The Van Dammeathon - "Cyborg"

I've delayed this one partially because of work and partially because my thoughts on it are going to be extremely telling not only of my taste, but of how the rest of this is going to go. That, and the stream I initially found of this wouldn't allow screen-capture (oh the joys of modern watching...), and surprisingly I do not own this, but did own "Black Eagle" at one point. Go figure.

(Credit: City on Fire. Man, posters used to be FUCKING AWESOME)
A post-apocalypse knock off in the same vein as "Salute of the Jugger", "1990: The Bronx Warriors", "Yor: Hunter from the Future" (hey Spoony fans), "The New Barbarians" and "Hell Comes to Frog Town", we know we're in for a good time right off the bat because it's from our old friends

CANNON, baby!
Clearly wanting some of that sweet, sweet "Mad Max: The Road Warrior" and "Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome" runoff money, they decided to have "Mad Max" at home, the Cannon way! I am so excited for more Cannon!
Let's get to it!
Concept:
It is "The Future"

And with a virus known as "the living death" running rampant, things are pretty bad. A scientist named Pearl Prophet has not only cybernetic implants (making her some sort of... "cyborg" if you will) but also a cure, and is on the run with it. To help her not die at the hands of these charming fellows representing me and the boys on the way to watch this:

Pearl hires a "slinger" named Gibson Rickenbacker (played by our man) to protect her across the wastelands. Gibson is reluctant, despite initially saing her life, but soon comes to realise that her quest may line up with his own hunt for revenge...
Concept:
Jean Claude Van Damme protecting a cybernetic lady and a magic virus vaccine across a post-apocalyptic wasteland?

I like it. I mean, it's the sort of movie idea I would have come up with at the ages of 13 and 47, but I like it. It's the perfect vehicle for the man, his talents, some bloodshed and some lunacy, expect kicks, cheese, Canon madness and blood galore. Plus it's a man named after a guitar fighting cyborgs after the apocalypse, that's just awesome.
Concept: 4.
Excellent work so far!
Onto the next part:
Execution:

I'm only partially joking.
The movie wishes to be a "Mad Max" knock off from Canon, and essentially boils down to a vengeance-fulled Van Damme (whose family were slain by the villain, whom I shall get to) pursuing some coslpayers across the wastelands accompanied by an equally vengeful bandit girl orphan:

In practice it's a series of brawls in old, run down buildings, which is a fine way to hide the low budget, but the true crime is the mean-spiritedness of it all. It wants to be about cyborgs and high-kicking mercenaries taking on bandits and having fun, but it also wants to show brutal murders and the barbarous senseless cruelty of a species circling the drain. So there's going to be bloody, unpleasant senseless murder of families, with an admittedly quite good shot of a burning centrepiece in parallel:

Followed ever so shortly by fight scenes with dummies like this:

And fights like this:

Then, spoiler, alert, the cheap nature of it all really showcases the meanspirited nature of the kills and the deaths at the end when his fellow traveller goes to get revenge on the man who killed her family only to die.
It's lower budget, but did give us this gloriously horrifying prosthetic which resembles me whenever I look up Libertarians:

On the whole it's competent enough, but never quite rises above that.
Execution: 2
Now then, Charm!
The lower budget does give us some fun filmmaking mayhem, like the aforementioned sets. We do get this absolutely disgusting haircut:

Followed rather swiftly by this one:

Disgraceful. It's the attempted dark tone which lets it down, because "Gibson Ridenbacker" fighting crime in the Apocalypse is fucking awesome:

Charm: 2.
The Villain!
Vincent Klyn, a profesional surfer apparently, plays Fender Tremolo, and does a servicable enough job roaring and snarling lines about how much he "likes the virus" and "likes the hatred" with a baritone almost parodying Dolph Lundgren.

The real star of note is an early cameo from Ral Moeller as one of the boys.

Villain: 3.
Score standing at 9.
Bonus round!
Future collaborators:
Michel Qissi (from "Bloodsport" and soon to be seen in "Kickboxer" and "A.W.O.L")
So that's 1 point.
Splits!

Final Score: 12.
A mediocre effort Van Damme seemed to not really get behind and regret, but don't worry: soon he'd turn a fucking corner, this was merely a stumble...

"Lesbian Space Princess" - Review

On the planet of Clitopolis, winner of "Most Boring Royal" Princess Saira (Shabana Azeez) is dumped by her bounty hunting, adventuring partner Kiki (Bernie Van Tiel) of two weeks. Despondent, miserable and once again alone: she receives a message from a trio of aliens who have kidnapped Kiki. Unless she brings them a valuable weapon within 24 hours, Kiki will be dumped into acid! Forced into action, and seeing a chance to win her back, the sheltered, self-conscious and anxiety ridden princess must take a ship (Richard Roxburgh) on a quest to find and rescue Kiki, and maybe learn a little about herself in the proces...

(Credit: QNews)

An unashamed celebration of queerness and identity, feeling like a lost 2000s Adult Swim cartoon. The humour is tailor made for me, with rat-a-tat jokes at an excellent pace from all corners of humour: visual gags, puns, background gags, one-liners, insults and screaming incandescent rage about "lesbian phones"; its madness and irreverence are front and centre, and hark back to that "era" of mad fun cartoons and whimsy. Some of the jokes are low hanging fruit (the villains are "Straight White Maleians", bisexuals "don't exist" and Clitopia is "hard to find unless you know what you're doing") and some are tailor made for the "online" (I hate that I understood the joke about the name of Roxburgh's ship...) but criticism of those tends to come from bad faith, so I'm happy to ignore that well of poisoned discourse in a world where queerness and anything differing from the norm is seen as an assault on fascists. Its funny, daft, ludicrous, a blissful ninety minutes which also impresses with its refreshingly mature ending: a thoughtful and all too often overlooked examination of relationships and how maybe it's best we don't leap into them just because we've been denied kindness all of our lives, combining it with a funny but real look at mental health and anxiety.
Highlights include Gemma Chu-Tran as a non-binary Goth musician with absolutely no thoughts and an empty head; Richard Roxburgh (because it's an Australian film: he is legally required to turn up) as the foul-mouthed starship behind the times; Auntie Donna as the villainous trio, who got some of the biggest belly laughs from me, a niche gag about drunk girls in toilets and the powerful wisdom they dispense before vanishing into the ether, and the performance of Shabana Azeez as our titular heroine, who handles her growth and insecurities excellently.

"Masters of the Universe" - Skeletorture Porn

Forced to flee his realm of Eternia after an attack by the skeleton wizard Skeletor (Jared Leto), young prince Adam (Nicholas Galitzine) resides on Earth as a human relations manager in an ofice, mourning the loss of his sword and home planet... But when his quest leads him to his sword, he finally sees a chance to bust free of this office job and seek his destiny!

(Credit: Kotaku)
An enormously expensive Amazon-backed romp attempting to emulate the camp of the original TV series (and actually rather fun movie), which largely floats by thanks to a breezy tone, pastel coloured backdrop punctuated by "Flash Gordon" style riffs and music (Brian May chips in, weirdly, which does explain some of the budget) and a fondness for its material which verges on the cloying, but remains relatively ernest despite some digs (there's a fairly niche, funny laughter gag/mockery right towards the end, and the naming of characters like Fisto and Ram Man does earn well earned laughs without getting homophobic, and pays off rather well) at the silliness of the material: hell they even have the titular character dressed from that video (you know the one) in his pink shirt, and play the original song from it. It's charming and perfectly amusing fare, and I giggled a fair bit: the film feels like something made with love and affection for the source material. This is a film made by guys who love "He-Man", damn it! Even the cameo early on is from a fantastically game icon, and passing of the torch. It's overly long but for every joke that doesn't land there are at least 3 or 4 which earn a mirthful chuckle, even if they're about memes regarding the show (I rather enjoyed Camila Mendes role as the straight-woman Teela proclaiming that Skeletor "has a skull for a face. It's not that complicated"), and the cartoony buouyancy is in safe hands with Travis Knight of Laika. I'm not sure anybody was rooting for a 40+ years overdue adaptation of "He-Man" (at least, not as many people as the OUTRAGEOUS budget banked on), which cost around 200 "The Raids", but the central performance by Nicholas Galitzine is a legitimately funny joke: a musclebound himbo who wishes to resolve conflicts amicably and with empathic, healing language; only to be granted enormous muscles and galactic power. That central gag is great, in my mind.

"The Last Viking" - Far from the Mads-ening Crowd

After a 15 year prison sentence for a daring bank robbery, supposedly reformed Anker (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) returns home to collect his hidden bounty of stolen kroner. Unfortunately the only person who knows where it now is is his brother Manfred (mads Mikkelsen), already unstable but now diagnosed with disassociative identity disorder and believing that he is John Lennon. The mismatched pair return to their mother's lake house to begin their search, for more than the money.

(Credit: IMDB)
A delightfully twisted, offbeat comedy of manglings, maimings, nail guns and Ikea-obsessed physicians (Lars Brygmann) played with a stony-faced Nordic sensibility (particularly by the excellent, dry and wallpaper Nikolaj Lie Kaas) as its off-kilter premise mashes together buddy-cop road movie, crime thriller (Nicholas Bro plays a thug on the tail, he's good in "Brotherhood", and that I know that is a sign I've watched way too many God-damned movies), heist-movie bust-out from an asylum, and darker angle of a family-reunion in the vein of something like "Festen". It's a wild, weird mash of genres but writer and director Anders Thomas Jensen balances the razor's edge wonderfully, and is actually pretty fucking hilarious to boot. There's a genuinely funny Holocaust joke here.
The movie then becomes a uniquely toxic examination of family breakdown and masculinity, and the dangers of miscommunication, but with the sheer brass fucking balls to then be a somewhat hopeful tale about accomodating and accepting flaws and imperfections rather than forcing others to be the same.
It may drag a bit towards the end with its multiple epilogues, but its outrageous mashup and mish mash is daring, deranged, dark, and uniquely weird. I liked this a lot.

"Madfabulous" - Ar Hyd y Nos and Daughters

In the late 19th centure, Anglesey, in the greenest country on Earth, is about to receive a shock to the system when Henry Cyril Paget (Callum Scott Howells) arrives to take up the resplendent mantle of the 5th Marquess of Angelsey.

(Credit: The Guardian. Also this one is getting extra large photos, because I feel this is going to be in my top five of the year)
A romp and showcase for the talents of an absolutely spellbinding Callum Scott Howells (whom I am sorry to say I was unfamiliar with before this) telling a lesser known piece of outrageous queer Welsh history, featuring fucking legends of the Welsh acting scene (Stephen Speirs as a jeweller who gets one of the best chest-pumping parts towards the end, a delightfully devillish Paul Rhys; reliable Ian Puleston-Davies as an Ian Puleston-Davies character, and a fantastically cunty-shithead Tom Rhys Harries NOT playing a Welshman and it annoys me), as well as English stars allowed to have fun (Kevin Eldon puts on a pretty good Welsh accent actually, playing the local photographer, he's supremely underrated; Rupert Everett gives a beautifully understated performance in the vein of "Remains of the Day"; the excellent Louise Brealey has a vomiting scene which had me giggling; and a weaselly up-and-comer Louis Hynes is fantastic); as it weaves a tale of a non-conforming and all-too-fabulous eccentric wracked with consumption and making it his mission to burn thrice as bright for but a moment. It weaves a sweet tale of his complex relationship with his wife/cousin/best friend Lily (Ruby Stokes, also excellent here) and the knotty things that entails, whilst they make a splash in the community at large and high-society and the community around them. It juggles a lot of plates, and when Lisa Baker's script goes pedestrian in the centre (most crucially around the lowest point of that FUCKING SHITHEAD Nick's big fuck-you moment... though that I hate him so much is a testament to Tom Rhys Harries and Callum Scott Howells) it perhaps doesn't quite soar as it should with Celyn Jones' understated direction and period-piece accuracy; but by the time of the bold and audacious ending heist/bust-out/redemption arc/Ffion the Maid (Greta Jones') finest hour - there is just so much passion and love and joy on screen that it's infectious. The ending credits are Callum Scott Howells dancing to "I Feel Love" by Donna Summer in the mansion in a fuck-you to "Saltburn", and such a pure, joyously wonderful celebration of this film and its history and such a love leter to the character that I got misty eyed leaving the cinema.
Fuck yes.
Fuck fucking yes.
Support Welsh cinema.
Happy fucking pride motherfuckers.
Yeah, it may not land as well as it did for me, but I am ranking this movie on the fact that I felt something, this piece of art spoke to me on a personal level, it made me feel anger, joy, sadness, sorrow, whimsy, delight, an effervescent glee at being oneself and remaining true to it (the best line is "I should be myself, because everybody else is taken!") ESPECIALLY in an era when that sort of thing brings ruin and disgrace to false portraits of baroque "manners" and "society".

"Passenger" - Na-Na-Na-Na Nanana

A young couple (Jacob Scipio, the guy who yelled a "Mean Girls" quote in "Expend4bles", and Lou Llobell) embark on a road trip to begin "the van lifestyle". But before every normal person can kill them for their pretentious hipsterdom, a demonic entity may beat us all to the punch...

I'm going to show my hand here and get this one out of the way so I can get to the film I want to talk about.
All I remember from this bland nothingness of a horror film are the following:
1. The house they move out of looks like Lisa Loeb's in the music video for "Stay"
2. The Sheriff from "Willy's Wonderland" shows up in it.
3. The only scare came from me approaching some noisy teenagers, telling them to be quiet, and one of them jumping at the sight of me.

"Tuner" - Big Fish in a Small Pond

Nik White (Leo Woodall) is a piano tuner, tutored by Hary Horowitz (Dustin Hoffman) in a simple enough life, accomodating his hyperacusis with this job he is good at. When Harry falls ill, however, Nik takes up the offer of a shady security expert Uri (Lior Raz) to take up a new job he is equally talented at: cracking safes.

(Credit: Mama Scrapelle)
By the time the credits rolled on "Tuner", I was basking in the warm afterglow of a satisfyingly well-made pocket watch, piano or concerto (hah), and "Project Hail Mary" was just beginning its plot and giving a woman their first line of dialogue.
Absolutely my shit: an immaculately edited, crafted timepiece of a film where I'm so gripped by just the day-to-day life of this piano tuner (a rather good Leo Woodall, whom I used to get confused with that blob of actors popping up at the same time: Jack O'Connell and Jack Reynor, namely, that "type") and his budding romance with Havana Rose Liu's Ruthie (as it is with "Booksmart": casting anybody from "Bottoms" improves a movie immensely) that it's almost a shame when the safe-cracking and life of crime kick in. But subsequent aforementioned crime shenanigans are more on par with "Emily the Criminal" than "Rififi" (please watch both), and it keeps its momentum going through the edits, jazzy soundtrack (fantastic use of Dave Brubeck and a Herbie Hancock gag which pays off) and great central performances from its lead duo, all the way through to a welcome Jean Reno appearance (for all of 6 minutes, but it's still "Leon" so...) and a full-circle coda to its finale. It really rather enjoyed this.