Sorry for the lack of updates recently; I was preparing for a local Con. I had a great time speaking at Balticon this weekend. While the organization was a complete zoo, and my main session (Hidden Cyberpunk Gems in Film) was opposite against a kickin Browncoat play and terrific Gene Wolfe session, it was still a blast. The Gems session eventually got close to 20 people. A few came up afterwards and mentioned this was their favorite session of the whole event - another mentioned she might have a potential interested reviewer. In any event, I enjoyed this enough I probably want to look into doing similar events.

In doing the sessions, especially the anime themes one, I’m more convinced than ever that some of these wonderful animes and films sorely need publicity. There are some absolutely terrific stories that people that aren’t getting in front of those who would be REALLY interested to know about them. This really has become one of the primary goals of Cyberpunk Review. I really do believe I’ve helped expose people to truly interesting films that otherwise would have never gotten in front of them. In that same vein, I TRULY appreciate all the regulars here who are constantly exposing ME to previously hidden cyberpunk films. At one time I thought there was only about 120 cyberpunk anime and films. Now the number is hovering around 180 and rising. Keep them coming!

BTW - has any one seen all these movies in the brocure? If not, I’m guessing at least a few of you can identify all the pictures.

I’ve finally gotten around to updating my complete list of cyberpunk movies in the Meatspace (Forum). I’ve added a bunch based on suggestions from those who post here. The hyperlinked movies are the ones that have already been reviewed (over 100 reviews). I’ve still probably missed a few, as many are scattered in other threads. I’ll try to catch the remaining ones in the next few days.

Also, I have a list of potential cyberpunk movies on the bottom of this thread. These generally are movies that others have suggested but that I haven’t seen yet, and am worried they might not be. Again, THANK YOU TONS for finding all these cyberpunk flicks! This really makes a big difference in the quality and completeness of the site.

Sometimes the US DVD distributors really piss me off. They unilaterally decide that dumb Americans like myself will only watch a movie if it’s spoken in God’s Language (Which is English, of course - this is verified by checking the earliest versions of the “real” bible - turns out it looks exactly like the King James version. ). If a movie is from one of those foreign places (woe is them!) that haven’t agreed to speak God’s language yet, we must correct this flaw by providing a dubbed version prior to releasing it in God’s country. In one egregious case, Miramax, in their infinite wisdom, provided us this piece of shit:

Based on this version, my earlier review of Nirvana started off like this:

All in all a decent cyberpunk flick from Italy, but unfortunately suffers horribly from bad dubbing. The dubbing here is as bad as your average anime dubbing, and unfortunately here in the US, this is all we get. I wish I could get a copy of this in Italian with subtitles - if I did, I’m sure this would shoot up significantly on my cyberpunk list, but alas…

Since then, based on a personal pleading at the bottom of my review, a number of you offered advice on how I could obtain a copy of the Italian version. Case provided me a link on XploitedCinema.com where I could buy the copy - something I eventually did, even though it set me back $30 bucks. Now my updated review of Nirvana reflects this copy:

My rating bumped from 6 stars for the English dubbed version to 8 stars for the Italian language version. I must say though, I’m still pissed about having to drop another 30 bucks to get this - truly, the Italian sound track should have been included on the Region 1 disc (hence the ranting above - I really don’t hate religion, but do detest the arrogance in the US at times - this is one of those times). I don’t know that Nirvana is worth $30 bucks though - I rarely pay this much for a DVD. But if you’re planning on buying Nirvana, I would advise skipping the R1 version altogether, and instead save up for the Italian version. The dubbing on the R1 version is truly horrid - like low quality Japanese anime dubbing horrid.

Back in January when I started Cyberpunkreview.com, some of my reviews and screen capturing weren’t as detailed as more recent ones. Sometimes, I now feel I haven’t given some of the better movies enough detail. This was the case for Natural City. I’ve gone back and added a lot more screen captures (a whole second page in fact), along with a bit more on the review. Natural City just has some terrific shots - many of which the initial review didn’t show. I expect to do this to a few more of the reviews, including Dark City, for instance.

It’s not just cyberpunkreview.com, but seemingly everyone at my hosting ISP (including the ISP’s home page) is absolutely crawling at a snails pace. Icine.org, a fun movie discussion site that I hang out at is also hosted there (on a different server no less) and is also experiencing major access issues. My apologies - hopefully this gets fixed soon.

Just a word or two on site access and growth. The month of March has continued a steep increase in site access. Overall, March statistics included:

• 8283 Visits (a “visit” is when when a person actually comes to the site and accesses one or more pages)
• 37,311 Pages viewed by people (and almost another 28,000 by search bots), which means the average person accessed 4.5 pages per visit.
• 308,961 hits (obviously graphics are most of the hits as I have many screencaps per review - also many have linked my images, which, to date I see no reason of blocking)
• Over 1000 of the visits lasted over 15 minutes, with almost 300 lasting over an hour (meaning the visitors read LOTS of movie and game reviews when they visited).

Just for perspective on growth, in February, the first full month of operation, cyberpunkreview had 4305 visits and 20,948 in page views (again, both not counting bot access). Also, Just three days ago (April 1st), cyberpunkreview for the first time had over 400 visits (April 2nd had 388 visits and April 3rd had 399 visits), so it appears that the upward trend is continuing.

International Access
The US accounted for just over 60% of all page views (meaning almost 40% of everyone accessing cyberpunkreview is from outside the US). The next highest countries in order were:

1. Great Britain
2. Australia
3. European Union (I’m guessing many of the smaller European countries are grouped into an “eu” extension, but I really don’t know)
4. Canada
5. Netherlands
6. Greece
7. Germany
8. Sweden
9. China
10. Poland
11. Puerto Rico
12. Croatia
13. Romania
14. Denmark
15. Bulgaria
16. Japan

Top Pages
Many people are accessing the site through the RSS feed. This accounted for my top page with over 4000 page views. In terms of actual pages, they are as follows:

1. Ultraviolet, starring Mila Jovovich - Coming (updated) March 3! - this is true because Google still has cyberpunkreview on the first page for those searching for Mila Jovovich.
2. Cyberpunk Movies by Decade
3. Tetsuo - The Iron Man - many seem to come for the screencaps
4. Ghost in the Shell
5. Ultraviolet
6. What is Cyberpunk?
7. Natural City
8. Armitage III
9. Metropolis
10. Texhnolyze

You’ll notice that most of these were among the first posts on the site. This indicates that the search engines have put these higher in search results than some of the more recent entries.

Game Reviews
One of the really cool things to occur in March was we got more reviewers on the site! Specifically, we got Metatron, Neuromancer and DannyV_El_Acme! All three have contributed wonderful game reviews - Metatron has also contributed reviews for Alien and the awesome William Gibson penned X-Files episode, Kill Switch.
In terms of game reviews, the highest accessed entry was System Shock, followed closely by I have No Mouth and I Must Scream and Deus Ex.

Book Reviews - and still looking for other reviewers!
Again, I’m truly excited about getting more reviewers on the site. I also want to thank Case for giving me some info and pictures on the Gene Generation, and for getting the director to come here and post!

Also, I’m fervently hoping to get some book reviews from David Gentle, Desirina, and others who mentioned an interest in this. I fully understand that doing a book review entails LOTS more work than a movie review, so I anticipate this taking more time. Again, if anyone who has familiarity with the genre and is interested in helping out with reviews, please drop me an email at sfam@cyberpunkreview.com. We’d love to have you join us!

I’m also looking for a resident cyberpunk Art critic. I’ve mentioned this once or twice to Budo (username ETM), who did my most awesome header, but thusfar he hasn’t bitten down. Hopefully I get someone to take this on though. I do want someone with artistic talent to do this (or someone with an art history background) - when I look at most of these, I find myself loving all of them. But perhaps art critique really can’t use a star rating system - this is OK too.

The Meatspace
The Meatspace discussion area is still growing. Just two days ago, we had 10 people on at once! There’s some pretty cool topics under way, including a list of all cyberpunk movies, so check it out if you haven’t already.

Future Plans
I’m starting to slow down a bit in my movie reviews. I don’t think I’ll be able to keep up with one a day. In part this is due to the increased amount of time I spend on my reviews. If you go to some of the earlier ones, many are lots shorter with less screencaps. At some point I intend to go back and beef some of these up (like Dark City, for instance). I find screencaps and cyberpunk musings essential for good movie reviews, and will probably continue this.

Mangas and Graphic Novels: Also, I intend to start reviewing some of the bigger cyberpunk mangas and graphic novels. I’m still thinking of the best way to review these, but I’ve already decided that the reviews will involve captures of the artwork.

More Navigation Pointers: Because the number of movies has increased substantially, the decades page is becoming a bit less useful. I intend to build a tree structure of all my navigation pages and link them within the key nav pages. So, from the Movies by Decade page, you’ll be able to get to the “Movies by Star Rating” page and the cyberpunk themes pages.

Wow! Things are moving fast! In addition to Neuromancer, DannyV and Metatron have joined up as reviewers. DannyV and Neuromancer are doing games, and Metatron is planning on reviewing a few games, LOTS of music, and perhaps an odd movie or TV show (starting with an X-files episode).

On top of this, Desirina, site owner for Pop Culture, Postmodernism, and the Cyberpunk Aesthetic and With a Whimper: How to survive the coming apocalypse (both blogs which I really like and have linked to) is planning on reviewing cyberpunk books! There’s also a brilliant guy named Kurt (forgive the spelling if its with a “C” instead of a “K”), an AI afficionado that I see every now and then at the local coffee shop, who may try his hand at book reviews.

To me, this is VERY exciting news, as I’ve always wanted to have this site the a place to review all forms of cyberpunk media. We STILL need more reviewers though, especially for books. I’m also hoping to find a cyberpunk art afficianado somewhere.

So if you’re interested in participating in the review process, drop me a line at sfam”at”cyberpunkreview.com, and I’ll get you access into the special reviewers forum inside the Meatspace.

Great news everyone - A new reviewer has joined the Cyberpunk Review team!

Neuromancer, a frequent site participant, is going to start reviewing cyberpunk games!

We should see Neuromancer’s first review up on the site in the next day or so. This is terrific as the goal of cyberpunkreview.com is to eventually encompass all forms of cyberpunk media. Game reviews will make a terrific addition both to the content and to the discussions. So everyone give him a warm welcome as he gets his feet wet.

Also, if anyone else is interested in participating, PLEASE PLEASE drop me a line at sfam”at”cyberpunkreview.com. I am VERY interested in expanding the content to cyberpunk games, books, manga and graphic novels, art, and even cyberpunk music. I know Desirina mentioned she might be interested in reviewing books (I’m hoping to hear back from her on this), but I’m guessing that in the case of most forms of media, multiple reviewers won’t be a problem. So again, speak up if interested. And welcome, Neuromancer

I’m in the process of upgrading Wordpress to fix a security hole. Apologies in advance for (hopefully) short-term functionality, look and feel problems.

Just a word about usage statistics for cyberpunkreview: I’ve only been up since the middle of January, but I’m pretty thrilled about how much this site is already accessed. With less than two months under my belt, this site has already been accessed by over 8000 different people, many of whom come back and visit a number of times (over 18,000 visits total). In total Cyberpunkreview has had over 39,000 page views and over 291,000 hits (this number isn’t surprising, as each graphic counts as a hit).

So far in March, for instance, I’m averaging:

• 225 visits per day, with an average of 1.4 visits per visitor (meaning people come back more than once after their session expires)
• 684 pages viewed a day (so far over 6,100 for the month)
• 7855 hits a day - again, the vast majority of these hits are graphics, so am more interested in unique visitors and page views.

More exciting to me is the international participation this site seems to garner. While the US gets about 60% of the hits, cyberpunkreview gets really good participation from other countries - especially from the comments! Besides the US, the top 10 countries in terms of page views are:

1. Great Britain
2. Australia
3. Poland
4. Canada
5. Netherlands
6. Switzerland
7. Greece
8. Japan
9. China

Additionally, there is significant access from a number of other countries, including Germany, the Czech Repulbic, Finland, Spain, France, Italy, Russia, Korea, South Africa and Brazil (and lots of others at smaller levels). In terms of total page views, the European Union (EU designator) actually shows up right after Great Britain, but I don’t know what this really means. I’m guessing that many of the smaller European countries are bundled up from ISPs to this category, but I really don’t know.

And to those of you who have commented on movies or the forum, I truly appreciate it! I am always looking for more though. If you have any thoughts or questions about some of the movies, please ask, and I’ll do my best to respond (I just remembered I have to add an interpretation to the ending of Casshern - I’ll do this later today).

In terms of search engine access, Google is by far the biggest referrer. Cyberpunkreview actually come up pretty high on a number of terms, to the point that I actually wonder if some cool soul over at Google has raised my profile past what it should be. For instance, if you just search for the actress “Mila Jovovich,” cyberpunkreview currently comes up in the top 5 search results. Cyberpunk review also comes up pretty high with some truly bizarre search terms - it’s almost scary looking at what people actually search for in order to find this place!

Most people tend to either use the RSS feed or use the Movies by Decade page to find movies. I am wondering if they are missing the other movie category pages on the right hand side, such as movies by star rating, or themes like android movies, et cetera, so I may do more to highlight these. My “What is Cyberpunk” page also comes up pretty high, as do two Japanese Cyberpunk screencap pages for obvious reasons - both pages NSFW - I.K.U. and Tetsuo the Iron - Man Page 2.

There are a number of movies that are continually accessed. Here are the heavy hitters:

• Testuo - The Iron Man
• Ghost in the Shell
• Avalon
• Metropolis
• Texhnolyze
• One Point O
• Ultraviolet
• William Gibson - No Maps for These Territories
• Ghost in the Shell: Innocence
• Natural City
• Immortel
• Battle Angel

And again, if you’re interested in participating, especially for those looking to review other cyberpunk media, such as games, mangas, books, and so forth, please email me - I’d look to expand!