52 Pick-Up #44 – Robot Carnival (1987)

 Despite the title and framing of this movie, it's probably for the best it didn't give me an opening for a carny joke.

Cause I thought about it. I really did. It would likely not have been in good taste.

But, given what I got instead, I can afford to lose a tasteless carny joke or two.

Welcome back to 52 Pick-Up, my year long journey through a cinematic to do list. With October now in the rearview, and Belial shaking his puppeted fist in my direction, the home stretch is coming up fast.

It's been a weird, wild journey, and so far about the worst I've been able to say for anything is the occasionally underwhelming movie. Overall, I'm calling this a win and hoping I didn't just jinx myself right at the finish line.

In any case, this week is one I'm calling a win and another I'm surprised I put off this long – the 1987 anime anthology movie Robot Carnival.

As for the pitch? So, I'm gonna take a moment to say this movie is going to cause me to break what loose formatting this has. Just a little, but in a way I would argue is necessary given the anthology nature of this movie.

I'll start by saying the broadest pitch of this movie is a team of different directors and animators all came together for a movie of short stories all united by the singular theme of robots. These stories don't take place in a shared world, there are no recurring characters or callbacks. They were all given a fairly free hand, so long as they stuck to the theme of robots.

Given how varied this makes things, I contemplated how to approach this one in a way that properly gives every team their due.

With that in mind, I'm going to go through these story by story with a general impression.

And so...

-Opening/Ending

Pitch – The one story to feature the titular Robot Carnival – an automated entertainment apparatus bringing joy and destruction across the face of an alien world.

Impression – This story was my first introduction of this film years back while researching for a convention panel on the works of Katsuhiro Otomo. I got to it later in the run of his work and watched it independent of the rest of the movie. With that in mind, I could very quickly tell this was an Otomo short based on what I was seeing – in the two mini-segments, we get several of the writer/director's stylistic hallmarks. Incredibly detailed mechanical set designs, visually stunning set pieces that often culminate in equally stunning destruction of said set pieces, and a generous dash of gallows humor. In terms of the larger movie, does a great job for setting a tone and closing out with a cheeky note.

-Franken's Gears

Pitch – A mad scientist works to bring his creation to life.

Impression – I should take the moment now to say most of these stories are completely devoid of dialogue. The Opening/Ending is a partial, as characters speak, but it's in an alien language so we're left to get the impression from general behavior and tone rather than specifics.

I say this as Franken's Gears is one of the stories that is entirely free of dialogue. Which, honestly? Isn't a bad thing here, as this is one where dialogue might feel extraneous. This is one that justifies itself on pure atmosphere, presenting the doctor's workshop as a darkened, clutter-filled mix of Universal castle and anime-style technology. At the center of this atmosphere, the mad scientist is himself a perfect embodiment of mad genius, toiling as his weird, unwieldy creation in a rickety workshop with a zeal that drives the story. All leading up to a final beat that is darkly funny, but in keeping with the short's balancing act of dark tone and traces of humor.

-Deprive

Pitch – In the aftermath of an alien invasion, a robot sets off in search of their companion that was taken.

Impression – This was my 'oh God' moment where I realized some of my particular anime tastes were a little too keyed to this movie in that I wound up clocking the character designer (and director) of this short based on its similarity to character animation from another series. To be clear, he didn't design the cast of that other series, but he worked on character animation there, but the style was distinct enough it still carried over.

Having said that, this was a fun little action set-piece. It's not quite as memorable as some of the other shorts, but that's not really the fault of this segment. On its own, it's a brisk, engaging little action story that doesn't overstay its welcome and is a great reminder of what animators could put into an fight scene back in the heyday of the movie and OVA boom of Japan's late 80s.

-Presence

Pitch – In a somewhat futuristic world, a quiet man develops a strange attachment with a robotic girl he has been developing in secret.

Impression – So, I can't quite speak to how this landed in Japan at the time, but I can't pretend there wasn't a curious read to this watched in 2026. The unnamed protagonist introduces himself to us as the quiet husband to a high-powered executive wife. He says it doesn't bother him and he considers himself a feminist before we get the reveal of his side project. When the project is just something on his work bench he can tinker with, he is completely fine with it. Once the robot starts developing its own personality, well...you can start to see why this certainly lands a certain way in 2026.

Having said that, there was something about the way this presents the story that struck me. This doesn't really come across as romanticizing the man, nor does it go out of the way to make him overtly monstrous. The short does present the moment in question as him crossing a line, and from there it leads to a sense of guilt that haunts him for years after. The end result makes for an interesting balancing act where the man is neither redeemed nor completely despised.

I'm still not sure if I can say time has necessarily been kind to this or not, but it's technically quite stunning and the fact it doesn't fully seem to side with the protagonist does make it hold up a lot better than it could have otherwise.

Also, I do have to give a shout-out to this for one beat outside of the main story. There is a running joke involving a group of mischievous children and one unlucky robot character that got a chuckle out of me. One of those where it feels like it was an idea that didn't necessarily fit the story, but was probably also seen as too good not to include. In any case, I'm glad they kept it.

-Starlight Angel

The pitch – A chance encounter between a teenage girl and a young man in a robot costume at a futuristic theme park turns into a high-flying fantasia of romance and heroics.

Impression – This is probably the lightest of the stories in this collection. Like Deprive, that's honestly not a bad thing though. Part of the appeal of an anthology like this is getting to see the wide array of directions people take the premise. Also like Deprive, director Hiroyuki Kitazume has a good sense of balance in what he's doing here. The story lets you enjoy the fun, theme park trappings, but also knows to keep things moving without rushing too fast past anything.

This is actually probably the point where I should give a shout-out to the music in this movie, especially as Kitazume's piece has the look, feel, and narrative tone of a breezy, enjoyable music video already. Like the stories, the score across this varies in tones and styles in ways that help further capture each director's unique voice, and in that regard, it only feels right to give the proper credit to the work done by the two composers, Isaku Fujita and Joe Hisaishi (yes, of Studio Ghibli fame. You can even hear some of his particular stylistic beats you might recognize from Ghibli in some of these segments.)

-Cloud

The pitch – Follows a robot journeying through the history of life on the planet.

Impression - In a word, abstract. In more than one word, one of the most ambitious and beautiful segments of the movie. This was one where at first I wasn't entirely sure where this would go, as it introduces itself with a robot with a human face walking among clouds. It keeps this motif with the backgrounds changing, soon reflecting on a larger history passing by to which this robot remains unchanged.

There is a part of me that feels strange boiling this down to a quick text summary, because this is one where it feels like there is a danger in over explaining it. This is one where so much of it is just in the feelings it captures – how it evokes the passage of time, loneliness, and the baseline tragedy of the idea of immortality, just as a few ideas. I would recommend the whole movie, but this especially is one where I'd say it justifies watching it to see how it lands for you.

-Strange Tales of Meiji Machine Culture

The pitch – A gleefully anachronistic East Meets West tale of dueling technologies, pitting a western man and his steam-powered robot against a team of scrappy locals and their parade robot that step up to defend their town.

Impression – This is arguably the most fun of the stories here. Coming from Hiroyuki Kitakubo (probably also best known as the director of Roujin Z) this keeps with his sensibilities for comedic destruction that made him work so well with Otomo. Besides the chaos element, the cast of character Kitakubo and his team put together for this are also a lot of fun. Our heroes play out as a mix of archetypes that almost feels like a riff on a classic giant robot team, both in terms of personalities and how they operate their parade machine turned town defense robot. On the other side of the coin, the western invader is all bluster and bombast that plays in a similar vein to those rare Looney Tunes where they would let Wile E. Coyote talk, a cocky genius whose verbal preening just adds to the punchline when his plans backfire.

As you might have guessed from that, this is one of the two shorts in this to use actual dialogue. I bring it up in this case in part because this is one where I would say if you have the option to watch this in its original Japanese, I would recommend doing so in large part for this segment. One of the nice details they did with this involves the western man, whose dialogue is all in English with Japanese subtitles. This language gap is in the movie by design and even plays into some of the early encounters as his gleeful declarations of conquest and are ignored because no one understands what he's saying – all they know is he's trashing the town and that's grounds enough to stop him.

It's loud, silly, and a nice way to shake the audience back up after the thoughtful tone of Cloud without feeling atonal.

-Chicken Man and Red Neck

I'm gonna give you exactly ten seconds to get the giggles out about the name on this one, because in context, it is not at all what you think it is.

Aaaaaand done.

Pitch – One night in Tokyo sees a robotic sorcerer (the titular Red Neck) give life to all the machines of the city for a celebration. This goes unknown to most of the people of the city, save for one drunk who gets caught up in the revelries.

Impression – Two thoughts immediately came to me watching this.

First, I am not at all surprised to learn director Takashi Nakamura worked as an animator on Akira. The opening sequences of this as Red Neck summons machines to life, threading cables and piping through Tokyo like so many tentacles immediately gave flashes of some of the bigger set pieces from the back half of Otomo's classic.

Second, if Nakamura wasn't at least partially inspired by the Night On Bald Mountain segment from Fantasia, I would be genuinely stunned. I'm not saying this to be derisive or suggest he's copying. In fact, I was loving the influence to the point certain little moments feel like a loving homage to the famous sequence. Besides, Nakamura and his team still do plenty to distinguish, giving the whole thing a strange phantasmagoria of robots whose appearances are as much demon as they are machine. In the middle of all of this, the human (the titular Chicken Man) becomes an odd one out and a nice dash of levity trying to survive the chaos all around him. Amid this, trading the Mussorgsky score for a suitably haunting synth score that adds a dreamy (or nightmarish, depending your tastes) vibe to the whole thing.

As an overall movie, I really enjoyed this. I went in trying not to know too much about it and got a mix that ran from the entertaining, to the contemplative, to the truly bizarre and I was never bored by it.

This is now joining that list of films from this that I am really hoping I get the chance to see in a theater, because there are visuals here that could spectacularly on a big screen.

With that, I've kept you all here long enough.

It's time to keep moving as November rolls on with next week's entry.

It's a little past for Halloween, but that's not gonna stop me from doing this anyway – it's another first here as I take on the first silent movie on the slate with F.W. Murnau's 1926 version of Faust.

Till then.

Hellraiser and The Hellbound Heart – A Boy, a Girl, and a Box

Hello and welcome back to another October here at the Third Row.

As I said last time, this month I’m diving into the surprisingly deep back catalog of the Hellraiser franchise.

This first step was, for me, a mix of old and new. The 1987 film is one I will admit up front to having a fondness for. At the same time, I confess to being a newcomer to Clive Barker's written works, finally reading The Books of Blood back in 2019. As a result, this marked my first time reading The Hellbound Heart, the original novel that Barker adapted the movie from.

Taking in both versions close to one another, to my pleasant surprise, served to enhance rather than detract. As the man behind both versions, Barker presents a largely faithful adaptation of his book. What changes he makes reflect the difference in mediums and benefits both.

I'm not putting these together just to play compare and contrast, however. In fact, the aspect I really wanted to focus on is one that plays the same in both versions. It’s also a topic that will be a major part of this month.

With that said, let's get into Pinhead, shall we?

More than anything, to invoke the title Hellraiser calls to mind Douglas Bradley’s grid-faced priest of Hell. He is a horror icon on the level of Jason Voorhees, Michael Meyers, and Freddie Krueger.

Which makes it interesting that, in the beginning, this wasn't his story. In fact, the earliest form of the character is barely there.

If you were to have someone with no knowledge of the series read The Hellbound Heart in a vacuum and ask them where they would see a larger series coming from, they might correctly guess the Cenobites as a group, but still be hard-pressed to recognize the one member who would come to represent the series.

In fact, within the confines of the original novel, the character isn't even named as such (Pinhead was a behind the scenes nickname on the movie that fans adopted, becoming official in the sequels.) The Cenobite that matches the appearance is a supporting character who has maybe ten lines in the whole book, as a generous estimate.

Not a bad promotion, all things considered.

"Clean-up duty now. Straight to video sequels later!"

Of course, that’s for later entries, though they do factor into my thoughts here.

Hellraiser is one of those movies I remember liking as a teen for the shock value. The movie’s blood-soaked finale, in particular, where fugitive damned soul Frank Cotton is reclaimed by Hell in a display involving hooks and chains that is still an impressive, if graphic sight nowadays.

As an adult nearing 40, I still appreciate that. For one thing, it’s a great, grisly visual and kicks off the movie’s delightfully chaotic finale. Plus they have spent so much time setting up Frank as an utter bastard that it’s hard not to enjoy seeing him reap his karmic reward. With age, however, I’ve also come to appreciate just how the reduced rule of the Cenobites plays in the larger film, especially with regards to Frank’s aforementioned awfulness.

Contrary to the marketing, Pinhead and his cadre of torture priests aren’t the main villains of the movie. They aren’t summoned to do wrong or inflict torment on the innocent, they’re summoned in response to a misdeed. Instead, the core horror of the movie is focused on the dark, savage, and all too human love affair between Frank and Julia.

That human factor is part of what makes the story so interesting to me. Yes, for large parts of the film, Frank certainly doesn’t look the part (physically, he is a ghoul, made to feed on the blood of others in order to slowly restore himself) but his arc is still familiar, if amplified for horror. Frank is presented from the jump as a man in pursuit of pleasure - it’s his prime reason for seeking the puzzle box in the first place. He gets far more than he had bargained for, however, and instead spends most of the movie trying to find a way to cheat the consequences of what he agreed to. Julia is in similar straits - bored by her marriage to Frank’s brother, Larry, she has been harboring desires for the man she had an affair with years earlier. When Frank returns, however half-formed and appeals to her, she doesn’t have to be asked twice.

One particular change in adaptation I have to give Barker points for -
The decision to change Kirsty from just a friend to Larry's daughter.
It's an extra detail that adds to Frank's creepiness by giving his 

advances an overtly incestuous overtone 

(no doubt intentional given how Sean Chapman
leans into the delivery on "Come to Daddy.")

Over the course of the film, these are the two we see as monsters - Julia picking up random men she can then kill and feed to Frank (though many are seen as alive when Frank starts to feed, adding to the brutality as they plead for mercy.) All are seen as expendable in their pursuit of pleasures, culminating in their decision to murder Larry - ending in a final ‘insult to injury’ as Frank wears his skin as a disguise to fool Larry’s daughter, Kirsty.

By comparison, the Cenobites are, despite their ethos of pain mixed with pleasure, strictly business - they come when the box summons them. They bring whoever summons them to Hell to be subjected to torments for all eternity. They are beings that could be described as horrifically principled. The only time we see them even slightly waver on their rules is a result of Kirsty accidentally summoning them, then bartering to avoid damnation. Even that flex is, ultimately, still within their jurisdiction - the box summons them and they can’t return empty handed. In order to give them someone in her place, Kirsty offers them a more tempting target - one who has broken their rules and that they would, otherwise, be unable to deal with unless he summoned them himself.

It goes back to an aspect of horror that I’ve resonated with more and more over the years - so many of the monsters mankind has dreamed are presented as beings with set rules. There are ways to deal with them, ways to avoid them, ways to summon them, and in some cases ways to defeat them. It’s not universal, of course, but often there is a sense of guidelines that are seen as irrefutable, or if refuted, the storyteller is called to task on.

As a result, they are often presented as more principled, reasonable, and, for lack of a better term, honor bound than human beings. Just as often as horror presents creatures with set rules of engagement, it presents stories about how the most disturbing aspects of human beings is how they will frequently skirt the bounds of what is acceptable or the social contract in pursuit of their own personal drives.

Love is...
Helping your skinless partner by bringing home people
he can drain the life force from.

In this case, that means the beings who live and thrive in an alternate world where pain and pleasure are horrifically intertwined, despite a lifestyle built around sensation, are still framed to us as the creatures of (for lack of a better term) law and order, compared to the movie’s fugitive couple. Despite their menacing appearances and brutal means of dealing with those who are damned, they are ultimately seen as fair against the self-serving, ruthless counter of Frank and Julia, whose love is even secondary to self preservation.

While I don’t imagine marketing did it this way on purpose, the misdirect makes the movie into a great inversion of expectations that allows it to stand the test of time arguably far better than many of the movies that came after where our leather-bound sadomasochists take the center stage.

That, however, is a topic for later this month. For now, the time comes to put the box back on the shelf.

It won’t have long to gather dust, however. Keep an eye out, for soon we’ll be back here to discuss the fascinating, fantastical sequel that literally takes us to Hell in Hellbound: Hellraiser II.

Till then.

Prince of Darkness (1987) - Evil Not Void If Seal Is Broken

Hello and welcome back. You may have noticed the previously mandatory blood tests are no longer in effect. That's because The Week of Things ™ has come to an end, and in this final week, we resume our journey through the Apocalypse Trilogy proper.

The good news, now that we're done in the world of Outpost 31 (and some offshoots), things are going to start getting a bit warmer. The bad news, isolation is still on the menu, this time in the form of the abandoned church that houses Carpenter's Prince of Darkness.

Of the three movies in the trilogy, this could arguably be considered something of the black sheep nowadays. Not as a statement of its quality as much as the fact that, compared to The Thing's modern classic status and the recent resurgence over the past decade for In the Mouth of Madness, Prince of Darkness is more at the level of a cult favorite – still generally well regarded by Carpenter fans, but not quite as well known as the other two in general.

Which isn't entirely hard to understand – of the three, all of which are pretty bold on the concept front, this is the movie that is arguably the most ambitious with what it's trying to do, presenting a story taking place in a curious nexus of science fiction and the occult.

Case in point - this movie's version of Satan.

Those crossroads make an interesting playground for Carpenter to work in – starting from the already promising horror hook of a secretive religious order known as the Brotherhood of Sleep tasked with keeping Satan imprisoned under lock and key. From that jumping off point, the movie expands to include the idea of evil as a great cosmic force, messages that travel across time as dreams, and a small team of university students trapped in a building poised to become ground zero for the ultimate evil being unleashed upon the world.

Speaking of that ground zero, one aspect of this movie I find myself appreciating this time around that I never fully considered before – the earlier mentioned isolation. Despite the church much of this movie takes place in being in the middle of an urban area, Carpenter still finds a way to create a situation of isolation from the world at large – without nature at play, the ill-fated team find themselves much more literally trapped, as the building falls under siege by an army of derelicts acting under the influence of the evil within. After the first act, those who venture out are few, and those who make it back in alive, even fewer. Paired with the growing influence of Satan inside, the growing sense of claustrophobia within the movie becomes an effective strength.

I don't care what the internet says - Todd Phillips's Pee-Wee's Big Adventure was a mistake.

As those trapped within are concerned, the movie's cast are an interesting spread. They don't hit the same highs as the earlier The Thing, but there is still some good interplay between them. As a nice bonus, there are also several John Carpenter regulars among the players. Of these Donald Pleasance makes a welcome familiar face as an unnamed priest in a theological tailspin after discovering the secrets of the Brotherhood have completely upended everything he's believed of good and evil. Besides Pleasance, other returning faces include Victor Wong and Dennis Dun, both fresh off Big Trouble in Little China and getting a chance to each try a different sort of role, the former trading mysticism for science, the latter making for a fairly entertaining comic relief character.

Of the new faces to this cast, two in particular stand out in supporting roles. The first of these bring rock star Alice Cooper in a nonspeaking role among the army of derelicts. Doubtless, the fact it's Cooper is likely part of why he is one of two derelicts to be given significant screentime, but even with that acknowledged, he brings a malevolent presence that helps the part stand out. The other being Jessie Lawrence Ferguson, whose transformation from one of the more levelheaded, good-natured members of the team to a leering, giggling agent of evil is an especially effective dash of creepiness in the movie's final acts.

 

Seriously - the other possessed don't get as much chance to stand
out, but Ferguson not only stands out, he is genuinely unsettling
when he turns.

Said creepiness, admittedly, comes in stops and starts compared to the earlier efforts of The Thing. There's a sense of dread, to be certain, but it doesn't have the same level of paranoia to benefit from, instead playing to the altogether alien nature of the evil force at the center of this movie. To its credit, despite that overall uneven feel, the movie has some strong individual sequences and images that help to stand out – the recurring nightmare warning is a main example, teasing hints of the danger to come in the form of a scratchy video recording that helps make the sequence, and its eventual evolution, even more memorable.

Lined up alongside its predecessor and successor, I have to admit, I don't have quite the same affection for this movie that I have for the other two parts of the series. I want to clarify – this doesn't mean that I think this is a bad movie, because I don't. Taken on its own, I still find this an overall enjoyable offering from Carpenter's overall filmography, and even if it doesn't quite hit the same highs as the other two, it still has a number of strong visuals and sequences on its own that are worth the the experience. What it does with traditional Satan horror is something that feels like a sci-fi take on something from Lucio Fulci's Gates of Hell trilogy, and that's something I never would have thought I'd want to see until I saw this try it.

And honestly, this sequence alone helps secure it a spot in my good graces where Carpenter is concerned.

With this, we're now one entry away.

Carpenter has brought humanity to the brink twice now, each time taking it a little closer, and now it all comes down on Halloween night. Join me for concluding this run, and the trilogy, with Carpenter's tribute to H.P. Lovecraft, In the Mouth of Madness.

Till then.