Alien by WBYK

The Fat Boys by Tom Scioli

Joe Pineapples by Simon Bisley

Futurecop! - NASA / Lost Love feat. DWNTWN (Sunglasses Kid Remix)

The Rock

Easily Michael Bay's best film, The Rock strikes a balance between the director's inherent vulgarity and some genuinely compelling character work. As was the norm with the Bruckheimer / Simpson machine, The Rock's script passed through many hands before arriving on-screen. Known contributors include Robert Towne, Quentin Tarantino, and Aaron Sorkin. Porridge writers Ian La Frenais and Dick Clement performed some uncredited doctoring as well. Since Sean Connery's onboard, there's even a chance that John Milius might've had a pass too. On the Criterion commentary track Nic Cage and Ed Harris both state that their readings informed revision, Cage even stating outright that he reworked pages. So while the dramatic shape of The Rock is malformed and ludicrous, the characters sing. The three leads, Dr Goodspeed, Captain Mason and General Hummel, have been worked and reworked to the point where they're multi-dimensional personalities rather than just rote archetypes. There's no doubling, characters don't share histories or hang-ups. Instead they're three different kinds of professionals dealing with an extraordinary situation. 

Stanley Goodspeed could be just a neurotic sidekick prone to outbursts. While that's still there, it's tempered with an underlying sense of duty. Goodspeed is ill-equipped to deal with the violence inherent to this situation, but he shoulders it because lives are at stake. Goodpseed finds his centre in the ability to dismantle the VX poison rockets. A skill no-one else possesses. A character that could have been lost to comic relief is then elevated to reluctant hero. The audience can invest in his failings and delight in his triumphs. There's an emotional consistency to Goodspeed too. He isn't mutated by the experience. Crucially, killing never becomes comfortable for him. It's always his last recourse in a desperate situation. These writing decisions keep Goodspeed human, informing the relationships he develops, most crucially with Mason. The Rock also functions as a far better send-off for Sean Connery's 007 persona than his last stab at the role, Never Say Never Again. That film only lightly touched on the idea of a defunct, decrepit Bond. The Rock revels in it. It proposes a Bond that has found himself abandoned by his Universal Trading superiors. 

John Mason has had decades to ponder the fallacies of nationality and patriotism. The archetypal company man was discarded, despite his talents. There's an element of Ian Fleming's The Man with the Golden Gun at play. A slower, meaner spy, past his prime and searching for a good death. Mason has had time to consider and re-evaluate his place in the world. An element of sentimentality has crept into his thinking. He wants to engage with his estranged daughter - the result of a one night stand during his last escape. After breaking a few arms, Mason manages to give his FBI handlers the slip. He uses the opportunity to reconnect with his offspring. When Goodspeed and a legion of San Francisco's finest crash the meeting, Mason is thankful for Goodspeed's discretion. These are new emotions for a Bond character - vulnerability, the desire to make connections, gratitude even. Connery's Bond, especially under Terence Young's direction, was a bastard without peer. He roughed up allies and manhandled women into the path of bullets. He was a user. A man programmed to think and act like a shark. Now his back pains him after a fire fight. 

James Bond has never really been given a last case. He's never died or been confronted with finality. The character's forever locked into his late thirties, voraciously consuming. The advancing age of his actors barely figures into the portrayal beyond the odd joke. Mason is Bond confronted with age as reality. His body doesn't work the same way anymore and he's ostensibly alone. While he has a daughter somewhere, at best she's tentative. The route he took to meet her did reveal somebody he can unburden himself on - Goodspeed. Stanley's underlying decency is at odds with superiors who routinely tear up pardons. Mason takes note, making him for a man he can trust. This is one of The Rock's strongest points. It has Heroic Bloodshed ideas in its head. The twin protagonists aren't competing, they're complimenting each other. It's a male relationship film that takes a cultural icon from the 1960s and transforms him into a patient father figure, guiding the nervous young buck. A lot of the reasons Mason has for staying are contrived - he's decided he's too old to swim the San Francisco Bay - but they play into Mason's emerging vulnerability. He's found a friend in Goodspeed and doesn't want to leave him to his death. 

There's a hint of shame too. Goodspeed doesn't stand a chance but he's still game. How can a former super-spy excuse doing less? Which brings us to Ed Harris' General Hummel, a character so well defined and played he unbalances the entire third act. Just so you know he isn't fucking around, Hummel is spoken about in absurd terms. Crisis meetings at the Pentagon are full of hype men talking him up like he's Golgo 13. Hummel appears to have been a sticking point in The Rock's writing. At some point everybody got into a pissing contest trying to explain the psychology and motivations of a man that would do something ridiculous like set up chemical weapon rocket pods on Alcatraz. Hummel isn't just clarified, he's made sympathetic. His cause is just. He's simply seeking reparations for dead soldiers from an uncaring government. Like Goodspeed, Hummel is made exceptional by his altruistic desires. He's also contrasted with the unit that works around him. Goodspeed's superiors want to melt the island, regardless of the hostages. 

Hummel's crew want to get paid though. They couldn't care less about the General's high ideals, they've sniffed out a windfall. This is where everything starts to fall apart for Hummel. Rather than have Goodspeed and Mason come in and bust heads, Hummel's group unravels from within after he pilots a rocket away from an American football game and into the drink. Despite his posturing he had no intention of killing innocents. He was bluffing. The Rock lasers in on this moment, hurtling away from the idea of Hummel as a megalomaniac, making the two heroes obsolete in the process. As well sketched as Goodspeed and Mason are, they are just old ideas with a new coat of paint. Hummel's problems are unique and exciting. Henchmen shouldn't mutiny, they're unthinking limbs. When subordinates start unpacking pistols and pointing them at SPECTRE Number 1's head, we're in uncharted territory. This is The Rock's best moment. A Reservoir Dogs idea given centre stage in a $75 million blockbuster. On release it probably seemed glib, Tarantino regurgitating his John Woo steals for the blockbuster crowd. 

It all hangs together though. We've spent time with these men. We understand the falling out. We noted the tensions. Every scene with the Marines has built towards this. When Goodspeed and Mason sneak in you're almost disappointed. You don't want them to resolve the situation. They can observe if they want, but you'd rather they just disappeared altogether. Ed Harris has stolen the film. He looks like he's been carved from wood. You can tell he can kill at whim. The frailties that have made Goodspeed and Mason human now read like weakness when regarding this Terminator. Hummel has won. He has been so magnetic, so unwavering in the face of danger, your allegiance has instantly switched to him. His prowling, arrogant determination is reminiscent of Richard Burton in Where Eagles Dare. Now two Nazis have turned up to stick their fucking noses in. The Rock's myriad writers put their characters first and ended up making something bizarre, a Summer blockbuster in which you root for the bad guy. Rather than resolve with a big win for the home team, events taper off into utter chaos driven, primarily, by spite and greed.

UNIVERSAL DONOR

Pretty good of Warner Bros to get this out quick so I didn't have to hunt down an off-screen version someone's recorded in portrait on their phone. As expected, Mad Max: Fury Road's trailer is so insanely kinetic that I feel like I could run head first through a wall after watching it.

Alien vs Predator by Mike Mignola

ZYURANGER

Ahead of the gritty blockbuster reboot, Shout! Factory have announced their intention to release the original Japanese TV series that formed the backbone of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Hacked up for action scenes, Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger was the 16th Super Sentai series and the first to have a recurring sixth superhero. Rather than mess about granting magical powers to the Saved by the Bell kids, Zyuranger was instead about a group of ancient warriors that were descended from a race of dinosaur people. Awakened in the present day, the troop inherit gigantic prehistoric robots and do battle with an evil witch from the Planet Nemesis.

MONEY PIT

Look! The first (censored) episode of the animated Prison Pit series. If you want to see the gore and hear the swears you have to fork out over here. Despite the truncation, I'm pretty taken with James Adomian's decision to give Cannibal Fuckface a growly Macho Man Randy Savage voice. Love the sparse, deteriorating sound design too.

Emma Peel by Stacey Lee

MAGNUM FORCE

Stephen Altobello talks us through how the 5.1 remixes prepared for DVD re-releases have messed with original artistic intent, fixing sound cues that may not have been broken. I'm not really sure I understand this particular revisionism. It seems to be predicated on an idea of the audience, rather than the actual audience. As if the film studios believe modern viewers can't stand to hear any sound effect they haven't already heard a million times before on TV.

It might make sense as an alternative, if the original track is damaged or has elements missing, but not as a replacement. It also speaks to a boring literalism with film sound effects as a locked, indexed idea rather than something fluid and imaginative. Unfortunately, Clint Eastwood seems particularly cursed by this movement. Recent issues of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly have had their buzz bullets replaced with dreary hollow-point rapports.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

More elastic animation principles haven't tended to get a lot of play in CG blockbusters. There's an ever-present sense of restraint. Nobody wants their robots or their dinosaurs slipping into capering, so movement and expression are kept rather routine. There's an inbuilt critical backlash too. Any film that spends too much time with its effects tends to get labelled as a video game - the vulgar other that most people don't even consider a worthwhile artform. So what should cinema aspire to? Three people bickering in a small room? Why are dynamics so looked down upon? Surely as a visual medium there should be space in the canon for spiky things moving incredibly fast?

Despite his assertions to the contrary, Andy Serkis' motion capture acting has ended up being a vessel for smuggling sustained computer generated animation into mainstream films. As a credible human actor, Serkis has become the poster boy for acceptable simulated excess. His loud boasting, coupled with the inherent critical safety his thesp credentials offer, has allowed a feature creep. Films like Dawn of the Planet of the Apes hinge, dramatically, on a lot of time being spent with textured 3D models. Press releases tell us they're just visual approximations of physical on set acting, but it's obvious there's a lot more to it than that. Scour any article in which Serkis evangelises about mo-cap and you'll find a string of animators in the comments section casually chatting about how much, or how little, of his performance they ended up using when constructing their passes.

Serkis then has allowed live action filmmaking and animation to intermingle at a conceptual level. Films no longer need to stop dead for special effects sequences, the entire piece can be one. The apes in Dawn and Rise of the Planet of the Apes inspire a genuine sense of wonder - higher primates are always fascinating but seeing them act with clear, dramatically delineated, agendas is spellbinding. If either film has a fault it's that the human story never grabs the attention in the same way as Caesar's. How could it though? What actor could possibly be as interesting as a photorealistic Chimp that's Arthurian monarchy personified one minute, extreme personal threat the next? Ralph Fiennes came close recently with a similar kind of performance in The Grand Budapest Hotel, but that film didn't spend actual minutes gazing lovingly at Fiennes while he drew his muscled body up to its maximum height.

La Roux - Uptight Downtown

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles by Tomer Hanuka

Bad Boys

Originally conceived as a post-SNL vehicle for Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz - that is until producer Don Simpson took the pair to Vegas and horrified them by being a party animal / disgusting fucking pig - Bad Boys eventually landed with Martin Lawrence and Will Smith. Propaganda Films graduate Michael Bay finds himself hamstrung on his first feature trying to make sense of a reheated buddy cop script that frequently rambles off into dreadful. Based on the evidence presented here, it's easy to see why Bay cultivated a distrust for the written word. Four credited screenwriters couldn't shift Bad Boys out of its clunky, tell-don't-show funk. The director gets far better results by just letting the two stars bicker in tight close-ups. Elsewhere, Tea Leoni tries desperately to wring some sort of pathos out of the mumbling, stuttering arc she's been assigned.

Bad Boys is an object lesson in the difference between an actor and a star. Workhorse Leoni sticks to the blueprint and comes off wooden. Lawrence and Smith fuck the script off and ham it up, becoming masculine ideals to 15 year old boys everywhere. Lawrence and Smith's contempt for the basic mechanics of the film they're in saves Bad Boys to a degree. By disengaging they get to be the audience stand-ins, commenting on the formulaic proceedings. The pair don't act anything like your typical, heroic movie cops. They break the law and flippantly talk about killing people. Most importantly they aren't emotionally invested, because, truthfully, neither are we. This is the idea Michael Bay has built a career on. Why bother trying to construct meaningful characters or situations when you can instead shoot your actors like they're in a hyper-sexualised music video? You make your stars the crux of the commercial. The product they are selling is cool.

Toy Story That Time Forgot by Mike Mignola

Major Eazy by Carlos Ezquerra

RUG BURN

Head over here to buy up merchandise to help fund a feature length Prison Pit animated movie. In a perfect world a Japanese animation studio would snap this up and turn into an interminable serial full of nonsensical filler and minimal animation.

ABC Warriors by Mike McMahon

ABC Warriors by Simon Bisley

Transformers: Age of Extinction

Transformers: Age of Extinction is the first film in the series I've enjoyed. Previous entries fumbled an easy sale by changing million year old soldiers into uncoordinated idiots, basing the entire third act around racist robots and, in the case of Transformers: Dark of the Moon, a truly revolting performance from Shia LaBeouf. Implied domestic abuse aside, Moon did have a few cool beats. Fallen Autobot Sentinel was, thanks mostly to Leonard Nimoy's performance, at least a two-dimensional idea of villainy. Michael Bay's latest easily tops that renegade robot with a PTSD Prime coming to terms with the horrors that have been visited on his kind. Prime is no longer a background player, he's Extinction's dramatic engine. In this sense the film is the closest match to the multimedia brand that was pumped into my brain as a child. So while Extinction may be vulgar, blaring trash, it has enough consistent character ideas to conjure up a few cackles.

Extinction's villain Lockdown operates as an opposite to Optimus Prime, the swaggering mercenary versus Prime's rigid true believer. Lockdown has no allegiance to either the Autobots or the Decepticons. He's something new - a third path. Lockdown's name and occupation springs from Transformers: Animated, were he seemed an attempt to roll Marvel UK's Death's Head character into the Hasbro canon. Lockdown is Lamborghini grey and carries a sickle. He unpacks from a Aventador sports car, his body flayed and athletic compared to the new plate metal Prime. Like Sentinel Prime before him, Lockdown has a human face to stress cunning and duplicity. Lockdown's grasping anti-agenda opens up future conflicts beyond the strict binaries of Autobot and Decepticon. He's a cosmic character with a menagerie of violent, spiky things to command and the ability to reconfigure his face into a gun.

Lockdown, along with the rusting, cantankerous Hound, feels like he's been designed as a personality first and a toy second. He's a Spaghetti Western sharpshooter brought in to throw a spanner in the works. Riding shotgun is Megatron, resurrected as his upgraded form Galvatron. He's visually cleaner, resembling an ogre mocked up by Apple. There's none of the regal splendour of Floro Dery's original design but, like the 1986 Galvatron, he's immune to an outside force trying to rebrand him. As ever, the Megatron personality is persistent, looking for weaknesses in his prison. Extinction's Autobots are no longer hulking do-gooders, they each have own individual outline and colour scheme. Their personalities are violent and disagreeable. Two of Prime's soldiers are openly insubordinate when they think he isn't looking. Fresh recruits are battered into compliance. These kinds of ideas aren't new to Transformers as a property. Flick through Marvel's The Transformers Universe character guides and you'll discover the Autobot ranks are full of sociopaths. How else do you cope with a war that has lasted forever?

Simon Furman, Geoff Senior and Derek Yaniger's Transformers: Generation 2 comics featured Autobots seething with grenade pouches and belts of ammunition. Yaniger using the visual vocabulary of 90s X-Men comics to rejuvenate ailing ideas and characters, making them gritty champions of war that terrify the pacifist aliens they help. Extinction goes a little further, Hound's mek-nificent four are basically 2000 AD's ABC Warriors - a cadre of treacherous killer robots who only respect strength. There's a sense of truth in this idea though. Optimus Prime isn't Superman. He doesn't have a no kill policy when it comes to equals. He's a warrior general fronting an intergalactic establishment in a civil war. Since he carries a God artefact in his chest, he should probably be considered a religious extremist too. This ancient, punch-drunk approach to a Prime adds up. When Marky Mark finds him gathering dust in a devastated movie theatre he's literally decrepit. Peter Cullen's voice has a raspier register this time too, evoking a bone-deep sense of weariness.

Extinction's Prime has been betrayed by the race he tried to help. His preferred team mates have been hunted down and horrifically murdered. So when he takes a moment to lay out the fact that he absolutely will kill a human now, it doesn't feel particularly extreme. If you accept Optimus Prime as a character rather than a special effect, why wouldn't he? Especially locked into this hyper-aggressive Michael Bay milieu. Extinction's Prime is past higher ideals. They died with his comrades. Three films have taught him humans will sanction his actions, attack him and his troops, and now dissect them in pursuit of a pay raise. Prime is a zealot from a world that has subsumed every aspect of their society into pure conflict. Currency is irrelevant to Prime, all he values is subsistence. He's used to total war. So when he brushes up against profiteering and the military-industrial complex why wouldn't he be revolted?

Prime survives in the company of Cade Yeager, a deranged possessive with a knack for engineering. Yeager repairs Prime and speaks to him like an equal. Yeager is also keen to use Cybertronian technology to join the fight. To a ruthless utilitarian like Optimus Prime Yeager is genuinely useful, he fulfils the same battlefield function as Prime's deactivated warrior-medic Ratchet. Sam Witwicky was always just collateral damage waiting to happen, a human germ who had his action heroics mapped onto a secondary character. In contrast Yeager tracks after Prime providing suppressing fire. Screenwriter Ehren Kruger repeatedly stresses Mark Wahlberg's character with the same old-fashioned masculinity as Prime. He's the Father God who plays with his children's lives but will ultimately die for them - when Yeager's government threaten him and his family, Prime is explosively angry, abandoning his disguise to immediately go on the attack.

Extinction stays entertaining because it's about an ideological clash. Optimus Prime is the supreme commander of the Autobot faction of Cybertronians. It's a position he's won through bloodshed and maintained with respect. Extinction also posits that it's a role run on fear. Prime is so terrifyingly powerful no-one dares challenge him. Even skyscraper tall Tyrannosaurs get their jaws broken trying. Prime is then the totality of a government state, a fascist ideal programmed to fulfil every executive role in an endless war. If he has found a use for Cade Yeager, who the fuck are Frasier or the American Government to disagree? Age of Extinction has bum jokes, a peeping Tom gaze and a runtime that feels like punishment, but it also features an Optimus Prime who is so absolutely fucking disgusted by the race he's found himself protecting that he's excited to blast off into deep space on a suicide mission.

Hoist by James Cox

Hellbound: Hellraiser II

For all its faults Hellraiser had solid, dramatic ideas about familial unease underpinning the transatlantic vivisection. Director Tony Randel's Hellbound: Hellraiser II doesn't even bother with that kind of personal dimension. The film begins well enough - Clare Higgns' Julia is dragged out of the underworld by Kenneth Cranham's Dr Channard, a lobotomist who is sexually excited by flayed bodies. Early scenes of the Julia drifting around Channard's house, smearing bloody hand-prints over his all-white interiors are visually interesting too, evocative of the human cost associated with Channard's hobbies. Julia and Channard do make for an intriguing couple too: Channard's an Aleister Crowley fan who uses his position at a psychiatric hospital to requisition police evidence and stage satanic ceremonies; Julia, hardly pliant arm-candy, actually seems to be working directly for the all-powerful shape that twists and turns at the centre of this film's rendition of hell. Neither of these villains gets very much to do beyond that though. Julia is trapped glowering at a pair of dreary heroines, boasting about her new role in this destitute cosmology as a wicked witch. Channard (eventually) gets himself a Cenobite makeover but ends up falling apart at a crucial moment for no particular reason. This is Hellbound's problem. Characters and their actions aren't tracking towards satisfying conclusions, they're simply grist for risible splatter effects.

Satanus and Judge Dredd by Mike McMahon

Fury by Carlos Ezquerra