James Ferraro: Rapture Adrenaline

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A HELL TV PRODUCTION

JAMES FERRARO: RAPTURE ADRENALINE

(VHS videotape, PAL!*, 94 min, 150 copies)

RAPTURE ADRENALINE is a 94 min epic science-action movie from 2009.

STORYLINE

Set in a crime-ridden Rochester, New York in the near future, RAPTURE ADRENALINE centers on a police officer who is brutally murdered and subsequently re-created as a super-human cyborg. The main plot of the movie revolves around a "Bug" (code word for a member of an alien species that is similar in many ways to a very large cockroach) searching for a miniature galaxy which is also a vast energy source. "Acid Eagle" is the president of Hell-TV (Channel 83, Cable 12), a sleazy television station specializing in sensationalistic programming. Displeased with his station's current lineup (which mostly consists of softcore pornography), Professor Pizza is on a seemingly endless quest for something that isn't so "soft" and will "break through" to a new audience. The rescue turns out to be a fake; the two climbers are taken prisoner by a group of ruthless thieves. The driver is now a hostage trapped by his own seatbelt. However, the robot becomes smarter and more dangerous as it plays putting the boy and his friends in mortal danger. In addition to being an action film, the movie includes larger themes regarding the media, resurrection, gentrification, corruption, and human nature.

REVIEW

RAPTURE ADRENALINE is a virtual videogame car chase through the veins of hyperreality seen through fragments of US movies – mostly produced in the 1990s and diffracted by the euro-lens of Dutch subtitling and French dubbing. To achieve optimal melting these fragments have been transferred from tapes, DVDs and computer files to VHS.

Hollywood is here mirrored, xeroxed, enlarged, cropped and disfigured in order to burn a passage to the next dimension – one defined by cars, weapons, heroes, planes, corpses, space/time machines, virtual reality gods, babies, aliens, animals, dinosaurs... all piled up till reaching new, transcended levels in speed, power, tension, evolution, hi-tech, destruction, sense of space and fear of death… ultimately conveying adrenaline through fear – until you reach meditation point: blue screen. Blue screen is a concept used in computer science to define a state of technological crash, the burn out of the machine, overstimulated by too many demanding applications. The blue screen of death is caused by a fatal system error and is the error screen displayed by the operating system upon encountering a critical error, of a non-recoverable nature, that causes the system to crash.

RAPTURE ADRENALINE is an educational mixtape program, a cyber marine combat training video designed through primitive editing techniques – rough in terms of means yet subtle in their development, displaying a remarkable sense of composition and dynamics plus a peculiar attention to shapes and textures. Operating mythological transformations of popular movie iconography, it reaches the merging point of the magical and the political.

– Fabrizio Terranova & Xavier García Bardón, Chinotto Beach

* Please note! This is a PAL format videotape. It will play on most of VHS players in Asia, Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Western Europe. The following countries and areas are normally included in a PAL region release.

Tape is 15 eur + postage. For any order please get in touch with: Music City. Email: lanouvellecite (at) gmail .com