Freaks (1932)

From http://www.audienceseverywhere.net/wp-content/
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Director: Tod Browning

Screenplay: Tod Robbins

Cast: Wallace Ford (as Phroso); Leila Hyams (as Venus); Olga Baclanova (as Cleopatra); Roscoe Ates (as Roscoe); Henry Victor (as Hercules); Harry Earles (as Hans)

Synopsis: Within a travelling carnival and its sideshow "freak" attractions, the owner Hans (Earles), a midget, falls in love with the Amazonian trapeze artist Cleopatra (Baclanova). Unfortunately Cleopatra is in cahoots with the strongman Hercules (Victor), and the pair as well as being cruel and abusive to those within the sideshow have a plan for Cleo to marry Hans and poison him to claim his financial inheritance. However, as a carnival barker who bookends the film states, the sideshow "freaks" including a living torso, a bearded woman and "Pinheads" live by a code. In a world where they are discriminated against, they have their own community where they protect each other and deal with their own foibles; those from the outside who befriend them, including animal trainer Venus (Hyams) and Phroso the Clown (Ford), will be treated as equals, while those who trespass against them will suffer horrible consequences.

A lot of cineastes will know of Freak's notoriety. Banned in the United Kingdom, causing outrage in its country of origins, sold to Dwain Esper to be churned out on the grindhouse tent circuit until it was critically revaluated, living with the reputation as a thirties horror film that still surprises. More so today with political correctness, the film from the title to some of the words in the synopsis will be even more uncomfortable without having seen the film, and even to the cast it was a film both championed but also damned for its depiction of those with physical differences. As someone who grew up with a learning disability, autism, whilst I cannot compare to someone like Prince Randian, the living torso, who had no limbs to speak of, viewing Freaks more and more since I saw it the first time in college film studies has a different perspective for me as someone not part of "normal" society even if it's not because of a physical handicap.

From http://breakfastwithplato.com/wp-content/uploads/
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In testament to the film, Freaks never mocks the titular individuals. While in broad brushes depicting the lives within a circus, the brief snippets of a community are rich as they stand. Tod Browning did run away with the circus when he was young and throughout there are many aspects to the film that couldn't be seen in anyway but heartening. A community where everyone helped each other, married and had kids as the human skeleton and the bearded lady do in one scene, and whilst the film is fictitious the normalisation of everyone's lives and letting actual sideshow attractions act is a huge virtue. The rawness of amateur performers is matched by the charisma of everyone, from Schlitzie the pinhead (actually a man playing a woman) to the already mentioned Prince Randian, who only gets one moment but shines just from showing how you don't need limbs to light a cigarette. That the film was cut down to only around an hour does mean a lot was probably lost that would've been exceptional to see, but what snippets remain are utterly inspiring and subversive in seeing these people be filmed having meals and merely gossiping between themselves. This is where even someone like myself with a mental disability can embrace this film more beyond a love of the movie, where not only is there solidarity between the sideshow, but also how it shows how ordinary they are even if their lives travelling could've been exciting and full of gossip. The film's in the same vein of the Universal horror movies of the thirties that it was meant to capitalise on, a lurid carnival drama also in the vein of the decade later Nightmare Alley (1947) where deceit and murder plots bubble up. Barring a finale where people crawl in the mud during a rainstorm with knifes ready, the horror movie moment, this exists in-between dramas as a pot-boiler which straddles the line between respectability and being offensive. The film for me is the former, but it still gladly provokes taboos. Just before the Hays Code, which was already created, finally clamped down on what it perceived to be morally offensive material, you had films in the early thirties which still stand out for how brazen and quite progressive they still are. Hans is openly wooing Cleopatra, hinting of an eroticism that is still not tackled in cinema a great deal, and more openly subversive is to be found the subplot with real life Siamese twins Daisy and Violet Hilton playing sisters who are planning to marry their respective suitors, one of the funniest parts of the film for imagining how the arguments with the sister-in-law is going to turn out like but also hinting at more when both sisters can feel the sensations of the other.

From http://www.popoptiq.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/freaks1.png

You can easily connect Freaks, even though it was and always will have meant to be a horror movie to scare, to the likes of Alejandro Jodorowsky, Harmony Korine, Lars von Trier's The Idiots (1998) and Ulrich Seidl, all of which have prodded the taboos of either (or both) physical and mental disability, Freaks by possible coincidence being an ancestor of them in disregarding the safety bubble used around the subject. Whilst no way near as explicit as those films, and not in their cult/art cinema environment, this still does everything those examples do - showing the disabled as human beings, far from perfect, passionate and even having sexual desire. This doesn't detract from Freaks being a fun film, with a proto-Tales From The Crypt twist that's nasty, but the humanity is still worth relishing too.

From http://filmint.nu/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Freaks-2.jpg

Technical Detail:

The one flaw with Freaks that I've finally overcome, but must be bared in mind, is that as an early thirties movie, it had to grapple with the introduction of sound and how films would now have to be made, visible in its basic cinematic structure. Browning was said never to be comfortable with sound - Dracula (1931) is an utterly sluggish and misshapen creation even with Bela Lugosi - and Freaks is a quietly put together work as a result of this. The content is what Freaks succeeds though, not elaborate technique you can find in another great film like Rouben Mamoulian's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931). This was why it took a while for me to fully embrace Freaks over all these years, superficiality no longer a bias.

From https://i.ytimg.com/vi/WeC8r2kZajo/maxresdefault.jpg

Abstract Spectrum: None

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

The term "grotesque" could've been used but for me that would be utterly offensive to the people in the film. There should be a distancing of that word away from connotations of physical deformity and disability by itself barring the extreme realms of body horror and its fictitious exaggerations. Grotesque for me should represent exaggeration and transgressive material like taboo sexuality or the worst in mankind's behaviour. I could use the word for if I cover an Ulrich Seidl film. Another work based around a carnival "freakshow", the notorious anime Midori (1992), could also qualify for the word as would Horrors of Malformed Men (1969), a film banned in its home country exactly for the concerns of it being offensive to the disabled but firmly entrenched in a truly strange reality instead.

Aside from this, Freaks isn't a weird film at all. Barring having real sideshow performers play themselves rather than using practical effects, nothing is unconventional from other movies. Nothing is abstract and there is no cinematic techniques which effect the content. Having the performers be real sideshow attractions is confrontational, causing people to react and if the legend is true it caused a violent reaction at its original premier. The rest of the film is a melodrama with lots of dialogue, mostly if not all shot statically without anything to baffle. Now if what I've heard is true about Tod Browning's silent films, where dialogue wasn't an issue, films like The Unknown (1927) which made his name with Lon Chaney could be awesome and utterly strange too.

From http://www.bfi.org.uk/sites/bfi.org.uk/files/styles/full/public/image/
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Personal Opinion:

This was and still is a unique film, still utterly provocative to a modern audience, and despite its technical limitations, the boldness of the premise is still strong. It could be seen as sad, it would still be shocking, but firmly on the side of the titular characters, it champions them as much as it would offend others. This is also a film which doesn't fall into the annoying convention of the normal defeating the outsider evil. Here instead it's the outsiders who are the good people and the apparently normal people are evil, a simple idea far and away more relevant and more entertaining now in a fun film than most horror movies that do the opposite.

The Black Cat (1981)

From https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/
en/8/8a/The-black-cat-1981-poster.jpg

Director: Lucio Fulci

Screenplay: Lucio Fulci and Biagio Proietti

Cast: Patrick Magee (as Prof. Robert Miles); Mimsy Farmer (as Jill Trevers); David Warbeck (as Inspector Gorley); Al Cliver (as Sgt. Wilson); Dagmar Lassander (as Lillian Grayson)

Synopsis: In an English village a series of bizarre deaths start to place, leading to a London police inspector (Warbeck) being call to help in the cases. American photographer Jill Trevers (Farmer) however finds that the culprit could be even more bizarre than the deaths themselves - an evil black cat that exists in the home of psychic medium Prof. Robert Miles (Magee), who uses recording technology to document the voices of the dead.

For any director or individual who has consistently contributed to "Abstract Cinema" as almost a patron saint, it's appropriate to cover their obscurer films to see how their work transferred over their career per entry within the filmographies. Lucio Fulci had a length career so naturally there's quite a few films within his that are obscured by his more well known horror movies. Quite a few of the obscurer ones I've watched have as much an incredibly dreamlike tone to them, and while The Black Cat is a lesser work compared to the films bookending it - City of the Living Dead (1981), The Beyond (1981) and The House By The Cemetary (1981) - it's still cut from the same cloth in terms of quality.

From http://www.dvdactive.com/images/reviews/
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The film has plenty of loose plot threads - of why the murders are taking place in terms of motive, how the evil cat exists - alongside details that are never built upon beyond surface dressing like Miles' ghost recordings. But if you're comfortable with the illogical nature of these sort of Italian genre movies this is far from a problem. The unpredictable tones of these films have always been amongst their greatest virtues, The Black Cat a nice and spooky horror yarn where the questions left answered are actually appropriate for the style it has. The film's free improvisation on the Edgar Allen Poe short story means it's not an adaptation at all, despite taking moments from the story, but set in England (with English on-location shooting alongside Italian sets) it does have an appropriately Gothic tone worthy of the cribbed source material. It's also appropriately more driven by the mood than its plot as Poe's stories usually emphasised. Lucio Fulci had a tendency to stray off conventional scripting for his horror films and even when the stories where very structured there were aspects, side details, that would lead to brief diversions taking place that take up large portions of the films, not connect to the central plot inherently but rewarding detail. (One here, involving a levitating bed from a haunted house film, was forced upon him by the producer and also shows, when it's not like the former, it nonetheless is entertaining despite its incongruous nature). These aspects thankfully became a great part of his work becoming part of the films' personalities and their overall quality.

From http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-CmL6UbsDO8w/ViGLouG99tI
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This specific film benefits from those working in front and behind of the camera as well as much, its cast in particular even if dubbed in post-production suitably strong in charisma to guide the narrative along. An actor like Patrick Magee, able to dub his own voice as well, adds an entire level of quality to a film just by himself, as he psychically acts with such tremendous resonance in his sullen looks that the material improves inherently even if the premise is silly. He makes the idea of a killer cat that lives in his gothic home and mauls him occasionally sincere, and the menace he also shows is intense from his use of facial expression. David Warbeck is the same even if he doesn't get as much screen time as a viewer may expect from his character - one slight change in expression when he gets a speed ticket from a village policeman is one of the best moments of the film alone. Out of the trio of main actors, only Mimsy Farmer feels behind the other two but only because the two men are so distinct. Especially as this is one of Fulci's less violent films of this early eighties period the quality in everything else helps boost the movie as more of an unconventional supernatural drama. That said, do expect some gristly cat attack sequences and possible one of the most dangerous looking house fire sequences I've seen in a while, a nastiness still prevalent even if its dialled down from the films that surrounded it.

From http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-P890PLRt4wc/ViGLgfsB4YI/
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Technical Quality:

Even if the plots made little sense in many of them, the Italian genre films still succeeded the likes of those made by Hammer in Britain when it came to technical quality. At their highest in quality, they trump most horror films in mood made in around the world during this era barring a few exceptions. The cinematography is impeccable by Sergio Salvati, clever and inspired camera angles and movements throughout that are nonetheless subtle and not merely for showing off. Fulci himself also likes extreme close-ups of eyes, be they feline or human, which has a boldness as a trope for this film as well, and other trademarks of his like the slower pace adds to the prevalent mood. Only his obsession with fog machines is sadly absent. The use of first person for the titular cat, far from silly, has a grace to it that is matched by the cue from Pino Donaggio's score in having a suitable tension to it, as the frame crawls on the floor stalking victims.

Having Donaggio score the film is a huge advantage for The Black Cat, and the result is incredibly lush and tranquil with moments of almost sarcastic grimness to parts of it. The score is the kind that is severely underrated and also boosts the quality of the film around it up altogether in how elaborate it is.

Abstract Spectrum: Psychotronic/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

If I let the film onto the list, as I am, there might be at least one or two films I need to re-evaluate from my blog's back catalogue of reviews. But there're cases where you forget, as someone who watches a lot of cinema, that a film like The Black Cat could have create a stronger reaction from people not used to watching such films. A die hard Fulci fan is going to miss the less obvious but still immensely "odd" aspects of this film compared to his more well known and dreamlike films like The Beyond. While the plot here goes from A to C easily, so much if left unexplained that I have to step back and think carefully of it whether it makes sense or not. That I tend to ignore this completely with each viewing of the film and go along with its atmosphere instead is as much a factor of it being "abstract".

Fulci's films are some of the most atmospheric of Italy's golden era of genre filmmaking, with only Dario Argento and Mario Bava having a consistently large enough filmography of films that are similarly moody. Set in England, he managed to avoid the clumsiness that could've happened with a lack of knowledge of another country, but like The Beyond with Louisiana its an England entirely of its own existence out of time. A warehouse of storage palettes becomes a maze of strange, jagged patterns straight out of Orson Welles' The Trial (1962), a backdrop merely for a drunk fleeing from a single cat that is yet with great seriousness in the moment. Mimsy Farmer when she's introduced photographing ruins suddenly enters a crypt and one is taken into a Gothic location from one of Roger Corman's Edgar Allen Poe adaptations briefly until she climbs back up into daylight. An attempt to escape a home suddenly ends up becoming a random rubber bat attack that Fulci had a bizarre obsession with.

From http://monsterhuntermoviereviews.com/wp-content
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This isn't even bringing in the reinterpretation of Poe's original Black Cat story. The cat here can here teleport and duplicate itself to savage a human victim or hypnotise them to stumble out in front of a car. He can coordinate suffocating a couple in a locked room where the door was closed on their side. That the cat is even considered a murder suspect is strange, baffling the characters themselves as an idea. How the Poe story ends is inherently surreal in the content of the original story prose, Poe willing in his depictions to exaggerate his ideas on perversion, despair and evil with literal concepts such as talking ravens and bladed pendulums. Placed in the context of this murder mystery, the ending's nightmarish nature is even more apparent.

Personal Opinion:

It could be seen as tenuous how abstract The Black Cat is, but especially in his horror films and certain other works like Conquest (1983) and A Lizard In A Woman's Skin (1971), he's so partially entrenched in the illogical with many of his movies that I can't simply dismiss it. As for the film in terms of entertainment, it has plenty especially in its artistic virtues to appreciate. 

Music of the Abstract: I'm Going Slightly Mad by Queen

Out of all the hits and well known songs in their canon, enough to fill three compilations, I've always had this as my favourite Queen song. Part of it is the darkness of the lyrics knowing that after the album this comes off, Innuendo (1991), Freddie Mercury would die of an AID effected illness in what was and still is seen as a tragedy, knowing that he could've been making music still to this day. Yet I'm Going Slightly Mad, especially seeing the music video above with the song, is hilarious at the same time, a darken humour that's very droll, a very English sense of wit. The disorientated, almost backward played, guitar solo in the middle reminds me of a very trippy song back from the Sixties.

It shouldn't be strange that Queen should appear in this article as, even as they hit the mainstream, there was still an unpredictability to them, a willingness to bring a variety of genres together into a single album let alone over a span of them. Bohemian Rhapsody, their most famous song, isn't exactly a conventional three minute pop song, a rock opera with an a cappella in the centre of the track that is as indulgent as you can get and loved for that reason. Even on Innuendo itself, while with more conventional hard rock and pop songs in comparison to other albums, there's still a flamenco guitar passage in the title track and another song about Freddie Mercury's beloved cat amongst them. 

Zardoz (1974)

From http://www.cartelesmix.com/
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Director: John Boorman

Screenplay: John Boorman

Cast: Sean Connery (as Zed); Charlotte Rampling (as Consuella); Sara Kestelman (as May); John Alderton (as Friend); Sally Anne Newton (as Avalow)

Synopsis: In 2293, the world as we know it has long vanished. Mankind is divided between those that are the have-alls, including immortality, who stay in their own society and everyone else, the Brutals.  Some of the Brutals are partially controlled by a god named Zardoz to be Exterminators, who follow the decree of "the gun is good, the penis is evil" and kill off their fellow Brutal. One such exterminator called Zed (Connery) however manages to get into the Immortal's homeland, and whilst Immortals Consuella (Rampling) and May (Kestelman) argue whether he should be studied or disposed of, Zed himself may be the giver of death to the Immortals as well.

Zardoz as a film, if one wants to get past Connery wearing red bikini briefs, has so many ideas vying for attention in only a hundred minutes or so that it does overwhelm the viewer with a lot to take in. As a narrative it's a lot more concise than its reputation suggests, but there's a lot that's absence in the synopsis above of what Zed witnesses and is part of, some of which has only a few minutes of time to be brought up causing one to be continually barraged with concepts. Boorman, unable to adapt The Lord of the Rings novels but having success with Deliverance (1972), had the moment in his career that thankfully still happens today when producers give a director carte blanche to make whatever film they want. Even if it's a little unconventional or flat-out strange, no one has thankfully learnt from the mistakes of the past. They're a divisive subgenre, but from Richard Kelly's Southland Tale (2006) to Steven Spielberg's 1941 (1979), they're some of the most interesting entries in a director's CV, where for every mistake that might be there, every overlong and indulgent aspect, there's plenty of ideas being thrown out and plenty of inspiration to burn.

From http://theslaughteredbird.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/zardoz2.jpg

Zardoz is about the perils of class, of the community authority over individualism, masculinity against femininity only to suddenly put the macho Connery in a wedding dress and skewer the gender politics. For me as well there's a surprising mood of this representing the sixties counter culture dying slowly and excruciatingly as well, turning into a repressed and emotionally numbed society in the Immortals, melancholic to the point some have become like somnambulists cast away into the outskirts. These sorts of films flummox one in terms of their politics. Case in point for an example, it would be understandably seen that Zardoz is misogynistic as the macho former James Bond overpowers a land ruled by women and men who can't even grow a beard like him, one having to make do with drawing it on and thus proving a felt tip pen still exists in the future. But then there's, again, the image of Connery in a wedding dress. Gender seems useless to the Immortals anyway where they're utterly asexual, no sexuality be it hetero or gay, where its explicitly stated the men cannot have erections anymore. The macho barbarian meanwhile develops humility, wisdom and kills his old self metaphorically in a hall of mirror sequence. Like other films like this overstuffed with ideas the creators, while creating something that's give the producer a heart attack about trying to sell, manage between every  muddy or half-finished idea to create plenty to be interested of in this conflict in their prickliness.

From http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_mpBGa4P5jUo/TOxm3OehuEI/
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It helps that there intentional humour in Zardoz as well, a willingness to find absurdity in itself as well as purport serious ideas. Like Nicol Williamson as Merlin in Excalibur (1981), John Boorman can appreciate a magnificently succulent piece of ham, be it Niall Buggy as Arthur Frayn opening the film with a monologue from his felt tip marked mouth suggesting the audience are puppets like him, to John Alderton with his odd high voiced intonations as Friend, eventually doomed to be alongside the Renegades, those who still cannot die but are punished for thought crimes through rapid aging and senility. Connery himself despite his original costume, which is more ridiculous for the ammo belts and ponytail than the bikini briefs, is the anchor that stops the film from becoming silly, not continually asking questions about the world around him but the usually silent witness to the strange behaviour of the Immortals. While the shadow of the Bond films, not long before Zardoz, makes Connery's casting even stranger and unpredictable, the result is less an embarrassment but an odd and curious sight from a decade of cinema where this sort of unpredictability was more common.

From http://lh4.ggpht.com/_pQyvcBbJ0Fs/TJY0wY4chuI/AAAAAAAACn8/
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Sadly the film does betray itself to gassy philosophy and Connery trying to fight (wobble through?) the mentioned hall of mirrors, which is the only part of the film where it lives up to its notoriety. It suffers in these parts from the vagueness that exists in modern spiritualism outside the cinema even today, where ten words are used instead of only one. Barring this, Zardoz acquits itself to sci-fi and fantasy ideas which, ironically, are still pertinent now.

From http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7t27aChMq1qluw2co1_500.png

Technical Detail:

A low budget film shot near to his actual house in Ireland, Boorman could've easily made a film entirely of its time, one in look that would've dated badly even if that sort of aesthetic appealed to me anyway. This isn't the case however as the aesthetic is instead one of its best aspects, beautifully put together. It's a mashing of mashing of naturalism in the outdoor environments infused with available buildings, cottages and barns, and poppy acid infused costumes and colours from the sci-fi films from this era. Everything that is of its time - from Connery's bikini briefs to the candy coloured peasant garb of the Immortals - is intentionally exaggerated and within the confines of a visual template that's very carefully considered. It's a colourful film, but not just in terms of its more unconventional sets but also natural colour in general, from a struggle taking place in a sewing room full of multiple colours of thread to the strange sight of green bread being broken at a dinner table.

When you do get to the aforementioned unconventional sets, they're something to behold. Images of amoeba and primitive life printed on the back of an interrogation room Zed is being questioned in. Nude bodies of Immortals, preserved in glass tanks like living wallpaper, being re-grown and cultivated. An archive of the Tate Galley's paintings and corridors of statues of what Friend tells Zed were god and goddesses who died of boredom. No matter how indulgent and erratic these passion projects can be, production design is rarely terrible for them and Boorman has shown a great deal of artistic inspiration in the films I've seen of his, shown here especially. Even if you still find Zardoz gobbledegook, all the content visually is used to carry on the ideas rather than leave them behind. A testament of this is the sequence where Zed is taught an entire world of knowledge, a mix of languages and references spoken aloud as in a meticulous way various images are superimposed on actresses' and Connery's bodies like tattoos. It's an exceptional moment, poetry and mathematics intertwining into a tapestry but uses it to tell a story or mood, one of many moments where the campiness can be pushed back and the serious artistic premise of the film does shine through.

From http://www.flickeringmyth.com/wp-content/
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Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

The only real disappointment one might find in Zardoz is that it's quite conventional and concise in its themes if you strip away all the arty language. It's not a film that enters into unconventional plot structure or fully evokes the mood of an esoteric film like those made by Alejandro Jodorowsky. As a result, contrary to what some might think, Zardoz is one of the more "normal" films I've covered on the blog, where when you stripped the flourishes away it's Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1931) and L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) skewered into a strange direction.

What does get it on the list are ultimately the flourishes that even back in the seventies, before I was born, would cause people to scratch their heads, a giant floating head moulded from Boorman's head but looking like Karl Marx the first amongst them, gliding along with an airless grace in the clouds. A young Charlotte Rampling musing about the male erection as a naked Connery is shown erotic images to induce one. The Renegades, elderly and senile men and women, in a perpetual party in dinner suits and night gowns rampaging around a dilapidated hotel. The madness of the end, where there's chaos, orgies and eventually a mass genocide welcomed by the victims wanting to die. That the films still manages to be utterly serious and profound makes these moments even more strange and qualifiable for the Abstract List.

From http://rowereviews.weebly.com/uploads/1/2
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Personal Opinion:

Revisiting Zardoz is significant because I saw the film when I was young. Like director Ben Wheatley on the extras of the new Arrow Video release, I encountered Zardoz on television. God knows when but in hindsight, I wonder whether this was the film responsible for turning me onto the oddball cinematic tastes I have now. I could recount, while not the whole monologue, the line "the gun is good, the penis is evil" perfectly in my head for decades, and the final image, of a time lapsed metaphor for life to death, was burnt into my memory for that length of time. What stands out seeing the film again after all this time is that, weren't it not for the moment the dialogue becomes more esoteric and New Age by the end, Zardoz is quite a sombre story which has a lot more going for it that being an utter disaster. Whilst not as poetic as Brave New World is depicting someone in an alien, oppressive environment, what you get is a film that's on the cusp of campiness but that can be taken seriously.

1000 Anime Crossover: Cyber City Oedo 808 (1990)

From http://media.senscritique.com/media/000006544034/
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Director: Yoshiaki Kawajiri

Screenplay: Akinori Endo

Voice Cast: Hiroya Ishimaru (as Shunsuke Sengoku); Kaneto Shiozawa (as Merrill "Benten" Yanagawa); Tesshô Genda (as Rikiya "Goggles" Gabimaru); Emi Shinohara (as Remi Masuda); Kyousei Tsukui (as Versus); Mitsuko Horie (as Kyōko "Okyō" Jōnouchi); Norio Wakamoto (as Juzo Hasegawa)

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

Kawajiri makes his debut on my anime review blog, and whether his work could qualify as abstract or not, he's someone who has contributed a lot of imaginative and shocking images in his career. Cyber City Oedo 808 is one of his more lighter toned action works, without a lot of the more darker and mature content - a lot of gore but none of the transgression of works like Wicked City (1987) - and while it couldn't qualify for the list, it does make up for it with some of its more exaggerated story content choices.

Personal Opinion:

To read the full review, click on the link [HERE].

From https://classicanimeblog.files.wordpress.com/
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Music of the Abstract: Nocturnal Fury by Satori

Sadly due to the work I needed to complete for the Halloween 31 For 31 season, I had to neglect the following series, more irritating as I promised a series of seasonally appropriate choices for the weeks covering October. Now that Halloween has finished, I can thankfully bring this back starting with a track I was originally going to bring up during the month. It's rare to catch a band or artist you've never heard of and fell swept away on first hearing, especially if you don't live in an environment where there's record stores and have to rely on the radio and its Top 40 tracks and songs. Even if they are good, you've heard songs on the many times before or had advance warning of the terrible ones. With Satori I have nothing in terms of context for them baring the album Nocturnal Fury comes from, Kanashibari (2008), and only some basic information, a British group that has existed since the late eighties and has fluctuated in the musicians it had since its creation. I merely heard an ominous mix of pure noise and sounds coming from the speakers of a second hand book and music store in Sheffield, and in a moment either of rashness or desire, asked to buy the CD that being played itself. I have no regrets and this would not be the only time I bought a CD from that store in the midst of it being played, causing one to wonder what the store owners kept thinking of me forcing them to have to switch albums for the rest of the day's work.

Ambient and electronic music which has no big beats is an area I've yet to even dip a toe into, not even the work of Brian Eno explored by me. It is both perfect background music, not a dismissive comment at all, but also can be fully immersed in. Listening to such hair raising electronic groans and screeches as in the chosen track in a music store pushes one into a certain heightened mood from the moment a track or whole album's worth of them start, and it's not surprising the album cover for Kanashibari is a replication of The Nightmare (1781) by Henry Fuseli. Itself a potent piece of art, the attempt to replicate such imagery in the darkened and ethereal music with the CD is done with commendable hard work.