRIDERO

The Expendables 2

I was quite fond of The Expendables. Sylvester Stallone's 80s action mega-mix neatly juggled a reductive police action plot, with some gonzo character moments. Each actor appeared to be playing an amped up version of themselves: Stallone was codgery but desperate to please; Statham, unlucky in love with beautiful brunettes; Jet Li working overtime to support two families; Stone Cold Steve Austin quite happy to strike a woman. It was a film with a pro-wrestling mindset, turning up personality tics and tricks against a backdrop of Commie stomping and big government mistrust. All that and Sly seemed to have spent hours cruising YouTube for bite sized attention grabbers to co-opt for the big screen. Expendables was a piece engaged with the type of viewer who delights at record breaking pistol reloads, or seeing an American twenty-somethings - who are pretending to be Russian - chopping up the landscape with their latest combat shotgun. It was crass and shallow, but betrayed a slathering, uncompromising affection for also-ran 80s thugs and their modern equivalents.

The Expendables 2 takes a different tact, perhaps trying to recontextualise the sappy, barely reconstructed personas that Sly and the gang struggled with during the early 1990s. Stallone's doomed relationship with a perky surrogate son pokes at the same mutant identity areas as the last film, but the execution is clumsy. The film plays like a TV movie, with a plot better suited to a modern-day A-Team pilot than an all-in genre stomp. Director Simon West lets the Planet Hollywood trifecta burn screen time cracking gentle jokes in static set-ups whilst Jason Statham is relegated to one tiny feature thump - a knife ninja remix of Clint Eastwood's entrance in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.

The rest of the original cast get it worse. The wonderful Terry Crews is made to play second-fiddle (in the realm of enormous firearms) to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Li bails out after the first mission. Lundgren is a mere background player here, doomed to blow kisses at Stallone's future squeeze Yu Nan. The underdog charm of the first film is jettisoned then in favour of (fading) A-list indifference. It's fun to see Schwarzenegger marching forwards firing a Call of Duty gun without blinking, but it's a fleeting joy. The only person really trying is Jean-Claude Van Damme. His character, Jean Vilain, seems to be the only role still operating on the first film's private-life-as-action-reality premise. His sinewy, euro-trash arrogance perfectly suited to make adversarial moves against Stallone's dull macho internalism. For all its faults Expendables 2 is one of the few films that really taps into Van Damme's dickish, sport shagger appeal. If we are to suffer an Expendables 3, Stallone would be well advised to seek assistance from some of the behind-the-scenes stars of 80s action cinema. I'm sure Steven E de Souza could knock up a suitably hyperbolic script for jailbird John McTiernan to direct.

Turtles vs Oroku Saki by Bunka

DAY OF RECKONING

What is a special effect? Is it seeing a computer animated sequence of Iron Man's house falling off a cliffside whilst our hero struggles to free himself from the rubble? Or is it seeing Dolph Lundgren's wrinkly red face screaming directly into camera about self-determination? Is it more exciting when your brain experiences that tranquilised buzz you associate with CG, or when you see someone real locked into ludicrous? I submit that there's more juice in witnessing a shotgun fired a few inches above a man's hairline than a million missile merchandise helicopters. Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning looks incredible. They should let John Hyams do a Terminator movie.

Heads up

BRING THE PAIN

Shane Black's sequel formula revealed! Obliterate the house on stilts, and dump the main players in the sea. Worked for Lethal Weapon 2. Probably gonna work for Iron Man 3. I wonder how much of a wizard Ben Kingsley's Mandarin will turn out to be? Although we hear him dropping terror rhetoric and doing basic pistol maintenance, we do get a snatch of hero shots on his power rings. With the cosmic peril of The Avengers under the Marvel brand belt, Mandarin doesn't even need to be specifically magical - he could just be wielding hyper-advanced Asgard tech. Fingers crossed for a psychedelic showdown!

Zombie Zombie - The Bank Robbery