omercifulheaves:

talesfromweirdland:

The Mad Max inspired video for the 1984 Duran Duran song, “The Wild Boys”—it was an elaborate torture device really. The band members are tied up, caged, dunked in water, exposed to weird images. It all scared me a little when I was a kid. The stuff came with no context, no explanation; as if somewhere, in a dark underground world, this was business as usual.

Little Bit of Trivia: The Wild Boys video was basically a dry run for a feature adaptation of the William Burroughs novel of the same name that Russell Mulcahy had wanted to do but was never able to get off the ground.

poisonedsequin:

off-white spring 2023 rtw

eyeodyssey:

Photos from the elusive early-80s Tokyo Grand Guignol play Mercury, also known as Mercuro and Merbro. While the Tokyo Grand Guignol are more well known for their subsequent work in the original 1985 version of Lychee Light Club, Mercury was an ambitious debut effort that was as much Tetsuo: The Iron Man and Alien as it was Ranpo. In the two-act narrative, an unstable school teacher runs a health program where students volunteer to have their blood replaced with the outdated medicinal substance Merbromin. The Merbromin substance turns the students into sentient machines, with their organs being made “valuable” in how the doses of mercury turns their innards metallic. In the midst of all this, a mysterious transfer student infiltrates the school grounds to uncover the whereabouts of his missing sister. Plots ultimately intertwine, resulting in a nightmarish Oedipal bloodbath in a macabre science lab that’s riddled with many taboo secrets. The play contains several infamous special effects standouts. One of the centerpieces was an extended sequence at the beginning of the second act where the schoolmaster (performed by the now mainstream actor Kyusaku Shimada, originally working under the pseudonym Lovecraft Shimada) carries out a live vivisection on a student to surgically extract his pubescent urges, which had manifested as a chestburster. The screenplay is decorated with intricate surrealist details with characters speaking direct quotations from dadaist poets of the early Showa period, resulting in an experience that is as much nocturnal poetry as it is taboo horror.

The play only had one run in 1984, with a heavily truncated TV performance being done a year later on the “Youth Performance Special” morning Nippon TV program where the set pieces from the openings of the first act and second act are strung side-by-side. While a full video recording is known to exist of the play on both DVD and VHS, the recording has never surfaced. It’s a damn shame.

The only available bits of media in relation to the play to this day are the screenplay, a handful of grayscale photos and some parts of the soundtrack. The known songs that were featured in Mercury include:
1. Four Enclosed Walls - Public Image LTD
2. Sons Of Pioneers - Japan
3. The title theme of the 1956 film “Des gens sans importance”
4. Brilliant Trees - David Sylvian

Bits of media relating to Mercury’s short 1984 run are steadily being resurfaced every day. Two of the images in this post were digitized by yours truly. The source was the 28th volume of Yaso magazine, a volume that concerned underground theater which included and interview with Norimizu Ameya, the lead director of the Tokyo Grand Guignol.

backfromrlyeh:

Dragon’s Heaven (1988)

abobobo:

“Illustrations made for the arcade version of Moonwalker and published in the 50th issue of Gamest. The art style reminds me a lot of Taku Makino’s (who animated some of the game’s characters).”

(VGDensetsu)

omercifulheaves:

Frank Miller homage in Battle Angel Alita