Death From Above 1979 - Totally Wiped Out

Streets of Rage 4 - SWORDFISH

Streets of Rage 4's Mr X Nightmare DLC adds three new playable characters and a survival mode to one of last year's very best games. This paid update releases alongside a patch with some quality of life tweaks as well as a new difficulty mode and alternative colours for each of the playable Ragers. Perhaps we'll get the strange, Turbo-style colours seen in the western releases of Streets of Rage 3? Axel always looked pretty cool in a yellow T and black jeans. Officer Estel, a boss in the initial release of this sequel, is the first of the revealed fighters, while the shapes of the two remaining silhouettes would seem to suggest another two end-of-level challengers, the brainwashed Max and Mr X's right-hand man, Shiva? 

Street Fighter V - PROJECT JUSTICE

After 20 years away Akira Kazama, the leather biker brawler from Rival Schools: United by Fate and Dreamcast gem Project Justice, is back! Scheduled for release sometime this Summer, Akira is a welcome addition to Street Fighter V's roster, recalling a time when Capcom were battering out hit after hit in fight-focused arcades. By now a long dormant property, Rival Schools is up there with Power Stone and Darkstalkers as a series begging for a modern follow up. 

Elvis Presley - Loving Arms

Deathlok by Paul Harrison-Davies

Godzilla vs. Kong

Despite placing Godzilla's name at the top of the card, Adam Wingard's Godzilla vs. Kong is very much structured around Edgar Wallace and Merian C Cooper's Eighth Wonder of the World. Like seemingly every Warner Bros tentpole these days, Godzilla vs. Kong's debut is preceded by rumours of production difficulties and whispers of a director being side-lined or second-guessed. This initial release version (presuming another may eventually follow) is very much like the theatrical cut of Zack Snyder's Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice in that the assembly itself has chosen their preferred combatant. While Snyder's film strained to place Batman in a driving seat that the character hadn't been designed for, this MonsterVerse sequel happily motors along under Kong's impressive steam. 

Josh Schaffer's brisk edit, and perhaps even Eric Pearson and Max Borenstein's screenplay, makes gigantic strides to keep the film under two hours. The minutiae of kaiju wrangling is renounced, circumvented by witty snips and tranquil 70s rock that centres Kong's predicament as the film's driving force. The soundtrack speaks for him. This computer generated Kong, mapped out by umpteen special effects studios, is never simply a featured trick - he's the film's mute male lead. An ape the size of a building that is (somehow) communicated as an underdog; struggling manfully to not only keep himself breathing, but to protect the puny humans that have made themselves his family. Wingard's Kong is one weathered by age, far past his blonde abducting years, happily settled into the role of a colossal Grandfather to the last human survivor of Skull Island, Kaylee Hottle's Jia. 

Lifted out of an enclosure lined with a flat panel sky, Kong is press-ganged into acting as a guide for Alexander Skarsgård and Rebecca Hall's seafaring academics - the hope being that a brush with his ancestral environment will spark something in the ape's latent, genetic, memory. The sense of discovery that Godzilla vs. Kong offers is communicated, not just thematically but emotionally, using the film's enormous gorilla. Godzilla is simply a reactive force, acting as the predatory answer to mankind's latest pilot driven horror. It's a portrayal very much like the King of Monster's role in the Millennium era of his Japanese series but it's also a framing that keeps him offscreen for the majority of the runtime. Kong on the other hand is placed in chains and shipped back to a point of origin that he has no living connection to. Like the 1933 original, Kong's story here is one of displacement. The character, always portrayed as some form of prisoner, suffers for the curiosity, or outright greed, of humans. 

In this film the physical trajectory, if not the dynamic, is reversed. So instead of being tranquilised then shipped off to a New York to be gawped at, the Skull Island native is drugged for passage to the Antarctic, the icy continent apparently the one stable access point to the mythical Pangea at the centre of the Earth. Kong's place in Hollow Earth is hereditary rather than personal but the prehistoric, lighting racked, location does allow the long-suffering primate an opportunity to assume the position of a monarch. A moment to pick up a magical weapon then take a throne that, once, could have been his. The human connection to this realm is technological, an opportunity to synthesise a particularly powerful energy wavelength. For Kong this brief stop, before battle is joined in Hong Kong, is therapeutic; it demonstrates to him that, not only does he physically come from a line of culture and Kings, but his predecessors were able to vanquish the lizards that plagued them. 

Although he passed away in 2017, Godzilla vs Hedorah director (and, let's not forget, Prophecies of Nostradamus' assistant director) Yoshimitsu Banno is still credited as Executive Producer on Godzilla vs. Kong. The credit acknowledges that this big budget monster movie still has its roots in an unproduced IMAX short - Godzilla 3D to the Max - that Banno had attempted to steer towards the largest possible screen. Banno's great big credit registers as ironic in an American production where the King of Monster's portrayal feels peculiarly laundered - specifically, one that has had its atomic hide sheared off. While Toho's creation has multiple, contradictory, creation stories, Wingard's film is the first to suggest that Godzilla and his kind might be naturally occurring behemoths. Presumably, the ancient saurischian bones scattered over the Hollow Earth's seat of power haven't been mutated by mankind's extremely modern nuclear arsenal? This hint of whitewash lingers, a distasteful correction that generates its own background radiation, particularly in a film where Asian characters are portrayed as either shopkeepers or attachés who behave like Vulcans. 

For its finale, Godzilla vs Kong offers up a triple threat in which every neon structure on the Hong Kong skyline sits ready to be used as a turnbuckle. True to form, the film examines these massive interactions from the perspective of the newly crowned Kong. Godzilla is clearly adversarial, a bristling abomination that charges through skyscrapers like a blood-crazed crocodile. Kong doesn't rely on his mass, and cannot count on fire breath, so he fights smarter - snatching up rotating restaurants to use as a shield or hanging from superstructures, crane cudgel in hand. Although we are repeatedly assured that Hong Kong is in the process of being evacuated, ground level shots of kaiju calamity are framed by darting pedestrians, struggling to get to safety. An early news report improbably tallies up only 8 deaths from a particularly violent Godzilla landing in California. The Hong Kong collision inspires no such updates but surely the count is far higher? 

For a film in which Godzilla's portrayal skews far more bestial and aggressive than either Gareth Edwards' Godzilla or Michael Dougherty's Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Wingard's film is reluctant to really embrace the individual, physical, calamity generated by a collapsing, photo-realistic, city. Even Mechagodzilla's synthetic villainy - when it finally puts in an appearance - is expressed purely in the realm of his contemporaries. The mechanical facsimile attacks a flagging Godzilla, exhausted from a night spent battling Kong, using spine rockets and electrified fists to clobber the ailing tyrant lizard. Firmly bracketed away from human terror then, this Mechagodzilla is simply a cheat. An opportunist who sees their chance to batter the current title holder. A backstory for MG that includes exhumed Ghidorah bones and a supercomputer run amuck barely factors into the robo-beasts characterisation - presumably included so the audience can delight, unapologetically, in this undead creature's eventual dismemberment. 

Emil Rottmayer - Deep Water

Ex:Re - Misery is a Butterfly (Blonde Redhead)

Shattered Glass Optimus Prime by Dyemooch

Tom Holkenborg - REV 9 / Terminator

Shadow Dancer: The Secret of Shinobi - BIG FIRE WHEEL

I had thought that the bouncing, burning wheel - seen here at 14:15 - was the last boss in Mega Drive exclusive Shadow Dancer: The Secret of Shinobi, likely because it was as far as I ever got. Turns out there are several stages afterwards; remix encounters that take a short, basic, layout from the second level of the Shinobi coin-op then stuffs it with a barracks worth of enemies. Limp through these ambushes to face a seated final boss who summons even more minions. No idea why I had trouble with the orbiting fire hazard either. Looking at it with 2021 eyes, the pattern looks pretty straightforward, even if the windows for damage are pretty narrow. Probably, my pre-teen brain couldn't handle the idea that the tumbling rock arena didn't mean that the fight was on the clock, requiring a quick resolution. 

Death From Above 1979 - Modern Guy / Free Animal

Sucker Punch (Extended Cut)

For a film filled with almost nothing but young women dressed in various examples of fetish wear, Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch goes out of its way to needle viewers who expect an uninterrupted leer. Snyder's 2011 release, co-written with Steve Shibuya, tells the tale of Emily Browning's Babydoll, a waif committed to a mouldering mental institution following the death of her mother and the murder of her little sister by a salivating Stepfather. Hoping to net himself his ward's inheritance, this ogre schedules Babydoll for a lobotomy, bribing Oscar Isaac's hunched orderly to forge the necessary documents. Trapped and bereaved, Babydoll begins to disassociate from her grim surroundings, imagining herself first as a virginal prize in a burlesque brothel then as a sword-wielding hero, crashing through waves of mechanical, masculine, aggressors.

Seen here in an extended cut that runs eighteen minutes longer than the theatrical presentation, this home video re-issue restores a level of bite that the American ratings board felt strayed beyond the remit of the PG-13 certificate. One long song and dance sequence aside, the majority of these version longue additions are the opposite of titillation. Instead we have harsh, threatening moments or bitter dialogue tweaks that underline the lack of actual, real-world, power these dozing superheroines possess. The manipulative rhetoric of Isaac's Blue, elevated from creepy hospital attendant to a glittering mobster in Babydoll's delusions, strikes a nastier chord in this edit. The mealy-mouthed platitudes of an unsuccessful pimp are subbed out for statements that anchor his desire for these women in something genuinely sinister. He wants to dominate them; to hurt them and have them love him in spite of this violence. 

With days left before her frontal lobe is rendered dull, Babydoll enlists the other inmates to mount an escape, determining a list of keys that must be acquired - simple items like a kitchen knife or a lighter. These objects, lent scale by the sheer desperation felt by these women, are magnified into incredible treasures that form the basis of action interludes that break with an otherwise impoverished existence. Babydoll has something of the siren about her, able to command male attention then generate enormous, impenetrable, fictions with nothing but a listless swaying. The asylum's men are enraptured, their brains numbed, allowing Babydoll and her accomplices - Jena Malone's Rocket, Vanessa Hudgens' Blondie, Jamie Chung's Amber and Abbie Cornish's Sweet Pea - to slip away to their battlegrounds. Unencumbered by reality, Snyder is able to motor through his varied and fantastical influences, matching flying fortresses against dragons or firing schoolgirl assassins at undead, steam-powered Alleyman. Sucker Punch is a melting pot massacre; Métal hurlant by way of the copyright flouting Daicon Opening Animation shorts.  

God Ginrai by Geoff Senior

Mad Reflex - Oblivion

Tom Holkenborg - The Path Chooses You / At the Speed of Force

Zack Snyder's Justice League

Upfront, Zack Snyder's Justice League offers a very clear demonstration of what the slighted director brings to this material, beyond a towering aspect ratio and a colour palette attuned to unyielding metals. In Snyder and screenwriters Chris Terrio and Will Beall's undiluted version, Batman's first meeting with Aquaman in a remote Icelandic outpost is presented as an incredible effort in of itself. Ben Affleck's Bruce Wayne has surmounted cracking glaciers and a storm that grounded all manner of aircraft just be in the same room as the rightful King of Atlantis. Their meeting concluded, Jason Momoa's regal roadie strides off to be in the ocean. Bruce and an awed village follow. Joss Whedon's Justice League presented this sequence as a bickering back-and-forth that concluded with a hero shot of Momoa smashing into the water then zipping away. Punctuation, essentially. 

Here, we instead focus on Affleck's despondent expression, his glance off this would be ally as it starts to snow and a group of women begin singing the kind of mournful, lilting, prayer you'd expect to hear at a monarch's funeral. Bruce worries that his words - his warning - has fallen on deaf ears. When he remembers to look back, Arthur has gone and gentle ripples are fading on the water. Whedon's reconfiguration of Justice League was arranged to access chummy sniping and casual success; earth-shattering powers portrayed as something easy or natural for a select few. Snyder and this project's editors, David Brenner and Dody Dorn, want you to feel the effort, to sink into these moments and experience them as enormous and transformative rather than simply exciting. It's a mode of communication that is rambling, episodic and, often, portentous, but it's also frequently magical. 

Four hours long and broken up into eight distinct movements, Snyder's League occupies a space outside of whichever continuity WarnerMedia are currently hurtling forward with. Affleck's stocky take on Batman has long since been replaced - Matt Reeves and men's magazine troll (not to mention generational acting talent) Robert Pattinson wrapped shooting on The Batman less than a week ago - while the story told here seems at least partially at odds with Aquaman's first solo foray and completely incompatible with Wonder Woman's 1980s set sequel. Zack Snyder's Justice League is already a document, a relic from a recent past that, despite an Epilogue prickling with several different flavours of promise, seems unlikely to be followed up on. In a way, this is the strength of DC's disparate platter, their continuity is so obviously broken that it allows each character to be the star of their own, ever-changing, micro-continuity.

Trapped in Snyder's pocket realm, these heroes are put to the test in ways that require genuine strain, one that is consistently amplified throughout by the piece's downcast tone and an editing style that rejects hurry. Although cities are not atomised the film establishes a genuine, and consistent, sense of danger. We are not watching a film that seeks to glibly reassure its audience that good will, inherently, triumph. Every action has a consequence. So whenever Ciarán Hinds' gigantic Steppenwolf - reimagined here as prehistoric musculature, resplendent in a chainmail armour that hums with machine life - bursts into the frame, slaughter quickly follows. The invader's assault on Themyscira, already a stand out sequence in the theatrical cut, is significantly extended here - trading quick, geographical, fixes and action movie editing for an assembly that submerges us in Queen Hippolyta (Connie Nielsen)'s fraying emotional state. 

We sit with the rage felt when a holy place is defiled; the despair as an enormous temple crumbles into the sea, ending umpteen lives. All this pain and confusion is expressed via image, space and sound rather than the crude, sex slavery invoking dialogue that Whedon brought to the table. Over and over we are forced to process the weight of these events and the effect they have on these characters. We are rarely thrown cold into an aftermath. This distended, atypical delivery works beautifully for a great deal of the film's other action sequences, especially those that felt perfunctory in their superheroics back in 2017. Gal Gadot's Diana / Wonder Woman foiling a London terror attack is elevated from a throw away scuffle to an act of Herculean expertise as Diana - in slow motion - struggles to place her bullet proof bracelets between Michael McElhatton's gun-wielding terrorist and several dozen innocent lives.  

Gadot's agog face fills the 1.33:1 frame, the first bullet traveling much faster than she can react. Through sheer will she gets her arm where it needs to be, interceding just in the nick of time. That's one bullet though. When the madman switches his rifle to fully-automatic then takes aim at a class of schoolgirls, Wonder Woman follows his line of fire, crouched and exerting; zipping inhumanly fast to put her gauntlets and, in one instance, her body between this outrage and these children. The film no longer rushes through these movements - perhaps previously unsure of how these staccato, obviously artificial, lunges would be received by an audience - we linger and examine now, cutting back and forth between the hammering gun and a dashing Diana. The effect is explosive, delirious even, precisely because the scene is unselfconsciously structured to cater to this idea of a body in the midst of a prolonged physical struggle. 

This Justice League is not summery or obviously celebratory then. Tonally speaking, we're not hanging out with our superpowered pals as they quarrel and pinball between disasters. Snyder's take is closer to a war film, one with a fantastical scope that reaches into our world's distant, unrecorded, past to tell of the day when a barbaric New God touched down on Earth and battled a who's who of human myth. Zeus and the Greek pantheon fought alongside an alien Green Lantern, Atlanteans, an Amazonian cavalry, and man's armies - including bearded Hun - against the being who would be master of the universe. The attempt, although unsuccessful, left both a mark on our planet and three living machines that can be combined to trigger an instantaneous apocalypse. Steppenwolf, the demonic agent gathering these devices, exudes the anxious presence of a toady. Although indescribably powerful when compared to mere mortals, he is, at heart, a needy middle-manager hoping to curry favour with his boss by wrapping up a noted loose end. 

Thanks to Marvel's trendsetting credit teasers this ruler, Jack Kirby's Darkseid, was beaten to the cinematic punch by Jim Starlin's deliberately similar cosmic bruiser Thanos. Elevated to chief threat in his universe, Josh Brolin's take on the Mad Titan even got to headline his own film, Avengers: Infinity War as well as a feature role in its sequel, Avengers: Endgame. That intergalactic plunderer, although brusque and all-powerful, was afforded a human dimension - a daughter he loved; a bizarre pursuit he, on some level, believed to be altruistic. Comparatively, Darkseid is portrayed with the kind of awe usually reserved for religious revelation. His introduction is that of an unholy visitation, a rippling God of militarised industry first seen silhouetted like John Wayne at the close of The Searchers before Snyder and cinematographer Fabian Wagner begin appraising this menace vertically. His figure is massive and granite; a hammer about to fall. 

This nascent form - identified in pre-release press as Uxas, the identity the God wore before taking command of the Omega Effect in John Byrne's Jack Kirby's Fourth World comics - is a ravenous, youthful, behemoth in search of an outlet. The Darkseid we see later in the film, primed for a starring role in a sequel that will likely never come, is this same being matured; skewing closest to the character's taciturn portrayal in Superman: The Animated Series and the subsequent Justice League and Justice League Unlimited television series. Voiced by Michael Ironside, that interpretation is, fundamentally, Satan ruling from his Church in Hell. Actor Ray Porter imbues this computer generated tyrant with similar gravelly malice; his voice a grim-dark growl that issues from a pit then carries through halls filled with conquered, mutated, subjects. 

Darkseid's screentime may be slight, especially when weighed against a 242 minute running time but every interlude counts - we see him batter through armies, felled only by the combined efforts of a Green Lantern, a legendary king and three Olympians; we watch the almighty Steppenwolf cower in fear when his master's image exerts itself on a slab of fissile ore. Darkseid's technology, the three Mother Boxes he abandons to Earth - depicted as desiccated hags in the apocalyptic visions of Ray Fisher's Cyborg - are a profane take on the act of creation itself. This God's Genesis is a wave of destruction that picks the flesh from Kryptonian bones and sets the world ablaze. Kirby's character, wholly new to this version of the film, makes such an obvious and immediate impact that the other sequel teases embedded in this film's Epilogue - Jesse Eisenberg's Luthor and Joe Manganiello's Slade Wilson laying the foundations for The Legion of Doom and an abandoned Batman film - seem positively tiny by comparison. 

Darkseid isn't the only character to receive reappraisal. Whereas this version of the film delves much deeper with the newer members of this Justice League, Whedon's theatrical cut seemed more of a feature length attempt to resuscitate Superman as a future tentpole prospect. Scenes were added and subtracted around Snyder's ticking time bomb - an effort undermined by computer assisted reshoot footage that, often, looked confrontationally bad - until Henry Cavill was behaving with the tranquil assurance of a Christopher Reeve. Snyder's assembly is a completely different story, doggedly sticking to Batman's Knightmare visions from Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice as an eventual destination for the hero. The disorientated Superman who violently reacts to his resurrection doesn't instantly fade as soon as an action sequence has been ticked off here either. 

Kent's pain lingers, expressed in his choice of suit - a funeral draft of his usual costume that recalls everything from Spider-Man's Secret Wars symbiote and Jon Bogdanove's Recovery Suit to the evil Kryptonians of the Reeve films and the rogue Superman seen in the cyberpunk future of the Batman Beyond animated series. This clouded, post-death perspective allows Superman to register as something other than a pat obstacle in a genre rehash. In Snyder's cut it's clear he carries real pain at having been unnaturally returned to life. Mothers and fathers, both living and dead, flock to him, talking this superbeing out of his fog by reminding him of his emotional and physical connections to this world - Amy Adams' seemingly pregnant Lois Lane and his patient, hardscrabble mother, Diane Lane's Martha Kent. Russell Crowe's Jor-El and Kevin Costner's Jonathan Kent join the chorus, recounting the spiritual quest they imparted to him in the language of Gods and men. 

In action, this Superman is different too. His understanding of stakes and pressure rendered off-kilter by his all-powerful nature. So while his teammates battle through a tumorous, irradiated, gauntlet, Kent remains in Kansas to get his head right. This pronounced contrast between an absent, healing, hero and a squad of allies flogging their hearts out against a terrifying extra-terrestrial threat - especially when played at this kind of length - is a fight blueprint straight out of Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball, a hugely successful multimedia series that plays with the myth of Moses and The Exodus in a similar way to Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's Superman comics. Toriyama's interpretation takes a more hysterical, comedic bent with a central character whose might is so massively out of whack with his contemporaries that all of the manga's plot contrivances are about placing successive hurdles between its hero, Son Goku, and any unfolding battles. 

As if to underline this structural note, Snyder's film tweaks Wonder Woman to be Superman's violent near-equal, an accomplice who isn't content to simply batter their enemies into submission. She's basically Superman's Vegeta - the displaced alien prince who works twice as hard to keep up with the savant Goku. Diana's similar insistence that Kal-El should only be referred to by the name given to him on his home planet is just the cherry on top. When Snyder's Superman does finally engage Steppenwolf, his hovering blows are unforgiving - the same brutal strikes he aimed at the Justice League seconds after they reawakened him - reminding us that this Superman remains at least slightly abstracted and perhaps not even the exact same man we saw in Man of Steel or Dawn of Justice. Death has altered the Kryptonian, there's a sense he isn't a complete person anymore, instead he's a wraith anchored to a previous life only by his Lois. 

That it requires such a massive intervention by his loved ones to even access his previous persona (his return to the life he had only possible because of their memories) tallies with Bruce Wayne's recurring fear that the Sun God who fell from the sky could become poisoned by dark rhetoric and take up the position of general in an army of annihilation. Finally, there's Fisher's Cyborg, a superhero instantly course-corrected in the theatrical cut to resemble the comedic, braggadocios, sidekick familiar to fans of Teen Titans Go!. Cyborg isn't simply re-evaluated here, his contribution to the overall shape of this film is seismic, far bigger than scene tweaks or costume corrections. In Snyder's version of Justice League Cyborg is a significant dramatic axis, one told with the anguish of a dead child forced back to life by a guilt-ridden father, Joe Morton's Silas Stone. Cyborg's story is one of halting reconciliation, not just with the parent who repeatedly chose work over his family, but with his own self-image. 

Cyborg's story is so thoroughly threaded into this king-sized Director's Cut that it's obvious why Fisher was protective of the role and then so bitterly disappointed when very little of it was released in 2017. Victor Stone is a multifaceted character that allows the actor to play two completely distinct personas - the confident, letter jacket wearing human half that keeps himself connected to the rest of mankind with bursts of online altruism and a mechanical aspect that Stone believes to be unnatural and damned. The latter gives Fisher the opportunity to play several different classic monsters - when he first meets Wonder Woman he's Quasimodo, hunched and evasive but taking a certain delight in his expertise; later he's Frankenstein's Monster, a resentful son committed to concealing or outright destroying his father's work. A metronome score carries us into an interior life where Stone is a God of human data, so powerful that he could end all life on Earth in an instant. 

Cyborg is a Dr Manhattan who hasn't become bored with the people around him. On the contrary, he wants to use his incalculable powers to help but sees no possibility for integration into wider society. He's hung up on the manufactured organs and arteries that maintain what's left of his shattered body. The shame he feels for this mechanism traps him, creating a wider context of internalised monstrosity that sours his outlook. It's clear that he abhors his physical identity, retreating into vast digital head spaces where he can stride around in the broad flesh and bone body he's all but lost. Cyborg's story, unlike his Watchmen counterpart, tracks towards an acceptance though - one facilitated by the precious knowledge that he isn't alone in this universe, that there are other people who share similar burdens to his own. It feels conceptually significant that it is Diana who reaches out to this metal man - in certain versions of her origin story she is an artificial construct herself, moulded from clay then imbued with life by a loving parent. 

None of this is to say that Zack Snyder's Justice League doesn't have its flaws, there are more than a couple of computer generated effects that, quite apparently, haven't received the fullest of attention. When suited up, Affleck's Batman, particularly in the tunnels fight, looks stodgy rather than brawny. And - despite an introductory accident that finds absurd, Richard Lester style humour in a moment of blind panic - Ezra Miller's Flash, when babbling in repose, often works against the film's mood in a glaring rather than playful way. There are perplexing additions too, the worst of which is a heartfelt conversation between Martha Kent and Lois Lane that tours the crater that Clark's loss has left in their lives before suddenly terminating with a needless superhero cameo that thoroughly undermines the moment. At its best though, this version of Justice League stresses stakes in a way that consistently feels just out of our heroes' control. Instead of clattering through danger, the film gives its set-pieces enough space for logistical appraisal. Threat waxes and wanes, allowing a genuine sense of wonder to take hold then flourish. Again and again we are assured that these heroes will have to break their bodies and work in the moments between seconds to accomplish the impossible. 

Tom Holkenborg - Wonder Woman Defending & What Rough Beast

Tom Holkenborg - The Center Will Not Hold, Twenty Centuries of Stony Sleep

Darkseid by Jon Lankry

Super Tight Woody - Let's Get It On (STW Flip)

Highlander III: The Sorcerer

Lacking both the confused audacity present in any version of The Quickening or the pure, kinetic energy of the original Highlander, Andrew Morahan's Highlander III: The Sorcerer (viewed here in a European theatrical cut, also known as Highlander 3: Die Legende, that includes a number of expanded sex scenes when compared to the US cinema release) settles for the dilatory pace of a televised police procedural. Although Sorcerer, like the two films before it, peeks into the memories of these battling immortals, these recollections are used to prop up present-day elements rather than really nose into the private mental space of someone who, despite living for centuries, hasn't yet been able to die. Sorcerer is a much more ordinary film then, one built out of pure exposition. Building blocks are dutifully doled out alongside handsome music video imagery to serve a wistful, erotic thriller-level plot. It's an approach distinct from (but inferior to) the frazzled, kaleidoscopic fragments that electrified Russell Mulcahy's swaggering rock operas. 

Christopher Lambert's Connor MacLeod and Mario Van Peebles' Kane are arranged as competing monsters in an investigation that naturally centres - but doesn't delve too deeply into - Deborah Kara Unger's Dr Johnson, a famous archaeologist puzzling through the discovery of an obscure tartan pattern within a Japanese historical site. MacLeod maintains an amiable but strangely distant presence - essentially pottering around until he's able to re-forge his broken sword - while Peebles, despite his character's pointedly Biblical name and a look best described as bubble money barbarian, isn't asked to do much more than growl his way through a Clancy Brown impression. Neither competitor has much in the way of an interior motor then. This pervasive sense of detachment is exacerbated in MacLeod's case by the crude fixes employed to nudge him towards something recognisably human. As well as a supernatural connection to what we presume is one of Dr Johnson's previous lives, MacLeod now also has an adopted pre-teen son who, really, only makes us wonder whatever happened to Rachel, the little girl MacLeod rescued from the Nazis in occupied Europe who grew up to be the executor of his vast estate? 

Manic Street Preachers - Faster

Jackie Jackson & Glen Barbee - Paula's Theme

Highlander II (Renegade Version)

Only available now in a reorganised edit called the Renegade Version, Russell Mulcahy's mid-90s director's cut (which was further tweaked with CG additions focused around the film's light palette and background plates in the early 2000s) of Highlander II seeks to mitigate the wilful damage perpetrated on the series by a bizarre theatrical release that - in a rough, up-front, spill of treacly exposition - demanded viewers now consider Christopher Lambert and Sean Connery's immortal swordsmen as deposed alien warlords, banished to our planet for the crime of mounting a deeply unsuccessful insurrection. Mulcahy's subsequent assemblies junk this intergalactic aspect, tweaking the story so the film's fallen future has roots in some long-forgotten, technologically advanced, Earth-based civilisation; one that apparently predates women (but not the Genbaku Dome). 

Although ill-considered these attempts to reframe Highlander in sweeping, science fiction, terms are at least audacious. They represents a colossal overhaul of expectation that, surely, tracks into an expanding, operatic, canvas? Not a bit of it. The distant past and Planet Zeist both serve the same mechanical function - they provide a separate location from which enemies with similar abilities to our heroes can invade from. Highlander II barely even plugs into the promise of further battles between semi-invincible swordsmen. Only three immortals cross over, two airborne splatter-punks (quickly dispatched) and Michael Ironside's cackling General Katana. Given that the film is set forty years after the first, trapped in a ruin organically connected to MacLeod's interpretation of The Prize, why not make Connor's foes a trio of immortals born (or realised through the kind of near death Connor suffered on a 16th century battlefield) too late to stake a claim on their birth right? 

Youth and bitterness could be stressed; a rootless fanaticism aimed directly at MacLeod, an ageing relic who, quite apparently, has sucked the life force out of countless rivals (and perhaps even the world itself) then squandered this unfathomable triumph by allowing himself to moulder. Unfortunately Highlander II betrays no such interest, battering through half-formed characters and orphaned scenes until it reaches a state of conceptual tedium. The film even in its longest, most complete form is clearly unfinished, lacking not just basic transitional and connective information but, obviously, entire episodes. It's a lumpen, discursive, film then but this misbegotten sequel is home to one genuinely spectacular sequence - a metamorphosis that sees a wheezing, decrepit, MacLeod see off multiple assassins to stand dead centre in a series of thunderous detonations that bestow upon him the smirking vigour he allowed to slip away. MacLeod immediately takes advantage of this rejuvenation to hurl himself, pelvis first, at Virginia Madsen's Louise Marcus, the beautiful (but completely underwritten) terrorist who had, just minutes earlier, been demanding that this shuffling old Highlander stand to attention.