Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Punisher!

Article theme: just listen to the soundtrack, man.

When the Berenstein timeline forked off from our own, its Marvel chose to eschew le ironic quips and be 500% unironic chudkino, releasing nothing but sequels to 2004's The Punisher. This sole gem in the capeshit coalheap commits whole-assedly to its edgy remit. Thomas Jane's Frank Castle cracks scarcely an expression the whole runtime, pulling off the kind of cool of which we mortals only dream when we don our Columbine cosplays.

Me staring down the Asda security guard, knowing full well I turned down a receipt for my two dozen Cadbury's Creme Eggs at the till.

You know the story: Frank is an FBI agent in the movies where the FBI takes on dangerous mobsters instead of railroading old grannies who amble through the Capitol, so he incurs the wrath of mob boss John Travolta (Broken Arrow) and his wife Laura Harring (Mulholland Dr.), who orders Frank's whole family whacked as revenge for their late son. Frank alone survives to edgily take down the Travolta crime family in reverse-revenge or, as he puts it, punishment.

Much as I love you all, if this all-time Would Hall-of-Famer asked me to have your family whacked, I doubt I'd even feel bad about it.

Not content just to kill all the mobsters (though he does that too), Frank engineers an hilariously convoluted plot straight out of Orson Welles' blackface comedy Othello to convince Travolta that Harring is cucking him with his Village-Peoplely mustachioed consigliere, just to be a dick. I don't know if the scenes in which he goes as far as planting fire hydrants in front of her car to get her ticketed were meant to be Looney-Tunes-logic hysterical, but that's sure how they played to me. I wouldn't altogether write the humour off as inadvertent though; scenes featuring what I assume are bad guys from the comics (never read a damn one) lean more blatantly into cartoon mode:

Imagine being Thomas Jane and putting more work into acquiring the perfect ripped male body than I've put into everything in my life combined (no homo), then this fucking beast shows up on set.

An underrated moment has Frank contemplate the sorry state of his fridge contents as the big dude slams his head in it.

The finely-balanced humour aside, it's mostly quite a low-key, elegaic story of a man with nothing left to live for, who becomes a symbol of elusive justice; a ghost of sorts, like Eastwood's Preacher in Pale Rider. Bereaved and bereft, Frank sits alone in his room in the dark, drinking himself to death, no reason to get up tomorrow but to punish the guilty. The Morricone pastiche theme music is sadder, wearier, not gormlessly triumphant like the interchangeable themes of every latterday Marvel hero. The spaghetti western has become mythologised by those who've never seen one; in reality, most are sub-Mad Max ripoff in their quality and care, but The Punisher ekes out the poetry found in the best fistful of examples (OK, really it's all Morricone's contributions that redeem the genre, but we'll be nice).

Sorry babe, I'm stone cold incel. I don't even make eye contact with a woman (too autistic). See ya around...kid...

It's not hard to see why they never followed this up in our Berenstain timeline: the R rating put a hard cap on the potential for profit, half the prospective audience would have found the idea of a vigilante who actually kills people too heckin icky, and at some point you'd have had to break with the all-white cast of criminals for Frank to kill, which would have had the Death Wish moral-panickers squealing histrionically all over the web even back then. I give this one a pass from the safe-edgy stamp of shame only on the assumption that it's pretty much a comics-accurate origin story. Regardless, though, one well-judged, excellently-scored western-tinged chudcore classic easily outclasses every smarmy Em Cee Uuuniverse entry and offers just a hint of what might once have been, and what could be again in better times.

Sic semper soyjaks.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Lost Highway!

.eivom a hctaw s'teL

With the passing of David Lynch, a great sadness has descended. Unless Vincent Gallo returns to releasing his films, we are unlikely ever to see another work from a great master of the form. Most tributes I have seen play up his warmth, humour and deep love of beauty and nature, as you might expect. But for me, the greatest of his several masterworks was by far his coldest and most alienating: 1997's still-unnerving meditation on the mind of OJ Simpson, Lost Highway.

In this scene, Lunch evoked the relatable horror of someone wanting to speak to you in the morning.

I have no more interest in explaining Lynch's work than he did: he was known to say only that he disliked talking about his films because "the film is the talking". Personally, if I were a genius (well, even more of one), I doubt I'd be able to shut the fuck up about everything I did, but Lynch was the Platonic Chad shape-rotator in a world of virgin wordcels. Lost Highway's plot may indeed be perfectly intelligible with a bit of analytical attention, as are those of Mulholland Drive and the rest, but the immediate impression of being hopelessly lost in an endless Möbius strip of nightmares should be experienced first and examined later.

Warning: David Lynch harboured an inexplicable hatred for epileptics and devoted at least one scene in each of his films to murdering them en masse with intense strobe lights.

Lynch wanted to use This Mortal Coil's heartbreaking, oceanic "Song to the Siren" (which might constitute the most brutal mogging of an original by a cover this side of Hardline's "Hot Cherie") in Blue Velvet, but couldn't get the rights, so collaborated with regular soundtrack maestro Angelo Badalamenti and their muse-of-the-day Julee Cruise to pen "Mysteries of Love" instead. A happy frustration, both because it yielded that serene exultation and because "Song to the Siren" fits much better in Lost Highway, Lynch's MTV nightmare, where its devastating ode to irretrievable loss crowns a soundtrack packed with bleak industrial bangers that capture a fleeting moment in popular music ignored by other films and thus forever sonically welded to this dark noir.

Which is crueller: showing this kino to an epileptic or to a zoomer with telephone anxiety?

Lost Highway remixes motifs from the greatest noirs, Kiss Me Deadly and Detour, but somehow effortlessly elevates them, just as Twin Peaks did for Laura. Patricia Arquette's blonde and brunette iterations recall Hitchcock's Vertigo. The scenes featuring Robert Blake as the Mystery Man are particularly redolent of Bergman's Hour of the Wolf, another Lynch favourite. Robert Loggia (The Sopranos) was cast as a particularly volatile gangster after a blowup over casting from the Blue Velvet days. Lynch always said ideas were like fish, and he never threw a good one back. But for all he hoarded inspiration from eclectic sources, there was still some mystery X-factor that made his endlessly imitated style somehow impossible to cap. Let's let his fellow late enigma and Lost Highway soundtrack alum play us out with a song that might as easily have been written for Lynch as for himself.

Article theme: I Can't Give Everything Away - David Bowie

Mad Max Ripoffs: Clash of the Warlords!

Is 1985's Clash of the Warlords, AKA Mad Warrior, the shittiest Mad Max ripoff of all? Yes.

The version I watched on YouTube opens with a two-minute-long freeze frame of this explosion. Presumably it was intended to be filled in with opening titles or voiceover narration, but nah. Leave a comment if your version played differently, because I'm dying for that deep lore.

In this spin on the post-nuke world, goofily costumed baddy Malzon (????, Mad Warrior) entertains himself by making all his best fighters off one another in gladiatorial axe fights, which is strange, because he later muses that his main disadvantage against his enemies is fewer men. I disagree with this assessment, though, because it's clear his real main disadvantage is that he's a dribbling idiot even by post-nuke megalomaniac standards.

Malzon looks like the one guy at every Halloween party who put effort into his costume and now feels like a NERD.

Nor, dear reader, is this solely my assessment: for Malzon goes into an ear-biting meltdown every time he sees the moon, at which point his own goons chain him up and openly laugh at him for the gigatard he is. There's nothing quite like an outnumbered, mentally challenged villain whose own minions treat him as a huge joke to instill fear into the hearts of viewers.

Without his Phantom of the Opera mask, he looks like a Filipino Toxic Avenger.

If you think this lunar fixation will come into play at a timely moment to change the outcome of the movie, you'd be wrong: it's never mentioned again. Rather, his not particularly tragic downfall is precipitated by the escape of one of his gladiators, Rex, who goes to join the rebels from Return of the Jedi. That might seem like just a throwaway comparison, but this fucking gem has the brass balls to close out on a lightsaber fight straight out of a Star Wars fan film:

I love how there's no attempt to hide or fudge it whatsoever: they even use the same colour-coding.

It's clear director Willy Milan (I swear this is the name he's credited with on The Movie Database) just dumps whatever he liked in other movies into his, which is endearing, but incoherent. The movie literally ends with Rex riding off on a horse because I guess Ol' Willy saw a western once. For all its faults, Clash boasts one ace that sets it apart from the pack: its searing Top Gun Ray Bans beer commercial cock rock soundtrack is insultingly good for so farcical a project. If a cleaned-up version exists anywhere, send it my way, because it stomps absolute prostate.

Post-apocalypse checklist:

MOHAWKS: none.

SHOULDER PADS: special mention must go to the female lead's choice to don gold-plated ones, which in a low-res YT upload make her look like something off the Soldiers Under Command album cover.

Damn, Michael Sweet looks like that?

CUSTOM CARS: we have to count this dorky looking tricycle:

Lord Humungus and Wez would have raped this guy so many times.

MUTANTS: presumably Malzon.

GOGGLES: IDK, I don't recall any.

TOTAL: 3/5 - uuuurghhh

Greatest Album of All time of the Week: Mirrors In Your Eyes!

Can't focus your camera for shit? Have you considered a career in shoegaze album covers?

Disco was so reviled by the rockers it dethroned from the charts for its fifteen minutes of relevancy in the 70s it spawned a mini-genre of hilarious protest songs, but it only took until the dawn of the 2010s for an enterprising shoegaze outfit, the tragically overlooked Soundpool, to perfect the formula and turn a sound synonymous with dated, disposable trash into a sonic treasure by injecting funky disco beats beneath a shimmering surface wash of shoegaze guitars and ear-piercing synth tones, implicitly vindicating my hoarderesque refusal to divest myself of all the junk I've accrued over decades of subsistence. Just like metal and the morin khuur, disco and shoegaze go so well together your first impression will be "why did no one think of this before?" to which the answer probably is something like "by the time shoegaze dropped, dance music had moved on to more acclaimed pastures, producing gems like 'Pearl'", but that's no excuse, because disco needed its redemption arc even more than you and I needed Chapterhouse on our art-ho-courting playlists.

If Mirrors In Your Eyes has any faults, it frontloads the best tracks a little, but the sound is so cool this hardly matters. The title track plunges the listener into a realm of ambience so atmospheric and absorbing you won't want to leave until long after closer "Listen" peters out. Be sure to blast this disc in your car as you leave work late at night for maximum effect (you do work late just so you can experience your musikino existentially, right?).