At the end of time and space are phat beats: Blood Machines movie review

[Karlston]

At the end of time and space are phat beats: Blood Machines movie review

Makers of “Turbo Killer” music video bring gonzo synthwave sci-fi to Shudder.

Enlarge / The future of AI is a mannequin's nightmare.

Seth Ickerman + Carpenter Brut

Two spacemen in the distant future get more than they bargained for while chasing a rogue AI to a far-off planet in Blood Machines, which debuts tomorrow on the Shudder streaming service.

 

The movie is a collaboration between synthwave musician Carpenter Brut and French directors Raphaël Hernandez and Savitri Joly-Gonfard (who work together under the pseudonym "Seth Ickerman"). Carpenter Brut and Seth Ickerman had joined forces before on the music video for Brut's 2016 song "Turbo Killer," which can be best described as two competing ritual sacrifices involving bad men and captive hotties. In the video, one ritual ritualizes in a delightfully artificial graveyard while the other does its thing aboard—get ready—a spaceship shaped like an inverted crucifix.

 

Cool. Car chases ensue, synthesizers blare, and everything is awash in the kind of threatening neon that befits an '80s homage.

Music video for Carpenter Brut's 2016 song "Turbo Killer."

 

Uh, what’s a synthwave?

 

Having trouble keeping up with everything The Youths are into? I hear that. Synthwave music asks the question, "What if the '80s were as cool as you remember them being and not the hot garbage they actually were?"

 

Countless hours of synthwave have been uploaded to YouTube playlists with names like "Love in the Time of Synths." Bands like Lazerhawk, PowerGlove, and Miami Nights 1984 build ornate towers of melancholy synthesizers, lovesick robots, and Velveeta. The fan-made videos that go with them often wallow in Reagan-era pop-culture detritus, including grainy loops of 8-bit Testarossas crossing Tron landscapes toward neon skylines they will never reach. Everything has the patina of an old VHS tape, and cuts from the soundtrack to Drive exhort us to make nightcalls and wear sweet, sweet scorpion jackets.

 

Even bigger names that are either synthwave or synthwave adjacent incorporate some of those same visual elements, evidenced by Kavinsky's Testarossa-powered videos and the neon sunset of The Weeknd's "I Feel It Coming.

 

The filmmakers attempt to bring the same gonzo energy to their 50-minute followup, Blood Machines, and for the most part they succeed. Sure, some of the dialogue bits can be clunky, and what can be enjoyed as "archetypal" at four minutes sometimes just becomes "unsubtle" when stretched too long. But these leaks don't sink the ship.

 

The filmmakers describe Blood Machines as a sequel to "Turbo Killer," which makes about as much sense as anything else in "Turbo Killer." After the music video's success, Ickerman (the Ickermen?) raised €117,539 through Kickstarter, which Google says is currently $128,284.42. Now is when I remind you that Avengers: Endgame cost $356 million dollars, or roughly 3,000 times as much.

 

For that princely sum, Brut and the Ickermen get an interplanetary space-chase of bone-crunching sound effects and sexy-gross spaceships. Our two spacemen (Anders Heinrichsen and Christian Erickson) follow a rogue, AI-powered spaceship to the surface of a desolate world. While trying to destroy or recover the rogue ship (Blood Machines is either vague or I don't pay attention real good), they cross paths with a band of scavenger-witches, leading them on a pursuit of cosmic proportions.

 

Themes and imagery return from "Turbo Killer," but the palette has become engorged. The setting is entirely extraterrestrial; the spacemen's AI computer looks like a golden fertility statue that Indiana Jones has no chance of carrying; an angular spacewarp leads to a psychedelic nebula; and the cavernous interiors call to mind a neon-lit Notre Dame. Blood Machines does not lack for ambition.

 

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Wait... did you say it’s 50 minutes long?

Fifty minutes is an odd runtime for a modern film. It's hard to work up the energy to drive to the movies when you know an hour later you'll be back home with your miserable thoughts again. Conversely, 50 minutes is a huge ask if you're at a short-film festival. You could watch somewhere between five and 10 movies in the same time. And think of how snooty you could be to your film-snob bros who squandered that hour at just one screening. "Lame!" you'd exhort. "Lame!"

 

fx

 

Are the special effects in Blood Machines convincing? What does that even mean? I know those spaceships aren't real, so how could they possibly be convincing? If the point of FX is to just duplicate reality and that doesn't work out, what do you have left? No, the FX in Blood Machines are good because its spaceships end up somewhere between insects and HR Giger's bondage monsters, with Gothic architecture thrown in. Cubism and Impressionism aren't photorealistic, so why should the model city in King Kong or the phony crowds in Citizen Kane be? Have you watched The Mummy with Brendan Fraser recently? Its pharaonic Egypt is utterly unconvincing and all the more charming for it.

 

But with so many of us stuck at home, maybe now is the perfect time for Blood Machines to debut on Shudder. Here's the scene: you're pinned to the sofa under a snoring housecat. A combination of spilled Dr Pepper Ten and Doritos dust has welded your hand to the TV remote, but you don't have the mental energy to start a two-hour feature. Maybe you should start another episode of whatever binge-able cable series was cooked up in a lab to hook your brain chemicals. But you decide against it—the show is starting to make your frontal lobe feel as punished as your liver. Now's the ideal time for a 50-minute one-and-done.

Glorified music video

Do people still use "glorified music video" as a way to criticize a movie? That's a stupid thing to say. The Crow is a glorified music video, and it's the raddest thing ever.

 

The best parts of Blood Machines are the music-video parts: the synths, the chases, the inexplicable imagery. You know, the general WTF-edness. The non-music parts are the weakest. Clunky dialogue simultaneously explains too much while not explaining enough, and the initial standoff between the spacemen and the cryptic machine-defenders goes on too long for the allegory Blood Machines clearly is. Fairy tales move quick—there's no break in the Three Little Pigs to wonder, "The pigs have created an infrastructure that allows for the creation of bricks, and they can talk?"

 

One of the great things about silent horror films like Nosferatu and The Fall of the House of Usher is that the characters can't weasel out of their problems by talking. Once the nightmare begins, conversation goes the way of the dodo. That tradition persisted, to varying degrees, in the badly dubbed European horror films of the postwar era. Think of Euro-cheap trashterpieces like Suspiria or even Night of the Demons in which minimalist spurts of English-language dialogue are portioned out sparingly among actors who probably learned two or three English words phonetically just before a director yelled "Action!" in Italian. Blood Machines could have benefitted from that.

Story or resume?

To quote my colleague Nathan Matisse, short(-ish) films are often made by filmmakers who are early in their careers to "act as proof-of-concepts, [and] they play at festivals because people who might be able to collaborate on or finance a larger project tend to attend." The goal, he adds, "might be a future deal more than audience distribution." In other words, the goal of many short films is both to tell an original idea but also to prove to the Men in Suits Who Have All the Money that you know where to put a camera, when to cut a scene, and how to come in under budget. (Watch the terrific behind-the-scenes video that accompanies "Turbo Killer" to see just how small an operation the Ickermen were running. And you get to see a gasmask-wearing space demon check his smartphone between takes.)

 

So is Blood Machines 50 minutes long because it needs to be 50 minutes, or because the Ickermen had 50 minutes of special effects they wanted to show off to get funding for their next, even bigger project? Is it the Ickermen's way of telling the The Suits, "Look at all we did for 124 grand! Imagine what we could do with twice that much!" Maaaaaybe.

 

But when The Suits see it, I hope they throw fistfuls of cash at the Ickermen and everyone celebrates with a few lines of coke, which I understand is the primary love language of Men in Suits. I am eager to see what the Ickermen do with their in-development first feature film, which is titled—I poop you not—Ickerman.

 

The hubris! I can't wait.

Trailer for the film Blood Machines.

 

Source: At the end of time and space are phat beats: Blood Machines movie review (Ars Technica)  

 

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