Reviews

Chicago

Featherweight US rockers at their commercial peak

JJ Cale – In Session

Belated release of 1979 live session

Atrocity Exhibitions

Vital live dispatches from the last five months in the life of Ian Curtis

Dark Water

Classic ghost story from Ring writer and director

Fulltime Killer

Stylish slice of sub-John Woo heroic bloodshed

The Swordsman

Ling (Samuel Hui) and his tomboy sister are charged with keeping a sacred scroll from the clutches of their self-serving Sifu and the scarier-than-they-sound Royal Eunuchs. With multiple directors and more characters than it can handle, the cracks show, but the swordplay and comedic touch proved popular enough to spawn two sequels.

The Funeral The Addiction

Abel Ferrara made these almost simultaneously in '95, and they're especially intense even for him. The more successfully operatic first (Chris Walken, Chris Penn, Vincent Gallo) follows a family of '30s gangsters on a revenge mission; the second's a gory monochrome vampire flick starring Lili Taylor (and Walken again). Nietzschean, neurotic.

The Green Man School For Scoundrels

Two vintage Alastair Sim comedies released as a double-pack. In 1956's The Green Man he plays a political assassin whose plans are interrupted by the arrival of bumbling vacuum cleaner salesman George Cole; in 1960's School For Scoundrels—based on Stephen Potter's One-Upmanship books—he teaches downtrodden nice chap Ian Carmichael how to get the better of dastardly cad Terry-Thomas.

Lightning Bolt – Wonderful Rainbow

Startling third album by hardcore bass/drums duo from Rhode Island

Psychomania – Trunk

Something of a cult, this. In 1972—that year again—the Brits made a dreadful zombie movie wherein frog-worshipping biker boys commit suicide, then return, undead, to burn up motorways and terrorise old ladies like Beryl Reid outside supermarkets. Fog, satanism and skull helmets, on a budget of around nine quid. The soundtrack, however, by Kes man John Cameron, has changed hands for daft money since, and now appears on CD. It mixes wah-wah rock, choral arias and phased backwards drums for no better reason than that Cameron felt like it.
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