Glibertarians.com 2017 Archive

Category: Reviews

  • What are we reading? April 2017

    SugarFree

    I am about halfway done with Operation Chaos by Poul Anderson. Although published in novel form in 1971, it is actually a fix-up of four short stories that appeared in various magazines between 1956 and 1969 that are held together by a thin frame story.

    I’ve been hunting down reading antecedents of Charles Stross’ Laundry series and Operation Chaos is fairly interesting so far. Unlike the Laundry universe, the use of magic is a widespread and civilian-led affair rather than the province of secret government agencies. (The same setup explored briefly by Robert A. Heinlein in 1940’s “Magic, Inc.“) In Anderson’s world, magic is studied as just another branch of science and is increasingly seen as working on scientific principles. The leads are a werewolf and a witch that meet in an alternative World War II where the continental United States is invaded and occupied by a jihadist Caliphate–weirdly similar to ISIS but with afreets and magic carpets at their command. The novel moves along at the brisk pace of 1950s magazine science fiction. Although Anderson published a sequel in 1999, Operation Luna, I wish he had spent more of his prime years in the Operation Chaos universe. There is a lot of potential in his world-building that I would have like to see him explore.

    Closer to the Laundry universe in both tone and style was Tim Powers’ 2001 Declare, which is so similar that Stross talks about it in the afterword to The Atrocity Archives.

    Declare follows an operative of a secretive branch of the British secret services that are focused on occult threats that was created (or maybe just revealed itself) during World War II and was thought to be disbanded after the cessation of overt hostilities. In 1963, an agent of the service is reactivated and sent to Mount Ararat to relive a disastrous mission from 1948 that may or may not involve Noah’s Ark.

    I finished Declare a couple of weeks ago and I’m still not sure how I feel about it. It mined a more esoteric vein of welding together Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Elder Gods than the Laundry series but it was somewhat unsatisfying. There was an elusiveness to the text about exactly what was going on that left me unfulfilled. But it is something that I have experienced in Powers’ other novels, so it wasn’t surprising.

     

    jesse.in.mb

    I’m currently chipping away at three books:

    • Arturo Islas’ The Rain God, a bildungsroman and family drama about three generations of a family set on both sides of the US/Mexican border. I first came to this novella in high school when I borrowed a copy from my English Lit teacher with all of his college notes in it, which I kind of miss in the current copy I have. I was distracted enough by the book the first time I read it to have to be pulled out of a swarm of bees;
    • Palm Trees in the Snow by Luz Gabás is another trans-generational and cross-cultural family drama consisting of twinned narratives about a Spanish family’s experiences in colonial Guinea and a daughter’s attempts to figure out what was left behind when the family was driven out in a post colonial revolution;
    • Dan Simmons The Terror is the SugarFree recommendation on my list. If you like monsters dismembering mid-19th century British arctic explorers (and I know you do), you might enjoy this epistolary novel. I’ve enjoyed the action and personal drama so far, but while there’s been plenty of rum there has been very little sodomy and the lash, but I’m only about half way through, so there’s still hope.

     

    Riven

    I used to be a huge reader when I was younger. As I’ve gotten older, I find that my reading is very seasonal–unless I’m laying out on our deck working on my tan with a tropical drink and a smoke, it just doesn’t happen as often as I would like. That said, I do have three books on my reading list right now that I mean to read…soon…ish. SugarFree gave me a copy of Dead Witch Walking, which is apparently part of a huge series called The Hollows. Definitely looking forward to the whole set if the first is worthwhile, and I have it on good authority that it is. Additionally, my sister gave me two collected works for my birthday: an H.G. Wells anthology and a collection of Sherlock Holmes capers. Everything in both of those books is new content for me, so that should be a good time, too.

     

     

    JW

    Bullshit IT service delivery certification, invented by the British. Tedious, unnecessary and dull, dull, dull.  Eyes started bleeding from the dull walls of text. Kill me. Kill me. Kill me.

     

    Old Man With Candy

    I can only dream of having as much reading time as SugarFree. Nonetheless, I still have a few on the burner. I’m nearly finished Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, an alternative history novel premised on Charles Lindbergh defeating Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election, and keeping the US out of World War II by reaching an understanding with Hitler. It is creatively told from the POV of a young (((Philip Roth))), who knows that everything around him is changing and not in a good way, but doesn’t really comprehend why and where things are headed. If it were just released, you’d think it was a tired allegory about Trump, but it’s a bit more prescient than that. Assuming he doesn’t piss me off at the end, it’s a wonderful novel.

    I have a childlike fascination with magic, and Corinda’s 13 Steps To Mentalism is a classic text. As with most magic tricks, once you understand the basics of mentalism and the repertoire of classic illusions, you’ll be simultaneously struck at how simple the tricks are and awed by how wonderfully they’re performed by the masters.

     

    Brett L

    E. William Brown’s first foray into Sci-Fantasy, Perilous Waif. If you’ve never heard of Brown, he’s a self-published guy in the kindle unlimited sphere. I find his stories fascinating even though his main characters all suffer from what I call the Dresden effect. In order to fight tougher and tougher opponents, your main character essentially becomes a god. I first encountered it in Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files, and I know Charlie Stross is actively trying to avoid it in his Laundry Files — and more failing than not, honestly. So there it is, I’m outed as a total Sci-Fantasy geek. Brown’s Daniel Black series isn’t bad either, although there are times you can see why it wasn’t picked up by one of the big houses.

     

     

     

     

    sloopyinca

    Working on The Neverending Story. I’ll report back when I’m finished.

  • Reviews You’ll Never Use: Suspiria

    Greetings once again, my fellow travelers in the transgressive, to another installment of Reviews You’ll (Probably) Never Use.

    Last week as you’ll recall, we explored a little of the background of the wonderful Italian crime and horror genre called giallo. This week, before getting to our feature review, we’ll explore three of the main personalities which shaped and defined the giallo over the years.

    Barbara Steele in the original, and still best, “Black Sunday”

    Undoubtedly the father of giallo, and indeed of Italian horror in general, is Mario Bava. Born in 1914, Bava got his first taste of directing in 1956 when, as cinematographer for I Vampiri, he was asked to finish the film when the hired director walked out on the project. He later went on to direct the gothic horror masterpiece Black Sunday (not the one about the football game, this one is better) and began directing what are widely considered to be the first true giallo films in the early 60s. Bava’s start as a cinematographer and special effects man provided the early shape of the genre as being primarily concerned with the immediate visual impact on screen and the relegation of other aspects to subsidiary status. His son also made films, but aside from a promising turn with Demons, has utterly failed to live up to his old man.

    Next, we have the great Lucio Fulci. His film Zombi 2 was the subject of last week’s review (not linked here because linking to my own posts seems weirdly like masturbating), and if you watched or read that, you know his game. While his wonderful Don’t Torture A Duckling showcased a fine directorial ability, in general, he became known as the king of Italian gore. Despite getting his start in comedies, eventually his films were watched with a grim fascination by folks eager to see just how much brutal violence someone could get away with putting on screen. Seriously, if you have a problem with a slow close-up shot of an open eyeball having a straight razor dragged across it, don’t watch The New York Ripper. But really you should to you know, not be a pussy. His Gates of Hell trilogy (City of the Living Dead, The Beyond, and The House by the Cemetery) are all good to excellent and worth watching for any serious fan of horror. The Beyond is probably my personal favorite Italian horror film from this era.

    Finally, we come to the director of tonight’s film, one Dario Argento. He managed to have both a prolific and influential directorial career and to produce a pretty decent-looking daughter. He will be appearing at Texas Frightmare Weekend, and I will share a photo of the gentleman after I obtain my signature and regale him with stories of how much I love his movie because fuck knows he hasn’t heard that a thousand times from rando overweight white bald misanthropes. He started off as a screenwriter for Sergio Leone on spaghetti westerns but came into his own when he moved to giallo. In fact, his nearly flawless masterpiece, Deep Red, is considered by many critics to be the supreme expression of the giallo form. No less a personage than John Carpenter has frequently cited its influence on him when making American slasher innovator, Halloween. He’s fallen off recently (seriously, I bought his Dracula starring Rutger Hauer sight unseen, and returned it, it was that fucking bad), but man, when the guy was in his prime, he could make a fucking great movie experience. One thing I’ve always thought a bit off, however, was his willingness to direct his own daughter in nude scenes. How does that go? “OK sweetie, that was a good take, but now I want to see your titties a little bit more to the left, and rub that nipple a bit more sensuously. Yes, that’s the way…rub it slowly for daddy.” I mean, I know they’re Italian, and so their mores are going to be less “the corporation bought us lunch today so we can meet a deadline” and more “fuck it, let’s hit this bottle and sportfuck until the sun comes up,” but shit man, there are limits.

    WHY DO OUR CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS HAVE TO BE SO DAMN BRIGHT?

    Anyway, that brings us to our feature tonight, Argento’s Suspiria. The film was inspired by Suspiria de Profundis, a series of short essays by English author Thomas De Quincey. Argento thought to make three films out of the three Sorrows recounted in the essay: “Mater Lacrymarum, Our Lady of Tears,” “Mater Suspiriorum, Our Lady of Sighs,” and “Mater Tenebrarum, Our Lady of Darkness.” Argento would indeed go on to complete his plan with Inferno in 1980 and The Mother of Tears finally in 2007, but let’s not digress onto those paths and ruin future reviews.

    The film follows American dance student Jessica Harper as she attends a prestigious academy in Freiburg, only to discover that it’s a front for witches, just like all Arthur Murray Dance Studios in real life. Suspiria is pretty much the only famous thing Harper did, though she apparently was in Minority Report in a role I don’t recall just from reading the name.

    She’s feeling a little blue.

    Jessica’s introduction to the academy is seeing a student flee from it while ranting during a storm. The fleeing student is then murdered in most satisfying fashion. She goes to her friend’s apartment, and a random hairy-armed intruder stabs her so damn many times in the sternum that her heart is exposed, then we get a nice close-up shot of the knife being stabbed directly into the beating heart. Then she’s hung from the skylight, the shattered debris of which falls and buries itself in her aforementioned friend’s skull. It’s easily the best opening to any movie ever made, and if you disagree, you can fuck right off with your incorrect opinions which can be disproved mathematically.

    Seriously, how can you not love a movie that ostensibly takes place almost entirely at night, but is still so full of glorious colors?

    So Jessica meets the various eccentrics who staff and study at the academy. Creepy things happen, people die, and she starts to get suspicious. There’s a great scene where the blind pianist’s guide dog is possessed and rips out his owner’s throat, and tears chunks of meat out of him until a couple of polizei come running over to chase him away. Her friend Stefania Casini tries to run away from an unseen murderous fiend with a straight razor, only to fall into a storage room filled entirely with razor wire. WHAT THE EVER LOVING FUCK? It’s giallo, it doesn’t matter or need any explanation! But seriously as she’s struggling with the razor wire and getting cut up she gets her throat slit with the straight razor. Very tragic.

    Oh shit, I jumped into a room full of razor wire! I hope that guy with the straight razor who was chasing me doesn’t take advantage of this situation and come slit my throat!

    Eventually, Jessica discovers that the academy was founded by an old evil witch, and after parsing out the meaning of the opening runaway’s rant is able to find the secret passage where the academy staff congregate to perform black magic. The main baddy animates poor Stefania’s corpse, crucified on a coffin and now with needles in its eyes for some reason, to attack Jessica, but our brave Final Girl is able to see through the witch’s glamour and kill her, which causes the other witches to apparently suffer cranial bleeding and migraine headaches while the whole house tears itself apart.

    Honestly, the plot isn’t as convoluted as some critics make it out to be. You do have to pay attention and give the usual allowance for a giallo film’s somewhat blasé attachment to narrative flow, but that just comes with the territory. The real sparkle of this film is in the visual realm. The entire thing is shot in imbibition Technicolor, which was seen in films such as The Wizard of Oz and Gone With The Wind but was no longer widely used at the time. It produces a more vibrant, vivid color palette, almost to the point of garishness, though of course, that’s only a good thing in certain circumstances, of which this happens to be one. There is heavy emphasis on strong primary colors as the background in many scenes – the academy walls are deep blue and red velvet, and in a scene where sheets are set up as a screen so the ladies can sleep without a horde of maggots falling on them through the ceiling (watch the damn movie), as soon as the lights are out a nightmarish red backlight pulses through everything. Even in a bedroom, at night, there will be what looks like bright green or blue spotlights shining onto the actor’s faces. The damn skylight the initial victim is hung from is an enormous mosaic of bright colors. The entire thing is like a kaleidoscope given form and is really quite remarkable, and I can’t recommend it enough. Lord only knows how great it would be to watch it blazed (note to self: what am I doing this weekend?). Maybe the best part is what I have lovingly dubbed the Disco Peacock in the main witch’s bedroom. I desperately want one of these, and it also would be suitable for extended viewing while blazed.

    I wasn’t kidding. I present to you: Disco Peacock.
    I also wasn’t kidding about the camp-out sheets having glowing red backlight. And nobody comments on this or thinks it sinister in any way.

    Again, though, this is very much in the realm of art for the sake of art, so don’t go expecting some kind of Tarantino-esque dialog or Oscar-nominated stories of black folks overcoming oppression. It’s all enhanced with a great soundtrack by Goblin, long-time collaborators with Argento, and mentioned in my previous post. It’s less accessible to a standard horror audience than Zombi 2, but is ultimately superior. I award Suspiria 13 Sexy Witches out of 15.

     

     

     

  • Reviews You’ll Never Use: Zombi 2. Or is it Zombie? It’s Both!

    Greetings fellow marvelers of the menacing and macabre, and welcome to another installment of what is indisputably at least the eighth best weekly recurring article on this site. For the next several weeks, we shall be exploring your humble wordslinger’s favorite single genre of horror, giallo.

    I will preface the reviews with a brief history of the genre itself, the horror directors most well known within it, and its larger impact on American cinema.

    First, lettuce define our terms. Giallo is greasy wop-talk for “yellow,” like the color of my wife’s skin, and refers to a particular style of Italian-produced murder mystery film which often includes elements of horror fiction (such as slasher violence and eroticism). The genre developed in the mid-to-late 1960s peaked in popularity during the 1970s, and subsequently declined over the next few decades. This description is copied entirely off of the beginning of the Wikipedia article, but if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, says I.

    Is that a zombie riding a shark? MAYBE. Read on!

    Without getting too into the weeds on the subject, the genre covers a fairly broad range of films, from pulp murder mysteries to straight supernatural horror. There are some common elements. First, there is almost always a psychological element to the films, some insanity provoked by trauma in one of the main characters. There is always killing, and it is always very violent and very much center screen – this is not a genre of happy fluffy bunnies. There is very (and I do mean very) little focus on the cohesiveness of plot or dialogue throughout the film. Don’t get me wrong – it isn’t the purposeful insanity of, say, House, or the purely so-over-the-top-it’s-weird-ness of Zardoz. More of a…benign indifference to strict logical flow. There is, essentially, just enough of a storyline to ensure that one event leads to another, and that’s about it. There is a great focus on cinematography, on capturing interesting or provocative or just plain unusual shots. The soundtracks are usually awesome, as in, done as if the keyboardist from an early 80s synthpop or electro funk band was on some mellow acid and just decided to score some movies in his spare time. There’s even a band, called Goblin, most well known for their movie soundtracks. I could go on and on, but this gives you the gist of it. Seriously though, if any of you guys want to just meet somewhere and listen to me wax philosophic about this genre and all the movies that I love in it for six hours while drinking beer, I am always up for that.

    One of the many different posters for this film. Collect them all!

    We begin our exploration with one of the seminal works of the great Lucio Fulci (more on him next week), Zombi 2. Or as it was known in America, Zombie.

    Italian copyright law (pre-EU) was a funny thing. Any movie could be marketed as a sequel to any other movie, without having any direct relationship. We of the superior Anglo-Saxon lineage understand that George Romero’s masterwork Dawn of the Dead was a direct sequel to his groundbreaking Night of the Living Dead. As the science of phrenology teaches us, Italians aren’t nearly as intelligent as we are, and so were ignorant of this fact. Personally, I blame all the out-race breeding. Dawn of the Dead was released in most European markets titled Zombi, and the audiences thought it was simply a stand-alone. Ever one to try and turn a quick buck on the cheap, the Italian movie industry decided to cash in, and Zombi 2 was green-lit. The title Zombie is for the American release since over here, it is not a sequel.

    As a brief aside, this started a bizarre and, for the collector, irritating trend of any movie involving supernatural cannibalism to be labeled as a Zombi sequel in Europe. So there are a shit-load of movies that all have multiple titles, but if you’re hunting them down, they might be known as one thing, or might be known as Zombi 3, 4, 5, etc., depending on which production company is doing the release at any given time, and varying according to release region. In two weeks I’ll review one such, chosen to show just how far afield this trend can go. Though not one of the chief offenders of appropriating the Zombi moniker, Non si deve profanare il sonno dei morti (I Do Not Profane the Sleep of the Dead) is one of the worst, having been released with over 15 different titles. My personal favorite of the titles for that film, and the title on my copy is Let Sleeping Corpses Lie.

    Anyway, I won’t go into a great deal of background on director Fulci, because I’ll cover him some in next week’s installment of giallo background since he is an important figure in the genre. Suffice to say the man has some kind of obsession with eyes. I own six of his films, and I’m fairly certain I remember seeing eyeballs punctured or mutilated up close on camera in every one of them.

    That started with Zombie. After a brief opening scene in a hospital where a doctor shoots somebody wrapped in a sheet in the head, we cut to an abandoned boat drifting into New York City. Officers variously described as either Harbor Patrol or the Coast Guard find somebody dead inside, and a zombie, which bites one of the cops in the throat (they look like harbor patrol to me, though one of them makes a crack about getting a big bonus for bringing this ship in, so maybe they’re some kind of salvage crew mercenary harbor patrol cops?), killing him. His partner blasts the zombie back into the sea, and his dead partner is taken to the city morgue.

    One of the “zombies” promised by the title of the film.

    The daughter (Tisa Farrow) of the man whose boat was found adrift teams up with a reporter (Ian McCulloch) investigating the ghost ship, and they trace its route back into the Caribbean. There’s a hilarious scene where the cab driver on the island they fly to tells them there aren’t many boats about to be hired, and then we see them walk along a dock which is literally cluttered with civilian boats. There they meet Al Cliver (who was born Pierluigi Conti – cultural appropriation!) and Auretta Gay, who are just about to set out on vacation on their yacht and agree to take our investigators with them to try and find a sinister island that the natives are rumored to avoid.

    Here’s where this movie gets fucking awesome. Auretta strips down to just a thong bottom and goes scuba diving. She encounters a tiger shark, which is attacked by an underwater zombie that keeps trying to bite it. This scene is pure cinematic gold. There was a diver, done up in water-resistant zombie makeup, and he actually fights a tiger shark they doped up so that it wouldn’t be too aggressive. When you see the guy biting on the shark, he’s actually doing that. Man, they just don’t do movies like that anymore, and it’s a goddamn shame.

    So awesome it deserved another look.

    While fending off the shark before the zombie showed up, the boat was damaged, and so the protagonists fire off some flares. On the island, doctor’s assistant Lucas sees the flare and asks if it’s the Devil. Yes, Lucas, the fucking Devil is firing off bog-standard emergency flares from just off shore. This is why a white guy is in charge of your island.

    The foursome are rescued by Doctor Richard Johnson, who was also in one of the great all-time classic horror films, The Haunting. I’ll review it someday – it’s really superlative. A complete sense of dread built up with almost no effects whatsoever. Also, it lent the opening sample to a great White Zombie song.

    Once ashore, we learn that Richard Johnson was friends with Tisa’s old man, and they were researching why the dead are increasingly returning to life on the island. The film never makes a definitive statement, but voodoo is mentioned several times, so I guess we’re going with “magic” in this one. He agrees to help the stranded newcomers but first asks them to check on his wife up the road while he tends to more zombie research right quick.

    Of course, the fucking gardener was left in charge of security at the house, and he blew it. You already know the wife’s dead, because of a fantastic scene earlier in the film where she’s showering (yay, more titties!) and a zombie breaks into the house and kills her. Here you have another one of the great moments in horror history: for the first time in a major release, you get an agonizingly slow, up close, center camera shot of a big splinter of wood jamming right into and bursting her eyeball, no cutaways or wide angles to lessen the impact. I remember seeing a brief interview with Tom Savini for Bravo’s 100 Scariest Movie Moments where he recalls watching that scene building, and wondering if Fulci had the guts to do what even he hadn’t dared in Dawn of the Dead (for the tragically ignorant amongst you, Savini did the effects for that film).

    See that spike on the right edge of the frame, just below the zombie’s wrist? It’s about three seconds from going straight into that eyeball.
    Don’t worry though, she has bigger problems to worry about than her missing eye. She gets eaten.

     

    Fleeing in terror from the scene at the house, our protagonists are making their way back to the hospital when they stop to catch their breath. For some reason Tisa and Ian start making out when it turns out they’re in a Spanish conquistador cemetery, and the remarkably still meaty former Spaniards begin to reanimate.

    Fight fight fight people die, eventually, we have a last stand at the hospital, and I won’t spoil the ending for anyone who decides to see it. But New York City at least gets overrun, so I’ll leave it at that. Serves all the progressives who live there right! If it wasn’t for major cities, there’d be no national democratic party! Down with urban dwellers! REEEEEGION WAAAAAR!!!

    Look, everything I write about these movies is going to be biased because I love them all so very, very much. I could seriously sit down and watch this shit all day. The barely-there storylines, the garish, brutal on-screen killings with bright red pulsing blood, the horrifically rotting zombies dropping piles of worms out of their eyes, I even love how you can’t tell what language the fucking things are shot in (pro-tip: most of the time they’re shot without the dialogue being recorded at all, and dubs are put over it in post-production for each country that it’s going to be released in. Hell, in Zombie, half the cast were English speakers who had no Italian, and the other half were the reverse. This is because they were always filmed with an eye towards international release since none of the European nations were large enough to guarantee good gross receipts by only catering to their own native audiences). So don’t take my word for it, because I’m going to tell you to watch every one of these.

    I picked this one first because I think it’s a good way for those of you unfamiliar with the glory of low-budget 1970s Italian splatter-horror to segue into the genre with a fairly familiar motif. Everybody knows zombie movies and has seen at least a few, so the transition from American “don’t show anything too graphic and try to make sense” movies won’t seem so jarring. The bottom line is, if you like horror, you will like this movie, I guarantee it. If you don’t like horror, then what the fuck are you doing reading this anyway? Fuck you too, buddy, and just get on with posting all your endless goddamn “hurr durr let’s all give HuffPo more advertising money by hate-sharing their posts” OT links in the comments below. Always remember how much Zardoz loves you all, my children.

    I rate Zombi 2/Zombie six decayed heads out of seven.

     

  • Reviews You’ll Never Use: The Monster Squad

    Greetings Boils and Ghouls, and whatever other gender you may be currently identifying as. For the next three weeks, I’ll be reviewing films from that wonderful splendiforous genre, my personal favorite, giallo. I’ll be doing this due to the presence of several well-known giallo guests at Texas Frightmare Weekend, coming up May 5th-7th. I’ll choose three different films from three of the genre masters. And don’t worry, my beloved readers, you’ll get a full report of Texas Frightmare after it’s finished and I’ve recovered from my biggest drinking & spending weekend of the year.

    But since most of you probably either haven’t heard of that genre or don’t care for it because you are philistines with no taste, who drink knock-off Colt 45 in paper cups drawn out of a large plastic bag being sold by that elderly Mexican fellow pushing it around in the little cart, I won’t subject you to four straight weeks of the best 1970s Italy had to offer. This week we’ll go with a popcorn goofy horror film, one of my favorites from my woefully mundane childhood, Monster Squad. Or more correctly, The Monster Squad. But seriously nobody calls it that in casual conversation, and if you do, you’ll stand out as being that guy.

    The movie poster. Pretty much does what it says on the tin.

    Monster Squad is a 1987 creature feature with a set-up so ludicrous you can’t help but love it. Dracula is trying to take over the world, and to do so, gets the old band back together. Only our impetuous band of child heroes can stop him.

    Monster Squad was directed by Fred Dekker, a man who writes much more than he directs. His few other directing efforts are…hit and miss. You have RoboCop 3 (boo, hiss!), but also Night of the Creeps (huzzah!). More interestingly, the film was written by Shane Black. Now if that name doesn’t ring a bell to you, see if this does: “Billy. Billy! The other day, I was going down on my girlfriend. I said to her, “Jeez, you got a big pussy. Jeez, you got a big pussy.”

    That’s right, Monster Squad was written by fucking Hawkins.

    Seriously though, check out his IMDB. In addition to being Hawkins, he’s written Lethal Weapon, Iron Man 3, and is directing the upcoming The Predator film. Nuts, huh?

    Aside from that, Monster Squad is peopled largely with actors that you may probably kinda sorta recognize, but probably not (depending, of course, on how big a film fan you are). Mary Ellen Trainor (RIP), mostly known from the Lethal Weapon series. Leonardo Cimino, who plays the weird little bald guy with an accent in every movie which called for that role (also RIP). Jason Hervey, who played asshole older brother Wayne on The Wonder Years. Tom Noonan, from all sorts of things like Last Action Hero, and decent little Satanic Panic throwback horror film The House of the Devil. The IMDB photo for the main protagonist, Andre Gower, kind of has a rapey murder vibe going on. Finally, Drac himself is played by Duncan Regehr, whom our friends from north of the border will recognize as also being Canadian. He was in several episodes of DS9 as a Bajoran dude getting to occupy Major Kira’s wormhole and was also the ghost-but-really-it’s-an-alien-who-likes-fucking-Dr. Crusher-and-lives-in-a-candle-for-some-reason on that one episode of Next Generation where they go to Planet Scotland. You know exactly the episode I’m talking about, you fucking nerds.

    ANYhoo, our story opens 100 years ago, with Dr. Van Helsing botching an attempt at killing Duncan’s Dracula – Dracan…Duncula? I like Duncula, let’s go with that.

    Cut to present. Duncula has set up shop in Red Stick, Louisiana, and has recruited The Mummy (who escapes from the local museum), The Creature from the Black Lagoon (whom I could totally see living in Louisiana), some poor schmuck who has been turned into a werewolf, and even managed to rob Frankenstein’s Monster from an airplane carrying it God-knows-where. Does Red Stick even have a museum that would be fancy enough to host an actual mummy as part of an exhibition? I dunno. Suthenboy, what of it? You’re the closest one I know to that area.

    The Jackson Five, as re-imagined by…well, me, I suppose.

    Turns out, Mary Ellen Trainor just so happens to buy Van Helsing’s diary at a fucking garage sale (not making that up) and gives it to Rapey McMurderface as a gift. See, he’s really into monsters and has an after school club where they go up in a treehouse and talk about monsters. The only problem is, the diary’s in German.

    So off we go to Leonardo Cimino, playing a Holocaust survivor, who translates it for them. Turns out there’s an amulet that balances good and evil in the world, and once every hundred years, you can bust that shit up and then evil will rule the world. So this is Duncula’s plan in a nutshell.

    Our plucky protagonists manage to defeat the monsters one at a time (the mummy never does a goddamn thing except shuffle around and then get destroyed) and even recruit Frankenstein’s Monster onto the Good Team. Finally, we’re left with only Dracula, who, in a pretty badass scene that somewhat presages what you see at the end of Rogue One, purposefully strides through the middle of town casually massacring the entire police force as they run up to him one at a time.

    Of course, in the end, a hole is opened to Limbo by having a virgin read some words (that’s how Limbo works, right?), and the mean monsters are sucked into Purgatory forever. Frankenstein’s Monster is also banished, punished for looking weird regardless of the morality of his behavior. Just like in real life. Being an 80s movie, there is, of course, a bitchin’ training montage, and a contrived rap song for the final credits.

    Look, the movie has tremendous heart. And the monster effects, particularly the Gillman, are honestly quite good (thanks to the wizardry of Stan Winston). I also personally have always preferred the half-man, half-wolf bipedal werewolves to the “he just turns into a big wolf” variety. And there are some background scenes that still warm my nerdy child heart (one of the characters wears RoboTech pajamas. I wish I had RoboTech pajamas as an adult!). It’s genuinely great for kids, or even for adults just looking for a cotton candy movie on an otherwise boring Saturday night. But ultimately, there are just too many plot holes that you can drive a bulldozer through. How the hell do all these monsters manage to converge in Red Stick? Actual non-monstrous humans have a hard enough time converging there. Why the hell does the US Army show up at the end entirely in response to a letter written to them in crayon by a little kid? Why does Duncula have so much fucking dynamite on him at all times? He casually tosses dynamite at people that he just pulls out of a pocket on his tux at least twice – I don’t remember that as being a known method of attack, and I’ve read a lot of vampire lore.

    I have no clue who this guy is wearing the shirt, but he’s pretty fucking awesome, I can tell you that.

    Still, it’s impossible not to like this movie down on some level, in the cockles of your heart. Just don’t go into it expecting it to be anything more than it is. The film didn’t do well when it was released but became a “cult classic,” and when the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin held a screening featuring many of the cast & the director in 2006, it sold out with lines around the block. So if you’ve got an hour and a half to kill and want a little old-style Universal Monster action updated to mid-80s standards, give it a shot. You’ve really got nothing to lose except time, which if you’re a frequent guest of this site we all know you have plenty of, and you may find yourself smiling here and there.

    Two quick anecdotes: first, there’s a scene where one of the characters (a fat kid who died of pneumonia in real life in 1997; I can’t help but feel it would be more tragic if he wasn’t so goddamn fat) remarks to Leonardo Cimino that he knows an awful lot about monsters. Cimino says that he supposes he does and closes the door to his house, where we see a concentration camp number tattooed on his forearm. As a kid, I had no idea what that was and thought it was Dracula’s phone number. Why else would he be saying he knew a lot about monsters, with the camera then focusing on those numbers with menacing music playing?

    The Mummy, right when he realizes he’s about to be vanquished after accomplishing exactly Jack and Shit towards Dracula’s goal.

    Also, Rapey McMurderface wears a shirt through the first portion of the film that’s just a red t-shirt with yellow screen-printed letters that say, “Stephen King Rules”. My wife loved that shirt so much she found it at Texas Frightmare Weekend three years ago and wears it around all the time. I think maybe only two people have gotten the reference in all that time, though lots of people just think it’s a pro-Stephen King t-shirt and comment on how much they enjoy that author. I love my wife. I love having sex with my wife. I think I’m going to go have sex with my wife right now while you’re reading this. Think about it.

     

    I rate Monster Squad 15 Weather Penises out of 27.

     

  • Reviews You’ll Never Use: Gargoyles (1972)

    Greetings once again, fellow intrepid interlocutors of the insidious and the incredible, it is I, your humble author, once again delving into his personal DVD archive to bring you only the finest is bizarro horror filmmaking.

    This week we take a look at the largely forgotten 1972 made-for-tv movie, Gargoyles. I’m afraid I don’t have much to regale you with in terms of production information; such is lost in the sands of time. And in the sands of New Mexico, where this beauty was filmed on a single camera in 18 days.

    Opening title card. It’s always promising when they go with “day-glo slime” font.

    No dear readers, this film is remembered for one reason, and one reason only: the exemplary practical gargoyle effects, made for zero dollars and whipped up over only a few days time. Now when I say, “exemplary,” understand that I’m grading on a curve here. Obviously, they don’t touch what is seen in much larger budget films. The costume designer was a fellow named Tom Dawson, who also did the wardrobe and costume effects for Blazing Saddles and Arnold Schwarzenegger crap-fest End of Days. It is interesting, however, to note that one of two people tasked with creating and applying the gargoyle makeup is Stan Winston, in his first credited special effects role. If after perusing that link you find yourself still unimpressed with the fine work of Mr. Winston, then you can go right to hell – my reviews are not for the likes of you.

    Our story begins with a voice over explaining that gargoyles are actually the earthly spawn of Satan himself and that they arise every 600 years to try and take over the planet. However, it appears humans whip dat azz pretty badly every time because the creatures are now on the verge of extinction. However, it does result in many of the world’s myths about monsters.

    Cut to anthropologist Cornel Wilde (who, fun fact, was blacklisted during the HUAC era) taking a drive through the desert, with daughter Jennifer Salt in tow (Salt would later touch again on the world of the macabre as a producer for sometimes-great-sometimes-dumb FX staple American Horror Story). Interestingly, throughout the film, Jennifer always seems to wear her shirts tied up to show off her stomach, which is, I suppose, something of a welcome diversion. Coming across a barely-functional roadside tourist trap run by lovable old Uncle Willie, the drunken coot ushers them out back to show them his prized possession: a gargoyle skeleton hung up in his shed out back. Willie proceeds to tell the anthropologist (the character has a name, but does it really matter?) about how the Injuns in the area used to have a lot of stories about these and….you know what, it’s just the usual hokum spun out in crappy horror movies. I’m so damned sick of people acting like/assuming that a bunch of freaking dudes dancing around smoking peyote have some kind of magical powers or great insight into the universe that I lack because I wear pants. Fuck that noise.

    Bernie Casey is a Critical Monster Studies Professor

    Anyway, the titular monsters attack, killing Uncle Willie and driving Generic Anthropologist and Hot Daughter to seek refuge at a nearby roach motel run by horny drunk Grayson Hall (best known for her long-running stint as Dr. Julia Hoffman on the original Dark Shadows). Having escaped with the gargoyle skull from Willie’s shed and with audio recordings of the attack, our protagonists try to make sense of all the shenanigans and goings on. They are attacked again by two of the creatures trying to retrieve the skull, and once they have it, they flee across the road only for one of them to be hilariously run over by a semi. It comes out of nowhere and is really quite funny, because normally when you see the creatures running or attacking, they director uses a kind of weird slow-mo, so it cuts straight from that, to a damn truck coming out of nowhere and smacking one of them.

    “I don’t remember you from the faculty meetings at UCLA…”

    Running to the police station to report the latest attack, Hot Daughter pleads with the cops to believe her, and to release several dirt bikers they caught at the scene of Uncle Willie’s earlier that day (the lead biker being played by Scott Glenn, who is one of those guys whose name you don’t know but you’ll recognize him when you read through his IMDB). On her way back, she’s kidnapped by King Gargoyle…Bernie Casey?! I think that’d be racist today. You may know him from his work in Revenge of the Nerds or Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, but because I’m me, I’ll always remember him from Suzanne Somers and Stacey Keach eco-horror film, Ants. Yes, I have that on DVD as well. Anyway, the actually pretty awesome looking head gargoyle takes Hot Daughter back to their cave, where he explains that 1) they’ve only been woke for a few weeks, 2) he’s taught himself pretty good English in that time, and 3) he likes to have chicks read stories about 15th century rapes out of scholarly books to him. We also see the gargoyle hatchery, where eggs literally half the size of the adults hatch the creatures, and we learn that the ones with wings (such as Casey and his female gargoyle consort) are “breeders”.

    A close-up of the really quite good monster makeup used in this film

    Generic Anthropologist convinces the cops and the local dirt bikers to help search for Hot Daughter, and the group is eventually assaulted by the gargoyles. The humans manage to kill a lot of them with shotguns and pistols, which really makes one wonder how the whole, “We’re going to exterminate humanity” thing is going to work out for the monsters. Scott Glenn goes in to throw gas around and burns the hatchery, and upon seeing him beset with gargoyles, Generic Anthropologist declares him dead and flees (he did the same to Uncle Willie earlier – seriously, the guy will decide you’re a lost cause within seconds of you running into any adverse circumstance). The supposedly thousands of eggs burn up from the two gas cans splashed around one room, and Bernie Casey, along with his consort, try to fly away with Hot Daughter to, I guess, rape the shit out of her, since it’s pretty clearly established that the monsters only produce offspring with each other. However, Generic Anthropologist makes a Quick Decision and uses a handy rock to bust the consort gargoyle’s wing, forcing Bernie Casey to abandon Hot Daughter so that he can fly away with his basic bitch. And…that’s it. They get away, they end.

    Bernie Casey: Critical Monster Studies Professor’s breeder counterpart. She actually gets jealous of Hot Daughter and helps Generic Anthropologist to escape at one point, dooming her entire race because she can’t control her womanish cattiness.

    The movie basically sucks, but really, if you have the 74 minutes to spare, it is honestly remarkable how good they do with the gargoyle costumes given what you know must have been incredible time and budgetary constraints. So kudos for that. Director Bill Norton went on to acclaim *coughbullshitcough* as the director of such masterpieces as More American Graffiti, and Hercules and the Amazon Women. If any of you have seen either of these, sound off in the comments.

    Actually please don’t, nobody gives a shit.

    On a parting note, apparently it’s not safe to trust the TCM website’s user-generated movie ratings, because holy hell, check this out. The lowest one is 4.31  out of 5.

    Personally, I award Gargoyles 10 Pubic Hair Cartoons out of a possible 30. Keep track of the percentages here; 10 isn’t very good.

     

     

     

  • Straffinrun Tours

    Tō-ji, a Buddhist temple of the Shingon sect in Kyoto, one of the many beautiful attractions in Japan you aren’t visiting.

    Welcome to Straffinrun Tours.  Do you want to go around and see some of Japan’s oldest and most visited shrines and temples?  Experience the subtle beauty of a tea ceremony?  Try your hand at the wondrous art of ikebana?  Yes?  Get the f*** out of here because you bore me.  Use Google and save yourself a couple grand.  My tour is focused on exposing you to the concept of 本音 (pronounced honne) and 建前 (tatemae).  For that we will need to meet and watch real Japanese people doing mundane things in their daily lives.

    Have you ever laughed at a bad joke your boss or customer has made because the social situation called for it?  If yes, you have practiced tatemae.  The Chinese characters 建前 translate literally as “constructed front” and can be seen as your social persona that we put up to keep us from beating each other to death.  Some people say it’s basically lying, but, well, they’re idiots.

    Ever fantasize about slamming you boss’s head into the corner of his desk after hearing his bad pun for the 26th time?  Well, that would be honne.  本音 literally means “real sound” or, in other words, what you are really feeling at the moment.  Hopefully, you practice some impulse control and don’t run around calling a spade a spade.  It can be a bad idea.  Especially in Compton.

    Pachinko parlor

    So now that you’ve gotten the basics of honne/tatemae down, let’s find out what the little Nipponjins are up to.  First stop on the tour is a Pachinko parlor.  Noisy, smoky, and filled with dejected people gambling.  The game itself is ridiculous, but we’re not here to be bedazzled with blinking lights and digital breasts.  Over there!  Don’t look, but look at the woman in her 60s, wearing the tiger pattern blouse.  Her machine just went “reach” which means she has two of the three numbers necessary to win.  Will she?  Zannen (too bad).  She lost.  Did you see her reaction?  She pawed at the screen as if to say, “Oh, you’re a bad boy.”  Now watch the man in his 40s, wearing the suit.  His machine just went “reach”.  Zannen.  He lost, too.  Yet his was a stone-faced reaction despite having a 70% chance of winning \10,000.  The tiger blouse woman showed you her honne and the man, his tatemae.  You’ll notice about 90% of the players react like the man and 10% like the woman.  That’s Japan.  You don’t show your emotions in daily, public life unless you’re a freak.

    Let’s get out of here and grab a drink.  I know a pub down the street.  Yes, it does say “Pub,” but remember that donut you bought at the bakery in the station this morning?  It had “Donut” written on the wrapper, but it had eggplant inside.  This is not your mother’s English.  “Pub” to them means a small bar where, usually, a youngish gal, the one-san, and an oldish gal, the oba-san, fawn over you and you pay through the nose for the pleasure.

    The only pic I could find tagged “oba-san” that wasn’t granny porn.

    “Aah, sutoraifeen-san. Hisashiburi, desu ne” (long time, no see).  The oba-san greets us as we slide into our stools, her 48-year-old bosom defying gravity due to the hiked up obi (sash) of her kimono.  She pours us two Jim Beam Ryes on the rocks from the bottle with my name on it that she pulled off the shelf behind the bar counter.  Talk to her.  She is a master of tatemae.  Your jokes will be hilarious.  You look like Bradley Cooper, and where did you ever find that sweater?  Goodwill?  I’m not familiar with that brand.  Is it a boutique on Rodeo Drive?

    Here’s the rub; she doesn’t care about you other than you’re a paying customer.  She thinks you know that, but you see how good you feel regardless?  It’s dishonest honesty.  The true masters of tatemae don’t trick you into believing what they are saying is true, but rather allow you to bathe in the respect they are showering you with.  This is not your Western, “You look great.  Did you lose weight?” type of flattery.  It’s respect, so soak it in.

    Unless you want to drop a mortgage payment, I suggest we get out of here.  Hopefully, you’re beginning to see from our experiences at the pachinko parlor and the “pub” that honne/tatemae permeate Japanese consciousness.  You get polite, speedy, and competent service at the convenience store because to do otherwise would be disrespectful of not only you, the customer but also of the clerk themselves.

    So when you get back to The States and hear about “trigger warnings” and “micro-aggressions,” think about honne/tatemae.  Are the sensitive souls pushing this nonsense because they want a more respectful discourse, or are they simply forcing people to yield to their superior wisdom?  If it were truly about being respectful, they would show their tatemae and keep their petty grievances in the honne box.  Running around, pointing out trivial offenses is the exact opposite of what honne/tatemae is all about.  And for all the faults the concept has, it does provide a shield which can insulate you from nutjobs.  The next time you’re accosted by a pink-haired slob for using the wrong pronoun, just remember the oba-san from the pub and tell her, “Those black yoga pants really do smooth out the ripples in your thighs.”

  • Making Cooking Easy and Your Day Better – Louisiana Gumbo Edition

    By But I like cocktails and lurking

    I have had a few requests for some of the recipes that I have posted in comments over the years so I thought putting them up here would be easier for any interested parties to find. After hearing about some of the cooking mistakes from the inexperienced and how some people are pressed for time, I thought it would be handy if I compressed/condensed the recipes and methods so that anyone can eat gourmet quality food with very little effort and time. I hope you all enjoy these immensely. Really good food can only make your life better. This is gourmet food for the non-gourmet chef.

    Justin Wilson, the Cajun chef, was famous for beginning his recipes with “First, you make a roux.” Justin knew what he was talking about.

    I am going to give instructions on how to make a basic roux but I recommend buying your roux ready made from the grocery store. They are identical in taste and quality. The only disadvantage in buying roux is that the pre-made roux tends to settle on their way to your kitchen and can take some effort and time to stir back into a homogenous consistency. The only reason you should make your roux is if you can’t find any to buy or if you want a special roux made differently.

    Practicing making a roux is easy, cheap, and doesn’t take long to master. Start with a warm skillet, a good whisk, and a pot set aside to put the roux in. Put equal parts white flour and oil into the skillet and whisk until there are no lumps. I have tried various flours and found that the best, by far, is plain bleached wheat flour. Any good vegetable oil will do. A quarter cup of flour and a quarter cup of oil will make plenty of roux for any large pot of whatever dish you are making.

    Turn the heat up to medium-high and stir occasionally until you see the oil-flour mixture begin to boil. Begin whisking constantly. If it begins to smoke you have the heat too high. The constant stirring keeps any of the oil-flour mixture from sitting on the hot pan surface long enough to burn. Continue doing this until you see the flour start to brown. When it gets to the color of caramel you have made a light roux. You can remove the skillet from the heat now if a light roux was your goal. Because the pan and oil are still hot, it will continue to cook the flour for a short time and possibly brown it further. To prevent this, empty the pan into the cool pot you have set aside.

    If you want a darker roux continue to cook and stir the roux until it reaches the color of milk chocolate. If you are really adventurous you can cook it to the color of dark chocolate but you run the risk of burning your roux.

    The light roux will have less flavor and will thicken your dish, the darker roux will flavor your dish more and not thicken as much.

    For taste you can experiment with different oils. I find that peanut and sesame oils have a much nuttier taste, lard is more hearty, and the various other vegetable oils are more generic but still satisfactory.

    If you are worried about calorie counts, don’t be. A little roux goes a long way. The oil coats the flour granules and makes them more difficult to digest. The darker you make the roux, the more you cook it, the fewer calories there are to be digested.

    Again, unless you are shooting for something unique like a sesame roux, it is much easier to buy your roux ready made. There are numerous brands of ready-made roux; they are all identical and as good as what you can make yourself. It only takes a few minutes to make a roux but having it ready made is a real time saver. Buy your roux. It is usually found in the ethnic foods section of your grocery store and is economical.


    How to throw together a first class meal in fifteen minutes

    1/4 – 1/3 cup of prepared dark roux. A light roux will do but a dark one is preferred
    1 12oz to 16oz bag of frozen seasoning blend (onion, bell pepper, celery mixture)
    6-8 chicken bouillon cubes
    1 cap-full of Zataran’s liquid crab boil
    1 teaspoon (less if you are a wimp) Cayenne pepper
    1 tablespoon crushed garlic or 1 teaspoon powdered garlic
    Dark chicken (8 boneless, skinless thighs or 4 leg quarters)
    About 2 lbs of cajun sausage, sliced ¼ inch thick
    6-8 cups of water – to cover the meats

    If you are in a hurry you can simply throw all of these ingredients into a large stock pot cold, adding the water last to just cover the meats. Cover your pot and bring to a low boil for about one hour. There is no need to precook or mix anything. The boiling will do all of that for you. While it is boiling, an occasional poke with a spoon isn’t a bad idea. After you have turned the heat on you can start the rice, put away all of your ingredients, wash any dishes if there are any. (There shouldn’t be aside from the measuring spoons. All you needed to do was open packages, the pot is on the stove, and the stirring spoon is next to the pot on a trivet or spoon-rest.) When your significant other/others arrive all they will see is a clean kitchen, a boiling pot, and the air will be filled with the most delicious smell. Serve over rice.

    – Get yourself a microwave rice cooker. It is a simple plastic pot with a snap-on lid and a vent. It only costs a couple of bucks. To make your rice, put two cups of water, one cup of rice (basmati is best), two chicken bouillon cubes, one and a half tablespoons of butter, and about one tablespoon of dried, sweet basil in the pot. Microwave on high for 15 minutes.
    You can taste the rice but don’t let anyone else taste it before serving the meal. They will eat all of your rice right out of the cooker.

    Lastly, while you are in the Cajun food section of the grocery store, keep your eyes peeled for gumbo file’. It is dried and finely ground sassafras leaves. After you have served your gumbo over rice you can sprinkle this over the top of your dish.

    This is a perfect recipe for anyone who wants really good, authentic home-cooked meals but doesn’t have a lot of time. It is easy, fast, and doesn’t take a master chef. I am looking at you Commodius Spittoon. It is also a perfect recipe for any restaurant because it can be made in bulk in minimal time and sold by the bowl for a good profit. It will draw a large, hungry crowd, especially in cold weather. Trust me, they will keep coming back.

  • Game Review: NieR:Automata

    I love Carnivals!

     

    This review comes from my 30+ hours of gameplay. I have not exactly 100% completed the entire game, but I did finish approximately 70% of all the missions and quests before I finished the game’s story. I will not reveal any spoilers.

    Before I go into the nitty gritty details about NieR:Automata, I would like to quickly go into the game’s background, such as the series it’s a part of and its creators. NieR:Automata is a sequel to the 2010 PS3/Xbox360 title Nier, which is itself a spin-off from the Drakengard series. The series and franchise as a whole were directed by Japanese game developer Yoko Taro, who is quite known in the industry for having multiple endings in his games. He is also known for his narrative style consisting of dark topics and atmospheres with a few little happy and funny rays of sunshine to lighten you (the player) up. Very important to keep in mind about all this is that this game is mostly stand-alone so please do not worry, you are not missing out! If you do find yourself curious for more background information on the series, however, please check out the other games yourself for more fun and sad times!

    “I don’t like sand…”

    Now that we got that little introduction out of the way, let’s get to the main course! In a nutshell, the game’s story revolves around a cold, stern female android named YoRHa No.2 Model B (2B), an inquisitive and somewhat sensitive male android named YoRHa No.9 Model S (9S), and an embittered, lonely female android named YoRHa Model A No. 2 (A2). These androids are a few among many in a war between their organization (YoRHa and the Council of Humanity) and machines on Earth thousands of years after they (the machines) and their alien masters drove humanity off the planet. That’s as far as I can go with the story, but there is A LOT for the player to go and discover for him or herself and there are many twists and turns out there. For now, let’s move on to the gameplay.

    Kicking robutt!

    The gameplay is third-person hack-and-slash action with a few hints of RPG elements. RPG elements include weapon upgrading (which you will have to farm the materials for), leveling, and managing your Android’s chip systems which can affect your stats and combat capabilities (e.g. bonus health, exp gain, damage from counter-attacks, etc.). The combat system is very smooth, and the particle effects look great even when you’re juggling multiple machines in the air with your katanas! Hacking enemies and making them fight or blow each other up as 9S is also VERY satisfying. There are also some bullet-hell flight sequences. (For a probably well-known and simple example, think of Galaga or Galaxia, and for all you weeaboos/Japanophiles, think of the Touhou games). Controls in the game can be a bit awkward at times since the dodge button is located where the trigger would be on a controller, but the player can change the settings for their own pleasure.

    Taking a break

    Now, concerning the environment or the game’s general world, the game has an open-world, but it is not quite on the same scale as The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind or Skyrim (not that this is necessarily a bad thing). Fast-travel can only be utilized in a few places at first, but as the player progress to a certain point in the story/main quest, many more FT (fast-travel) spots become unlocked. This gives players quite some time to explore the different areas and scenery as much as they want (the FT system feature, however, is VERY convenient for the many side-quests in the game). The player will also be traveling with a companion for a good majority of the game so they won’t feel totally lonely. The game is also meant to be played in multiple runs, so just beating it only one time will not complete the full picture of the story or give the player the full experience. There are also many side-quests the player can do across multiple playthroughs (progress for some side-quests is saved, too!), so do not worry about doing everything in one run. Just enjoy the current run you are on and play at your pace. Now for the music and graphics aka A E S T H E T I C S.

    I walk this lonely road…

    The music composition composed by the franchise’s veteran composers Keiichi Okabe and Keigo Hoashi is spot-on for many parts of the game. If one played the original Nier or Drakengard 3, they may find some nice remixes or familiar sounds in this new title. However, the original tracks are especially interesting and fitting for the game’s settings. For example, in one of the game’s early areas is a ruined, abandoned city being reclaimed by nature, the gentle piano background music amplifies that somber and dreary feeling of loneliness the area exudes. The tune however also carries the sound of a gentle and lively guitar that plays while one sees animals such as a boar or a moose running through the rampantly growing nature. During boss battles or action intensive scenes, the score greatly swells and the themes fit the bosses to a T, going with a variety of styles ranging from full orchestras to wild techno/synthetic. The voice acting is also very well done, both in the original Japanese and English languages. Either way you play it, the voices are very satisfying, and I feel they accurately conveyed the emotions and personalities of the characters.

    Fire the MISSILES!

    The scenery and graphics are also particularly beautiful and may even distract you from playing at times. In most of the areas the player will go to, they will mostly find no one but enemies, and I feel this helps further emphasize a sense of isolation that only makes you appreciate the interactions and relationships between the main characters and their companions so much more. The character designs also shine in this title. Prime example is the main cover girl, 2B, complete with her skirt and high heels. (Fun fact: when Yoko Taro was asked why 2B had high heels even with all the combat and action, he stated, “I just really like girls.”) Besides 2B, the rest of the ensemble are well designed, and some of the machine enemies you fight may even look surprisingly cute and endearing.

    The Great Ascent

    Some final thoughts and observations about the game: Many moments in the game touch upon topics that lurk in the darkest parts of our hearts and minds. However, the thing that makes all of this interesting is that only a few, if any, of those moments feel forced. A lot of these moments appear in casual and intimate conversations between 2B and 9S throughout their journey, and their interactions come across as a bit awkward at times (they are androids after all). But still, these conversations have an uncanny, natural feel to it. Topics brought up throughout the game include duty, life, death, emotions such as love, the concept of a soul or an afterlife, the futility or purpose of life itself, free will, why people kill, personal motivation, and prejudice. These topics/themes may not be entirely novel or original concepts in video games or science fiction, but I feel that it is in the presentation and application of these ideas that makes this game truly shine. It does take quite some time to get into those previously mentioned interactions, but I believe the emotional pay-off is well worth the hours of fighting machines and traveling with your partner. Another observation I found was that in a lot of the side-quests, players can make their own choices that are neither necessarily good nor bad, but all of these choices rely on what you feel is important to yourself and your own motivations.

    ZA BOSS

    A final interesting observation about the game is the rather egalitarian relationship between the androids 2B and 9S. There are moments in the game when 2B has to save 9S and vice-versa; both characters have their strong and weak points that complement each other (2B’s physical prowess and 9S’s hacking powers). And neither of them appear to have more authority or importance than the other. Now, one may be surprised at how a simple-looking Japanese hack-and-slash title can have such depth, but trust me, I was very surprised myself and I’m happy to say I’ve never been happier to have been wrong about a game.

    TL;DR

    PROS: Rich and deep narrative, beautiful graphics, and the music is expertly composed by the series’s veterans, Keiichi Okabe and Keigo Hoashi. Voice acting is also very crisp and fitting. The characters are relatable (it does take a bit of time to really feel them through) and each have their quirks/personalities making them each interesting to learn and care more about. Combat is very smooth, and boy, do you feel cool fighting robot samurai with your combat bracers or katanas.

    The infinite vastness of space…

    MAYBES: The dark and odd humor of director Yoko Taro can come across as awkward or too quirky at times, so that may or may not be off-putting. The story can also get a bit convoluted or chaotic at times. A few feels or serious moments may/can come across as forced.

    CONS: Some framerate issues on PC (it is not exactly a buttery smooth 60fps at the moment, but there are unofficial patches available), fullscreen mode tends to cause a bit of lag, but windowed mode seems to work just fine. There is also occasional lag during pre-rendered cutscenes (this may have been due to my own fault/system, but it is still something to potentially keep in mind.) Combat may be a bit repetitive at times for some. Controls can also be a bit confusing, especially for beginner action game players.

    Final Verdict: 9.5/10 would play again for the Glory of Mankind.

  • Reviews You’ll Never Use: Kong: Skull Island

    I’m going to break one of my own rules established when I began this review column and provide a review for a new, mainstream blockbuster film. In a broad sense, I’m doing this simply because I can; admin power is not worth having unless it is wielded capriciously. But in a much more focused sense, I’m doing this because this film falls firmly in my wheelhouse. It is an American kaiju eiga, and there are damned few bigger fans of this genre in the world than your intrepid author.

    I hope that it is not too much of a letdown when I tell you that even as someone radically predisposed to enjoying this sort of film, I found Kong: Skull Island to be an unsatisfying experience. Let’s delve a little into what brought this film about, and see where things went wrong.

    Image result for kong skull island
    Promotional poster for the film

    This movie is a direct result of the existence of Marvel Comics. More specifically, the new Hollywood craze of “shared universe” largely instituted by the success of the Marvel films, beginning with 2008’s Iron Man. Shared universes existed previously, of course, mostly in linear sequels which often only obliquely referenced the events of prior films in the series. Perhaps the most famous and successful shared universe pre-Marvel was the Star Wars franchise. However, Marvel took it to an entirely new level, with cross-over cameos, and explicit tie-ins canonically linking each movie into a specific place and event sequence in the universe, and where actions in each film had direct repercussions upon the subsequent films in other lines (Agent Smith’s capture of the Tesseract in the first Captain America story having a direct influence not only on the first Avengers movie, but also creating the overarching story of the hunt for the Infinity Gems/Stones, as they are called in the comics and film series, respectively). This level of cross-promotional bonanza was unheard of before the wild success enjoyed by Marvel, and other studios have been scrambling to catch up ever since (and mostly failing – suck it, Warner Bros.!). Even one of the previews for this film is for another franchise-starter for a shared universe, The Mummy. Universal is hoping to rehash all their classic monsters in new, gritty films in which the monsters will all presumably eventually work together. This will lead to a steaming pile of crap, OR possibly be one of the greatest movies ever made.

    Never ones to pass up an opportunity to copy something else more successful, studio after studio began planning sessions on which properties they could franchise into endless streams of summer blockbusters in shared universes. In 2010, Legendary Entertainment had acquired the rights from Toho Co. for a big-budget American Godzilla film. This led to the Gareth Edwards 2014 film, titled simply, Godzilla. I thought it was very well done, but I’ll not say more lest you heathens receive two reviews for the price of one.

    After the success of that film, in which Legendary partnered with Warner Bros. for financing and distribution, some bright bulb thought to check and see if WB had or could secure the rights to our own homegrown giant monster, King Kong. Sure enough, they did, and Shared Universe Mania did the rest.

    Image result for king kong vs. godzilla
    What this is all ultimately leading up to. Read on!

    However, you can’t simply launch straight into a two-marquee monster mash-up without the mortar of the shared universe structure, which in the industry is called universe building. A more prosaic term might be “let’s see how many of these cash-grabs we can shit out before having to get to the main event”. And so Kong: Skull Island was born in their small, fevered minds.

    Our story takes place in 1973. Fancy-pants cryptozoologist (fun fact: Microsoft Office does not recognize that as a real word, just like it isn’t a real job) John Goodman has discovered a new island in the South Pacific, where he believes be dragons. He fakes an interest in cartography and securing any unknown natural resources of this island before the Soviets can get their red claws on it, and manages to convince the gub’mint to provide him with an Air Cav escort led by regular-pants Samuel L. Jackson. Jackson is an officer who is bitter over America’s seeming defeat in the Vietnam War, and looking for one last mission to find meaning in an otherwise meaningless age.

    Image result for full metal jacket hooker
    Pictured here: all you need to know about Vietnam

    With Too Tall and Snake Shit in tow (damn, wrong movie), along with stock issue anti-war journalist Brie Larson, and drunken burned out former SAS devastatingly handsome devil-may-care mercenary Tom Hiddleston, the stage is set. Upon flying over Skull Island on an investigatory bombing run (yes, I meant what I typed: it’s part of a geological survey cover story so preposterous I don’t want to spoil it for you), the entire force is knocked out of the sky by Kong. The remainder of the film is the story of groups of survivors trying to make their way to a pre-planned rendezvous with a resupply mission from the cargo ship they arrived in. Jackson wants to kill Kong to avenge his dead soldiers, whereas the civilians are only worried about getting the hell off the island. Various giant beasties make their usually violent appearances, and we meet the taciturn natives of the island, who have taken in stranded World War II fighter pilot John C. Reilly.

    It’s a hell of a cast. Legendary obviously was willing to spend All Of The Money to make this thing work. The problems, though, begin to surface early.

    First, I honestly thought that Goodman and Reilly turned in the only worthwhile performances in this film, and even then barely. The characters are written so thinly that they all come across as clichéd archetypes, from the Handsomely Brooding Very Serious Hiddleston to Jackson’s bitter war vet, played by the actor shockingly against type as a loud badass angry black man. Reilly is genuinely funny as the comic relief, though there’s nothing in his performance that you haven’t seen before, so if you weren’t a fan of him in Talladega Nights or Step Brothers, there won’t be much for you here.

    Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts seems to be aware of the paucity of actual artistic effort going into this movie, and we’re introduced to the titular giant ape extremely early in the film. I suppose he knows why people are coming to see this movie, and it isn’t just to find out it was a fucking sled from his fucking childhood (I still get angry thinking about that, at random times throughout the day). His only other full-length efforts prior to this were the indy film The Kings of Summer, and 49-minute runtime made-for-tv movie Cocked. Being given the keys to the kingdom on such a large production so early in one’s career paid off handsomely with an at-the-time still relatively unknown Gareth Edwards and Godzilla (Gareth got that job on the really quite good indy alien invasion film, Monsters, before using his kaiju success to then land the plum directorial job for Rogue One), but here Vogt-Roberts’s fails to bring life to an already torpid script.

    A small sampling of my personal Godzilla memorabilia collection, and every film except for the 1998 Matthew Broderick abortion.

    The effects, always of paramount concern in a film such as this, are passable. It is, of course, a CGI crap-fest, but since that is the future of all film, I suppose I have to rein in my old man frustration and forever bury my man-crushes for the masters of the practical. If the names Tom Savini, Rick Baker, and Rob Bottin mean nothing to you, you are a sad, deprived little person.

    There are call-backs to Jurassic Park (Mr. Jackson tells his men to, “Hold on to your butts!”), the original King Kong Vs. Godzilla (giant octopus fight scene), and universe building with the 2014 Godzilla. The secretive government-sponsored Monarch Corporation is a prime player, and Godzilla-related past events shown in the earlier film are referenced again in this one.

    Already announced: the next film to be released will be Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), followed by Godzilla vs. Kong (2020). Hold on to your butts.

    Ultimately I rate Kong: Skull Island 12 Bags of Cat Food out of a possible 20.

  • UnCivil Reviews – Mass Effect: Andromeda

    After complaining in the Lynx that I got a physical box with a digital code instead of install media for my preorder, there were those who suggested I review the game and give an opinion.

    First Caveat: I have, as of this set of impressions, thirteen in-game hours. On the plus side, it does not feel like the game is about to end. Though it also means I have not fully explored the character of all of the NPCs, which is an area that traditionally was BioWare’s wheelhouse.

    Second Caveat: I may end up with unmarked spoilers because of my style of writing reviews. I will try to avoid this, but mistakes happen.

    I took my code and typed it into Origin while the Lynx were going. After getting to 42% of the download completed, Origin installed the base game and said I could start playing. It then went on to keep downloading content in the background. So if anyone is already put off by the Origin requirement, there’s your answer. This isn’t an Origin review, so all I’ll say is that it’s a weak Steam rip-off, and I’d rather not have to have yet another sales platform installed on my machine to play games.

    One of the designers also supposedly said something racist about white people

    The first impression I had of the game proper was that it loaded to the main menu massively faster than earlier Mass Effect games. After poking around in the settings menu as per my habit, I dropped into character creation. There has been much said about character creation on other pages, including claims that it was difficult to make a white Ryder which prompted me to immediately try for that.

    The results were passable but there were a few things wrong when wandering about in-game. One, the hairline does not actually attach to the forehead. That gets distracting in close-up shots. Two, the face looks fractionally small for the head but proportionate to itself. That could just be me having screwed up in making my changes. But one thing that kept jumping out at me – all the restraints on the character customization are artificial. It is clear that the engine as it exists could easily handle giving a wider range of variation. Two, it is easy to see where the impression that there was a deliberate effort made to try to prevent people from making a white character. Whether there was intent or not is the question.

    Anyway, I had my soulless ginger, and I kept wondering – why doesn’t the hair color apply to the eyebrows? It makes it look like everyone has a terrible dye job. Actually given how the hair doesn’t connect to the forehead, it makes it look like he’s wearing a wig. This leads into the next distracting problem. I’d dismissed the fuss about facial animations, but there is indeed something seriously off about them. At times, the lip-sync is broken to the point where the Salarians have more natural speech movements than the humans. This wouldn’t be as bad, but being Mass Effect, there are closeups during dialog, and it’s right there, front and center where you can’t miss it. Speaking of dialog, the voice acting… is spotty. Some characters work just fine. No problems. Others, the voice just doesn’t sound right for the model. And then there’s the handful where the actor is just awful. The Salarian director is one such character, where I was wondering “did they leave in placeholder audio?” during his dialog. Decent voice acting is invisible, it blends into the background. Bad voice acting ruins the immersion.

    Will this cavalcade of complains end? Yes, but there are a few more to get to first. Coming from the voice acting, you get the writing. Whoever wrote some of this dialog at best half-assed it. Other writing is par for the series and not so much of an irritant. The problem is the juxtaposition of varying degrees of quality. There is a side quest where you investigate a murder which is actually pretty okay, but I was doing it in parallel to some of the main quests where the glaring mistakes popped up. Little flubs – awkward sentence structure and word choice unrelated to character proclivities, things like that, but being in cutscenes for the primary plot just meant there was nothing else to pay attention to at the time. I get the feel of several parallel writers, where the less experienced members got handed the main plot.

    Right, lets get on to the gameplay. Anyone who’s played BioWare’s work in the past decade will be familiar with most of the conventions. In fact, they will have played this exact game before. For some, what I am about to say is the most damning commentary I could make. For others, it’s a non-issue. But here it is. This game is really Mass Effect: Inquisition. Character picks up unique ability that requires them to personally attend to some vital task. They are dropped into a position of authority within an organization without any qualification – an organization which they have to rebuild from a shattered state and woo allies against a better-resourced foe. And they repeatedly return to the same locales to do side quests and harvest resources to perform upgrades. They even have strike team missions which fill the role of the strategic map in DA:I. These strike team missions are where the Multiplayer is slotted in, as any of them sent out using an “APEX” requirement is a multiplayer mission. I’ve not done any of these because screw multiplayer; I play video games to get away from real people.

    I was okay with Inquisition, and I’m fine with its reskinning. In fact, the reskinning is one of the best things because the Environment artists did a gorgeous job. Lets take a trip from the Citad- sorry, the ‘Nexus’ to the Desert world.

    The office view.
    I told you it was the Citadel.
    Even the star system is dusty.
    The pretty view.
    The Business View.
    We really should pave the parking lot.
    We did build that.
    Fun fact, the Nomad doesn’t float.

    Then we go and have a chat with an NPC and we get another good look at the character animations. And we see that there was a shortage of quality control

    She stood like this the whole conversation.

    Lets take our mind off that, here’s a view of the system on the verge of falling into a black hole.

    It doesn’t technically suck, but it won’t be fun.

    But that brings me to another problem. While exploration is explicitly a part of the game’s premise, the movement transitions take too long. You select a new celestial object to visit, the camera zooms in where you are, pans to aim at the other body, then flies over there, pauses for a full second, and finally reorients at the new location before giving you back control. You can’t skip it, and it does this for every transition. This wouldn’t be so bad, but when you’re doing stellar cartography, a lot of these planets have zero or at most one surface feature to investigate from orbit. You will be flying from world to world a lot. This gets tedious after a while.

    While we’re on the subject of transportation, the Nomad is a decent vehicle in some ways, it definitely handles better than the Mako, but cannot tackle anything approaching the inclines that the Mako could. It doesn’t jump very high, but it also doesn’t leap off of cliff faces and pirouette through the air like the Mako did. It has one seriously annoying drawback – no gun. You have to get out of the Nomad to shoot anything. I’m not going to compare to the Hammerhead because that was a skimmer, and the wheeled vehicles are more appropriate parallels. The Nomad apparently has an infinite supply of mining probes packed away in the back. These probes are as big as people and I’ve launched a number on a single run without resupply. I think I’d rather have a gun.

    While I joked about the aesthetic in the screenshot travel montage, I do understand wanting to keep the Initiative tech looking like what we saw in previous installments. Where the problem comes from is the lack of originality in the Andromeda aliens. I’ve seen two sapient species thus far. One looks like it got lost trying to figure out if it was supposed to head to the Star Wars set or the Star Trek set. It is an uninspired rubber-forehead design. The main villain race looks like someone tried to mix and match traits and animations from the Geth and the Collectors. They are the biggest disappointment thus far. We flew all of these light years for something that isn’t even all that alien. The ‘Archon’ has a comedically child-like face too. It’s just a bit embarrassing.

    The characters look like BioWare standard fare, and I could point to the archetypes from previous games, but as I said, at thirteen hours in, I’ve not had time to evaluate them all. Except I know I cannot stand ‘Peebee’. Immediately after the scene where she introduces herself, I emptied an entire thermal clip of pistol rounds into her because she was that obnoxious. Sadly, these seemed to have no effect. There were points in the subsequent mission where I was all but yelling “Don’t follow the moron” at the pathfinder, but the power of cutscenes compelled him. I cursed when I opened the wrong door on the ship and ended up in an inescapable conversation with her. Some of the other NPCs started out grating, but became less of an irritant over time. Liam was much easier to deal with after I replaced him with a Turian and he wasn’t constantly yapping on during missions.

    I am seriously distrustful of the AI, and I really wish there was a way for the PC to try to get it out of his head. That thing is just plain wrong and the first step down a lot of bad endings for humanity.

    So far, I give it three dead Reapers out of five. It won’t wow you, but it can be enjoyable if you liked Inquisition. You may want to wait for a sale if you’re on the fence.