Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem by Buster Moody

Adieu Aru - Saved

The Toxic Avenger

Michael Herz and Lloyd Kaufman's The Toxic Avenger is determined to fill its frame with as much repulsive imagery as possible. This interest in the relentlessly off-putting goes beyond the special make up effects that depict the bubbling skin of a teenager who has fallen into a radioactive barrel or the caved-in heads of thrill-kill victims. The camera pushes in on cackling faces, not to inspect them but to leer, to probe from such close proximity that these pitted landscapes begin to twist and warp. If the character is particularly repellent they might even have food spilling out of their mouths as they motor through their lines - chewed-up grub utilised as a cheap way to achieve the viscerally grotesque. Male faces - particularly the one owned by Mark Torgl, the fearless actor who plays the weedy pre-dip incarnation of the eponymous hero - are screwed up into the kind of honking, cartoonish caricature you'd expect to see adorning the cover of Mad Magazine. Set in Tromaville, the chemical waste capitol of New Jersey, Toxic Avenger details a crimefighting spree that draws from television's The Incredible Hulk and the murder musculature seen in the many Friday the 13th sequels. When battling other men, this over-inflated putz growls like Lou Ferrigno as he tears limbs off would-be muggers. The violence visited on women though is much more intimate, adopting the stalking rhythms of a slasher film as this mutant initiates humiliating assaults on the slobbering gym rats who mocked his sexual inexperience. The crown jewel of the Troma video library, The Toxic Avenger is available in an extended cut that adds several blurry montage clips (apparently sourced from analogue tape) that either burn screentime with stock footage of trundling tanks or by recapping the sub-90 minute film that we're all already watching. 

Kupla - Gravity

Nightbird by Rui Onishi

Magic Sword - OMNI

The Beguiled

Long before a lame drunk starts pointing a Flintlock pistol at startled school children, Don Siegel's The Beguiled is a siege film, one premised on hopeless, wartime longing and the incompatible desires experienced in unequal relationships. Clint Eastwood plays John McBurney, a grievously wounded Union soldier being nursed back to health by a half-dozen women in a Confederate sympathising seminary school. McB - so called by Pamelyn Ferdin's Amy, the (apparently) guileless adolescent who discovers his burnt-up, bleeding body - is Eastwood at his most louche, a bed-ridden stud pouring syrup into the ears of anyone who'll listen. He's arrogant and conceited, completely assured that his good looks and treacly manners will allow him to behave as he pleases. The women who fall under his spell, Geraldine Page's middle-aged headmistress; Elizabeth Hartman's virginal schoolteacher; and Jo Ann Harris' precocious teenager, each vie for this plucked rooster's attention. Variously, they extend offers of a salaried position, romantic love and, simply, sex as a way to secure their place in his affections. 

Siegel's film, adapted from Thomas P. Cullinan's novel by screenwriters Albert Maltz and Irene Kamp, uses bursts of memory and whispered thoughts to reveal the ways in which these people appraise themselves and each other. McB and Page's Martha - the characters experienced enough to actually have a past - exert themselves on the film using the former. While McB talks up his affinity for these untamed Southern lands we catch a glimpse of him, pre-injury and beaming ear to ear, as he sets crops alight. Before he was blasted into repose, McB experienced war as an adventure, one curtailed by his near fatal injuries. Martha recalls the last time she had an opportunity to roll around with a handsome man, and the shame she attaches to that relationship. We hear the hurried thoughts of the other women as they catalogue the school's ever-evolving relationships. Each one capable of incisive and pitiless assessment. There's a breaking point in The Beguiled though, an amputation performed under dubious pretext, after which all decorum is dropped. McB, having regained some mobility, rants and crashes about the house; desperately trying to cower these women and children. The revenge that sees his lifeless body sewn into a burlap bag is engineered, almost entirely, by the twelve year old who discovered him though. Amy, an overlooked but no less jealous member of the household, repaying Eastwood's brute for his boozed-up thrashings.

Freddie King - Going Down

Ugly Duckling - Left Behind

Pale Rider

Clint Eastwood's Pale Rider is a strange beast. Conceptually, it's an obvious retread of the actor-director's earlier western High Plains Drifter, to wit: a ghostly stranger appears out of nowhere to dispense a Biblical kind of justice on a threadbare settlement packed with wrongdoers. Whereas Drifter wallowed in cruelty and a windswept damnation, Rider position's Eastwood's phantom as a literal miracle, one that rides out of the imagination of a furious teenage girl, Sydney Penny's Megan, to answer her tearful prayers. Megan resides alongside a stream where her mother's partner, Michael Moriarty's Hull, sifts for enough gold to settle the debts he's accrued in the nearest town. The camp, little more than a dozen middle-aged men and their simpleton sons, are being pressured to abandon their duff claim by drunken, spoiling miners so that a greedy magnate can sweep in and unleash a deluge of industrial effluence on these autumnal lands.

Pale Rider, although routine in terms of premise is notable in how it contextualises its star. These means of presentation even differ based on who is currently appraising him. The audience, who are privy to whispered conversations and insert shots of an impossibly scarred body, are prompted to consider Eastwood's Preacher as a supernatural presence. A dead man returned to life to revenge himself on the killer who shot six bullets through him. Preacher is the same sort of wandering loner as Shane or Sanjuro; a kind of character that Eastwood has plenty of experience inhabiting and deconstructing. The defeated prospectors, used to a deranged sort of toil premised on fleeting shots at fortune, see him as their leader. A man of faith who is smart and resourceful enough to carry them to victory against their much braver and far more experienced, in the ways of warfare, persecutors. He's serene, self-assured and masculine in ways they cannot hope to be. 

Yet another interpretation comes from Megan and her mother Sarah, played Carrie Snodgress. They see this gunslinger in purely romantic terms, a figure of such tempestuous sexual energy that they both pick their moments to proposition him. Preacher demurs, at least in the case of Megan, reassuring these women that someone else - someone lesser - will find in themselves an ability to stick around, beyond the bloodshed he was summoned for, and make them happy. It's not even that Preacher is specifically sexless. After Sarah has confessed her hurried affections, he asks her to close the door of her sinking shack, to silence the echoing taunts of a crooked lawman, then he strides purposefully towards her. If anything his behaviour is suggestive of some pre-established, but fading, connection. Just as we are prompted to examine Preacher in archetypal terms, he also relates to others using similar parameters. Relationships are general; detail extraneous and unimportant. Even Eastwood's approach to violence in Pale Rider is unusual. Preacher's slaying of the seven lawman recruited to exterminate him is almost farcical in its arrangement. Eastwood concealing himself in ways that only make sense when considering this three-dimensional setting from the flat, two-dimensional perspective of a screen. 

Starscream vs. Grimlock by Geoff Senior

Ugly Duckling - A Little Salsa (People Under the Stairs Remix)

Blur - The Swan

Shin Kamen Rider

Notable as an action adventure film that doesn't make any attempt to conceal that it was shot under Covid protocols, Hideaki Anno's Shin Kamen Rider (listed as Shin Masked Rider on Amazon's streaming service) is a film concerned with tiny human figures broadcasting their thoughts to vast, empty arenas. Sosuke Ikematsu stars as Hongo, a socially withdrawn motorcyclist inexplicably granted people pulping powers by a mad scientist, played by the grand seigneur of cyberpunk, Shinya Tsukamoto. Naturally, Hongo is alarmed by his sudden ability to tear faceless goons limb-from-limb, as well as an attendant physical transformation that has hardened his skin into a cracked carapace. This mental and physical unease doesn't last though. Hongo quickly learns from Minami Hamabe's robotic Ruriko, his creator's indifferent daughter, that he can temporarily dump his anxiety-inducing metamorphosis by venting over-accumulated life energies. 

Lumbered by a storytelling model that prioritises isolated individuals, locked centre frame and delivering excruciating recaps, Shin Kamen Rider's most entertaining elements are the strange low budget scaffolding inherited from its parent television show: super-fights that are staged on desolate industrial estates; armoured costumes that don't completely tidy away the sweating human animal underneath; and hard cuts between locations to show that our heroes are permanently in a state of having arrived somewhere. Unfortunately, the film's fights are drowned out by a deliberately simplistic approach to computer generated figures. Shin Kamen Rider completely failing to build on the kinetic fluidity evident in Anno's extremely similar live-action adaptation of Cutie Honey - another 'Shin' film in all but branding. The director's most distinctive contribution then is a germophobic affect, one exacerbated by real-life social distancing rules that have gutted this concrete canvas of normal, non-superpowered people. Hongo, at least initially, is fixated on inspecting his hands. He flexes and curls his filthy leather claws, studying the spilt blood of vanquished heavies. 

Eagle Eyed Tiger - The Game

Lone Wolf and Cub by Daniel Warren Johnson

Blur - Barbaric

Battles Without Honour and Humanity

Kinji Fukasaku's Battles Without Honour and Humanity opens on the mushroom cloud that devastated Hiroshima. The camera tilts, travelling up the stem before it arrives at the boiling cap of the atomic firestorm, the reveal accompanied by blaring, brassy horns. Fukasaku's film tracks a group of demobbed Japanese soldiers scratching out a living following their return to this shattered, occupied city. The young men fight their way across the open air markets that have congealed on these famished, irradiated ruins, seeing off thrashing mobsters and the American soldiers who roam in packs, preying on screaming civilian women. Although long passages of Battles revolve around the effortlessly charismatic Bunta Sugawara, it could hardly be said that his Hirono is the film's main focus. The low-level gangster spends as much time off-screen and in jail as he does at the centre of the frame. Instead, Fukasaku's film largely adopts an anthropological approach: an embedded camera that runs alongside its subjects, cramming into tiny rooms for a decisive meeting or jostling for an advantageous view on the constant quarrels. 

Literally post-apocalyptic, Battles describes an effort to act out an antiquated, pre-war idea of criminal chivalry. It's a stock kind of gallantry that, very obviously, didn't really exist. The film's many characters are enthusiastic novices with no clear connection to the organised crime fraternities they are emulating. Their ceremonial initiations are parroted and incomplete, each a strange sort of lark performed by arrested children who are playing at being hard-bitten men. The stakes are the same though, regardless of individual experience. It's not that Fukasaku's film betrays any great affection for how these things used to be done either. The older men who prey on these youngsters are greedy and self-centred, obviously the products of a system premised on the relentless exploitation of an imaginary but inflexible class system. The veterans reflexively rat out their subordinates, playing them off against each other and ensuring that they themselves can stake a claim to the lion's share of profits. In this way the police, usually an antagonistic force in crime cinema, become almost immaterial to the unfolding events. Since their dragnets are frequently directed by a snitch, they nearly always get their man. Battles Without Honour and Humanity then concerns the dawning realisation that genuine loyalties are forged between peers over decades, and cannot easily be recanted. 

Altered Sigh - Just a Phase

Akuma by Quasimodox

Alan Palomo - Meutrière (feat. Flore Benguigui)

The Flash

The most fascinating aspect of Andy Muschietti's The Flash is that Warner Bros. was convinced they had a smash hit on their hands. A picture so purely entertaining that it was capable of overshadowing the bizarre (not to mention well publicised) criminality of its lead actor and bid a fond farewell to an era of superhero filmmaking that has inspired a genuinely rabid level of affection. On the day, we are instead treated to a strangely fatalistic money pit that, at least initially, seeks to emulate the light comedic touch of Robert Zemeckis' Back to the Future series before the studio edicts pile up then collapse in on themselves. Muschietti's film isn't always a boiling disaster though. Often it's even agreeable, usually thanks to one of the many Dark Knights skulking about. Ben Affleck briefly returns as Zack Snyder's Batman, this time behaving with the unhurried confidence of a Sprangian Scoutmaster. This burly grump is quickly overwritten, after Flash visits a temporal treadmill, allowing Michael Keaton's heavily merchandised take on the vengeful billionaire to spring back into action. 

Every moment spent in Keaton's company is a delight. The actor steering his untouchable take on Bill Finger and Bob Kane's crimefighter towards a kind of gravelly stoicism, one typically associated with Clint Eastwood - incidentally, another Warners mainstay. The Flash keeps on churning though, eventually sinking itself into a computer generated sludge thick with totemic marionettes choking on their own arrested adventures. These plastic depictions of a reality sinkhole are sort of stunning in their ugliness: Ezra Miller's twin speedsters the subject in an enormous colosseum stacked with conveyer belts that teem with hijacked imagery. Rather than tell an engaging story about a buffoon who treats his life like a series of video game checkpoints, we have a piece that literalises streaming services as a stinking cauldron of thwarted ambition. These century-spanning properties, and how they are expressed, are not special to the people cutting the cheques. It's all just content. Fit only to be piled on top of each other in an pulverising attempt to silence the bleating subscriber. No wonder the Discovery regime was so delighted: this Flash is a two hundred million dollar juggernaut premised on the idea that people should, in fact, just shut up and accept the slop that is served to them. 

Olivia Rodrigo - Vampire

Cammy by キシリ

ALISON & VIQ - Ardent