Space Cowboys (2000)

 

Director: Clint Eastwood

Screenplay: Ken Kaufman and Howard Klausner

Cast: Clint Eastwood as Colonel Francis D. "Frank" Corvin, Ph.D., USAF (Ret.); Tommy Lee Jones as Colonel William "Hawk" Hawkins, USAF (Ret.); Donald Sutherland as Captain Jerry O'Neill, USAF (Ret.); James Garner as Captain / Reverend "Tank" Sullivan, USAF (Ret.); Marcia Gay Harden as Sara Holland; William Devane as Flight Director Eugene "Gene" Davis; Loren Dean as Ethan Glance; Courtney B. Vance as Roger Hines; James Cromwell as Bob Gerson

Canon Fodder

 

I've got Medicare. Give me your best shot.

Clint Eastwood's first film of the 20th century is a high concept film, effectively the idea of imagining old farts in space. This would be mean as a description except that this is a running joke throughout, that the age of the four men in the titular cowboys, from the pre-NASA space programme era of airmen, have to be brought in and shot into space to deal with a Russian satellite whose technology is beyond the latest generation. Including  the prologue of young actors being dubbed by the leads, the premise is also about having three great actors (Eastwood himself, Tommy Lee Jones and Donald Sutherland) and a fourth as good as them (James Garner, lead a various classic Hollywood films and the likes of the Maverick TV series) in a work which is also about mortality.

The irony is not lost when Clint Eastwood into his nineties would still be directing and acting in his own films, but with numerous moments where the leads ask about old colleagues only to be told they have passed on, Space Cowboys is a slight film for its director-actor but still with clear themes within it which are pertinent. A surprising amount of Eastwood's directing career, even as light hearted as this,  tackles humility and virtue a great deal, which is one of the reasons I have both come to him as a director of great interest for myself, and why I am even covering a film like Space Cowboys in the first place. It is continually surprising that a known Libertarian in Eastwood, conservative leaning, was however balancing his very traditional values as a filmmaker with notions of human decency and a willingness to reflect, something which placed him at a considerable position for me from his elder statesman era. This reflects a period, his films appearing in cinemas when I was getting into cinema late 2000s, reflecting where after Unforgiven (1992) there would be films into the Millennia where he started to become a more prolific director.

For a film like American Sniper (2014), which was held with great issue for even tackling the career of Chris Kyle, a United States Navy SEAL sniper, a controversial subject and honestly not an interesting film in his career, than you get a film like The 15:17 to Paris (2018), not a film about American soldiers which flag waves. In spite of that later film, for example, being about three American soldiers on vacation who stopped a terrorist attack on a train, that was an attempt to depict it accurately, abruptly leading to Eastwood the experimental director evoking Robert Bresson in casting the non-actors themselves as themselves only with more European light comedy vacation frolicking. In another director's hands, Space Cowboys would have caused you to gouge your eyes out just for the old man gags, or Donald Sutherland being the lothario trying to woo all the young and older women on site, but here it is tempered with a great cast and an emphasis on its themes. Of men's mortality and duty contrasted by a lot of humour which works, usually everything about letting Tommy Lee Jones and Eastwood play the former friends whose arguments, leading to actual fisticuffs at one point, being the main character dynamic and lets the pair shine. This avoids so much you would expect of this premise because Eastwood feels more straight-laced, even to a fault in the real man a straight shooter in speaking his mind, or how he can be very sedate in his films (such as the documentary Piano Blues (2003) from this period in its pace). Nothing is forced as wacky here, and none of the themes feel tacked on for a cheap emotional core, having so much more in that, with the exception of James Cromwell's character, no one is just evil and wrong here, and Cromwell's sins as a head of NASA is entirely the pedantic one of wishing to take credit and look good regardless of whether it was better for everyone else.

There is also the fact, adding a sudden twist to what felt like a comedy in premise, in how this is about the Cold War. The Space Race, to even the glory of civilisation itself in general being able to enter orbit, or reach the Moon, was spurn on as much by the United States and Soviet Russia trying to one-up each other politically, something this film does not need to crowbar in as the theme but is there. Regardless of one's politics, the beauty of outer space even just above Earth is shared by the characters once we reach it and the audience, alongside the fact this is four men hired from the Space Age era having to reflect on a literal ghost of the Cold War, floating around the Earth with a dangerous payload. The film is frank regardless of the director's politics in the general idiocy of it all, imagining how we wasted our resources, instead of going into space and the celebration of this, in trying to blow each other up in nuclear winter. The ending as well, not pulling punches but surreally triumphant, in sacrifice and a final shot on the Moon, has stayed with me and whilst there are stronger films later in Clint Eastwood's career, it says a lot this one has stuck nonetheless.  This is absolutely the case of a film, from an auteur, which grows in context. It would shine in its whit, and its emotional richness, but it means a lot more placed within an entire director's career, the themes and ideas juggling and conversing between each other, making this stand out more.

Games of the Abstract: Castlevania - Bloodlines (1994)

 

a.k.a. Castlevania: The New Generation / Vampire Killer

Developer: Konami

Publisher: Konami

One Player

Sega Mega Drive (Genesis) / PC / Switch /PS4 / Xbox One

 

This was my first Castlevania game, which marks an important signpost as a gamer. It comes with a weight to it, as this is a legendary franchise that began with 1986's Castlevania for the Nintendo Entertainment System, and whilst Konami's messy legacy into the 2010s has caused huge problems with their licenses, Castlevania had at least the advantage of a Western animated series commissioned for Netflix, which began in 2017 and lasted for over four season by 2021. Konami's legacy has been sullied by many mistakes, but thankfully into the 2020s too, in the late 2010s, there was a considerable effort to preserve and re-release titles like this and Contra as franchise collections which has been successful. A lot of critical rebuilding would be needed by Konami from the mistakes made in that decade, but working with the likes of M2, the legendary Japanese developer who devote themselves to the best of video game preservation, they do themselves well with the likes of the 2019 Castlevania Collection. Best conversions met where even the Game Boy titles from the franchise to the mid-nineties, including Castlevania: Bloodlines, came back for people to play. The only reason the notorious arcade entry Haunted Castle (1987) was not in that collection is that it was placed in the Arcade Collection, another set of Konami games, whilst this collection even has Kid Dracula (1990), a Japanese exclusive cute platformer from the NES, and the Japanese versions of these games, which includes the original Vampire Killer version of Bloodlines. Only the likes of the PC-Engine games from this era, including the likes of Rondo of Blood (1993), were not included and that has had its own releases in the West multiple times over the decades.

My first game is atypical, beginning with the fact this is viewed as a "Gaiden", a term for "side story" or "tale", with Bloodlines being set in an entirely different timeline than other games. For those unaware of the series in general, with titles remaking the original 1986 version just among the timeline included in the Castlevania Collection, what is called Akumajō Dracula in Japan is about the history of one lineage, usually, called the Belmont family who have fought the vampire Dracula over centuries and all the monsters at his disposal. Bloodlines is still in this setting as, whilst set as far forward as 1917, one of the two playable characters, whilst called John Morris and from Texas, is from the lineage and inherited the Vampire Killer, the trademark of this franchise among many of a whip as a main weapon which can destroy even the undead. The second character of Eric Lecarde, from Spain, comes into this context with a spear, out for revenge for his female love being turned into a vampire, both in context dealing with how a figure named Elizabeth Bartley desires to resurrect Count Dracula and bring horrors to the world again. One aspect of Bloodlines just in these two is that, whilst it could have been expanded further, each do have occasional differences in how the levels will play out, divergent paths on at least two major occasions where Morris can swing across gaps like Indiana Jones, whilst Lecarde has a super jump, which could have had additional gameplay differences but works as a nice touch in what we get.

As my first Castlevania, there is also the fact this is a streamlined take on the franchise as it had been at this point. Whilst Konami worked the franchise over multiple formats - the arcade, the PC-Engine - they had mostly released games in the franchise for Nintendo consoles at this point. With the NES games too, they would be building the blocks with those releases with what, with Nintendo's own Metroid series, would be the "Metroidvania" genre of adventure-platformers with non-linear structures. Bloodlines is very linear in comparison, six stages divided up to at least eleven sections within each, which you play in order with limited lives and continues to an ending, the full one only available at harder difficulties. You only even occasionally move right-to-left across the screen for sections.

Whilst I did not grow up with a Mega Drive, and do not want to presume the following only from a few games in, I do however see this as fitting the tone of the console in terms of style and its arcade playability. It is a difficult game, where even on Easy mode, you will have a challenge, to the point I have no issue with admitting using save states as the Castlevania Collection version includes, but Bloodlines has a lot to it in terms of virtues to it including how this difficulty is with respect to the player. Konami, praise them, even back in the original version, alongside their trademark Konami code and others, included a password system which, if you had a pen and paper, lets you stay on the password screen as long as needed to write down the code you get for each new level when you beat the one before. The gameplay itself has a lot of virtues too once you get used  to it, even in helpful touches that you can hit projectiles and destroy them, or the trademark that you can find food hidden behind breakable pieces of walls, signposted whilst rarer here. Jump and attack have, if limited, the ability to send the whip/spear in multiple directions, and a lot of the game is memorisation but in a way that is not pointlessly difficult. There is also the special weapons, which is a franchise staple, usually in the games having hearts you need to collect to power them, red gems here instead. Barring a super fourth weapon you can find, you have the choice (and need to avoid accidentally collecting the less preferred weapon) of a boomerang (forwards attack, coming back for additional damage if thrown right), an axe (goes diagonally up in an arch, comes back down), and holy water (useless), with the addition for more gems you can execute a more powerful version.

Playing the game twice, for both characters, I was already learning and improving too, so modern releases of Bloodlines with save states have the advantage to allow one to get better and better, appreciating the aesthetic virtues of this game to the point one could try, with plays, for the eventual one credit run of the game on various difficulties. As a franchise, just from this atypical one, Castlevania is imagining cramming as many horror and folklore entities into one game as enemies as you can get. This game alone is impressive for a visual and audio production, pure gothic adventure with surreal touches and over the top. Going through level to level, across Europe to England, level one is in Transylvania, which only feels less memorable as, ironically whilst with the difficulty spikes onwards, the later levels as they get harder also become more memorable in the obstacles and the sights on hand. It does however, from the get-go, have a macabre nature, with bodies hanging off hooks and corpses which led to the original Europe releases having to be censored. This is beautiful 16 bit imagery to look at, and marks a moment as well as, for the soundtrack, this was the first game composer Michiru Yamane started on in this franchise. Working on Konami games before and after, she would work on countless Castlevania games with collaborators, including in the 32 bit era with Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (1997), her music here for her first game in this franchise wonderfully atmospheric.

By Level 2, Greece, the difficult is upped with drowning hazards, but also with the fact that, alongside some learning - that you gain such as the dodge, and that fireballs do not beat whips - you also see the imagination on display. Fighting minotaurs and desecrating ancient statues, this leads to the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy and where the gameplay fully won me over with its creativity. You are no longer spanking mermen with the whip, but dealing with slanted stages, having to manoeuvre on auto scrolling stages, and challenges which at first can be a shock but are all with lush moody aesthetic. The technology of the era too, Mega Drive's graphical capabilities, do have to be talked about as they shown themselves across all the levels but more and more prominently by the middle levels, such as with Piza and the fourth level, a military factory in Germany. Alongside scaling perilous heights or dealing with helmet wearing skeletons, it is worth focusing on how this game was pushing the hardware in ways that could be taken for granted, such as the idea of levels having background and foreground layers, something which Germany as a level has with some of the best looking sections with elaborate moving cogs in and behind the stage. There is Germany's boss, a strange cog machine monster, who putters about in a cute but evil way if they do not turn into a buggy to run you over, who is depicted as a polygonal-like character, the many first attempts to make "3D" graphics which have a new strange aura around them but have to be appreciated for their innovations.

As the game raises the challenge, it is as if the production becomes more elaborate to compensate for this, the reward of accomplishing further along being greater aesthetic flourishes which is helped by how more idiosyncratic the later sections of levels become, from combat and/or platform sections to figure out. The gardens of Versailles in France, opening level 5, may have annoying swinging rose monsters, and giant flowers whose pollen reverse your controls, but those flowers can be destroyed, and the luscious sights here, even grim ones of a giant fountain overflowing with blood and forging un-destroyable red skeletons on you, are beautifully animated to look at. Fighting a maiden who turns into a giant moth leads to the final level, befittingly for Bram Stoker's Dracula set in England. Some of the more unconventional challenges come here, such as an actual optical illusion where the screen is refracted into three layers, having to watch where your feet are for the platforms and incoming Medusa heads, or the gravity being upside down the screen later. It does have a long boss run which would have been difficult on the original version, with a boss run hosted by the Grim Reaper with randomised choice, the Reaper himself, Elizabeth Bartley herself and three stages of Dracula, but by this point, over two plays, I fell for Bloodlines. It introduced me to this franchise, but contextually as well, as the game not like the others, this also worked in terms of winning me over more to Sega Mega Drive even further. A console from before I got into videogames, my tastes, as much from having a Sega Saturn and a Playstation, come for the 32 bit era, and also the strange curiosities of the period like FMV, but this emphasised the magic of the 16 sprite era just as much. This type of game is one I appreciate more for its spectacle, and in mind that this originates from a franchise with more entries, which are being made available, and this excites as much as I love Castlevania: Bloodlines as it is.

Dead or Alive: Final (2002)

 

Director: Takashi Miike

Screenplay: Hitoshi Ishikawa, Yoshinobu Kamo and Toshiki Kimura

Cast: Riki Takeuchi as Officer Takeshi Honda; Show Aikawa as Ryō; Maria Chen as Michelle; Richard Chen as Dictator Woo; Jason Chu as Prisoner; Josie Ho as Jun; Tony Ho as Ping

Canon Fodder

 

Among the three Dead or Alive films by Takashi Miike – three films only connected by V-Cinema megastars Riki Takeuchi and Show Aikawa - they all deserve their own coverage, but among them the third and final one always came off as maligned. The first was a film which helped Miike’s reputation, as much due to its out-of-nowhere ending, the second film is one of his best and a reminder of his emotional and dramatic side, and Final came to the United Kingdom in the wave of Tartan Video DVDs with a dull thud. It was neither helped that at this point, when Arrow Video decided to preserve the entire trilogy for a Blu Ray release, Final was shot on standard digital with burnt in Japanese subtitles, even having included a warning the preserved copy is less than perfect due to one of this film’s many quirks.

Old films onscreen, all fantasy wuxia with homemade monster costumes, open up the film with a melancholic air before we are sent to A.D. 2346 Yokohama, in a post apocalypse when the new major, Major Wu, has enforced the strictest of population and birth control rules. Pregnant women are incarcerated and it is implied they will outright shot children to keep the population down, with Wu’s own birth control pill is mandatory for all couples to take, with an enforcer called Officer Honda (Riki Takeuchi) as his right hand. Obviously there is a rebel group, refusing to take the pill and this introduces Ryo (Show Aikawa), who wanders in abruptly in this, preventing Honda’s men gunning down a young boy, and being introduced to the rebel group, mostly two figures that have made the ill advised decision to hire gangsters to help them stop Wu. Ryo thankfully is a replicant even able to stop bullets with his hands.

Whilst the premise sounds like horrible homophobic propaganda – when Major Wu is introduced having a shirtless sexy sax man, who preaches eternal love being only possible in homosexuality – Miike films, as usual, are more complicated, especially as whilst this is set in Yokohama, most of the cast are speaking in Cantonese, and the film was shot in Hong Kong, which evokes mainland China’s controversial one child policy than anything else. Implemented between 1980 and 2015, and thus still enforced when the film was released, it was a real life attempt at reducing population rates with strict laws, and I would not be surprised this came to mind for the production alongside the idea, set in a post-apocalypse, of imagining population issues being a subject the creators wanted to explore. Wu, played by Richard Chen, is less evil due to being gay but being a bastard, but one who feels the old world, of environmental disaster and chaos, can only be prevented from appearing in these extremes, Honda enforcing this law by the book of logic. The film, is there are any issues, plays its premise as a merely a context, not as fully fleshed out as it could be, but it feels less problematic than it suggests initially.

Contextually the origin in V-Cinema adds a lot to Final as a film, as with the whole trilogy. In lieu to cinema’s constant challenges such as television, Japanese cinema in the eighties gained a new format with videotape, which led to the likes of straight-to-video anime and the cinema Takeuchi and Aikawa made their names in, let alone this being where Miike started as a director originally. Dead or Alive as a trilogy, in hindsight to Miike’s earliest films before the 2000s, with some going to cinemas but others not, feels like a capstone to this period. The sense of its repetition of the two leads, always to cross paths, feels apt for the careers of the two too, as much as the lurid and strange moments in the trilogy coming from the unpredictability of Miike’s earlier films. Here for the last time Riki Takeuchi, Elvis pompadour and cool, and Show Aikawa, eccentric with his own idiosyncratic croaky voice and dyed blonde hair, got to revisit this world one last time. The first Dead or Alice is underappreciated, as it is known for its opening and ending, but with the central crime story being just as interest as a sad, melancholic tale where even the absurdity of the ending befits two men on opposite sides of the law literally destroying the world in their hatred. Dead or Alive 2: Birds (2000) was even more idiosyncratic and bittersweet, with the leads friends and hit men who knew each other from childhood, a drama in crime genre clothing of memory, nostalgia and purpose. In comparison to Birds especially, Final does feel a curious turn, a piece which connects to earlier films, specifically one of Miike’s best Rainy Dog (1997), as passages become Ryo bonding with a woman and the child he rescued in his introduction, but is also an imperfect production next to the other two just for the sense that this could have done with a few more minutes and grown from its virtues.

Shooting in Hong Kong adds something at least for starters, never trying to be futuristic baring some aesthetic details, like CGi giant dragon ships over tower blocks, and the replicant subplot, involving robots from a war far in the past able to eat and be empathetic as much as being dangerous to normal humans. Clearly the film had interest in the country’s history of martial arts cinema, even if it would be fed through CGI, with Show Aikawa trying his own stunts. Here I have to get to its standard digital shooting style too. This is thankfully something changing over the decades, especially with the work of the likes of American Genre Film Archive in preserving shot on video films has caused titles with imperfect technological appearances to be more readily available, but I did have a legitimate concern that an era of early 2000s digitally shot films would be lost. There was some sense of the issue being how something like this, shot likely for practicality, shows the technology in its softness and being out-of-place in a world of 4K and High Definition technology especially when it came to televisions. A production like MPD Psycho (2000), his great mini-series adaptation of the Eiji Ōtsuka and Shou Tajima manga, is something left obscure and with this concern, and here you can see, with its interlacing, Final has a fuzziness to it that will put some off immediately. Considering however though, with MPD Psycho still having huge censorship bars over gore, not for censorship but on purpose, Miike does feel like someone who has toyed with the style of his films deliberately. He is one of the few able to make very obvious CGI work, as here, and the green hue to this world is a slight emphasis on this being a dystopia without overdoing it, all felt with the sense of his usual trademarks of being one of the few directors to go out of the box fully.

This does jar with the beauty of the previous films in this series, but considering the crammed, waste and water logged world of futuristic Yokohama here, it also makes sense to have this style. The film’s hardcoded Japanese subtitles also come with the fact that, continuing his interest in multiculturalism, Miike has a mostly Cantonese speaking cast, with the leader of the resistance also fluent in English. It does not hide its Japanese setting clearly being Hong Kong, and it never feels out-of-place. The golden virtue of Takashi Miike – whilst even Sion Sono could spin his wheels in repetitious content – is that Miike unless you got him on a really bad day is a chameleon, always interesting, and here too, Final becomes more of a drama as Honda’s reality is shown to him and Ryo bonds with the survivors from when the rebels are caught off guard. Here is another film where, even with its absurd moments, it still however has emotional resonance regardless of how bizarre he can get, where even a botched rescue becoming an accidental kidnapping of a child leads to a friendship between two instead.

The film eventually refers back to the two films before by the ending, openly embracing the sense of these films existing within themselves whilst still being serious. Note that, yes, the ending of Final is bizarre, with a penis robot at the end as unexpected as you would presume, alongside the end credits just recording an older man on the street singing a song. This comes with him as a filmmaker - the profound and emotional against this openly silly and juvenile content - and it does not jar from the content from the previous two Dead or Alive films either. The film's true flaw, in truth, is that I have already mentioned, that this does fell slightly undercooked, not fully fleshed out as it could be with the importance of the film, the end of this trilogy, and the virtues already here when it is both serious and it is silly.

The Bay of Love and Sorrows (2002)

 

Director: Tim Southam

Screenplay: Tim Southam

Based on a novel by David Adams Richards

Cast: Peter Outerbridge as Everette Hatch; Jonathan Scarfe as Michael Skid; Joanne Kelly as Madonna Eveline Brassaurd; Christopher Jacot as Robert Allan 'Silver' Brassaurd; Elaine Cassidy as Carrie Matchett; Zachary Bennett as Tom Donnerel; Torquil Campbell as Vincent Donnerel; Rhonda McLean as Dora Matchett; Marshall Button as Emmett Matchett

Ephemeral Waves

 

Everyone has those films they do not finish, preferring not to spend the time to sit through them even if there is no truly negative emotion, only a disinterest. Openly admitting that I am autistic even when it comes to my hobbies, let alone the learning disability itself, I have forced my way through almost all films I have seen and can say, up until this review, only three were never finished. Two are now left unfinished, and it is neither that they were bad, but literally I stopped them within ten minutes feeling a complete lack of interest. I have marked these (once) three with 0% entirely as I could not comment on them, not with a true reason for having so because I gave up on them and did not give them a proper number rating. They are a curious trio – one is an obscure British horror film Daddy’s Girl (2006) (a.k.a. Cravings), one is a maligned Kevin Smith film with Bruce Willis, the cop comedy Cop Out (2010), and this which is arguably the most curious, an obscure drama adapting a David Adams Richards novel. More for completionist sake, I thought why not watch these films, especially as for The Bay of Love and Sorrows, the experience was with worth.

Drama is an area of cinema I neglect even as a huge cineaste for the classics of cinema, if only because, if you stick to finding the legendary titles of the cinematic medium, Hollywood and World Cinema, and those obscurer titles from fascinating auteurs, “drama” is such a nebulous genre which is so vast you will barely cover it. The ultimate irony too is that, whilst genres like horror and erotic/pornographic movies have been the ones dismissed, whilst dramas are those usually gaining the awards and praise, dramas as “high art” are not always getting the prestige restorations. Even the obscurest and maligned in technical quality in those genres dismissed to the gutter have gained more support in bringing them to life in the modern era whilst so many dramas, even potentially great ones, are lost to knowledge. Drama as a genre is also just a questionable in what it intends to do, in how they can be about grief and bleakness for the sake of exploitation human emotions, in melodrama or worse for just those awards each year from critics.

The Bay… is thankfully not this type of film, merely one lost to the annuals, to be found (as once I did) in a DVD case in a second hand store, not even a DVD second hand store but a local corner who specialized in second hand game console equipment and burnable DVDs by the bus station. In a very British tradition of stores in small towns and villages which have a lot of old DVDs, some whose DVDs are faded from being in the sun for too long, the old titles from Hollywood in the 2000s are still there to this day as they can be found in car boot sales at the seaside, but also the old releases from companies like Hollywood Films long gone can be found. In this case it was an even obscurer company long gone with the presumption this would always have been second hand and never once been printed new, now existing unknown to many like the back alleys now in streaming sites.

The Bay… is set in farmland "Americana", the exact location of where the story is set that needs to be looked at more carefully as there is one detail that never comes up explicitly, that this novel and the film are explicitly set in New Brunswick, is shot in New Brunswick, and The Bay of Love and Sorrows is a Canadian production, a friendly reminder that this iconography of “Americana” needs to factor in the entire continent also having the many countries of South America and Canada. With one of the first scenes involving Madonna (Joanne Kelly) and her younger brother Silver (Christopher Jacot) being caught in illegal fishing, all this evokes Southern Gothic down south, but ironically this is  a view of Canada that is far from a stereotype of them, nor has any of the snow covered and cold scenery usually ascribed to their films. In this, as well as being glad I finally saw The Bay…, it is also a pointed reminder that Canadian cinema is not something, truthfully, as widely made available I would have thought it been. The irony in this is that the director-writer of this, Tim Southam, even when he transitioned to directing episodes of US television shows later in his career was not leaving far from home – shows like Bates Motel (2013–2017) or The Good Doctor (2017-) among those he has worked as an episode director on are shot in Canada.

There is a former criminal named Everett (Peter Outerbridge), out of jail, in this tale alongside Michael (Jonathan Scarfe) the well off son of a judge with all the privilege behind him, Madonna and her younger brother Michael, Madonna trying to get her tech savvy brother in technical collage as she does menial jobs, Tom the young farmer (Zachary Bennett) happy to inherit his farm life and never leave town, and the potential farmer’s wife who is wary of this named Carrie (Elaine Cassidy). Carrie is the figure who stands out beyond the film as Cassidy, ironically getting back into the subject for this review, found herself years after as the lead of Harper’s Island (2009), an ambitious one season horror show which still works as a cancelled production as, intending to be a different story each season like American Horror Story, it is a slasher movie expanded with melodrama and character developed over a television season.

Michael, recounting how he has been to Nepal, talks of a communal life, and Everett suggests having a literal jar they collect their money together in. This will be with sinister intentions, and it will spiral down into a lot of tragedy from a literal glass jar of change, such as Everett having his eye on Madonna against her desires. I am far less interested in terms of a drama whether this is a good one or not. The scale of quality in terms of how film reviews usually cover this, the need to reinvent the wheel, feels pointless, and with this, one with a clear modest budget yet not that low, is interesting as a genre film about this spiral down which will cut people down. In mind to how this review began, it was more rewarding to actually watch the film after such a long time as one of the few titles which I never completed, one which was compelling in this story, a drama with crime edges emphasizing that dialogue as much as event is what will push things along.

There are greater points to consider, which should not be ignored. With Tommy, for example, there is a figure that will never venture out of rural New Brunswick, his possible future wife Carrie disinterested in this and seduced by Michael, emphasizing his crimes, a timeless one, of his status making him an outsider who looks down on the community even unintentionally. Class conflict exists in just his character, something to be found as he is working on a photography project in the locals that, whilst meant to be empathetic, comes off with what he has gotten into with a man cruelly scrutinizing the rural folk like ants under a magnifying glass. There is also a potent factor, whilst religion is never explicitly tackled, and adaptations can lose their author's intents fully, that the source writer David Adams Richards comes to his books, through his career, as a Catholic who explicitly deals with themes like sin¹, something to at least consider in mind to the ways these characters end up damning themselves by accident, if just to escape from their lives to a semblance of happiness. Rather than caring whether I will remember the film in a year’s time, I was happier to let it go alone with interest, filtering these background contexts to the plot where this gets into the obviously doomed decision where, Everett having taking the money and invested it into a drug deal, the moment anyone suggests helping is sealing their fates.

This story will get intense – someone, in a haze of drugs and panic, bludgeons one of the few “innocents” of the cast, who just wanted to leave the town, to death with a rock to hide the eventually failed drug trade. Honestly, the only thing here which seems pointlessly over-the-top, and it is neither the actor’s fault, is that there is a character with a learning disability, like a Lennie from Of Mice and Men without the supernormal strength, who is broad if never more than a potential victim of the others’ crimes. Beyond this, the experience of finally watching The Bay of Love and Sorrows was worthwhile, a stint in a genre not normally tackled, a tangent into Canadian cinema that was only realized afterwards but was felt with great worth, and with that sense that, when my earlier self lack a complete patience for this, it was felt with reward to actually experience the film without any biases going into it.

 

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1) Canadian author hides message of hope in bleak landscape, written by Mike Mastromatteo for Catholic Register and published on December 4th 2016.

Ninja III: The Domination (1984)

 

Director: Sam Firstenberg

Screenplay: James R. Silke

Cast: Shô Kosugi as Yamada; Lucinda Dickey as Christie; Jordan Bennett as Secord; David Chung as Black Ninja; Dale Ishimoto as Okuda; James Hong as Miyashima

Ephemeral Waves

 

Only a ninja can destroy a ninja.

Out of the Cannon Group canon, Ninja III could be seen as one of their most infamous productions, where after Israeli expats and independent film producers Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan helped produce the eighties craze for ninjas, with Enter the Ninja (1981) and Revenge of the Ninja (1983), the cousins backed another production by director Sam Firstenberg with Shô Kosugi, the Japanese star who became central to considerable few of these ninja films in the eighties (such as Pray for Death (1985) and Nine Deaths of the Ninja (1985)) in the United States. This one however would imagine what would happen if you were possessed by the ghost of an evil ninja.

The film does not slouch with a ridiculous opening which is yet, with hindsight to how Cannon Group were not a company able to throw a lot of money around, that is impressive with age. It becomes a far more ambitious and mad spectacle, especially knowing one of Cannon's ultimate swords of Damocles over its head was trying to spend too much on films which were not successful. In how the prologue establishes the evil ninja, assassinating someone on a golf course, it becomes a prolonged act a mayhem before he becomes the ghost that possesses Lucinda Dickey of Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo (1984), slaughtering everyone including the police who chase after him. Alongside how long and extravagant the scene is on its small budget, there is the fact this was before CGI was prominent, so that is a real stunt person hanging off a real helicopter in a ninja costume at one point.

Eventually the numbers game is too much, but this ninja still survived having holes blown into him with firearms, even shotguns, and massacre a whole lot of the cops after him. This was just the prologue, eventually crawling along in the desert where he encounters Christie, Lucinda Dickey's character a telephone pole engineer in the day, passing to her his katana which contains his soul and possesses her. This is, undoubtedly, a bizarre film as it goes along, a reminder that Cannon Group were a curious beast, who funded so legitimately talented figures, including working with John Cassavetes as a director or Jean-Luc Godard, even if that later production King Lear (1987) was effectively a middle finger to Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan. They also released films presuming they would be hits but coming from a complete naivety at points - Going Bananas (1987), a children's film, has the bizarre anecdote from Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films (2014) about Menahem Golan meeting with the handlers of Clyde the orangutan (Clint Eastwood's co-star from Every Which Way But Loose (1978) and Any Which Way You Can (1980)) to discuss a potential movie deal, only to eventually have to have a dwarf actor in an obvious suit. They could hit trends perfectly, like the original Breakin' film or cashing in on superhero films, but Ninja III does come from the studio being out of touch in a magical way for their productions.

Nothing is more of the eighties, of its moment, in one shot than within Ninja III where Lucinda Dickey is playing Tapper (1983), on an arcade machine she can somehow afford to own, in aerobics lycra. The film after its opening does, honestly, struggle at times with its own shambolic nature, but there is an infectiousness to the proceedings if you can appreciate this film, as Christie begins under the ninja's influence to kill the police officers who finished him off, one attempting to romance her by way of being such an annoyance she finally gives in. Alongside the question of whether pouring V8 vegetable juice on yourself can be considered sexy, which does happen in this film, the other obvious concern is that this definitely is not even like other American martial arts films from this period, in that this really does not focus on the martial arts, yet the idea here of a supernatural ninja is not as trivialising as you would think. This does evoke the cut-and-paste ninja films which made Hong Kong filmmaker Godfrey Ho's infamous reputation, with this in comparison managing a slicker nature in its eighties cheese than some of the productions Ho and his producer at the time Joseph Lai had, but still retaining the DNA. Its supernatural nature makes the comparison perfect, even riffing on The Exorcist with a much appreciated cameo by James Hong as a spiritualist who realises he is out of his depth with an evil ghost ninja. The film is not really even a Shô Kosugi work either as, whilst a name for the tale to sell it, he is a minor figure here, a good ninja out for revenge, for his lost eye and his slain master, travelling to the United States after the evil ninja and happy to perform his own form of exorcism when he realises the circumstances. Instead, this film becomes a curious hodgepodge of aspects and plot points of its own.

A film like this would be even lower budget in the modern straight to streaming era, making one like this which got cinema releases at one point more fascinating. It has its lengthy dialogue scenes, but the strangeness of the production from Cannon Group does feel a one off, not a great film but a compelling one. The Godfrey Ho comparison is apt, and honestly, whilst the real Japanese ninja were people who disguised themselves to blend into surroundings, in Japanese pop culture they have taken ninja to their own exaggerated forms. Particularly in mind to The Kouga Ninja Scrolls (1958–1959), a novel by the Japanese author Futaro Yamada and its lasting impact on depictions in decades after, alongside the influence of cult pop culture media like video games, ninja in Japanese pop culture have been exaggerated as supernatural figures who have bee hives growing out of their backs, let alone their own infinite supply of shuriken like this film has. The difference is that, like the moody synth score by Udi Harpaz and Misha Segal, this has its own quirks from reinterpreting ninja in a Western hemisphere alongside its unintentional aspects, such as its extended aerobics sequence for comedy. Whilst this cannot hold a candle to the Hong Kong and Japanese martial arts films from this era, there is the fictional ninja iconography, like Japan's, which is quirky with hindsight.

The only real issue with this film, truthfully, is that it is exoticising Japanese culture, which is definitely problematic, and whilst his cameo is fun, undeniably a Chinese American actor in James Hong playing a Japanese character, or one who is ambiguous in his spiritual clinic's aesthetic whilst being able to understand a Japanese ghost, shows Ninja III has aged. But the film itself, with its legacy of infamy, is too gleefully weird to just dismiss, especially as it lives up to its mad reputation and does not feel too low budget to cop out of what it promised. The ninja fad as well of the eighties has an added quirk which is meaningful for myself in that, thanks to a certain person named James Ferman, the head of the British Board of Film Classification who started in 1975 and was thankfully ousted in 1999, we would have never gotten a film like this unless with severe censorship until the DVD era. I was too young for this to care, and Godfrey Ho's ninja films were the ones I got to first, but Ferman was responsible for numerous practices which are right to view of puritanical or just bizarre in British film censorship, one of them being he had scenes of things like nunchucks and shurikens removed from films under the fear of British children imitating them, which even compromised the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise. This makes a film like Ninja III even more idiosyncratic, as the ninja fad is this strange eighties concept in terms of their Western depictions that we would have not gotten the full extent of. A film like Ninja III would have not been seen in its proper form, outside of bootlegging, until the DVD era here, and its additional time capsule nature of pure eighties oddness, mainlining some of Cannon Group's most charming but also infamous aspects in one production, was a huge experience for me even if this was less a great viewing experience entire for just the film, but the experience itself. Certainly it was an entertaining experience too as a film, not as weird as I had presumed in some ways, more with a greater sense of cheesy eccentricity that won me over, but this is definitely a case of a film which you need to appreciate a "cult" film to get the best out of this or you will think this is dumb. Those who can appreciate just that extended prologue on the golf course will be happy that, if that wins them over, the film will be a great experience for them onwards.

Games of the Abstract: Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon (1995)

 

Developer: Gazelle

Publisher: Banpresto (Japan); Sega (World Wide)

One to Two Players

Arcade

 

Sailor Moon for many that needs no introduction. Even if it rarely screened at a sensible time on Fox Kids on British satellite television, I still saw an episode in my youth. Only that fact this series has not been well released on physical media or streaming over the years made Sailor Moon out of reach for large periods of time despite the fact that, a) in Japan, Naoko Takeuchi's source manga and its anime adaptation became huge, and b) in the West, a fan base was created too when dubbed in English and syndicated in the West. The manga starting in 1991, Sailor Moon follows in the magical girl genre, of schoolgirls having heroic alter egos. In this case one named Usagi Tsukino who (with friends) who inherit incredible powers to fight evil as the "Sailor Guardians". A shōjo manga, targeting teen girls and young adult women, this franchise has gained a fan base regardless of age and gender, and the legacy continues with a 2014 animated reboot, Sailor Moon Crystal, the original Sailor Moon animated series, which lasted five seasons with tie-in works, a 2003 live action series, and even an attempt at an American version from 1994 which infamously never came to be. 

And, obviously, for such a huge franchise too in its homeland, a lot of games were released as tie-ins we never got in the West. There was a JRPG for the SNES/Super Famicom called Bishōjo Senshi Sailor Moon: Another Story (1995) for example, or two one-on-one fighters, another Super Famicom game called Bishōjo Senshi Sailor Moon S: Jōgai Rantō!? Shuyaku Sōdatsusen (1994), and later for the Playstation One named Bishōjo Senshi Sailor Moon SuperS: Shin Shuyaku Sōdatsusen (1996). The correlation between most of the titles' releases, including Pretty Soldier, which says a lot of when the boom for the franchise came; by 1994 when the games were coming thick and fast onwards, that would have been into the second animated season into the third by 1995. Pretty Soldier is not even the first scrolling beat-em-up either of the tie-ins, which goes to Bishōjo Senshi Sailor Moon R (1993), also for the Super Famicom.

Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon did get a Western release however. In its homeland, it was published by Banpresto, and in the rest of the world, with versions with at least English text even if the voice acting is still in Japanese, Sega acquired this. This stands out among the pack of this era too for that, barring one or two male villains, and male goons, this is almost entirely dominated by women, and whilst a character named Tuxedo Mask is used in a cool gimmick here, all the playable characters are women. The Sailor Guardian team led by Usagi Tsukino, known as the titular Sailor Moon alongside the others from that point in the series - Minako Aino / Sailor Venus, Makoto Kino / Sailor Jupiter, Rei Hino / Sailor Mars and Ami Mizuno / Sailor Mercury - not all the leads who would be introduced over the franchise as it continued from this game. The game itself, as a franchise tie-in if you played this without any of the source's context, plays contrary to the concern that, for a shōjo work, this would be sold to a stereotypical female audience as happened in games form the time like for the Barbie tie-ins from Mattel. Instead, Pretty Soldier looks the part for the many beat-em-ups from the era in richly details but realistic locations, even if fantasy ones eventually end the game, contrasted by a menagerie of monstrous villainesses led by Queen Beryl, one of the antagonists of the animated and manga series who in this is trying to steal life force from the human race.

The developer is of great note here as Gazelle is one of many breakaway groups from Toaplan, a studio who broke up in 1994 (the same year Gazelle founded itself) and was known among other genres for scrolling shooters. This is of note as CAVE, the legendary cult studio for scrolling shooters, is founded by Toaplan staff, and Gazelle only made five games in the entirety of its existence between 1994 to 2002, members joining CAVE themselves during and afterwards if not to another studio named Raizing/ Eighting, another cult studio especially known for shooters¹. Two releases, Playstation One’s Toaplan Shooting Battle 1 (1996), a compilation of Toaplan shooters, and a 1996 Sega Saturn port of Toaplan’s Batsugun (1993), could not really count, leaving among the others Pretty Soldier itself, Quiz Bishōjo Senshi Sailor Moon: Chiryoku Tairyoku Toki no Un (1997), another Sailor Moon arcade tie-in in the mold of a party quiz game, and Air Gallet (1996), their one scrolling shooter involving aerial combat planes. The 1994 bankruptcy of Toaplan led to four companies coming from its ashes – Cave, Raizing, Takumi, and Gazelle – as well as argubly some of the holy figures when it comes to the founding of the "Bullet Hell" side-genre of scrolling shooters. Sadly Gazelle is the maligned one of the quartet, which is a shame as, whilst it is a game which required some polishing, Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon as a licensed arcade game, a late beat-em-up, has a lot to impress with.

This fully embraces being a beat-em-up, including the rise in difficulty, both in the sense this was designed for multiple players to deal with the hordes that eventually appear, and the general jumps in challenge just from the bosses. From the get-go, I will admit there are flaws, and most of those beyond the coin munching nature of the game are more to do with what is missing. There is not a lot of combos possible, neither is there a lot of actual pick-ups, with no weapons, very few health pickups, and few of the gems (looking like blue energy drink cans) which power up one of two form special moves your character can do. Barring a crowd control attack which takes health, combat is mostly having to step out of the way of attacks and try to get your shots in, or exploit the jump kick, whilst there is a lack of four player mode despite being an obvious thing to appeal to fans of the license or the genre. There are times too where it feels like grinding for the sake of it, be in how the bosses in particular are frustrating for their challenge, Queen Beryl herself as the final boss constantly teleporting. These do not take from the game too much, eventually quibbles, but they are factors which could have been improved on.

The license means you cannot have Sailor Mars shooting someone with an Uzi, understandably, but considering the franchise would introduce a chibi (diminutive) comic relief character named Chibiusa who waves air soft replicas of guns, you could have invested a bit more to the proceedings to spice it up, both in its fantastical nature and that there is comedy in the source material. This is especially as, beyond this, this has a lush aesthetic and, due to how the license was interpreted, juggles between incredible imagination, being a game entirely driven by women in non-damsel-in-distress positions on both moral sides, and a gleefully macabre nature that was unexpected too. A few breakable weapons and more health items to work with would have befit a game where, rather than a whole turkey in a bin that boosts health, you get milkshakes and burgers from the pockets of defeated monsters for this instead.

There is style here. This has the voice actresses for the anime for the leads, and there is animated FMV. One bosses, the third as a bat woman, has a cool twist midway through taking down her health bar where, stopping the gameplay, she flees to move the fight to Tokyo Tower for a dramatic finish to the brawl. In terms of sprite art, this has a rich palette, grounded environments befitting the leads, normal schoolgirls, contrasted by the unnatural intruding on their world. The main enemies are all based, even if repeated and with colour swapped versions, on villains of the week from the animated series, as with the bosses, and they become some of the most memorable enemies I have encountered for a beat-em-up. It is almost a shame Stage 5 is mostly male masked thugs committing a bank heist, as this is almost entirely a roster of women, including those which border on horror to, a feminine series of macabre and/or elegant figures. Some are alien underwater figures, other are ninjas, and then there is the buff muscle female mutant, with the blonde elongated crew cut from Guile from the Street Fighter franchise, who uses a tennis racket, between hitting explosive tennis balls to raising the heroines with one muscular arm and smacking them with an incongruous tiny golden tennis racket. There are also more overtly Japanese figures, like yōkai in their appearance, or the really creepy female mannequins, who, able to throw their heads and, if not collected, leave them on the ground even after they are demolished.

The sense of aesthetic is a huge reason why I fell for so many genres considered “retro” like this, be it scrolling shooters or beat-em-ups like this, where the designs really stand out. Even the sole male characters include a psychic bishonen (pretty boy) and a cat creature being transformed against its will into a hulking monstrosity, so everyone is extravagant or inventive. It says a lot that, with how good the game’s style is, that I wish it has embraced this more. It’s limits in gameplay and grinding through certain events are the only annoyances – that power ups are restricted is more annoyance, not only for practicality defeating the hordes, but especially because that the special moves were clearly meant to sale the arcade cabinet as, in another game stopping moment, you get fully animation of that specific Sailor Guardian. The little touches, such as Usagi's two gem mega attack literally her crying to the point it clears the environment of enemies out of unforeseen guilt of upsetting her, add so much when the production pulls them out.

Probably the best example of living up to the license, but making sure it adds to the gameplay, is Tuxedo Mask. For those unaware of the franchise, the leads are all teen girls who fight evil, but Tuxudo Mask is the one male all, a possible love interest for Usagi who steps in difficult moments to help the female team, dressed in his tuxedo costume with mask, throwing a rose at enemies which gives the heroines the upper hand again in the midst of a fight. It can happen randomly (if with hidden contexts) and more than once in the game, with him appearing in the middle of boss battles, with his own cut scenes in sprite animation that pause the game and throw a rose at the enemy. The cut scene when it happens is both an advantage to get the punches back in and also with the rose a health pickup. This is one of the other unique touches, recreating the source’s context, where a cameo has a gameplay advantage and is inspired.

The potential for Gazelle if they had lasted longer, just from this game, adds a shame to their brief existence. Birthed from the likes of scrolling shooters, and many joining CAVE, the irony they only made one of their own and two Sailor Moon licenses, neither of them shooters, is a little funny in its own way. Whether they continued in this direction, in mind to how shooters like this became more of a cult genre into the 2000s, or embraced the legacy of Toaplan, the team here with some mistakes nonetheless knocked this license out of the park. The license itself, allowing for this proudly all-female cast and story, but possible to make a no-nonsense beat-em-up from, more than once, alongside one-on-one fighters, is also something to admire for this reason, that it can be an action story with an all-female cast and yet has the visual style this has. The time when Sailor Moon Crystal came to be, screened over three seasons from 2014 to 2016, we got Sailor Moon Drops (2015), a mobile phone puzzle game, which frankly is disappointing to learn of. For all the knowledge of people who loved this franchise, grew up with the original animated series, and with this animated reboot coming in the 2010s to bring the franchise back, it comes with the conclusion for me that, to be honest, the idea of this proudly resplendent franchise in style, with sailor suit costumes and elaborate superhero transformations, not having an action or fighting game tie-in seems disrespectful. It seems so much cooler if the art style is full of cuteness but also its leads punching bad guys than solving mobile puzzle games, something with Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon attests to.

 

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1) Toaplan: The Rise and Fall of Japan’s Greatest Shooting Game Company, written by Ryan Lambie for Den of Geek and published on June 21st 2018.

Offerings (1989)

 

Director: Christopher Reynolds

Screenplay: Christopher Reynolds

Cast: Loretta Leigh Bowman as Gretchen; Elizabeth Greene as Kacy; G. Michael Smith as Sheriff Chism; Jerry Brewer as Professor Jim Paxton; Tobe Sexton as David; Max Burnett as Tim

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Among the many slasher films of the eighties, Offerings was clearly made for its market. All the illusions to Halloween (1978) borrowed from it are here to that, to be considered, would damn this very late era production, but at least with a morbid tone of its own, not gleefully revealing in the kills but an actual ickiness with a bleak corpse humour, Offerings was at least memorable.

Your Killer John has an emotionally abusive mother who tips cigarette ask in her cooked scrambled eggs, which is a sin in itself, and already as a young boy he is killing animals, like his pet turtle the mother found, so his journey had awful signs from the get-go of what he will become. If this seems all intentionally humoured as a set-up for a review, this is not to trivialise an actual upbringing to real serial killers, but to point out that Offerings' content whilst gristly is also ridiculous. Some of it is accidental, but it is clear at times the creators were aware of this, from director-writer Christopher Reynolds, playing to this.

There is salvation for John in Gretchen, a childhood friend...but the other children are evil bullies who dare him to go walk around the lip of a well and cause him to fall in. In exposition, ten years later having lived in a mental institution, it is suggested this fall in the well and the damage it had caused to the frontal lobe of his brain has fully erased his morality, worse as he wakes up, gets out, and is with vengeance in mind. He will even climb an electric fence unphased, so he is that determined. From here, well, the Halloween parallels cannot be ignored. I love the main theme, some nice synth to win one over, but composer Russell D. Allen is in danger of the heavy debt it has to John Carpenter's main theme. There are scenes openly riffed upon from the Carpenter film and there is even a less efficient version of Dr. Loomis here. It is entirely shameless, but thankfully Offerings, an indefensible title as pure schlock, is one which proudly became Grand Guignol and is at the point the slasher genre was becoming self aware. Long before Scream (1996), and aware a parody Student Bodies (1981) already existed, this has the leads, the grown up Gretchen (Loretta Leigh Bowman) and a friend watch a slasher film and point out their own clichés.

This does blatantly rip off Halloween, but it exaggerates it, such as recreating Dr. Loomis going to the cemetery in one scene, at the grave of Michael Myer's family, only here with a grave digger who is too "enthusiastic" about his job. I am finding myself looking at certain horror genres like slashers with more discomfort for their fixations on "kills", and disinterest with the scares and jumps, instead finding their tangents and quirks more interesting. This at least has a black humour to its content, like the killer's electric drill not working, forcing them to have to head vice something until their head implodes. It is, depending on how you view it, still pointlessly morbid, but throughout the over-the-top nature feels on purpose, grotesque on purpose than accidental, so at least this is a grotesque for me as a horror fan with a ghoulish humour to this.

This is especially the case with the fact John, infatuated with Gretchen, leaves body parts like ears and a nose for her as a cat would present a dead mouse to an owner in front of the door step. (From cats, not killers) I can attest to having this happen as a child in the family home, whilst here in any other context this is something you would get from a grim Ed Gein-like serious horror film. Instead, here it becomes almost like a Herschell Gordon Lewis aspect of sick humour to the proceedings rather than the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It adds a distinct touch to a film which, honestly, is a cheesy slasher to anyone who is not a fan of slashers, in its goofy and creepy tone. It even continues an obsession too with ordering pizza being a scary prospect in the eighties, between The Slumber Party Massacre (1982) and this, but with this going further with John adding his own special meat "topping" to the order which definitely was not sausage.

Moments like this are gross, but I have to give credit to the film as, for a genre which can be extremely bland at its worse in the slasher film, these moments are intentional and memorable. Some of the film does feel unintentionally silly - even if it does require a trigger warning for dead animals being used, John terrorising a duck pond when he leaves the asylum, imagining Jack having eaten bits of the wildlife and torn them to shreds, does feel ridiculous especially when talked of matter-of-factly. However it was also clear the production realised they should fall into humour intentionally, such as the sheriff figure, searching an abandoned house, catching a teen boy reading porn magazines, which is funny. The film as a slasher is as conventional as the genre gets, with the characters incredibly generic and one dimensional, so this side to Offerings is a much needed godsend in terms of, as a thrill ride as cinema, bringing a sense of the perverse to the film. This is not perfect, and not the gold standard even in its genre at its best, but I will appreciate one greatly if it manages to be memorable like this became.