vic angels

i dont know how to rate this thing. the father of a genre focused on scrappiness (or at least the one who popularised it and inspired a great many of its entries). feels so impossibly big and yet so small and rough around the edges at the same time. so flawed and so stupid and yet so charming and human???? i dont know, i had a lovely time. laughed at its expense quite a lot but it still warmed me. important history. has some real eye candy too, lot of homoerotic undertones. whatd they mean by this? really weird messaging that i dont fully agree with, but theres so much life to see in this that i cant focus on the grime. idk, conflicted

when you know robocop just from it's name and a few odd references throughout pop culture, there's this really awful moment when you're watching it and you realise its good. and its not just, like, camp good. its genuinely just a wonderful time. the writing is so sharp and the presentation so fantastic that it kind of feels like its every genre. i like that it not only shows how terrifying it is to be in a room with robocop, but how terrifying it is to be robocop. i like how every tv segment spliced into the movie shows just how fucked the world is. i love the gore and the stop motion and the wonderful design. some absolutely wonderful performances in here. i dont think it goes as far as i want it to, but i was in shock for so much of this viewing. WOW. so much fantastic satire just used as throwaway or background details. fuck, i love robots. fuck, capitalism is miserable.

i took a really long time to log this, i think life just kept getting in the way and also procrastination is my greatest vice. very effective horror, obvious love for the genre in here. i didnt care for bears actor, he felt a bit too much like a guy doing a skit on tiktok or something than an actual movie actor, but when the rest of the cast came in i cared less. nikkis performance is fantastic. a lot of the editing conventions is still very youtube-ish which im not the most fond of on the big screen, but its not annoying enough to make you overlook the quality of the rest of it. interested to see future stuff from these guys.

watching this in preparation for WERWULF (which is everything ive ever wanted). did i like the robert eggers viking presented-as-revenge-quest-but-something-more movie full of animal comparisons? of course i did. who do you think i am??? i will say, i dont really care for the sequences with blatant digital environments (like the bloodline sequences), i dont think it fully fits with the style of the film. i also thought a few flashbacks were kind of silly considering it feels like it just happened, but i understand what was being communicated and this isnt that big of a deal. especially because everything else about this movie is so fucking good to me. its cool. its so metal. its fantastic and awe-inducing and sometimes outright terrifying all without becoming more white supremacist bait. it never glorifies the viking. its filthy, and bloody, and violent, and cruel, but it never truly calls them savages either. they love, they sing, they dance. theres these constant beautiful costumes and lovingly crafted environments and props and these long, painterly drags across the environment. it reflects the protagonist, really, and the fact that under all his rage there is love, but he wont face it, and its never enough. (i also like the... everything behind the protagonist being called puppy.) i love how the surrealist mindfuck scenes serve to both ground and justify the mysticism at the same time. you can make entirely plausible real-world excuses for whats happening while simulatenously understanding that this is, truly, what he believes, and why he believes it in the first place. what a dirty, beautiful movie. i wish we got a little more from olga, i found her and his mother were as fantastically multidimensional as the rest of the cast and his mother especially just as grimy as he and his uncle and everyone else was, but olga just always felt kind of half-known. fantastic beyond this. will sit with me for a while. i always love it when a script is so good it jacks me off.