Japanese Madness, Part I – Escape from Amsterdam
Images of construction abound in Escape from Amsterdam. Aozora is seemingly destined to be a crooked bureaucrat for the Japanese Ministry of Construction, and his journey takes him from the rebuilt Hiroshima to abandoned seaside hotels to the rapidly disappearing countryside of Japan to the ominous, sterile and ultimately creepy Amsterdam, all thrown in with lashing of ‘Japanese Madness’ as Aozora encounters life-like sex dolls, Spicy Nan Bread Tacos (think about it) and gun-carrying Japanese motorbike gangs. It’d be a perfect noir novel if it was a little darker, and Aozora is the perfect unsympathetic character for a hardboiled story.
Pete Carvill reviews Barrie Sherwood‘s Escape from Amsterdam.
Aylett’s Lint
If, then, it is Robert Crumb and Jorges Louis Borges who can bring some swooning warning bells to the appreciation of this endless genius then it shall be only through the darker and less simpering anomalies of crash and skin sci-fi, with jellied morons from outer space and women that need the speaking nullity of Flesh Gordon Uptights to breach their codes of spandex, that we will be able to enter the swallowing gullet of this crazy maw. There are grand symphonies of gooey sounds here, moments when an idea is found stitched into a dress to be worn by a blonde schoolgirl hitching a lift from the farmyard hick-load, ducks a-quacking from oversized blood-soaked beaks, her big ass tanned.