Self-portrait of the suicidal trans youth of a hopeless city, with sober narration from a coffin.
The director cast Camilo in his gay ghost dystopia film, but Camilo died, and half his friends followed, real ghosts in an actual dystopia.
Tag: dystopia
Dredd (2012, Pete Travis)
Is this the first movie I’ve watched in full after previously watching its last ten minutes? It’s not the first time I’d watched the end of a movie and thought “this isn’t bad, I should see the rest of it” – that’d be Waxwork. This one I simply lost track, and ended up half-watching while working on something, looking up whenever someone got killed in super-slow-mo (they’re taking hummingbird-brain drugs). Some good violence, if nothing else. I noted all the important details last time – in the years since, Judge Urban has gotten involved in all the major properties, Psychic Thirlby was in Lousy Carter, Villain Headey did Game of Thrones, and the writer and DP made Trainspotting 2 together.
Zooted Dawg:
Slow-mo final boss plummet:
Death Race 2000 (1975, Paul Bartel)
Before Schwarzenegger starred in The Running Man, before Stephen King even wrote it, Schwarz’s rival Stallone starred in a better movie about a deadly future game show (based on an Ib Melchior novel). In a totalitarian USA (I cannot relate) David Carradine is a clone puppet masked hero representing the establishment, targeted by the resistance but secretly also planning to destroy the president, as belatedly revealed to his navigator/spy Simone Griffeth. Stallone is his toughest competitor Machine Gun Joe – other quickly-dispatched competitors are Mary Woronov, nazi Roberta Collins (between Caged Heat and Eaten Alive) and Martin Kove (professional Karate Kid antagonist). Most get blown up, the nazi takes a Wile E Coyote detour off a cliff.
A familiar pose:
Frankenstein kills the president and so becomes president – is that really how it works? I’m not very smart now but I was even worse in 2012, so I won’t link to my review of the remake, which is probably fine though I’m not running out to rewatch/reassess it, and we’ll see if the rumored Running Man remake comes out. Am I hallucinating, or did Eric have an Amiga game based on this movie?
Bartel is protective of his creation:
Junk Head (2017, Takahide Hori)
I can’t believe another sci-fi stop-motion feature exists with the same plot as Mad God – Phil Tippett must’ve been so steamed when he saw this. Both movies’ worlds are packed with lore and backstory, which they mostly don’t bother us with, as we follow a little guy who descends into lovingly-detailed hellish depths on some doomed mission. This guy’s human body has been mangled so he’s been robocopped into a doll head and roboticized. Early in his trip he’s ripped apart by worms and takes a mission-endangering head knock, then is re-roboticized into a science lab servant, and fails (but with great effort) to complete a quest to retrieve some mushrooms. The little guy kills a monster and rescues one of his mole-man friends – he does not save humanity or return to the surface, but a sequel is due next year.
2551.01 (2021, Norbert Pfaffenbichler)
Laborious “Mad God but not good” vibes. The strobing pounding metal grotesque masked riot scene was a decent open, continues with monochrome cruelty (in every scene there’s some poor sucker who the others are beating). Throw in clowns and banana peels, silly music/sfx (laugh track?) in case we take the grim masked drama and Abu Ghraib references too seriously. The sudden stop/start of fast electro music just made me wonder if I could find the “Come On My Selector” video in high-def. In the end, it’s just an excuse to make lots and lots of masks, some of them really cool. Apparently during pandemic year one I spent an evening watching Nor-Pfaf movies, but now in the post-pand 2020s I remember nothing of previous years and rely on the movie memory blog more and more.
Fortress & Space Truckers (Stuart Gordon)
Fortress (1992)
A couple of movies I haven’t seen in many years… Fortress being the only Gordon film I saw in theaters, before I knew him as the Re-Animator guy. It sets up a decently convincing sci-fi dystopia, but no actors are “good” in this, not even Jeffrey Combs. Anyway it’s not taking itself too seriously so why should we?
The gang:
That 70s Dad runs a private prison where even an “unauthorized thought process” will get your guts electroshocked (“intestinated”) – after RoboCop, Kurtwood Smith was typecast as an evil boss in cyborg dystopias. Ex-soldier Christopher Lambert and his illegally pregnant hotwife arrive as prisoners, and while T7D macks on the wife (Loryn Locklin of Wes Craven’s Night Visions), Lambert teams up with his cellmates to escape – including timid nerd Combs, Lincoln Kilpatrick of The Omega Man, and Clifton Collins Jr. of Guillermo Del Toro’s Robot Jox remake Pacific Rim. Lambert has to fight a giant psycho (Vernon Wells of Mad Max 2 and some Joe Dante films)… Combs is killed while installing a virus into the mainframe by typing “install virus.exe” or something, which reminds me, isn’t there a new version of Blackhat coming out?
Unauthorized thought process:
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Space Truckers (1996)
An even sillier movie – I don’t think sci-fi action plays to Gordon’s strengths – but Dennis Hopper is a huge upgrade over Lambert, bringing the charm he omitted from Witch Hunt. He’s a Millennium Falcon/Firefly-style independent space trucker, beefing with George Wendt over shipment prices, then accidentally gets involved in a plot to take over the world.
Our heroes in a porta-potty:
Hopper and hired hand Stephen Dorff take a load of killer robots, then get stuck in space while lusting after the same girl (Hopper’s Witch Hunt costar Debi Mazar), then attacked by their own murderbot cargo. Nice cynical ending, the guy plotting a hostile planetary takeover (Shane Rimmer, best known from Thunderbirds) is now President of Earth – the super-soldiers were just a backup plan should he not get elected. But his plan to eliminate witnesses backfires, and our guys flee after blowing up the president. I’d take a sequel, but this straight-to-video widescreen movie was never gonna get one.
Space pirates:
Johnny Mnemonic (1995, Robert Longo)
I love when no-prestige 1990’s studio flicks appear on Criterion Channel – here in a revisionist black-and-white version. Much better than I first thought, made by an ambitious artist who got caught in the Hollywood crap machine. The new coloring and the passage of time help you see “the movie that was in the movie.”
After Blue (2021, Bertrand Mandico)
Toxic Roxy is young and blonde, frees buried criminal Kate Bush, who murders all Roxy’s friends then escapes, leaving the whole community angry at Roxy and her hairdresser mom. This all takes place on another planet, populated entirely by women who shun electronics and chemistry, after the earth became uninhabitable… well, only shunning these things to a point, since they have guns and androids (both named after fashion brands). While waiting for Kate, Roxy and her mom (Elina Löwensohn of course) bond with Kate’s fancy rich neighbor Sternberg, with her male android Olgar 2 and weirdo bounty-hunter bots Keifer and Climax.
Extremely horny sci-fi, Roxy masturbating at every opportunity, with dreamy visuals. We got zombie horses, geode-faced creatures, energy weapons, a pubic third eye, hats and fur coats everywhere, and everything is slimy or dripping and cross-faded onto everything else. I felt bad about not liking The Northman last night, then today I double-featured this with Mad God at the Plaza, and now I am feeling much better.
Prisoners of the Ghostland (2021, Sion Sono)
I paused this halfway since Katy wanted to watch To the Ends of the Earth, which features a lead actor from Sono’s Tokyo Tribe – kinda thinking I should’ve rewatched Tribe instead of this. As Sono’s movies get wackier, I lose more interest… I hated Noriko’s Dinner Table, but it at least felt like he was aiming for something more than prefab cult movies for festival midnight sections and Alamo Drafthouses. Anyway, most of us are here for Nicolas Cage, and he’s good – the production design > acting > editing > writing. It’s written by an American cartoon voice actor and an actor from A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night – Sono’s tendency to slow down and repeat everything does the weak script no favors.
Sofia in Ghostland:
The Cult of the Mushroom Cloud:
Escape from New York meets that Rutger Hauer movie Wedlock where the convicts wear exploding collars. This time there are multiple little bombs in his jumpsuit, so Cage can lose an arm or a testicle and survive to the next scene. He’s a bad dude (frequent slow-mo flashbacks to a bank robbery where his partner went all Michael Madsen on the customers), as is Governor Bill Moseley who hires him to retrieve escaped daughter Sofia Boutella (Atomic Blonde and Climax). The Ghostland isn’t such a bad place, compared to anywhere else in this movie, it’s just everyone there has mass delusions. The baddie with a nuclear-melted face turns out to be Cage’s psychotic criminal partner, and Cage turns his half-arm into a weapon – what horror movie fan could’ve seen either of those developments coming?? MVP the Ratman.
Discovering Sofia:
Psycho Nick Cassavetes beneath my favorite banner:
Ratman at left:
