Games of the Abstract: Aliens - Extermination (2006)

 

Developer: Play Mechanix

Publisher: Global VR

One or Two Players

Arcade

 

Aliens (1986), and this is specifically James Cameron's sequel to the 1979 Alien, has left a lasting mark. I will tip my hat to the first by Ridley Scott, but between them, never was there a case with Cameron's big sequel which has itself left a lasting mark on popular culture. Hilariously, the Aliens: Extermination cabinet, a large console with a platform to stand on with your big gun, was positioned next to a basketball hoop cabinet, which had the looping sound bite of "Game over man!", one of the more famous lines from Aliens itself.

Alien as an intellectual property, originating from a haunted house in space film with the titular figures designed Swiss artist H.R. Giger, tapped into biomorphic horror, as altered and mutated over the years from Ridley Scott's source film, a spectrum of interpretations just found in the videogame adaptations. Alien: Isolation (2014) for example is the kind of game I may never play, simply because jumping all the time is not something I wish to experience, even if the concept of a game that brings back why the titular figures were terrifying, through just one you have to flee from, sounds like a complete success. The arcade games over the decades took a different direction, a vast contrast as Capcom's Alien Vs. Predator (1994), not the first person shooter franchise, was a Japanese beat-em-up which allowed you to take down xenomorphs more easily. Even before Aliens: Extermination, the blunt if cool sound Alien 3: The Gun (1993) existed for anyone who wanted a light gun game to plug facehuggers.

Aliens: Extermination is a jaunt. This is not a scary game, and whilst it has a plot to its four campaign levels, about xenomorphs and mutations artificially made by an evil corporation that is effectively the Weyland-Yutani Corporation from the franchise in anything but name, this is slight. Instead, this feels clearly indebted to Behind Enemy Lines (1997), a Sega shooter set within a military jeep and having a giant machine gun peripheral bolted on the cabinet, two, with constant vibration when fire, but switching a military shooter to being the marines of the Aliens worlds. I make the comparison not only for the peripheral, but because I swear that the voice over man, when he shouts "Ammo!", when you replenish it, is a sound clip directly taken from the older game or that someone from Play Mechanix, the company famous for Big Buck Hunter (2000) and its series, wanted the exact sounding replication as a fan of obscurer arcade games.

This is, truthfully, a game that is fun but I admit is more generic for me. Over four long levels, each ends with a boss, and barring the truth that mowing down xenomorphs does undercut the tension of the creatures that were once meant to evoke fears of unnatural reproduction and their monstrous forms, it is more of a spectacle than survival horror. It is also, honestly, an intellectual property I have little interest in. The original Alien, and Alien 3 (1992), the divisive David Fincher film, even Alien Resurrection (1997), the really less regarded Jean-Pierre Jeunet sequel, are more interesting to me to revisit as three very different directions bringing their personalities to the material. Barring Prometheus (2012), one of Ridley Scott's returns to the franchise, I have less interest with anything else, and Aliens is the action film of the original franchise I have the least interest in. In terms of the game itself, this also factors in how, with no Sigourney Weaver stand-in, not even Bill Paxton, you are playing faceless grunts, and the original horrific nature of the titular creatures has been watered down. Play Mechanix worked on licenses like the Halo videogame franchise and The Walking Dead, bringing them to modern 2000s and 2010s arcades, and with Global VR they made a solid produced game here with this license. It is a solid lightgun game, the distinct touch that, alongside vibrating like mad when you fire and getting extremely warm when you play for a long time, the machine guns have a button on both the front and the side. The front is for power-ups like flamethrower fuel or missiles, whilst the side is for grenades.

Beyond this, firing like mad is the rule, though getting the ammo and power-ups is important, especially as ammo for the machine is not infinite, and the handgun you end up with when that happens was not designed for a game like this. Aliens: Extermination is fun, but alongside my lack of interest in the iconography, this does not look interesting either. A lot of this is being pushed through similar sci-fi corridors and caves, which is not appealing, and by this point, a codified version of the aliens themselves exists without the initial horror of when the first was designed by Giger and brought to life. Their original, creepy form lingers occasionally - as when one sees the eggs pulsating on the floor, thinking of how a facehugger will leap out to kiss your face, I was automatically firing at the things before that happened - but that is slight when they melt like butter to bullets, especially as headshots help clear through them. With no radical attempt to change them up either, barring one boss which is a xenomorph with wings looking closer to a fantasy game enemy, this feels lacking in style. Global VR, which its more original licenses as a company, has something far more idiosyncratic, with an appealingly cheesy tone in a modern 2010s sense, with Shh...! Welcome to Frightfearland for Arcade (2011), shooting zombie clowns and sentient rollercoaster bosses in an amusement park of hell, a lightgun game that I see of interest, if sadly obscurer without an intellectual property of recognition, due to its personality just at a screenshot glance.

Personality becomes the crippling flaw to Aliens: Extermination. Eventually a few more non-alien enemies appear, even hijacking the third stage, be it android grunts to killer machines, and Aliens: Extermination even becomes more grey in how you find yourself even, as a boss, fighting turret towers in a row. Again, I admit my biases as much to this. If this had been Starship Troopers arcade game for example, specifically the 1997 Paul Verhoeven film with the satirical elements, not a po-faced attempted at taking it serious, I would be like a pig in muck, but Aliens: Extermiantion whilst well made does feel lacking. This is curious, if disappointing, when you have a game which is solid in production, and presentation, and gameplay, but is average as an experience. Attempts at increasing the game's enemies to red xenomorphs, to comically phallic little critters sticking out the mouths of victims, horde the screen do feel fun to mow down, but whilst there is enough to enjoy here, it does feel bland in the world of lightgun cabinets even with what can be found in a modern day one, let alone the classic games in the canon.

First Name: Carmen (1983)

 

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Screenplay: Anne-Marie Miéville

Loosely based on Georges Bizet's opera Carmen.

Cast: Maruschka Detmers as Carmen X; Jacques Bonnaffé as Joseph; Myriem Roussel as Claire; Christophe Odent as Le chef; Jean-Luc Godard as Jeannot

Canon Fodder

No one needs an atomic bomb. Nor a plastic cup.

Jean-Luc Godard is Mr. Jeannot, a patient stuck in a hospital, a has-been director pretending to be sick to stay in his room on threat that he will be kicked out by the staff, living there with a stereo player which he will have at his head like boom box sometimes. His niece Carmen (Maruschka Detmers), who visits, becomes one of the leads, Godard's loose adaptation of Georges Bizet's opera Carmen having her be a member of a group, posing as a film crew, who rob a bank. The equivalent of Don José, the soldier who falls in love with Carmen from the source, is Joseph (Jacques Bonnaffé), one of the bank guards there who falls in love with her mid robbery, joining her.

Godard was always unconventional. His eighties output is stranger knowing he clearly wanted to transition to experimentation post 1968, his Dziga-Vertov Group work, but returned back to narrative cinema from his second "debut" Slow Motion (1980). This second "mainstream" run before he went to, arguably, the post Film Socialisme (2010) era as the elder statesman, still has experiments within them, and the more I see these films, First Name: Carmen the more narratively driven of a few, the more it becomes obvious he was still interested in narrative dramas even if he would gracefully move away from them. Far from having to become "mainstream", it was more he found narratives which he could tell, with his other concerns, which were still interesting to the audience alongside the experimentation.

This is also the films from when Anne-Marie Miéville, an important Swiss filmmaker by herself, is important to consider, meeting Godard by accounts in 1970, at the Cinémathèque Suisse in 1970, their relationship growing further after his near-fatal motorbike accident in 1971¹. Their collaborations in the seventies into the eighties mean a lot for me in context - the Historie(s) du Cinema and post-Film Socialisme work feel indebted to their collaborations, experiments in video for television and short films, sadly not readily available to see, and for the eighties films, she worked in this "mainstream" period as a screenwriter, a co-writer or here for First Name: Carmen the sole screenwriter, as an editor, and as a general collaborator which gives her a significant weight to this era of films alongside how Godard was changing in his own right too in this later period.

Here, Godard with Melville makes a narrative film but, like even his sixties output, this among the other eighties and early nineties films I have seen move like sketches and character dramas than actual plots, even when a group armed with gun abruptly storm a bank out of nowhere. That Godard has an older man sitting nonchalantly during a gun fight, reading his newspaper until he is shot, really emphasises as well how he had a tangential attitude to plot, include farcical moments like this, even if the character drama still drives this film far more than others from his output. The central romance a tense one, effectively a more sexually frank take on his sixties films where Carman's romance with Joseph has left her precarious among her own group, he a latch-on to theirs. It is frank in how sexually explicit it is in nudity, but it is equal opportunity, Bonnaffé as much as Detmers to bravely bear all onscreen. Bonnaffé also has the most explicit moment of self touching; in fact, whilst an entirely different film in atittude, that moment does feel like it would appear in French New Extreme films decades later, a prototype more appropriately to the type of naturalism, including sexual explicitness, a director like Bruno Dumont would casually depict.

Godard is also making a film in eighties urban France, not the classic sixties France which he himself idealise with his pop art films. Neither is this the France of later productions from the nineties on with middle class characters in the narratives, but the world of gas station France with some extravagant locations just in-between a locations. Eric Rohmer among others like Godard wandered into this world, and whilst elegance is here, it feels fascinating to see a film this grounded and closer to the modern day in look, despite some technology and fashion, with its idiosyncrasies like VHS tapes and shell suits just touches of the time. Godard would even explicitly touch on these subjects, in dialogue and in terms of playing with the medium, like playing with a Triple XXX sign in neon and videotape in Détective (1985), so he was more naturally suited to play with the changing France onscreen. There is a sense, honestly as I will get into later, this era feels neglected, and because of the iconography of his sixties films codified what his style was for many, even parodied in the mainstream, whilst something this grounded, even if of the past, feels less comparable and closer to the modern day than images from the likes of Breathless (1960).

Godard's films, from the eighties within these environments, fascinate between how he stretches and kicks even against plots, wanting to clearly wanting to bend the form, and also a sense of melancholia found in certain films. First Name: Carmen is the least experimental of the lot I have seen barring its use of sound. Intercutting continually to a strings quartet practicing in a room, the soundtrack is very idiosyncratic and one you would never get for a film like this in another context. The soundtrack can switch to gulls, to abrupt silence, to using his Beethoven but also suddenly having Tom Waits at one point, even within that scene having both Waits and strings at the same time. Here, as he would also lean on very recognisable names in his work onwards, from Bob Dylan to Scott Walker, Godard would be playing with soundtracks onwards, heavily as well showing he was good at choosing choice music cuts for whatever purpose.

As for the melancholia, in contract to a King Lear (1987), the most infamous of his films from this run, a Shakespeare adaptation by Cannon Group not made by someone who read Shakespeare, or to actually follow the source, First Name: Carmen is a languidly paced and tragic tale of love between two people which will not come to be. He has his humour within this still - the man spooning a jar of food, in a Mobil garage mini-market bathroom of all places, springs to mind - but this still a sombre and ultimately rewarding drama as a result. It feels a forgotten film for me, which is odd to say, felt only in how, with titles from the eighties in general, even King Lear, his output from this era is frankly maligned, Carmen not a film talked of greatly. Again, his sixties work, to be honest, casts a shadow on who he is as a film maker until Film Socialisme onwards, where his more experimental work from the 2010s has the benefit, for incredibly radical work that would be difficult to sell, of a legendary name to sell them on. This is a shame as, with the eighties films incredibly rewarding, this among them as a drama is a highlight.

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1) Love and work differently: Anne-Marie Miéville’s cinema of companionship, written by Albertine Fox and published for Sight and Sound magazine, in an updated version, on June 20th 2018.

Games of the Abstract: Plumbers Don't Wear Ties (1993)

 

Developer: United Pixtures

Publisher: United Pixtures; Kirin Entertainment (3DO); Limited Run Games (Re-release)

One Player

3DO Interactive Multiplayer / Microsoft Windows

 

I'm going to marry a virgin, in the nineties!

It is funny in a positive way, though very perverse, that Plumbers Don't Wear Ties in 2021 was announced as a release from Limited Run Games¹, a specialist company who release very limited edition physical releases. Canonised by YouTube figure James Rolfe, the mind behind the Angry Video Game Nerd, a show he started in 2006 on the site covering "bad" retro games, the history of Plumbers... is ironic. Normally this is an alarm bell for me, but with mind to having actually played this 3DO title, the infamy is as much what a curious artefact it was even in the early nineties. This is more so as the infamous version is a conversation, that the original 1993 version was first a PC Windows release, with the Philips 3DO Interactive Multiplayer version the one people remember through Rolfe's masochistic and scatological rants through such games.

"Playing" Plumbers also required huge air quotes, as on the surface this is a full motion video choose-your-own-adventure game for the adult audience, but it is something more misguided. For starters, for the 3DO version which is the basis of the review, there is only one FMV video sequence before the game's beginning, with actress Jeanne Basone in character as Jane, explaining the set up whilst, with her dialogue, setting herself up as a sexually confident figure. Plumbers originally was developed by United Pixtures for the PC version, becoming for a long time a lost port of the game^2, whilst the 3DO version was published by Kirin Entertainment. A subsidiary of retailer Digital Stuff, Inc. created by Jason Chen in 1994, they are only really know for Plumbers Don't Wear Ties, despite also publisher a PC FPS, Esoteria, developed by Mobeus Designs³. Any sense of who put together the game comes with the director/writer/producer credit of Michael Anderson⁴, who should not be confused with the British director Michael Anderson, who helmed The Quiller Memorandum (1966).

Kirin Entertainment, a Fremont, California-based game company⁵, nonetheless immortalised themselves by accident. The game is a series of still photos telling a narrative in a slide shot, a plot in truth that is a short film, with barely an hour's worth of gameplay, and a considerable amount of padding to even get to that length. You have Edward J. Foster as John, the titular plumber who goes to work, wearing a tie his mother got him far more loosely than Donkey Kong, a monkey, would, crossing paths with Jane, a beautiful woman on her way to a job interview with Thresher (Paul Bokor). Thresher's blatantness for getting potential employees to sleep with him proves a huge section of the choices, all of which barely count up beyond one hand's worth of fingers let alone two. Prominent, before we get to how this story goes and is told, is the 3DO itself, as conceived by Trip Hawkins, the founder of Electronic Arts who left the company in the time of the 3DO's rise and fall. His console had idiosyncratic touches to how it would treat videogames and being a videogame console. One at an unfortunate cost, literal of $699.99 dollars when originally released in the United States in 1993, was that alongside being more costly for the console itself, it was both designed to innovate as a multi-media system, but that also their hardware specifications were outsourced so multiple companies could make their own versions of the machine.

In the opposite direction, software developers paid far less to get work, CD based, onto the system, and with Hawkins' machine anti-region locking and censorship, it had many adult and erotic productions, such as a series of productions from Vivid Interactive and Plumbers Don't Wear Ties. The irony is the, baring one scene of actual nudity, in the ten to fifteen minute prologue before the first choice, there is none other else barring Jeanne Basone is her underwear, least a bra prominently showing off her bust, and even the nudity, of Basone in the shower and actor Foster's bare buttocks, are censored for the 3DO version. There is apparently a cheat - on the 3DO controller pressing [Up], [Down], [Right], [Left], [Down], [Right] and [X] while Jane is talking in the intro FMV scene⁴ - but un-censoring certain photos, which are censored with a pair of eyes and a large proboscis prodding through the red censor symbol, does not get past the absurdity of a game meant for adults but this tame.

The prologue is not something you would have expected either, a huge warning of the work put together in randomness and duct tape unleashed into the world. Looking like it was made in a basic photo editor from the era, this is random in the truest sense for a comedy game, where the opening is John dreaming of a man in a panda mascot suit, driving in a go-kart in a race on a speedway, very noticeably pasted into Daytona-like race photos beneath trippy post-image effects. The other thing to note, and be warned of too, is that alongside its random sense of humour is some of the most politically incorrect humour you can find, not even aged but timeless in the sense it feels alien to the modern day. It even jokes in one of the bad endings before you choose it that it is the option available when fighting is considered un-PC in that era, so it made with an awareness of that era's climate on the subject to thumb its nose in the same way a child eats food with its mouth open to be crass. It comes with the perverse dichotomy that, for most, this will just be offensive, but its infamy and cult status comes from also being mad as a box of frogs at the same time. That un-interactive prologue, with "Microwave Jane" as she nicknames herself in the only video footage, finds herself being called by her father, a man around a table with alcohol and even rat poison in a scarf, who wants children N-O-W. John is in as bad a position as his mother, in the phone call he also gets within the prologue, wants him married to, with a potential suitor available already. The leads are not nice people either, especially not John regardless of what options you choose, but already we are in a strange world of forced marriage and sex appeal, like a tainted parody take on romance.

Plumbers as a game has almost everything you could think of in terms of offensive humour. Gay panic humour, as John's mother worries briefly her son is gay; sexism into misogyny, just from the fact that, if for the first option you choose is for Jane to make the first pass to John than visa-versa, he will consider her a slut even if still interested and continuing the game; not having either of them make a pass leads to an ending where they imagine themselves as different people, of different ethnicities too, as John considers that white men to women then had no rhythm. It is tasteless, and most will not get past this. The ironic history of the game, and what compelled me, is that there is incompetence but there is also madness here in its amateur nature. It cannot be defended, and I will say right now, that if this is all enough to wish to avoid the game, that is not surprise, and completely understandable.

I have not even mentioned the narrator yet, who when he is introduced, wearing a purple suit, has an army tank driver's helmet on, sometimes on a full chicken mascot head on as he talks to the viewer. A feminist who specialises in invading other peoples' stories as the narrator knocks him out briefly, chastising the player for being a pervert before he brings forth a gun to get his role back. It is all strange, and this is all in mind there is not a lot of actual interactivity at all. It does deserve one credit that, if you get a "bad" ending, willingly to annoy the original narrator in my case, you immediately get the option to go back to where the choice is made, which is better than having to sit through the same footage before again. There is a points system, at the bottom left corner, but it is insignificant, and there is an option to just skip the first fifteen minute prologue to get to the main game quickly.

There is voice acting over the still images, and beyond the small cast, there are two voices for the choices section, one male and one female who put on very accented voices which is strange in itself. The humour is trying to have its cake and eat it, its saucy humour entirely sexist, with no one particularly coming off well at all. The main plot, of Thresher trying to seduce Jane with money, aside from not aging well, also does not progress far from this to a very long game at all. It afterwards quickly leads to a finale, with an extended (ten minute?) chase when, if chosen to progress, Thresher will try to kill her with a letter opener with Jane running after him. Turning into a series of jaunts needing the Benny Hill Show theme tune, it goes into shots at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, through a market with confused bystanders caught on camera, the cast like Basone posing with bystanders, Basone throughout this just above the waist in a bra only, and early Microsoft Paint covering over a theatre marquee of the Andrew Lloyd Webber Phantom of the Opera to tell Jane to run.

Able to be finished quickly, the plot just after that, after trying to kill her, is Thresher trying to still bribe Jane to go with him, with only a few choices to be made and a "Hollywood" ending the only good ending of them all the goal to reach. The Hollywood ending, alongside where the title comes in, is anti-climatic as the happy conclusion. Instead, I found myself more pleasure, alongside the ease to access the bad endings, intentionally annoying the exasperated narrator choosing endings which, tasteless or not, better even as the bad endings. Some are least funny even for a game where most of the comedy is unintentional. It gets away with not saying a homophobic word whilst still implying it for one, which is unacceptable, but the ending where John and Thresher suddenly decide to be a couple is a better ending. Between ones where she can either take Thresher's money, or inform John that she intends to stay a virgin and likely become a nun, Jane gets one ending, even if joking about older businessmen seducing employees is more problematic now, which is arguably the best ending. Even if an excuse for Jeanne Basone to be in her underwear, the ending where she reveals her inner dominatrix, with handcuffs and a whip suddenly in hand, taking the spineless sleaze ball and making him a submissive in his office, promising to give her the best paid job there whilst being rode around in his underwear like a pony, is a superior ending to the one you are meant to get.

You could argue the game is intentionally ironic with its true ending being lame, but the truth is, the project has the air of improvisation and messiness. One of its more idiosyncratic moments is Edward J. Foster accidentally fluffing a line for a Freudian slip, which is kept in and is either an accident, or a faked one, and the blurring of the sides of what is what fits a mess in concept and existence. It is, truly, not a production I would recommend unless you wish to dip into the guiltiest of weird cultural items. It is truly bizarre, yet I openly admit it is one of the technically and morally worse things I have encountered as a game even if compelling.

Thankfully, the ironic cult status is aware of this. Limited Run Games, releasing this game, clearly knows this, and it is sweet to know that, whilst an odd choice of word for this game, those involved sees the game as it is. It also has one of the most fascinating figures of any FMV game to have crossed paths with in Jeanne Basone herself, from this becoming an author and stunt woman whose careers before this game and after is compelling to learn of. Before this, she was literally Hollywood in GLOW, the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, a television all-female wrestling show whose interest led to a fictitious television drama decades, and Basone's career, with this a curious footnote to it, gets even more fascinating afterwards. Anyone who, after GLOW and Plumbers, decided to be self employed, having her own published videos of wrestling other women in eroticised scenarios, or even having paid clients that, with no nudity or sex involved, she wrestled even in booked hotels⁶, is a distinct figure, one to this day clearly has a sense of self pride and personality to admire. Eventually starting an artisan soap company with an emphasis against animal testing⁷, Basone really emphasises that, for all the problematic aspects about Plumbers Don't Wear Ties, the people around it fascinating and soften the production, seeing that this was literally a day's work as truthfully many of these productions were. How weird it is actually softens the blow too as, whilst technically a disaster as much as its content is also such, it's perplexing creative decisions neuter any concerns with wondering where this was beamed from in the outer reaches of space.

 

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1) Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties: Definitive Edition Arrives This Year, written by Marcus Stewart and published by Game Informer on June 6th 2022.

2) Closing Logos Group page on United Pixtures.

3) Giant Bomb's page on Kirin Entertainment.

4) FMV World's page on Plumbers Don't Wear Ties, a site in tribute to FMV games from the past to the current day.

5) The Web Archive page for Kirin Entertainment.com's contact info, from between December 5th 1998 to May 3rd 1999.

6) How an '80s Female Wrestling Star Makes Thousands in Underground Hotel Fights, written by Dan McCarthy, and published by Thrillist on January 19th 2017.

7) The about page for HollywoodBotanika, Jeanne Basone's artisan soap company.

9 Fingers (2017)

 

Director: F.J. Ossang

Screenplay: F.J. Ossang

Cast: Paul Hamy as Magloire; Luc Catania as Delgado; Damien Bonnard as Kurtz; Lionel Tua as Warner Oland; Alexis Manenti as Springer; Elvire as Gerda; Lisa Hartmann as Drella; Diogo Dória as Le Capitaine; Pascal Greggory as Ferrante; Rafael Mathias Monteiro as Le barman; Gaspard Ulliel as Le docteur

An Abstract Candidate

 

One man, Magloire (Paul Hamy), is like many in a crime narrative, stuck in a scenario that is doomed for even everyone else, where failure or betrayal means your body is cut up into pieces, and burned for waste disposal. Magloire is barely accepted in the gang he is under, a bystander left home with the two women of the criminal group, Drella (Lisa Hartmann) and Gerda (Elvire), when the robbery of a safe does not turn out well, forcing everyone on a cargo ship with the titular 9 Fingers the unseen figurehead pulling the strings, who gained that name from subtracting ones for punishment. This is already a crime noir scenario few protagonists would want to be involved with, but Magloire is in an even worse situation, that the safe box had radioactive material, polonium.

The scenario on the cargo ship is a deadly one, a bomb having gone off when the material was taken, leaving one of the members of the gang with radioactive sickness, all in an apocalyptic scenario in what could be caused with the quantity they acquired. This is just the tip of the iceberg to 9 Fingers, and outside the film, it is sod's law I am only now prepared for the films of F.J. Ossang, and his work is difficult to access. Ossang is truly a cult figure, in terms of a director from another country, a French filmmaker, who is prolific (least since 1985) and has a fan base, has a distinct style blurring genres, but is despite his career being laced with crime and pulp tropes someone who has never seen access least in the British Isles. Streaming from November 2018 to January 2019 temporarily, I was lucky to have seen the MUBI curated F.J. Ossang: Cinema Is Punk¹, compiling all his feature films up to and including 9 Fingers; sadly, I was not at the right time to appreciate the films.

I was violently hostile to the films in fact, only won over when the films were beginning to be taken off by Doctor Chance (1997), his idiosyncratic full colour crime film which did end the festival positively with finally understanding his work, with Elvire, found here, as the female lead and Joe Strummer of The Clash in a prominent role talking about gonads. 9 Fingers is not conventional either, as all his films were, the genre director on the surface but with fascination for talking and mood, the tropes of noir and crime here, but not the same. The set up is here, where on the Sri Ahmed Volkenson V, the first name of the cargo ship, there is a dangerous substance in the cargo bay, with the added issue that Magloire has fallen for Drella, whose brother he got killed, and develops a jealous hostility in their leader Kurtz (Damien Bonnard) towards him as a result.

Where Ossang caught me off-guard originally is when you have long contemplative films within the genre tropes he used, rather than what you would have presumed from the punk filmmaker/musician/poet with an interest in noir tropes and characters wearing black. Case in point, Magloire's only solace is a senior member of the cargo ship who talks to him, an older man not happy with his position within this, with his books marks by when the authors died. Ossang is a true punk filmmaker in attitude, yet his dialogue with that one character gets into talking about revolution, but also about God and the Devil existing with plans for the world as mankind has freewill. Ossang for 9 Fingers shots this as a chamber piece, a lot of dialogue with the form of genre here in its moodiness. Especially with how striking the film is, Ossang whether working with cinematographer Darius Khondji on Treasure of Bitch Island (1990), before his memorable work for David Fincher on Seven (1995) or with Jean-Pierre Jeunet, or Docteur Chance being his only colour films, presented with a distinct hue in itself, 9 Fingers with Simon Roca as the cinematographer when you get its groove is eerie. It feels it was more indebted to horror films of a certain vintage than a crime film, whether Val Lewton or Vampyr (1932). Not a lot "happens", which is significant, but paranoia aptly seeps in, not surprising when you have a leader named Kurtz in change, slowly breaking down, on a ship where radioactive polonium is there and eventually a mysterious doctor appears on board that takes power.

The film's pulp tone, stuck at sea drifting past countries, is timeless, modernity but, with Kurtz fixated on an ornate map, ageless in form as much as its fixation of black trench coats and glasses is very "punk". The strangeness is emphasised by when Nowhereland is introduced, an alien island which is the straw which breaks the camel's back for the narrative. Befittingly, it adds to the influence of old horror and pulp melodrama when all goes wrong, even if nothing evil is actually on the island, entirely bare and nowhere in the sea. The film's nihilistic tone, and The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster's Psychosis Safari on the end credits, is punk, but it is a perplexing mood piece in crime trappings, eventually stuck on a void wasteland of an island, and an unseen gunshot for emphasis concluding before Psychosis Safari kicks in. Ossang's work is the kind, with the right frame of mind, that could win people over, but my original frustrations were clearly from how he undercut the expectations, like a three cord three minute punk song, of something fast, edgy and venomous for something more ethereal. He is, with this film's ink black monochrome appearance, more esoteric, the shots of the moon cutting through the black, and growing tensions (and alcohol consumption) on the ship, providing a compelling air now I am aware of Ossang's tone for his work.

Again, shame F.J. Ossang's work is not easily accessible, his being the kind of work which is "niche" but, with the right frame of mind now, I get into greatly.

Abstract Spectrum: Atmospheric

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

 

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1) F.J. Ossang: Cinema is Punk, with a link to the main article, The Paradoxes of F.J. Ossang, written by Adrian Martin and published on November 9th 2018 on MUBI, to present 9 Fingers and Ossang to a new audience.

Ninja the Protector (1986)

 

Director: Godfrey Ho

Screenplay: AAV Creative Unit and Godfrey Ho

Cast: Richard Harrison as Ninja Master Gordon Anderson; David Bowles as Bruce

An Abstract Candidate

 

Only a ninja can defeat a ninja.

What's a ninja?

Continuing with Godfrey Ho and producer Joseph Lai's infamous cut-and-paste ninja films, this even among the more traditional ones I know of (i.e. the ones with American actor Richard Harrison within them) has the more curious aspects as a production among them. It has the traditional set-up - Richard Harris versus an evil ninja leader in red, a costume like an onesie with a beard and a hangdog look from the black mascara. Queen Elizabeth II's picture in the back of one shot with Richard Harris does however remind you even these films have a historical connection, films made in Hong Kong who would go from a British colony to the 1997 handover to mainland China. This is purely a tangent before we get to the meat of this review, but it provides the added strangeness you can see Queen Elizabeth II, whose coronation was filmed as a documentary in A Queen is Crowned (1953) can go from fifties Hollywood to this to 2020s Marvel comic book films.

Never mind that ninjas, even in this inaccurate form, are Japanese by origin but in a Hong Kong film like this are taken as is, the Japanese art of ninjutsu continually breaking out among picnic benches, as with the other Godfrey Ho films of this type. This tries a lot to connect its source film to the ninja footage it is spliced with, with photo recognition for the evil ninja lair establishing a connecting tissue, through stills, of the characters from the source film who are the baddies.

What is weirder here even next to the other Ho ninja films however is the source film, reinterpreting it as being a ninja clan involved with counterfeiting, Richard Harris effectively playing ninja cop against them, shruikening and handcuffing criminals, effectively playing the same character regardless of name or job as with the other films. With the source film, it becomes one of the oddest experiments to get a British DVD release from these set of films, because it is drama about a male model that is pulled into a downward spiral. Starting with being seduced by his young female boss, it begins with a softcore one-upping of From Here to Eternity (1953) and its famous beach romantic scene, only to get into betraying his girlfriend with more than one woman, a sleazy male business man and his younger wife, and murder, a soap opera with a lot of nudity now turned into a counterfeit action film with ninjas.

The source film even has fight scenes choreographed like low budget martial art fights, especially in the punching and kicking sound effects that sound like a potato being fired out of a homemade cannon, and this even for a Ho cut-and-paste ninja film now is weird. Warren the model, dubbed a spy for Harris' Interpol team, is clearly within a drama of a man sleeping his way up in modelling, his girlfriend Judy and brother David becoming suspicious, all in a world where even older women are eyeing him up with the chance he can be seduced for money. It is strange, as this is reconceptualised to suit Ho and producer Joseph Lai's goal, seeing conversations altered to mention a member named Tiger being killed, but in context of a scene where two people in an office are having a casual work conversation. Knowing this is meant to tie to Richard Harris the ninja cop stopping people, not even killing them, in black ninja costumes and secretly leaving them for his bumbling assistants to find handcuffed in broad daylight, tipping them off, is peculiar.

Ninja in Hong Kong is, yes, a curious thing no one bats an eye about, neither that throughout his films, Harris rocked a camouflage ninja costume in an urban centre. Nor that here, ninjas are not meant to exist, as he keeps telling his assistants before they get suspicious, only to let them in on the truth matter-of-factly when, challenged to a ninja duel, it is frankly impossible to hide the fact. It feels more cognisant, however, than when Ninja the Protector's source material, in comparison to its light hearted action tone, becomes suddenly bleaker. Ho, even as a huge fan of his, never has had a deft touch in tone, and the source film turns on a hairpin to aspects that should be warned about for some viewers, feeling itself tonally lopsided even when the attempt to turn it into a ninja film itself makes no sense. With a trigger warning, this will have moments such as Judy trying to commit suicide, lurid even in the source film without any new additions, with a nasty blood splatter cut to shooting onto a wall from off-screen.  The paradox of a film that already an erotic melodrama, where a lot of the female cast, even really minor ones, have a prolonged nude scene with awkward faked sex, and also these bleaker aspects does make this different from other titles in this run of cute-and-paste ninja films. The idiosyncratic aspects of Godfrey Ho's film are amplified by a grubbier drama as its internal organs, good and bad. It is a genre, erotic drama, which is not commonly imported out of Hong Kong cinema for cult audiences, even in mind to their Category 3 films of this era. Whilst it is not as extreme as some of those films, its ideas, such as just deciding to end with a murder, brutally committed, which is meant to implicate someone falsely makes this feel like a soap opera if allowed to get filthier than merely implied.

Again, the warning is of concern, as this does lead unfortunately to a tonal dissonance, even as someone who liked this. It is a film which can be difficult unintentionally such as a woman being brutalised with a belt for sleeping with other men, which for obvious reasons will be off-putting for some viewers. Thankfully most of this film is contrary to this, cheesier and ultimately one of the more idiosyncratic of these wave of Ho-Lai films in hindsight because of what it is, a mash-up of melodrama with an at-odds genre combination, leading to the requisite ninja battle finale. This particular one feels even more ridiculous to other ninja battle endings for this duo, as this starts with ninjas jousting with chained blades on motorbikes. Moments like that, in contrast to the bad taste here that does come up in other Godfrey Ho films, and cannot be denied, is why I came to his films, messy productions but with scenes and moments you never seen anywhere else.

Abstract Spectrum: Atonal/Eccentric/Lurid/Weird

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

Games of the Abstract: Ninja Baseball Bat Man (1993)

 

Developer: Irem

Publisher: Irem

One to Four Players

Arcade

 

Never converted from the arcade, Ninja Baseball Bat Man is one of the biggest examples of a game which never had a console conversations, when others did in the nineties, but managed a cult reputation when, as a result, the creation of MAME for emulation allowed people to see this game. Regardless of your opinion of emulation, sadly, if people cannot access these video games, you not only lose history but also potential audiences. This creation from Drew Maniscalco, an American co-founder of Irem America, is an intellectual property he own even if Irem still owns the arcade game, one which has developed a cult legacy that, even on June 5th 2022, lead to a Kickstarter campaign for an official comic book reboot¹ by a British comic duo Team Beats.

Maniscalco has admitted the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which was huge at the time, was an inspiration for these characters. Other influences was Batman, and the 1973 film Walking Tall², likely a connection with this game's baseball weapons to how Sheriff Buford Pusser, the real professional wrestler-turned-lawman from McNairy County in Tennessee, as reinterpreted by Joe Don Baker carries a big stick and became iconic to the film version of this figure. The name of the game is clearly as much inspired by tokusatsu television shows, and Japan's love for baseball is something we will get to in a second. The designs come from Maniscalco hiring Gordon Morison, the pinball artist working with Gottlieb, an American company known for pinball machines as well as arcade cabinets, whilst for the American version, the names of the four main characters are after famous players - Jose Canseco (red), Ryne Sandberg (green), Roger Clemens (yellow), and a favourite for Simpsons fans, Darryl Strawberry (blue).

Arcade games over the years sadly have been neglected even when console ports were a convention, which is way MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) has had to exist since 1997. Intellectual properties are an issue, considering that Konami would have access to an esoteric licensed title like Bucky O' Hare, the arcade beat-em-up not to be confused with their NES adaption, both released in 1992, where licensing is an issue. Or Konami's 1991 beat-em-up adaptation of The Simpsons for the arcade, which has been released for consoles over the years, but is also affected by licensing and more so as a cultural juggernaut. Ninja Baseball Bat Man's lack of console release is strange, except if you consider it was not a success in the arcades, where some of the lost cult games from that area came from, as it barely reached the North Americas, even if it did all right in the Far East and Japan². This seems, in hindsight, more tragic considering two target markets were being catered to with this wacky take on baseball for baseball fans as much as arcade players. Like the United States, baseball is really popular in Japan. Ever since baseball was introduced to Japan in 1872, by an American named Horace Wilson, an English professor at the Kaisei Academy in Tokyo³, baseball in Japan - if you just stick to videogames - is really well regarded culturally, to which it is popular enough that this goofy premise could appeal to someone like peanut butter and jelly.

Someone has stolen golden baseball artefacts, and so a team of male ninja practicing baseball based combat (base-nitsu?) - Captain Jose, Twinbats Ryno, Beanball Roger, and Stick Straw - have to travel the United States, from Las Vegas to New York City among states, decimating giant sentient baseballs and gangster dog men with Tommy guns among others to get them back. Red/Captain Jose is, as with any red indicated leader of a team, generic but the all-rounder you begrudgingly accept. Yellow/Beanball Roger is a food fixated large ninja - as he will have thought bubbles about food if you leave him still for a moment. Blue/Stick Straw is a lank rail of a combat specialist, and Green/Twinbats Ryno is the quick and pint-sized magic user.

I will admit, whilst likely to be stuck in a pink costume, the lack of a female character here for a beat-em -up is disappointing. In mind however, that Drew Maniscalco based these characters on real players, this leaves an entirely different issue of gender politics about if any female baseball legends deserve their name recognition, when Maniscalco created this as a huge fan of baseball but, for female players, women in the sport are maligned. Just searching online for well regarded players, and literally starting with the first two in the list⁴, you have enough instantly fascinating figures, and have not even touched other figures from older periods or the modern day. You could have had a Dottie Schroeder, “The Human Vacuum Machine” who played within 1943 to 1954 and started only at fifteen, or Toni Stone, the first female player of the African American League in 1953⁴, and it is sadly a case that, yeah, even among baseball fans this is an area that is neglected. Most people like me who do not even know much about baseball can only think about male figures that transcended into popular culture in general, like Babe Ruth. Or it is like Daryl Strawberry, someone who iconic in cameos in work the likes of The Simpsons which admired his status but teased it playfully.

Honestly, the leads themselves are props, but this is with outmost admiration for this game's aesthetic style, a world that already stands out with these central figures certainly memorable because of their idiosyncratic "baseball-jitsu" techniques and distinct costumes. Standing out more than most male protagonists in this genre, let alone other games, they are archetypes in a world which is insanely colourful, imaginative and weird as a brawler. The game as a beat-em-up is conventional, within context to this genre, and simple to pickup. The personality, and the legacy this game got, is how it is solid as a game and because of what it is, a vibrant aesthetic going to bat for a ridiculous premise of baseball combat, that pun appropriate for a game which begins from stage one with you fighting giant baseballs with eyes and limbs. Barring the requisite bonus button bashing stages, it is a traditional beat-em-up with scrolling fighting stages, with not a lot of changes in presentation, but compensating for this in style and having to fight against enemies that are more ridiculous as it continues.

Its tone is the biggest virtue, its wonderfully bright and surreal style feeling of an ultraviolent brawl depicted with the contents of a car boot toy sale, which I use as a compliment as. A reference that may only make sense for a British reader from a certain age and/or region of the country, this feels appropriate to use, also with weight to having referenced Bucky O' Hare or that this was inspired by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, as this does feel like a Saturday morning cartoon in tone, one which would have gotten action figures you would find in those car boots second hand, a menagerie of strange colours and designs of an inherent surrealism to them especially of nineties pop culture I grew up with. As someone who got second hand Bucky O'Hare toys from a car boot, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles toys for Christmases, this beat-em-up (whilst fully ingraining its characters and stages into a consistent logic and style) does feel like if you took the content from a car boot sale box and bashed a motley set of toys together in dream-like conflicts. Here you are literally fighting an anthropomorphic as a first boss, or an evil mechanical alligator for another boss later on,  fully investing into the idea , which I admit to doing as a kid myself with a lack of preservation of said toys, of taking two regardless of size and have them scrap. Texas here is a haunted house of flying refrigerators and ectoplasm, Las Vegas a jaunt through the bright lights against sentient playing cards and a slot machine boss who does have a potential dangerous random slot reel attack unless you punt him beforehand. It is strange and wacky in a great way.

The game' simplicity includes that throws are simple to pull off, and there are few power ups, as small as the move list, be it baseballs and objects to throw, to food to replenish health, or the ability to briefly summon a cheerleader troupe, which can either create a cornucopia of power ups, or a super crowd clearing attack. Beyond this is the challenge of having to clear the game, including its twist reveal of the final boss, one whose reinterpretation of the United States is deliciously silly, a cartoon in its tone which, barring its text base and still shot cut scenes, is bold to watch. It is not a surprise why the game has a cult status, for how ridiculous its tone is, and the quality of the art style does a lot to stand out. The personality here really shows how important that is for a game, emphasising how you can stretch a silly premise as far as you can, and not stretch it out too far.  

 

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1) The Ninja Baseball Spirits #1 Kickstarter Campaign.

2) The History of NBBM, from the official website for Ninja Baseball Bat Man.

3) Gorham Man's Gift to Japan: A National Pastime, written by Steve Solloway, for the Portland Press Herald, and published on May 20th 2007.

4) Top 10 Greatest Female Baseball Players of All Time, written by Samantha Lauren, for the Sports Browser, and published on January 19th 2022.

White of the Eye (1986)

 

Director: Donald Cammell

Screenplay: China Kong and Donald Cammell

Based on Mrs. White by Margaret Tracy (a.k.a. Andrew Klavan and Laurence Klavan)

Cast: David Keith as Paul White; Cathy Moriarty as Joan White; Alan Rosenberg as Mike Desantos; Art Evans as Detective Charles Mendoza; Michael Greene as Phil Ross; Danielle Smith as Danielle White; Alberta Watson as Anne Mason; William G. Schilling as Harold Gideon; David Chow as Fred Hoy

An Abstract Candidate

 

Because you can't change a channel, man. Future or past.

Your introduction to White of the Eye, a serial killer drama with a mystical and unsettled edge, is a series of shots within its setting of Tucson, Arizona, which alongside the soundtrack by Rick Fenn and Nick Mason, forces the viewer to experience the atmosphere of the environment, abstract in tone. The shock of the film soon after also sums up how unprepared you will be, even if the plot on paper is a traditional thriller, as the first murder scene of a suburban upper class woman continues the disconcerting rhythms and choices for shots. In a perfect white kitchen, among the glamour of the eighties in the cutlery and equipment within it, blood intermingles with the meat dish a goldfish is placed into, and wine and blood mixes against white walls and counters, all in a series of edits and cuts dismantling the imagery.

The films I have found myself obsessing over are those that cannot be easily defined - by genre and tone - and Donald Cammell's White of the Eye has clear things to its plot but undercuts it with a significant tonal choices. Margaret Tracy, the author of the source material, befitting a story about secrets is actually two men, Andrew Klavan and Laurence Klavan, Andrew Klavan of note as a crime and mystery author, one whose work has also been adapted into films like Don't Say a Word (2001). Irony is not lost that, Klavan the proud "unwoke" American conservative, ended up with his novel adapted by Donald Cammell, the complete and utter antithesis in persona in his tragically short life, but likewise, White of the Eye as with the other films, only four, in the director's career undermines the source material for a greater weight. Follow a person who is killing women, interconnected with the life of Joan White (Cathy Moriarty) and her happy marriage to her husband Paul White (David Keith), a supernaturally talented audio equipment specialist, you would find this plot in a paperback thriller and even a TV movie, not dismissive as comments from me but how graspable these plot points and the obvious plot twists you read into can be. White of the Eye, as with the few other films in Cammell's filmography, is a deliberately peculiar film, at odds with its standardised serial killer plot - someone killing women and performing gristly rituals in the aftermath - even in how only having two murder scenes are shown, in fragments and aftermath.

Instead, it concerns itself with Paul and Joan White, Paul a potential suspect for the police, and Joan's romantic view of him slowly turning along the running time. Considering this was made by the Cannon Group, a company that brought legitimately great contributions but also contrasted them with pulpy films like the American Ninja films, this feels appropriately one of their productions, feeling like the two sides of their work bleeding into each other like some of their best productions did. It is a film, mostly in truth, about a family unit falling to pieces, which however is placed within a gristly psychodrama of the most elliptical and unsettling of ways. Even that the breaking point is when Joan suspects her husband is having an affair feels appropriate for even a made-for-TV weepy, but the tone sets the film out greatly alongside how the story, slowly, itself is told with far more disconcerting aspects, quirks and nuances. His co-writer and widow, China Cammell, deserves as much praise as the co-author, adapting a novel which has touches in general which, when a character starts talking about the television in his head, are strange but fit the tone. It has a lived in reality, with side characters like a cafe owner, allowed moments to breath, alongside moments which take one back on purpose, asking why the shots were there on the first viewing, like abruptly cutting a side character, a police officer, flossing his teeth for no seemingly necessary reason in extreme close-up.

Cammell, co-director of Performance (1970) with Nicolas Roeg, became more potent an author for that film, even if Roeg became a unique figure in his own right. The sense of unpredictability with the tone there is as much found here. One key detail to how this film is told is in the flashbacks with Jean's first lover Mike Desantos (Alan Rosenberg), complicated when Desantos appears again in the main narrative. A daughter is between them all who could be harmed by this is also the obvious dramatic tension, whether this was the film it came to be or "more conventional", but likewise emphasises the tragedy of what presents the idyll life - happiness, a home in the Arizona countryside, the pet dog and tranquilly - only it has been built on a psychosis.

What the film does however around this content is more ill-at-ease, more gradually paced. Filmed in the eighties - prosperity, ridiculous perms on both genders' heads, slasher films and the Italian giallo murder mysteries of the sixties and seventies at their most lurid when the eighties came - it misses the real meat to merely say it is a critique on American ideology. The location of Arizona feels like an outside world only connected by the fashion and trends of the era, and the country music in the soundtrack, sung or playing on the soundtrack, is far too clearly sincere, for a genre that can be mocked but is also a sincere and emotionally strong part of Americana, itself adding the ill-ease with a lot of the music about heartbreak and despair, it itself aptly a genre like the blues about the tragedy apparently found in tranquil life. This film is set in a place here instead abstract with expensive audio systems, cars and kitchens which is more general, that in this apparent bliss, regardless of era and nationality, regardless of how much the kitchens cost, people can be both wonderful human beings on the outside but psychologically psychopathic. The abrupt explanation to why the killer does what they do is simplistic; the monologue appears a really ridiculous giallo or another Cannon Group production, but it befits the shift into the strange already here. From the cut to the flossed teeth to a goldfish in a Pyrex dish, this film from the get-go is uncomfortable and is much so because it is weird as it is nasty. Here you can literally find the worse nightmare just in a certain part of the bath, in a scene that would not leave many viewers' minds involving a mere thread. The landscape outside is wonderful, from dunes to vast plains, but it is isolated, the drama between the co-authors warping a novel into a world where the worst in human beings can exist in the apparent complacency of public, commercial life.

Early on, you could have read a cheap dig at the author of Andrew Klaven which could reveal this author's politic beliefs, but honestly, with little knowledge of him up to creating this review, it is instead, for a vague figure now in my knowledge I may never met or have fleshed out at all, an apt jumping off point to talk about these type of serial killer films with White of the Eye. In the grand scheme, thrillers could easily be a cheap excuse to explain the world through a conservative, black-and-white morality of good and bad, the idea that Dirty Harry is the hero for shooting a serial killer when, even if the 1971 original film has its cake and eat it, it came from a muddy ground where, unfortunately, the only person that could fight a monster is a monster himself in his attitude. Giallo are inherently exaggerated, the id onscreen for good and bad in aesthetics, style and transgressions, whilst the idea of the mystery thriller about a serial killer could be argued as being far less defendable than the Italian cousins. Many, for film or television, feel like they happily placate a vicarious desire for morbid death and mutilation, with the clean cut notion a cop or detective being able solve it the escape pad to not feel you are just ingesting in delight over dead bodies.

It would take more weight to deal with a serial killer, in real life or on a page, and many giallo murder mysteries are about corrupt people, usually middle class, bumping each other and a poor person finding themselves within as the improvised detective in the middle of it. Alongside how here the police are actually down-to-earth and alien to the trumped up notion of the arm of the law, ordinary Joes trying to work around these gristly murders, even butting heads with outside law enforcement, White of the Eye is compelling as it is entirely focused on a family disintegrating. The plot twist - [Huge Spoiler] that Paul is the killer [Spoiler Ends] - is incredibly obvious from the get-go, but that reveal is the start of the ultimate tragedy.   

Very little violence is shown. The most gore shed, reminiscent of Dario Agrento's Tenebrae (1982) and his fixation for pale white walls and blood, is a tomato sauce being splattered in the opening, the change still vile in suggestion of the brutality shown. A reminder of Peeping Tom (1960) that horrifies appears later on, with a mirror being shown to the victim of another sequence. Everything is ready to break into said violence without explicit mutilation. Paul White is not what he is expected to be, his wife showing her rage openly when it feels he has betrayed her, and Mike Desantos is someone who was violent before, released from jail and with apparent mental illness, comes as the wisest figure even when talking about a TV in his head. Summing up the reveal of the worse in a person, even if an absurd take on misogyny, as being stuck with reruns in the head TV if perfect, as flashbacks to the original relationships between the three bleeds into the current day, slowly complicating and showing the grim reality of the situation.

And then the film goes insane on purpose. The tone, even with its violence, before the final act was calmer, eerie with its score by 10cc's Rick Fenn and Pink Floyd's Nick Mason, but even their score starts to become tense, bringing a sense of growing horror to the situation in the narrative. That this even has a sense of humour, if a bleak one, is apt, where you find yourself briefly wondering if a character actually strapped hotdogs to themselves, something the daughter as a child presumes, only to consider the fact that it is dynamite inherently bizarre still in itself. The delirious tone by this point may be seen as out-of-place, except for the fact throughout the film there has been weird humour, strange touches, alongside the fact that Donald Cammell's tiny career has these strange and divisive touches for many - Performance where it cuts to Mick Jagger's song Memo from Turner and turns into a music video; Demon Seed (1977) and its premise as general, about a computer that ultimate wants to conceive a child with Julie Christie; Wild Life (1995) having an extended scene of Christopher Walken, as a crime boss, threatening to literally bugger one of his henchmen. The organised chaos of the tone that White of the Eye develops into still conveys the most animalist in people, even if the content is silly on paper. The acting has a rawness throughout, worth praising especially from Moriarty, turning into a madden frenzy when that finale takes place. When logical reality is replaced with the notion of heightened emotions affecting that reality, it has an immensely powerful effect. The result, far from ridiculous in an undermining way, is adding to the disturbing nature of what takes place.

The film switches through time periods with fluidity, blurring them together. The editing, a trademark in Cammell's small filmography, breaks scenes and moments to lingering pieces when needed. Cammell, in both scenes of violence and out of them, examines objects in extreme close-ups, adding a layer that makes them new. That the film looks like a glossy eighties Cannon Group film, going against the content inside, befits this. Night scenes are intentionally grainy and vague, creating a tone to even love scenes by the fire where it is all not it seems. The flashback tale is intentionally washed out in tone. The music by Rick Fenn and Pink Floyd's Nick Mason adds as well to the film, atmospheric and adding a ghostly edge. The result, on paper, feels like a film anyone could make. The result, onscreen, called White of the Eye is not, which leaves with the aftershock of what has happened. As an expression of the failures of the family unit, it uses its distortion to startle.

Abstract Spectrum: Abstract/Disturbing/Weird

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