For fans of psychotronic cinema there are few things more enticing than forbidden content and establishment outrage, and Jake West and Mark Morris’s 72-minute documentary on the often-oversimplified era of the “Video Nasties” brings both in the bucketful. Information, education, and entertainment abound in this vivid and engaging oral history.
Horror movies have always traded on two key things; novelty and transgression. They’ve also always held a dark secret; the more “high concept” those two are, the more likely it is that a film will try to trade on those elements alone and not bother to actually be any good in and of itself. So, it’s with great joy and relief that I can confirm that this zombie musical coming-of-age Christmas movie is also a great movie. Well, assuming that you like the idea of multiple song-and-dance numbers mixed with blood-soaked scenes of walking dead induced slaughter.
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Katie Holmes, aka “America’s Sweetheart in Dawson’s Creek”, had appeared in a couple of action films before this 2014 Karen Leigh Hopkins-written and directed movie. However, she had never appeared as a protagonist and certainly hadn’t been presented as Charles Bronson in a floral dress. This probably explains why this movie has managed to slip under the radar. Well; that and it being panned by the critics for the high crime of being a bit odd but not in the way they liked.
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This 2014 Canadian sci-fi horror, written and directed by David Hewlett, sets its stall up in the trailer as a medium budget, medium concept bit of midweek fun. It doesn’t suggest anything ground breaking or radical, and it doesn’t lean too heavily on having scooped Jason Momoa for a lead role. For a film that doesn’t have enough critic reviews to get a Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic rating, it arrived into the watch pile with the due fanfare of it just turning up on the “customers have also watched…” rolodex between Jurassic Galaxy and 2099 The Soldier Protocol. Filled with duly tapered expectations, it turned out to continue it’s tepidity by being mildly surprisingly good.
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I got my copy of this mighty tome back in July 2020, and that it’s taken me this long to feel I can finally give a solid review of its 430 pages, is testimony to how detailed and in-depth it is. Within the 50 information-rich articles is not so much an introduction to Cyberpunk, but more a state-of-the-art snapshot of some of the finest Cyberpunk Studies writing going around. Whilst the writing is not aggressively academic, the concepts and ideas discussed are given a weight and a reverence of serious critical analysis. The articles also demonstrate the most valuable facets of true fans of any genre: the joy of taking apart a favourite topic and evaluating it from every angle and in every light possible. Faults are on display as much as perfections, because it’s a part of the thing being loved, so needs to be part of a whole conversation.
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There is a long-standing tradition in folk-horror, all the way back to camp fire stories, of the weirdo family that lives in the middle of nowhere and eats anyone who inadvertently trespasses onto their hunting grounds. On an intellectual level it’s probably something to do with fear of the unknown and warnings against wandering too far away from the safety of the collective, but for B-movie fans it’s a very basic “hicks are inbred idiots” combined with the visceral thrill of transgressing one of the biggest cultural taboos. It’s morally reprehensible enough to make murder worse, it’s instinctively nauseating due to the fear of disease, and when done right it’s bloody funny.
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Upgrade starts out as a “by-the-book” bit of cyberpunk sci-fi. I-Could-Swear-That’s-Tom-Hardy, burly house-husband and committed future luddite, and his charming wife, Succesful-Generica, live in Now, But With Self-Driving Cars And Police Drones (population: lots). Fifteen minutes in, they get ambushed in their fancy car, him getting paralysed and her getting fridged in an unnecessarily sexual manner. I Can’t Believe It’s Not Tom Hardy then broods over being paraplegic and widowed, until Jared Leto-Lite offers to implant him with Legally-Not-The-Venom-Symbiote, later upgraded with Siri: Ultimate Fighting Championship Edition.
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Because it’s always good to go outside of your normal world, for this trip into obscuria we’re having a watch of a Japanese romantic comedy-drama. Based on the 2015 comic series “BL Mangaka Desukedo Kekkon Shitemo Iidesuka” by Haruki Fujimoto, who is also credited at writing the screenplay, Wedding Bells For The Otaku is an hour-long made-for-TV special. Directed by Toshimitsu Chimura, who probably got the job due to working on other nerdy TV series, it’s the kind of show that Japanophiles will probably wax lyrically about for many moons. Well, I’m not writing for them and any of their apologist behaviour, so my advice is that if you ever find this in a bargain-bin you should leave it there. Unless you know a J-Drama obsessive you can up-sell it to.
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Doom Patrol is finally to be available for streaming in the UK, via the Amazon Prime sub-subscription service StarzPlay. So, after raving so hard about The Pilot at launch on DCUniverse (and then watching it all again on Blu-Ray), it was time to do the season review.
Yeah, I got bribed/sponsored into watching this one as well. However this time it wasn’t my choice of film, and my “delightful” readers decided I needed to watch Cats: the CarCrash dejour of the end of the year. Whilst others had the glory of watching it on opening night or ripped off their tits on an assortment of drugs, I got to do it on a damp Monday with one coffee to keep me going. I have to say that waiting for that coffee was the highlight of my trip.
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Trash or Treasure 