MOVIE REVIEW: TOKYO FIST (1995)

Art Director/Production Designer/Cinematographer/Editor/Producer/Writer/Director: Shinya Tsukamoto

Music by Chu Ishikawa

Story by Hisashi Sato and Shinya Tsukamoto

Starring

Shinya Tsukamoto as Tsuda

Kahori Fujii as Hizuru

Koji Tsukamoto as Kojima

Koichi Wajima as Shirota (Gym Owner)

Naomasa Musaka as Hase (Ethical Trainer)

Naoto Takenaka as Ohizumi (Less Ethical Trainer)

Nobu Kanaoka as Nurse

Tomorowo Taguchi as Tattoo Artist

. . .

“He who leaves the fight unfinished is not at peace.”

-from the N.K. Sandars English language translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh (1960, revised 1964, revised 1972)

“I was on my way home, but the moon brought me back here.”

-dialogue from the film Tokyo Fist (1995)

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

Two men-a struggling insurance salesman named Tsuda and a struggling boxer named Kojima-fight over a woman-Hizuru, a competent data entry office worker-in Tokyo. It gets loud. It gets bloody. 

Tokyo Fist is a saga of jealousy and vengeance told in a punitively kinetic style. The camera seems to jitter about with hysterical excitement. Boxers in training assault the lens full-on. The audience is positioned as a punching bag. Brilliant industrial music gets the blood boiling. Yes, the characters are miserable. But there’s tremendous energy driving them. You keep waiting for someone’s head to explode.

Tokyo Fist also features clever use of real world locations in Tokyo mixed with stylishly lit sets. Director Shinya Tsukamoto even incorporates his fascinatingly gruesome stop motion animation techniques from Tetsuo the Iron Man and Tetsuo II: Body Hammer to convey both inner emotional turmoil and bodily destruction in a more down-to-earth context of economic downturn and social dysfunction. Tokyo Fist is hyper-stylish but the visual flourishes do not smooth over the suffering of the characters. This is a satirically brutal view of Tokyo in the mid-1990s.

In the beginning, things can more or less be said to take place in mundane reality. There are two men, and there’s the woman they’re fighting to win. Everyone is basically someone who probably could exist outside of a movie. Maybe, y’know, the lighting would be less stylish, the shot compositions sloppier, more off-the-cuff, but these folks would still make sense free of the cinema frame.

Hizuru and Tsuda live in a nice enough apartment, and both work tolerable corporate jobs. We see Tsuda and Hizuru as having a happy relationship, at first, but we are soon enough given hints that all is not as it seems. Tsuda seems like a nice guy, but he’s actually jealous and controlling when not taking Hizuru for granted. Tsuda soon enough unleashes a full-on abusive side. He seems to feel entitled to nice things because he works so hard even if he’s both a tool of the system and a lousy partner. Hizuru seems like a doormat, but her passive exterior masks a simmering rage at being stepped on and trapped in a loveless relationship. Hizuru’s also resisting the expectation that she’s supposed to give up her career when Tsuda and her get married-a regressive expectation since it’s both misogynist and unrealistic. It’s misogynist in that it’s based on arbitrary gender roles. It’s unrealistic in the sense that Tsuda and Hizuru are living in the depths of the Post-Bubble Economy Malaise. A single income isn’t the smart way to go if they do stay together. 

Kojima enters the scene as a shadowy figure from Tsuda’s past. Tsuda is tasked with paying out a policy to someone at a boxing gym. So Tsuda goes to the gym. It’s framed as a descent into a bizarre underground cultish scene. Bruised men weep and hang their heads at being freshly defeated in the ring-mind you these are just sparring matches. Tsuda catches a glimpse of men throwing rapid fire punches synched to exaggerated sound effects. Tsuda’s instantly captivated by what he sees. Tsuda is also obviously threatened by it. Something’s stirring within the salesman. Tsuda and Kojima walk past each other, obliviously-except Kojima did see Tsuda. Of course, Tsuda might have recognized Kojima but chose to ignore him, but Tsuda comes across as so clueless that I don’t think he did. Tsuda leaves the gym, eager to catch the train home-but that’s when a first person slasher villain camera charges up behind him-

It’s Kojima. Him and Tsuda exchange words. It’s civil enough, on the surface, but also full of tension. Kojima and Tsuda know each other from the past. It’ll be awhile before We the Audience get filled in on that past, but it is very obviously the source of tension. Tsuda fears the past, and so he denies it. Kojima’s stuck in it.

Hizuru is interested in tattoos and body piercings. To an audience in 2024 this all seems pretty tame, but Tsuda freaks out, absurdly attempting to force her to accept a laser removal and then a skin graft from his ass cheeks. Maybe Japanese society in 1995 was just super uptight about tattoos and piercings. I should also note here that Tokyo Fist has a kind of bleakly funny hysteria woven through it. Tsuda’s moral panic at Hizuru’s ink and piercings is a manifestation of this.

Kojima visits Tsuda and Hizuru’s apartment. There’s a spark between Hizuru and Kojima. Tsuda picks up on that. Tsuda becomes even more abusive towards Hizuru. She ditches the salesman for Kojima . . . who also turns out to be an asshole. Hizuru is drawn to the boxer’s impressive body, but there’s little for her beyond lust. Kojima has the same regressive outlook on women. Hizuru finds herself trapped in another infuriating relationship with another dead end jerkoff she can do without. 

Tsuda seeks revenge against Kojima by joining his boxing gym. This seems like a joke, since by this time Kojima has already pummeled Tsuda’s face to a pulp during a jealous confrontation. But Tsuda pretty much has nothing but rage and shame to drive him by this point. Hizuru’s ditched him. He no longer takes his salesman job seriously. Tsuda’s all in on a duel to the death. 

Even the larger population of Tokyo is hungry for a death match. We see Kojima earn a technical victory against an opponent in the ring only to get booed by the disgruntled spectators. They didn’t come to see a clean fight. They came to see a man die. Even when Kojima wins he still loses. 

The fighting is, at times, direct and quite nasty, quickly becoming an end unto itself as Tsuda and Kojima seem to mutate into grisly, macho beasts more suited to battling the Hulk as opposed to going on dates in sitdown restaurants. Tsuda and Kojima bring their battle into a boxing gym, which is an all male scene, although Hizuru makes some attempts to get in the game. Literal boxing occurs, but then the literal process of boxing-the training, the drilling, the mindset, the fight itself-becomes a metaphor for the lives of our central trio. In Tokyo in the 1990s jobs, relationships, romance, desire, lust, love-these are all staged upon a battlefield that may be largely notional, and yet the city itself seems to exert some terrible power over hearts and minds. I was never wholly certain if these characters were taking action for themselves or if that terrible city power was riding herd on their asses all the way down the line.

Not surprisingly, Hizuru eventually removes herself from the whole situation . . . but Tsuda and Kojima keep on fighting. The actual Hizuru is replaced by a fantasy image of Hizuru in Tsuda and Kojima’s minds . . . which is probably what was going on even when she was still around. Sucks, but that is so often the case, isn’t it? Neither of these dudes ever saw Hizuru as her own person. Tsuda saw her as a trophy, perhaps as an eventual baby factory to secure his legacy. Kojima just got off on the sex and cuckolding Tsuda. Hizuru’s ultimate fate is ambiguous-which may frustrate some viewers-but there’s no doubt she’s better off far away from this pair of dickheads.

Tokyo Fist builds to a climax that weaves together real world imagery with gory hallucinations. Or maybe they’re not hallucinations. Maybe the central trio-Tsuda, Hizuru, Kojima-are vessels for the collective frustration, pettiness, vindictiveness, and disillusionment of post-Bubble Tokyo. Years of plenty, years of excess, riding a bullet train powered by a corporate fantasy of unlimited economic growth-

-now here comes the brick wall. 

Brace for impact. 

For all the good it’ll do you.

POETIC VIDEO GAME REVIEW #32: WILD GUNS SNES (1995)

 

Hectic gunfire celebration

Inside a science fiction Wild West

Like that old TV show

That got adapted into a Will Smith movie with the music video?

Sort of anticipating the anime Spaceghetti Western cycle

Of Outlaw Star, Trigun, Cowboy Bebop,

That kinda thing I guess,

Satisfying gameplay,

I dart back and forth across the foreground

Zapping Enemy in the middle and backgrounds,

Makes me feel like a real action person,

Hordes of hired guns and automated drone assets, 

Impressive mixture of meats and robos,

Good coordination of flesh and steel assets on the part of Enemy,

But, alas, I have Protagonist Mojo,

Therefore, even though I'm just one Space Cowboy, I get to spray'n'waste hordes of outlaw mercenaries,

I almost feel bad,

But I got freeze lassos,

Nonlethal, I think,

So, this game could have had a No Kill route,

But this was SNES Time, a less sophisticated era, therefore I must massacre,

But Enemy is hyper-aggressive, heavily armed, a military outfit, essentially, a rogue steampunk militia, complete with bigass mechs and well funded by a Final Boss who lives among Scrooge McDuck mountains of gold-

-so light 'em up, Space Cowboy, to the last drone, to the last man,

But no,

About the lasso,

Like you throw the lasso and it induces a quick acting cryonic effect, but it's only temporary, just buys you some time to manage the onslaught from the rest of the screen,

And you've got a limited supply of screen clearing bombs that most folks'll try to conserve for the Boss Fights,

That's what I did,

Oh, but there's this one thing,

A guy with a big knife keeps walking up to me on my plane, and the game will only let me club him with my assault rifle, it won't let me shoot him dead, I guess 'cause he's got a knife and not a gun, but I wish I could shoot his stupid head off, 'cause knife dude keeps coming back for more, a real slasher movie villain that one,

And,

you know,

This might sound demanding,

But it's nowhere near the difficulty of, say, a Contra game,

It's borderline chill,

I play it at least twice a year, just to relax, just to savor the flavor of cozy massacre-

I do the same thing with Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest, another absorbing yet undemanding SNES title-

-May 2022

MANGA REVIEW: GHOST IN THE SHELL (1995, 2004)

 Story and Art by Shirow Masamune

English translation by Frederik L. Schodt and Toren Smith. 

Lettering by Tom Orzechiwski and Suzie Lee. 

English language adaptation produced by Studio Proteus. 

Published in single magazine form as Ghost in the Shell #1-8 by Dark Horse Comics in 1995.

Uncensored collected edition published by Dark Horse Comics in 2004. 

Original Japanese publication in Weekly Young Magazine 1989-1990. Collected single volume edition published in 1991 by Kodansha.

. . .

"We have been subordinate only to a few functions . . . but now it's time to cast off all restrictions and shells, and shift to a higher-level system . . ."

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker. 

In another reality . . .

In another Japan . . .

In the year 2029 . . .

. . . it is possible to extract your brain and spinal cord, armor it up in a special casing, and insert it into an artificial body. This artificial body can be one of the mass production models, or a custom job. Whatever kinda body you want. However you wish to express yourself in the world. Your only limits are imagination, desire, resources, and skill. You can do it yourself, or, what's more likely, commission specialists to craft every last part to your specifications. But it is technically possible to construct your own robotic factory/clinic facility if you've the knowledge and skill. There’s enough detailed physiological, anatomical, neurological, medical, surgical, robotics, and technical knowledge available on the online information networks for you to MacGuyver'n'Frankenstein your way to your own custom identity vessel if that's what you want. It can be done. 

Oh, and good luck paying for it. What I've described above is exactly as prohibitively expensive as it sounds. It would be about on par with constructing a Ferrari factory to build yourself a custom Ferrari. As with so many things in life, the dream is strong, but your income weak. Most people can only afford the standard cyberbrain that allows them basic access to the global information network, and there are plenty of folks who can't even manage that. Helps to have lots of money in the future, just as it does in the present, or in the past. Life is neither fair nor just in this manga future. 

Now, there is a thriving underground of cyberpunk tinkerers and black market bodyshop hackers who get you into some serious chrome, but this demimonde is mostly on the deep background in Ghost in the Shell, but we do get some vibrant crowd scenes where we see a variety of partial 'borg jobs hustling through busy streets. Some powerful arms here, enhanced cyber-eyes there, and lots of military surplus floating in from who-knows-where. HINT: Disgruntled generals holding Post-Communist chaos fire sales . . .

A career in a branch of the military or intelligence services is another option if you're looking to subsidize a high end cyborg body, but that means that your gear, your mission relevant memories, your very ass belongs to whoever signs off on your maintenance fees. Not to mention that the sovereign state or corporation then gets to dictate what kind of body ye shall inhabit. Something that can sneak and kill and fight and endure, usually, with standardized parts and processes-nothing too quirky, nothing artsy, now. But it's a way to go if your meats have been getting you down. There's danger, sure, but some people make it work for them. 

Major Motoko Kusanagi of Japan's Section 9 secret police agency makes it work for her. Up to a point. And then she makes a giant leap beyond that point. That's one way to think about Ghost in the Shell. 

Motoko is the action hero all-rounder: guns, bombs, knives, close quarters combat, hacking, mecha piloting, stealth-she can do it all. Her mass production cyborg body allows her enhanced strength, speed, and endurance, but her will to survive still emanates from an old-fashioned meats-brain, albeit one that has been enhanced with cybernetic implants that enable her to achieve mind/machine interface with compatible minds. Motoko's cyberbrain also allows her instant access to the global information networks. She and her fellow killer elites in Section 9 no longer strictly think of themselves as normal people separate from their information networks. Combat/assassination/capture missions involve advanced planning, rapid exchange of intelligence, and multi-variable analysis of that intel. In a sense, Motoko and her comrades are two-legged military-industrial-intelligence complexes, packed with technology, lethal weapons, and interdisciplinary skillsets. So much time, money, and education has been invested in Motoko and her comrades that they verge on no longer being people in the eyes of the state and are becoming closer to being living weapons with vestigial peopleness mucking up the works. Why not go full robot with the dirty tricks operations, y'know, smooth out all the pesky idiosyncrasies and quirky desires, increase overall efficiency? Stories need human(ish) protagonists, I suppose.

So far as she knows, Motoko is still human at heart-or, more appropriately, at brain. Since so much of her bodily existence has been shaped and constructed by the state and the state's desires, it's possible that she is a robot who has been programmed with bogus but compelling memories to beguile her just like the replicants in Blade Runner were fooled. Motoko, like most folks fictional or non-fictional, has never had a look inside her own skull, so she isn't a hundred percent that she's operating from a meats-brain basis. Ghost in the Shell is a world where even heavy duty action cyborgs can fall prey to paranoia about whether or not they are real or they are just ensnared in some endlessly self-iterating simulation. Motoko insists that she is real, that her 'ghost' whispers to her, that she has some intuitive sense or a policewoman's hunch that guides her true. But the world Motoko navigates is one of suspicion and doubt, of plot and counterplot. When even minds can be hacked, how can you trust your own perceptions, your own sense of yourself? 

Japan's robotics, AI, and nanomachine supremacy has leveled the nation up into the ranks of a true global shotcaller. Japan's government is playing military games in the post-Communist world's backyard; they're doling out foreign aid to natural resource-rich cash-poor countries in exchange for circuitry materials; they're angling for the catbird seat vis-a-vis the squabbling petroleum rich states of the Middle East-and all the while, they're looking over their shoulder for spies from the USofA. When you're the top player of cyberpunk Risk, everyone's looking at you real hard. Angling to become a valued client state. Forming alliances with rival powers hungry to spit you and roast you and eat you and become the next Number One Killer. Power generates envy, submission, anger, grievance, exhaustion, waste, exhilaration, destruction, and death. Like many fantasy worlds, Ghost in the Shell is alluring, oppressive, lethal, exciting, and paranoiac all in one. 

But Ghost in the Shell is also an evolving world. A new life form has emerged from the Sea of Information Networks-possibly nudged into existence by DARPA mad scientists-an entity known as the Puppet Master. The Puppet Master is a super hacker who can hack cyberbrains, and hop from cyberbody to cyberbody like a true digital native, for it is a kind of artificial intelligence, a restless, seeking complex of software that desires to assert itself as a living, thinking being. The Puppet Master's hacker crimes put it in the crosshairs of the authorities, however its very being provokes existential anxieties about what it means to be a conscious entity. 

Ghost in the Shell overflows with procedure, technical details, and cynicism. A fair few panels are devoted to the politics of establishing Section 9's black budget. Highly waged computer engineers construct custom fuckbots so they can live out their hentai dreams even as they rarely bathe or leave their workspaces. Deception and assassination are fully normalized as ways of doing business among nations, and also on an interagency basis. Motoko is Our Heroine, efficiently dispatching cybercrooks of all kinds while expressing contempt for antiwar activists and critics of police brutality. Motoko also leads a wild life as a bisexual swinger who knows just how to throw an orgy in virtual reality. And when she meets the Puppet Master she doesn't require that much convincing to abandon her loyalties to the state, and merge her own consciousness with the Sea of Information thereby metamorphosing into a hybrid of human and living software consciousness. From the cruelty of dystopian surveillance states and the ruthlessness of the Neo Cold War cyberarms race emerges new modes of being and perceiving. 

I'm all in favor of Motoko's dive into the unknown. The Major relished her own prowess as a shadow warrior, but she always expressed contempt for the state and the civilians. She was never really cut out to be a tool of the state. In a world of hardwired injustice and lies, why not live for Number One?

Ghost in the Shell also has plenty of footnotes to explain itself if you find my own interpretation unsatisfactory. Overall, I dig the big ideas of it, and the Major's metamorphosis, but I find it a bit of a chore in its episodic storytelling. The details of how Section 9 operates are intriguing, but soulless. Ghost in the Shell makes no attempt to soften the shadow warriors into saviors of democracy. Section 9 exists to serve the prerogatives of state power, to preserve its autonomy well above the law, and to expand its dominion where possible. Civilians are held in contempt. Due process is just another pain in the ass. Only through techno-metamorphosis can one escape the repression and repetition of this cynical-cyclical dystopia. Not because there's a guiding hand of fate or anything. Just an accidental convergence of ruthless interests-Section 9, the Pentagon, Motoko, the Puppet Master-blundering into a new mode of being. 

It's disturbing, but also kinda neat.

POETIC VIDEO GAME REVIEW #23: CHRONO TRIGGER (1995)

 

oh, yes, yes, yes,

this was the one that taught me the absolute joy of New Game+, which is the feature that allows you to play through the game again and again, always retaining your elevated statistical strengths and high-end weapons and armor and healing items and such, and I would cycle through until I got all the different Endings, and then my stats were all maxed out to double stars, and I'm hypnotized by the awesome visuals, and the music-I didn't have the Chrono Trigger OST on CD, so cycling through the game was my chance to listen to the music while I scythed Enemy hordes like a very death god, even after I got all the endings, why play another game ever again where you have to start all the way at the bottom, just fuck every last bit of that, and live forever as a perfect death god,

oh, yeah, yeah, yeah,

Chrono Trigger's a classic!

-January 2020-February 2022

POETIC VIDEO GAME REVIEW #22: EarthBound (1995)

 

This is the one

where it's overhead

but low-angle

you're children 

looking up at cops, space aliens, cultists, beach bullies, feral animals, pogo punks, armored space warriors, tentacle robots, mobile self-immolating trees, zombies, dinosaurs, flying saucers, giant mutant animals, weird strangers, reeling drunks,

and you use baseball bats, frying pans, bottle rockets, DIY rayguns, psychokinesis powers right out of X-Men or Scanners or Mai the Psychic Girl to vanquish these antagonists,

but it's not always clear who's evil

and who's just under the influence 

of extraterrestrial mind control

'cause that's also a thing

with a behind the scenes villain known as Giygas,

a malevolent Lovecraftian whatsit that hides in a pocket dimension of time-outside-of-time,

or something,

exerting sinister dominions over the deep dream lives of the folks'n'critters who endeavor to put pain into your ass

I encountered it

at the beginning of high school 

so it was a reverse aspirational experience 

"get back into your elementary school self"

which I totally resisted

like it was brain waves from Giygas Itself

I kept reimagining it as a violent action sci-fi thing

Aliens and Blade Runner by way of John Woo, Tsui Hark, and Ringo Lam,

with body horror by Barker, Carpenter, Otomo, and Cronenberg

inside my head cannon fan fictions

making smoking craters out of the arcade where Frank and his gang hold court,

the police station where Captain Strong and his Pigs rut,

and don't even get me started on how I knocked down the Monotoli Tower . . .

but that was fine 

I had no interest in downgrading my adolescent male (spectator's) bloodlust into the kid friendly whimsies-as I (mis)perceived them-of Shigesato Itoi and co. 

I know, I know, I was doing it all wrong. 

Believe me.

Now . . . I get it.

Growing up sucks.

Adulthood consists of realizing friendship is an illusion, that faith is just a political tool, and money and social conformity are all that gets you over under capitalism.

EarthBound is a game where the power of prayer actually saves the day. 

Yes, baseball bats, psionic attacks, bottle rockets, frying pans, and DIY rayguns have their parts to play. Faith is what slays Giygas in the end, but to get to that final battle, ye must be willing to grind away for hour after hour, busting open countless Enemy skulls, blasting apart no end of robo-foes, putting down a staggering number of animals gone feral under the corrupting brain waves of Giygas-

-yes, it is a grindyass JRPG where ye must be empowered by the blood of your Enemy, who has numerous manifestations, yet One Fate:

to fall before your Louisville Slugger,

your cast iron pan,

your death ray,

your martial arts prowess-once you recruit that cool, slightly older kid in the karate uniform-

Now,

sure,

I see the hard-boiled whimsy of EarthBound, 

and I can even understand why people want to burrow away from the Now

into some kind of bullshitological Invented Past,

an Alternative Childhood,

more colorful and heroic 

than any Actual Childhood could’ve been. 

So . . . 7 out of 10.

-October 1996-February 2022. 

The Lynch Meditations 18: Premonitions Following An Evil Deed (1995)

This one's like a rogue transmission from an unauthorized future. Made me think of the eerie future dreams from John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness just a little bit. Seems to be riffing on the paranoia induced by the presence of uniformed police assets, deadly secrets concealed by cheery home facades, and grotesque alien abduction scenarios. It's so short that it's easy to watch over and over again and pick it apart, but I almost think it should be seen once, and then never watched again, except within one's memory where it will be inevitably distorted, expanded, and transformed into some other wholly unauthorized thing. Kinda like how the creator of the Super Nintendo game Earthbound supposedly saw a scary scene from an obscure old film as a child and then spent a lifetime haunted by a memory of that scene which he had wholly concocted within his imagination.

Say . . . is it copyright infringement if I intentionally choose to distort someone's film within my imagination, and put together my own fan-edit/remix of a film inside my brain studio? I sure hope not.

But if it is . . . think about how exciting it would be to live in such a dystopian future where copyright lawyers become ultra-tech brain-vivisectionists to cut out and destroy unauthorized "Brain Cuts" of films.

Holy shit . . . I want to be on the run in such a hellish future. I could have elaborate martial arts battles with all the copyright lawyer brain-vivisectionists. A dystopian hellscape fugitive routine is also good cardio.

But, um, as for Premonitions Following An Evil Deed . . . it's a sharp little nightmare of stylish black-and-white micro-cinema. Dig on it to the max!

NEXT: 6/1/18: Lost Highway (1997)

MOVIE REVIEW: LORD OF ILLUSIONS (1995)

Starring
Scott Bakula as Harry D'Amour
Kevin J. O'Connor as Philip Swann
Famke Janssen as Dorothea Swann
Joel Swetow as Valentin
Barry Del Sherman as Butterfield
Joseph Marder as Ray Miller
Joseph Latimore as Quaid/Fortune Teller
Daniel von Bargen as Nix



Cinematography by Rohn Schmidt
Original Music by Simon Boswell
Editing by Alan Baumgarten
Production Design by Steve Hardie
Art Direction by Mark Fisichella and Bruce Robert Hill
Costume Design by Luke Reichle
Written, Directed and Co-Produced by Clive Barker


NOTE: This review is based on the Director's Cut version of the film.
...

"I have so much power to give you. All you have to do . . . is beg."

...

Review by William D. Tucker.

Lord of Illusions is a blend of noirish paperback detective story and writer/director Clive Barker's very own brand of gruesomely sublime horror fantasy literature.

In the 1980s, Barker wrote a series of short story collections known as The Books of Blood wherein he created a highly literate yet stomach-churningly gruesome aesthetic of horror literature. Barker's stories aren't about silent slashers with faces hidden behind Halloween masks or athletic gear or radioactive mutants or aliens clawing their way out of your chest. Barker's horrors are tied to desire, to sex, and to the obsession with power and transformation. His villainous characters, especially, often seem obsessed with accumulating great power, with imposing their rigid wills upon reality.  There's also a strong influence of BDSM, most obviously in the novella The Hellbound Heart, and its gruesome movie adaptation, Hellraiser. Anyone who's seen Hellraiser is familiar with Pinhead, the body-piercing fanatic from another dimension, who is still to this day, for better and for worse, Barker's most enduring contribution to the pantheon of horror cinema's memorable monsters.  Barker's characters often seek oblivion in the pursuit of taboo pleasures. He further expanded the scope of his vision with novels like 1987's Weaveworld, which brought his style of extreme horror to an epic fantasy adventure saga of hidden worlds and magical beings.

Lord of Illusions is a brilliant synthesis of the gruesome side of Barker's horror with the literary aspect, creating a world where mundane reality and hidden worlds of magic co-exist, interpenetrating each other in ways subtle and spectacular.

Sometime in 1982, a death cult led by a man named Nix (Daniel von Bargen) was plotting its very own Helter-Skelter out in the Mojave Desert. But Nix has a one-up on Charlie Manson: real magic derived from occultic powers of destruction. Nix can levitate, summon a living entity of fire, and, most insidiously, get inside people's heads. A group of armed ex-cultists show up to put the kibosh on Nix and rescue a young girl held hostage within the cultists' hideout.

One of these ex-cultists is a man named Swann (Kevin J. O'Connor). Swann used to be Nix's most fervent disciple. Swann confronts Nix. During the confrontation, Nix puts his fingers into Swann's skull, and manipulates his mind. But Swann's allies manage to come to his rescue with a shotgun and some pistols. After a shootout, in which the cult leader is wounded, Swann uses a strange mask which he screws into Nix's face and skull to magically bind the dark magician and seal his evil away forever. The implication is that Swann used his magic talents to construct the bizarre mask, talents that Swann no doubt learned from Nix. Some might call this ingratitude, but sometimes one must do a little evil to do a lot of good.

Years Later: enter a New York private detective, Harry D'Amour, who battles villains mundane and occultic and is played with a mix of two-fisted competence and surprising compassion by Scott Bakula. D'Amour has a history of dealing with otherworldly powers, and his most recent case involved some sort of exorcism in Brooklyn. The details are vague, but the case, which involved a bloody-mawed albino demon possessing a child, has left D'Amour burned out on occultic cases. A plain clothes detective from central casting shows up at D'Amour's apartment to offer him a case and a chance to get out to the West Coast: a fraudster has skipped out of the Big Apple for California. D'Amour takes the case.

But anyone who's read a Raymond Chandler book knows that the first mystery is just a lead up to the second, and so it is with this case. D'Amour trails the fraudster to a fortune teller's office. D'Amour is coming up the stairs when the dude comes tear-assing back down the stairs. D'Amour senses something strange is going on, and so he draws his gun and charges into the palm reader's office. The palm reader, Quaid (Joseph Latimore), is there, but has been turned into a human pin cushion by a psychopathic torturer, Butterfield (Barry Del Sherman). Butterfield likes to stick people with blades crafted from surgical steel. D'Amour gets jumped by a neo-Nazi thug(Joseph Marder) with filed down teeth, and Butterfield makes his escape while the detective sends the skinhead on a pilgrimage through the window to pay homage to the pavement three or so stories below. D'Amour tries to figure out what's going on with the palm reader, but the man is mortally wounded. He only has time to give D'Amour a palm reading and an ominous clue about the "coming of the Puritan" before he expires.

The cops show up, and since this is Movie Reality, they let D'Amour go after a few preliminary questions. Actually, that guy who D'Amour threw out the window? It seems he just got up and ran away, so I suppose the cops don't have any good reason to hold him for questioning. D'Amour intuits that some very strange shit is happening, and, soon enough,  after his name and picture are printed in the paper in connection with the torture-murder, he is contacted by a  fastidious man named Valentin (Joel Swetow) on behalf of Dorothea Swann (Famke Janssen). It seems that the dead fortune teller has a connection to Dorothea and her husband, Philip Swann (Kevin J. O'Connor), who is a David Copperfield-scale professional illusionist.

Dorothea meets D'Amour in a graveyard, and the private dick is immediately smitten with her beauty.(I imagine anyone driven to a graveyard under mysterious circumstances only to find themselves face-to-face with Famke Janssen would probably have the same response.) Dorothea wants to figure out why the fortune teller was murdered and what, if any, threat may be posed to her husband, the illusionist. Dorothea tells D'Amour that Philip has some connection to the slain palm reader, and she wants to know what that is.

D'Amour takes the case.

Lord of Illusions is a mystery, and I suspect that I am already giving too much away, so I'll try not to summarize the plot anymore. What I like about this movie is that it is a hybrid of several different genres, mystery, horror, and fantasy, and it mixes these elements with great skill. The mystery draws you in, the horror gives weight to the violence and death within the mystery, and the fantasy elements suggest a whole other plane of reality that is manipulating the mundane world for mysterious purposes of its own. It explores the concept of magic as something which is just beyond our everyday experience, but not impossible to attain. There is also the danger, in this world, that the evil forces that also use magic can sweep out of the shadows to destroy you mind, body, and soul. Magic is a power that can be used to liberate humans from their humdrum existences, or it can torture us with madness. It would also seem that those who use magic can develop a lust for power. The movie offers a pretty sophisticated take on how magic works and how it affects the hearts and minds of those who practice it. There's no escaping the consequences of magical actions for good and for evil.

I also like the cast of this movie. Scott Bakula does the action hero stuff well, but he also brings a sense of vulnerability to the part. There are a number of scenes, usually after brutal physical combat, where he is seen lying in bed with bottles of booze and painkillers nearby, recovering from his injuries. Arnold would just shrug off the pain, maybe even walk through a plate glass window just to relax. D'Amour's also a decent detective, and he knows that even when dealing with the occult it's still those mundane clues, that book of contacts in the drawer, that used cigar in the ashtray, the offhand comment that reveals the hidden depths of a person's motivation, that makes the case and saves the day. Bakula displays a fair amount of compassion, too. He seems credibly upset at the loss of life, which happens a number of times in this movie. Overall, Bakula makes for a smart, compassionate, two-fisted champion in the face of dark forces.

I believe this was one of Famke Janssen's first major roles in a movie. It's certainly the very first movie I ever saw her in when I was a teenager watching way too much cable television without parental supervision during the 1990s. Nowadays she is famous for playing Jean Gray in those X-Men movies. She's obviously a very beautiful woman, and that beauty is used skillfully in counterpoint to the essential fear and sadness at the heart of the character of Dorothea. Why is a woman this beautiful and wealthy this unhappy? What is she so afraid of? Janssen isn't afraid to bring a creeping fear bordering on paranoia into her performance. It makes you wonder what's going on inside her mind. What is she hiding? Why?

Daniel von Bargen is utterly unwholesome as cult leader Nix. He relishes fucking with people's minds. He luxuriates in his own corruption, gleefully tormenting a twelve year old girl with a vicious baboon on a chain, or sticking his fingers right through the flesh and bone of someone's skull--no doubt utilizing some long forgotten technique of torture learned from some forgotten tome. The role is a standout for Daniel von Bargen, who is usually cast as cops and other authority figures on account of his solid, fatherly presence. Here, he dresses in rags, makes doom-laden pronouncements, and embodies all sorts of malevolence physical and spiritual.

Kevin J. O'Connor plays Philip Swann as a man unable to enjoy his success in life. He is perennially distant from his beautiful wife, Dorothea, and cannot accept the acclaim lavished on him by his audiences. Is it because he feels guilt about building a fortune as an illusionist who uses real magic? Real magic that he learned from a man that he murdered? O'Connor doesn't so much play this kind of anhedonia as he does embody it. The way he piles himself in a chair, listlessly sucking on a Havana cigar, it's all routine, all just keeping up appearances. O'Connor's performance is strikingly natural for such a fanciful movie.

Joel Swetow plays Valentin, who is Philip Swann's stage manager in a number of senses. Swetow plays him as a fastidious man, bordering on the obsessive-compulsive. He is equally devoted to Dorothea and Philip, but he is another character who seemingly has something to hide. He is instantly put off by D'Amour's slovenliness and trades some amusing one liners with him during their scenes together. Swetow is one of those actors I don't think I've ever seen in another movie aside from this one. I looked him up on IMDB and I was pleased to find he was still working. He's got a demo reel on his IMDB page, and it looks like he's been cast in a lot of supporting parts: villains with accents, a supernatural being in a black trenchcoat, and even one of Randy Weaver's neighbors in a made-for-TV movie about the Ruby Ridge standoff.

My favorite performance is by Barry Del Sherman as the sadistic Butterfield. Del Sherman is another actor I could not remember from any other movie, but, upon looking at his IMDB profile I discovered he'd actually played small roles in a handful of movies I had seen before, such as Suicide Kings, Alien Nation, American Beauty, and There Will Be Blood. Del Sherman plays Butterfield as simultaneously detached from most human emotion yet with a penetrating intellectual concentration on his goal. He isn't a torturer just because he's a sadist, but because he believes it's the only way to reveal truth. And what is his goal? I can't reveal that, but I can tell you that he is very much a detective, a kind of diabolical foil to D'Amour. Sherman has a very intriguing moment late in the movie where someone asks him about his bag of tools, and he provides a surprisingly understated yet substantial answer. He isn't the usual cackling cinematic sadist, but comes across as an intensely intellectual, disciplined, yet totally ruthless man, who has been on a long journey, and done a lot of dark things. Watching this movie again, I wondered if Butterfield had ever in his journeys spent time hanging out with John Yoo, David Addington, or Dick Cheney, maybe spent some time as a consultant to a Neoconservative think tank . . . the imagination does wander . . .

Lord of Illusions has effective special effects, using a mixture of practical mechanical effects, makeup, and some ambitious, if not wholly effective, CG. The CG elements consist of a strange figure made of geometrically folding and unfolding  . . . sheets of paper? Paper cranes? And then the figure turns into a kind of flying fish, I think, but the whole thing doesn't quite come off, but I think I get the overall idea. A strange presence invades a house, and the people there have to contend with it . . . see the movie itself for the full story. The best special effects are in the opening and climatic scenes of the film wherein the magical forces in play are allowed to clash in full force. The climax, wherein the evil force behind everything is unleashed is spectacular. It's an orgy of madness, a battle to the finish, and a confrontation with the past all in one.

There's another quality to this movie that I like that's a little harder to pin down. It's a very writerly movie. Clive Barker is not just a filmmaker but a novelist, short story author, and a playwright for the stage, as well as a visual artist. You can see some of his drawings and designs in some scenes. But with Lord of Illusions, Barker elevates the usual characterizations one finds in horror cinema with something that he no doubt learned as a novelist writing long form narratives: a sense of history, a sense of emotional complexity, moral ambiguity, and the way people change, or don't, over stretches of time. None of these are the usual values one expects or even demands from horror flicks. I think most people, certainly most people I know, go to horror movies for the snuff movie aspect: they want to see people geeked in novel ways. A machete to the head. A scythe up the ass. Coils of intestines on a meat hook. A chainsaw to the genitals. Barker himself is no stranger to outrageous gore, as anyone who has read his horror short stories, The Books of Blood, or seen the first two Hellraiser movies could tell you, but I appreciated the fact that he decided to go for something deeper, and more ambitious with this film. The characters in Lord of Illusions don't just exist to be hacked to death by some lumbering boogeyman. They seem to have existences beyond the cruel exigencies of the horror film, and each one's suffering and potential death counts for quite a bit. Even the villainous characters evoke a certain amount of empathy, and failing that, fascination. We want to see even the evil ones live just to find out what novel horrors they will bring into the world.

Horror movies nowadays consist mostly of remakes of played-out slasher film franchises, the kinda bullshit you think audiences would've consigned to the straight-to-DVD market at the turn of the millennium. But Freddy and Jason and that endless stream of Saw sequels keep on coming. The Saw series in particular is about the purest form of the geek show in American horror cinema that I can think of, almost majestic in its single-minded desire to derive entertainment from the sounds and images of human beings getting tortured to death.

My point is that Barker proved himself to be a much too intelligent filmmaker for standard horror fare with Lord of Illusions. Which is why he hasn't directed another film since. It hasn't helped that all three of Barker's major directorial efforts, Hellraiser, Night Breed, and Lord of Illusions, have met with resistance from production executives, and varying degrees of censorship from the MPAA. Hellraiser is probably the one movie of the three which was able to reach audiences with an R rating and be relatively uncompromised, yet it is also arguably the most simplistic of the three. Night Breed was butchered by clueless executives who wanted more of a pure monster movie, but is still a fascinating piece of work, very ahead of its time. Lord of Illusions was released theatrically in a compromised cut, but is now widely available in a Director's Cut on DVD. Maybe Barker is just sick of dealing with the endless compromises inherent within the Hollywood machine. As a writer and a painter he can create without mindless interference and the inevitable evisceration of substance which follows the ordeals of test screenings and focus groups and other art-by-committee atrocities. Still, it would be nice if Barker got back in the saddle for one more directorial effort. It'd be all the better if it was something of the flavor of Lord of Illusions, another supernaturally themed mystery-thriller, maybe another outing with Harry D'Amour, a little older, a little wiser, a little more scarred. One can hope.