MOVIE REVIEW: DEATH POWDER (1986)

Written, Produced, and Directed by Shigeru Izumiya

Music by Kiyoshiro Imawano

Cinematography by Kazuo Komizu

Special Make Up Effects by Yuichi Matsui

Starring

Shigeru Izumiya as Harima (thief)

Takichi Inukai as Kiyoshi (bounty hunter)

Rikako Murakami as Noris (bounty hunter)

Mari Natsuki as Guernica (android/replicant)

Tomoko Ohtsu as Guernica 2 (android/replicant)

Kiyoshiro Imawano as Dr. Loo (mad scientist)

Tamio Kageyama as Mr. Hacker (Scar People boss)

. . .

DR. LOO MADE ME

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

From the depths of Japan's Bubble Economy comes a future mish-mash of Blade Runner, the gooey monster transformations of John Carpenter's The Thing, science fiction narco-gangsterism, and a dash of TV tokusatsu gadget warriors vs monster of the week style action. All of this is presented in terms of lo-fi Video Toaster visuals of bombed-out warehouses intercut with music videos and a still picture slideshow. 

The plot concerns a pair of bounty hunters who are tasked by a gang known as the Scar People to track down a stolen female android called Guernica. Guernica is an artificial person designed as a new style of robot to serve the whims of humanity. The word Replicant is used, thereby implying that Guernica is a vatgrown slave much like the doomed artificial beings in Blade Runner, complete with false memories and a four year lifespan. The one key difference between the Replicants of Blade Runner and Death Powder is that as Guernica approaches death her body produces a strange powder that causes people to uncontrollably mutate. The titular powder carries Guernica's memories along with it, thereby facilitating a strange new reproductive cycle based around bodily transformation and being-to-being memory transfer. This is all presented in gooey body horror terms, but we also see the corruption and avarice of a cyberpunky status quo in which everyone is either a heavily armed mercenary free agent or a blindly loyal gangster with a procedurally scarred face to signal one's fealty to a big boss. The Death Powder, in this scheme, becomes a kind of arms race commodity that armed factions battle to monopolize. 

Death Powder is comical in the sense that the conflict seems to be about who gets to become an oozing, avaricious monster first and fastest. It's a sort of inversion of the values of tokusatsu action shows like Kamen Rider in which a transforming cyborg superhero lethally polices more grotesque mutating monster villains. In Death Powder everyone is either a villain or a pawn of a villain operating within a cutthroat brakes off capitalist economy. 

The best scene comes near the very end, when a trash out crew shows up to clear a condemned building of debris and squatters only to find themselves disappeared by a video meats door. The implication is that the Death Powder is beginning to mutate not just people but the very material basis-private property-of capitalism into a wild, untameable monster. Now, your stuff doesn't just own your ass-you're its food! You'll just have to see it for yourself.

Mostly, though, Death Powder is about the atmosphere, the style, the ratty nth generation VHS dub vibes. Good luck finding a version with both legible subtitles and all of the scenes intact. Even so, Death Powder is that rare work that increases in creativity even as it has been damaged by neglect and lack of digital remastering. It's a dystopian science fiction horror flick dealing with themes of capitalist aggression, mutation, and contingency that has been mutilated and mutated into a bizarre cult object by time and tide. I usually don't go for throwback videotape aesthetics but Death Powder is just too perfect in how it merges form and substance.

COMICS REVIEW: METALZOIC (1986)

 

Written by Pat Mills

Art by Kevin O'Neill

Lettered by John Costanza

Edited by Andrew Helfer 

Cover Painting by Bill Sienkiewicz 

Published by DC Comics Inc. A Warner Communications Company in 1986 as 'GRAPHIC NOVEL NO. 6'

. . .

"But know this . . . on the day the god-beast dies, the end of the robots is near, and the sun shall set on the era called . . . METALZOIC."

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker. 

This is the story of Armageddon and Amok, two mechatyrants engaged in a death duel for supremacy over a race of highly evolved robots in the distant future. 

We're not talking about Asimov's rational, servile robots. These are some wildass machine beasts, whose evolution has been turbocharged by the succession of Cold War military-industrial-infotainment complexes and totalitarian surveillance systems gone rogue. Add in a side-salad of sprawling, hyper-mutational chameleon plants known as Traffids, and you've got yourself a buffet of post-human, future-botbarian savagery-what fun!

Amok is a kind of robot mammoth on tank treads. He leads a massive herd of similar creatures. He manufactures an heir by combining data with a female wheeldebeast, and then pumping liquid steel into her womb-foundry. Out rolls junior, a little guy, who will be built and modified with new, larger parts as he accumulates data over time. 

Amok is the oldest robot, and therefore the God of this cruel world. But as Amok ages, and his parts are damaged, and become dysfunctional, other 'bots may arise to challenge him to a death duel to attain the God position. 

Armageddon is a cruel and treacherous being who has conducted surgery on his own positronic brain to become a more perfect slaughter engine. Armageddon is determined to best Amok in combat and become the God. 

But Armageddon and Amok must endure a world of dangerous mechabominations if they are to have their fated duel . . .

Polaris nuclear submarines that have merged with robosharks.

Predatory eaters that camouflage themselves with the rusty hulks of junked-out 'bots'n'infrastructure. You're scavenging for parts in a boneyard when a terrible, mechanistic maw opens wide to consume you . . .

The organic traffids, genetically engineered carnivorous plants of yore who have developed a taste for steel.

Manipulative religious leaders-shameks-who try to psych you out by manipulating your positronic brains with strategic radio waves . . . or is it wi-fi?!

All of this craziness is drawn with mindbending detail. You'll want to take this one slow, lingering over each page, savoring the comic grotesqueries of each beastbot battle. 

Metalzoic is a clever comedic riff on how human technology is bound up with our values, our fantasies, our pathologies, our tribalisms, our stubborn refusal to let go of outdated mythological and religious motifs. 

And yet . . . these terrible 'bots carry on human idiosyncrasies and desires. Truly, they are making the most of their dreadful human heritage as the misbegotten spawn of late twentieth century war machines. 

Terrifying vessels of an ambiguous spark . . .

POETIC VIDEO GAME REVIEW #6: THE LEGEND OF ZELDA (1986)

Fourth grade 

this kid drew these elaborate maps of forests and dungeons 

it is, 

indeed, 

an unauthorized paper version of Zelda 

a way to extend the game from screen into physical reality 

I gather my rubbery Monster in My Pocket figures to play the enemy 

and a badass Lego knight in black and gray armor with a sword and a shield bearing the image of a fearsome dragon to play a tougher, battle-seasoned Link

Soon enough this kid was drawing maps of post-apocalyptic city settings and a wrecked subway line inspired by a Planet of the Apes marathon on one of the Ted Turner channels 

We decided not to bring in any modern weapons 

just those Danger Mouse bombs 

keep it to blades and some magic 

We're trying not to repeat the mistakes of the past, I suppose. 

The Lynch Meditations 8: Blue Velvet (1986)

It holds up.

I don't want to spoil too much with this one. If you haven't seen Blue Velvet go watch it. It is a tightly assembled mystery that is surreal without totally departing reality for parts unknown.

If you have seen Blue Velvet, I'll try not to bore you with what has already been said many times over about this film. So let me see if I can say something that hasn't been said about it before . . . I might not be up to the task . . .

I'm a big fan of point-and-click mystery adventure games: Shadowgate, Deja Vu, Uninvited, King's Quest, Nightshade Part 1: The Claws of Sutekh, Snatcher, Grim Fandango, the Gabriel Knight series, the Tex Murphy series, the Phoenix Wright series, and pretty much everything put out by Wadjet Eye Games. These are games where you drag a cursor around the screen, looking for some kind of response from the program, looking for any kind of a clue. You might need to interrogate people by choosing dialogue prompts, being careful not to say the wrong thing which could potentially shut down a conversation prematurely. Usually these games take place in a series of rooms and passages, where each section must be thoroughly investigated and solved before you unlock more rooms, and more passages, that are, ultimately, all connected in some unexpected, labyrinthine fashion by game's end.

Point-and-click games are sometimes notorious for the difficulty of their "moon logic" puzzles-conundrums whose solutions are so arbitrary and obscure that they could only possibly make sense in the hermetically sealed, hyper-postmodern reality of a video game. Sometimes, though, these moon logic puzzles transcend to a level of surreal brilliance which delights, but just as often they make you want to throw your monitor through a window. The best point-and-click adventures create an internal logic that subtly challenges you to engage with the mystery on its own terms, giving you enough clues and worldbuilding contextualization so that you have a fighting chance to reach the end state of the game with a sense of earned achievement.

Blue Velvet creates a near-perfect point-and-click adventure scenario with its own internally consistent reality that seems rooted in our world, but departs from it in key moments to give us a bit of a jolt at just the right moments. We even have a video game cypher of a protagonist (perfectly played by Kyle MacLachlan as a twin-souled square and voyeuristic freak all in one) who allows us to enter into the world with just enough perception to suss out a mystery worth diving into, but lacking that extra bit of common sense which would send a normal person running the fuck home. Visually, we are presented with a series of images and objects that lead us further into the heart of mystery: a severed human ear; a propeller hat; a blue velvet robe; angry and agonized and ecstatic faces distorted in dreams; human forms moving from the background of shadows into the foreground of light; an apartment and a living room presented as though each were a proscenium stage; a work light used as a microphone . . . we are encouraged to think in terms of a show presented before our eyes and how exactly that show has been put together.

The video game cypher takes time out of the adventure to assemble his thoughts and experiences in montage, drawing conclusions that advance the program closer to the end state.

Meanwhile, Angelo Badalamenti's lush score seems to emanate from a dimension of refined film noir that blurs the lines between cinema and reality. After my latest viewing, I am now convinced that the world of Blue Velvet was born from Badalamenti's mysterious score, as opposed to being a film created by a cast and crew of hundreds of people as you would expect from most movies.

Much like in a point-and-click mystery adventure, our protagonist doesn't notice all there is to notice until he is deep into things. When he first goes to a nightspot called the Slow Club, he is mesmerized by a sad and beautiful torch singer. Later, after he's been through some shit, he goes back to the Slow Club, is once again mesmerized by the sad and beautiful torch singer . . . but now he sees someone else in the audience. Someone who was probably there the first time, but our protagonist had no reason to notice this person as distinct from the other anonymous customers in the crowd. I imagine a New Game+ version of these sequences where you can play through it, again, and have a different outcome.

But Blue Velvet isn't a video game. It's a movie. It flows in one direction, coming to one conclusion every single time, and it will never change.

Unless, of course, David Lynch decides to go back into it with computer graphics technology and add in copious amounts of bantha poodoo, digitally enhanced explosions, and maybe an extra rock for Kyle MacLachlan to hide behind inside that closet . . . this would be so fucked-up and absurd I kind of want to see it happen.

But I get drawn into this one every time I watch it. Maybe it's a great movie. Maybe I'm just a great sucker.

NEXT: 2/23/18: Twin Peaks Pilot Episode (1990)