JFL

Jean Claude Van Damme has again bounced back and again shows that, in the hands of a capable director, he can hand in an unexpected performance. The French genre maestro Julien Leclercq serves up a bleak, gloomy existential action flick with an aging hero. The Bouncer is actually the sombre counterpart to JCVD, in which Van Damme leaves behind the radiance of a star and passes himself off as being at the mercy of frailty, as well as another captivating action sequence filmed in one shot. Leclercq's characteristic long Steadicam shots tracking characters in motion from a third-person perspective, using video games as a model, greatly enhance the gritty realism of this genre revelation.

Amélie from the gritty corners of Glasgow, or the perfect combination of the fierce style of young French directors at the turn of the millennium and the fantastic action choreography of the Hong Kong masters in an enchantingly naive and aggressively brutal action fairy tale, which as a European high-concept blockbuster is also wonderful historical evidence of the peak of production achieved by Besson’s Europa Corp., as no one else has ever put together such a diverse mix of niche-hip names (Massive Attack, RZA, Jet Li, Morgan Freeman, Bob Hoskins, Luc Besson, Yuen Woo-Ping).

The Breakfast Club on acid cut with Back to the Future and seasoned with Fight Club, or a phantasmagorical meta trip in which pop-culture references and self-reflection of genre formulas collide in a raging vortex across several time dimensions and elements of slasher flicks, high-school romances, sports melodramas, outsider comedies and every other possible kind of teen movies are mutated into bizarre forms. Detention is so post-modern, it’s pre-future.

The director of the entertaining metalhead horror flick Deathgasm picked up the gauntlet that remained lying on the action-movie battlefield following the breakup of Neveldine/Taylor. Guns Akimbo is a cyberpunk action comedy with video-game styling that borrows a lot from Crank and Hardcore Henry, though it fakes its sincere punk energy with fanboyishly phoney grittiness. It’s a shame that the film is unable to untangle itself from its nerdishly scraggly essence, which motivates not only its humour, but also its embarrassingly messianically self-reverent climax.

In addition to its over-the-top absurdity, this meta-parody sequel to a parody of disaster movies is appealing mainly as evidence of George Clooney’s tremendous charisma and acting talent, which neither the insipid screenplay nor his monumental mullet can overshadow.

The normal life of a married guy with commitments. J.G. Quintel exchanged the fantastical world of anthropomorphised animal heroes from children’s cartoons for the “reality” of coarse grown-up series, but he views that reality with an equally wild and adamantly infantile perspective suffused with the logic of trashy 1980s pop culture. The context of adulthood and family and social commitments gives both a bitter touch and a satirical sting to the mentally immature protagonists’ absurdly overwrought confrontations with the bizarre aspects of modern city life. In Close Enough, the world around the central family and their friends turns out to be even more self-reverent, absurd and immature, while taking on the form of Quintel’s typically trashy caricatures.

Kicks has enormous potential to be a truly impressive and stimulating film about adolescence, peer pressure, adoption of behavioural patterns and social roles, and the endless cycle of violence which, at the same time, represents a spiral that leads to increasingly stubborn self-denial and identification with an attitude that is supposed to serve as armour. In the effort to reach their intended audience, the filmmakers stay on the surface and replace the provocative reflection of the protagonist’s inner self with clichéd symbolism. The message about the endless causality of violence, from which one must break free as a way out of that cycle, shows only a rakish act that brings forth nothing more than problematic heroism. Thanks not only to the casting of Mahershala Ali in the role of the mentor, Kicks comes across as a teen variation on the grandiose Moonlight, but in contrast to that film’s complexity and painful introspection, it remains stuck only in a phoney soulful teenage pose, which peculiarly ends on the surface below which Moonlight dares to dive. Some may argue that these films and approaches cannot be compared because they are targeted at different audiences, but such underestimation of teenagers helps to perpetuate the cycle of mistakes made in adolescence and the exploration and obstinate persistence of those mistakes in adulthood.

The wave of ’80s retro has enabled us to relive, in a nostalgically soft package, all of the fictional emotions of our adolescence, or rather the enchanting versions of those emotions suggested by pop culture. Though this trend is slowly losing steam, it is obstinately being kept on life support by the artificially extended series Stranger Things and other Netflix productions that refuse to give up the already noticeably exhausted cash cow. At its core, the inevitable crossing of the forbidden boundary between decades into the early 1990 soffers an even more twisted, though fortunately more entertaining, continuation of this retro trend. The beginning of the nineties was characterised by the malignant growth of all of the tastelessness and gaudiness of the eighties to the point of caricature. The first appropriately tacky and caustically subversive harbinger of early ’90s retro is the rambunctious pastiche Psycho Goreman from a professional-enthusiast low-budget trash factory by the name of Astron-6. The comforting and touching nature of E.T. is replaced with the coked-up derangement and delirious excess of Biker Mice from Mars and other deformed outgrowths of ’90s pop culture. Steven Kostanski is not afraid to throw open the monstrous Pandora’s box of nineties boorishness, where taste, moderation and pathos gave way to flamboyance, pretension and aggressive kitsch and monumentally irritating, prideful heroes such as in those pop-culture milestones Cool As Ice and The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Psycho Goreman is obviously not for everyone and, conversely, it will piss off a lot of people, but that's good, because its roots draw their sap straight from the deepest darkness of modern pop culture. Imagine Buffy The Vampire Slayer in which everything good has been replaced by the worst elements of series starring the Olsen twins, seasoned with a pinch of Home Improvement and smothered in a tonne of insipid comic-bookishness and rubber Power Rangers costumes with a light coat of red paint modelled on splatstick flicks of the day and Celebrity Death Match. The result is atrocious, profane, over-the-top and basically unwatchable, and thus also beautiful.

Bee Gees + G.I. Joe = the most bombastic ’80s camp. For some, this is a nightmare; for others, it is a beautiful gem of pure 1980s naiveté, outlandish ambition, phantasmagorical children’s logic and a heap of epic WTF moments. Plus a bonus for connoisseurs: Barry Bostwick in his only film role as a truly “perfect specimen of manhood”.

Candyman is a meta-horror movie on the theme of urban legends which itself became an urban legend. As in his stunning debut, the spectral coming-of-age film Paperhouse, director Bernard Rose combines the worlds of reality and fiction by means of an immersive atmosphere. In the interest of interconnecting the two spheres, however, there is no clear boundary between them. Candyman is one of the best horror films of not only the 1990s, because it completely deviates from the usual genre production, which is due to Rose’s supremely conceptual treatment of it. As both director and screenwriter, Rose essentially expands on the original idea of ​​Barker's short story and gives us a view from the outside into fragments of a complex world, which, together with the main heroine, we tensely explore until we suddenly discover that Candyman has absorbed and fully enthralled us. Aided by the interplay of the camera wok, set design and music, the brilliant gradation of the narrative and the stylistically precise suggestion of a warped reality make for a horror movie that, even though it is placed alongside classic butchers of horror such as Freddy Kruger, is much closer to similarly singular and extraordinary phenomena such as Jacob’s Ladder. In comparison to that film, however, Rose’s work is even more stylistically nuanced, particularly in its balancing on the edge of reality and, thanks to that, also more ambivalent, though at the same time it remains more anchored in the genre and more earthy or, better said, more popular, in the good sense of that word. It’s simply an urban legend that we initially laugh at, that we think we can appropriate and analyse, but then we suddenly find that we are afraid to go to the restroom by ourselves and we avoid looking in the mirror.