Critics reviews

It gleefully engages the Eurotrash spirit of liberation from corporate culture.

Looking like absolute shit, pouring with sweat and sucking wind after jogging only a few feet, RWF, for his final screen appearance, delivers a pitch-perfect performance that demonstrates what wonders could occur when his relentless attention to detail was applied to acting. With riveting extras... this ne plus ultra cyberpunk gem belongs on the shelf of every Fassbinder obsessive.

Its Pop Art and plastic erotics take on a slick of the sinister from the glandular throb of Tangerine Dream's score, preparing you for the film's final revelation about the real truth of the 31st floor—a real doozy, a surprisingly unfanciful rendering of corporate capital holding culture in a vise it can barely be bothered to twist.

When the increasingly knotty conspiracy plot that motors Kamikaze '89 grows too unintelligible or dull, Gremm has the good sense to cut to the film's greatest set piece and sadly yet-to-be realized innovation: the Police Disco, where Jansen squeezes in a few solo games of racquetball while quad-skating colleagues gyrate under neon lights.

A science-fiction whodunnit set in a near-future that sits awkwardly between utopia and dystopia. It was directed by Wolf Gremm, a gigging journeyman whose critical reputation at the time of its release was basically dismal. The film's eyesore costumes and neon-wreathed production design suggest that it belongs to the same extended cinematic universe as Menahem Golan's West German kitsch classic The Apple (1980).

It's an oddity for sure, but Fassbinder gives his usual 110%, exemplified most by the film's closing shot, which contains only the actor, an oversized photo of an astronaut, and an ending that is both inevitable and unbelievable.

To adjust Dr. Mabuse for the gaudy early Eighties is to inevitably pass through Godard's Alphaville and Fassbinder's World on a Wire, and here's Fassbinder himself on the screen mocking the results, like a puffy Tartar warrior swelling around in leopard bathrobes over tangerine vaquero shirts. The jumbled mise en scène of peeling paint and blasting phosphorescence... has at least the decency to close on a wunderkind's perverse, lopsided smile.