Games of the Abstract: Batman (2013)

 

Developer: Specular Interactive

Publisher: Raw Thrills

One Player

Arcade

 

Batman was a disappointment. Among the countless games adapted from the DC Comics' character, to the point this arcade game could be confusing for a lack of a subtitle for the title, this would have been much more fun if its premise, as a vehicular combat game using the Batmobile, felt more interactive and less a slightly messy spectacle.

For those who might have actually lived in a cave, and because it is funny to actually step back and explain Batman as if an obscure concept, a man dressed as a bat fighting crime set against a huge rouge gallery of idiosyncratic villains started in comics in 1939, and with this in mind, and all the films and video games that came afterwards, this does wrap into the arcade game's production here as this is as much a tribute to that history. As much as an excuse for a mission based game entirely about driving the aforementioned Batmobile, a high-tech car with weapons, the best thing about this entire game, with their designers credited, is the option of almost the entire history of Batmobile cars being available to choose between. You can have the 1960s Adam West car, the Batman animated series ones, the Arkham Asylum videogame franchise car, even Batman & Robin (1997) included side-by-side with the Christopher Nolan directed ones with bias. It is a nice touch, and yes, I openly admit choosing one of the Joel Schumacher directed film cars, specifically Batman Forever (1995), for a laugh in the first play.

The game has three choices, in two difficulties, split into missions per villain, one with Mr. Freeze, as an ice based villain who wishes to freeze Gotham City; Bane, not the idiosyncratically voiced one by Tom Hardy, but the original comic version as a big muscle man; and the Joker, the iconic villain of them all, a psychotic clown who here has managed to get a nuclear missile of all things, especially when one presumed, canonically to one of its film sequels, Superman got rid of all those in this universe. All these are known characters to many, so explaining the Joker in such detail may seem absurd too, but is worth bringing up as, for the video game, Batman as a franchise does provide a lot to go with that would lead to incredible games just in terms of personality if done well, something you see here in spite of ultimately my issues with the cabinet in general. This is especially as with the cut scenes and levels, Joker's is the most rewarding, whether in the most dynamic gameplay, even using the arcade cabinet's keypad, used for saving your process, to deactivate the missile, to the Joker talking to it like a temperamental baby.

It is however a shame the game is how it is. Without even needing to accelerate, it is both too simplistic but way too chaotic to feel a good grip on its premise. With most sections destroying enemies in pursuit, or avoiding them like an on-rail dodging game in all but name, it however becomes a visual noise of enemies and their fire to even recognise to dodge, making it easy to blow up and need to punch a quarter in without a sense that you failed and need to improve. Having a game with a semblance of freedom but effectively on rails, despite being allowed to drive in seemingly any direction, is not an issue but even if the break and acceleration pedals lose some meaning, the bigger issue does feel like the game is caught in a schism, where alongside this issue of visual clutter, it could have done with either emphasising this structure or fully embraced being an arcade vehicular combat game with an actual accelerator. Considering some of the tank combat games that came to the arcade over decades, it would have been interesting to have missions within time limits where you have more freewheeling routes or at least more emphasis on dodging enemies, more so as some of the Bat Mobiles, mostly the Christopher Nolan films, are close to literal tanks. Between collecting documents, items "stolen" by Cat Woman to finding a kidnapped Commissioner Gordon, more follow a route section, this could have been more spectacular if you were given more finesse to its main gameplay route of dodging enemies and destroying them, where the boss battles for this cabinet are the better moments which emphasise this, emphasising this is more of a two dimensional scrolling shooter in the disguise of a three dimensional form. There are joys to have with the game, but I personally find a better game from such a simple idea and iconic license is still up to create.

La Poison (1951)

Director: Sacha Guitry

Screenplay: Sacha Guitry

Cast: Michel Simon as Paul Louis Victor Braconnier, Germaine Reuver as Blandine Braconnier, Jean Debucourt as Maître Aubanel, Louis de Funès as André Chevillard, Marcelle Arnold as Germaine Chevillard, Georges Bever as Mr Gaillard

Ephemeral Waves

 

He has something of a chimera and of a clown.

A twee French comedy...about wanting to bump your spouse off their mortal coil. Even the opening credits have a whimsical politeness to them in contrast to this central premise, and that does not include the sweet natured tribute to the production team and lead actor Michel Simon from director-writer Sacha Guitry himself, letting everyone on staff out of character and job say hello to the audience before turning it into an admiration for Simon's talents. This is all in context of an incredibly misanthropic premise which makes this pleasant opening more striking with hindsight. This is pre-French New Wave cinema, a quietly spoken work from a time when the directors would be lambasted by this incoming wave as antiquated, or in the case of Guitry, gaining admiration by the likes of Francois Truffaut in his work and in his position as a director-writer with his own voice. The quaintness from the get-go is perfect for the premise, where in a quiet French village a man named Paul Braconnier (Simon) cannot stand his wife, and at fifty three, is contemplating murdering her, even consoling the local vicar on his hatred for her.

Telling the small town chemist's is busy with selling aspirin, products to help customers who cannot sleep, and seventy percent of the locals being constipated, presenting a bleak view of "harmonic" community life, especially as Blandine Braconnier (Germaine Reuver), the wife, is not an innocent either, wanting to buy rat poison in consideration to murder him too. Not a good look at "wholesomeness" in the slightest, and in context, when Guitry would pass in 1957, this belies the idea of how a director as they got older is stigmatised for getting "softer" in their attitudes and themes. Moving away from adapting his plays as he was in the early part of his career, and branching out into modern set works between historical pieces, the plays its content with a light grace, but you find yourself at a deeply miserable dinner between the central couple contrasted ironically by a love song on the radio making comparisons to being pigeons mating together despite the absurd contrast it has in the scene.

The film itself is quiet, clear filmmaking with no elaborate editing or camera set-ups. Documented is how Guitry, who admired Michel Simon, went out of his way to explicitly request the crew on the production were as efficient as possible, to only to one takes for scenes is possible, making this a short shot¹. Clear and precise in filmmaking, it is itself still loaded, its light hearted presentation bringing a barb like a beautiful spring flower which turns out to have thorns within it, like a scene where the shopkeepers, believing that having a spectacular event like someone giving birth to quadruplets would bring attention to a town from curious tourists and more customers, ask the vicar to his horror if he can perform a miracle on the spot if they bring someone's daughter to be healed by him. This constant undercutting of the tone is still, in context to a film plus fifty years old, incredible in its gleeful subversion.

The plot itself concerns when Paul, contemplating his plan, learns of a lawyer through his radio with an idiosyncratic take on murder and searches him out, even lying about having already murdered his wife to plan one which can be defended in the defendant box at court, a twisted idea of being able to reconstruct a fake murder to be innocent of self-defence. Here there is a historical context which likely influenced the content, where Sacha Guitry was accused of collaborating with the Nazis and imprisoned, which more than likely emphasised contempt for the French law system. A prolific stage actor and playwright as well, Guitry was still able to perform in the German occupation of France during World War II and, with his reputation as an artist even of interest to German soldiers, he was seen as a collaborator despite friends of his being imprisoned by the Nazis and one scenario, taking advantage of an officer's admiration of his work, to get prisoners of wars releases¹. Even without this personal context, there is a legitimate contempt, witnessed in the final scenes when even the kids ask and try to rationalise what murder and justice is, playing mock murders and trials with even a homemade guillotine stand-in built.

It is still transgressive in the modern day, and it reflects in its own way the contradictory and inadequate problems one could have with crimes being deal with legally. Trials are meant to rationalise and stick to logistical facts, something I can attest to having done jury service at least once in my life like so many readers of this potentially have, but when it comes to thinking about the reason why people would commit a crime, law as a concept has to struggle against the existentialism, alongside the fact you can bend and distort the way a trial works to win your case as this deals with. Even if in this case the justifications by Paul eventually are all extreme, not meant to be justifiable to let him get scot free but in context of a fabricated story, meant to fantasise about this taboo subject safely, let one cheer him on as he thumbs his nose at the institution. The only thing which has not aged well, or is going to be understandably challenged, is that his wife is an alcoholic shrew stereotype playing off to wife jokes. Not to defend the interpretation of the character here, but also factoring in how this broad stereotype found itself through pop culture for a long time, not just in one French film, so many are to be challenged for these stereotypes, it is also clearly part of the misanthropic edge to this entire work.

Sacha Guitry here does present how, with older films, you find works whose style and production do feel of an entirely different time in attitude, but where their content regardless of age remind one how these films were written as far as they could, as now, to shock and strike against what they felt needed mocking. The term "don't judge a book by its cover" is a cliché that is beneath the auteur, but I did come to La Poison with a sense of it being a film playfully whimsy with the subject of murder, but was not expecting how its gentle nature has a very wicked grin I also shared by its end credits.

 

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1) From On Life on Screen: Miseries and Splendor of a Monarch, a documentary by Dominique Maillet focusing on the film and its director-writer's life in connection to it which was included in the Masters of Cinema Blu-Ray release for La Poison.

The Driver's Seat (1974)

 

a.k.a. Identikit

Director: Giuseppe Patroni Griffi

Screenplay: Giuseppe Patroni Griffi and Raffaele La Capria

Based on the novella by Muriel Spark

Cast: Elizabeth Taylor as Lise; Ian Bannen as Bill; Guido Mannari as Carlo; Mona Washbourne as Mrs. Helen Fiedke; Luigi Squarzina as Lead Detective; Maxence Mailfort as Pierre; Andy Warhol as the English Lord

An Abstract Candidate

 

But orgasms are yang!

The Driver’s Seat, when I first heard of this film adaptation, was presented as a bizarre folly¹, something camp which is arguably deliberate when you get to Bill (Ian Bannen) and his macrobiotic diet. However there is so much more here, now you are in an era where the film can be seen in pristine form as intended than a bootleg¹, that is disarming on purpose, comedy there but morbid and, against the eerie nature inherent to many Italian productions in how they were made, a dread clinging to this. There is a perverse humour to our lead Lise (Elizabeth Taylor), on her way to Italy, meeting an older woman who asks which pulp novel is the more “sadomasochistic” for preference, one of the few moments, including her recounting in delight reading her lawyer son’s records on crimes, which is not from the source text but not out of place from the novella’s tone. The corpse humour however leads into the tale of Lise herself, a woman on a knife edge who is after the perfect man on her trip, but not for a clear reason until it is too late, especially as it has flash forwards when it is seen that Lise will be dead and the police will be trying to figure out what happened.

It is a befitting film from an author, Muriel Spark, who literature could be uncomfortable. She wrote stories which could be also whimsical in their tone whilst nonetheless posing moments which undercut it – The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) flashes past the lives (and abrupt deaths) of a troupe of teenage girls forming a cult around a female teacher whose liberal attitude is however cut by her ego and passion for Mussolini – and for the bleakness of the story’s final reveal, The Driver’s Seat has its own idiosyncrasies which blur the lines between funny and dark too.. All set in the (real life) tense situation of kidnappings, crime and terrorism in Italy, a vague location in the novella given flesh by the production at an incredibly turbulent period in modern Italy, where random outbreaks of crime even happen here in the airport, Lise is on a mysterious goal to find the right man. There is a wit, but with an aura where everyone is apparently afraid of Taylor’s Lise, you have a lead who is not likable on the surface, with a hair trigger temper over anything from a glass left in a hotel room which a dissolvable aspirin to stainless dresses, but is also someone who is visibly on a trajectory in a fragile state. It is great performance you could dismiss as camp except it has the layers of the film helping enrich Taylor’s acting. Take the first scene, more disarming in a location where feminine mannequins in the shop have a foil-like material wrapped around their heads like a crime scene; her temper at a stainless dress which causes upset is absurd until you see how Lise continues, and how her fear of “stainless” fabric is meaningful as the secrets are unlocked. Considering, as in the novella, her behavior is as much to get attention, from her over-the-top and multicolored clothes to her responses to people, like kicking a fuss at the airport security, then Taylor’s performance is appropriately heightened.

Some of this is gleefully absurd, taken from the novel for the most part. The touches the film add work, such as the novel Lise carries being something specific here - Richard Neely's The Walter Syndrome (1970), one of many pulp crime books from this period that causes one to think director/co-writer Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, or the co-screenwriter/novelist Raffaele La Capria, wanted to parody the giallo boom in Italian culture and cinema, as well as feel absolutely right for the twist that centers Lise's plans, as a murder mystery about a killer. The decision to emphasis the political turmoil the novella is set, by placing it in Italy, where we see an attempted kidnapping at the airport, and an ambassador for an Arabian King having their car blown up in the street, fits contextually for the time period and fits how the novel, while vaguer, nods to this period in general for the political strife too. Other passages are entirely from the book if enriched in the film, especially in the case of Bill.

The “macrobiotic diet” was a concept developed by Sagen Ishizuka, and codified by George Ohsawa, the later a Japanese educator who also drew from Zen Buddhism with its ideas of ying and yang being balanced by what you ate, which means it does have a streak of non-scientific New Age to it in concept. Even the most ultra cynical disapprover of alternative medical diets, like Penn Jillette, would be in Ohsawa’s corner, mortified, if they saw a real life representative of the macrobiotic diet like Bill, one of the many sexually predatory men from the novella who try to force themselves onto Lise aggressively, which requires a trigger warning but is in mind, in the end, she is the one in control making them look fools. The difference between the version of Bill in the book and this version is that Scottish actor Ian Bannen really adds so much to make him stand out, the first shot perfect as Bannen’s entrance fully gets the character over, looking lustfully at Lise on an airplane with a literal comparison to Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother wanting to eat her thrown back at him. Believing in a mandatory orgasm a day, ignoring the existence of masturbation, and that two in one day would cause him indigestion, alongside his habit of carrying tiny plastic bags of unpolished rice on his persons in a way suspiciously like he was smuggling cocaine into Italian soil, he is a cruel parody of New Age figures from this era. He is however also a perfect centre to the reoccurring aspect of Taylor’s Lise, as an older woman, among libidinous men trying to get a woman (even by force) despite Lise with no desire for sex, barring one scene by herself, but for a different goal.

The film leans on the police investigating the case more than the book, a crime thriller touch that does not neuter Spark’s novel but feels the same way legitimately, like Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970) by Elio Petri, as a way to emphasis the complex psychology at hand when other characters can present fragments of images of Lise. Yes there is plenty here which does scream “cult” – Andy Warhol cameos as a vague character from the book, a lord who Lise briefly fixates on, Warhol there at the right time, aptly around the time when his name presented the Italian shot Flesh for Frankenstein/Blood for Dracula (1973) films by Paul Morrissey, and also a perfect choice in hindsight for the tone, even in terms of an English lord clearly played by an artist from Pittsburgh in his pure white hair and suit. There is however so much here which a level above, even for a film streaked in camp, that is incredibly well made, a huge factor to the proceedings being Vittorio Storaro as the cinematographer. Set in modern environments, with a large portion of the film in septic white and alien-looking shopping malls, Storaro adds so much by himself in showing this fascinating but sterile world where Lise literally is the most colorful detail within them. It is a film which, like so many idiosyncratic productions particularly with the sixties and seventies, came but seemingly became lost to time, with no actual British release for the film until a 2023 British Film Institute Blu-Ray for a debut. It will confound a few viewers but feels too precise to dismiss. Certainly it makes a legitimate argument, from a figure of the golden age of Hollywood starlets both in terms of her own screen roles but the gossip around her life, that Elizabeth Taylor was both a great actress but one with this entire deeply unconventional period in her filmography – next to Boom (1968) and Secret Ceremony (1968 too) in terms of deeply unconventional films she controls – that is ripe for dissection.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric / Psychodrama

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

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1) Elizabeth Taylor's Craziest Role: 'The Driver's Seat' aka. 'Identikit', by Richard Metzger for Dangerous Minds, published 24th March 2011.

Wrath of the Skunkape (1997)

 

Director: Mike C. Hartman

Screenplay: Mike C. Hartman

Cast: Mike C. Hartman as Clause; John M. Morgan as Johan Von Smith; Jason Severson as Stinky Thumbs

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Skunky won’t you sing this song, Skunky, Skunky…

Wrath of the Skunkape is a film I would recommend to many. A micro budget, micro-length film from a director-writer Mike C. Hartman, he would go on with Silver Bullet Pictures to continue making other films, and this feels like the first attempts at making a movie with all the issues that you could imagine in his position, and things which have no aged well in throwing whatever wacky premise onto the walls to see what sticks too. I openly admit the reason I got some pleasure from this film, aside from only being forty minutes long, is that this has a lead that least makes those forty minutes compelling every time he is onscreen, even if he is improvising. That would be Jason Severson as Stinky Thumbs Arbuckle, out to revenge his brother Billy-Bob-Joe-Jr., and with Severson swinging for the fences, and his character pursuing the skunkape responsible over decades, he represents the pleasures one can find even in films which struggle in the micro-budget genre in their creation, in this case some of the content here, technically and in presentation, struggle like the first attempts of any person attempting to make a movie.

Skunkapes belong to a type of ape-like creature catalogued by cryptozoologists to inhabit forests and swamps in the southeastern United States, though alongside way too high a potassium build up for all the bananas it eats, this particular one is a monkey costume where the lack of usable mouth prevents the actor from eating them onscreen. Said to be really smelly, Skunkape as a film is split between a) an insanely cheesy no budget film which struggles with its lack of production, b) a very silly film, for the better, when Stinky Thumbs Arbuckle is on screen and, c) the one idea that, whilst tamer than it is presented, does add an unfortunate trait of scuzziness many may not be comfortable with about cryptoid apes being interested in human women, to paint that as politely as possible and needing to be dealt with later on in the review.

Not a lot happens, despite three other male characters being introduced, alongside there being an antagonist played by the director, a crazed German scientist who wants to capture the skunk ape to breed an army of them under him, barring some dialogue scenes and some “horror” scenes of the ape attacking people. Baring one strange tangent involving a seemingly English accented vagrant wanting cheese, this feels mostly improvised, with moments where this does show how it was shot on the fly. It has a production many may not be able to sit through, such as a camp fire scene at night where you cannot see anything baring a screen of orange-red from the fire. It also has licensed music, which would prevent it from getting an official release, such as Johnny Cash; one example was removed in the version I saw, as you hear the opening of Aerosmith’s Sweet Emotion before hastily cutting it off for banjo music.

As mentioned, this is another film with cyroptozoological ape people sexually interested in human women, and if that may raise an eyebrow in the word “another” being there, it is a slight list but there are a few films obsessed with this. There is a hardcore film called The Geek (1971) about this idea, released by Something Weird Video among their vast catalogue of weird titles where you could probably discover any subject like this got a low budget film back in the day, and there is the Video Nasty Night of the Demon (1980) which makes this a key plot point. Here, whilst it is ridiculous, and eventually involved actresses in bikinis tied to a tree, it is creepy and understandably will put people off. The film does feel like the silly ideas of a younger guy making a film, but this one with hindsight unfortunately went into something which becomes more an issue in the decades past, and when female characters are introduced, they are literally there for wearing bikinis. Whilst it is thankfully done with clothes on, this does get into content no matter haphazardly done, when the skunkape interferes with the male and female cast getting intimate, which is going to be unacceptable to many. Thankfully the film never goes further with this, as much because the film only gets to some dramatic stakes by the last ten minutes, but when even the end credit bloopers have the female cast being instructed by the men working on the film to pose the right way for these scenes, confused and little uncomfortable themselves, it is at least distasteful if not offensive. Even some of the dialogue about “perfect breeding hips” earlier on is going to offend some viewers, with the banter between male characters, only for me as a male viewer just glancing by in how absurd it is especially, even with that distasteful plot thread, with the inane silliness of a character with a mock German accent obsessed with an army of skunkapes being a creditable weapon, where the silliness of the production thankfully undermines questionable content for the better.

Stinky Thumbs/Severson is a godsend in comparison to all this, and thankfully he gets most of the film. Some viewers will not appreciate what is clearly a non-actor going for the most ridiculous southern accent and even repeating himself, but there is something which worked for me with his obsession in skunkapes not being able to see food unless its green, or just shouting nonsense about wanting to catch the skunkape and being impatient about it. He is the kind of thing, if you are able to appreciate micro-budget genre films even when they fail, you come to appreciate the more of them you watch, for the levity, bordering between the intentional and unintentional, where you see the fictionality of what a film is as a construct being blurred, by what is undercutting the craft but is charming and entertaining in itself. Also Severson’s way of saying his lines is so over-the-top, on a gut level, it is just funny for me as a viewer. When you feel uncomfortable with the entire treatment of women in the film, no matter if the amateurish nature undercuts it, or the film is a series of prolonged scenes of dialogue, Stinky Thumbs emphasizes something in his dialogue to a comedic affect or when he ends up in a slap fight with the skunkape by the final scene. Alongside the surprisingly good country music on the soundtrack, these are the things that help get through even a film like this. Silver Bullet Pictures made this available on their YouTube page on the 18th May 2012, which I am glad of as all films deserve to be preserved and seen, but this is a film I cannot recommend to a viewer unless you can find that sense of fun within it. Mike C. Hartman would go on to make more films, and in comparison, including the concerns of the content with is questionable, it is truly one of those early films someone makes over a few weekends, for good and for bad.

The Adventures of Sam & Max: Freelance Police (1997-8)

 

Studio: Nelvana

Director: Steve Whitehouse

Screenplay: J.D. Smith, Steve Purcell, Hugh Duffy, Marty Isenberg, Robert N. Skir, Bob Ardiel, Jamie Tatham, Tim Burns, Dale Schott and Tracy Berna

Based on the comic book series by Steve Purcell

(Voice) Cast: Harvey Atkin as Sam; Rob Tinkler as Max; Dan Hennessey as the Commisioner; Tracey Moore as Darla "The Geek" Gugenhee; Patrick McKenna as Lorn the Friend for Life

An Abstract Candidate

 

It might not look much, but in two weeks they put me on fries. Then they’ll pay!

By episode two, this show has parodied 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), when tuning the monolith to stop it causing suffering leads to the simian people living around it to discover roller disco for the better. This is somewhat appropriate for this title, a one season adaptation of Sam & Max, originally a comic book by Steve Purcell, adapting the characters his brother Dave started in their youth, apatly being the result of Steve parodying his brother’s own comics just to annoy him¹. Most will know the videogame adaptation by LucasArts, the point & click game Sam & Max Hit the Road (1993), as Steve Purcell became a staff member and brought the characters with him. From their golden age of these titles, Sam & Max was a strange game as much as a funny one, a touchstone to weird Americana which this series gets into, a franchise which would see a reboot in 2006, when with Sam & Max Save the World, Telltale Games would bring the characters back in a series of episodic games. In the midst of this, was this Canadian animated series that I actually saw an episode of on Fox Kids on satellite television in the UK, the episode about a “glazed McGuffin”, so I have had an emotional investment to track this series down.

Wondering why the series was cancelled, effectively thirteen episodes with twenty four segments, I would not be surprised alongside how precarious television is in general, where even a good show will not be continued with, that a work which feels more inclined for adults to appreciate it more was not going to succeed. It feels barely like a children’s show, disguised as such when it is more a dissection of one, where in episode two, going by each being ten minutes stories, the leads are looking directly to the camera and breaking the fourth wall among many times, saying that they will not have commercials only to cut to one. Even the music is eclectic as it goes – the title theme is jazz verging on avant-garde, and eventually with the Apocalypse Now parody in a later episode, when the leads are in central park in New York City, a literal jungle here searching for the commissioner’s lost keys, you get psychedelic rock in the score.

The premise is scatter shot on purpose aside from the fact that Sam in an anthropomorphic dog in a suit, Max is a bordering psychotic “rabbit-thing” and both are true best friends forever. As “freelance police”, in a world where New York City is even more rundown to the point you get a joke about a rat literally carrying a baby on its back away, they are the only sane thing to bring in for the weirder cases if they do not get into their own mischief along the way. The original videogame was already unpredictable, getting into a secret tribe of Bigfoot, as this show gets into for an episode, and an apocalypse to be averted, so this is not strange ground for the franchise. Even with prior awareness of this, however, this show is still legitimately strange, the kind of show which does not try to explain why it has shifted into a parody of the night Mary Shelley devised the story of Frankenstein, set in the period past, to allow a story of Max’s tale being resurrected and developing sentience, or how episode fourteen involving them having to deal with a giant robot which has done its job, even if that means taking it over to Japan to fight a kaiju sized baby.

Probably more striking before you get into the plots or the visual look of the series is how verbose the dialogue is. Likely to go over some adults’ head, and even referencing Aristotle at one point, it is hilarious at times and shows how the series is able to get away with pure disregard for logic, in how this show finds ways to be this gleefully witty even when it is weird. A lot of the experience is just viewing the series and not expecting what will transpire, but there are good episodes just by themselves – a Die Hard Christmas parody is funnier because you have Sam’s grandma, an awesome one-off of a woman who apparently survived the Korean War and put most of the prisoners away she now visits and gives gifts too on the series, even if being a stereotypically lovable grandma, and armed with fruit cake both likely to be bulletproof and proven to break a whole foot’s worth of bones when used as a defensive weapon. And it is amazingly twisted in a lot of its humour as well, where the sense it is merely pretending to be a children’s show is clearly obvious at times, in how the Frankenstein parody gets into the idea of desecrating graves, only to get a Victorian era drive-in fast food place to provide fake body parts, or helping sentient rats on the moon avoid being used to stir into coffee by giant cockroaches. There is one entire segment, about the practical uses of a pancreas, such as being a door stop, which is just an excuse to get body organs onscreen without being too gory.

There is also stuff in here I wish, as original concepts from this TV series, returned into later videogames, such as Darla "The Geek" Gugenheek, the sole female character in the cast but a cool one as the most sober figure in the leads’ circle, as their gadget creator and friend, cool in the sense of the straight man in their comedy who still has the appropriate cynicism for the tone as a teen prodigy able to accept the lunacy that transpires in this world. Some may not be as fond, in his two episodes, for Lorne “the Friend for Life”, one of many ways these shows were perversely mocking their own obsessive fan bases, something you see even in the Comic Book guy in The Simpsons, a super fan for Sam and Max whose enthusiasm is too much even for them. That he willingly breaks the law, and eventually ends up hijacking a Swiss tourist blimp to for his heroes to save the day in, is an ultra-cynical joke contrasted by how potentially annoying or insulting the character could be, as he really cuts down into the bone with hindsight about fandom for pop culture. (The blimp episode would also not be acceptable, in its jokes, post 9/11).

A huge portion of the show, and these characters included, is a fixation on weird and “lowbrow” Americana, the world of the largest balls of string attractions, which was a prominent aspect in locations in the first game, alongside junk food and general pop culture, be it the bigfoot episode, explosive corndogs as a single episode joke, a Jerry Springer parody required to settle the marriage problems of Greek Gods Zeus and Hera, or that one of the villains’ plans, only evil because he has the brains removed from the locals to turn them into zombies for his lair, is to create sea monkeys which actually live up to the years of false advertising. Said villain, Mack Salmon, also has to be a hyper intelligent fish in a robot suit which, like Bob the Goldfish in the Earthworm Jim franchise, is general weirdness that can also be found throughout the nineties in general. Fast food employers, unwisely, are employed by a super villainess who wishes to extract all the worst traits of tourists and use it as a biological viral weapon, and like the game, Sam and Max clearly like their strange on the road attractions as they do junk food and television. The glazed McGuffin episode I remember in fact, a reference to the “McGuffin” Alfred Hitchcock used as a term, is entirely of its era of idiosyncratic (and highly unhealthy) junk food full of preservatives and the streak of political correctness campaigners from the time, as someone gets their favorite snack taken off the shelves and, in their attempts to hound him to change his mind, ends with him snapping and trying to murder them. Mocking fifties pop culture, at a time when nineties culture reflected on the past, you get an entire episode, if slighter than the premise could have become, about a figure from a children’s TV show named Dangly Deever being brought into the then-present and being forced to accept a world worse than Rudy Giuliani’s worst nightmares.

As for the leads themselves, they nonchalantly take most of this in, with the show having a streak of post-irony to it all, the pair blasé no matter how dire the situation, such aliens running a diner where they feed customers other customers, effectively riffing on Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste (1987)  in as child friendly form as they can. They do not act like cartoon characters in fact, as in possibly one of the issues a viewer could have, they never go off-model as anyone else in this world, a concept for comedic timing in animation of distorting your characters for moments for emphasis in the moment, instead the two figures appropriate for this highly details and vivid world standing back and commenting in the absurdity until they need to get their hands dirty, even in reference to being a fictional show. They are capable of nobility, such as getting an artificial heart as quickly as they can to the President of the United States, but they also willingly mess around with time travel and change it, giving a caveman a rocket launcher, to see what happens in the future. It is not with surprise these characters, in this version, were not going to take the show over more than one season, for they seem as much reflections to their writers, gleefully stepping on clichés in the medium, rather than making something which is meant to have adventure and fill space between advertisement.

I have nothing but admiration for the show. It dangerously gets close to being too weird for the sake of it, but the level of humour is so consistent that it succeeds, with how many jokes land and even when something is so abrupt, in strangeness or just kneecapping expectations, to cause me to laugh. The show is helped simply by the fact that it is one season and cannot outstay its welcome. As much as I am fascinated by the idea of how they could have continued this, a one-one season which knew it was doomed, ending on a final episode which, in another inspired touch, is a clip show using scenes that are newly animated from stories we never saw, there was as much chance it would have been compromised if it managed to be hit. I think, truthfully, its home in videogames where the big success came from was where these characters can rightly stay, with this instead the tangent that we really just need to be more readily accessible.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric / Metatextual / Surreal

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

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1) The History of Sam & Max: Part 1: The Early Years. From Telltale Games’ site, archived from the original on January 3^rd 2008 and preserved on the Wayback Machine.

Games of the Abstract: Three Dirty Dwarves (1996)

 

Developer: Appaloosa Interactive

Publisher: SegaSoft

One to Three Players

Sega Saturn

 

Tragically a rare game nowadays, Three Dirty Dwarves is cumbersome at points, but it is a deliciously unique and weird as it takes the scrolling beat-em-up and skewers it, making up for the times this is awkward with some true imagination on screen. Two figures have to be thanked for this: E. Ettore Annunziata, who was behind the original concept and story, and its developer Appaloosa Interactive. Annunziata is a name who has gained a cult appreciation as he is behind Ecco the Dolphin, a unique creation for Sega hardware which played to Genesis / Mega Drive fans as an unconventional franchise. Annunziata is a figure with willingness, even with games which still played to genre tropes, of making them very unconventional. He is like a man out of time, as a game like Kolibri (1995), a scrolling shooter which is however about a hummingbird, would be something you would presume came from the modern indie era, only to have actually been funded by Sega, Kolibri for the infamous 32X add-on as one of its few games.  

Amongst Annunziata's career as a producer and conceptualizer through Sega, two of them were sadly lost on the Saturn as rarer titles. One is Mr. Bones (1996), a deeply odd multi genre hybrid, like a mini game collection with a plot, about a resurrected skeleton with the taste for blues guitar, and Three Dirty Dwarves, to which the second figure worth nodding to is the Hungarian video game developer Appaloosa Interactive, frequent collaborators with Annunziata. Founded in 1982 as Novotrade, the later Appaloosa Interactive were a Hungarian company who helped bring Ecco to be and their work on Three Dirty Dwarves too produces a very idiosyncratic production. Especially with the sense of the animated scenes here suddenly allowing me to nod to the appreciated art of Eastern European animation, if combined with something from the post-Ren and Stimpy era of cartoons from the USA, you have two groups coming together to bring something unique.

One cut scene, if you do not press start at the first screen, explains this strange game’s context. Four children, military experiments to produce hyper intelligent figures to help cause conflict, to their creator’s ire are pacifists more interested in tabletop role playing games than violence. In this world, that which is fiction is actually an alternative reality, bringing forth three dwarven anti-heroes (and monsters from their world) from that interrupted tabletop game to help rescue these children from the military base, even if they have to ransack a sporting goods store for weapons and march through the American cities in a violent rampage. One takes a baseball bat and baseballs for projectiles; one a bowling balls and pins; the last, as hunting exists as a sport in the USA, has a shotgun, and the trio go forth causing mayhem.

This for a beat-em-up, having to go through stages picking through goons with a limited set of attacks, is idiosyncratic even before you get to fighting an entire gym, the building itself and not the occupants, nor the baseball mini-game. One to three players can play its three leads, and it is only in hard mode on the difficulty options where a conventional form of health bar is brought in. Instead, going by the idea you have the three dwarves to choose from even in the one player mode, all onscreen and able to be switched between in single player on the fly, they themselves need to be protected. One hit knocks one out, and all three out ends your chances, but this is contrasted as a potentially hard gameplay mechanic with the fact that a) in multiplayer, you can wake yourself up, or b) in any option, a nice whack to your follow dwarf does not cause harm but actually restores them back as a usable fighter. Neither is there any lives or a traditional game over; everyone out means just restarting the level, only a lack of save function for the game your other obstacle in trying to beat the challenges for a game you could clear in an hour or so. This game is frustrating at times, like all beat-em-ups as you fight through a curious horde of enemies, so this different style will add newer frustrations for some players, but it is an inspired take which, with the ability to keep charging ahead, is to its virtue.

It is befitting such a strange game, where level one is tame in comparison to the later game, yet would be weird to most casual players. The first level is tame only because, by level two, you soon into the game have to have a boss fight against a man entirely covered in dogs that throw them at you, which as opening bosses in any videogame goes has to be one of the most intimidating for any game even claiming to be "quirky" or "original" decades after Three Dirty Dwarves' release trying to match this in that area. Matching the visuals and the gameplay is a motley assortment of obstacles and challenges in your way. Some have aged - it is a weird fight, in a car junkyard, with a diminutive voodoo priest riding a headless chicken, but that archetype has become problematic, as is the one female orc in a dress who with hug your team to death until you figure out to throw a male suitor to her - but even some of the edgy choices, like gun tooting postmen, have aged more to reflect the nineties than being offensive like the stereotypes have, where cartoons for kids from this time, let alone videogames like this, has a willingness to be edgy and scuzzy. This particularly game baring the few times it has questionable designs also presenting some delightfully perplexing moments even one after another in the same level.

Elderly homeless women armed with duck tape contrast with biologically mutated axe welding blue babies, to fork throwing criminals on Staten Island to military machines armed with giant booting abilities, and as a result, the most comparable thing to this game in this genre, for a unique tone which keeps wrong footing you with its next level, is Denjin Maki 2: Guardians (1995), a true compliment as one of the most surreal of the beat-em-up genre's existence, in good ways as well as bringing in such a unique tone and mood to match these designs. Unlike that game, this is simpler for a beat-em-up, not as elaborate with its combat controls if with more attack buttons to work with, and instead what is more idiosyncratic for Three Dirty Dwarves is in its systems, even when a health bar in some form is added in higher difficulties, and even in terms of the tangents in genre. Like Mr. Bones was, there are some left field turns which are clearly trademarks of E. Ettore Annunziata as much as Appaloosa Interactive looking at this genre and presenting their own takes. Even in terms of the beat-em-up levels, the boss battles (which are their own levels) have their own weirdness, including one player only sections, such as the aforementioned fight against an actual gym building, throwing protein shake at you and walking about on human feet, or the fight with the dragon, which begins by riding a wrecking ball into the screen to destroy the building it is hiding within before the conflict starts proper. For a game this short in scale, in mind to the longer games being generated for consoles at the time, it is a wild journey worth the one hour or so, where even hitching into a truck to reach a destination is its own level for a tangent.

The presentation helps so much. The animation, the few that are here, feel like the creation, even in digitized FMV, of people who honed their craft over the decades before in animated productions outside of videogames, whilst yet befitting this perverse take on Americana which feels like a twisted animated cartoon I might have seen growing up in the nineties. The music by András Magyari, Attila Dobos and Attila Héger as well is gleefully quirky, adding a spin to this distorted world where, from the Bronx to a military base, everything feels off and dirty in a way that is somehow still cartoonish. The game sadly become one of the rare titles for the Sega Saturn, which is sadly neither surprising as this was always going to be a cult game on a console, the Saturn, where the idiosyncratic titles would become rare even if it was losing the console war in the West. In 1996 alone, Super Mario 64 was released, as was Crash Bandicoot, and Tomb Rider and the original Resident Evil, whilst one of the few exceptions of an idiosyncratic game which got heavy promotion in this year was NiGHTS into Dreams..., which had a huge weight of expectation behind it as a Sonic Team title and a killer app for the Saturn itself. This was always going to be among the quirky titles which get stuck as "cult" titles even if they never get released again. This did get a PC port, but it has become one of the curiosities and underrated pieces from a console where a lot of its most fascinating games have become rarer to acquire. A shame as this maligned title is truly unique and brimming is a magic to its nature.

Vertigo (1958)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Screenplay: Alec Coppel and Samuel Taylor

Based on the novel D'entre les morts by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac

Cast: James Stewart as John "Scottie" Ferguson; Kim Novak as Madeleine Elster; Tom Helmore as Gavin Elster; Barbara Bel Geddes as Marjorie "Midge" Wood

 

Vertigo was once a critically maligned film from Alfred Hitchcock only to grow into one of his most critically lauded, so much so it knocked off Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941) from the top spot of the Sight & Sound magazine poll for greatest film ever made in 2012. That was not exactly an easy achievement to have completed when Citizen Kane was number one before it for five plus decade, and the fact Vertigo has gained this stature is both an achievement but also strange for me when viewing the film. Vertigo is a true one-off deserving to have done this, but it is a difficult film to digest, one which is possible to criticise for being too languid, too obvious and at times too stripped of Hitchcock's precise, expert filmmaking, even having something the director himself considered a plot flaw in how reliant the protagonist’s acrophobia would be for the plot the succeed¹. It is also justifiable to champion, even if it involves digging into his own psyche at the same time as a filmmaker, for how alien, disquieting and hypnotic as a film it is. The premise is one perfect for a Hitchcock thriller: when he develops acrophobia and vertigo at heights, San Francisco detective John "Scottie" Ferguson (James Stewart) is forced to retire from his career, but is asked by an old friend to follow his wife Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak) under the belief she has been possessed by one of her late ancestors. The results of taking this job lead to Scotty becoming detached from reality chasing after a woman he falls in love with, one who might not be all she seems. This however leads to a very different result, an unnerving melodrama with vaguely Gothic tinges.

You have to accept a lot of poetic license. That Scotty's vertigo is a MacGuffin. That a major plot twist is shown earlier than it would in any other film, and very obvious if you are attuned to these types of plots, turning the rest of the movie into a type of psycho-dramatic character piece that roots itself into a direction detached from the rational. If you "get" Vertigo's tone and appreciate its crafted elegance, however, it is an unnerving film about psychological breakdown and neurosis, the plot crux more to do with the emotions of two characters, Scottie and Madeleine, who become more emotionally disconnected from reality and pull the rest of the film with them into their heightened worlds. For the moments of lightness that take place, screwball comedy with Scottie's friend and ex-fiancée Midge Wood (Barbara Bel Geddes), who still loves him, most of the film is connected to Scottie almost entirely, onscreen for most of the film in the centre during his descent into dark obsession.  When the film shifts to its second half, the already mentioned plot twist which would usually happen at the end of another thriller is suddenly revealed halfway through with half the film left, leaving Vertigo in uncharted waters where one is disturbed by Scottie's increasingly erratic behaviour after he is briefly hospitalised.

Passages of Hitchcock's career have this film's tone, an odd supernatural or psychological murkiness. Rebecca (1940) is an obvious cornerstone of supernatural melodrama, even Under Capricorn (1949) expressing his interest into slow burn dramas based on hidden neurosis. However even the dream sequence in Spellbound (1945) is safeguarded by the fact, despite being designed by Salvador Dali, that it is a dream whilst Vertigo, despite also having a dream sequence, is entirely in the vague and mysterious. In Vertigo the characters are drawn along narratively by emotions and unseen forces, not elaborate plots of other Hitchcock films, locations such as flower shops, woodlands and a mission called Mission San Juan Bautista all becoming imbued with ghosts of many forms, literally in an image at the ending in the bell tower of the mission. The use of striking colour especially adds to this. Made in the height of Hollywood's Technicolor era, the film is striking in its aesthetic and use of San Francisco locations, but it is especially when you get to the interiors this stands out. Those scenes emphasises the ghostly air from the red walls of a restaurant that is repeatedly entered by the characters and the reoccurrence of the colour green in the second half which purges the world into a sickly obsessive form. It is a deeply perverse film in its themes, carefully dictated by Stewart and Novak, between them managing to keep the film's tone in the right groove, despite the visible age difference, Stewart able to switch himself from the stereotypically jovial and charming man he is seen as in cinema to someone almost shell shocked or a walking comatose, while Novak also has to juggle a complicated role when the film pans out in the end.

Shot in said lush Technicolor by director of photography Robert Burks, a regular collaborator with Hitchcock into the early sixties, Vertigo is as much able to work because the aesthetic of classic Hollywood that the story is depicted through, especially when this takes the studio system style of Hollywood, always evoking for me the sense of the elaborate and stylish, literally the "Dream Factory" creating dreamy films even when shot on location, and undercut it with this tale of obsession. The rear-screen projection for actors driving cars to the colour palettes now become unintentional tools for creating heightened dreams, here becoming more and more unsettling as this narrative of a love for a construct continues. The San Francisco locations, especially the gorgeous panoramas of the sprawling metropolis, add a sense of scale, keeping a Gothic tone for the plot but setting it in a modernist urban environment. Another big contribution to the film is Bernard Hermann's orchestral score, the drama contained in it solidifying the characters' emotions as a lush but far-from-generic score, adding further to the mysterious air surrounding all Scottie encounters and does. That it can switch from the legitimately romantic to the disturbed, and you can pick up the difference in the orchestral instruments and the notes they play, is evidence of its success as a score.

The most openly unconventional aspects of Vertigo are specially created animated sequences. The first is the opening credits by Saul Bass, the title emerging from a woman's eye in extreme close-up, the very modern design of Bass' work for Hitchcock still to this day incredible for their craft but also unique compared to modern title designs still, the use of colour and shape. They become almost avant-garde especially as the credits do not portray anything that takes place in the movie but sets up an unnerving mood it has. The other is the mid-film dream sequence designed by abstract artist John Ferren that takes the same route, flower petals spiralling outward and a figure falling into the void, one of the most iconic images of Hitchcock's career being James Steward's disembodied head staring straight at the viewer which comes from this sequence. It is an iconic image as he is sucked into a mental abyss of his own psyche that he is chained to for the rest of the narrative. It aptly sets up the emotional shock, in the series of events that set up the second half, which will turn Scottie drastically.

Barring its style, including the innovative depiction of Scottie's vertigo, a distortion of our perception as well as his as it is always in first person, cinematic space growing in size without any seemingly actual movement, the rest of the film's unconventional tone is internal. Alfred Hitchcock was a Hollywood director who made commercial films, his auteurism coming from how clear and involved in their craft he was from the get-go of each production, but Vertigo does reach its tendrils into the expressionistic, with its languid pace, in that it is all induced and affected by its characters' minds. When it gets to the second half as Scottie meets another woman similar to Madeleine, the ghosts of the first half change from historical ones to psychological baggage of sexual and gender issues. About a man's memory and view of others becoming distorted and affected as he tries to control and groom this second woman to be Madeleine, Hitchcock was completely blunt about the sexual meaning of this in his interviews with Francois Truffaut, even going as far as say that Scottie was “indulging in a form of necrophilia”², but there is as well the notion of idealism and how it can become poisoned is noticeable. It also cannot be denied that, to an uncomfortable degree after this with his problematic history with Tippi Hedren, Hitchcock himself had blatantly obvious fixations on the idealised woman, and whether he can be defended as an artist for this or not, Vertigo becomes a text unintentionally, but with greater weight, in seeing obsession as a concept for the perfect woman be dissected by its plot.

[Spoiler warning. Skip italicized text if you do not want the film to be spoilt for you]

Adding to this is knowing the woman Scottie is obsessed with is a mere image, a fake stand-in for his friend's real wife in a twist Italian giallo filmmakers would have ran with. The woman he loves manages to die twice in fact, his love only existing for the form of Madeleine, wearing a certain flower, a certain way to their blonde hair style tied up in the back, a certain grey suit dress designed for the film by Edith Head, and an image created based on the real wife, the individual Kim Novak's character actually is and Carlotta Valdes, the ancestor Madeleine is said to be possessed by, amalgamated together. The image of femininity he adored is a mere picture, while the stand-in who promises to love him is rejected for admitting how she is not the Madeleine he wanted and that she was used to trick him into a murder scheme. The "abstract" I am obsessed with in cinema, how I use the word, is as much about the questioning of subjective reality, and the theme of Vertigo of an idealised image, a beautiful woman, being both impossible to be reach and not even existing is a good example of this type of questioning, when the symbols of femininity for Scottie not the woman herself is what he desires. As an entertainment film, this makes the film a cautious tale of this obsession, and that the film is as languid as it is befits this.

[Spoiler ends]

Whilst there would be a film later on which is stranger than this in tone - The Birds (1963) even as a monster film is more stranger and chilling in the baggage it evokes - Vertigo is haunting as an entertainment feature, and as art, because its conceit is about the image one has overtaking reality as Scotty is chasing after a phantom in many a sense. This comes with mind as I have had to gradually warm to Vertigo over the times I have seen it. It does meander significantly halfway through, noticeably slower in pace to other Hitchcock films, and that makes it a film whose acclaim is fascinating in that it shows visible flaws in plotting and pacing that cannot be denied. It possesses something which overcomes this, even if it is unnerving, even before the Sight & Sound polls, back when the film was not readily available to see, causing someone like Brian De Palma to openly riff on the same theme of perception in Obsession (1976), the title spelling out the themes openly. Film critics dug into this film when it was more readily available to see, and what virtues the film has - its performances, the music, the aesthetic style - make what would be a hammy melodrama at points in another's hands enticing as it is disconcerting.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Expressionist / Mind Bender/ Weird

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

 

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1) Truffaut, François (1985). Hitchcock/Truffant, Revised Edition. First Touchstone Book Edition. Pg. 247.

2) Truffaut, François (1985). Hitchcock/Truffant, Revised Edition. First Touchstone Book Edition. Pg. 244.

Yakuza Apocalypse (2015)

 

Director: Takashi Miike

Screenplay: Yoshitaka Yamaguchi

Cast: Hayato Ichihara as Akira Kageyama; Riko Narumi as Kyoko; Shô Aoyagi as Angus; Kiyohiko Shibukawa as Aratetsu; Ryushin Tei as Killer Priest; Yayan Ruhian as Kyoken (Mad Dog); Masanori Mimoto as Kaeru-kun (The Frog)

Cinema of the Abstract

 

Yakuza Apocalypse is when one refuses to die when shot full of holes because you are a yakuza vampire, and the toughest opponent is in a giant frog costume. Or that Takeshi Miike, used to the crime genre and yakuza tales, returns to the genre in his later career and make an epic work proudly deadpan in how increasingly absurd it is as it goes along. Yakuza Apocalypse is going to be an acquired taste especially at this point Miike’s career, where he gained acclaimed for films like 13 Assassins (2010), because it is a cavalcade of new absurdities followed by a finale which is left unanswered. This is a film which takes itself seriously only to be argued to be a pure joke by the end, set in a town where the recession hit leaving it unstable, the yakuza looking after the place about to devour itself when the noble and kind hearted leader, who also happens to be a vampire, is assassinated in a power shift. This feels like a throwback to a certain type of film from Miike’s direct-to-video era in the nineties, specially the more brazenly pulpier ones like Full Metal Yakuza (1997), and in that context, what could already appeal to a viewer without prior experience as a “wacky” cult film gains more credibility in this knowing how Miike, helped in this film by screenwriter Yoshitaka Yamaguchi, carved a niche for this type of movie that felt a bar higher than others.

With significantly less transgressive (and in places problematic) content from some of those earlier films, Miike’s virtue even without the gems of his more seriously minded tone is being able to juggle tones fully, between being able to be sincere in the moment only to undercut expectations, such as the leader’s food source being former yakuza, imprisoned in a cellar, who spend their time knitting and being treated as if in a reform school for criminals. One of his most loyal members, Akira Kageyama (Hayato Ichihara), is the one yakuza who cannot get a tattoo due to his sensitive skin, which will change when his boss is killed but not without passing on the mantle of yakuza vampire to protect the town. What this becomes after this lengthy set up is a freewheeling mass of pulp storytelling where the time allows it to be fleshed out even when a joke. Clearly this was made as a flex in genre for the sake of genre, apt as this was produced by Nikkatsu, who at this point looked back at their legacy – the constant stream of crime and genre b-films from the fifties and sixties, to their pinku films – and produced films inspired from them in the then-modern era of the 2010s, not throwbacks but modern equivalents. Yakuza Apocalypse feels like what would happen if Seijun Suzuki had not been fired for what he got away with for a film like Branded to Kill (1967), adding here horror, open surrealism and martial arts fight scenes.

And credit to Miike and the production team, they hired martial artists and shoot it well, including the stunt casting of Yayan Ruhian, an Indonesia actor and martial artist who came to prominence through Gareth Evans’ The Raid (2011), here getting to play a striking member of the villainous group who took over the yakuza, if with an eccentric touch that he starts with wearing a nice ironed shirt, glasses and looking like a buff train spotter with a backpack full of maps, one of the many times Yakuza Apocalypse presents its story with seriousness whilst also being sardonic about it. That the film ends with no resolve – a central villain, an actual kappa, disappears with no explanation, or the world ending scenario about a giant kaiju sized frog creature –has happened a few times in his career. Whether it was time, budget or the source material not being fully available, be it Fudoh: The Next Generation (1996) having an open ending, or Dead or Alive (1999) famously ending with the most abrupt shift into worldwide destruction possible, Miike has done this so many times with his career that it is a trademark. It feels on purpose a lot of the time, and there is so much that stands within these films, as here too, where even his more indulgent genre films are more interesting than many. There is a whole series of weird subplots which make this particular case more standout, where an older female yakuza, having betrayed her boss, goes through a Lady Macbeth scenario if she keeps hearing a dripping noise only in her brain and tries growing civilians in a green house, or that Kageyama ends up turning everyone into yakuza vampires, from schoolgirls to young boys who upgrade by removing their hair (and fear) with revenge in their heart and a new afro-perm.

It is, as a film which fits the director’s career, one which would raise an eyebrow for many, for good as well as he still takes the production seriously, still making these broad archetypes have meaning to them even when the scenarios are absurd, such as the female yakuza losing her sanity or Kageyama having to grow up quickly in his role. Even when this is utterly insane, it is depicted with the likes of a frog mascot being the ultimate fighter, who is cast with a competent martial artist who can even fight in a full mascot costume. That one figure emphasizes, even as pure pulp for the sake of entertainment, the little weird details which have been with Miike’s films early in the career, playing to the joke (he struggles down stares) whilst still being credible as a figure in the world itself (including his death stare). Yakuza Apocalypse among Takashi Miike’s films is not a canonical title, but it is one which succeeds if you take it as a pure entertainment spectacle with all its absurdist touches; if you have been a fan of his, aware of how prolific he is and how films in this tone came before, this is a follow up to this in his career again which is successful.

Abstract Spectrum: Deadpan / Wacky

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