Games of the Abstract: Castlevania - The Adventure / Castlevania II - Belmont's Revenge (1989/1991)

 

Developer: Konami

Publisher: Konami

One Player

Nintendo Game Boy

 

With new hardware comes new possibilities alongside new challenges, something videogames have shown and explored in its existence. Perversely Nintendo, despite their lack of archiving and preserving enough of their legacy, have this wonderful side the opposite of this of experimentation which third party developers were happy to latch onto with their newest ideas, both good and bad ones. The Game Boy was one of the best, the original when released in 1989 a vast chasm from the LCD games from the likes of Tiger Electronics in the day, and even when handheld machines meant for travel threatened them with colour graphics and better visuals, like the Sega Game Gear, the original Game Boy (notwithstanding the Game Boy Pocket in 1996 and the Game Boy Colour in 1998) lasted until 2003. The challenges with this machine back in 1989 can just be seen with Castlevania: The Adventure, one of the first games to be released for the handheld by Konami, a spin-off for the franchise that was then mainly a Nintendo franchise with some exceptions. The limitations notwithstanding of developing games for the machine, not knowing how to push its limits, were contrasted by the clear sense the production team made mistakes.

This is not held as a good game at all, and covering its sequel within the same review, when others would separate them, makes more sense for me as they are siblings, the sequel like a remake which however nods to the original's slight narrative and both sharing their own idiosyncratic quirks within the franchise, least of all the obsession with climbing ropes. The issues thought with Adventure is that, fine tuned, it would be a slight game at four levels and with the struggle of the new hardware seen, but it would be a perfectly fun game in the franchise. All its notoriety and negativity is due to unfortunate problems and ill thought out ideas that could have been nixed even if superior games exist. It is meant to be a prequel to the whole franchise, back when Dracula, the main antagonist through the franchise, was not of the undead but a magician dabbling in black magic. Father to the future lineage, Christopher Belmont has to stop him, only with the struggles in his way being the game itself alongside the monsters and death traps along the way.

Considering Masato Maegawa, the founder of Treasure, the legendary developers, is among the production team, people were here early in their career who would show their talent, but you can see the team struggled. Christopher Belmont is not only plagued by bats, monsters and giant rolling eyeballs, but slow movement, the inability to leap far, the inability to leap without being a foot off the ledge as well to reach distances, rather than fall in pits, and this weird force field around him that absorbs damage rather than repeal it, i.e. a larger hit box than a character should have. It is confounded by the fact too that he loses power ups in merely one hit, and without these issues, this would have been a fun game in its own right, but with these factors, would have made it a nightmare back in the day if you were a child who got this game for their Game Boy. It is if you somehow accept this, or accept save states exist, as the game has been made available legally in the Castlevania Anniversary Collection (2019), its quirks and eccentricities are its own and are charming, but these handicaps and insanely precise leaps are a burden to this game it did not need. It was clear the game was fighting the tech - Level 3, which is an extended game of avoiding a giant spike trap moving for you, already was a challenging with an unfair flaw to it, in how quick you need to be to get ahead of it, but you can see as well the vertical spikes you move sideways from (even on the Castlevania Anniversary Collection) looks like clip art with a border around the illustration moving along, which shows there was a lot of struggle out of the producers' hands let alone mistakes of their own.

It is a game where soldering on, you see a distinct personality coming to this, set to good 8 bit chiptune music (from Shigeru Fukutake, Norio Hanzawa and Hidehiro Funauchi), and even at the beginning of this handheld's life showing that the Game Boy aesthetic was its own distinct one of interest. These two Castlevania games have their own goofy and interesting style which carried in-between them and won me over. Ropes are the obsession, instead of the requisite stairs to move up and down screen on, to scale up and down on with the sequel thankfully making it possible to whip enemies off one; were it not for unfair levels of perfect platform jumping, this world of obstacle courses causes even next to the other games to stand out. The strange gallery of enemies is a highlight too, those aforementioned giant eyes found numerous times, rolling hazards like boulders between the games, or the annoying but cool monster heads which belch fireballs that bounce off surfaces (and randomly) that look more like dandelion heads of death.

It is still possible to find fun with Castlevania: The Adventure, even if accepting save states are your necessary back-up, but it is absolutely the standard case we should point to for mechanics and design when done wrong undercutting the joy one has with a game. It did however clearly do well enough that a sequel was warranted, and thankfully, for Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge a lot was learnt over two years. Thankfully the prequel was not entirely dismissed as aspects are openly lifted and even improved upon, be it figures lifted from the previous game like the rolling eyeballs to the rope climbing, to using the level 3 spike traps as specific obstacles where you can either duck underneath them or even destroy their mechanism as you had to do previously to survive. A lot was improved to make this a proper Castlevania game, the platforming fairer, the damage not immediately taking away power ups after merely one hit, and special weapons from the series being finally introduced in the form of a throwing axe or holy water. It is clearly a sequel, as Dracula is definitely a vampire here, but it is a remake in mood.

This is in mind that, Adventure was fun when fair - aptly the bosses are more rewarding, considering Masato Maegawa's legacy with Treasure are games like Gunstar Heroes (1993) with great bosses - but Belmont's Revenge took this maligned blueprint and imbues it with further style and virtue. It can be hard in its own way, as Dracula this time is now a pain in terms of how to dodge him and only being able to whip him in the head, but it is now without badly implemented game mechanics. With this in mind, I do not want to separate the pair as they feel perfectly linked. Adventure is in truth a bad game, but as with Haunted Castle (1987), the maligned arcade entry, the problems are entirely due to design flaws and both exhibit personalities which can now be appreciated as modern re-releases get around their gameplay failures. The game clearly had something as it was able to blossom as Belmont's Revenge, which is a good game in the franchise. There would be a third game, Castlevania Legends (1997), which is fascinating as bringing forward a female protagonist, Sonia Belmont, and how it is late in the Game Boy's existence. It is considered non-canon, as the guiding hand of the franchise for a large portion of it, producer Koji Igarashi, considered that it conflicted with the narrative canon of the games¹, and it is sadly not readily available as with the likes of the Nintendo 64 productions. This is a shame as, for a full picture of the Game Boy run, Legends even if it could not follow in the footsteps of Belmont's Revenge is fascinating to consider with how this franchise would go on when developers figured out the original Game Boy. The franchise itself managed, with the later Nintendo handhelds, to really find a niche in terms of its 2D games, so as the first games with this run learnt to run, those later games managed to sprint.

 

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1) Tales from the Crypt: Castlevania's 20th Anniversary Blow-out, written by Kurt Kalata, and published by 1UP.com on 26th July 2006. Archived from the original on 14th September 2016.

Britannia Hospital (1982)

 

Director: Lindsay Anderson

Screenplay: David Sherwin

Cast: Leonard Rossiter as Vincent Potter; Graham Crowden as Professor Millar; Jill Bennett as Dr. MacMillan; Joan Plowright as Phyllis Grimshaw; Malcolm McDowell as Mick Travis; Mark Hamill as Red

Ephemeral Waves

 

You wouldn’t know Karl Marx from a toffee apple!

Lindsay Anderson’s success, after his short documentary work from the fifties and This Sporting Life (1963), would reach an unofficial trilogy of loosely tied films, starting with If… (1968), the breakout success at the right time and place in history, in the late sixties during a politically tumultuous time, a tale of the final violent breakdown between roles at a boys' boarding school that would win acclaim and the Palme d'Or at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival. It continued with O Lucky Man! (1973), apt for the strange and freewheeling seventies, three hours long, and an indulgent production varying between weird animal person experiments, an idiosyncratic Pilgrim’s Progress-like take about then-Britain, and one unfortunate aspect of English actor Arthur Lowe in black face among the multiple characters he plays. Britannia Hospital, set within a day at the titular hospital when the Royal Highness is meant to visit, is the film to end the trilogy and appeared at the wrong time be to appreciated, brought out knee deep into the Margaret Thatcher era of British politics where this bleak satire on the state of the union would have violently contrasted her push as Prime Minister for Conservative capitalism.  

It is, with the opening an old man left dying in the middle of a hospital, an unfortunate reminder that the National Health Service, and the issues of health care and how it runs, has been with us for decades. Britannia Hospital is an ensemble tale where this tour of the Queen is going to collapse as the kitchen staff is on strike, there are protests about the African dictator in the private ward, and one of your staff is building a Frankenstein body even if it means ending someone’s life support for the perfect head. Malcolm McDowell is Mick Travis, following this tentative trilogy built around the actor, secretly entering the hospital as a window cleaner to get a secret scoop (with a duo including Mark Hamill in the truck outside to record everything, if they are not getting stoned watching documentaries about battery chicken farms). Lindsay Anderson’s film is the bleakest of black comedies, a snapshot of how he views Britain and humanity through many sides. Aggravated workers on strike, blocking ambulances; Professor Millar (Graham Crowden) with his built man and his Genesis Project; the overwhelmed staff in non-medical levels having to be bribed with hot breakfasts to clear the entrance for a huge emergency; and just a general sense of nothing working, as this hospital is merely a metaphor for Britain in general from a very jaded perspective. Even the union protests can be as bad in their choices of racist language and how they can be bribed with OBEs, even when they find their courage to follow their beliefs afterwards. Even the private patients, the example of the corruption of the hospital, and in the middle of a class and privilege war, feel they are paying too much for their treatment even if they get exclusive luxury lunches and their own private rooms, so no one is really winning from this system.

What this becomes is a work not trying for answers, and is a bleak work at its heart. There is absurdity however to undercut this, coming in touches. The consultants for the Royalty, for example, have a male actor playing a woman without a deliberate joke on this, and the Lord with her significantly shorter by her waist for contrast. Alongside a murderer's row of recognizable British actors of television and cinema from this era, they also have characters even as archetypes they can embellish. Graham Crowden's Miller is a show stealer by himself, a megalomaniacal egotist who wants to be God and literally blends a brain into a drinkable smoothie at one point, who yet gets the sanest rant of how damned humanity is in the ending, even allowing Anderson to bury Hollywood when one of the lines in that final speech is how the money put on one film could have fed an entire third world tribe for a long time. Leonard Rossiter, who would be famous for the likes of the BBC sitcom The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1976-1979), plays Potter, another show stealer as the man who really runs Britannia Hospital, its negotiator who actually makes sure the place is still working even if it means bribing people with the promise of the aforementioned OBEs, even brain staff to death with a shovel. Whether it is from the series Dad's Army (Arthur Lowe in one of his last appearances in a memorable one off scene) to British theatre with Joan Plowright, vast swathe of British culture comes together in this film, like so many even into the modern day, and like the best of these, you have character actors who can stand out and add so much particularly to a work like this, so barbed yet fully one scathing one-liners, they make stand out. Even Mark Hamill, the least expected person to be here, works in his scenes perfectly.

The film is difficult, arguably too nihilistic and too scattershot to work for some, but the problem is one accepting that in real life, as not much has changed in Britain decades later, too many problems let alone with the NHS are to be spun like plates and are always a threat, especially as this film's subjects are not just health care but universal, such as the treatment of manual labor staff and class biases. There are moments though which succinctly get a point across, such as the Rudyard Kipling ward, an advanced ward where one nurse looks after more than seven people. Even before you glance side eye at the tech bros nowadays obsessed with cutting out human beings, with computer run hospital wards something one would try, and cut the nurse out of it entirely, there is also the very British joke that this advanced ward is closed due to the lack of cleaning staff, wasting all that money on something not likely to have worked and also named after a contentious author of the British colonial era.

It is a compelling film, one where the mad scientist, despite being one who builds a human being (and results in a very gory finale as a sub plot), turns out to be the sanest one. Even when lamenting humanity's lost potential and presenting a future of a brain in a jar as the superior evolution, his final words are not funny but tragic. Sadly for Lindsay Anderson, whose career was already small in terms of the amount of theatrical films he actually helmed, this would be one of his last films. There is a documentary covering the music group WHAM! touring China from 1986, and television work, but the last theatrical film before his 1994 passing was The Whales of August (1987), a drama which in tone feels of a very different type of film from the three politically charged works (and This Sporting Life), followed by Glory! Glory! (1989), a TV movie about televangelists and his last before his death. Britannia Hospital is absolutely a cult film in its form and existence; where as If... came in 1968, where a sudden political earthquake happened which it befit the time, O Lucky Man and this for the other two films in this unofficial trilogy are strange satires, of their times in their casts and even getting made as they turned out, but alien even to their time periods. They are unique and to approach Britannia Hospital, one needs to be willing to laugh even at the absurdity of life to be able to appreciate its caustic nature.

Games of the Abstract: Spooky Starlets - Movie Monsters (2022)

 

Developer: MogWallop Games

Publisher: TinyHat Studios

One Player

Windows

 

Trying to cover an adult video game seriously, even a softcore one, could be seen if you are not careful as sleazy in principal. A lot of this comes with the taboo sex is in art still, but there is also the issue that, if you are going to take the subject seriously, of how one brings in the erotic even if meant to titillate first into a video game, as with all media like cinema or literature, let alone those wishing to have a more cerebral take on the subject. Games with real explicit sex, even if fictionalised, are a niche which is also prolific in their number, found even on Steam and GOG and easy to make. That presents a new problem, as with filmed pornography itself, not only of their moralities but also the quality of their presentation beyond their selling point. There is also the issue, if to be crass about this, of how the interactive nature of the video game interjects between the pornographic, as there is the likelihood that, if you make the game legitimately challenging, some would not want to play the game. This is more of a case due to that proliferation of titles, now developing video games is easier; now we are past American Multiple Industries, who produced a notorious line of pornographic games for the Atari 2600, but looked like games for that system from the eighties, or a more innocent game in hindsight like Gals Panic (1990), which just offered nude images.

We now have a lot of games which are hardcore in vast numbers, even in the more mainstream sphere, the only factor that there is clearly a restriction on real images, hence where animated characters (polygonal or drawn) are more commonplace, be it visual novels imported from Japan or other genres, even the least likely like scrolling bullet hell shooters.  It is a challenge, especially if the developers wanted to make a game with a more profound centre or at least with a sense of care to the production, when there is a glut of pornographic games cheaply made as competition, found online if not in digital stores. Spooky Starlets, on the surface, is also a card building game which is a hybrid with a visual novel, though sadly this was clearly a case, as we will get into, where there was an ambitious plan but the budget (time, resources and money) forced a compromise. This one came from that well, including outside of games for Steam and GOG, originating from the areas like Newground, a site founded in 1995 to encourage independently made short animation, illustration and games which also has an adult section, but changing considerably over time.

The premise, even without the explicit content, is enticing even if it was entirely a comedy, in which you play a faceless protagonist, with only narration, who dies but finds that the afterlife they are of us. This underworld full of ghouls and ghosts has an adult film making industry and you are a good candidate to run the lot. The adult film industry as a concept, especially as this runs closer to the "Golden Age" where theatrical films were made rather than videos for the internet, is its own complicated and moral complex entity, where that Golden Age had its issues, even running into conflict with criminal groups, and the modern day industry has a lot of issues of its own. There is thankfully work made with ethics, let alone female directors and producers making diverse work for a diverse audience, but you also get morally problematic content, morally problematic people involved and issues of stereotyping including exoticising ethnicity, which is not to be found in Spooky Starlets at all. This is a sanitised version of an industry with its virtuous individuals and its problematic ones. It is a high concept premise, as a macabre cartoon, where you run a studio where your female stars can involve an actual vampire or slime from Dungeons & Dragons formed into a woman.

Spooky Starlets was a game which went through many changes, originally closer to simple business management game where scenarios with the film shoots, the stars and sets were to be chosen from a number to get the best results¹, with there being cameo roles for female characters from other independent erotic video games¹. It is fascinating, in mind that these games, despite their popularity, can be looked down upon for their pornographic content yet they are not different in the slightest to mainstream games, even how they go through development which drastically changes their tone and gameplay entirely. There was a drastic change to this being entirely set around being a deck building game instead, simplifying the choices further. This is its own niche which has gained traction as a genre, even spinning in side genres like rouge-like deck building games, a genre based around the idea of taking real life card games but making digital games around collecting new cards, or just using those you have as in Spooky Starlets, and negotiating challenges with the right ones. Slay the Spire (2019) is an example of this genre, but card and deck building has found itself in even bigger games and spin-offs, such as Phantasy Star Online Episode III: C.A.R.D. Revolution (2003) for the Nintendo GameCube or Metal Gear Acid (2004) for the Playstation Portable handheld console.

The difference here and there is no point, if you the reader have comfortably read this review so far, to not shyly dodge around the themes of Spooky Starlet, is that the cards here including the cast and event cards meant to change the hand include sex positions in different suits as well, which you have to carefully choose. With this originally a game which included working around how to run the studio, let alone film the movies, you could probably see without any background detail that Spooky Starlets could have been a lot more ambitious in its original plan than what you get, with the potential that this was a full world to explore with its female cast of titular starlets, or that its visual novel cut scenes are that, without any of the multiple choices visual novels allow for different endings or trajectories which could have effected how the main card building game went. If you as a player were happy with the fully explicit content, this could have been a fun and unconventional game. Even as a fantasised version of this industry, imaging cards at hand such as the camera malfunctioning or location scouting being a factor would have made it a fun game, and certainly with the right tone and right attitude one which could have avoided being scuzzy.

The game, barring one curious choice of a horny tree, to its credit never feels scuzzy. It says, unfortunately, how much of the material on Steam by itself causes me to want a restraining order separating me from it, as this game is probably a rare one which, to the right people, is wholesome and defendable in its sexual content. Its world and its female cast, if you were to step away from the sexual content and the cast being figures that are meant to play archetypes of lustful figures, are distinct as characters just in their designs, and it is telling that over the development changes, they were never altered in the slightest. Especially as the visual novel story itself is effectively playing a faceless agony aunt, a person there with the right words for this cast who have their own hang-ups and concerns outside of their work, even for the male cast in one or two cases, there is a fascinating cast here to work with if more production time was possible for this game. One figure named Suzy Stitches could be seen as problematic, as she is a Frankenstein woman built literally for this job, but she is an energetic woman wishing to have a life more outside of sex, even if she is enthusiastic about that still. There is a were woman Redd, whose rowdy attitude is contrasted by her jaunts into the moral world like a bull in a  china store; Vivian, a spider woman and veteran, whose esteemed male admirer, a goblin who we would categorise as a twink,  eventually melts her demeanour with his respect for her career; Rella, a goat demon whose difficult to express herself is a concern for her demon boyfriend; Francine, a vampire living under the shadow of her elder sister, who wishes to overcome this by entering a literally sex Olympics; Drusilla, an Egyptian mummy whose class status, faked, is revealed and creates a personality crisis; and Lucy, a fitness demon who is struggling with her body image.

There is also the main story, focused around your senior, a demoness, who wishes secretly to participate in filming, and Blibby, the slime girl who is blissfully at peace with herself, whilst it is a male co-worker, a porn actor on strike, who is more concerned with her constant attention for him, especially as his libido next to hers is dwarfed. None of this is dramatically complex, and is all a pretext for the sexual content, with some animation and voice acting for the female characters, but considering the hard work put into designing and fleshing these characters out, with even distinct silhouettes to them, they present a diverse and likable set of leads for a lot of comedy and melodrama. Aesthetically, there is a huge step up next to many of the games you can find previewed on Steam in terms of erotic games, embracing the cartoonish with the supernatural, literally a cartoon show if made for adults. This does admittedly present a potential acquired taste if you do view it as erotica - it is very cartoonish and the cast do include explicitly inhuman figures, such as Vivian being an actual spider woman with four limbs, before if you factor in how it may be a divide for some to find animated characters arousal, something in mind that Steam, for their liberalness, have a noticeable lack of live action erotic games on their digital shelves².

A bigger issue in the end, however, is that with its bright and colourful, even having a main musical theme, that the game is short. The one thing that is of focus when playing this game is its sexual content, which is defendable, next to material with uncomfortable streaks of sexism, non consensual content or just bad presentation just in their Steam pages, but that is juxtaposed against the fact that the gameplay to get to this, even next to a visual novel which would have a lot of routes to choose from, is slight. Once you figure out the basics - certain combinations of cards, in different suits, are needed to reach certain goals - there is only a few challenges repeated, such as over 24 points in value, and it does not vary at all beyond this to get each chapter for each starlet's story. The visual novel element has no alternative paths as mentioned, and there is no additional content beyond the "Creative" mode which is getting unlimited access to cards to make scenes with, which is not for everyone as that was clearly a mode emphasising this as erotica. There is a sense, as an independent production published by TinyHat Studios, who specialise in erotic games, the ambition from its Newground days to its newest form was too high for the resources, and the game's creators felt that by 2022, they needed to bring the project home or it would have been stuck endlessly updated with no true final version.

The hope, which is a reach sadly, is that this has enough fans to have a follow up, as even if you jettisoned the erotic content, it entices with its distinct characters and its kooky premise. Considering the low bar into this area of gaming too, where it comes from a place of cheap games churned out with people commenting on their playing erotic games in their main Steam account, just the idea is interesting enough. Even if the erotic scenes here are still the selling point, one which bothered with an aesthetic, one which is actually something you could comfortably play with a significant other, and of macabre friends in underworld adult movies, deserves a revisit or a sequel. More so as the idea it was originally meant to have, card building game meets visual novel meets erotic game, is certainly one of the most idiosyncratic you could get.

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1) Though it is censored, I will warn anyone this still qualifies as NSFW in the truest sense, but the original template for the game, preserved on a Reddit thread from 2018, still exists in the wild. It gives you an idea of how this changed over the years, linked to here with just the chart by itself.  Then there is also the one for the guest character from another character here.

2) Sadly I do have to point to a game in this review which radiates sleezy from its aura, a work from a "professional" pick up artist named Super Seducer 3 (2021), where the two first games were available on Steam but Valve refused to publish this third game. Alongside how the culture of the "pickup artist" is its own problematic beast, with these games meant to teach a player this culture for their own use, the issue was Valve's refusal to release a game with sexually explicit images of real people on their Steam platform, which suggests that the free nature of Steam in terms of sexually explicit content does draw a line with the non-real, the drawn and the animated acceptable. Even then, there is likelihood moments where Valve will have to even be brought in to question and consider some of the titles they will and will not release on the store even with this clear divide, and I am surprised in fact there has not been any real trouble, as for GOG, with some of the titles they have had with moral campaigns still. Taken from Steam will not sell pickup artist game Super Seducer 3, written by Jonathan Bolding for PC Gamer, published on March 20th 2021.

A Zed & Two Noughts (1985)

 

Director: Peter Greenaway

Screenplay: Peter Greenaway

Cast: Andrea Ferreol as Alba Bewick; Brian Deacon as Oswald Deuce; Eric Deacon as Oliver Deuce; Frances Barber as Venus de Milo; Joss Ackland as Van Hoyten; Jim Davidson as Joshua Plate; Agnes Brulet as Beta Bewick; Guusje Van Tilborgh as Caterina Bolnes; Gerard Thoolen as Van Meegeren; Ken Campbell as Stephen Pipe; Wolf Kahler as Felipe Arc-en-Ciel; Geoffrey Palmer as Fallast

An Abstract Candidate

 

Is leglessness a form of contraception?

Peter Greenaway's first theatrical length film was The Falls (1980), his debut an incredible production but structured like the work he did for the Central Office of Information (COI) alongside his short films, a fake document told as a fictional catalogue using multimedia. The Draughtsman's Contract (1982) and A Zed & Two Noughts are his "first" films in terms of setting up how he would fully introduce narratives and characters alongside his obsessions. This, set up with two women dying when a swan hits their car, is a narrative first but, as mentioned, his obsessions with lists and references stays and is amplified. The grieving twin brothers, working at a zoo, are trying to rationalise this tragedy and start with an obsession with photographing decay whilst fixating on the one survivor from the crash, the female driver Alba Bewick (Andrea Ferreol), left permanently disabled as a result of the crash. It is, with a word of warning, a bleak film as a result, just in how real animal carcasses (even a dog) were acquired and are seen documented like stop motion in their decay. Thankfully, it is a film, even if you need to be willing to tackle its subject matter of death, contrasted by Greenaway's profane, perverted, joyous, libidinous, witty and profane dialogue and tone to his work.

His work is very peculiar, not just because of the subject matter, or the decision to make the leads Brian Deacon and Eric Deacon twins, predating David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers (1988) from the era, or the small role by British comedian Jim Davidson as a zoo keeper, an odd inclusion as the former game show how and contentious un-pc stand-up comedian sticks out here at an early part of his career. It is because how, even with its ruminations on life and death, as the brothers are watching a David Attenborough documentary serial about the beginnings of life, the corpse humour and obsessions with the transgressive contrast this. It is a gleeful film at times about the bleak subject, as eccentric as they come even next to Greenaway's later work, just as much from how, whilst more sexually explicit work would come, his trademarks including the subjects of desire and lust feel even more exaggerated in context of its zoological and metaphorical themes. Whether wondering about what colour a woman's underwear is to the sex worker Venus de Milo (Frances Barber) and her erotic animal themed tales, this film has a foot in life explicitly as with death, a reoccurring trend throughout Peter Greenaway's career.

There are also the tonal choices and the other obsessions. Greenaway never left his former work with documentaries even into his veteran years, and you can go to something like The Sea in Their Blood (1983), attempting to catalogue the entirely of the British coast, their culture and centuries of existence in a short film, and you see the tone and stylistic choices stayed. It literally has a narrator listing what British coastal seaweed and Welsh lobster is edible among its ethereal score by Michael Nyman, a barrage of lists and images contrasted already by Greenaway's pitch perfect sense of humour, such as the idea that people once thought geese came from barnacles, and calling them out as "credulous". With Alba's daughter listing animals from A to Z, to the Attenborough dictionaries starting at the beginning of Charles Darwin's' theories of evolution, by microbes, and climbing upwards, Greenaway fixates on structures and lists as his narratives usually contrast to the characters themselves. They may be able to catalogue the world, but human flaws and their inability to control the worlds around them is in vast contrast. Then there are the eccentric touches, in his interest in art abruptly appearing here as well, as the surgeon working on Alba, fixated and wishing to keep her even if it means taking both legs; he is obsessed with Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer and sees Alba as the ideal Vermeer woman to recreate from the canvases. Already the film has its playfulness, such as one brother in his grief releasing anything from flamingos to, on Christmas, a short sighted rhino to the anger of their boss, but Greenaway's work can be even more proudly imaginative on the subject in the vibrancy of the dialogue to the style of them.

Greenaway's style would stay with him long after cinematographer Sacha Vierny and composer Michael Nyman, huge figures in creating Greenaway's films, left but their contributions are necessary to consider with his eighties to late nineties productions equally. Vierny's work is striking here, Greenaway as a fan of his work on Last Year at Marienbad (1961), able to work with an idol on multiple films which were as much Vierny's in style as they were Greenaway's own in composition. Michael Nyman was the other clear voice, whose compositions over potentially distressing images, the decomposition of a swan, is contrasted by the life and ethereal grace of his pieces, someone who contributed so much to Peter Greenaway even if the later continued to show his talents as a director-screenwriter where the partnership separated. A Zed & Two Noughts in terms of standing out, even among its creator's other work, has many virtues; knowing this would only begin the diverse career of Peter Greenaway, who would continue from this and expand upon themes and ideas here, makes the film's virtues more pronounced, as its snail ridden ending could have been enough of a capstone to a career that never got off the ground after this, instead become one of the many images that linger in the director-writer's career that went onwards.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Meticulous

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

Games of the Abstract: Police 911 (2000)

 

a.k.a. Police 24/7, The Keisatsukan

Developer: Konami

Publisher: Konami

One Player

Arcade

 

Wishing to innovate with the light gun genre, Konami by 2000 came with two distinct arcade cabinets worthy of this. Silent Scope, which got a series of sequels, captivates as a cheesy American action film in video game form, but with the factor that this story is about playing a sole sniper against terrorists, which drastically changes the pacing of the game with a scoped rifle peripheral to tackle challenges from far away as much as close. Police 24/7 as it became known as in Europe, but will be called Police 911 here onwards, had continuation including in terms of the technology used, but is maybe more obscure nowadays. It is a shame as it is a really idiosyncratic game in that, using infrared technology on the machine, could re-release for the virtual reality headsets as it is entirely about letting the player themselves move, duck and take cover to avoid bullets as they play a police officer fighting for the law and shooting back.

It is a simple game where, depending on whether you are playing the Japanese or Western releases, which change around the levels and story as a result, follows the American and Japanese police forces across two countries teaming up to tackle a Japanese criminal organization involved with arms smuggling. For the European arcade cabinet at least, you begin storming into a night club, and story is less of a concern then a series of specific criminals in the hierarchy of the organization to arrest and a lot of shoot outs to get to them. The motion capture itself is a huge factor from the get-go, the selling point and the make-or-break for playing the game, and for a machine from 2000, even an old but well preserved cabinet hardware as I was lucky to play shows Konami succeeded and deserve applause for what could have been a botched disaster. You cannot wear a hat, even police standard, which is one of the few things the machine warns of alongside potential health concerns for those players who are with heart conditions, and to not attempt to play it drunk, which is legal content clearly put there to prevent Konami being sued. The game is sound in its machines however beyond one piece of fashion that would likely affect the infrared technology; you are restricted to one floor mat to move in, and the comparison to modern virtual reality technology does feel apt to compare to, as this accepts the limitations from the time and yet does so much. You have to move your body and duck, but you can also lean around obstacles to take pot shots.

It is a fun challenge, especially as the bullets are visible when they are fired at you, and you are on a time limit like many light guns from this era had, like those with other ducking mechanics like Time Crisis forcing you to plough ahead rather than camp behind a seat for an infinite time frame. That there is a ranking system with rewards is also a factor; avoid being shot, running out of time, and/or hitting civilians or other cops, and you can claim in promotion in ranks with increase your time and lives. There is no cross hair onscreen though for your firearm, which represents a huge issue/challenge expect if taken that you need to actually use the plastic pistol as a real one, i.e. learning to aim up to your eyes and using the end of the barrel to target. It is a curious touch of realism to a game which is cartoonish in its core. It is also a one player machine, but that is not a surprise considering practicality has to be considered for total movement of a player, as with Silent Scope needing to focus on making the plastic sniper rifle work.

The realism comment comes in mind that, as Silent Scope initially felt uncomfortably real in having in a plastic fake of a sniper rifle in my hands, Police 911 is a strange game to come to as criticisms against the police have made the idealized concept of the police force more suspect for some, specifically the North American (and British) police in the 2010s for aspects like institutional racism. This game is a cultural object from the past, made without this factored in, unadulteratedly a game of good police officers, stereotypical thugs as villains. Call this the cheap “woke” moment of the review, but there is a dichotomy against the reality and a game from a  Japanese developer that, as with Silent Scope, is an outsider’s view of America (with tangents in Japan), a pulpy action work which is oblivious to these real life concerns. The fact there is a side character you trail behind in stages who looks like Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, or even a Sonny Chiba by way of Dirty Harry, and feels like a deliberate choice to have a plainclothes officer in brown suit slacks and big seventies hair, does emphasis the difference between how time forces one to reflect on the pop cultural images of the police and the real one. A work like this feels cut-off and alien, the arcade game forcing the game play to be streamlined to the idea as a thrill ride on infinite continues, or the coins or skill to continue to the end of, i.e. imagining being a Dirty Harry (or normal officer here) in a shootout from a Lethal Weapon film.

Or if you want to be more apt in reference, in a Lethal Enforcers game as Konami had been here before, with the 1992 Lethal Enforcers light gun game, followed by Lethal Enforcers II: Gun Fighters (1994) which was set in the days of the Wild West, and Lethal Enforcers 3 (2004), explicitly making Police 911 a sibling in that it took the infrared motion capture of the players for that game’s mechanics. All four do not represent the reality – all are reflections of American pop culture from digitally photographed goons with perms to the main targets in this game, when challenged, having their eyes censored as if an American reality TV show. It is not even a criticism on my part for Police 911 having its subject for propaganda purposes, which it really is not, but a fascinating turn in time where, if this was an American game released in the 2010s, it would have gained a lot of controversy for even existing or could have ended up in a social media argument for and against where someone uses “woke” without knowing what the term means and questions of how to represent the police in pop culture.

Personally my biggest criticism of the game is that it needed a lot more personality, in contrast to its construct working perfectly mechanically. This is the police as b-movie characters, against a comical number of goons in the streets, in a car chase, on busy downtown at night between nightclubs, and in the subway for the final act. The main antagonists, who can be taken out by one headshot but weave, duck and even drive cars at you, are taken away very much alive even if you succeed in doing this, when it would normally kill a person. Goons too, if not hit point blank, sit down sore or waddle off if you shot their gun from their hands without physical cost, all part of a bloodless action story. As a result, it contrasts the look of “realism”, in ordinary environments, which does mean there is not a lot of variety in terms of locations and enemies. There is a result something missing which Silent Scope had, that just embraced being very silly. That game had set pieces and was literally a sniper being bad enough to rescue to president, from trying to pick off a goon with the president’s daughter on his back, fleeing American football players in a circle around a sports stadium, to a final boss being the boss’ female secretary, a metal one-piece and Wolverine claw wearing dominatrix skipping about and feeling up the tied up president when not attacking you. You sadly do not get something with the tone, even if just the music, of some of the best of this genre, which is a shame as this has everything right in terms of the mechanics but needed to be campier than what we got.

Both games could have presented huge issues to ever convert to home consoles, but interestingly both were. Silent Scope, even if it had to compromise the original point of the mechanics, got released on multiple consoles with the scope a button function, but Police 911 did get a Sony Playstation 2 release, using USB motion sensor technology (with a compatible camera) to take advantage of the original gimmick of the arcade machine.  The problems that affect these games affect all light gun games, in which the transition from cathode ray tube televisions to digital flat screen ones made the technology to make the games work obsolete, presenting an issue of ever playing them. There is a chance for resurgence, as when the Nintendo Wii and Playstation 3 brought in full motion controls and a flood of old with new titles came to the consoles, but it will take another day for the genre to return. I see this potentially happening, as these machines are still available in the arcades, and it can take an indie production to figure a way around this and becoming a hit as an indie production to figure a way around this and becoming a hit as Cuphead (2017) did for hard scrolling shooters and games like Hades (2020) did for the rougelike, bringing these obscurer genres forwards in the consciousness with greater interest.  I can see too Police 911, even if the content as mentioned will be more cautiously viewed nowadays, working for the virtual reality headsets of today, even overcoming issues to this day of potential motion sickness and limitations in an owner’s game room from what the simple structure is. Whilst Konami have had their shaky moments, especially in the 2010s, there is an undeniable fact they were innovators in gaming for consoles and arcades, in mind this was a time when the Beatmania and Dance Dance Revolution games starting in the late nineties were a success for them in other fields of gimmicked arcade cabinets. This title I am covering is one of many of the interesting and entertaining machines they worked on, and for the flaws I have brought up, it is still undeniably a great achievement in taking its central gimmick and making it work fully.

Ai City (1986)

 

Director: Kōichi Mashimo

Screenplay: Hideki Sonoda

Based on the manga by SYUFO (Shuuhou Itahashi)

(Voice) Cast: Hirotaka Suzuoki as Kei; Yuki Ueda as Ai; Mami Koyama as K2; Banjou Ginga as Ii; Ichirō Nagai as Rai Ro Chin; Issei Futamata as Ryan; Jouji Yanami as Ti; Kenyuu Horiuchi as Mister J; Kiyoshi Kobayashi as Kuu Ragua Lee; Nachi Nozawa as Raiden; Seiko Nakano as S; Takeshi Watabe as Aroi

An Abstract Candidate

 

With fair warning, this review will have to spoil a great deal as even merely to explain Ai City, an obscure anime feature film, means having to unravel a significant amount of its content. To even explain the plot it going to be a great deal to figure out: for the opening scene, in a futuristic metropolis, a man named Kei, a young girl named Ai, a detective named Raiden and a cat are fleeing from a motorbike gang led by a female psychic. Kei and Ai were test subjects for the evil corporation FRAUD, in their developments of telekinetic powers, and their story becomes even more complicated as allegiances switch, FRAUD falls into violent infighting, and that Ai’s purpose (and who she is) is intertwined with Kei and with the fate of many. That seems simple but Ai City, based on the manga by Shuuhou Itahashi, who would later adapt episodes of The X Files into a manga, will confound so many viewers between its unconventional plot structure and erratic pacing of plotting. It is gleefully weird, for how else do you explain a comedic side character cat that seems to have wandered from a children's cartoon in the midst of this proto- cousin of Akira (1988)?

Only released two years before Akira, which broke into the West and properly introduced anime, they exist from a period in anime and manga's history with an obsession with ESP and psychic powers as their key themes. Likely influenced by the sixties and seventies interest in fortean culture, and figures like Uri Geller, every piece of cutlery's greatest nightmare, this strand of plot premise would appear in countless works. Genma Wars (1967-9), the collaboration between sci-fi author Kazumasa Hirai and the legendary Shotaro Ishinomori which was adapted into the infamous 1983 feature length animation, and a really bad (if morbidly fascinating) 2002 animated series. Mobile Suit Gundam (1979-1980), a giant robot show that became an institutional franchise to this day, had psychics in its plot eventually, and even a romantic comedy, the Kimagure Orange Road franchise, had psychics in it. There is as well, in an adaptation we sadly never got to see, the collaboration between the legendary band Sparks and Tim Burton to adapt the 1986 manga Mai the Psychic Girl¹. Ai City is another member of this fad, when psychics were big as a plot point, the inevitable weird film that also was helmed by anime director Kōichi Mashimo. Many anime fans will think of the film he made the next year, Dirty Pair: Project Eden (1987), which is a highly regarded production in a highly regarded franchise, and would put him in their good books. He is also the founder of the animation studio Bee Train, which makes this a fascinated production early from his career that he and the production team put their hearts into even if it is ridiculous.

As is described in a very descriptive song halfway through, Kei is a man with super psychic powers fighting for good, kidnapped alongside his girlfriend for experiments by a group named FRAUD. She dies, and he is deemed defective and only useful for laundry duties, only for the cartoon cat (who cannot talk, but walks on hind legs and interacts with everyone) to reveal that his girlfriend was cloned. Now a seven year old with incredibly powerful abilities, Kei wishes to protect her whilst being targeted by FRAUD. She is part of a power play between FRAUD's leader Kuu Ragua Lee, helped by minions including cloned female beaus and artificially constructed men, and Lee's former colleague Lai Lou Chin, probably the strangest character as he is literally a tiny little old man in a jar, in water, on top of a robot body. Alongside the fact that Chin's psychic ability is so strong, he can conjure up stone floating heads that swarm the city, and there is so much here to work with in just eighty minutes. If it had been more conventionally told, Ai City would have still been an ambitious production.

Ai City's difficulty is not from how dense the plot threads are, but how the story is told. A lot is in the abrupt flashbacks and a lot of exposition that feels out of place, eventually starting to get into ill defined details like past lives, a DNA evolutionary monster, and an abrupt inclusion of what the title "Ai City" actually refers to. Other details are just unpredictable, weirdness of this specific eighties era of anime. The cat, a fully fledged character who eventually gets his own set of clothes and even a pair of shades, is a figure of importance plot wise, behind the. Then there is K2, a former enemy who is blasted so hard with psychic power both all her clothes and the fabric of existed are blown away, propelled through reality itself as if a theatre stage cloth ripped asunder. Briefly losing her memories, she becomes a heroine, entering a flirtatious relationship with detective Raiden, and is wearing a Playboy bunny outfit for the rest of the film. Even getting her memories back, she ends up in an awkward respect scenario with a henchman when she kills someone on his side. Material like this is strange, as is the tragic relationship with Kei and Ai, once lovers but now with her calling him her "papa" and Kei taking on a paternal role. It is compelling, a fascinating bundle of idiosyncrasies, but it all fits without a collage that is abrupt in what transpires too. Even in terms of the depiction of psychic powers, Ai City is unique in how, to depict the psychics being different, they have digital number gauges appear on their foreheads mid-use, the numbers for each power varying randomly depending on what is done.

It is all incredibly irrational, incredibly random, but also magnificently compelling and at times gorgeous to look at, the most eighties of anime in aesthetic style with moments of incredible experimentation. Even when there are clear limitations to the production, such as why a metropolis this sprawling has few bystanders barring one scene, there is still a multicoloured spectacle as a result in multiple scenes. It sadly was not a title available in the DVD era, and especially in the UK from a company like Manga Entertainment, a shame as its not only a cut above in craft (barring some wonky moments), but would have been the perfect representation of that delirious breed of anime churned out from the period, which is absurd but is certainly memorable. The fabric of time is literally ripped, only to be fixed as if a traffic incident, whilst Lai Lou Chin is powerful enough to not only brainwash people but also release those aforementioned giant heads, big enough for anyone to ride on. The best way to approach this film, as I did, is to never attempt to figure out the whole plot, aware that a lot of it was probably improvised; it is not as difficult to grasp as it first appears as a result, but just mixed with wild tangents you need to let soak through.

And yes, MAJOR SPOILERS HERE, it gets weirder when the film collapses into forgotten memories, a battle in a phantom realm with a horrifying mass of DNA that feels nonetheless illogical, and the plot being told as a Möbius strip which repeats itself from the beginning. Even admitting that does not spoil how this happens, as that abruptness befits the work. And this is in mind of who made Ai City. Knowing something this bizarre may have been just another day in the office for Kōichi Mashimo, alongside his more famous production for the next year, just adds to the madness. Eventually the psychic genre ebbed away, befittingly with Akira, when it helped anime reach the West feeling like the zenith, but we can still look at this oddity among them. It definitely feels like it could only have been made in that era, utterly perplexing yet energised as a mad, colourful head-trip.

Abstract Spectrum: Bizarre/Mindbender/Psychedelic/Surreal

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

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1) Tim Burton to Direct MAI THE PSYCHIC GIRL? Written by Ramses Flores, and published for Collider on May 18th 2010.

Surviving Life (Theory and Practice) (2010)

 

Director: Jan Švankmajer

Screenplay: Jan Švankmajer

Cast: Václav Helšus as Evžen and Milan; Klára Issová as Evženie; Zuzana Kronerová as Milada; Emília Došeková as Super-Ego; Daniela Bakerová as Dr. Holubová

An Abstract Candidate

 

I am the Chinese melon!

Ever since I discovered the short films of the Czeck filmmaker Jan Švankmajer in college, borrowed from the private stash of DVDs in the office of the Film Studies tutors, I can say he is one of my cherished filmmakers.  Having seen most of his career’s work too, the through line from the famous short works to long form movies is a fascinating progression. One of the best living animation directors, his knowledge of traditional techniques (puppetry, stop motion etc) is matched by a distinct use of everyday objects – toys, wood, metal, animal bones, even pieces of meat – that are moved and crafted in ways that pushes the films into the areas of texture as well as sight and sound, allowing the viewer to ‘feel’ them by their nature and the grain and details you can see. This trademark, through decades of shorts, was combined with various types of ideas, from adaptations of Edgar Allen Poe and fairytales to satire, and his idiosyncratic obsessions such as childhood to food and the act of eating. The later is one of his most idiosyncratic trademarks, and going into a Švankmajer work, you will both witness food as a beautiful substance and utterly vile, which Surviving Life continues with the new addition of projectile vomit.

With his first feature film Alice (1988), Švankmajer would incorporate live action, but not in just having actors in front of the screen but having them being as much figures for the director to animate as well as actual people. Švankmajer incorporated this in short films, 1983’s Down To the Cellar a predecessor of his debut Alice, but after he started to concentrate on feature films, this has become a central part of his work. With Lunacy (2005), the film before Surviving Life, the live action would have completely taken over were it not for the continuous scenes of animated cow tongues that are intercut between plot points. With Surviving Life, Švankmajer's fan base met with an experimental tangent even from his previous films, his bitterly humorous opening monologue to the camera introducing the film as a result of a lack of money for production, though with the advantage that, since they only needed to shot with the actors in a shorter span of time, they did not need to pay for catering because “photographs don’t eat".

Created using cut-and-paste photographic images, ‘like old children’s cartoons’ as the director compares it to in the opening introduction, Surviving Life follows an older man Evžen (Václav Helšus) whose life is punctuated by dreams of a beautiful, red dressed woman whose name continually changes and exists in a dream reality which continually fluxes out of his hands. Becoming a patient for a psychoanalytic doctor, and delving into other methods of guiding his dreams, he tries to understand the images he sees every time he sleeps. The plot sounds quite common and paradoxically, this is the closest for me yet Švankmajer has gotten to a ‘conventional’ story - including the layer of clues and images you discover on a second viewing - but is one of his least conventional works in a filmography that would be viewed as abstract against traditional views of animation. The cut-up images that make up the entire film, spliced with live action moments (usually close ups of intricate actions or gestures), is incredibly different from what I have encountered in cinema. If anyone, like I did as a child, used to cut out images from magazines or comics and either moved them about like toys, or spliced pieces of them together to create new ones, this is what the entirety of Surviving Life feels like, only taking to it to an entire feature length film, from the backgrounds to most of the moments, being created from two dimension images cut out and finished digitally on computers.  Just from the initial set up in one of Evžen's dreams – where giant female heads blow out watermelons from between their lips, and buildings switch sides on human feet, where teddy bears have long furry phalluses and chicken headed nude women run around – I am reminded of what an actual surrealist artist is as Švankmajer shows his skill with the craft.

This style of animation has been used by Švankmajer previously, including outside his film work, but here it is allowed to breathe out into this entire construction. The results are surreal, human beings and their photographic copies alive and mixed with a story where dreams are in the centre of the narrative. Švankmajer has played with the concept of dreams in his filmography, but this is the first one where they are the central subject as well, which is another distinct part of the production. With this, expect Freudian images of everything from eggs to flowers, giant hands coming out of windows to drag bystanders up to their doom, a dog with a suited office worker’s body, and an entire film where reality and the dreams, while separated, still bleed into each other, continuing Svankmajer’s message at the start of the film, through quotation, of how only by combining the both of them together can a human being be full.

The result is unconventional even for animation, incredibly creative with its imagination and technical production, and with a wonderful sense of disgracefulness in Švankmajer's old age as a veteran, an acquired sense of vulgarity that did not even come out in Conspirators of Pleasure (1996), his take on sexual fetishes, but erupts in this wonderfully in its sex obsessed, puke filled, poodle fucking mentality filtered through the obsessions with childhood, food and the fantastical. This may have started in Lunacy, with its combination with the Marquis de Sade with stories by Edgar Allen Poe, but while that film was serious in its takes of blasphemy and of the concepts of freedom, the self proclaimed follower of Surrealist Art Švankmajer properly added a sliver of crudity to his repertoire with Surviving Life and uses it perfectly. The film is also abstract in that, it does not only look at dreams but incorporates psychology. The plot is incredibly idiosyncratic if graspable already, as Evžen fixated on this Eva/Eliza figure in his dreams, trying to dream more to fall in love with her, but by invoking the ideas of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Alongside having to literally fight a father personification who looks like himself and a variety of various neurosis to unpack, Freud and Jung are paid with respect if personifying their real life combative and disagreeing views of psychology through living portraits which fight each other; Surviving Life introduces layers that, while very easy to grasp, cause the scenes you see to take on new and peculiar lights to them. Touches taken from psychology can add entire memorable side characters, the old woman in Evžen's dreams who is his superego, who collects all and is God/Brahma/Karl Marx/whatever is a symbol of all-knowing. There is also an entire layer of how depressing the real world is, both in the relationships in the real world, such as Evžen's wife thinking he is having an affair, to the reoccurring plot point of lottery tickets being the false hope for the better in real life and the dreams.

I am biased for Jan Švankmajer, but it is through his skill of an animator and as a creative figure, still able to create such imaginative and stimulating work after fifty years or so since his first projects, that you see within Surviving Life. It is a film that came and sadly went without enough praise for it as it deserved, and wished his career gained more praise for how distinct productions like this were. To step into a Švankmajer film, while part of a rich culture of animation (especially European animation), is to encounter a truly unique voice, driven as much by ideas behind the images as by the creations on screen. Surviving Life combines a full narrative with this, as seen in his other features, and gets the best of both worlds. That it is also humorous and, by its ending, deeply poignant also adds to its quality. Surviving Life is, far from a work compromised by its budget as Švankmajer self decapitating says, but a masterpiece in a career already full of them.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Surrealist/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low) – High