• DECODER (1984) directed by Muscha & starring: FM Einhert a.k.a. Mufti (Einstürzende Neubauten), Bill Rice (The Offenders (1980), The Big Blue (1988), Manhattan Love Suicides 1985, Coffee&Cigarettes), Christiane F., Genesis P-Orridge (Throbbing Gristle, Psychic-TV) and featuring William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch, Junkie, Queer, Drugstore Cowboy, Dead City Radio) whose writing was an inspiration for the film.
  * The film featured this month is very avant-garde, subversive and punk-af. It is not meant for children under the age of 18 years of age and contains images of nudity, drug use, chaos magick, surgical footage, sexual situations and ideas of delinquency and anti-authoritarian themes.
  Language: German with Spanish subtitles.
  
  

In 1970 the collection of essays by Beatnik and Underground art icon William Burrough was published. In it Burroughs meditates on the written word and its evolution into the spoken. That language is something unique to the Human experience as it can exist both in image and sound. That the written language can enable the writer to cheat time and space and project thoughts, ideas, emotions, through time and affect readers in the future. Language regardless if it’s written on a medium or spoken has power; it is magick; no different from the sigils in a magician’s grimoire or the crystal ball, energized and imbued with power. How with the write configuration of words, images, sounds and their meaning can influence, control, infect and gestate inside the psyche very much like a virus.  

Decoder is a 1984 West German cyberpunk film that you’ve probably never heard of. I was fortunate to find it one late night while in one of my insomnia periods.

The story follows FM as he works for a fast food chain to make ends meet but, spends his evenings making compositions of abrasive industrial music. When FM starts noticing how passive and docile the customers at his Burger joint are when the Muzak playlist is cycling over the speakers. He figures that perhaps there might be something in the Muzak that’s making people compliant. That it’s the muzak that’s lulling people into submission in a world where visceral reality is almost a cheap thrill (a kink), something you tuck under your mattress when the relatives come home; a world where we just accept subjugation into an authoritarian corpo system where fascism bridges the gap between military and corporate corruption. FM also spends his free time with his girlfriend (Christiane) a peep show girl that works in the red-light district.

One night while working on music, FM starts to manipulate one of Christiane’s frogs and records the screams. FM realizes that he can use abrasive sound to instigate destructive impulses in people that listen to his music and cancel out the corporate muzak. He strategically places tape recorders, like sonic I.E.D.’s, at different well-known fast food establishments armed with his music. These subversive recordings cause riots, destruction of property, violence and social upheaval. After sometime these terrorist incidents earn the attention of the corporate overlords who hire an assassin (Bill Rice) to find who is creating these tapes and execute him. Bill Rice’s character a weary hitman more preoccupied with haunting the red light district and infatuated with a peep show girl who just happens to be FM’s girlfriend.

DECODER is low-budget, analog, cyberpunk with a Cold War edge to it. Lush lighting and a noir dread drip heavily here. The soundtrack features SoftCell, Psychic-TV, THE THE and Einstürzende Neubauten. The basic plot of the film is summarized here in this review so all you have to do is follow the visuals and vibe. Not suitable viewing for anyone under-the-age of 18.

Stay dangerous, stay underground, stay out of sight, stay away from bootlickers, magahats, democrats and anyone that tows the company line, puts blinders on, shuts up and takes it right up in there deeply (and without even a kiss or dinner to eat), drinking the government kool-aid. Stay aware, stay armed and get angry and keep your G*ddamn finger on the REWIND button.

Movie:

https://youtu.be/vdCXssmZLdw?si=PDidB4yL53XRVpXv

Bonus: Soft Cell – Seedy Films (Official Video Release HD)

Fishscale/V/: New.Entry-Transmission.Whatever.Wetnightmares.
Screamscapes.and.corporal.malfunctions//The movie theater has gone dim. The Kodak camera has lost its reel. The Mall is shuttered. The video store is closed. The soundtrack plays on the tape deck, scrambled. The Pyrex takes a nap for the evening. The national anthem plays after dusk behind a scrambled pornographic transmission. The ICE is out tonight and the night is on fire. The sky looks like a dead screen. No stars in the sky. No whistling wind. No connection. No firmware in a pushup brazier to tune into the right nocturnal frequency. Just dead space and a static filter, not even the air could be trusted with authenticity. Media never sleeps. The television stays on. It’s always on and watching us, omnipresent and instigating, a rabble rouser and a shit talker galvanizing the masses into herds and stampedes at the press of a button. A planned reaction to the insurgency of law. What have I walked into? They say revolution is out in the streets but, it’s all a mixer, a munch, a social fellatio, what have I walked into, a gaggle of geeks, gooners, meat pacifiers and skin socks – repeating what the TV eye and the cardboard says. All in step and out of order. For sincere reasons and free will – although dictated in silent vibration from the overseers Morse code. Engineered resistance to a problem that will be solved and locked down with dystopia and monitored by A.I. screws. Then. Here come the star fuckers and the vampires the celebrities and leeches. Lead by the pimps. The publicists. Celebrity cameo appearances in the back rows of protest. Kissing babies. Shakin’ hands. Only there for the photo-op and never joining rank at the frontline. Pretenders; actors; slaves to corporate rations and privilege; no gunplay, no backbone, just a game in the end. A hologram of a leg-wit-ammo, a box of blanks, rambling his gums into the void for a star on the avenue. Not here. It’s just another dead night and about this same dead time every night. They reenact and replay the same playlist and cosplay their childhood dreams. A boulevard of vapid dreamers, chipping away at the surfaces and hurling the city like feces at pigs, drones, naysayers and the npc. Nothing more but performance art against the machine. Showroom Dancers. With color commentary by your favorite content creators; jesters and critics feeding off the algorithm. Crossing their palms with silver traded in from your attention and likes; bunch of Svengalis and pied pipers in the new preachers clothes not like them but living a karaoke life in sheeple skin. A generation nursed on instant gratification through an umbilical usb cord detached from the contaminated coarse weather of reality and living one TikTok moment after another in some perverse REM sleepwalk. All copyrighted and sponsored by your elitist fascist overlords full-throttling their plans into a doomsday reset scenario and the birth of the new religion. Sponsored by oligarchs. You are all sleeping. Make it a better dreaming. Get into your phalanx formations. Red Dawn. Bravehearts. Look to your brother-in-arms. And behold leading the ranks. Not random protagonists. Imagine, just imagine under those hoods in the front. A fantasy.  – unveiled is the avengers or at least those that play them. Imagine yourselves rejuvenated with angst and righteous rage as those performers now possessed by the spirits of the IP that propelled their public image holding the line. As Christ Evans with trash lid in one hand and the stars & stripes in the other raised high; RDJrD2 in his aluminum foil iron armor inspiring courage in you. As descending from the rooftops with karambit gloves and fury in his teeth screaming to the heavens that “this is our ENDGAME!” is Hugh Jackalman too. Tears in your eyes and love swelling up in your frail chest and throats, “They’re here!” “The Avengers are here”. ”This is it!” A moment of our lifetimes when all men can lock shields and crush the oppressors under the tidal wave of change. freedom. and a better tomorrow. Something Aragonidus would say. What a dream that could be, Teen Wolves. Fleeting. Transitioning. Remixing. Getting carried away on a channel surf. The sequence again scrambled. The channel switched on everyone. All because the common man has lost his remote control. It’s been in the hand of the bad men this whole time. The bloody bag men. The usurpers. The adversary. The ones who remake, mutilate and remaster our memories and script our futures. The sky is a dead screen. The stars are blacked out. It’s just us in here and the movie rolls on. The show goes on. The empire strikes back. As everyone plays Sophie’s Choice every week on which Hot Topic to rally behind next. From the killing fields to local inconvenience. These aren’t freedom fighters this is the mob. And Rome knows its mob. How to fatten them up and keep them occupied with spectacle and gossip. The enemy knows the system. And the only responsible response is too crash the system. Crash N’ Burn. Hack the dream and make it yours.
Then. Then, I woke up. And the theaters were screening, the video store was open, the soundtrack restarted and the sky was in high resolution. What a beautiful sunset. The TV dinner smells amazing. That’s when I woke up. And forgot what I was dreaming about. //////….then WW3 began.
SamHaiNe

• Bonus: Chinatown (visual video) HaiNesVille:

Dominion has been adapted into three original video animation series: the first, Dominion Tank Police, was released in 1988, the second, New Dominion Tank Police (特捜戦車隊ドミニオン, Tokusō Sensha Tai Dominion) in 1993, and the third, Tank Police Team TANK S.W.A.T. 01 (警察戦車隊ＴＡＮＫＳ．Ｗ．Ａ．Ｔ．０１, Keisatsu Sensha Tai TANK S.W.A.T. 01) in 2006. The 1988 OVA is four episodes long and animated by Agent 21, the 1993 OVA is six episodes long and animated by J.C.Staff, while TANK S.W.A.T. is one episode long and was animated by DOGA Productions. The manga was published by Hakusensha, Kodansha and later by Seishinsha. It has been published in English by Dark Horse Comics. The anime has been released in English translation in the United Kingdom and Australia by Manga Entertainment and in the United States by Central Park Media, under their U.S. Manga Corps division.

Cyberpunk from the land of the rising sun. Masamune Shirow’s precursor to his magnum opus Ghost in the Shell. Tank Police is retro-futuristic camp, as cheesy as you would imagine a love child of the Kerberos Panzer Cops and the Police Academy films.

First aired in the States on the Sci-fi Channel in it’s first years during Saturday Anime in the 90’s.
Get connected. Enjoy the ride and tune into a channel under a dead sky and get jacked into my nostalgic drip.

Stay off the drugs, stay strapped, stay dangerous, don’t forget your burner, wetware and ballistic hardware and always keep your finger on the REWIND button.

-HaiNe

The Crucifix ‘Psychopunk 2165’ is out now on Bandcamp and Spotify.

Favorite tracks : Night Owls (feat. Tima), Wavelengths, 5 AM

Lucy in Disguise ‘Distorted Memories’ is out now via Bandcamp.

Favorite tracks: Lupex Alpha, All Out

Mitch Murder ‘City Wars : Tokyo Reign (Original Soundtrack) is out now via Bandcamp.

Terrabot by Waveshaper

Waveshaper ‘Terrabot’ is out now via Bandcamp

In true DD fashion, the new songs eschew the gimmicks of cyberpunk-themed darksynth, aiming for pristine production value and tracks that build and maintain an exhilarating amount of momentum all throughout the EP. Daniel Deluxe makes the distinction between action and brutish violence, striking a tasteful middle ground that sets his songwriting apart from other darksynth composers.

Ghostrunner Project HEL by Daniel Deluxe

Daniel Deluxe’s Ghostrunner Project HEL soundtrack is out now on Bandcamp and Spotify

Before getting into the current EP which you’re about to release. I’d like to go back to the start of your career as a solo artist. Where were your musical goals and ambitions at as you moved on from Yellowcard to a solo career?

When Yellowcard first split up, I had been making plans. My original plan was to produce records for other artists, but I learned pretty quickly that it wasn’t necessarily where my heart was at, creatively. If I was going to put in hours and hours of hustling to create a new path for myself, that just wasn’t the way I wanted to go; going to shows five nights a week, doing the sales pitch to bands to get them to come in and work with you… It didn’t feel very fulfilling to me and everything just led me back to making my own music.

It really kickstarted when my buds in New Found Glory offered me a full US tour with them, as an opener and rhythm guitarist. They didn’t really specify what “opening” meant. They probably assumed I’d bring an acoustic guitar and play some Yellowcard songs and I did play some, but it was also a catalyst for me to think about having a record to sell at the merch booth. That’s what led me to record the first EP Thirteen. It was sort of a double-edged sword because I wanted something to have on the tour, but I also wanted to make something so far removed from Yellowcard and anything I’d done before that I knew the hard pop-punk fans on the tour were going to be weirded out. I could’ve leaned harder in the sounds of the past, but I decided to stick with what I thought was right. It was an EP of very stripped down, ambient acoustic tracks. It was hit-or-miss on the New Found Glory tour, for sure [laugh]. There were some nights that were really cool and some nights where I couldn’t hear myself playing because everyone was talking over what I was doing and totally uninterested. I was mentally prepared for that, though.

I started getting some more opportunities to tour, which led me to record a second EP, Virtue. That record took me all over the world and I got to open for Mayday Parade on a full US tour. I also did one solo headlining tour. At the end of all of it, I had to take stock of how much work I was doing to stay on the road and be touring full time versus the return and growth that was happening with it. The pandemic hit around the same time, forcing me off the road. During that time, I really honed in and focused on what I wanted to do, where I want to go.

I really have a desire to move into scoring for film and television, and you can hear the cinematic elements on Everything Except Desire because it’s the first time I didn’t have to consider touring. I was able to cut loose and let all of my influences, which have been primarily electronic, experimental, EDM… It’s been that way for many years, much more than rock n’ roll. I was able to experiment and not worry about how it would tour. Maybe I will play some shows with it, but what it has really done for me is get the ball rolling with a few tracks. I’m constantly creating now. I’m in my studio every day, practising scoring, creating ambient pieces and doing as much as I can to build a collection of songs to show to people and get closer to the goal of scoring film and TV. I think the sound of the EP was very much done with that in mind. I tried to think in a cinematic sense. It’s very movement-driven and I wanted it to feel like the EP had “scenes” that were developing and changing. Being forced into staying at home and working on these tracks really opened a floodgate for me and I’m in a totally new place, musically. I really enjoy what I’m doing and what I’m working towards.

How would you describe this EP if you were to translate it into visual form?

As electronic music does, the whole thing has a certain “pulse” to it. A good example of seeing it visualized is the music video for ‘Face in a Frame’, directed by Stefano Bertelli (Seenfilm : www.seenfilm.com ). The way he used light flares and flashes is one good way to describe it. It’s got pulsing flourishes of light. I tried to make it very colourful with the sounds that I was choosing and the layers that I was adding. I’ve had a lot of experience in the last few years working in the space of electronic music. My close friend Ryan Mendez from Yellowcard and I have been working on a project called JEDHA, which is strictly instrumental experimental EDM. I’ve had a lot of experience working with him building these big, lush soundscapes. This was the opportunity for me to translate a lot of that experience into my solo stuff. My favourite song on the record is the last song ‘Union Chapel’, and one of my favourite moments on the record is when the bass and kick hit at the end of the song to take you out after you had been lost in the trance of the piano arpeggio. It may be a cliché visual, but it does feel like this warm blanket that comes over you at the end of the EP, to cruise you out at the end of your journey.

Back in 2014, you released the album Lift A Sail, which marked quite a departure from Yellowcard’s established sound through its inclusion of electronic elements. Looking back, how did that experience affect your approach to writing electronic music?

That is my favourite Yellowcard record, contrary to popular opinion [laugh]. It’s a very personal record for me and it was a time when my musical palette was shifting so dramatically away from Rock n’ Roll and into Post Rock and ambient EDM. Ryan Mendez has had such a cool, broad palette of musical influences from a very young age. He’s into original Aphex Twin and old Daft Punk. I, on the other hand, grew up fully as a rock n’ roll fan that I had a stigma connected to electronic music, like many people I’ve talked to still have. It still exists. There’s still an idea that it’s not made with ‘real instruments’, and I was that way for a long time too.

Around the time of Viva La Vida, Coldplay started working with Jon Hopkins, and Ryan Mendez is a huge, longtime fan of him. Around that time, Ryan helped me connect the dots from Coldplay to Jon Hopkins by giving me a copy of Immunity. I had never heard and seen a piece of music like the title track on that Jon Hopkins. It just changed my whole perception of electronic composition. It changed everything for me. I started asking for more recommendations went down the rabbit hole of playlists and recommended artists. That all led to Lift a Sail. I was so inspired by these influences but we still had to make a rock record.

Ryan being the more knowledgeable person in the world of electronic music, we tasked each other with him writing the nastiest riffs for the intros and choruses whereas I was in ‘Studio B’ pressing buttons. I was building loops, experimenting with sub-bass and all kinds of stuff I had never done to use for the less intense sections of the songs on the album. I played almost no guitar on that album. I spent most of that record writing lyrics and producing my first ever loop and beats. We ended up with this interesting hybrid record that no one really understood [laugh], but we loved it and I still love it! It was the first record that felt like I was genuinely standing on my own two feet as a writer, as opposed to writing within a genre. I don’t want to minimize or say that the records don’t have value, it’s just that there was this undeniable shift that happened with Lift a Sail. When Yellowcard broke up, Ryan and I immediately decided to make electronic music together. Four years later, we’ve just finished a full-length record, we’re doing a remix for a big band and we’ve been hired to score the first season of a new show for a massive brand. It’s starting to happen for us! It’s funny that you mention Lift a Sail, I appreciate it because that is where it started for me, from a writing and production standpoint.

The first thing that struck me on the album, compositionally, is the heavy emphasis on ambience and space. Vocals are sparse, the arrangements feel quite stripped down and you really give each idea the breathing space it needs.

I owe a lot of what you’re picking up on to the artists that I listen to. I’ve been on a crash course of learning how to make great music through their albums and learning how to create that sense of space. Part of what you’re sensing comes from two things. First, there’s the way the EP was composed in the middle of that summer during the pandemic and I was by myself in the studio, very focused on this specific batch of songs. The songs do feel like they grew up from the same roots. Secondly, there’s the cinematic element of it that I’ve been learning as I’ve worked towards this goal. I pay attention to what showrunners, music directors and editors are looking for. While this wasn’t something that I was writing for a show or a film, I was conscious of how hand in hand this type of ambient electronic music goes with visuals. I wanted to make sure that each song would rise to these places and take moments to breathe because when an editor is looking at a waveform, they’ll just delete the message if the waveform doesn’t look right.

You’ve lived in quite a lot of different places. You’ve been moving around!

Too much! I even lived in Osaka for about two months when I was producing a record in 2019. I left home when I was 19 for the first time to go to California with a band I was playing in. I went home, ended up playing in Yellowcard, moved back to California for a couple of years before going to Manhattan for a year. I moved back to California again… My family is on the east coast and my job was on the west coast, so I struggled throughout my life to find where I’m going to settle. And here I am moving again!

As an album that has such a strong sense of space, would it be fair to say that location  physically affects the places you end up emotionally and how you express them?

Being so nomadic has always inspired my music. It’s helped me as a creator to have new experiences in new places, meeting new people, new people, new bars … it’s always helped me not get stuck in rut as a writer. When my environment is constantly changing it helps my music change as well. I think it’s particularly true for this EP because it was made during such an unsettling time. I was feeling very unsure because I would normally try to do is knock out one or two tours a year, which provides me with the opportunity to be home working on scoring and composing, which isn’t paying me yet. I’m just making stuff right now and hoping that someday it will go somewhere. When the lockdown happened, I was in California and had no place to go and I was freaking out, so I moved back to Florida for a bit. As a result, this EP has so much exploration of self in it. There’s not much storytelling, it’s really about self-reflection. I had to make a choice when I got to Florida to wallow in this stress, anxiety, sadness and fear, or turn it into something good. At the beginning of the pandemic and before leaving for Florida, a lifelong friend of mine got stuck at my house with me in California for a whole month. He’s very active and expresses to everyone he knows how important meditation is in his life, so I started doing it with him. It was the key to my success through the pandemic. When I got to Florida, I was really bummed, I was excited to live in LA again and start to work towards film composing, and here I was back at square one. So meditation really helped me to let those thoughts pass through and not let them consume me and direct my path. This allowed me to compose with such a clear mind. Had I not gone through those moves and those shifts, I wouldn’t have had those dark thoughts to overcome which poured into this record. I think it’s always been a part of me as a songwriter. Maybe even more so now than ever.

Was it a particular challenge to distil your thoughts into so few words for this record or was it a natural byproduct of the songwriting process?

I think it fits into what we were talking about with JEDHA. We’ve learned so much about restraint and refining a loop or synth melody so much that it’s all that it needs to be, it doesn’t need to change later or have another layer added. Vocally, there was very much a sense that I didn’t need to add any more. There’s peace in this. ‘Face in a Frame’ is such a different style of writing for me; to have the same verse happen twice in a song. It felt right, like the things I was learning about composing this style of music bled over into the vocals, using them more as an instrument than a “storytelling element” in a song. I was pretty conscious of that, yeah.

You’ve stated before that you’ve been a fan of video games for a long time. Yellowcard’s music has even been featured in a number of videogames throughout the years and you’ve done a couple of gaming streams over Twitch. What are some of the games you grew up playing? Have you ever been into a game that happened to feature one of your songs?

As a lucky kid, I never wanted for anything. I wasn’t spoilt rotten, but I had a great life as a kid and I had a Nintendo. I’m an eighties kid and I was the prime age for the NES when it came out. That said, I was such an imaginative, theatrical, outdoors kind of kid that I didn’t play the Nintendo anywhere near as much as other kids around me. I loved it but it was never my instinct. I was more of a worldbuilding imaginative type of kid, acting out movies I liked and stuff. I wasn’t so much into Mario at all. I loved Kung-Fu, I loved Contra and I loved The Legend of Zelda. I didn’t get the SNES but I got a Sega Genesis and so I was obsessed with Sonic the Hedgehog. Then came the N64 with Ocarina of Time, the most iconic game of all time. I actually played it at a buddy’s house a month ago, along with Goldeneye! I still have memories of sitting on the floor with friends and playing 4-way split-screen Goldeneye. Those were the glory days! After that, I’ve been an Xbox player. We got free Xboxes. One of our songs was featured in SSX3, so they gave us consoles to be able to play it. That was when I got back into gaming after high school. The thing about gaming now is that I never got into competitive online gaming because I was on tour and we never had Internet. For a long time, we played video games all the time. We had consoles on the bus and that was a huge time passing activity. FIFA tournaments were bloodthirsty! It was so hardcore! With the pandemic, my social interaction throughout the lockdown was playing Call of Duty with other band friends. I was dragged into it because I thought I’d be terrible at it, but it became more about the hang, spending time with friends. In turn, I actually became addicted to it. I’m actually trying to ration what days of the week I let myself get on a game because I love it. I’m a PC gamer now and I think my favourite game now is Warzone. I also really got into F1 Racing. I want to get a racing rig in my new house if I can and be able to race with an ultrawide setup [laugh]. I love it! So I was a spotty, touch-and-go gamer throughout my life.

Closing off, can you name one of your favourite albums, movies and books?

I’ll go with the pandemic theme. First, Some Kind of Peace by Ólafur Arnalds has been a sanctuary for me. I still listen to it regularly. All of his work is incredible. He made the record during the pandemic and had to work with the string players at a distance and whatnot. You can really feel the solitude in the recordings.

For books, I’m actually reading Dune right now and I’m obsessed! It’s the fastest I’ve ever read a 600-page book in my life. If I’m thinking all-time favourites, I think I’d have to say The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I think I read that book on one cross-country flight. I’ve read it several times since.

For movies, I’m not allowed to say Star Wars. It can’t count. I’m going to go with what I think is one of the greatest feats of filmmaking in History. I’m much more of a film person than a book person. I think the greatest film is Schindler’s List. I just can’t think of a film that carries more weight and is more beautifully shot. It perfectly encompasses everything a film is supposed to do. It’s heartbreaking, it’s funny, it’s beautiful… the script is incredible and the score is unbelievable.

Everything Except Desire is out now on all streaming platforms.

Whereas 2021’s ‘Face in a Frame’ reeled us in with its blissful melancholic sounds, ‘Brighton’ keeps us immersed in a deeply intimate mood, where dreampunk-like soundscapes meet heartwrenching hooks. William Ryan Key seems to have embraced a neon-shaded aesthetic, melding synthpop sounds with a lo-fi ambient touch to create a truly distinct sound print of his own, and we can hardly wait to hear what the rest of the record has in store for us.

Everything Except Desire will be released on February 11^th, 2022.

What can be said about the new Matrix movie that hasn’t already been said about Peeling paint, toe nail clippings, dripping faucets and hiking in the dark? The film is a yawn fest; a series of unimpressive scenes and bad cinematography built on the wobbly foundations of some interesting, although poorly executed, ideas.

Yes. It is bad. Although not as catastrophically bad as Wonder Woman 84, the recent Mortal Kombat or Bill&Ted 3, It still is bad and another reason for Hollywood to stop with the nonsense of rebooting films that need no rebooting or making sequels to films that need no sequels. They need to slow their own role and suppress their hubris. It’s not a factor of what Lana was thinking that is at fault. It is the factor of Hollywood wanting this to be made. In the Matrix Resurrections there is a scene early on in the film where (spoilers) the new Smith is in a meeting with Thomas Anderson instructing him that Warner Bros is interested in making another Matrix project whether the creators are involved or not. Yes, this movie is meta. If this was taken from an actual event in our reality and Lana had intention of sabotaging the franchise to keep it out of corporate hands then, by all means, she has my respect as a creator. Some of the earliest cringe moments that happen at the beginning of the film happen during the writers room montages; again possibly Lana letting us know how desk geeks, white shirts and corporate where brainstorming in a think tank on how to revive the franchise. Soulless hacks with not a creative bones in their bodies throwing around ideas based on algorithms, market testing and what works for other franchises such as the monolithic MCU.

The Matrix ended with Revolutions.

Resurrections attempts to reintroduce all those emotions and connections you had with the original film. Grave robbing you of your nostalgia while gaslighting you to accept the nonsense that follows.

Neo is now back in the Matrix. Constantly having to be rebooted every time he resists the new version of the matrix’s programming. How did he survive? The machines brought him and Trinity back. Why? because somehow his source code was imprinted onto her and together through the power of love can only exist close to each other but not too close otherwise the union would be catastrophic. The reasoning behind this? After Revolutions – a large number of humanity unplugged from the original version of the program resulting in an energy shortage and Civil War among the machines; many machines now sympathetic to humanity after witnessing Neo’s sacrifice to save Zion and the Machines work to help humans under threat of death while others have reorganized to maintain the system and supress humanity; Neo and Trinity are essential and repurposed to sustain the new fascistic machine power, they are super batteries.

The film had some promise and interesting ideas for I’d say the first 1/3 of the film. Ideas wasted. Bugs is a new character that could’ve been better served if not drowning in all these new characters, remixes and tech mumbo-jumbo.

Can’t say much else. The fight scenes are boring. The editing is choppy. The camera is shaky. The pacing drags along like a dirty mop. Nothing feels at stake. The Oracle is gone. The Architect is gone. However, Smith is still there, Morpheus is a program that Neo subconsciously creates and some of the exiles including the Merovigian still exist. Why havent these programs just been deleted. Especially Smith after all the havoc he caused in the previous two films. I don’t know. And the Merovigian, smh, is now an exile program dressed like he fell out of Oscar the Grouch’s trashcan that only serves as a comedic throwback during a throwaway action set piece the contradicts the climax of the film. Wasted and embarrassing.

Let’s talk about the fact that this is an R rated movie but, it feels like a PG cash grab. There’s cute machines, little machines that fist bump and lots of humor. Yes, humor in a Matrix film. Remember that film trilogy about a dystopian future where Machines have exterminated half of humanity and are growing them in vats to serve as fuel; locking them into a computer simulation without their consent or knowledge while the surviving members live in exile underground with the constant danger of genocide at any moment? Yeah remember that movie? Well here is a sequel but, this time with jokes and stuff.

Long story short: If this was a self-sabotage by Lana Wachowski then I salute her. But, if not then she is part of the problem in Hollyweird.

My Conclusion is  – It’s bad. I can’t recommend anyone pay money to sit in theaters to see this. If you have to see it go home and watch it on HBO MAX or stream it illegally.

A big disappointment but, not the worse of the worst.

Be warned.

Keep it safe. Mask up. And always keep your finger on that REWIND button.

10. Occams Laser – Halls of the Damned

9. Starfarer – Highrider

8. Burial Grid – Caput Mortuum

7. Acryl Madness – Kill _Em All

6. Microchip terror – Circuitry of Doom

5. Hollywood burns – Abomination from Planet X

4. Perturbator – Death of the Soul

3. Sierra X Matteo Tura – Inner Speech

2. Abstract Void – Forward to the Past

1. Gost – Bound by the Horror