Games of the Abstract: Bug Too! (1996)

 

Developer: Realtime Associates/SegaSoft

Publisher: Sega

One or Two Player

Originally for: Sega Saturn

 

Bug Too is a game I had always wanted to play, seeing a video demo on a Sega Flash Vol. Three disc, the demo discs which briefly existed for the British Official Sega Saturn magazine where this was just one of the videos, not one of the playable demos. Sadly, I did not get many of them, despite there being only seven demo discs¹. All those games, notwithstanding another demo disc I had, filtered into my adolescent brain games I have had an obsession to play even if sadly many are the more expensive titles for the Saturn for the original physical versions in Europe - Mr. Bones (1996), Enemy Zero (1996), Die Hard Arcade (1996) - a sacred list of titles I wished to play. As much as it comes with delight to finally play Bug Too!, as a title among that list, sadly I have to also mention that for a game which had plenty to love, you need to be patient with some cardinal sins of the platformer genre which did make it as agonising as a game I finally got to play and enjoy.

The original Bug (1995) is synonymous to the Saturn in the West as one of the first games ever released for the console, when released in the United States in May 11th 1995 and Europe on July 8th 1995, alongside the original Panzer Dragoon (1995) and Clockwork Knight (1994) as one of its most prominent titles which people may know of. Developed by Realtime Associates, who cut their teeth from 1986 into the sixteen bit era of games, the prequel was confirmed as being originally an official Sonic the Hedgehog project, as a jump into 3D, before it got kyboshed by Sega of Japan². So instead, alongside the messy history of Sonic the Hedgehog never getting a proper entry in the main franchise for that console, we got the titular Bug instead, an insect humanoid actor who, in the first game, is acting in a film we play as a game, rescuing his family from a Queen spider. Bug was a hard game, something to consider with this sequel, as alongside not having a save system in the conventional sense, my childhood memories vividly remember how its long sprawling levels, just in the first world, full of hazards and enemies meant I never got off that world unless I used a cheat code for level skipping. Even if both are technically 2D.5 platformers, with restricted routes to travel or move, that game and its sequel are games whose challenge or attempts to bring platforming to a polygonal world, with all the hiccups especially for Bug Too alongside its virtues.

Bug Too has as loose a plot as you could get, with just the context that with two new characters to choose from - our titular lead, who would get a "Best Buns" award for how much he twerks his posterior when allowed to get away with it, a lovable dog-maggot hybrid named Maggot, and one of a few questionable archetypes in this game, a Blaxploitation Disco-Stu bug humanoid named Superfly. They have been told by a film executive, rushing them over the worlds in his limo, to churn out films in a variety of genres which are our worlds, each with the level select now done by moving around a stage to access them in any route, which is distinct to say the least for this time. The first game was a an early era attempt at polygonal platforming if sticking in a 2D.5 form, that you worked on a restricted pathway even if the world is in three dimensional graphics. That meant restricting the paths ahead for you and, in mind to its pre-Sonic plan, having you wonder to and fro the screen, into the background and even upside down on sprawling surreal dream worlds of insects living on floating platforms. Bug Too is not different but does factor in a quirk which effects the gameplay as you have more freedom of movement; you still have limited paths, but alongside mazes to find all the bonuses, you have to factor in what place within a platform you are now stood on, even having to jump forwards towards the screen in multiple and dangerous platforming moments.

I have to credit Bug Too for personality. If you want pure surreal game world logic, this has this from the get-go with the horror themed world, Weevil Dead 2, of floating platforms with falling hedgerows, zombie weevils and ghosts. The Egyptian theme levels for world two, Lawrence of Arachnia, are kind of obvious, as is Antennae Day 4 for the sci-fi ones, but we get to a deeply dream-like circus world Flee Wee's Big Adventure, and for the requisite underwater section of a platformer, Swatterworld, which is, yes, a pin on Kevin Coaster's notorious film Waterworld (1995), but leads to background depicting islands of crystal and weird denizens like literal hammerhead sharks and accused sea monkeys.

Flee Wee's Big Adventure and the last world Cicada Night Fever deserve their own paragraphs alongside praise of the aesthetics of the game in general, as sadly I am going to have to be brutal about issues with the game which do undercut the game after Weevil Dead 2 world up to Swatterworld. The first is an uncomfortable amount that has aged badly. The sight of snakes dressed and sounding like stereotypical Middle Eastern terrorists with guns and rocket launchers, having wandered out of True Lies (1994) with Arnold Schwarzenegger, in the Egyptian levels are a reminder of how many stereotypes were found in not just videogames, but pop culture from this era, and you can add others like the "fey" martial arts mummy, one of two from this world's bosses, that have not aged well. The two levels I singled out will get their praises, but the wackiness that has been introduced with voiced enemies within the middle of the game only managed to be once and a while; Antennae Day has a gleefully subversive choice to have planet/octopus aliens floating in space who look like the Sega Saturn symbol and shout "Sega!" in the trademark of their advertisements.

The other issue with Bug Too is that, for all the levels for their hardness that are still fun, there is much that is unforgivable. You will get fun levels in this game throughout, but alongside the fact the game seems to have struggled in development, due to the fact you have up to five levels for Lawrence of Arachnia but only two and a boss by the last levels of the entire game, suggesting material had to be scrapped, there is a lot of excruciating examples of platforming you need to get through. Among them are two levels which deserve gaming hell for their sins. Part of this is one of the design changes from the previous game, which comes into play in the choice that this is still a 2D.5 platformer, but you can move above in certain spaces and platforms so you can move about on them, allowing for a greater semblance of freedom in movement even on limited spaced platforms. It just becomes an unnecessary niggle to complicate more precarious platforming, especially as you will have some insanely difficult platforming including jumping in and out of the screen, which unfortunately leads also to some leaps of faith to platforms off-screen. There are also platforms, despite barriers on them to restrict falling off them, where you can accidentally overshoot and jump even past their invisible walls to oblivion if you cannot exploit them. The decision to also turn levels into more overt mazes to find all the collectable gems, extra lives and bonus levels leads to levels which cannot be defended. Antennae Day Stage 1 is dreadful, for this maze-like structure where you can find yourself lost and returning to the beginning; the actual goal is found on a lengthy passage of invisible platforms over nothing, and only seen when stepped on or, with the spitting power up as a projectile, using the later to find the gaps rather than just used on enemies. Swatterworld Stage 1 is just as confusing as a maze above and underwater involving back tracking over elevators and spinning platforms, with more awkward platforming in three dimensional spaces to climb onto them, to find switches, even preventing you from using one elevator to the final steps until you have wandered off and returned back.

This is such a shame as there is delirious and proudly surreal fun here too, these platformers feeding the mind of my younger self with moments even if hard and imperfect mechanics that fed my imagination. This is something I can defend in spite of the middle worlds being some of the most awkward I have come across, even making the difficulty curves of Konami's Castlevania games more appreciated with them giving you some fairness to their restrictions. The composer Greg Turner is a huge virtue here for starters in terms of good parts of the game, having worked on the original Bug of before. Whether it is the haunted house funk of the Weevil Dead to the clown music of Flee Wee's Big Adventure, he got the memo even for the level select stage music to stand out. The aesthetic style in general to Bug Too is one of its strongest points alongside moments of bizarre humour which do work, such as a random alien drinking coffee who is an inadvertent obstacle when dealing with the Antennae Day boss, wandering the walkways between spikes and the actual boss trying to blast you. You have, in a 2D.5 world when not meddled with, such wonderfully out there aspects with the platforming like a giant spiral which pulls you into the screen, or all the upside down and on the side platforms where even reversing the controls feels less cruel but apt for these parts. Even when not perfect, when this game emphasises mechanics of the past, like the fondly missed mushrooms you bounced off from the prequel, of the level specific ones, like riding giant gun welding enemies to shoot the others in proto-cover based shooting, you do see the game at its best before you get to the two worlds I loved the most.

Flee Wee's Big Adventure is a surreal circus, with tiny clown cars with a full size clown inside them to worry about, lion bugs, dangerous bouncing balls, and a joke which would have went over children’s heads, a one moment scene involving voluptuous Medusa women in cages whose kisses cause damage but also reverse your controls, requiring you to take a literal cold shower midway through the section if you wish to get rid of this effect. Cicada Night Fever is just mad, and in the best of ways, as whilst the end boss is made harder by the bad choice of some freedom in space, the game actually ends on a high note with two fun and idiosyncratic levels with a challenging end boss. Between the Cheshire cats, returning frogs from the first game with fly squatter tongues, and one joke involving a Beatles Yellow Submarine tribute, with Liverpudlian accents, which did make me chuckle, and this shows how imaginative and good Bug Too can be. You just look at the backgrounds – including the giant drinking birds toys in the distance among multiple giant toadstools the size of mountains – to see how deliciously bizarre platformers could be in the best of ways in this last world. The final boss, an Alice in Wonderland tribute with a giant smoking caterpillar, even has you also avoiding giant pieces of popcorn falling from the sky alongside the caterpillar's smoke rings just because.

It is a shame that the game has some unforgivable moments I have to bring up, as alongside not having a proper save function like the original game, there are a long of mechanics and questionable choices which you will struggle with that undercut the great moments. It's now dated style is also chic in its unrealistic take on platforming, wandering upwards and upside down, and does also show the Saturn’s curious polygonal graphics, whilst a pig for some to develop with, could conjure imaginative visuals like this has. It is a shame that I have to say, however, that the middle of Bug Too could sadly cause some to give up on the game, which is tragic. This was also the last of the franchise too in general. Realtime Associates, who developed both games, briefly continued into the sixth generation of gaming consoles, but moved away in favour of "serious games" which use gaming mechanics for added benefits. I cannot help but praise them, for one primary example of this, for Re-Mission (2006) and its 2013 sequel, a game specifically designed for young cancer patients with HopeLab Foundation to use third person shooting game mechanics to help guide them through how their cancer treatments worked as well as the emotional benefits of playing such a game in general. Segasoft, who were brought in for Bug Too, sadly was taken away from gaming publication and development in 2000 with layoffs, changed as an arm of Sega in North America to focus on the Heat.net online gaming service at the time³. This is a shame as they were the ones we have to thank for publishing some really idiosyncratic Saturn games like Three Dirty Dwarves (1996). Bug found himself, after the end credits here where he talks directly to us of how multi faceted an actor he is, lost in the attic of time alongside Clockwork Knight’s Pepperouchau and characters from other games from this era, with the exception of the protagonist of Nights Into Dreams (1996) confided into oblivion. The Sega Saturn, with its odd history of being a console more popular in Japan, and absolutely forgetting to release a canonical Sonic the Hedgehog entry, decided in general to ignore most of the intellectual properties from the Mega Drive/Genesis in general, with characters from this time seen as misfits lost to time, many of which were sadly penalised like this to be abandoned.  

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1) Sadly I did not get all thirty seven magazines, nor kept the ones I had, so I also missed out on the first disc of Panzer Dragoon Saga (1998), the Christmas NiGHTS into Dreams (1996) disc nor another for Swagman (1997).

2) Bug! (Revisited) | Reviewing Every U.S. Saturn Game, Episode 7 of 246 of the YouTube series PandaMonium Reviews Every U.S. Saturn Game. Released on May 20th 2023, it includes an archive interview with David Warhol, founder of Realtime Associates, where this information is revealed.

3) SegaSoft Shake-Up, written by Curt Feldman and published for Gamespot.com on April 28th 2000.

Abby (1974)

Director: William Girdler

Screenplay: G. Cornell Layne

Cast: William Marshall as Bishop Garret Williams, Terry Carter as Reverend Emmett Williams, Austin Stoker as Detective Cass Potter, Carol Speed as Abby Williams, Juanita Moore as Miranda "Momma" Potter, Charles Kissinger as Dr. Hennings, Elliott Moffitt as Russell Lang, Nathan Cook as Tafa Hassan

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

We have William Marshall of Blacula (1972) in a lead role here, so we are good from the get-go, an actor who I wished could have had the huger filmography, one to match Christopher Lee's, as they both have the commanding voices, the gravitas and the sense no matter how ridiculous the film around them is, as with Abby here, they stood proudly within them. When I saw a retrospective screening of Blacula, as much as it was the cape that made him alluring, a younger woman in the patrons afterwards admitted to a male friend she found Marshall irresistible, one of those overheard anecdotes that make one glad to go to the cinema. Shame this is a role for him in a film viewed through an old sock depending on the version you can find, as this is a mostly all-black cast reinterpretation of The Exorcist (1973) which was sued off the screens. Warner Brothers may have forgotten to retract the suit, hence why it is difficult to see, alongside actually film prints. It's director William Girdler had no shame in following trends, with his most known film Grizzly (1976) if Jaws was replaced with a bear on land, but in the world of far more blatant Exorcist copies, especially the likes of the Turkish film Şeytan (1974), it feels cruel this idiosyncratic take, shot on barely a budget, was the one that got blocked from released, preserved through bootlegs or theatrical screenings of old prints.

Girdler himself is a distinct figure in American independent cinema, tragically dying in a helicopter accident whilst scouting for locations for a film. He was at only the age of thirty in 1978 when this happened, but he managed from 1972 to 1978 to make nine films. He is a regional filmmaker/producer who shot in various states - Abby shot in Louisville, Kentucky - and alongside how impressive that run is, to image what he could have do when the shot-to-video eighties era came in would have been tantalising in mind to a film like Abby, made in mind to a huge hit undeniably but having its own energetic spin to the material.  

Abby itself, alongside being a riff on the Exorcist, was also riding the wave Blacula was part of when "Blaxploitation" cinema grew in the early seventies, making films about predominantly black casts, and started touching into horror. I credit Girdler, a white filmmaker, just entirely devote himself even if in mind to the market to a mostly all-black cast driven film here, even if you do have to accept that the film might be seen as crass in its premise. I am not the right person to speak of whether the film can be defendable or not, but I could have seen something far more problematic in this premise, rather than what is over-the-top and not subtle in the slightest. Our Father Merrin stand-in, William Marshall, whilst doing humanity work in Nigeria goes on to research a site of Eshu, a trickster deity from the Yoruba religion, originating from south-western Nigeria. This is the one thing really that has not aged well, as you have an actual worshipped God of the past turned into an ancient evil that possesses his daughter-in-law Abby (Carol Speed), a young churchgoing woman with a priest husband who takes on the Regan place but somewhat differently. The deity is turned into a libidinous sex demon, which is broadly painting a figure of ancient worship as you could get and would be frowned on in the modern day, which is ironic because you could have even in a pulp film with this one's tone explored this idea of repressed sexuality and Christian faith much more.

It ultimately becomes an issue in that the film really has less interest in this figure of Eshu than to have the idea of a figure who will cause Abby to fall into being a figure who literally loves someone to death, literally steaming the car up to the point it erupts in smoke and burns up the person she was necking inside. It is more of an issue of you have the calm and saintly Abby contrasted by a demonic figure that is lascivious and has a demonic male voice which is broad in his comments. What really neutralising this, and makes the film more ridiculous than anything, is how absurd this goes. There is some unintentional humour, the demon coming up with memorable one liners, Abby tormenting an old woman to the point of a heart attack by slapping her around, or her offering sexual advice as a marriage advisor by offering to sleep with the husband. What is potentially problematic is crushed in its own alien take on The Exorcist, becoming its own take where there is no knock off Tubular Bells, but funk and monotone drones instead.

It is still, undeniable, with an eye on a huge hit, but this strips out most of the iconic aspects of The Exorcist, such as there being no Father Karras and his crisis of faith. It is as much budgetary reasons clearly we do not get some of the more elaborate scenes recreated, though we get someone floating by the end. It nonetheless is fun to witness, working with the bare essentials to its own quirks, such as the exorcism itself taking place in a nightclub and involves one destroyed disco ball. For a film in the context it was made in too, all the potential issues I have described do not thankfully have anything to them in regards to demeaning its cast, all barring one detective and minor figures an all-black cast, working actors who if you dig into their careers have films and television work which stick out. Our titular lead Carol Speed's career was sadly mostly within the seventies only, with films like The Mack (1973), but it took me by surprise to realise that, playing her mother, is Juanita Moore, famous especially for her key part in Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life (1959), an incredible film, whilst you have Austin Stoker from Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) too among others.

In terms of whether the film is actually "good" in terms of portrayals of these characters, rather than avoiding problematic stereotypes, one has to be blunt. It is in mind to whether you find Abby's foul mouthed, sex obsessed demon form against the saintly Christian archetype she begins as problematic or just ridiculous. It is, at its heart, openly cashing in on The Exorcist, and with the choice to spin it the way the film did, everything feels ridiculous instead. Everything feels unintentional in its mistakes than deliberately problematic stereotypes. It even attempts to bring in aspects of the Yoruba religion which, whilst not dealt with well, least gives us one good moment, with William Marshall mocking the demon, in a variety of languages between them, for pretending to be the real Eshu, and even moving into using non-Christian African religious rites to perform the exorcism. It is the scene that stands out as distinct even if one also wishes for a film which elaborated on this sequence more than here. If anything, it just makes me appreciate William Marshall more, who actually was not a fan of the film he was making¹, but still committed a powerhouse performance. I wish he was as well known as other cult horror actors as, with one of the better scenes in what is a silly film made on a very low budget in that example, the comparison to Christopher Lee is perfect. He was someone who could have been incredible in so many films if he had the wider length of filmography as the later did. As with the rest of the cast, and Girdler himself as producer-director, I wish this had not been stuck in this lawsuit situation, as alongside the pointlessness of this when most of these films are clearly not like the big hit, which feels like a power game in committing to the lawsuit, Abby within the light of day cannot be taken seriously. It becomes instead a fascinating item from the past with figures involved within it who shine in spite of criticisms of the film itself.

 

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1) Abby (1974): A Unique Blaxploitation Horror or Nothing More Than an Exorcist Rip-Off?, written by Neil Gray for Horror Obsessive and published 29th September 2022.

Macabre (1980)

Director: Lamberto Bava

Screenplay: Pupi Avati, Roberto Gandus, Lamberto Bava and Antonio Avati

Cast: Bernice Stegers as Jane Baker, Stanko Molnar as Robert Duval, Veronica Zinny as Lucy Baker, Roberto Posse as Fred Kellerman, Ferdinando Orlandi as Mr. Wells, Fernando Pannullo as Leslie Baker, Elisa Kadigia Bove as Mrs. Duval

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Set in the USA, specifically New Orleans with Southern accents in the dub, Macabre was the debut film for Lamberto Bava, son of the legendary Mario Bava, and it is less a horror film in conventions but a really twisted horror melodrama. The set up is a film in itself but sets up a more morbid narrative: a wife named Jane Baker (Bernice Stegers) is having an adulterous affair behind her husband's back with a man named Fred (Roberto Posse), creating suspicion in the eldest daughter Lucy (Veronica Zinny) to the point the later, in an act of psychosis, drowns her younger brother in the bathtub out of revenge for the betrayal. The drive back, panicked by the horror of losing her own son, leads Jane and Fred to crash the car, Fred losing his head in the collision with a wall.

A year later, the parents have divorced, and Jane has had mental health therapy, but this perverse melodrama with sultry jazz on the score by Ubaldo Continiello will see the repercussions of this incident for Mrs. Baker. Another figure of importance is Robert (Stanko Molnar), a blind instrument repair man who, in the prologue when his mother was still alive, let a room in the top floor for Jane and Fred for their affair, letting her take the room again by herself separated from her husband. Slow paced, I mentioned this was less a horror film in the traditional sense, and in a gruesome turn in the plot, befits its name a macabre drama in presentation. Late seventies chic of over textured and saturated coloured wallpaper and decor overwhelm the main setting, Robert's home, be it the marble wall bathroom with pure white sink to yellowish gold on everything from clothes to wall decor. Because of this, there is a sick lavishness to a sick story of love as Jane has not forgotten Fred, and someone comes to her room at night as Robert is still able to hear from the floor below.

Robert is our sympathetic figure, sweet and attractive with bold blue eyes, but they are unable to see a thing, Robert not playing a bad stereotype either of a blind man, caught blissfully unaware of Mrs. Baker ritualizing her beloved Fred, with even a portable shrine to him carried with her when she takes the room to stay in. Robert will learn the horrible truth, and even before then he is stuck knowing she pleasures herself at night seemingly on the top floor whilst he pangs in unrequited love. The story is made more complicated by Lucy herself, playing another obsessive in wanting her parents to reunite even if it means tormenting her own mother, like Lucy adding a photo of the late younger brother for her mother to find in her rented room. Wanting said parents back, in the same way Jane wants Fred back, makes up the key theme of the film, of two generations of people clinging to their past in unhealthy, destructive ways, making the film compelling as the equivalent of a radio drama extended into a ninety minute film. As I get older, this is the tone I prefer for a lot of horror, unless they can be great or fun exceptions, much more interesting to see this type of story you could tell in a thirty minute tale with audio only have its form expanded into this intriguing movie.

It admittedly has a plot twist you would have not gotten away with on an old radio show like Beyond Midnight or Inner Sanctum Mysteries. The twisted aspect is what Mrs. Baker keeps in the top of the refrigerator in the room, [Huge Spoiler] which turns out to be an act of necrophilia with Fred's head where the frozen peas should be stored. It is gross but the idea of a love so strong it turns into this obsession to even preserve what remains of him, as a talisman even if involving their actual remains, is compelling. More so as the story is actually based on a real story of a woman who kept her lover's head in a refrigerator too, Bava given a newspaper clipping of the incident by Pupi Avati, the filmmaker who also co-writer with his brother Antonio Avati¹. [Spoilers End] Even if the twist will be obvious if you have sussed up on your plot tropes, and have a sick imagination, the story is macabre literally for this sickly obsession with love in a lurid depiction.

It is helped by the lead Bernice Stegers, a British actress who was spotted through Federico Fellini's City of Women (1980)¹, made around the same time, giving a committed role as a woman lost in her own insanity. Her career is in small roles between film and television, but she would also reappear in Xtro (1982), a film which somehow managed to outdo this Italian film in terms of bizarre imagery. The perversity of the story is enough even with an even more absurd and supernatural end scene for an added jolt, because of its growing tension of everything starts to collapse. Even mother and daughter will be at war with each other in a gristly conclusion. Lamberto Bava's films after, to be honest, are not subtle in the slightest, his most iconic Demons (1985) as over-the-top as you can get, and whilst Macabre fits the director's career in the final act, when everything goes to Hell, the slow burn nature of this particular tale stands out with great reward.

 

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1) Taken from Macabre and the Golden Age of Italian Exploitation (2009), directed by Elijah Drenner.

The Voice of the Moon (1990)

Director: Federico Fellini

Screenplay: Federico Fellini

Based on the novel Il poema dei lunatici (The Lunatics' Poem) by Ermanno Cavazzoni

Cast: Roberto Benigni as Ivo Salvini, Paolo Villaggio as Gonnella, Nadia Ottaviani as Aldina, Marisa Tomasi as Marisa, Angelo Orlando as Nestore, Susy Blady as Susy

An Abstract Candidate

 

It seems my whole life is just this night.

Federico Fellini's last film, premiered outside the Cannes Film Festival competition in 1990, was tragically dismissed. It never got distribution in the UK until Arrow Video made it their task to release it in the late 2010s finally.

It begins introducing us to Roberto Benigni's Ivo Salvini, released from a mental hospital, starting from one night going on a journey through vignettes. Whilst it begins with a sense of humour, Ivo accidentally wandering into a nephew letting people pay to see his aunt undress, The Voice of the Moon feel streaked in melancholia of a different time. Based freely on a novel by Ermanno Cavazzoni, where Cavazzoni was taking his influence from the writings of real mental health patients, this film comes with the knowledge Benigni's character is a Holy Fool, with a fixation on wells which may pose a danger to him as others watch over him in fear of this, and with all the voices in his head. All we see is entirely subjective from his perspective. He is an outsider who will be ignored, and whilst his journey is brimming in life and vivescent, he is cast off in society alongside others. The first person he encounters demonstrates this: a musician living in a graveyard who found a man randomly eating everything in his kitchen, following by more appearing in his room when he rehearsed forbidden cords.

Ivo is blissful even when thinking of those he knew of who have died, but the world continues around him regardless of his presence, the modern changes to Italy visible in the background as tourists have collected together around the streets in the day, TV aerials are on all the roofs, and washing machines and refrigerators of pure manufactured white are especially everywhere. Against this, the film feels melancholic and eerie, even when Ivo is speaking tenderly of life, realities bleeding into each other especially when it comes to memories of his grandmother, Roberto Benigni playing the role whilst meant to be a child and a young actress is cast as the grandmother.  

The tentative plot is his love for a woman named Aldina (Nadia Ottaviani), as pale with blonde hair as the Moon she will be positioned as later on, trying to return a shoe back to her after an ill advised incident her sister helped with, clutching onto throughout without any true insidious (or unintentionally insidious) aspect to his love for her, almost childlike instead as a crush. The closest thing to another prominent figure, among those displaced like he and seen throughout in reoccurring roles, is a prefect named Gonnella (Paolo Villaggio), shown initially fearing his neighbours will infect him with their old age as an older man himself, made to retire due to his mental health and believe everyone is a spy out to get him, even thinking his own son is a fake pretending to be a son. There is still a light humour, and it is still bawdy, one of the stories is that of the wife whose libido is so strong it lead to an amicable divorce from her husband, who adored the hairdresser's manicurist but could not keep up with someone so passionate the sofa starts steaming up with their embrace and hurdles on literal train lines in one of their many frequent love making rituals. Honestly, where the film was probably dismissed is how gentle it is, following characters and scenarios Ivo encounters without a sense of plot driven melodrama. Considering early in his career Fellini jettisoned plot driven stories for this template which help bring his acclaim, such as with the likes of Amarcord (1973), it does raise the sense Fellini sadly was out of time for cinema in 1990 then the film being flawed in pace or meaning.

The film looks beautiful, Fellini's trademark a baroque maximalism where depicting entire aspects of Italian culture, even its ancient past, were depicted with every detail and every extra having interest to examining them. This was all with a dream logic that explored the "texture" of his worlds whether the internal subconscious of a lead, the environment itself, or both, the gnoccata festival is a good example here. Without the loaded satire of Roma (1972) of the fashion show of priest uniforms covered in neon or riding bicycles on a catwalk, it is still over-the-top in taking the real tradition of a festival based on the food item gnocca, with a crowned gnocca Queen and even mascot costumes of gnocca royalty, done in this case as a loving nod to tradition whilst having a sense of humour.

The film does dangerously get close to Fellini looking at the modern day dismissively whilst lamenting the past, which is righteous when mocking the obsession with fancy new electronic appliances, but with music would veer into closed mindedness of an old man. Thankfully, the sequence when this comes in clearly embraced the spectacle and feels less dismissive, more the lament of everyone charging ahead in the new world without pause for the past from the perspective of those lost from before. That is the discotheque sequence, an awesome scene for Fellini's swansong, of a giant warehouse with towering reflective panelled walls that move on rails, and crowds decked in late eighties fashion. The biggest surprise, which clearly was not a musical licensing issue at all when the film was instead "lost" to lack of interest, is how he managed to get Michael Jackson's The Way You Make Me Feel, off the Bad (1987) album, a huge album and one of its singles which also happens to work perfectly for the sequence itself. The scene, where Gonnella laments the music lost in the past, thankfully does not quash the beauty of this moment, actually evoking what David Lynch does in a set piece for Wild at Heart (1990). The irony is not last as, at that Cannes Film Festival where Fellini's film was dismissed it was Lynch, who admired the filmmaker and would even befriend him, who won their most important award the Palme D'Or for that year with Wild At Heart. Both films have scenes juxtaposing wildly alien fans of a different genre of music, in Lynch's a heavy metal concept, suddenly stop and become an audience for an entirely different reality, time stopping for everything as these youths circle around a beautiful slow dance with an older woman who loved Gonnella despite he being so gone in his conspiracy theories, getting to rekindle that love over a classical piece.

And thankfully, Fellini ends his last film, before his 1993 passing, with the satirical touch he streaked his career with, as whilst politics do not necessarily appear in his films, he did prod follies in humanity continually. Two brothers, set up early on wanting to accomplish this, end up literally capturing the Moon herself at one point, and as crowds gather, priests and politicians intermingle on TV, and it is a world changing event of spiritual profoundness. What happens is that this monumental event is to be ruined by bickering, the Moon getting abuse hurled at it for no reason, and a gun being fired spoiling a profound moment. Fellini still loves humanity but gets a humour in humans being distracted by their own pettiness, rather than enjoy the things in life Ivo as many characters before him had throughout the director's other films, a fitting end to a magnificent career.

Abstract Spectrum: Dreamlike/Eerie/Whimsical

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

Games of the Abstract: Oyaji Hunter Mahjong (1995)

Developer: Warp Inc.

Publisher: Warp Inc.

One Player

Originally for: 3DO Interactive Multiplayer

Warp and its founder Kenji Eno are unsung indie heroes of nineties video games, but tragically their legacy is marked by little of it being available officially. We can only be thankful D (1995), their most well known game, got ports on everything to the point Night Dive Studios, a retro game preservation developer, re-released the PC port, but Warp are a cult studio in a medium where preservation is still an issue with video game distribution. It neither helps Warp's legacy was backing the cult machines, not the winners, of the fifth and sixth generations of video game consoles. D, a really inspired attempt at an interactive movie that yet had an attitude to puzzles that I feel was more accessible, was a big hit but it was ironically Sony, the winner of the fifth and sixth generation with the Playstation One and Two, which under published copies and annoyed Eno so much he deliberately revealed he would jump to the Sega Saturn at a Sony press even with Enemy Zero (1996)¹, a full motion video sci-fi horror game. There is D2 (1999), sadly on the Sega Dreamcast, Sega's last hardware, and an unsung machine for arcade ports and experimental works. It would also be the last project under the Warp name even if Eno worked afterwards. More obscure is most of the work which helped Warp come to be. Those would be the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer console games, which is a very unpreserved console for any game which was not ported from or to the PC.

With hindsight, this console doomed by how expensive it was among other factors, such as a lack fof a mainstream killer app, was innovative and its figurehead Trip Hawkins deserves lionisation for. The founder of Electronic Arts in 1982, he spearheaded an idiosyncratic and bold console, taking a really un-mainstream attitude to a machine at the time where the hardware was not unique, and could have a variety of different versions created by outsourcing to electronics companies, had no censorship which allowed for adult games to be made for it officially, and had no region locking. The cost to develop for the CD based software was a lot less expensive too, which leads into how even next to Microsoft, a huge company who struggled to get the Xbox over twice in Japan, the 3DO managed to have an easier time, just from the exclusives, in that country, and even in South Korea which had exclusive games too. Kenji Eno was an admirer of Hawkins because of these aspects², and it was clear the model, whilst not a successful console, allowed Warp to exist. Knowing one of the variety of games they made for the 3DO, the block puzzle game Trip'd (1995), was clearly named after Trip Hawkins shows the company were grateful for the machine.

Among the obscurest is Oyaji Hutner Mahjong, which comes from Kenji Eno seeing all the erotic mahjong games including for the arcade, where beating female players leads to them taking their clothes off, and being sick of them, thus imagining a game where a male superhero exists to protect women from perverts³. It is a fun premise, and you have to respect someone even if not a serious satire playing with gender stereotypes in this genre. Innately, I do not see anything inherently amiss with the idea of strip mahjong games, but if they are all clearly designed for a heterosexual male audience, with the female players always the ones meant to lose, then you see an accidental issue of objectification this game rightly parodies. It is not perfect itself, and it would have been cool to see a female heroine fight the sex pests, but our lead the Oyaji Hunter does stand out in a funny way. With women even having a way to turn on his own equivalent of the Bat Signal in the sky to call him, be it by Hunter Yo-Yo to the face or the Hunter Beam, the Oyaji Hunter is there to beat up and force wrong-uns to apologise for acting like pigs. Like the man in just women's underwear and a trench coat terrorising a schoolgirl for an underskirt shot with a camera for the first opponent, he will beat these men up and then humiliate them in a game of mahjong.

It is a mahjong game, with it explicit these villains or the Oyaji Hunter himself the first to challenge the other to the game, even the later having to bring out a game board for a last ditch attempt against the big bad of the game, in a giant tall building sized robot, which is funny for a broad slapstick comedy. You still have to play mahjong, specifically Japanese (riichi) mahjong rules, to which this was my first encounter with mahjong in a competitive form than mahjong solitaire. As a result, I cannot attempt an expert opinion, but I will call Oyaji Hunter Mahjong a good example of experimentation in what I would call "ephemeral" video game genres, those which exist throughout video game history but are always doomed to be replaced by new version for new consoles and machines. Mahjong games have always been made for video game consoles, and even the strip adult ones are replaced by new versions, making this a case of one where the personality is its advantage of being remembered. Sadly despite the desire for electronic versions of such games, as is the case for soccer or golf, they can be replaced with ease, making those which are really idiosyncratic or openly distort the rules some of the more memorable even if in bad ways as well as good.

The game itself here is not that radically altered in mind to this. Attempting to explain rules as a new player, the goal is to match tiles in threes (and fours if lucky) by matching images or orders from a variety of different sets like the Sō bamboo tiles.  You can only do this if the tile an opponent discards is the one you need, and you can also win if you have a full hand (or what remains from those you still have) when the next tile you pick up for your round, especially the last one, can complete a set of tiles which all match or connect in a certain way. This raises the innate issue here of random choice, but you can win either by making full sets clearing as many as possible, or if you can manage to have a "fully concealed" hand, a full set of matching/ordered titles only revealed to the opponent when you have won the round instantly.

There is more to this game's rules though, as you both have life bars, the numbered states which are the equivalent of betting with money, yours always at "5000" and jumping into higher numbers over the five opponents for theirs, which have to be knocked down. If you are lucky, each time the opponent sacrifices their life points for a bet, believing they have a perfect hand, and you screw them over, you can still chip at this number, but you are advised to win hands so they cannot, especially as this leads to the one new factor for this game for whoever wins. If they win, you hope to choose the randomly shuffled card that leads to them miss a blow, or the one which only causes the least damage, as they can use a special attack like in a comedy anime story, such as saying a pun so bad it hurts, which can be destructive to your chances of winning. This is more an issue as the score they get for how they win is used for the initial attack damage, something you thankfully have as an advantage if you win. The Oyaji Hunter, if he wins that round, can through a roulette wheel kick, punch or use one of his attacks which have bigger multipliers, 5x for the hunter boomerang, or the Hunter Beam itself, which is a 10x and can decimate enemies in one shot if you won by a big point hand. Or you can miss entirely too and feel like a tool.

This presents an obvious issue with the game whenever you bring random choice. Mahjong has a strategy, but random choice is as much a factor here even with strategy involved, rather than the full ability to win by master planning, or puzzle games where you are previewed what the next item you will receive will look like. This reminds of another curiosity, the type Kenji Eno was satirising, Sega Saturn's Haunted Casino (1996), a bizarre erotic gambling game for that console which however envisioned a full video ghostly mansion to explore. It felt like it was a game in the mould of Myst (1993), if instead of puzzles you played Western style games like poker against cat girl card dealers. It also had the issue that you could be grinding through rounds in games, or that if the A.I. got good hands over and over, you are doomed. Random choice is innately difficult with games, as it is not due to you having made a mistake, and Oyaji Mahjong Hunter is affected by this.

Which is a shame, as it is a compellingly odd project. For a low budget production too, it is still ambitious, as Warp brought in Ichirō Itano as the director of the animated cut scenes, a huge name in Japanese animation. In fact, as an animator, he is legendary, a huge figure for his art form especially for the likes of the Macross series. This is even seen here with his trademark "Itano Circus" where at one point, with the final opponent's giant robot, the individual missiles they fire at the Oyaji Hunter, as they were in the Macross series from robot/fighter plane hybrids, take different (individually drawn) trajectories whilst in the air. As a director, this is probably the most abrupt yet wholesome work for a notorious animation director, Ichirō Itano's work some of the most controversial and nihilistic you can find. His entry in the three Violence Jack  episodes, made between 1986 and 1990, was not readily found uncut and would make some edge lords green; Angel Cop (1989-1994) is notoriously an ultra-violent jingoistic sci-fi action work which, infamously if the English subtitles for the Japanese dub were not censored, sadly fell into actual anti-Semitism for its final plot twists; even a television series Gantz (2004) had befittingly a director suitable for its nihilistic and very violent premise, of resurrected people who died forced to kill aliens in death match-like scenarios, which had to be censored for the gore and sexual content for its television broadcasts. It is quite perverse, in a sick humoured way, he fully committed to this comedic project and created some playful cut scenes in spite of this record of accomplishment for controversial, problematic and not necessarily well regarded anime as a director which violently contrasts his justifiable legacy as a talented animator.

As a story, this game has one which is far from perfect, but I was not expecting a profound tale of gender politics here considering the type of game this is set up as, a silly parody. After the first opponent, the dirty mac photographer, you get a man in BDSM gear trying to tie up and drip hot wax on a female biker, one who eventually gets revenge by revealing he accidentally targeted a Queen Dominatrix. The third is a man trying to grope a geisha, forgiven by her when you win, especially when revealed from then on the men are being brainwashed and cannot remember their actions. The fourth is an odd duck, using his bald head as a forfeit attack in its shininess, trying to force cooked meat products down a poor air stewardess' throat while saying bad food puns, getting his comeuppance when she turns out to be a talented chef who decides to however use ultra hot wasabi, part of the goofy cartoon tone. The big bad, the fifth and final opponent, is human Gollum getting revenge for being mocked for his short stature by wrecking havoc with a giant robot. His conclusion may disappoint, as he is forgiven by the women involved despite using a beam himself to briefly remove all their clothes and his comments on their gender's laziness. However, literally looking like a wizened Benjamin Button baby when defeated and humiliated, I again think the project was always a knockabout farce parodying erotic mahjong games, a proper video game satire tackling gender politics left to be created and worth trying one day.

The sense of where this came in Warp production is found in how, by accident, this has a compelling historical footnote for the company. There is little in the way of extra options, but the one you get, set up as an elevator with multiple floors for the options, allows players to try demos of other games from the company and has previews, one being an original tease for D2. D became their most successful game in terms of sales, but sadly, their company found themselves always on the wrong side of history afterwards. This version of D2 sets up what did happen in the Dreamcast game, only with the fact our lead Laura rather than just being the "virtual actor", Kenji Eno pioneering the idea with "Laura", a blonde Western female lead, playing different characters per game, is still playing the same one from the original D in that game's aftermath.

She is on an airplane, and whilst she is not pregnant as this trailer has her, the airplane crash that sets up D2 as it became is established here. D2's trajectory shows the unfortunate history for Warp, with Eno's untimely passing in 2013 happening long after that name did not exist as a developer. D2 was to follow Laura's son, warped into a medieval dungeon setting after the set up on the airplane leading to Laura's death⁴. It was being created for the M2, what was supposed to be the follow up console to the 3DO which never came, despite games being created for it. D2 as we got, which is effectively a re-telling of John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) that kept Laura alive and surviving an airplane crash in the Canadian wilderness, tragically found itself on a console which only lasted for three years and led to Sega stepping down from being a hardware powerhouse to just being a software publisher. Oyaji Hunter Mahjong by pure accident presents a tantalising piece of their legacy, and whilst not a perfect game, this game itself is unique as a production, so odd and full of charm you can forgive its game play mechanics, a real testament to the studio even as a lesser title for trying to make interesting work.

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1) Kenji Eno, Japan's Maverick Game Creator, Dead at 42, written by Chris Kohler for WIRED and published January 14th 2015. Archived on March 8th 2017.

2) CoreGamers Interview and Profile of Kenji Eno (Part 2), written for CoreGamers and published August 21st 2008. Archived from the original November 20th 2015.

3) Saving Women by Crushing Perverted Old Men at Mahjong – Oyaji Hunter (3DO), written by Snowyaria and published on their Kusoge Coffeehouse blog on April 15th 2021.

4) D2 [M2 – Cancelled ], written and published for Unseen 64 on April 7th 2008.

À l'aventure (2008)

 

Director: Jean-Claude Brisseau

Screenplay: Jean-Claude Brisseau

Cast: Carole Brana as Sandrine, Arnaud Binard as Greg, Étienne Chicot as the Taxi Driver, Jocelyn Quivrin as Fred, Lise Bellynck as Sophie, Nadia Chibani as Mina, Estelle Galarme as Françoise, Frédéric Aspisi as Jérôme

An Abstract Candidate

 

Sadrine (Carole Brana) begins with a friend on a bench where an older man sat near them on the same public furniture starts talking about their complacency as a species to act like sheep, starting her journey in self doubt which in context to how the film goes, could easily become a pretentious smut film. If my choice of words seem scathing, this will be a kinder review of À l'aventure, though viewing it as a flawed production which still is worthy of examining over and over. It is not a condemnation of erotica as a potential for art, or smut as inherently a bad thing, but in mind that this is a film by Jean-Claude Brisseau. The late French filmmaker presents a film which is doomed in nature, a film by an older cis male director making an erotic film with a female lead, which is common in the history of cinema, and made more complicated due to Brisseau's controversial real life history. A filmmaker since the seventies, I watched a film like Noce Blanche (1989) which still has erotic elements, but is a drama which focused on its characters complexities. Many will probably know him from Secret Things (2002), which was promoted in the early 2000s as a sexually explicit thriller and also begins the contentious aspect of his career. In 2005, he was found guilty in French courts for sexually harassing actresses in the auditions for that film, two actresses asked to perform explicit sexual acts during the audition process which included them being filmed, leading to him being fined and a one-year suspended jail sentence¹. This does not help scrutinise his career afterwards, especially when with The Exterminating Angels (2006), Brisseau had the gall if you condemn the man to depict his own criminal event in a speculative dissection of the incident which is sexually explicit as well. À l'aventure presents, however, something which feels drenched in ennui, presented as an erotic film where sensuality is still there, but the initial premise of Sadrine looking for the perfect orgasm, a premise from any softcore erotica, given way as a Trojan horse to existential dread. This review will not defend the man at all, but it fascinates as if the results of that criminal charge bled into this production completely.

It feels too obvious, before even watching the film and digesting it after, to just damn the production, more as even if its director presents a concern, now he marked himself for sins away from the film camera, films still present complicated psychological readings. The challenge for a man to write a woman's voice, and the perils of them doing it in a way which is potentially embarrassing, does however not ignore how intentionally (or unintentionally) write their own psychological state into any character they touch. With Jean-Claude Brisseau, this is even more of an issue, but Sadrine's lack of satisfaction with her boyfriend and routine starts as a set up for so many erotic works, sleeping with the stereotypically handsome male psychoanalysis, but feels like the work of a man drained in what he made. Even if going through the motions of erotic, it feels instead like Sadrine's sense of dissatisfaction is more than arousal, and this is also Brisseau's own, more poignant when his fascination of female sexual desire rightly got him criminated.

Whether the film itself actually succeeds is subjective, but in this case for this viewer, it is a failure from trying to be a profound about the meaning of life, as it falls into clichés, but becomes far more interesting and more rewarding as the struggle for meaning, and that pervading sense of distance a director-writer who pigeonholed himself into the stereotype of erotic cinema ended up in here. Brisseau has a type, let us be honest, of the slim intellectually beautiful woman who is bisexual in the ideal of certain cis male views, but even the male lead is an erotic ideal for him as a cis male, the ideal erotic man in Greg (Arnaud Binard), handsome and intelligent, embodying the desirable figure for this ideal woman. It is to the point he is named after actor Gregory Peck for a cineaste reference, a figure who believes in confronting conventional morality. The irony is knowing he will be skewered as a false love interest for Sadrine, and that feels on purpose, whilst Brisseau's own stand in is the older male taxi driver, who has no interest in Sadrine physically but like each other as figures wanting to talk about their place in the world. It is an erotic film which however falls back onto Brisseau's static camera takes, from cinematographer Wilfrid Sempé, of talking and Sadrine finding more insight with the aforementioned taxi driver, played by Étienne Chicot, who began her self doubts and shows more interest for her as a fully thinking figure.

It would almost be self parody in some of the scenarios here, as she encounters a submissive mistress to an open minded heterosexual couple, that indulge in cinematic light BDSM, but the idea of a restless middle class who need to escape routine is felt too, following sexual fantasies whether they can help or not. This comes with the issue of gender bias, beautiful women in the conventional idea who are intelligent on a surface level and open to all sexual scenarios as here. It becomes an issue with the figure who made this film who fell into the trap of thinking this ideal would be forced onto women, rather than how much more complex people are, and rightly got a criminal prosecution for this and thus marking all his art work with a stain we need to always point at even if we stay open minded to watching the films still. I would even accept being called a hypocrite for even watching this film or even taking some surface pleasure from it, but it comes with many details that dissect itself, becoming more than the stereotypical film of a bad filmmaker, bad in the true sense for badness as a man and not for something arbitrary as whether the dialogue makes sense, or if the film is well made. Figures, all women, are figuring themselves out existentially, be it from trauma of losing a child, or boredom and stifled sense of their purpose in life, and the mess of this take on the subject is still compelling even from a deeply failed production.

Even if objectifying a figure of desire, if figures speak at all of concerns or pains, even for humour, that can be a writer revealing more of themselves then they may realise. À l'aventure, set in the urban France of so many French films about anxiety and relationship tensions, where tellingly enlightenment comes from fleeing to the countryside, is filtered through divorces, the issue of the ideal marriage of heterosexual couples being hollow, and of how many of these characters here talk of themselves as wives or female figures being bored. The friend meant to say Sadrine's decision to ditch her job and work, drifting along in her sexual journey, is deluding herself ends up running off with an arms dealer in a romance and disappears from the film entirely, an absurd touch in the context but apt for the film. Even if the film ultimately feels like it is grasping at straws sexually and philosophically, that touches on a feeling of conventional reality being unstable from aimlessness that is one of the film's better aspects.

The fantasy the film is set up in is an issue unless you accept the inherent flaw of this particular piece of erotic trying to be serious, instead revealing itself as softcore punching above its weight but with the failed boxing blows still revealing so much more. You cannot work unless you are on the dole, or a true outsider, and there is more to even a naive writer like myself about the notion of a polyamorous relationship that, even for unrepentant and proud smut, you could work with beyond this, whilst this feels tame and falls into the problems of really hollow sexual fantasies shot for cinema that have women as the eroticised figures. But the fantasy still starts as a perfect template because of the fact it collapses, and the fantasy instead exaggerates the fixations that are uncomfortably real. Even when it looks like it is getting into a fantasy scenario that would be considered problematic and requires a lot more concern, even if transgressive to consider, about the place the willing submissive enjoys and controls the scenario as much as the dominant, the film throws the least expected curveball.

That scenario is when Greg is convinced to hypnotise the three female leads by the women themselves, which can make a viewer uncomfortable especially as erotica has the fantasy of mind control and hypnosis, frankly with the issues right to consider about whether it is a healthy scenario to imagine depending on the context. À l'aventure however completely undercuts this. Even if these turns in this type of world cinema I got into from DVD can be the moments which lose viewers as ridiculous, I am always happy when I get what I was not expecting from such films. It is set up that one figure Mina (Nadia Chibani) is susceptible to hypnosis, to the point a coin on her arm when told is hot does leave a real burn, leading into the supernatural crushing this fantasy as she starts to bring up past memories and past lives into what was meant to just be softcore. What was a set up to the sexual fantasy involving all three women turns into a work of figures trying to figure themselves out, accidentally prodding a hole in reality, and Greg making an ill advised attempt to explore this hole that just causes damage. All because he was not prepared to not go into the experiment and went in cluelessly, especially when people start to levitate off the floor in a real miracle.

The philosophical ideas of our repetition and sense of infinite are not original and of depth here, which would become an albatross if a viewer took this film to be a take on existentialism in a really detailed form, but even this abrupt turn in a plot is a surprise, including the one nod to a very contentious subject in French culture when Mima remembers an incident from Algeria in the past, talking of a horrible tragedy she caught the results of when too young to process it. Even the idea, if caught in the issues of Brisseau himself as a compromised artist, of the sexual ecstasy being linked fully to the spiritual is a compelling theory to think of, even if it ends here instead in disaster, those not prepared for the real force beyond their process, and Sadrine realising her ideal erotic man in Greg is not the person she can ever feel fullness as a person from. Ultimately the sex becomes unrewarding, more of a choreographed scenario by the end of this, which is pretty damning for a film that would have been sold on sex, leaving on a beautiful countryside field and discussing how people live in such little time of reality for what has been a millennia plus of the Earth's existence. Eroticism still plays a part in Brisseau's work, but it feels as if it is slowly ebbing away here, burnt by his own controversies of his career but also feeling like it confined him, none of which is a defence of the man in the damndest, but with the sense here the struggle came to the screen in a compelling way.

Abstract Spectrum: Introspective

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

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1) French Director Found Guilty Of Sexual Harassment, written for Movie Mail and published December 20th 2005. Archived for the Web Archive on April 26th 2014.