drillrando

[drillrando]

Lily C.A.T.

The category of anime horror films is not a crowded one. While explored in television somewhat more often (Evangelion’s moments of Lovecraftian terror or the miasma of dread and decay permeating Boogiepop Phantom), the same few names come up whenever features are mentioned. Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue and Magnetic Rose are common choices, but the former arguably better slots into the psychological thriller section, and the latter is a horror short in a non-horror-themed anthology. More adventurous viewers might suggest Angel’s Egg, Mamoru Oshii’s gorgeous post-apocalyptic art film. Much of the rest is violent horror-action titles, particularly the work of director Yoshiaki Kawajiri (Demon City Shinjuku, Vampire Hunter D, Biohunter), which trade scares for over the top gore and elaborate action sequences.

The purity of Lily C.A.T. then, as a science fiction horror film in the mold of Alien or The Thing, is somewhat charming. It’s a copycat of those films in miniature, to a fault; its 67-minute runtime is 42 less than is given to the frozen landscapes and cramped base interiors of The Thing, and almost half the time spent in Alien’s Nostromo. The same themes of invasion are here: a mining crew wakes from a twenty year hypersleep to find that debris containing pneumonia-like alien bacteria has entered the ship’s water supply; corpses pile up but suddenly begin to disappear as a just-out-of-sight creature begins terrorizing the crew.

But where the two movies it borrows from built slow, claustrophobic terror enhanced by characters we come to empathize with in a place where no one can hear you scream, Lily C.A.T. zips by. The few glimpses of the crew’s humanity are mostly seen in a quick intro segment as they introduce themselves before climbing into sleep chambers, leaving us nothing but horror archetypes. Even the Future War-esque notion that at least forty years will pass until the crew returns to Earth is barely remarked on, resurfacing mostly to help along a hastily introduced twist free of impact.

Should Lily C.A.T. be blamed for playing with a horror format it did not have the runtime to tackle? Its strengths hint at a far more atmospheric film if it had more time to breathe. The ship’s interior is cold and unsettling, slowly becoming something close to a living monster itself (a memorable gory scene involves the titular cat being eaten through a jagged hole in the wall); Yoshitaki Amano (who also worked on the aforementioned Angel’s Egg) provides a striking and well-dressed crew; Akira Inoue’s soundtrack (aside from an oddly mismatched rock tune during a climactic monster attack) is memorable, especially over the opening sequence as the camera glides through the deserted ship hallways.

And it’s never boring. Despite washing over you with little impression, it packs enough elaborate gore and moments of dread to make its short runtime worth sitting through. While Lily C.A.T is not the sci-fi horror masterpiece one might hope anime to have, it’s a fine October night watch.

[drillrando]

Out Run and City-pop

Out Run, with its bright red squished sports car cabinet, was a luxury object like none other. It was far from the first game with a smooth scrolling road and blinding speed, but it was the first to present itself not as a racing game, as predecessors like Namco’s Pole Position did, but as a driving game. A comparison of cabinet art makes the distinction clear. 

Pole Position’s lavish sit-down cabinet depicts a Formula One race. 

Out Run’s cabinet, meanwhile, *is* the car. The player experience is one to one; stepping into the cabinet is stepping into the Ferrari Testarossa. 

Even the more common standup Out Run cab’s marquee art displays not a breakneck race but the player’s car leisurely passing a sailboat-decaled semi on a beachside road.

In the 1980s, Japanese pop music developed a variant well suited for bayside coasting. Termed “city-pop”, it blended synth pop and flashes of laid-back new wave (Aztec Camera and Haircut One Hundred, both of which found success in Japan, come to mind) with the inoffensive chill of smooth jazz. Like smooth jazz, it was almost music-as-object, existing to be heard while driving. Its heavy bass, steady drums, and breezy harmonies were meant to come out of your brand new Sony stereo with the top down, sunglasses on, wind in your face.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSXTdnWyWRI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8x02hyz4fq0

City-pop sense of freedom was undoubtedly an influence on Out Run. The game’s opening shot is the convertible’s interior, hand hovering over a stereo dial. Though it *does* look like the player is changing radio stations, the freedom to choose between  Out Run’s three songs makes it feel much more like a CD, the kind you might have found in car stereos of the day. All three tracks echo city-pop.

Passing Breeze with its jazzy Rhodes chords and languid lead.

https://youtu.be/rF8u38wMBNE

Splash Wave with its upbeat drums (complete with 808 claps) and driving bass recalling white lines blurring into one on the freeway.

https://youtu.be/S7miBTOaa6M

Magical Sound Shower, with its overt latin influence and poppy structure.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEl7JuAI0nM 

Even Last Wave, the number that plays over the credits, sounds like the teary-eyed ballad that could close a city-pop album.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rH2zAdwZZL0

Out Run was a simultaneously chilled out and deeply challenging experience, something the series wouldn’t really capture again until its proper sequel, Out Run 2. In both games, the pressure isn’t on the player to beat an opponent in a high stakes race, but, really, to look cool. A timer above pushes you to keep up a high speed while taking tight, unexpected turns and dodging increasingly heavy traffic. The point, once a player has mastered Out Run’s highly responsive driving and become familiar with its roads, is for it all to look and feel effortless, to the blissed-out sounds of an FM-synth car stereo.

[drillrando]

Nevada

Nevada is a novel about the terrifying exhilaration of being somewhere far from home with someone you’re, for a whole mess of reasons, drawn to but barely know. It’s about being a stranger in a strange land, generally. It’s about how the coping mechanisms and shields we put up to survive as misfit kids can fuck us up and stunt our growth as human beings the older we get; it’s about how those coping mechanisms are absurdly hard to shake because, at some point, it’s just you, and it’s hard to imagine what a you without them looks like.

Nevada is about how unresolved and twisty and Third Space actual queer experience can often be. The last act is about a queer trans woman named Maria, with so much shit going on in her life, hanging out with a guy she meets while passing through small-town Nevada. He works at Walmart and has a lot of thoughts about his gender; Maria thinks he’s a trans woman and that he doesn’t realize it. It doesn’t end in triumph; it doesn’t even resolve really. It’s messy and bleak but not tragic, any more than tragedy is inescapable for any queer human being.

Nevada is about how escape is great but complicated and probably won’t solve all of your problems on its own. It’s about how we come to understand ourselves growing up through weird, bigoted porn and confused fantasies and nerd stuff and how that’s great but also how the baggage of that is hard to shake, too. It’s hard thinking about being a stunted person, about being damaged goods or whatever, especially when sometimes you feel really good, or at least okay. I thought about that a lot while reading Nevada. It’s hard, but how could you not think about it?

Anyway, read Nevada. It’s a good book.

http://topsidepress.com/shop/nevada/

[drillrando]

Exodemon

Exodemon is raw. You start in this metal catwalk with a message in blood written behind you (“THE EXODEMON IS AWAKE”). You look ghoulishly hunched over, demonic metal claws extended, a killing machine from the start. You move like one, too. You enter the metal warehouse the game takes place in by slashing a teleportation console.

The obvious comparison is Devil Daggers, but the manic energy of Gun Godz is there too. Grainy, bit-crushed explosions burst forth over a soundtrack driven by a menacing bassline that sounds like a Sega Genesis bass run through a Big Muff Pi. There’s an overwhelming sense of sharpness to the game’s lightning-speed combat, its grainy but fluid enemy sprites and jolting gunshots. Health and ammo readouts are diegetic, appearing on the backs of your clawed hands. Small clip size and a relative scarcity of ammo encourage you to use a deadly but risky melee slash that kills most enemies in a single hit, forcing you to learn the rhythms and patterns of the weird robots of Exodemon to preserve your rather small health bar.

It’s a speedy ride, one absolutely worth your time. The developer’s itch.io hints at more to come, and hopefully a less harsh checkpointing system.

https://kuupu.itch.io/exodemon

[drillrando]

The Shining (1980)

What struck me the most the last time I watched The Shining was a scene a few minutes in, where the Torrance family where Stuart Ullman is giving them a final tour of the hotel before it closes for the winter. Wendy Torrence (Shelley Duvall) asks Ullman when the hotel was built to which Ullman replies “Construction started in 1907. It was finished in 1909. The site is supposed to be located on an Indian burial ground, and I believe they actually had to repel a few Indian attacks as they were building it.”

The theories behind the significance of Indian imagery in The Shining were nothing new to me, burned into my memory by the late-night glare of Geocities webpages I came across while feverishly searching for info about the film as a kid. What struck me on this viewing is how casual this whole exchange is. A few moments earlier, Ullman tells Jack the story of the previous caretaker murdering his wife and two daughters before putting “both barrels of a shotgun in his mouth.” This scene is so tense, so full of euphemisms, rolled out so slowly by Ullman; the brilliance of it is that it’s difficult to tell whether Ullman is terrified of Jack turning down the job (like other candidates, presumably) or whether, even with almost a decade’s distance, he’s still terrified of the incident.

— The Shining is a powerful film. I don’t mean that the way people talk about a film that moved them, like Schindler’s List or something. In my head, it is something like an occult object, a puzzle that begs to be solved while clearly having no real solution, a film so hopelessly wrapped up in late night childhood memories that I’m still sorting out what I think it actually is.

My first encounter with The Shining came as my dad was flipping through channels. The film was in one of the scenes where the camera follows closely behind Danny as he tricycles around the hotel, which is one of the most striking images in the film. I don’t think there’s anything like it. My dad said something about having seen it before, what a cool movie it was, but my mom forcefully insisted that he change the channel, which he did.

I don’t think my mom had ever seen The Shining; she probably knew it was a horror movie, and she very much disliked those (still does). But this image that was left of a mysterious rolling shot of a boy in an empty space all alone mixed with this thought that this must be a terrifying, reprehensible film for my mom to have reacted that way. For months, I waited up late in our living room, catching bits of it on Showtime at 3AM, always afraid of being caught watching this awful thing; eventually, I saw the whole thing.

The Shining is a film of unusual power because its weirdness has barely lessoned after repeated viewings, after the thrill of being a kid and watching something you shouldn’t be watching has receded into the past. Plenty of films have lost that weirdness; I don’t find, say, Child’s Play 2 or Tom Savini’s Night of the Living Dead remake, two other horror films found in late-night premium cable spelunking, as awe-inspiring as I used to. But The Shining is, if anything, more perplexing after each viewing, its subtleties always just out of reach, its horror all the more potent for it. — Room 237 is a fascinating movie if only for the reactions it gets. To some viewers, its probably just as perplexing as The Shining when it first released. Steven King, himself a noted critic of Kubrick’s adaptation, called it “academic bullshit”. It’s a weird but kind of understandable misreading of the film, the idea that is a blanket endorsement of (often competing) interpretations of a horror film from the 1980s. Room 237 is a film about interpretation at its most frayed, where the part of yourself that you bring to interpretation is the thing that shows the most, where you’re probably talking more about yourself than anything else.

Someone in the film states (pretty earnestly) that the The Shining was Kubrick’s attempt to bring the entirety of human conflict and history into a single work. On a surface level, you could easily dismiss that as outlandish. But it’s also an extremely comforting idea. Kubrick is presented by the interview subjects as a genius-level IQ savant/control freak, the kind of person who, if anyone, could be capable of intentionally creating the film these people believe they have seen. If interpreting literature is a way to understand the world, then the idea of creating the world in a work of art in such a way is an act of reassurance. It implies there exists both a coherent vision of the world to build such a thing off of and the human ability to do so. Likewise, the “successful” interpretation of this work is letting yourself in on the secret, putting yourself on the level of the creator, reaffirming the comprehensiblity of the world.

It’s also a comforting idea that, ironically, pushes against Kubrick’s own work. I don’t buy that he’s a misanthrope or whatever it was Pauline Kael thought of him, but I do think he was fascinated by the incompleteness of the world, my mutual unintelligibility. A Clockwork Orange’s Alex is criminal whose happiness is incompatible with the world around him; Lolita is the story of an avowed sexual predator who is so easy to find human. It’s easy to see why Kubrick was drawn to collaborate with Jim Thompson, another chronicler of lowlives and weirdos whose portrayals of such aren’t so much “dignified” as they are fascinated. — The Shining’s power is that no single shot goes by that does not feel deeply sinister, concealing darker truths. The camerawork is no doubt a huge part of this: its incredible depth of focus captures the hotel in a way that always communicates its deliberately impossible, skewed nature (take, for example, Stuart Ullman’s office in the middle of the hotel and its “impossible window” to the outside). We feel this, even if we don’t recognize it.

Kubrick used close-ups, too. Jacques Tati said he disliked close-ups because they were crude, preferring to capture his vision of modern Paris in primarily wide-angle shots in his masterpiece Playtime. In The Shining, close-ups are a terrifying, exhilarating jolt from the shots that make up most of the film. Take the scene in the ballroom where Jack first encounters Lloyd, the bartender. We see Jack’s face as he sits at the bar, his face undergoing a transformation as he removes his hands from his face, smiles, and begins a conversation. The camera cuts mid-laugh to a shot of Lloyd, someone who wasn’t there only a moment ago in the wider shot. These close-ups conceal more than they illuminate. When we are close, we feel that we are too close. — Ullman’s quip about the Indian burial ground is treated as innocuous but couched in the sinister. The scene of the Torrances being given a tour are intercut with shots of Danny wandering alone in the hotel before being visited briefly by a vision of the Grady twins, and followed by a scene in which Dick Hallorann, the cook, tries to delicately explain to Danny that he has a “gift” (one of the few explicit acknowledgements of the supernatural in the film). The tour itself takes place on the backdrop of the hotel emptying out for the winter, leaving the Torrances alone in a place we have already grasped as sinister.

There’s no Rosetta Stone to The Shining, but its labyrinthian openings fascinate in a way few films do. We know it is hiding so much, just out of sight. The burial ground comment still haunts me. Is it so casual because Kubrick simply didn’t think of it as much more than window dressing for a ghost film? Or is just another strange, terrifying opening into a labyrinth with no exits?

[drillrando]

It Feels Like I Have A Seatbelt On All The Time: The Longmont Potion Castle Mixtape

Longmont Potion Castle is better than your favorite prank caller. If you don’t like prank calls, his recordings will have you wondering aloud if prank calls are Art. He’s been doing this before some of you were even born on scratchy answering machine tapes that beep every few moments. His calls rocket out of prank call cliches of machismo baiting and hackneyed stereotypes into a surreal world of products that don’t exist, conversations that take hairpin turns, and voices shot out like rubber bands from a guitar effects pedal. He’s Bernard Fuddle, or maybe Virtual Baoboa, or sometimes Dirk Funk. He’s your neighbor, just catty-corner to you. looking a broom and that Realistic Wand he read about in the circular. If you don’t help him out, he’ll come down there with his flamethrower and boots and stomp around over there. If you could keep the noise in your house down to a dull roar and keep your puppies from gnashing around, too, that’d be great.

Dieter’s Heat

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ja2-98e7KfI

Sometimes the central gag of a Longmont Potion Castle call is so brilliant that it carries the whole call on its own. In this one, LPC informs his callees that he’s from “Detroit Energy” and will be turning up their temperature to 110 degrees for a test. The reactions range from incredulity to bewildered resignation.

HIGHLIGHT: “My heater to 110 degrees? For testing? And then what happens afterwards?” “We turn it back down.”

Alex Trebek

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzZUXHtTr6c

This call is a good introduction to a few key Longmont Potion Castle traits: his go-to identity as an extremely vague UPS driver and his occasional, but always memorable, celebrity prank calls. Supposedly he found a few celebrity numbers in a gossip magazine which explains the somewhat bewildering list of famous prank victims which includes Eddy Money and Dick Dale’s bewildered wife. Trebek’s deadpan incredulity makes the call, pulling predictably Trebekian moves like arguing that Siam, the originator of his supposed order of 4,200 pounds of sod, is no longer a country.

HIGHLIGHT: “Send me something in the mail.” “I’ll send you a subpoena is what i’ll send you.”

Kiplet’s Prayer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnEQPb79piA

There’s plenty of weird one-off calls in LPC’s discography that probably could’ve made a whole series. This one is almost made better by its specialness. LPC calls a Christian prayer-by-phone service (?) via a hard-of-hearing text to speech device. The resulting mishearings and vague character building makes it one of the most memorable calls.

HIGHLIGHT: “Kiplet@hurt.friend”

Virtual Balboa

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLuzpqZWP-8

Short and to the point. It’s a perfect example of LPC’s ability to craft weird, almost-but-not-quite-right-sounding sentences and buzzwords on the fly that one can only imagine how the callee is managing to process without shutting down out of total confusion. I think about the closing line almost daily.

HIGHLIGHT: “I’m looking to get virtual with you and anyone else you’ve got around there, so.”

Moisturization

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTvRkZ-bs-U

The LA bar owner from this call reappears in countless other Longmont Potion Castle calls without any indication that he’s been called by the same man over and over again. It’s a virtuoso call, full of whiplash-inducing details (“We were in Newsweek. You might have seen that thing, there was a mermaid in there”) and a service LPC is looking for (Moisturization. Well, the Beautification process, really) which sounds like nonsense but so close to a actually existing product that it can’t be dismissed out of hand. The real star, however, is the bar owner. His unique mix of easily fired-up and utter unwillingness to end the call is something to behold.

HIGHLIGHT: “You’ve never heard of Mookie Blaylock before?”

Clown Motel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QBJaTtF7XI

A gym rat calls a motel owner at dinner looking for three rooms to work out in for three days. It’s going to be him, his weights, his barbells, and some raw meat; you can assess the damage at the end of his stay. Urgency (“Well, I’m on my way!”) is a key component of LPC calls and it drives this call. The motel owner is both genuinely confused and nervous about this man showing up at his motel at any moment.

HIGHLIGHT: “I’ve got two Humvees full of barbells and I’m on my way down there.”

Radio Julius

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daXG7yIVNe8

Longmont Potion Castle calls at their best are labyrinthian streams of consciousness, perching on some off-kilter idea for a few moments before hopping to some other barely-connected tangent. The Radio Shack employee he calls can’t find the Digital Goober LPC is looking for, so he conferences them in with an Orange Julius and decides the call is actually about getting a job interview, only to end up threatening to hit the manager of the Orange Julius in the lip with a cinderblock.

HIGHLIGHT: “Are you involved with that Sniagrab?”

Teary Eyed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFtoEiUAO7Q

Calling everyone from a physicist to random “neighbors” asking for advice on “crying my own natural tears” is one of the weirdest concepts to come out of Longmont Potion Castle. It’s also a strong showcase of LPC’s weird love affairs with guitar effects pedals, his voice moving from subtly-off pitch shifts to chipmunk absurdity at a moment’s notice. Contained near the halfway point is a particularly jarring moment: the phrase “Longmont Potion Castle” spoken aloud by a callee. After nearly a year of releasing prank phone call albums, something like that is bound to happen.

HIGHLIGHT: “How about liquid helium? Is that something I could try out?”