Games of the Abstract: Time Crisis 4 (2006)

 

Developer: Nex Entertainment

Publisher: Namco

One to Two Players

Arcade / Sony Playstation 3

 

Rolling on from the 1995 debut, which had an additional advantage of Namco porting their arcade titles to the original Sony Playstation and even introducing their own licensed light gun peripheral, emphasizing these games in the Sony catalogue, Namco’s Time Crisis alongside the likes of Point Blank were able to have more sequels and even in the case of Time Crisis console only spin-offs like Time Crisis: Project Titan (2001). Light gun games continued into the Sony Playstation 2 era, and here with the Sony Playstation 3 era, but sadly this would become a maligned genre, neither helped by the fact that the technology that made these games possible for the console ports, using the original cathode systems for televisions, was rendered obsolete by the introduction of digital television innovations. Thankfully however the lightgun game still exists in the arcade, if entirely for the fact that the gun controller is inherently something to entice people as a gimmick, with cabinets form the mid-2000s like Time Crisis 4 still making their way around even English sea sides.

What we got with Time Crisis 4 too, developed by Nex Entertainment, is appropriate bombast, a Michael Bay movie reinterpreted by Japanese video game programmers. So many video games are with knowledge of how American films inspired a lot of Japanese developers, and it is now with amazing hindsight for games you were not meant to be seriously how a few of them like this do reflect how American action films got away with things that would not be accepted in Hollywood of the decades after. This has a premise of dangerous biological weapons of an insect form known as “Terror Bites”, but the bigger surprise is that ultimately the villains are members of the United State’s own military using them as part of a plan to obliterate their own cities with nuclear weapons over their poor treatment as soldiers. The Michael Bay reference is apt, as The Rock (1996) was a big brash American blockbuster where American soldiers on Alcatraz Island threatened to release a biological virus weapon on their own people for how they were badly treated as veterans; it is amazing that a decade plus after Time Crisis 4, such premises would be deemed controversial or “woke propaganda” for some, whilst from an outsider’s looking glass, this is Namco’s developers hyper exaggerating decades of action films, like the others in this franchise, in its most ridiculous form. Even with a game like Razing Storm (2009), clearly influenced by the growing popularity of franchises in other genres like Gears of War franchise, was macho melodrama about the evils of military technology with all the absurdity, testosterone and un-credited Five Finger Death Punch songs they could muster.

Two players - Giorgio Bruno and Evan Bernard - have to take on this terrorist cell in a USA of the future, having to deal with those alarming insectoid biomechanical monstrosities, such as cyber slugs to mantises. There is not a lot more to elaborate upon but, with the graphical sheen of this era, there is an attempt at more realism contrasted by this proudly being over-the-top in its tone. There is not  a lot from other lightgun games before, where you have to clear through enemies whilst taking out those who actually can hit a bullseye first, but there is the spectacle, where over large stages, three altogether, you have numerous set pieces within them. It begins in California with a full blown gunfight in an airport against a small militia, juggling action to full blown sci-fi alongside. You will pilot the gun on helicopters multiple times, including through a cityscape. You will have a colleague stuck in a trap, upside down swinging across the screen to shoot around. There is a boss, in the streets, swinging around like Spider Man with the strength to carry an anti-aircraft rifle, another with magnetic power gauntlets and, the best, a mini-gun carrying tank who gets into a comically elaborate brawl with one of your NPCs. There is, to Nex Entertainment’s credit, so much that stands out, and this does not including the couple of defensive moments, where you have to protect the spot you are in from three areas, which can be switched between with a swipe of the light gun to the left or the right.

There is also the fact that, from the first Time Crisis game, the franchise brought its own unique trademark in how you had the ability to duck behind cover. Using a pedal here on the arcade cabinet, you have a different attitude in that you stay behind a protective barrier, allowing you to avoid hazards, but you have a time limit that prevents you from procrastinating behind it, forcing you to blast ahead. Time Crisis 4 has an additional use for the pedal in how, with limited ammo, you have alternative weapons (shotguns, machine gun and grenade launcher) you can switch between. This, once you get used to it, including how sometimes certain weapons rather than ones the machine recommends can be just as useful, and saving the shotgun shells for those defensive moments, becomes a creative take on the lightgun genre.

Where I found how much I really appreciated the game was with its final boss, where to really emphasis the cartoonish nature, the game literally has a man ladder, where soldiers pile on top of each other for you the player to climb on them and fight the boss in a gunfight over your allies’ mass of bodies. This ridiculous, frankly hilarious, way to end the game, with nukes the threat looming over this scene, was the cherry on the cake for the production, where it was not something you could take seriously at all, but within context of a coin muncher that had entertained me and was well made, was the kind of memorable thing you wish to have in an arcade game. The Playstation 3 port for the game came at a time when, with the interest in motion controls for certain consoles of that generation, lightgun games had resurgence, something which dissipated away into the next generation after into the 2010s. Thankfully they are a genre which have managed to last in the arcades themselves, fighting for space next to the ticket machines, so a generation of newer games could run with all the virtues one like this had. Thankfully as well, able to still find these machines, Time Crisis 4 itself is also a delightfully dumb but beautifully made cabinet.

Eaten Alive: A Tasteful Revenge (1999)

 

Director: Gary Whitson

Cast: Debbie D as Stacey; Barbara Joyce as Trish; Tina Krause as Lisa; Dean Paul as Dr. Baines; Sunny as the Dirty Blonde

Ephemeral Waves

 

I wanted to verify you were prettier than me.

Slighted because her boss Trish (Barbara Joyce) felt the most attractive female staff member was needed to talk to their male clientele, Stacy (Debbie D) is not impressed, armed with a shrink and growth ray, thus bringing us vore fetish before this was a known thing. Anyone who has no idea what “vore” means, well, Stacy realises that one has to eat her way up the corporate ladder to get anywhere...

This is a W.A.V.E. Production, which begins with two women getting wet t-shirts for their promo image, openly showing that this company was making softcore. This was an idiosyncratic one thought as, from New Jersey, W.A.V.E from their 1987 had their scripts written by fans, and were fan funded, producing mail ordered ultra-low budget films which catered to their idiosyncratic obsessions. As a result, Eaten Alive is going to be a bizarre experience for so many, in which a male scientist, with a British accent, creates a ray gun able to grow or shrink objects which Stacy uses to her advantage. Among its stilted amounts of dialogue, you get the first moments of this begin something exceptionally strange when the first victim, a W.A.V.E regular and a director in her own right, Tina Kraus, is shrunk and you witness, through video toaster effects and weird positioning of Debbie D's head, a nude woman the size of Tom Thumb being eaten by another. Clearly, this was someone who had a fetish who wrote this, a trendsetter in fact, but the result including the stock screams in the soundtrack and how low budget the sequence is makes it even stranger.

Whilst at least one (clothed) English man is eaten, the fetishishtic nature of this short clear in how all the victims are depicted naked, as Stacy develops a perverse ritual for this. There is even an extended scene of trying on bikinis with an extensive lack of music; this becomes more curious in how modest this production still is in terms of explicit context as, baring Krause being more comfortable with her scene, all the nudity here is the equivalent of a sixties softcore film, topless only, shot as an ultra-low budget film decades after. It is both, as a result, very tame but because of the context kinkier in paradox. It is, absolutely, strange to witness, one of those productions whose history, for those who knew of it, is matched by the fact that all its effects have to be completed with very cheap green screen and digital editing to pull this off, literally splicing the actresses awkwardly in place when they are shrunk. That is not an insult either, as W.A.V.E Productions were clearly a group whose work were made proudly aware they literally had shoestring budgets to these titles, working off their fan base’ interest in them.

That side does make this weirder too, knowing the script’s dialogue is made from a normal person unleashing his idiosyncratic obsessions, like entering the id of a person’s brain tapped into like a beer keg, and I include here for all the jokes I have made within this review no kink shaming, or shaming at all if it was not a kink at all but something that they wanted to see onscreen. It does admittedly produce one of the strangest moments I have probably witnessed in a film – a scene inside Stacy’s gullet, with a naked actress sprayed with water, with slowed down moans and a heart beat on the soundtrack - which is filthier than porn, but it was and so weird it was inspire. Including seven minutes of outtakes as an extra, this comes from this side of independent cinema which is entirely alien for many, as alien to the mainstream view of cinema as you could get, and it is admirable in this, how strange and out-there it is. Certainly, this feels like outsiders to cinema, people you normally do not find even in some softcore cinema despite the casts' careers. It is meaningful in seeing something closer to the world of the film viewer himself or herself rather than something fabricated, more so when time has passed and we can look back on this for that reason and a gleefully (and purposely) bizarre production.

Zyzzyx Road (2006)

 

Director: John Penney

Screenplay: John Penney

Cast: Leo Grillo as Grant; Katherine Heigl as Marissa; Tom Sizemore as Joey

Ephemeral Waves

 

Zyzzyx Road‘s name is already a curious one, a title which you would automatically find near the bottom of a list of all cinema alphabetically unless you included films in their original Russian and Indian languages. The tale of this one – produced, written and directed by John Penney - has the additional twist that this low budget film had a cinema release in the United States, and only grossed $30.00. That is a weird touch to this film, made by the screenwriter of Return from the Living Dead III (1993) and other horror genre films beforehand, to any film. The tale goes how, screening for a whole seven days, at Dallas' Highland Park Village Theater, with a single screening each day at noon, only six people went and it earned $30.00 against a budget of $1.2 million¹. Truthfully even this theatrical screening was not really meant to happen, fulfilling a Screen Actors Guild agreement that permitted low-budget films to pay actors a lower rate as long as the film gets a domestic theatrical release¹; as a production produced by lead actor Leo Grillo’s company, the focus for him was instead on non-domestic distribution of the film in other countries like Bulgaria¹, and in truth the story of all this does not really talk about what the film actually is.

In this particular case, you have in the centre three people - Leo Grillo himself, an actor who made his name more in animal rights; Katherine Heigl, working on the film as she was starting in the television series Grey’s Anatomy (2005-), and before she made films like Knocked Up (2007), and Tom Sizemore, who had a lengthy career beforehand but had also unfortunately had a reputation off camera for his legal and drug issues, which came to the fore here as he was arrested before he was meant to be shooting this film, violating his parole with a drug arrest, but still able to continue on the shoot with no delays¹. What it is, with these three people at the film’s centre, was a genre hybrid you could have actually depicted as a theatre production with a few touches changes, all centered around an older married man named Grant (Leo Grillo) and a young woman Marissa (Katherine Heigl) who, whilst she is more curious about Justin Bieber and Britney Spears’ romance at the time, have been having an affair. Driving at night, their affair may compromise his marriage with his wife, leading to his daughter being taken in the divorce, but there is an additional problem that they have to hide the body of Joey (Tom Sizemore) that is in the trunk, going to the titular Zyzzyx road and the road to nowhere.

Joey, unfortunately, is not quite dead, and even then there are a lot of twists which undercut the reality and subjective reality in what is a tale of a supposedly dead body hat needed to be buried in the desert. The plot goes in some obvious twists following what we begin to learn: how Grant is also hallucinating and having headaches; how Joey’s story is a strange figure seemingly wandering around like a spirit, with the absurd aspect he was brained to death with a giant vibrator/back massager to even get to this point; and how Marissa even represents the folly of a man’s midlife crisis without her being the cause of all this anxiety but merely a bystander caught in the crossfire, someone likely eighteen or younger, which is against the law, and in an unfortunate position for Grant unload all his neurosis over. It is a chamber piece in a desert, where the secrets come out, and it is insanely obvious where this is going to go with some idiosyncratic touches. One such touch, worth a slight plot spoiler warning, is how it touches upon full blown supernatural paranoia based on the fear of women between two men, especially as there is no explicit reference to what she actually is by name to them as an apparently no-human figure, emphasizing the paranoia.

The real issue with Zyzzyx Road however is that, from its initial set up to becoming a slasher in its finale, there is not a lot more to the production to flesh out the basics. It is a film which could have elaborated on its content more than it has, where barring some use of post digital effects and some idiosyncratic use of colour saturation to show levels of reality, there is not a lot which sticks out from a skeleton which you could have done more with. That is not to be taken as an insult against its director-writer either, as this was his debut helming a film as well as write one, and it would have been an obstacle to climb to even get the production completed with hope that later films would develop his voice. Unfortunately, the infamous $30 box office gross gave this production its legacy which would have not helped in the initial aftermath of its theatrical screenings. An article published by a website named CHUD, What If They Released a Movie and Nobody Came?, written by Devin Farcaci about the film on 1^st January 2007^1b would have allowed the ball to start rolling in terms of, optimistically, a wider interest but sadly this became a case of a film, when I had first heard of it, was only known for its theatrical screening and nothing about the content within the feature.

It is a film where all of it has interest, including the titular road. Zzyzx is a real place, outside of Las Vegas in the middle of the Mojave Desert, just off of Interstate 15, where a man named Curtis Howe Springer caught wind of the local springs in the area and in the 1940s established a spa where he sold "miracle cures" using the spring's fabled water. With the name coined by him from being “the last word” in health, his place there becoming popular until April 11th 1974 when he was forcibly removed from the land by the Bureau of Land Management, as he did not actually own the land at the formerly named "Soda Springs" but merely claimed the right to mine in the land, which was different from occupying or developing on it². That could have added flavor to this story about deceptive reality, as alongside the fact that, alongside the California State University's Desert Studies Center to study the desert’s ecology and geology, there are remnants of the old days, including abandoned buildings and even advertisements for Springer’s old mineral miracle cures², which is free surrealism for even a low budget film to have used.

Even in terms of its notoriety, in 2011 it would be outmatched by The Worst Movie Ever!. Written, produced, directed by, and starring Glenn Berggoetz, it ended up by accident despite its name getting just $11 during its premiere from one person³. Befitting the legacy of a film starring Santa Claus and Abe Lincoln together for the first time, it was nonetheless not a great scenario for Berggoetz’s film to have ended in as well, and in that case it did due from from struggles in terms of being able to promote the production³. In that case, a few years later, that infamy helped when people began to write about the incident, alongside 70,000 people watching the film’s trailer on YouTube during August 2016 so it came out as a badge of honor³. As a result it leaves Zyzzyx Road in a weird place, where John Penney thankfully directed more, but with an infamy for his debut directorial feature which could have done a little bit more, whilst with virtues I admired, and tied to an aforementioned infamy that does not even factor in whether you can appreciate the film, but the perils of film distribution.

=======

1) How 'Zyzzyx Road' only grossed $30.00, written by Rob Brunner for Entertainment Weekly, published on February 9th 2007.

1b) What If They Released a Movie and Nobody Came?, written by Devin Farcaci for CHUD.com, posted 1st January 2007.

2) The Story Of Zzyzx, The Eerie Ghost Town Along A Dead-End Road In The Middle Of The California Desert, written by Erin Kelly (and edited by Maggie Donahue) for All That’s Interesting, published on May 9^th 2023 with June 7^th updates.

3) "The Worst Movie Ever!" Lives Up to Its Name with Epically Bad Grosses, written by Matt Singer for IFC, and published August 26th 2011.

Games of the Abstract: Castlevania (1986)

Developer: Konami

Publisher: Konami

One Player

Famicom Disk System / Nintendo Entertainment System

 

Castlevania is a franchise I got to with later games where more bombast and advanced graphical capabilities were brought in, starting with Castlevania: Bloodlines (1994) for the Sega Genesis / Mega Drive. It says so much however that, with the first game in the franchise you can feel already right at home and see all the virtues which were going to be improved upon, only being elaborated upon as this went. Originally released on the Famicom Disk System, a Japanese only peripheral for the Japanese version of the Nintendo Entertainment System/Famicom that used floppy discs, this could have accidentally become a game lost on one of the many peripheral and gimmicks Nintendo have brought to their consoles, which do offer some idiosyncratic work but rather get preserved and re-released by the company. Thankfully, with a cartridge version of the game which got a release in the West, this franchise would continue, developing a fan base from what Konami added to the original game’s template.

With the first member of the Belmont family, Simon Belmont, having to go forth to defeat Dracula, already the important game play tropes for Simon there for him to use, and the impede him and the player. Having played the later games, it does present a difficulty in a way to talk of this game as the later sequels for the 32 bit systems especially took all here and improved upon them including in atmosphere. Even the way you defeat Dracula’s first form, by whipping him in the head, was taken for Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge (1991) for the Game Boy, so this game went on to influence all the later games in a variety of ways. What is however of note is that, for one of my forays into the third era of video games, this for the NES looks exceptional without any expectations for the era. Based on the premise of all history's horror and mythological figures being in Dracula's payroll to prevent people getting to him, the atmosphere is already there with its Gothic aesthetic even with the NES' technical restrictions including colour. The music by Kinuyo Yamashita and Satoe Terashima is insanely memorable too, marking the first notes (literally) of seminal soundtrack cuts for this franchise. Even in terms of the franchise's quirks into the later games, such as its obsessions with stairs, they show the charm of this franchise from the get-go.

Saying Castlevania is hard is like saying water is wet, but it is credible to the game how, with a lot of the challenge, it is negotiating the hazards even if I admit being terrible still with this franchise. The infamous Medusa heads for example, introduced here for the first time, fly in swerving patterns in arches, and were clearly designed to be mostly dodged when they are positioned in platform heavy sections. The challenge is tough but it is a game of dodging as much as attacking, even to the point you could miss most of the enemies, without needing to attack them, baring a few obstructing key areas. There are a few moments which show it could have been refined - the level with clockwork platforms, the first time for the series, has a few areas in that tiny section where it is confusing what is a platform you can land on jumping to it, rather than plummet to doom, and Dracula's final form is not well signposted for its moves - but I give credit to the game for a lot of surprising fairness even as a hard game. It could have been meaner than I got, and including the failed likes of Castlevania: The Adventure (1989), I have been prepared for this gameplay style, and how there is always a surprise piece of meat broken from a piece of whipped wall for health, even if done by pure accident as much as trying to find anything deliberately.

Castlevania is also pure fun if you can accept its difficulty, especially as this is also with a level of delirium to its Gothic tone. Appropriately there was a version of this NES game developed for the arcades, the VS. Castlevania version, which is apt as whilst this was a console game, this feels like an arcade game even in terms of its own surreal logic, especially when you have giant eagles dropping flea men at you in that aforementioned clockwork environment without context before and after. You find yourself fighting Igor and Frankenstein’s monster as a duo boss without having to ask why they are here, whether this is an extension of those forties Universal monster movie crossovers where Dracula got them and the Grim Reaper of all figures to help him out, and logic does not exist when the dreamlike spectacle in a rock hard NES game is too good to question. This franchise could have capsized, as it could have been derailed by the immediate sequel Castlevania II: Simon's Quest (1987), an ambitious if divisive attempt to bring role playing and open world aspects to the series. That is a game that needs to be taken in separately as its own thing for a proper judgement, as it was a game both with its own ambitious ideas and problems with the translation of its more bluntly esoteric decisions, but alongside a huge 180 degrees turn back to what worked, Castlevania thankfully went a direction I appreciated immensely.

Tetsuo the Iron Man (1989)

Director: Shinya Tsukamoto

Screenplay: Shinya Tsukamoto

Cast: Tomorowo Taguchi as the Salaryman; Kei Fujiwara as the Girlfriend; Nobu Kanaoka as the Woman in Glasses; Shinya Tsukamoto as the Metal Fetishist; Naomasa Musaka as the Doctor; Renji Ishibashi as the Tramp

An Abstract Candidate

 

Our love can destroy this fuckin' world!

Coming to the film which stands out as a metal behemoth in Shinja Tsukamoto's career, his theatrical debut after the films made with his Kaijyu Theatre, I will gladly argue he has amassed an amazing number of masterpieces in his career, with so many layers to those he would make in the decades on. Tetsuo the Iron Man, a “Regular Sized Monster Series” production, is by itself however a true one-off, which you can return to and detonates with an incredible power to it. Even here, layers can be found in terms of this tale of a man’s transformation into metal, not just the obvious one of urbanisation and modern technology as a source of anxiety, something which will be returned to in multiple ways in this director-writer’s career. For starters, the body is a fixation as would be the case onwards, as we encounter a fetishist of metal (Tsukamoto himself) who has cut outs of athletes (track and field) among his coils and scrap in his hovel. Unfortunately, inserting metal into his own leg, the wound becomes infected and full of maggots after a while, and in his panic hobbling for help outside he is run over.

Tetsuo is also subdued in its pace for a chunk of its length - for those unaware of this film, Tsukamoto after a pair of short films created this independent production with collaborators, from their Kaijyu Theatre team, a film which will eventually kick into a hyper intensity but to its credit slowly waits before bolting for the rest of its hour plus length. The fetishist takes his revenge on the salary man (Tomorowo Taguchi) who ran him over, starting to turn into a metal machine man himself and already having an encounter with a woman who, turned into a monster, made the ill advised mistake to stab a weird bio-scrap thing on the subway floor with her pen. With Taguchi to his credit having to work in a giant suit of scrap metal, what can be at times like an ultra violent brawl out of a Power Rangers, shot in the streets of Japan, is yet also a legendary cult film regarded for how distinct and intense it is, a bolt out of the blue when it was released at the end of the eighties in Japanese cinema which caught on globally.

The film is legendary for its intense editing, for Chu Ishikawa's intense industrial score, its monochrome look, and moments which can be incredibly disturbing but forgotten until revisiting the film, such as an entire stop motion moment of a man being broken down (even his skull and flesh) into living wires and machinery in a stop motion sequence, but this can also be subdued, prickling in what is to come with cuts to factory machinery and snippets of Ishikawa's music, taking its time. Even our salaryman's transformation is banal, suddenly the first concern to merely a spike found sticking outward from his cheek when shaving. It can be strange, such as the scene where he merely repeating the same thing over and over on a phone to someone, and it can be funny on purpose. Even the score gets into the tonal change as you can also get sultry jazz sax when the fetishist is hit by the car in the first place, which I secretly hoped that was Chu Ishikawa too playing the instrument.

Throughout the one thing you do not get from the later film is this film’s more playful nature, even in scenes which are meant to be shocking or disarming, such as how that music returns for a proudly homoerotic love between two enemies, the gender subversions and ideas of the body Tsukamoto would elaborate on in his further films already here but matched by the energy of a homemade low budget film which set the bar higher than most for how well made and precise it was. Little details with hindsight cause it to have more edge over other good cult films like this, such as Kei Fujiwara as the lead's girlfriend, who though with a horrifying conclusion to her tale not a damsel not in the least. Partially this is with knowledge that Fujiwara herself, who would go on to direct two cult films in dire need of re-appreciation, was the co-cinematographer on the film with Tsukamoto and a collaborator, alongside how the character in how she is portrayed, the salaryman himself not an innocent in his crimes, is not a conventional archetype. There is even a fantasy scene of her character dancing like in a pagan ritual before a phallic tentacle she is wearing between her legs, like a vacuum cleaner tube, participates in explicit pegging long before the infamous penis drill of the film appears.

Whilst this is a mood piece for a large part of it, little pieces like this, or the sexual licking and castration of a sausage with metal sounds over the noises, do come across showing more to the film over multiple watches, alongside a sense of humour and whimsy that would leave as Tsukamoto would continue. “Whimsy” is an odd choice of word for Tetsuo, but considering this ends with a hybrid man-tank storming the streets of urban Tokyo, the creation of two figures loving each other wishing to rust the world into metal, it is perversely the best choice of word when returning to the film. The deliberateness of the plot, never explaining the transformation of man into metal, does not mean either there is complexity either, as flashbacks to the fetishist’s past which bleed in, such as about a piece of metal in his brain, can be caught out as abrupt and disrupting the plot in first watches, and fire up the imagination when you eventually put together the film over multiple viewings.

As much as I love what Tsukamoto became, this film as the climax of his Kaijyu Theatre work does feel of its own existence, as I miss the stop motion he brought in to this film for its effects, the speeding up effects to make himself and other actors travel at supersonic speed down streets gliding along, and that this does show itself as a genre film which has all the imagination of this type of low budget and creative cinema, not just from Japan, at its most impactful. Thankfully the unpredictability that you get here, and grows as the film goes along, grew in the director’s other work as these traits started to ebb away. Tetsuo the Iron Man is also still an audio-visual experience which has not lost its power – later Tsukamoto films still retained this, Tokyo Fist arguably his best work and matching the intensity (with Chu Ishikawa’s craft) to his greater focus on human drama, but this is nonetheless able to retain its power even after multiple watches.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Grotesque/Kinetic

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

Games of the Abstract: Captain Tomaday (1999)

 

Developer: Visco

Publisher: Visco

One to Two Players

Arcade [Neo Geo MVS] / Sega Dreamcast

 

It is amazing Captain Tomaday was a 1999 release, as whilst vertical shooters from the likes of CAVE came into the Millennium as cult titles, and "cute-em-ups" were still being made into the late nineties, where you realise cute aesthetics in Japanese videogames can be for adults and still be tough to beat, Tomaday feels like an early nineties game out of time. Maybe this is just me, but particularly with an art style which is close to a child's drawing at times, a really good one and said as a compliment, it does not have the elaborate art style particularly in shading and detail for what is a very odd little world onscreen, looking even older than even some of the later Parodius sequels from Konami which were insanely ambitious with their art styles.

What this also is was a Neo Geo MVS release, Visco a regular collaborator who developed a lot of games for SNK's system, a ROM cartridge based machine which was an arcade machine you could change the game within with ease, and later the Advanced Entertainment System (AES), which was available to buy as one of the most expensive consoles ever released in 1991, able to actually buy similar ROM cartridges as for the arcade machines and play them in the console itself. One of the later games for the MVS, it was likely damned for how far in the history of the hardware it was and, for obvious reasons, because SNK's own work dominated their own machinery. A shame as, in the midst of their titles like King of Fighters, Captain Tomaday brings a quainter form of cuteness, envisioning Earth being attacked by eggplant aliens, with the one hero to save us being a tomato accidentally dropped into an experiment and off to fly into space to fight them.

Captain Tomaday is literally about a sentient tomato, as cute as that sounds, and from here you have a vertical shoot-em-up where with a lot of robot enemies, and some stranger folks like floating skulls or sentient toast with faces welding knives and forks, all of which you will go through in what is still a challenging game. With a career that did go into console games but were focused on the arcades especially, Visco with this to their fighting games come to this where they clearly let themselves indulge for fun but without losing the challenge, where having to gun through a weird menagerie of characters even the cherubs are likely to own you if you cannot dodge their bullets. With the tropes standard to countless genres, from going underwater, Captain Tomaday is less "weird" than quirky, and its charm comes from this whilst never really going for anything eyebrow raising or bizarre like Parodius did. This does not really change up the game play style either in terms of the level designs or challenges, barring the short level designed for yourself to hover up as many bonus items on masses as a short change of pace.

The bonuses are traditional points or weapon upgrades, the latter where Tomday's more idiosyncratic touches do appear instead. Our cute little tomato, who has goofy animated segments in-between levels such as fighting an octopus, is a tougher protagonist as they do not need a gun, only to fly in space and use their fists to punch things. That is some pretty tough grocery produce, but it means you use two fire buttons, one for the left fist and the other for the right, which is one of Tomaday's biggest differences as a shoot-em-up as a result. It can be a frustration if you are used to the growing habit in later "bullet hell" games of continuous rapid fire, as the fists need to return back to you when thrown out, but with the ability to vary your shots or double punch at once, it is still inventive. The power ups turn you into a smaller nippy flyweight, or a beefy tank with roundhouses a Super Heavyweight would be proud of, but this comes with another eccentricity in that, depending on the combination, when you are hit with certain power ups, rather than losing a life, you get another chance but are turned into something else. This can vary from a baby, which is pretty useless as you have a slow normal fire of toys and objects being thrown ahead, but also can have really useful results if, say, you become a lizard, with an extending tongue of death which clears through the screen. Add to this the duplication power up, if you get it, to have two Tomadays, which is effectively a shield to that the shot too if hit, and Captain Tomaday has a strategy even if the screen can be too chaotic to get to them without risks, only helped by the fact you can punch any bonus or power up back up screen to try to catch it again.

It is an obscure game, and tragically Visco themselves focusing on the likes of slot machines and horse racing betting games¹, and away from their more genre based arcade games when they worked with SNK, which is a shame but really evident to what the industry must have been that forced them into this direction to survive. To their credit however, their games have been made available even if a Captain Tomaday is probably more known for MAME emulation, be it their Breaker 2D fighters being relicensed in the West for Steam release, or that Tomaday itself managed to get a Sega Dreamcast release in 2019 as a retro limited edition release². Visco were a steady hand for SNK's Neo Geo MVS with their career, even if they deal in some console work, very much an arcade developer whose venture here with Captain Tomady was a whim they wished to entertain and with credibility making something fun.

 

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1) Visco's website. [Japanese only]

2) The Captain Tomaday Dreamcast release, with a confirmation of its date of release.

The Sword and the Claw (1975)

 

a.k.a. Lionman

Director: Natuk Baytan

Screenplay: Natuk Baytan and Duygu Sagiroglu             

Cast: Cüneyt Arkin as Süleyman Sah / Kiliçaslan; Bahar Erdeniz as Ayla; Yildirim Gencer as Kumandan Antuan; Cemil Sahbaz as Altar; Reha Yurdakul as Rüstem Bey; Anuska as Sabbah; Tarik Simsek as Komutan; Ekrem Gökkaya as Papaz Basaryos; Necdet Kökes as Zipzip; Aynur Aydan as Prenses Maria; Yusuf Sezer as Demirpençe  

Ephemeral Waves

 

You can't even open a door for me - idiots!

The medieval Byzantine empire: forced to unite after a war, one man with his group rebel against the Emperor Soloman in a coup d'état, but not without the Emperor’s lineage surviving after the assassination. Both a princess married to the rebel leader Anton, but who loved the Emperor instead, and the Emperor’s wife, bore sons. The empress lets her son be saved, as she passes during child birth fleeing, said son Süleyman Sah (our lead Cüneyt Arkin) being raised by lions, whilst the other is raised by the evil Anton as his own whilst his mother is thrown in the dungeon.

From Turkey, there is its own distinct style to these films.  Lacking the unpredictability of 3 Dev Adam (1973) - the infamous film where Spiderman is the villain, so villainous the Turkish government needs to hire Mexican wrestler Santo and Captain American to take him down - what you get here, with its very quiet and matter-of-fact English dub, is one of the more elaborate productions next to those infamous “Turksploitation” films with its bright colourful interiors and costumes. When I first saw The Sword and the Claw, I was disappointed with how more subdued it was next to a film like 3 Dev Adam, a double edged sword for a work which still has its own energy you can appreciate, but was unfairly being propped against some of the most infamous films to come from Turkey’s cinematic output, the kind of one-offs you do not watch but let soak into your eyes. What this instead evokes us old Asian kung fu films from the seventies onwards, not just the Hong Kong films but Korean and Taiwanese films I have seen on old second hand DVDs,  with less than stellar prints, and English dubs with a tendency to add egregious cussing and a lot of odd flections in the voicing. This comparison is apt because the narrative to The Sword and the Claw is one you have seen before, and the entertainment regardless of cultural differences between them in meat-and-potatoes pulpy action with an emphasis on its quirks radiating the more you can appreciate the film.

This film images a Jungle Book scenario (a young boy raised by lions after his king father and mother are slain by a warring leader) with a Medieval sword epic and pulp action, which mixed with the tone of a lesser known martial arts film does present a curious concoction, more so as, whilst Cüneyt Arkin was a trained martial artist, when it comes with the other participants in the cast there is a greater emphasis on punches in the fight scenes, alongside the excessive use of trampolines in having the characters bound around, clearly a troupe of this country’s cinema or something Arkin really liked doing.

There is still some unpredictability here but it is things you could miss or not reflect on fully, such as the fact that Cüneyt Arkin is filmed with real lions, as Soloman’s son develops claw attacks like his lion siblings, the right strength to take on Anton’s evil, tax raising sadists. Certainly in context to another of lead Arkin’s films, the infamous Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam (1982), or Turkish Star Wars as most know it as, this is a more subdued production. It really becomes his film, and there is praise to be had that he became a star even known in the West, bouncing on off-screen trampolines for jumps to tiger clawing extras to death here, even if by way of infamy. Cüneyt Arkin before his 2022 became a beloved figure in his homeland, but he can be appreciated for the fact that even Turkish Star Wars, for all its notoriety, managed to get a fanbase in the West for the madness of it, with The Sword and the Claw allowing one to appreciate him as an action actor clearly having a blast as a fighting lead. Certainly, Cüneyt Arkin is a striking lead who does not even have to talk for the most part, whose main trademark is mostly jumping on his opponents and pawing at them, leading to a lot of red paint gore being smeared on extras' faces, which anyone can appreciate.

This one as one of the few Turkish genre films from this era that have been more preserved, from the American Genre Film Archive, and you can see the colourful spectacle of the film, which I appreciate now more because the higher expectation was lost and its idiosyncrasies were found in their place. You see, able to appreciate the film in contrast to those in muddy forms online like other “Turksploitation” movies, its tone more cohesive than Turkish Star Wars and yet still feeling like an old film compared to others from decades later which I came to appreciate. Certainly, I can get behind this type of obvious pulpy genre cinema, and it does have a sequel called Lionman II: The Witchqueen (1979), which could have elaborated on this world but is sadly a film lost in time or would need a lot of searching for. By itself, now able to appreciate the production for what it actually was, this tale of men with steel lion claws scaling whole castle walls in real time and throwing soldiers around like ragdolls has won me over. Even if it does not have the manic energy of the films impossible to release legally without the copyright being a nightmare, without the whiplash editing and abrupt use of Star Wars music, this was a fun lark to see.

The Brawl Busters (1978)

 

Director: Kim Jeong-Yong

Screenplay: Richard Hung

Cast: Il-shik Jang, Yong-seok Kang, Yeong-ran Seo, Moo-Wung Choe, Mu-Seong Kwak, Debbie Ling, Chung-Il Nam, In-Ha Yoon

Ephemeral Waves

 

Starring "Black Jack Chan", the more notable detail for myself in the credits is Joseph Lai (and to a lesser extent Tomas Tang), a delightful appearance to witness in the credits alongside the familiar type of English dub voice acting here which I have only found with Godfrey Ho films. It was a pleasing surprise to return to this world of Joseph Lai, even if this is clearly a South Korean martial arts film he has taken and re-appropriated for an English speaking audience, as much an influence on Ho's infamous cut-and-paste ninja films and a sharp reminder that both, before the likes of Ninja Terminator (1985), had their names on a glut of martial arts films, in this particular case a South Korean entry from director Kim Jeong-Yong. Rather than a film about a 'Jack Chan', likely in mind to Jackie Chan's growing success, this is a film from a prolific filmmaker who spent a great deal of time in martial arts cinema as much as producing one-off curiosities like War Of The God Monsters (1985), a Korean kaiju movie that now immediately stands out as an enticing film to witness.

This like many of any country of origin has a very familiar premise - an evil leader, very good at martial arts, had a family slain over a priceless sword their patriarch won but he felt was rightly his, the only survivor a female baby who, rescued by a Buddhist monk, is out for revenge as the head of an all-female assassination group. A mysterious male martial artist, who makes his entrance catching darts in the air holes of his flute, is tagging along behind her as an ally. It is like many of these films, not just other Joseph Lai productions, so this film's level of unpredictability is a habit of martial arts cinema I am glad exists. This, even with the casual swearing per the Lai production formula of their English dubs, has its own energy, which does also help with the few things which do feel less well in terms of telling a simple story. It is a bit convoluted at first, causing confusion unnecessarily when our female lead, is pictured as a villain contrasted by a son willing to avenge a slain father of one of her targets, despite the later having been a baddie and his son a minor henchman in the end. Our lead does as well, sadly, gets maligned in n her own film to the male lead, so it is to Brawl Buster's virtues that it has a frenzied energy to make up for its imperfections. It even pulls off the "it was all a dream" segment for the lead villain, dreaming of killing the female assassin with his bedroom trap mechanisms, including one of a few times a net confounds a person, which is among its gleefully creative moments for what is a story and plot seen many times before. Especially for something not as perfectly explained as it is should be, factoring in that this English dub from the Joseph Lai group probably took liberties with the source material, this is a huge virtue.

You can see this in even the minor henchmen having their idiosyncratic special moves, a trope which has carried through martial arts from Shaw Brothers to a South Korean production like this thankfully. Tornado feet and extending sleeve attacks, razor male ponytail whips, steel claws (which look like oven mitts with foil claws to be honest), and even crushing spike trap set pieces are among the cavalcade of idiosyncratic pieces to this, to the point I see these martial arts films and realise video games were clearly inspired by these types of films. Even beyond the likes of Kung Fu Master (1984) by Irem just being martial arts stories adapted into a new medium, it is with how bosses in arcade games were clearly following the concept of escalation of each villain has their own idiosyncratic abilities. Hell, even the habit found just in Joseph Lai films like this, but other martial arts movies, of two heroes needing to team together to fight one main villain, which could be seen as unfair and is contrasted by Western films having one-on-one brawls, evokes how multiplayer co-operative games, like scrolling beat-em-ups, cane have players teaming together to actually get to the end of the game.

This comparison is apt as, baring the disappointment that our female lead, and her bevy of four female assassin assistants as the leads as promised in the beginning, a lot of the appeal of The Brawl Busters is that same cathartic unpredictability. The martial arts is solid, and our female protagonist still gets to be a strong character in terms of fighting skill, so a film like this is worthwhile if you have a taste for these type of productions. That is important as being able to split these obscurer martial arts films from each other, and able to appreciate them for their quirks, is different from watching some of the most acclaimed of this genre who have their own auras. As someone who went beyond those ninja films to binging multiple films in succession from this earlier Godfrey Ho-Joseph Lai martial arts films, I can attested to both how one should not try to do that, but also that even lower tier cheesy films like this can show their moments and personalities that, even if it is a scene or something silly, make them rewarding. The Brawl Busters you can appreciate for its bugnuts imagination and the level of creativity to any work like this even if not one of the acclaimed ones.

Kekko Kamen (1991-2)

 

Directors: Kinji Yoshimoto, Koji Morimoto, Nobuhiro Kondo and Shunichi Tokunaga

Screenplay: Masashi Sogo

Based on a manga by Go Nagai

(Voice) Cast: Emi Shinohara as Kekko Kamen; Arisa Andou as Takahashi Mayumi; Jouji Yanami as Principal Toenail of Satan; Kazue Komiya as Gestapoko; Kikuko Inoue as Yuka Chigusa; Kiyoyuki Yanada as Mizutamari Tsuyokarou; Mika Kanai as Tanaka Hanako; Mitsuaki Hoshino as Teacher Ben Kyoshi; Tesshō Genda as Shuwarutsu Negataro

 

My designer is a pervert.

At Sparta Academy, a strict system of punishment is carried out by the head master, a masked jester known as Principal Toenail of Satan. Openly uninterested in any of the male students succeeding in life, and a pervert alongside his sidekick and teacher Ben, he employs bizarre punishment teachers to sexually humiliate female students who fall behind in their studies. One by the name of Mayumi Takahashi is a specific target for them, taking the constant brunt of the staff's interest. However, there is always a mysterious female figure there to protect Mayumi named Kekko Kamen, who wears a mask, a scarf, gloves and boots... and completely nothing else. As the synopsis describes, and images of either the anime, the manga or the live action films show, this is one of those franchises which could be embarrassing to talk about, and has not aged well. Go Nagai himself from the 2010s has had a renaissance around him in the West, especially since an adaptation of one of his manga Devilman Crybaby (2018), distributed by Netflix, took the world by storm. His work has gained admiration even before then, whether his giant robot anime, or characters like Cutey Honey who, even if she has had version playing into her transformations in a sexual way, is a magical girl character many love and even had adaptations made for different audiences. Here though we are reminder that, even if his work has been celebrated as subversive he has his whims and some of them are like Kekko Kamen.

It also needs to be stressed to how Kekko Kamen was actually a joke Go Nagai created to send to his manga editor at the time thinking it was be immediately be rejected¹. A parody of Gekkō Kamen, a legendary superhero figure and one of the first of Japanese superhero characters, it was meant to only get a reaction out of said editor only for that person to actually want to publish it as a continuing series. Nagai is not one to have shied away from the perverse in his work too. Between becoming a legendary figure in manga and anime, including his significance in giant robot stories, his first successful manga, Shameless School (1968-1972), was a sex comedy which made him a pariah of moral standards groups. However the fact that Kekko Kamen, this joke he created, managed to last for five volumes, had a 1991-2 anime for the video market, and eleven live action films, is probably something he is baffled about to this day as some viewers might too.

The premise, even if crass, makes sense for a sexy anime if with the notable concern in how this surrounds "punishment" and sexual humiliation, which is a contentious thing to deal with for this anime when experiencing it. There is an obsession in anime with the shame of public nudity, which is played for a joke in many cases and is still argued to be problematic, but is fascinating to scrutinise in terms of imaging anime high school being a melting pot of neurosis, hormones and these types of fears; here it is taken further than this. It is also an anime, whilst only four episodes long, under two hours altogether, which is a chore to sit through and is the worst thing to introduce as anime to someone who has never seen any, even if you were to choose one with sexually explicit content as the first. The fatal combination of how icky the premise is and how utterly lame it all becomes its downfall, as it tries to parody itself with four wall breaking gags and comedy that cannot overcome its icky subject. All four episodes follow the same template exactly. A new punishment teacher is introduced, they always torment the main female character Mayumi, and Kekko Kamen eventually steps in to save the day, usually with her nunchucks and with a finishing attack that cannot be described any more politely as nude spread legged suffocation.

Even with the Barbie Doll nudity, it is a fetish anime full of ripped underwear and titillation that is off putting because it is all at the expense of the female characters without their consent. This show was once cut for release by the British Board of Film Classification in fact because of this, only to be finally be released uncut on my shores in 2007 by ADV Films², a company that no longer exists which, even with their less edgy anime releases, definitely feel of the era with stuff that has not aged well or is cheesy to consider just in their promo trailers. The Kekko Kamen anime in its original form is not a work, even if trying for cheek and a sense of humour, you can defend, particularly as the first punishment teacher would immediately put people off the show. She is Miss Gestapoko, a BDSM queen from (sic) Auschwitz Academy and ranked by fully uniformed Nazis, as offensive as you can get but quietly buried afterwards, something which comes from the point of deliberately going for the most tasteless idea but in the modern day making the worse introduction to the premise as people will find this material even more problematic than before. After that, a bodybuilder whose muscles are the heroine's kryptonite, a female android and a stereotypical ronin samurai seem normal, but you still have to work around its modus operandi being non-consensual. There are moments which can be fished out of virtue, but this will be a huge struggling point for many, especially as the humorous tone can make this more an issue than if the show took itself seriously. Considering the lightness of the end credit songs, with lyrics penned by Go Nagai himself and sung in earnestness by the female singer, it feels disingenuous to what from the song's tone should have been a more light hearted and cheekier sex comedy about a female heroine.

Production wise, it is a cheap show. As much as I reveal in this type of crackerjack, cheap anime from this period, with Kekko Kamen it has also the villain of the week structure which presents a huge issue to for anything to progress. The tone, in another production, would work but is at odds with the subject matter, be it the composer Keiju Ishikawa's score, of its time and low budgeted but still more interesting and diverse, or that the only progressive aspect is how Mayumi crushes over the girls around her, including Kekko Kamen herself. Jokes about Kekko Kamen's nudity and voluptuousness aside, this part of Mayumi's character, crushing over multiple female characters and the whole gimmick of the show could be subversive in another tale. That in itself becomes a thing to consider for this show, how even if with a gaze over young women, this sex comedy could have actually succeeded if one of its key aspects, the sexual humiliation, was removed, a trait that is clearly something more acceptable from a different time period which we look even more damningly on nowadays. A more light hearted and openly erotic tale, still about an evil school full of punishment, but where one girl's relief from it all is an older girl who is a literal superhero, who kindles your romantic longings even when she is brazenly nude all the time, would have worked. Arguably one of the punishment teachers without the content, the robot, would have worked in this tone too; the beautiful girl, the best in class, willing to help you study, only to suddenly start insulting you one night because your grades are still struggling can be one of the few serious and nightmarish aspects which could have been retained. Even the really crass joke that an off-switch is one of her breasts, because her creators were perverts, could stay, but it is when the show has to linger on a female character being restrained against her will and tormented, even if no way near as extreme as a Urotsukidôji title, where the work loses credibility. Controversially, even Urotsukidôji was meant to depict the horrors of demonic entities, and its problems were an undefendable bias to titillation than being proper ero-guro transgression, whilst Kekko Kamen should have been fluffy and silly, causes one to feel gross, and is arguably less defendable because of this attitude.

The origin of this premise does explain this adaptation's lack of legs, already burnt out by its halfway point, even though there is enough here which could have been salvaged. It is telling how Go Nagai views school for example, even with mind how he specifically named it Sparta Academy; even if you only known of the ancient city-state of Sparta through Frank Miller and Lynn Varley's 1998 graphic novel 300, or the 2006 film adaptation, it is damning even as a joke premise how the Japanese school system is viewed by Nagai as like a militaristic civilisation, where the weak perish and only warriors of education may survive. Aspects like this which make the work a little bearable and could have been good can be found, be it the parody of Gekko Kamen itself, that Toenail of Satan has nightmares of Kamen entering his bedroom while he is sleeping to give him permanent testicular pain, despite also having masochistic tendencies wishing for Kekko to be his dom, or the fourth wall breaking jokes which work, like the villains complain how Kekko is not using her theme music (which can be heard in this world), or how Mayumi's friend Chigusa Yuka can break the fourth wall, aware of the viewer and able to talk to the screen away from the rest of the cast.

The show even without its problematic centre can also be viewed as very sexist, such as the premise of Kekko being weak against a bodybuilder's physic, and that it takes her the whole episode to realise she can close her eyes to fight him, which would need to be factored in for this premise to ever work. It is juvenile, even if it was not a premise meant as a joke, and there is a sense that a lot of this comes off far more problematic nowadays than it already was as we have rightly reassessed how problematic content like this is. Coming from someone who believes that almost any idea, no matter how bad or tasteless it is, can work if the tone or point of the premise is exactly right, Kekko Kamen is completely misguided in presentation and point. It should be, even if an embarrassing anime to show others, a light hearted comedy. One without the Nazis, without the uncomfortable harassment fetish, without the awful jokey nature and something which, even if the idea of a super heroine who parades herself completely naked barring a mask and accessories is still juvenile, was fluffy and silly. A sex comedy with a farcical edge to it, even one which bordered into the pornographic area of anime, could have worked, everything that this anime never was sadly. Considering its origins as a gag, the chance of sustaining it was virtually slim from the beginning and the anime proves it, even in how that the final episode teases how, if the tapes sold well in Japan, more than what was released would be produced, something which never came to be. It is a bad work to consider Go Nagai from, but sadly for a time, this might have been one of the few adaptations, least in the United Kingdom, that existed from someone like him who is a huge name in the manga and anime mediums. Whilst examples like this in his career show his flaws, his well regarded reputation for when he created characters that could be emotionally attached to and be reinterpreted in so many ways is a far more interesting side to look at than something which is just tasteless and off-putting.

 

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1) Conférence public de Gô Nagai à Japan Expo 2008 ! (in French). Written by Gemini and published by Review Channel on July 8th 2008. Archived from the original on August 22, 2008.

2) The Melon Famers page of Kekko Kamen for BBFC Cuts K: Kb-Km