Amy Thomson

Ugoku -- Ugoku means simply move. It doesn t pretend to have a plot, but develops a sort of undiluted visual and sonic drama instead. Pounding rhythms and well over a thousand elaborately altered and combined, mostly hand-colored clips rise to crescendo after crescendo in a Himalayan range of peak experiences. A bizarre legion of ever-evolving characters culled from hundreds of found footage sources move with heart-pounding, eye-popping precision to intense beats while kaleidoscopic arrays of colors explode like digital mescaline. This Warhol meets Escher hybrid film+animation unfolds in a surrealistic, multi-dimensional vortex that gives 'rock the body' a new meaning. Every element of each image: movement, gesture, color, tempo, etc., is reanimated and synchronized to specific sounds in the music, creating layered and hypnotic psychotropic rhythms which in a normal state of consciousness would go otherwise unnoticed. Objects and characters are placed in unexpected contexts and tiers revealing entirely new structural formations, penetrating meanings and subliminal interpretations. 'Like a Tool video on acid.'

When marshal Frank Patch kills drunken Luke Mills in self-defense, he refuses to resign on the town's request. Afraid for the town's future and of the fact that Patch knows the town's dark secrets, the town fathers resort to old-style violence.