Katsuhiro Ôtomo has been called the god of Anime, and it seems fitting, even if in his long career he’s only directed two full-length animated films. Akira seems almost the font that all later serious anime came out of, a film whose look, plot, characters, pacing and just about everything else has been borrowed, reworked […]
Read more "Steamboy [Suchîmubôi] (2004)"(aka Da zai nan, Hong Kong Calamity, The Big Calamity, Guan Gong da zhan wai xing ren, Kuan Yu Battles with the Aliens, and probably a lot more I’ve missed) There are some films so insane that you can’t NOT watch them. War God is just about the Platonic ideal of unmissable insane films. After […]
Read more "Zhan shen [War God] (1976)"This one has basically been pitched as an evil version of Superman. “Evil Has Found Its Superhero,” as the tagline proclaims. But, for the most part it plays out as yet another evil child movie like The Omen (or, if we get away from cheesy modern horror for a moment and go back a little […]
Read more "Brightburn (2019)"This is one of the great classics of Science Fiction film. Which doesn’t stop me from taking a moment for a purely personal note: This marks my Eight-Hundredth review since I published my first (Nothing But The Night) on January 28, 2016. It seemed a fantastic dream at the time and now it just seems […]
Read more "It Came from Outer Space (1953)"Okay, let’s see if we can make some sense of this: A-Ko and C-Ko are best buds, while their fellow student B-Ko lusts after C-Ko. This naturally takes us into the familiar territory of all those little school girl triangle animes out there. I have to confess that I’ve never really appreciated the Japanese sense […]
Read more "Project A-Ko [Purojekuto A-ko ] (1986)"This is a thoroughly strange and trippy sort of science fiction film, loaded with a lot of wild concepts and strange imagery. And what’s more, it did this on a minimal TV budget. I enjoyed it thoroughly, despite its technical flaws, as one of the conceptually weirdest SF films I’ve seen. Which doesn’t change the […]
Read more "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank (1983)"This is a strange one. But that’s okay. Strange, even arty-strange can be fun. Particularly when a film is strange enough to overcome its liabilities and be constantly entertaining. We have a dreary, black and white world where everything is run by a single man, who just happens to be the head of the LaFont […]
Read more "No Such Thing As Gravity (1989)"