Tag: SF

Helldriver

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★★
“Conclusive proof that more is not necessarily more…”

I think I am officially over the whole Japanese uber-splatter thing. Either that, or I just don’t like Nishimura’s approach. He has been behind the last couple of examples I’ve seen (this and Tokyo Gore Police) and neither have reached the heights of te better genre entries. At 117 minutes, this is even more overlong than TGP and, to be blunt, I fell asleep before the end. Oh, there’s no lack of stuff going on, as we’ll shortly see, and certainly no shortage of arterial spray. However, neither of them make any significant impression, on either the emotional or visceral levels.

Kika (Hara) comes home to find her father being eaten by her cannibalistic mother (Shiina) and uncle; Mom has designs of dining on daughter too. However, this is interrupted by a meteor which blows right through her chest. No problem: she’ll just rip out Kika’s and stuff it into the hole. Dust, apparently related to the meteor, spawns a zombie epidemic which forces the government to wall off the top half of Japan, though the zombies grow antler-like tumours, which are much in demand for the psychedelic high they induce when ground up and ingested. Meanwhile, Kika is rescued and given an artificial heart which also powers her chainsaw-sword. She is sent into the infected zone, along with her associates, to take out her mother, who has now become the queen of the zombies.

Yeah. Like I said, it’s not short on “stuff.” However, none of this is explored in any meaningful way, and the uber-low budget ($600K) is stretched thin, with most of it going on gallons of corn syrup and obvious latex prosthetics. There’s certainly no shortage of imagination on view – witness the vehicle made entirely out of zombies – but it’s operating in a vacuum, and it may be significant that the opening credits don’t appear until 40 minutes in. The fight scenes, while plentiful, are badly assembled and rarely memorable. The length here is less necessary, and more an exercise in desensitization, and long before the final mother-daughter confrontation, the arterial spray will have lost its impact.

Dir: Yoshihiro Nishimura
Star: Yumiko Hara, Eihi Shiina, Yurei Yanagi, Kazuki Namioka

The Hunger Games (film)

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★★★
“Not as good as the book. There. I said it.”

Ok, it has become the biggest-grossing action heroine film ever at the US box-office. So there’s that. But truth be told, it’s not actually all that good. Sure, it’s impressively-staged, and Lawrence does very well with a role. But there are a number of problems, even as it follows the great majority of the novel. If you’re not aware of the plot (and didn’t read our book review!), I’ll summarize. In a future dystopia, every year the 12 districts in the US submit a teenage girl and boy to the capital, where they battle to the death in a televised spectacle. This time, the resourceful hunter Katniss (Lawrence) volunteers, after her younger sister is selected; she and her male counterpart, baker’s son Peeta (Hutcherson), have to go into battle with the other 22 contestants knowing only one can survive.

At 142 minutes, it’s likely too long, especially as almost the first half is taken up with the pre-game activity, which is distinctly low in thrills. Even once the games start, the action quotient is fairly low, with Katniss seeming do a lot more creeping around on her own. That’s fine in a book, which can fill things up with internal monologue, but it’s not the case in a movie. And what action there is, is badly-shot to the point of utter confusion. There were also a couple of changes from the book that weakened it: the rule change in the middle seemed more of a convenient deus ex machine than in the novel, where it flowed naturally from the Katniss/Peeta alliance, and the genetically-engineered creatures which appear at the end originally were described as being created to look like the fallen competitors, a marvellously horrific touch. In contrast, the movie doesn’t add all that much, in style or content.

On the plus side, I did enjoy Lawrence, who creates exactly the sort of strong, resourceful heroine we need more of, in all media. Unlike certain young adult book series I could mention, she doesn’t seek or need male approval or assistance. In fact, Peeta is basically a wuss, who would be dead without someone stronger to whom he can attach himself – it’s a beautiful bit of role-reversal. I also enjoyed a lot of the supporting characters, particularly Harrelson as the former winner turned alcoholic mentor, and Stanley Tucci as the TV interviewer who, I suspect, is much smarter than he seems. We should also remember that this is the first part of a trilogy, so probably needs to engage in more scene-setting. We’ll see whether the rest of the series can deliver a better handle on the action, while sustaining strong elements, such as the excellent lead.

Dir: Garry Ross
Star: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Woody Harrelson

Tokyo Gore Police

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★★½
“The middle word in the title is easily the most applicable. Far and away.”

In the near-future, Japan is plagued by “engineers” – criminals who have voluntarily undergone genetic modifications, which not only mutate their bodies in bizarre ways, but give them near superpowers and the ability to sprout weapons from their wounds. To combat this, the privatized Japanese police force under their chief (Benny) has an absolutely no-holds barred policy of shoot first, ask questions… Well, don’t bother asking questions. Their top “engineer hunter” is Ruka (Shiina, whom you may recognize from Audition), the daughter of a police officer who was killed in the line of duty while she was just a young girl. She is tracking down the scientist behind the engineers, known as “Key Man” (Itao) because of the key-shaped tumours which trigger the mutations. But when they meet, he infects her – and also reveals the truth behind the deaths of both their fathers.

The most obvious parallel would by Robocop, not only in the cautionary tale of law-enforcement run for profit, but also the sardonic commercials which pepper proceeding, showing how brutal society has become [here’s an example, for a wrist-cutting knife]. It’s against this backdrop that the cold, to the point of being emotionally-dead, heroine plies her trade, troubled by a past that she can’t forget. Shiina is certainly good at that kind of role, but it’s more or less a one-note performance, that doesn’t provide much reason for the audience to empathize with her. However, I get the sense that, as far as director Nishimura is concerned, characterization is probably not quite the main thing he’s concerned with here.

That would, instead, be the splatter, which goes to a whole new level, even by the outrageous standards of the genre. The arterial spray is so copious and powerful that, at one point, an engineer uses it to propel himself about, like a haemoglobin propelled jet-pack. That pretty much sums up the tone to be found here, with body parts also flying when not attached to their owners. It’s arguably the goriest movie ever made, though I’d have to re-watch Peter Jackson’s Brain Dead before I can be certain on this front. However, there isn’t quite enough to sustain it, especially at a fairly extended running-time of 110 minutes. While there no shortage of surreal imagination on view (like the creature which has had all four limbs replaced with samurai swords), and it’s undeniably the most OTT of its siblings, this probably works better as a party tape, playing in the background for your next Halloween bash, given its apparent apathy towards more conventional cinematic attributes.

Dir: Yoshihiro Nishimura
Star: Eihi Shiina, Itsuji Itao, Yukihide Benny, Shoko Nakahara

The Gene Generation

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★★★
“Well, I guess it’ll do until Neuromancer shows up.”

In a dark, grim future, Michelle (Ling) is an assassin, taking out DNA hackers for pay. However, her income is drained as fast as she earns it by her Jackie (Shen), her brother, who has a gambling addiction. To try and pay off his mob debts, he breaks into the apartment of their next-door neighbour, Christian (Newman), a renegade DNA hacker himself, and steals a device on which he was working. The “transcoder” can take a subject’s DNA and, more or less, rewrite it, thereby having the potential to end disease – yet it could also be turned into an enormously destructive weapon. Needless to say, when word gets out that Jackie has this device, everyone wants to get their hands on it.

I liked the visual style, even if it’s so Blade Runner, that Ridley Scott should be cut a fat cheque for its use. And Bai Ling may be in her forties, but is still capable of kicking ass in an impressively competent (and occasionally hyper-bloody) manner: witness the way she disposes of a bunch of evil minions, surrounding her, guns pointed, in about two seconds flat. Let’s just say, Cleric Preston would be impressed. Throw in some impressive industrial beats – VNV Nation leader Ronan Harris provided additional music – and you’ve got something that, at its best, is a very nice slab of cyberpunk.

However, the weaknesses are both severe and obvious. The plotting is clunky and muddied: it’s based on a comic-book (The DNA Hacker Chronicles), but some apparently important points are not explained, while others that appear important are never mentioned again. Jackie is also incredibly annoying; it wasn’t long before Chris and I were wishing a rapid death on this entirely unlikeable jackass. If the film-makers had been wise enough to find another, entirely separate way of bringing Michelle and the transcoder together, we’d have been a great deal happier.

The negatives and positives operate in sharp contrast to each other: the good stuff is really very good, but the bad moments are on the “root canal” level. The unevenness left us with a sense of wasted opportunity; the elements were there for something with definite cult-classic potential. However, they simply succeed in making the failings all the more obvious.

Dir: Pearry Teo
Star: Bai Ling, Parry Shen, Alec Newman, Michael Shamus Wiles

Assault Girls

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★★
“20 minutes of acceptable entertainment gets stretched very thinly.”

A loosely-related sequel to Oshii’s last live-action film, Avalon, this is similarly set in a VR world, and muses on the relationship between real life and game life. This one is a lot less populated; there are only four people in it, roaming a desert landscape, with the targets being giant sandworms (think Dune) and the “boss” Madara, the mother of all sandworms, whom the game helpfully informs contestants, cannot be killed single-handed. The four get together to launch an attack on it, having agreed to split the game reward equally. Is that quite how things are going to turn out?

That’s it, plotwise: describing the story as “slight” would be an insult to slight things. Opening with a burst of the most pretentiously incomprehensible voice-over in cinema history, this is only 70 minutes long, but still manages to outstay its welcome. This is mostly due to horrendous pacing; we watch one character do nothing but sit and fry breakfast for several minutes, while there’s an interminable sequence in the middle, where the characters trudge around the game landscape and stare at a snail. I get the point: these are archetypes depicting different styles of game player. No, really: I get the point. Move on. Please. I was ready to gnaw off a limb to escape, by the time that ended. Matters are not helped by the characters largely speaking English, apparently phonetically, and without much grasp of meaning. I’m pretty sure I’d not win any Oscars performing in Japanese, and while one admires the effort, couldn’t Oshii have found actors with some ability in English as a second language?

Things do perk up in the final act, when Jager (Fujiki, the only male) and Gray (Kuroki), have a battle over how the spoils will be divided. She kicks his ass, to his increasing annoyance. And I certainly appreciated the visual style here, which is easily the best component on view. This, along with the potential in the idea, saves it from being a total waste of your time, and I would not be completely averse to a further installment. Just as long as someone else writes the script.

Dir: Mamoru Oshii
Star: Meisa Kuroki, Yoshikatsu Fujiki, Rinko Kikuchi, Hinako Saeki

Samurai Princess

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★★½
“Whoever knew arterial spray could be so…dull?”

Ok, “dull” is perhaps not quite the word, but Chris voted on this one with her closed eyelids and heavy breathing, and I was struggling to avoid joining her, despite some impressive ideas. It’s set in the Forest of Infinity, a strange locale where past, present and future all seem to merge. Hence, you’ve got renegades with samurai swords and Buddhist nuns and a party of a dozen young women whose paths cross with the former, resulting in the rape and death of 11. The un-named survivor (Kishi) is rescued by a scientist who creates mecha – cyborgs – and he uses the organs of her friends as a core to rebuild her, with the nun adding their 11 souls. The new super-powered samurai princess goes after the killers, and then Red Dragon and Butterfly, who instigated the murders in the name of what they call “art.”

It’s not as good as it sounds. I think it’s a lesson that gore, no matter how impressive, does not make a “good” film, because plot and characters still matter. That’s where this falls down, with too many scenes between the blood-letting that fail to go anywhere. It’s a huge letdown, especially after a undeniably spectacular opening ten minutes, highlighted by the heroine turning her breasts into a sort of ‘flying guillotine’ device that she shoots out on a chain and… Well, you gotta see it. [And, since the whole thing is now legally available through Youtube, feel free to do so. We’ll wait here.] But beyond that, the script wanders off on tangents, like the two female detectives apparently hunting mecha builders, with muddied motivation for a lot of the characters and performances which, too often, rely on pulling faces in place of acting.

It’s a shame, as I liked the concepts, underexplained as they were – is the Forest of Infinity anywhere near Versus‘s Forest of Resurrection? – and the fusion of elements from different periods. However, it felt as if the makers concentrated all their efforts on the gore effects, and that will only work if your entire running-time is composed of these. Though at times it felt like this was the case here, it wasn’t so, and the makers could learn from other, better entries on matters like pacing and characterization.

Dir: Kengo Kaji
Star: Aino Kishi, Dai Mizuno, Asuka Kataoka, Mitsuru Karahashi

Black Magic M-66

  By

★★★½
“Aliens meets The Terminator in a brisk, head-on collision.”

Shirow has certainly done his fair share of anime works that are regarded as classics – his best-known creation is probably Appleseed. This is from relatively early in his career; indeed, coming out in 1991 made it one of the first anime to be ‘properly’ distributed in the West [and, by that, I mean subtitled and not cut down for a child audience]. It centers on the titular pair of military androids, who are released after their transport craft goes down in the middle of a forest. The army cordon off the area, which draws the attention of Sybel (Sakakibara), a reporter, unwilling to let anything stand in the way of her story. She witnesses a hellacious fire-fight in which one ‘droid is destroyed, while the other escapes, and discovers the goal for the android is to kill the inventor’s young grand-daughter, Ferris. As the only person who knows the current location of the daughter, it’s up to her to save the child.

Barely half the length of an average movie, this fairly gallops along, towards an extended climax in a high-rise block, where Sybel is the only thing left standing between the relentless robot and its target. This is when the film is at is best, with action sequences that wouldn’t shame most Hollywood action movies. Less successful – in fact, basically absent (admittedly, no real surprise given the running time) – is any real effort at developing the characters. We know Sybel is focused, because she leaves her apartment with her camera, yet forgets to put on clothes. That’s about the extent of it, and she is the best-served of anyone in the film; Ferris, for instance, does little but squeal in an irritating manner. It’s also a product of its time: originally made in 1987, animation has changed radically in the more than two decades since, and the style now looks somewhat clunky, especially when it tries to simulate camera movement.

Still, the storyline holds up nicely, and given America’s fondness for remaking Japanese genre films, one wonders why they haven’t bothered to mine the animation vaults further [though Speed Racer probably acts as a good counter-argument!]. It’d certainly be very easy to see this as a James Cameron movie.

Dir: Masamune Shirow
Star (voice): Yoshiko Sakakibara, Shinji Ogawa, Yû Mizushima, Chisa Yokoyama

Dirty Pair Flash, Mission 3: Random Angels

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★★★

The final – to date – installment of Dirty Pair adventures on the screen, is a bit of a mixed bag. Of the five episodes here, two are pretty good, one mediocre, and two are more than a tad creepy, thanks to the level of, from what I recall of my days in anime, used to be called ‘fan service’. There is an entire episode centered around beach volleyball, which is nothing more than a flimsy excuse to see Kei and Yuri in a variety of miniscule costumes, bordering on the fetishistic. Now, I just don’t find cartoons sexy – no, not even Jessica Rabbit – and given both of them are technically under-age, it all gets a tad sleazy. Things get worse in the fourth episode, when an even younger boy, rich and clever, but very weird, builds a mechanical replica of Yuri and falls in love with it.

That’s the bad news. The good news is, when they keep on track, the show has the right mix of goofy humour and collateral damage that we love. Witness the second installment, where our pair find themselves being hunted by Monica De Noir: someone younger, deadlier and with an even more saccharine approach to life, whose weapons include things like a giant killer teddy-bear. That’s got some nice jabs at the Sailor Moon school of anime, though since Flash takes some aspects of that show on-board, it does count as biting the hand somewhat. Also enjoyable was the final episode, where Berringer, a villain in a military hard-suit who was jailed thanks to Chief Poporo, lays siege to WWWA headquarters, with vengeance atop his list of priorities. It’s kinda Die Hard crossed with The Terminator, and I was sorry to see that one finish. Completing the set is an episode where Kei has to nurse a baby through a hostile landscape; emphasis on a) ‘nurse’ and b) ‘hostile’, which is also kinda odd to Western eyes. Having always preferred Yuri to Kei, this was never going to be one of my favorites.

All told though, it is a significant improvement on the dire previous series, returning the focus to what made the Dirty Pair entertaining, in a cheerfully destructive way. It certainly feels something of a mis-step to separate Kei and Yuri, as in a couple of the pieces: the interaction and character contrast between them is part of the show’s appeal. However, when they’re together and working in synch, they still represent one of the best double-acts in anime history, and I hope there will perhaps be more Dirty Pair available down the road.

Dir: Takahito Kimura
Star (voice): Rika Matsumoto, Mariko Koda, Shigezou Sasaoka, Mika Kanai

Dirty Pair Flash, Mission 2: Angels at World’s End

  By

★½

Where are Kei and Yuri, and what have you done with them? That might be the anguished cry of the Dirty Pair fan after watching these five episodes, most of which eschew any efforts at high-octane action, in favour of generally unamusing comedy and tedium. All five parts are set on World’s World, a theme-planet that recreates 20th-century life for tourists. Our heroines are sent there because the computer is virus-infected, to bodyguard the network engineer Touma (Ono) who is going to fix it. Their presence becomes necessary, as it’s soon clear someone is out to stop Touma from doing his job. That only occupies the bookend episodes: the middle three are, while still set on the same planet, largely unconnected. In them, Kei and Yuri must look into ghostly goings-on at a girls’ school, help Touma with his love-life and bring a con-artist to justice.

Wow, this is bland and forgettable. Two of the episodes are closer to shaggy-dog stories, with twists in the tail that might as well open with flashing neon signs indicating their presence. This is not the Dirty Pair I signed up for. I signed up for the ones with the large weaponry, capable of taking out entire cities with a shrug of denial and an oversized weapon. Not these…bimbos, more interested in the romantic dalliances of a feeble supporting character than in a bit of the old ultraviolence. Really, the direction taken in this slate is a good example of why I started to lose interest in anime after the mid-90’s: a dumbing-down and kiddification of the medium, that largely removed everything that attracted me to it to begin with. I blame Pokemon.

The setting has a lot of scope: the creators could potentially have thrown Kei and Yuri into any era and any location [can you imagine them in, say, the Wild West or feudal Japan?]. Appreciating that, dumping them into modern era Tokyo demonstrates a dearth of imagination that borders on the sad. There are occasional flashes of what you would expect from the series, such as the final episode, which becomes a moderately-rousing chase after the perpetrator behind both the computer virus and the attacks on Touma. That just simply throws the failings inherent in the rest of the episodes into even sharper relief. I never previously thought that the Dirty Pair could ever be boring; I guess I have this set of OAVs to thank for convincing me otherwise, as I spent far too much of them wondering how much longer there was to go.

Dir: Takahito Kimura
Star (voice): Rika Matsumoto, Mariko Koda, Kenichi Ono, Akio Ootsuka

Dirty Pair Flash, Mission 1: Angels in Trouble

  By

★★★½

The surprising thing about this, is that the six episodes, basically, form a single plot, a radically different approach to the first phase anime, where the individual OAVs stood on their own, with little or no ongoing story arc. Here, the parts mesh, starting with the pair, off-duty, coming into possession of an encrypted card, which they must get back to 3WA headquarters, in the face of significant opposition. From this develops the uncovering of a galaxy-wide conspiracy involving the malevolent Lucifer group, which must be foiled, since they have control of galactic communications. However, a significant subplot involves Lady Flair, a sniper who humiliates Kei in the second episode, provoking her into a fury which leads, later on, to our redheaded spitfire quitting the 3WA in order to pursue Flair on her own terms.

There’s some interesting background provided, in that Kei and Yuri are not the first to bear the “Lovely Angels” name for their employers. It seems to be more like the “Double 0” prefix, though perhaps limited to one pairing at any given time. Anyway, it seems the reign of the previous incumbents, Molly and Iris, ended when the former was killed on the job, and Iris quit, to vanish from the scene. Savvy readers may be already making a connection to the previous paragraph, but you’ll find no spoilers here. No. Not at all. I can neither confirm nor deny any such thoughts.

I can’t help feeling this wasn’t as good as it could have been, given the components, which have potential. Maybe’s it’s the relationship between the heroines which is the problem; efforts to show them changing, from initially dislike into devoted partners, never convince on any significant level. All the rest of the elements are certainly present, from the major urban renewal scheme initiated by the demolition company of Kei+Yuri, Inc. in the first episode, through lightly-cheesecakey costumes to wholesale mayhem at an airport where everyone is packing heat, and there are enough good moments and fun to keep me amused. But the pair (Kei especially) are less heroic, savvy women, than two peeved, heavily-armed, teenage, girls. As we already have someone in the house who fits 3/4 of that bill – thankfully, not “heavily-armed”! – the appeal of this series is naturally diminished.

Dir: Takahito Kimura
Star (voice): Rika Matsumoto, Mariko Koda, Hazime Koseki, Yumi Touma