Watched for the first time in theaters!

I was so excited about the possibility of a new HD transfer. Or revised subtitles. No. This had the same VCD-level video and subtitle quality I’d seen before, streatched across the full silver screen.

That still couldn’t spoil seeing one of my favorite movies in a crowd of people seemingly seeing it for the first time.

Seeing light fare with an enthusiastic crowd is frequently preferable to home viewing. When one of the turtles shouts “Dudes and dudeettes, major league buttkicking is back in town!”, multiple audience members stood and whooped. I was among the ones shouting out line.

I’d never seen this before, but I’ve known this line for about 20 years, as the opening seconds to DC hardcore band Affront’s album People Who Live In Glass Houses. There are several such samples of dialogue lodged in my brain from late 90s and early 00s songs, that when I finally encounter the source material I feel the arrow of time loop back and strike itself in the nock.

On a prior rewatch, I appreciated the deteriorating TV images, and the tension of things going wrong, but for uncertain causes. This time after seeing Threads, an unfair comparison, I long for a version that stews in that uncertain and fearful limbo for longer.

Still unnervingly dreamy on rewatch five years later.

I’d forgotten how much of the film takes place after the disappearance. It’s those moments and images that linger in the mind once the screen fades, but the film makes us sit with their loss for so much longer before releasing us.

Given the time handed over to action, I would have appreciated more action. And it’s also hard to get excited about a shitty copy who flouts the rules.

What was remarkable was the extent to which they allowed Jimmy Wang Yu to be sexually desirable and sleep with two white women. The script even winks about it, when one of them asks if he’s even sleptwith a white woman, and he says “only Tuesdays and Thursdays”.

The tension constantly ratchets up, with each new scene of a slight decay in peace and order in Sheffield. 40 minutes in, anxious and sweaty palmed, I reached for my phone and it squirted out from my grasp, shattering the screen. This unfortunately took my out of the moment, and it took a fair amount of time to once again fall under Threads’s spell.

What makes the first half so effective is that we’re absorbing so much of the war narrative through background diagetic broadcasts, which in at least one case get interrupted because it’s too much of a bummer for the characters!

There’s a “leopards eating people’s faces” angle to this that I like. A village that survives on the vehicular murder and pillage of strangers empowers an especially violent subset that ultimately destroys that same society and their veneer of alleged civility.