Hellraiser

Clive Barker's extradimensional sadomasochists are given a new lease of life thanks to a Disney streaming platform. Landing at Hulu (or whichever lackadaisical digital delivery giant is squatting on the film's distribution in your region) is a big step up for a series that has spent the last decade or so in a purgatorial rights-retention phase that saw new instalments barely screened beyond cast and crew parties. David Bruckner's Hellraiser is neither a sequel nor the long-promised remake of the 1987 original though, it's a rethink. A slasher slanted reboot with a tick 'em off structure further embellishing the A Nightmare on Elm Street-isms that crept into Hellraiser's less serious sequels while also switching the central relationship with Hell's emissaries from invitational (no matter how accidental) to sacrificial. This deliberately cruel adjustment allows the film to tease out another layer of power dynamics in a franchise that worked best when it burdened women with the sins of their self-indulgent men. 

Odessa A'zion plays Riley, a former addict struggling to get her life back on track while she squats in her brother's apartment, subjecting the tightly-packed household to the sights and sounds of her love life. Hellraiser deploys this idea of chemical or psychological dependency with no real intention to derive insight. Instead it's shorthand for the Riley character to remain lightly scorned by her peers and just unreliable enough that these same acquaintances meet increasingly sticky ends. Bruckner's film, written for the screen by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski, dangles an idea that the mission of Jamie Clayton's Hell Priest is self-perpetuating - that they find clueless marks then ruthlessly exploit their emotional vulnerabilities - but a third-act realignment pivots proceedings back into the realm of predatory billionaires. Goran Višnjić's Voight, the owner of a mansion riddled with red rooms, occupies a curious place in this story. He's a middle-aged voyeur who pays desperate twentysomethings to meddle with the occult on his behalf. The (strangely passive) monsters who stalk his estate then would seem to reflect the tastes he nurtured solving the central puzzle box - young bodies flayed and stripped of their identity. We assume they are the human grist ground on Voight's path to rapturous pleasure. 

HPSHAWTY - TO YOUR DOME W/TENNGAGE

Cooler by Francine Bridge

Mobile Suit Gundam: Cucuruz Doan's Island

Since it's based on an episode of the 1979 television series Mobile Suit Gundam that was deemed too poor - by series creator Yoshiyuki Tomino - to be included in any of the North American licensing agreements made in the early 2000s, surely Mobile Suit Gundam: Cucuruz Doan's Island should then be supplementary? Little more than a fanciful feature-length interlude that cannot play into any larger story or thesis specifically because of its apparent, ancestral, disposability? As if to hammer home this point, Yoshikazu Yasuhiko (the director of Crusher Joe: The Movie, the Sight and Sound feted Arion and early Manga Video UK release Venus Wars)'s film even disregards a time-sensitive mission given to the heroic faction, while the piece is rolling, to concentrate on Amuro Ray, a child soldier who has been uprooted from his warship habitat then deposited on a desolate island that is home to an enemy deserter and the war orphans under his protection. 

Injured during a battle with a weather-beaten but expertly piloted Zaku, Amuro awakens, not as a captive, but as a guest in Cucuruz Doan's household - a shattered lighthouse without the means to power its torch. While his host spends his time scratching away at blueprints from a lost age, the rest of the family, children of various ages, farm a small plot and dutifully tend to each other. Amuro slowly heals and eventually mixes in, earning the respect of the other children by repairing the pipes that carry their water supply. Although apparently low in its stakes, the power in Yasuhiko's film is that there is very little underlying tension between Doan and Ray. They are warriors from opposing sides but, unlike say John Boorman's Hell in the Pacific, there is little obvious animosity between the two before a truce can develop. The two characters barely even talk. It's not that Doan does not know that Ray is the pilot of the terrifying white Gundam either. Doan, we are shown, rescued an unconscious Ray from that stalled mobile suit. It seems that Doan has simply accepted that Ray is a child then treated him accordingly. 

When Amuro recovers enough to go searching the island for his giant robot, Doan gives him a water flask and a cap with a Zeon insignia stamped onto it. Amuro's acceptance of this cap is critical in terms of understanding how the boy is behaving in this space. Although the hat is adorned with the faction symbol of his enemy, Amuro accepts the gift purely in terms of its intended function: to keep him from getting sunstroke whilst out searching. He wears it without shame or complaint. He has seemingly disconnected from a theatre of war that, currently, exerts very little power on this place. When a crack Zeon commando unit - the Southern Cross Corps, Doan's former unit  - do arrive on the island, Doan again climbs inside his mobile suit in an attempt to vanquish the invaders. While Doan battles his one-time allies to a stand-still, Amuro finally locates his robot, nearly drowning in the process. Once encased in his Gundam, the teenager is forced to fight two of these commandos. The first he kills mech-to-mech, Amuro plunging his laser sword into the cockpit of the enemy mobile suit, vaporising his opposite. 

The second enemy pilot is out of his armour though, just a person snooping around. Amuro cannot afford to let him flee and either raise the alarm or resume piloting his robot though. Ray must press his advantage. Yoshikazu Yasuhiko's film again defies the simplistic morality of heroic fantasy by having this child use his towering robot to step on and crush this fleeing, helpless, enemy. The act registers first as disgusts then abject horror on Amuro's face; Yasuhiko's boyish draft of the character accentuating this acute, overwhelming, distress. The unspoken spell of Cucuruz Doan's island has been broken. Ray forcibly disconnects from the fast friendships he has made in this place; the safety and comfort of a childhood lived amongst other children. He resumes being a soldier. Later, having beaten back the remains of the Southern Cross Corps, Amuro enacts a kind of mercy on Doan, one he cannot give himself. Using his white Gundam, Amuro picks up the remains of Doan's ruined Zaku and casts it into the ocean, finally and completely severing Doan from a responsibility to fight. The children fret but their guardian understands. As Amuro and his White Base allies are waved off from the island, the viewer is left with an overwhelming impression that they have experienced a short but profound moment in Amuro's life. An alternative to a life spent fighting was briefly available to him but, ultimately, forgone. 

Muckman by Jeremy Brooks

Voyage - Align

Krosia & VIQ - Cloud Travel

The Battle at Lake Changjin II: Water Gate Bridge

The Battle at Lake Changjin II: Water Gate Bridge hurtles straight into pitched battle, dispensing with the first film's magic hour propriety and the gleaming computer generated landscapes that awed their bumpkin witnesses. The absence of these obviously falsified vistas, and the one-note nationalism they were designed to inspire, is an immediate boon in this sequel. Although positioned to evoke an expansive cinemascope awe, The Battle at Lake Changjin's adoring gander at The Great Wall of China was so golden and artificial that it actually more closely resembled those animated multi-channel audio trailers that would cue up before the main feature on certain region 3 DVDs. The nostalgic affection that pulsed through the previous episode has been almost completely hacked away then, leaving something rugged and monolithic in its place. 

Our sole glimpse of China in this episode is across snow-capped mountaintops; a distant and unreachable summit spotted by men whose bodies have already begun to rot. The sumptuous agitprop bent of the previous piece has been chiselled away - Changjin I's chivalrous affectations replaced with a two hour ode to gnarled noses and fingertips shattering by gunfire. The direction of this instalment is credited solely to Tsui Hark - Dante Lam and Chen Kaige are relegated to Executive Producer posts - this change in billing reflected in a film that, unlike its predecessor, does not feel like it is subject to umpteen clashing tones. Changjin II's focus is despairing combat, the film using furious montage and time-slice photography (emphasis on slice) to detail the pyrrhic bloody-mindedness required to push a human body past its breaking point. 

Water Gate Bridge's plot revolves around an enormous concrete complex that houses a mountain pass that will allow the American armed forces to flee the war in Korea, and the desperate efforts by People's Volunteer Army's 7th Company to detonate it. Frost-bitten Chinese soldiers, dressed in rags and wielding confiscated grease guns, hurl their bodies into hopeless, repetitive, conflict. This hair-raising martyrdom is backed by diegetic bugles and non-diegetic orchestra; a sweeping and anthemic chorus to match the film's euphoric expression of (fatalistic) patriotism. No-one escapes the meat grinder: matinee idols are penetrated and pulverised; teeth chip on flash-frozen rations; and a slumming boy bander (Jackson Yee) wears gashes all over his T-Zone, the marks burned into his face by the metal googles he has worn to protect his eyes. This deliriously photographed body horror peaks with a Chinese soldier being slowly crushed by an American tank. His flesh and bones gumming up the caterpillar tracks, rendering it still and, more importantly, vulnerable. This apparently dauntless machine of imperialist might is trapped in place by the literal body of the people. 

Rosentwig - Rapid Eye Movement

Savaged Regime - Toad Man (YM2612 Cover)

Batman by Daniel Douglas

Rosentwig - Like Yesterday

The Battle at Lake Changjin

Commissioned by the propaganda department of the Chinese Communist Party to celebrate the 100th anniversary of their founding, The Battle at Lake Changjin is a bloody affirmation of Chinese identity that uses a real-life rout during the Korean War to describe a political ideology so strong (not to mention romanticised) that it can completely repel the creeping forces of imperialism. The film presents brotherhood, both literal and fraternal, as a strength so potent and unbeatable that it can cross class and national boundaries, uniting thousands in one clear objective. Changjin proposes all this whilst also deleting any extraneous elements - such as the Koreans themselves - to arrive at a conflict between small groups of highly motivated Chinese, lead by the Wolf Warrior Wu Jing, and an oblivious mass of chundering Americans who would rather be back in their own country. 

In this sense then Changjin is closer to a fantasy epic than a war film that might flatter itself as a historical document. Directed by Palme d'Or winner Chen Kaige (for Farewell My Concubine), New Wave movie brat Tsui Hark (given all the sharp implements and nationalism on display here, The Blade and the Once Upon a Time in China series seem the most relevant to cite) and Beast Cops director Dante Lam, The Battle at Lake Changjin is also unapologetic in how it mangles the visual language of the American war film. Massing, computer generated, might and the idiosyncratic asides typically deployed to evoke a feeling of homesickness are turned in against their originators. Triumphant saturation bombing is contextualised from a ground level, becoming pitiless war crimes perpetrated against defenceless civilians; the greasy comforts of home are held up as repulsive excess when contrasted with frozen troops politely nibbling on their own, dwindling, potato ration. 

Changjin depicts its Americans in much the same way that Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy did its orcs: they are aimless biomechanoids who drive pulverising industry while protected by their fantastical air superiority. They huddle in meat walls and complain about how this war inconveniences their plans for the holiday season. Christmas and the God it celebrates are treated with a certain amount of bemusement by the film too - the power the latter represents is evoked constantly by the American high command when referring to the righteousness of their mission. This higher authority is even recognised by the Chinese, but only in the adverse weather conditions that are all forced to endure, the acknowledgment functioning more as a way to measure the sheer scale of the (eventual) Chinese victory. Above all though, these Americans are bullies who are completely incapable of the selfless heroics and physical ingenuity displayed by their Chinese opponents. This atypical alignment is massaged by a suite of exceptional action scenes that, again, mutate prestige beats from American cinema. The excruciating horror of Saving Private Ryan's knife sequence is exploded to include multiple participants, huge spurts of blackened gore, and a greenhorn who is actually gutsy enough to pick up a pistol and fire back. 

snaer. - lilly

Vega by Corey Lewis

Midan - Temporary Happiness

Savaged Regime - Dive Man (YM2612 Cover)

Top Gun: Maverick

Top Gun is the story of a talented young American pilot slowly overcoming a variety of (largely domestic) threats to his ego and sense of self. The pilot's real name, Pete Mitchell, is viewed throughout Tony Scott's film as a poisoned chalice; his hot shot mentality contextualised as a grievous threat to the group cohesion so prized by any military unit. He's double-damned and not to be trusted. Tom Cruise's younger Maverick is able to tidy away these nagging concerns only after learning the sealed document-level truth of his father's passing: he died a hero. This knowledge completes Maverick, allowing him to rise to the challenges set before him, becoming a team player in the process. His anointment isn't how many enemy planes he has shot down though, rather it is when his biggest rival states that he now trusts Mitchell. Joseph Kosinski's Top Gun: Maverick then, a sequel that has taken 36 years to follow its predecessor, is about this master returning to his calling. 

This Maverick has long been the finished article. Age and an unwillingness to follow a typical Navy career path has meant that he has drifted away from his true purpose - dogfighting - becoming the human component in much more esoteric, experimental, aircraft. His excellence has been folded into a scientific strata - he's human hard data, put in place to balance other unaccountable variables. His reliability is beyond question. Kosinski's sequel speaks with this sweeping language; that of a sports film. Massed air attacks are described and drilled in terms of pure objective and their prospective dangers, rather than how these strikes will then go on to influence a spinning world. Like the Scott film before it, Top Gun: Maverick is curiously apolitical in how it approaches its geopolitical unrest. Although clearly ex-Soviet Bloc in terms of gunships deployed, no clear names or locations are offered up for this enemy. 

Nameless but described with a clear cultural symbolism (one completely centred around military hardware), the country refining uranium deep in missile mountain might as well be a Soviet Union that never fell into economic hardship. Maverick's foe is a transcontinental mega power that reaches beyond the Sea of Okhotsk, deep into American Pacific territories, able to scramble next-generation aircraft that outclasses the planes fielded by the richest nation on our planet. This gap in technological prowess is a key building block in Top Gun: Maverick, one that allows the film to trespass into even more exciting and fantastical realms than its prequel. When the chips are down, Cruise's character is so supernaturally talented that he is able to render any advantage wrung out of aeronautical innovation effectively null. He doesn't just pilot his aircraft, he has a symbiotic relationship with the machinery. This concept is hammered into the audience via IMAX footage of a purple, straining, Cruise riding billion dollar planes so hard that they seem to be about to fall apart. 

Eagle Eyed Tiger - Rewind // Matador // I'd Rather Be A Stranger

Megatron vs Death's Head by Geoff Senior

Rosentwig - Bioluminescence

The Cure - Dredd Song

Play Dirty

A World War II film that goes beyond your standard covert military manoeuvres, using deliberately (and unashamedly) amoral characters as a way to draw attention to the idea that, at its core, war is a criminal enterprise. Play Dirty has, despite its title and penal battalion concept, more in common with the anti-imperialist spaghetti westerns than the Robert Aldrich film that its title is so obviously riffing on. André de Toth's film, working from a screenplay co-written by the director (credited as Lotte Colin) and Melvyn Bragg, portrays the British class system as a closed-off hierarchal arrangement that generates just as much danger for this Allied out-group as the Afrika Korp troops crawling all over the continent. Recalled from a cushy post logging ships as they sail into port, Michael Caine's Captain Douglas is tasked with leading a group of mutinous convicts on a suicide mission to detonate a fuel dump critical to Rommel's mechanised expansion. 

Disguised as an Italian desert patrol, Douglas leads his group of expendable, multinational, saboteurs - the team's ranks include a Cypriot, a pair of lovesick pickpocketing Senussi, and Nigel Davenport as an Irish second-in-command who will only support Douglas if there's a cash incentive in play - ahead of an ill-fated British truck battalion expected, by some well-insulated officers, to actually complete the mission. Although poised for all manner of creeping confrontation on these sifting sands, Play Dirty largely generates its excitement out of the environment itself: jeep wheels regularly stick and sag in this desolate wilderness; while a steep sandstone incline requires a creative solution that gives these troops a fleeting glimpse of camaraderie. A pitiless trek structured around the strange self-reliance of deep cover commando forces, de Toth's film is a thoroughly amoral adventure that, really, only wobbles when a particularly sour sequence of attempted rape terminates in a sight gag straight out of a Richard Lester sex comedy. 

Decisive Koala - Endless Summer

Warlord of Mars Attacks #1 by Ramon Villalobos