Review: Space Adventure Cobra (1982 Film)

Cobra, the universe’s most wanted outlaw, runs his motorcycle into a cat-suited bounty hunter. She, naturally, has her aim set on him, but not for his bounty. A gold-skinned crime-lord kidnapped her sister. With Cobra’s help she will save her sister from Crystal Boy’s megalomaniacal clutches.

Not a deep plot. And, despite many obstacles poofing into existence from A to B, not a complex one neither. The plot is an excuse. It seems an illustrator, still reeling from a prolific creative burst, sat before a wall plastered with drawings of characters, settings, moments and explosions, and only then wondered, ‘How can I string these together.’ In this, SAC resembles something from French Sci-Fi comics. The artist wishes to flex his visual muscles, and then concocts a narrative as vehicle. So while the narrative is little more than a well-done 80s, tongue-in-cheek, action-fest, I would be in error to judge purely on that. From the Bond-style opening credits to a space cruiser’s screen-filling flight, the film, with no apology, puts style over substance. 

Review: Kahil Gibran's The Prophet (Film)

Almitra (Quvenzhané Wallis), a mischievous thief, mute since the death of her father, follows her mother (Salma Hayek) to work one day. Her mother acts as housekeeper to the poet and eponymous prophet Mustapha (Liam Neeson), who after seven years house arrest has his sentence commuted to exile. As Almitra, her mother and Mustafa make their way to the docks, with guards ensuring their journey, Mustafa passes on aphorisms to those he meets on the way.

Review: An African Millionaire, by Grant Allen

Sir Charles Vandrift, ruthless South African diamond mogul, meets his match in Colonel Clay. Masquerading as a Mexican Seer, Clay, with little more than a few parlour conjurings, makes away with five thousand pounds of Vandrift’s fortune. And Clay’s not finished, he’ll swindle Vandrift to his last pound. After all, how can Vandrift fight a master of disguise, a hawk who can be anyone and anywhere?  

The series in a line: Gentleman swindler cons a millionaire over and over again. Sounds repetitive, doesn’t it, twelve stories performing the same dance. But Allen avoids stagnation by differentiating the stories just enough. Of course the stories have a formula, but they never descend to the formulaic. In each story Allen introduces one or two new characters – It doesn’t take a mystery aficionado to spot the criminal. But the unmask never hogs the climax. Allen doesn’t tease and hint at where, oh where, is that damned Colonel Clay. He focusses on the con, rather, on how that magnificent bastard Clay will swindle that petty bastard Vandrift.

Review: Olivia by Olivia, by Dorothy Strachey

‘[H]ave you ever been in love?’ …

‘Yes,’ she answered somberly, ‘yes.’

‘And what’s it like?’

‘Too horrible to speak of … And too delicious.’

(pg. 65)

Olivia, sixteen, and ready to have the half-sleep of childhood burned from her. Her bildungsroman, inspired by Strachey’s own life, blooms in Mlle Julie and Mlle Cara’s school. But her education extends beyond academia, as she cannot help, nor tries to help, that she loves her schoolmistress, Mlle Julie. A love perhaps returned.   

Review: Cochlea & Eustachia, by Hans Rickheit

By convention a review starts with a description of the plot’s setup. I hope you will forgive me if this sounds like the perverted dreams of a feverish addict. Cochlea and Eustachia, two identical girls of uncertain species, wearing only negligees and domino masks, explore the home (?) of a disturbed scientist (?) whose head is a sooty cotton bud. The girls explore the condemned manor, where bloodless viscera vines the walls. They witness another identical girl steal a book from a hairless borrower living in an owl statue. I won’t go on – not for fear of spoiling the story, just that I doubt I could describe it.

Review: Gunsmith Cats: Revised Edition Omnibus 1, by Kenichi Sonoda

Irene ‘Rally’ Vincent sells guns. Minnie May loves explosions. They fight crime. In Chicago. With lots of guns and explosions.

The reverence Sonoda shows towards firearms seems native to a country with strict gun laws¹. He loves guns like a steam engine enthusiast loves trains. A hobbyist’s fascination drives him to understand these exotic objects. While American gun nuts possess as much knowledge, the Western worship of guns depends on its violent ends. They care how a gun works only so far as it tells them how big a load it could blow through someone’s head. And while Sonoda does blow a few holes through heads, he also treats guns as artisan objects, refreshing one wearied by the Freudian, frat boy gun love of Western popular culture.

Review: Fantômas, by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre

[This review contains slight spoilers, both explicitly and by implication.]

"‘You are mad, boy, absolutely mad! Vidocq – Rocambole! You mix up legend and history, lump together murderers with detectives, and make no distinction between right and wrong! You would not hesitate to put the heroes of crime and the heroes of law and order on one and the same pedestal!’

‘You have said the word, sir,’ Charles Rambert exclaimed; ‘they are all heroes. But, better still Fantômas–’"

- Fantômas, 1911

A flame-lit discussion on that force of criminality, Fantômas, foreshadows the lady of the house’s slaughter. A missing English lord appears dead in a trunk. A foreign Princess, too scared to screamed, bathes as a burglar cuts her alarm. Only Juve, an Inspector of supreme deductive creativity, can grasp at the tenuous, yet iron, thread between the crimes. But is even his genius enough?