As I noted in my review for Steamboy, Katsuhiro Otomo has played an incredibly important role in the development of Japanese Anime. While he may only have directed two films (with a third, Orbital Era, in the works), he has been involved in dozens of films, providing scripts, storyboards, character designs, production help and who knows […]
Read more "Memories [Memorîzu] (1995)"Wow. I really miss Sam Raimi. You have to wonder what happened: one day, you are making some of the most insane, whacked out and totally unique movies ever and the next?… You look just like everyone else. Now, I know the cynical among you will say that this is because someone in Hollywood waved […]
Read more "Darkman (1990)"(aka Chamber of Fear, The Torture Chamber, Torture Zone) This one is genuinely bizarre. It has to be the strangest mix of utter nonsense I’ve ever seen. Boris Karloff was dying , but being the consummate professional he was, he kept making movies right up almost to the end. This was one of his four last […]
Read more "Fear Chamber (1968)"(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)"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)"