ABSTRACTIVES

From Eyetoon, d. Jerry Abrams (1968)

THOR THING

Contemporary (well, 1966) cartoon adventures of the Norse God of Thunder. It's categorized as animation but, mainly, just the mouths move.

THAT ESCALATED QUICKLY

Scanners, d. David Cronenberg (1981)

Tense, nervous headache? You probably have a Scanner in your noggin. There's no disengaging, just disassembling. It's going to get messy but, on the plus side, your skull ache will soon be gone.

I love 70s and 80s Cronenberg very much, but I also love the work of Brian De Palma from the same period. It's worth pointing out that Bri covered this very phenomenon in his 1978 classic The Fury, blowing John Cassavates into offal using only the power of Amy Irving's mind. If you ever want a high quality exploding human double bill, you know what to do.  

MAKE YOUR OWN REALITY

From Incredible Self-Confidence (1987)

DEGRADATION

Poor quality analogue + digital = the strange psychedelia of decay.

YOU GOT ME STAR TREKKING

Astonishing outsider funk from Forrest Terry, originally released in 1980 but recently made available by the good people at Athens of the North. I love everything about this lo fi sci fi track: its murky sound, its muddled structure - the fact that Forrest had the foresight to make a video - and his superlative work on the Tri-speed Moog Keytar Synthesizer Guitar, an instrument that he invented. 

LUNATIC FRINGE

d. Kazuhiko Yamaguchi (1975)

Wolfguy is great. Based on a Manga, it stars the amazing Sonny Chiba as Wolf, a roving reporter and troubleshooter who is also the only survivor of a clan of wolf people. The details of this are a little confusing as, unlike a common or garden werewolf, he doesn't transform into something hairy and vicious every full moon but instead becomes endowed with super strength and kung fu abilities, as well as the most un-lupin-like ability to leap thirty feet in the air and be shot with a machine gun over and over. 

None of this matters, of course, especially as he is investigating a series of bloody murders committed by a victim of gang rape who is so angry at being infected with syphilis that she is able to project her rage into the form of an avenging tiger. Naturally, a shadowy government department is interested in both of these unusual people, wanting either their compliance or their blood, hoping to use it to create a cohort of unstoppable super assassins.  

Bloody, kinky, full of fighting, jumping and running around, Wolfguy also has a groovy soundtrack. Seriously, what's not to like?