Sci-Fi Sunday - Growing Pains

AKIRA (1988)

Adaptations that bring stories from the page to screen before author has actually finished writing aren't generally a good idea. Whether it's something like Junji Ito's Uzamaki or any number of modern television shows there are various examples out there, each with varying results. Katsuhiro Otomo's science fiction epic would eventually be a mammoth six volume story, but the film was released two years before the books were complete. It really shouldn't work. Neither should condensing all of the source material into a film just over two hours long. However thanks to the author's obsessive artistic impulses the results are more than impressive and it remains a landmark in both animation and cinema. Themes might have been truncated and characters and story arcs have been excised but somehow it all feels just right.

Martial Arts Mix - He Ain't Heavy

AVENGEMENT (2019)

While grubby London gangster dramas and straight to video action heroes aren't perhaps the most obvious movie ideas to combine I'm all for outlandish experiments, particularly those involving colourful characters from each genre. Prison break stories or tales of racketeering don't usually have so many round-house kicks after all, but director-star duo Jesse V. Johnson and Scott Adkins are back to deliver on both fronts. Or perhaps more appropriately -- with both barrels. To paraphrase one of the sleazy crooks involved 'enough panto!' But I'm all for a bit of melodrama and good helping of overblown scenery chewing so the more the better.

Scorecard

 JULY

FILM OF THE MONTH: 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea ☆☆☆☆

HCF Review - Guilt Complex

FEVER (2014)

Fever is a French crime story (not to be confused with the German drama directed Elfi Mikesch) about two young boys studying literature and philosophy who, in the opening seconds of the film, have murdered a woman in her apartment. This happens off screen with just a few sounds of the death being heard. This impersonal act starts the whole thing moving and gets to the core themes in a story where they have decided that without motive, and without even knowing the victim, it’s not really a crime at all.

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Horror Bites - Crash Culture

 THE CARS THAT ATE PARIS (1974)

While the immediate Mad Max comparisons are easy to make because of the Australian gangs riding about in garish junkers, Peter Weir's first feature is a little more difficult to define. Some of the poster art shows bloody lettering and a monstrous Volkswagen adorned with metal spines, the sort of thing the first act of Fury Road gave a nod to. And yet this isn't an action movie, it's not a pure horror story and the vehicles are not really the centre of attention. If I had to pigeon hole this at all it would fall into the broad category of 'weird people in backwater towns doing weird things'. Which at least aligns the eponymous town with other strange places in the middle of nowhere that film characters wish they'd never stumbled across.