Everybody's Seen It

Yes. Go see The Hunger Games.

Doing better than Twilight and deserves to. Jennifer Lawrence is great, exactly how I pictured the Katniss character. In fact, most of characters (apart from the crazy looking Capitol ones) look and act pretty dead-on to my recollection. Including the two black contestants from District 11 that seem to have certain wacknut elements Twittering their discontent.

Seriously? I can't recall Suzanne Collins' exact words, but whatever she wrote about Rue and Thresh, I pictured them as black. There was absolutely no dissonance for me from the film. Cinna read black too. WTF people? Honestly, Lenny Kravitz is great in the film. The most heart-in-mouth sequence is between him and Katniss.

I'm oddly gratified that this is doing so well. I feel bad Lawrence isn't getting paid enough (1/2 mil plus residuals) but her ticket is in after this one. Probably my gratification has to do with it crapping all over Twilight. I've watched the Twilight films on DVD with my daughter, and Bella is just the whiniest, neediest, common-sense lackingest fem-douche on the planet. I haven't read those books, and can't imagine I'd ever want to.

If I have a criticism of Hunger Games, it is that it is almost too fast-paced. As juvenile fiction published by Scholastic, the books don't have much padding and are paced pretty much just like a film. But the movie is STILL almost breakneck, with no real pause to get a clearer understanding of why all this happens or who the characters are. I'm all in favor of the old 1960s style of picking up the characterization as you go in reading fiction, and the Hunger Games books certainly are that. But this film could still stand another half hour or so of meat on it. As it stands it is pretty much the Cliff's Notes version of an already spare novel. It hits all the major points and events... and is pretty damn dramatic and intense in places... but it seems edited to assume anyone watching it is already familiar with the story. It'll be interesting to see if a DVD fleshes this out a bit.

Bloody Hobo Justice

Okay, I have to admit I enjoyed Hobo With A Shotgun a lot more than it probably deserves.

Originally a winner in a contest amongst a slew of trailers made for Tarantino and Rodriguez's Grindhouse double feature, Hobo With A Shotgun is the second of those trailers to get made into a film after Rodriguez's own Machete.

Filmed in Halifax, Nova Scotia and armed with Rutger Hauer in the lead, this is an extremely violent, profane movie with its film stock and color saturation look firmly in the seventies and its over-the-top colorful punk style ripped from the eighties. Hobo knows it is a cult film, and is aiming straight at that audience, checking off all the boxes for transgressive or weird that it possibly can. But in amongst all the garish intestines and shouted f-bombs, Hauer is STILL pretty damn decent as the titular hobo.

If you do nothing else, seek out the trailer. It is an edited version of a monologue that's in the film, and it pretty much effectively sums up what the viewer is in for. But unlike most of the old grindhouse movies that frequently couldn't deliver on what their trailers promised, Hobo easily comes through. Even though the film is over the top and cartoonish, I can't decide what the most disturbing, horrific scene is. The film is about vigilante justice in a town that is impossibly crime-ridden (though I'm betting places in Mexico at present come pretty close), with the offenses running the full gamut, of murder, torture, etc. right up to torching a school bus full of children.

Lock this one away in the absolutely-not-for-kids box. I'll let my children see this when they are, say, forty.

Now I enjoyed this. But I've got a fucked-up streak a mile wide. Your mileage may vary.

A Game of Two Terries

Rock of Ages, a downloadable game on Xbox Live (and PSN I'm pretty sure), looks and plays like it was spawned by Monty Python's Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam.

Mash Jones' absurdist method of teaching history, like his Crusades TV series, together with the cutout animation and funny voices of Gilliam's Python days... you get this awesome video game. Neither person had anything to do with Rock of Ages as far as I can tell (the developer is Chilean collective ACE), but I hope they've been alerted to it!

Essentially you play the game as the legendary Greek character Sisyphus. You break free of your endless toil rolling a rock for Chronos' amusement and then move down through the ages of history using that same rock to conquer various kingdoms. The opponent kingdoms are laid out as a pair of paths (with terrain, obstacles, and gaps) that lead to castles. Players must roll Sisyphus' boulder (think Monkey Ball or Marble Madness on a bigger scale) through the gauntlet of their assigned path, ultimately smashing into the enemy castle gates with as much speed as possible. Your opponent will be trying to do the same thing to you, over his mirror image course. At its simplest it'd just be a race between two players (your opponent can be human or CPU), but the game is complicated by a tower defense aspect. You can build additional obstacles and hazards for your opponet to navigate, in an attempt to either slow him down (so you get to their gates first) or damage their boulder enough to reduce its mass at impact... maybe even destroy it altogether effectively costing them a turn.

I think maybe I like this game a lot more than the general run of gamers would. It has awesome, sometimes crude humor, a lot of historical references, and constant continual nods to a Pythonesque aesthetic. Everytime you roll on down toward the enemy gates the path is littered with soldiers and citizenry all represented as moving, dancing paper cutouts that shout 'oohg' or 'blah' when you roll over them. I never get tired of it! All backgrounds and landscapes resemble the bright, airbrush-enhanced backgrounds Gilliam used to do in his animation bits. The bosses are incredible absurd CG creations. The intro to each stage is a humorous history lesson, with some of your opponents a complete surprise.

I dunno, the whole thing is probably designed to appeal to me and very few others... at least few game players that'd be on Xbox Live! It hits a lot of my buttons and basically came out of nowhere. My kids think it is awesome, even though their exposure to Python and the other works of the two Terries is pretty limited. But they don't play it as doggedly as I do. I'm trying to get golds in all the time trials, find all the hidden item, everything. Whatever I can do to stretch out the longevity of this goshdamn game because it is too fun!

I read somewhere a reviewer complaining about how the defenses you build aren't enough to really 'defend' your castle. I think the dude was missing the point. The game is REALLY about rolling the boulder and getting to the enemy gates as fast as possible. It is primarily an action game with controller-facility and an understanding of physics and the boulder's momentum as your top tools. The defenses are there to slow the boulder's course. It is rare that a boulder actually gets destroyed and even going off the course only resets you in place with a small loss of time. Even if you lose some layers on your rock, from getting hit by catapults or running into dynamite, and it is smaller when it hits the enemy HQ, it is still basically going to take three hits to win no matter what. So when it comes to building defenses, you are not going to prevent the enemy from hitting you. That isn't the point. And the computer player WILL be better than you are at making the defenses until you put in a lot of time and learn what everything can do and the best places to set them up on the tracks. But you can still win. This CPU's advantages are balanced out by the fact that a human player is going to be better at controlling the boulder. Finding shortcuts and attempting insane jumps is part of YOUR advantage as a non-CPU.

If you want something really funny (and violent in a decidedly different way), try out the Rock of Ages demo. You'll know in two minutes whether it is the game for you. An utterly different, refreshing break from all the murder and grimdark games crowding the field.

Be A F@#%&ing Space Marine

The new game Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine is out for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC.

Reasons why it is a good game:
Robust graphics engine better than it has any right to be from RTS developer Relic Entertainment.
Seems like a cover shooter, but changes things up a lot to emphasise close combat.
Emphasises close combat, including health ups from finishing moves.
REALLY smooth system for moving from shooting to close combat.
You get to learn why 40K Space Marines are THE Space Marines.
Decent voice acting and music. Cutscenes good and also pretty short.
No weapons really suck if you no how to use them.
Customisation in multiplayer quite deep.
Multiplayer maps tight, interesting, and well-designed.
Perks in multiplayer varied and useful.
Ability to copy an agressor's loadout a great balancing tool.

Reasons why it might not be such a good game:
Close combat strikes and facing frustrating when finesse is required.
No block or shield button. And you could really stand to have one.
Levels very linear, encounters mostly staged the same way through the game.
Limited enemy variety.
Little play variety beyond run 'n' gun action (no vehicles, only one 'shooter' section, etc).
Extremely limited starting weapons and abilities in multiplayer.
System for unlocking weapons and perks in multiplayer arduous.
Only two multiplayer scenarios.
Some significant lag issues at times.

Reasons why it is a great 40K fan game:
You get to be a fucking Space Marine.
Narrative mostly accurate to 40K universe.
Setting and trappings accurate to 40K universe. Effectively disguises simplicity of the levels.
Hearing Orks speak. Seeing Guard hold the Marines in awe.
Definitely feels like part of a bigger war, with lots of incidental NPC actions.
Good choices made on visualisations of potentially difficult ideas like Bloodletter daemons and various plasma and power weapons.
Deep multiplayer customisation includes tons of Marine and Chaos chapters, and many armor types.
Again, you get to be a fucking Space Marine.

Reasons why it is a not-so-great 40K fan game:
Three man Marine squad around a Captain. No explanation for rest of squad.
Titus cool, but pretty underwhelming compared to canonical Marine Captains.
Health restore mechanic really out-of-place for Marines (it's clever, but almost vampiric).
Plot will seem 'same-old same-old' to those familiar with 40K universe.
Effect of Chaos on people and places treated too casually.



So basically, good fun for run 'n' gun players, especially those who like the GW game worlds. Sticklers have to be willing to overlook some oddball things put in for 'video game reasons'... seriously Relic, you couldn't include a Marine medic in Titus' squad instead of the life-sucking Execution finishers? Probably the first multiplayer shooter that has trappings cool enough to get me onboard with that particular type of timesink.

Lola Runs Away With It



I don't know how I missed ever seeing Run Lola Run over the years. But I watched it recently, and I have to say it is about the best 'time travel' movie I can remember. And all on a budget that was probably shoestring even back in the day.

German-language with subtitles but don't let that put you off. There is a commentary track on the DVD from the director Tom Tywker and star Franka Potente with both speaking fluent English. A major shout-out for the soundtrack too. Mostly industrial-tinged electronica, with some vocals from the lead, Potente.

Some comparisons to video games have been made about this film, but that didn't occur to me at all while I was watching it. After the fact, I can see that point, but I enjoyed it strictly on its narrative ideas, aesthetics, and extremely kinetic cinematography. Even counting the years and all the overuse of crazy techniques in cinema, the visuals were still really cool.

This movie confirms my faith in the strength of ideas over budget. Totally compelling.

Not Without Its Faults pt 2

The other game defying my expectations was Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team. I got this for ten bucks on my Xbox 360.

Unlike the giant-budget Epic Mickey, Kill Team is one of those little downloadable titles that publishers more and more frequently release as an apetite-whetting cash grab. Part of building hype for an upcoming triple-A game. Sometimes these are little flash games on websites, sometimes they are more elaborate... like the 2D 'retro-styled' game released in conjunction with Capcom's Dark Void. Usually these little side stories aren't anything to write home about, but Kill Team is now out about a month before the much-anticipated much-hyped Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, and is definitely an exception.

It is actually REALLY good.

The upcoming Space Marine game looks to feature the player in the role of a Marine Captain. In the tabletop wargame Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine Captains are legendary hero-level characters, typically commanding good size armies, and capable of laying waste to whole squads of trooper models on their own. They get their Chapter's pick of the best custom-made armor and weapons, and are typically very old, very experienced war leaders who have seen battle on countless worlds against all manner of enemy. They're also every inch the super-sized no-nonsense shoot-first type of warriors that western sensibilites seem to require. So a Space Marine Captain makes a great player character in the third person blast and chop-fest that this new game is bound to be. One of 40K's iconic enemy races, the Orks ('futuristic' versions of fantasy orcs), appear in most of the screenshots and videos I've seen for the game. Video games based on GW franchises don't always work out so well, but Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine *looks* like it hits all the right marks.

Which leads to Kill Team. This little downloadable game starts of showing an Ork Kroozer (warship) heading into Imperial Space to attack a Forge World (industrial complex planet). Space Marine boarding craft intercept it, and your game begins. I think the game represents a different specific conflict, but is attached to the larger that also encompasses the upcoming WH40K: Space Marine.

You can choose between four 'types' of Space Marine, and the differences in them basically reflect how much balance you want between ranged and close combat. You can also choose between five different Chapter color schemes, for a bit of personalisation. Each Marine type has three different weapons available but the high power ones need to be unlocked through play. The game also provides various levels of buffs (again most have to be unlocked) and you have opportunities to swap weapons and buffs in the course of blasting through each stage. You're never stuck with an unworkable combination. The controls are simplicity itself, the game is a twin-stick shooter. Moving in one direction while firing in another is a piece of cake, and use of special abilities, running and all that are mapped in logical places. There isn't that much to keep track of anyway.

Now for 40K purists there's going to have to be a little give here. The player is expected to run and gun through the corridors and chambers of a large ship killing hundreds of Orks and Gretchin (SF goblins). None of the Marines on offer would canonically be capable of accomplishing this. In the upcoming Space Marine game it might be a bit less of a stretch considering Captains are top-level hero characters, but in Kill Team you are using (for variety's sake) squad leader and lower level heroes. It is a bit like the stretch you have to make when Guile is fighting the Hulk in Marvel vs Capcom games. For the sake of even having a playble game, some bending of canon is required. So if a 40K goober can just have an open mind and set aside the limitations imposed on these Marines by the tabletop game, they'd find most of the rest of the game is a really neat little exploration of the 40K universe.

I read a review (after I'd played it) that said Kill Team's environments were drab and same-y. Well, there are only five levels and they will take the player about forty minutes each the first time through. And all the levels take place on a big Ork spaceship. So a certain amount of consistency could be expected. The devs structured this, actually working to NOT break canon in a sense, similar to the tabletop system's penchant for campaigns, scenarios strung along in narrative form to reach an ultimate goal. Most typically official individual scenarios do NOT range all over the galaxy and pit an army against a variety of enemie armies. 40K game narratives don't have an everything-but-the-kitchen sink approach, though in their own home games players frequently battle with little regard to a functioning narrative. So I found focusing on just the Orks and THEIR environment to be a good idea. Especially considering the short length of the game and the focused nature of the narrative.

As a long-time 40K fan, I found the portrayal of the cluttered, ramshackle Ork ship to be really cool. It had lots of great details, like every time there was an explosion big enough to rock the ship, all kinds of carp lying around would slide across the floor-- the Orks don't tie anything down! There are great vats of radioactive material just open to the air with no safety railings, and catwalks made up of metal planks barely riveted together. And everything is lit with harsh white lights or hellish red and green glows. The game totally nails the anarchic and heedless nature of Orks and their technology. It's a miracle they could build anything space-worthy. For a little variety's sake there is one level in the game where the Orks have sealed off the ship because of yet another alien presence that they haven't quite been able to eradicate. This was a good bit of fun, with a few visual cues here and there (heavy use of maroon and purple) to indicate the 'changed' nature of the region. The player must make their way through this area, of course, and battles a totally different, well-known 40K force, before confronting the Ork Warboss in the finale.

The in-game player and enemy models are also worth mentioning. I read somewhere that these were basically the assets from the Dawn of War strategy game series, but jazzed up with a few extra details. I haven't played Dawn of War (aversion to PC games, aversion to strategy games!) but the characters and enemies are all perfect for this type of game. The game is played in an on-high isometric view, very much like you were looking down on a tabletop wargame. You get a pretty wide field that you can see to allow time to see what's coming at you-- though the game has a lot of ambushing going on-- and to give room for many enemy to be on screen at once. Consequently, the actual size of the models for most of the game is quite small-- again, like a tabletop view, but every now and then the camera zooms down in for a slo-mo enemy death scene and then the level of detail in the scenery and characters becomes apparent. It isn't Halo Reach levels of sophistication, but there's a lot more texture and bling than was really necessary for such a cheapie twin-stick arcade game. Interestingly, with all the details the dudes in this game all look like well-painted 28mm figures, with the figure proportions and chunky details... as opposed to the upcoming Space Marine game's properly proportioned realistically rendered game characters.

There might be a lot of video gamers who will look at this game and think it is some kind of science-fiction ripoff of stuff from World of Warcraft, but GW's designs, both fantasy and futuristic, were full-fledged and established well before even the first early generations of Warcraft came along.

This game doesn't really do anything new, mechanics-wise. If you can play Robotron 2084, Expendable, Loaded, or Geometry Wars you're good to go. It just has everything tuned really well. It makes it seem ludicrous that no one has applied the twin-stick formula to 40K before. The graphics, the sound, the voice over (sounding rather like Patrick Stewart or Sean Connery at times), it is all just badass.

And the game is just as fun, if not moreso, in two-player couch-cooperative. The powerups, and their judicious use is pretty critical to getting through the game and Kill Team lets both players share the advantages of a powerup that either grabs as long as they stay in proximity to each other. Players can then stack the powerups in a way you can't do in single-player. Player one can grab the power field creating a dome around the Marines impervious to enemy fire. Player two can then grab triple fire, granting awesome sprays of bullets. So for as long as these pickups last, both players are protected, both players have spread guns. It really encourages the players to strategise together and not just be every-man-for-himself and dick the other guy by grabbing the good shit. Since my kid is a 40K fan, this game is tailor-made for he and I to just pick up and play. And it was actually fun trying to find all the hidden medals and acquire all the weapons and buffs. The usual confusion ensuing from two players wreaking havoc is a major part of the fun because with all the cooperative aspects, including reviving a downed partner, it almost never causes a game over. I never found the camera a problem either, and in fact its dynamic tracking actually added a lot to the game.

I've also read some complaints about game length, but to me it was perfect. I'm so damned tired of games that require such a huge commitment in time and effort... even fun games can bog down. This game is only four hours for one play through, as I've already said. But it was really fun on repeat plays and it rewards the primary player with unlocks, achievements, etc even when played co-op. So I've put much more than four hours into it, and none of it has felt like a chore or grinding.

Other writers seem to largely agree with everything I'm posting here. Even non-40K fans give the game a lot of props. BUT. I have to go along with the one huge glaring fault:

NO online co-op. Let me repeat that. A pick-up-and-play game with an expansive user-friendly field of view and multiple aspects to encourage teaming up, but has NO WAY for you to play co-op other than with a friend in the same room. Local two-player ONLY. Wow.

Now for me this isn't really a problem. I have a fanatical kid gamer and 40K goob right in my own home, and I'm not that big for online play anyway. This does, however, seem like an absolutely massive oversight. I can only think the money ran out. Since the game is so well-done in just about every other way, maybe the room wasn't in the budget to implement this. I don't know what all it takes to enable smooth netcode but looking at this game it isn't much of a resource hog. I can't believe it would require anything like a Halo or Street Fighter game to banish lag and get really efficient bandwidth usage out of it. It has a mostly fixed view, tiny characters, and minimal, straightforward controls (son not a lot of inputs to have to read).

Anyway. Huge oversight, yes. But for me personally, this is the best cheap game I've bought all year, and one of the better games overall regardless of price. I don't feel too keen to diss Mickey, and I'll admit to 40K frothing probably enhancing my enjoyment of Kill Team... but I'm probably not going back to the Disney game. I will, however, spend a lot more time in the Ork Kroozer icing greenskins.

Not Without Its Faults pt 1

I’ve ploughed through two more games recently, seeing through to completion both Disney’s Epic Mickey for the Wii, and Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team for the Xbox 360. Each of these games presents a case study in defied expectations.

Epic Mickey is a big budget, high-profile release from Warren Spector’s Junction Point Studios with some collaboration from Disney animation and Pixar Studios. The idea originally was to reboot interest in Mickey Mouse as a character, trying to shed some of his goody-goody image and go back to his roots where he tended to have more curiosity and mischief in his makeup. Mickey’s bad judgement in Fantasia might seem out of place to modern folks used to his squeaky clean image as Disney’s figurehead, but a look at his cartoon shorts from early in his career shows a much more troublesome mouse.

At any rate, all this high-concept thinking, pushed around with high-power talent and technical ability should’ve resulted in a game for the ages. That’s what the hype machine was saying prior to the game’s release (of course) and nostalgic as I was to see THAT old Mickey (not to mention some of the other characters being touted) I bought into it. Once reviews got actual hands-on time, they were less than fulsome in their praise. But I thought they were just strung out on dope, not really ‘getting’ how the awesome concept should override petty concerns like the odd bad camera angle or repetitious quest. My kids saw the ads and really wanted to play a game that plopped happy lil’ Mickey Mouse into such a Tim Burton-looking game world. So even if the game turned out to be not-so-good to me, they’d probably love it (not being so picky). I was so confident they’d love it, I bought the guide at the same time. I’d insist they NOT use the guide for their initial play-through if possible, but have it around to manage the huge collect-a-thon that I knew the game was going to be after they’d beaten it. And the book is pretty nice, a decent collectable in itself.

Well, I was right about the kids. They do love it. My son is on his second playthrough. My daughter hasn’t finished it, but only because she’s been really distracted by DDR. She just broke her dance pad (wore it out actually), so now she has no excuse. But who gives a crap what they think? They’re just dumb kids. This blog is what I think.

Epic Mickey is pretty damn good looking. The visuals are amongst the best I’ve seen on the Wii. Maybe not quite Muramasa great, but pretty far up there. Being a third-person 3D platformer, the graphics are all polygonal but they have a very moody hand-painted style. And the soundtrack is terrific. Composer Jim Dooley did a great job of coming up with original tunes and riffs on well-known songs (like It’s A Small World and the Pirates of the Carribean leit-motif) and imbuing them all with a Danny Elfman tinkle-tinkle creepiness. If you’ve seen any Tim Burton film that Danny has scored you know the kind of music I’m talking about. The game is not as dark and edgy as the ads made it sound, mostly because the game is almost non-violent (little in the way of real threats for most of the game takes a lot of edge off), BUT the aesthetic aspects and parts of the narrative (lost and forgotten cartoon characters) do imbue a lot of atmosphere and melancholy into the game.

It also does make Mickey an adventuresome hero once again. Plumbing the archives for the old Mickey and bringing along Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and plenty of other little-remembered characters was a great idea. Mickey has to own up to his mischief and deal with its serious consequences. You do this by performing tasks (a lot) and defeating minions and bosses (not so much) in order to undo YOUR original catastrophic mishap.

The controls worked fine for me. I’ve never really understood flat out hostility or antipathy for the wiimote controls. For older games come down the Virtual Console pipe I’ll use a joystick or the classic controller. But for modern Wii-designed games I never seem to have a problem using the waggle stick. For running, sneaking, jumping, and pointing at the screen to stream paint or thinner, the standard controls were fine.

But even with all this, it turns out much of the critical sniping is spot-on with my own opinion. The camera IS pretty effin' bad. I read a lot of 'kills you during critical jumps' complaints, but actually since you can have go pretty slowly and carefully you almost always have time to swing the camera around with the d-pad. If anything, actual onscreen visibility was more of a problem when making harrowing jumps. The game is dark, so the questions of whether you need to jump or where you could safely land seemed to crop up periodically. My problem with the camera was during combat. It tries to keep the same perspective as it does during most of the exploration time, but this is not the best choice in a fight in this particular game, especially where multiple enemies are involved. Honestly, the camera chooses not to be helpful even in battles with a single large beastie. I spent more effort trying to run and keep the camera facing the foe, than I did dodging or shooting paint. The battles aren't actually all that hard, but making the view work for you is an additional challenge that just did NOT need to be there. If I'd had a say in this particular aspect of the game, it'd have been to probably zoom out and up to give a higher, more encompassing isometric view, sort of like Powerstone 2. You'd sacrifice some detail during battles, but you'd know where everyone was at all times, and not have to fuck with camera facing. Again, this is a fault that is manageable, but because you're under duress in the battles, managing the camera while trying to dodge and shoot will seem a lot like patting your head and rubbing your tummy at the same time while driving a car in traffic.

Even THAT is actually not the games biggest fault though. Some reviewers refer to 'tedious fetch-quests'. And boy are they right. That's all this game really is. I bitched about the fights up above, but they only constitute a fraction... a frustrating fraction... of the overall game time. Everyone in the game has some goshdamn thing or other that they need you to do. And you will back track over and over again, to make things happen for the NPCs. And many of the deeds have multiple layers. So you might have to ferry ingredients back and forth between two locations more than once, or have the same mission repeat but with a bit more challenge. You learn several of the levels and their connecting 2D stages far more than you'll want to. You'll be able to navigate 'em with a blindfold on. Bafflingly (and also frustrating) there are a number of levels you CANNOT get back to. So if you fuck up a quest, you're done. I don't have a problem with that, but trying not to use the guide, I didn't know if I exited certain levels I'd never be able to get back... because many levels you can. Ugh. Points I guess for so much non-violent challenge. But it's a challenge just staying awake or maintaining interest in monotonous tasks, finding another flower or rounding up more annoying Bunny Children.

What really gets me about the fetch-quests though, is not the number of them, the repitition or the happy banality. Its the 'guide-itis'. This is where a game contains a puzzle that cannot be solved with normal logic or without a working knowledge of what the games' designers expected from you strategy-wise.

Spoiler alert: Here's an example. At one point the game wants you to find 'power boxes' scattered around a level. These are more or less analagous to the electric meter that every home (in the USA at least) has located on the outside of it. The game shows you one on the outside of a house-- blue with a voltage symbol on it. Then it says 'find three more'. So naturally I go looking all over the other houses. On the back of the buildings, like the one shown. But when that fails to turn up anything, I figure it's a game so they might be stuck on roofs or cornices or something. So I get on top of buildings and look. This turns up an additional one. I cannot find the final two anywhere. After way too much time spent looking, I crack open the guide.

One is located behind in an alcove INSIDE A WALL. The other is in a pit UNDER SOMEONE'S LAWN. What the fuck? Yeah, I could've found them... IF I'D SPRAYED THE ENTIRE LEVEL WITH THINNER... to uncover these hidden spaces. Another time I got stuck, and the answer this time was a hard-to-see route that again, YOU SPRAY WITH THINNER TO UNCOVER. After those two times, I never had another problem finding shit, because the answer is SPRAY EVERYTHING WITH THINNER. There are no hints from the NPCs, no 'fault' in the walls or ground like almost every other video game has in similar circumstances to keep you from hitting every possible spot on a stage. Nope. You pretty much have to thin ever goshdamn spot that looks like it can be thinned. And not only was this tedious, but it was antithetical to how I was trying to play the game. I was kind of playing like Mickey was unhappy that he caused the 'thinner disaster' that started the bad stuff, and created the villain. So I tried to be as positive and lean toward the constructive 'paint' end of things. Covering a whole level in thinner was just NOT what I wanted Mickey to do, purely from a character standpoint, let alone it's just dumb and arbitrary. End spoilers.

So I went to the guide twice to help me get on with the game. I'm not proud about it, but I maintain that I just couldn't get my head around what the game was after from me, the player. AFTER that, no difficulties. I didn't even try to do every quest that came my way. About 60% of the way through the game, the endless whining needs of the game world just stopped mattering. Some of the quests even 'improve' the ending cutscene, but I just didn't have the stamina.

The cutscenes were good, though I'll agree with the majority of critics that not having them fully voiced was odd. As much of a budget as this game obviously had, you'd think having Mickey and company talk would've been a no-brainer... at least during the cutscenes if not during all the in-game conversations. But no, it's all exclamatory oohs and ahs and the occasional grunt of effort. That's it.



Whatever the faults, the game's final act was pretty cool and I'm glad I stuck it out. That game becomes much more what I was hoping the whole game would be like actually. More focused on play skill with some timing on the jumps and peril from enemies while you are trying to perform other tasks. There's a fake-out with the final boss that works better than most final boss fake-outs.

I have NO desire to run through this game again and find more shit. I did do that for Brutal Legend and a few other games, but this game just emphasizes the wrong things for me. It certainly isn't the lack of violence or relative lack of difficulty. Not all games need to be as bloody as Mortal Kombat or as challenging as Ketsui. At first I welcomed the change of pace afforded by Epic Mickey. But it got old pretty quickly. It is hard for me even to say this game is great for little kids and their patience for fetch quests because the game is so damn long, and it does have that camera. My own kids like it, but they are nearly in middle school. I think younger gamers would get totally bogged down on the first run-through.

Unless they have the guide. But you didn't hear that from me.

Verdict.

I passed fairly lengthy judgement on the new film Captain America: The First Avenger elsewhere on an online forum. So to save time I'm going to paste that diatribe in here:

"I was disappointed by the movie. But I had unreasonably high hopes.

Too much CG for a character that screams practical effects only. Was done for Indiana Jones and every early Jackie Chan movie. So here you have the ultimate human combatant in a story set in the 1940s. Seems like as solid and non-tech as you could get it would be the way to go. They were already pushing things with all the Hydra gear.

I also think they missed some essential things that make the character great. I enjoyed the first act while he was skinny Steve and actually liked the handling of the experiment's saboteur a lot... it was better than most comic re-tellings. The cast were all fine, mostly correctly pitched as the simple pulpy characters they needed to be.

But after that origin section Cap never gets beyond 'kid from Brooklyn with big heart'. I realise this is 'Cap's early times' and all that, but by the time he was 'removed' from the war, his training, experiences, and exposure to all facets of humanity had made hime the embodiment of many American ideals (as opposed to propaganda, which is what he started as). When he awakens in modern times in the comics, he is a master tactician, incredibly adaptable, in full understanding of the limits of the super-soldier serum, and probably the Marvel Universe's foremost close combat specialist. The Avengers, Shield, and everyone else grossly underestimated him because they thought of him just as a beefy out-of-his-time-and-depth relic.

The film doesn't really get him past that. They give you glimpses... ie, memorising Hydra's goal map in about four seconds... but he just didn't become the Cap I always picture. Different people emphasize different things, so I'm grateful he got a picture good enough to erase memories of the old TV specials. I think as a movie it is better than Thor or the Edward Norton Hulk film... but I think all the other Avengers movies so far have nailed the essence of their heroes better.

....and him hitting a heavy bag for twelve seconds after the credits is no substitute for months and months of physical combat training he had prior to even being sent out on his first mission. He should, in a lot of ways be treated like the Batman. Not dark and scary, but unswerving, dedicated, and extremely well-trained.

Cap's comics are frequently at their most fun when modern characters act like Cap is literally old or from a more ignorant time. And then they not only find he is lightning quick and mentally adapatable but his supposedly out-of-date viewpoint is highly relevant to modern situations. Its like when Clint Eastwood cranks out a powerful filmic statement on racism. Old two-fisted Clint seems like the last guy that would make anything sensitive (if you buy into liberal establishment stereotypes) but there he goes making Invictus and El Torino, the crazy old bastard. People have more to them than just some checklist based on age or background.

The new Captain America film just keeps the character like he's a kid more-or-less. The Cap I know doesn't still have a lot to learn on-the-job by the time he wakes up with the Avengers."

Now. I realize my view, what I wanted out of the movie and the portrayal, comes from an extremely fanboyish/slavering comic nerd perspective. I'm pushing at little nodules of dislike that most viewers, even a lot of Marvel comic fans are never going to notice or care about. But I care. It is possible that the filmmakers can recapture lost ground with me in subsequent movies. But as it stands, Captain America: The First Avenger, despite my applause at the idea of a big-budget treatment, didn't do it for me.

Composed In The Baroque Mode

I’ve been sinking quite a few hours into Sting’s role-playing game, Baroque for the Nintendo Wii. One variant of the several, historically mutable, definitions of the word ‘baroque’ is: ‘adorned or decorated so heavily the original intent is unclear’.


That would definitely fit this video game and the choice for that title has to be intentional despite Japanese developers penchant for devising titles in English that are nonsensical or ill fitting. Baroque’s mechanics are so convoluted (though the controls are simple) and its narrative so obscure that, personally, I’m incredulous that somehow this thing actually got made at all, let alone was successful enough to warrant conversions to multiple platforms.

In the heyday of the Sega Saturn, the lion’s share of my purchases were Japanese import titles. Baroque first released in 1998 looked really interesting from the screenshots and descriptions. Very murky and mysterious and cool. But the Japanese-only language issue was a problem. I’d just gone through Samurai Spirits Bushidoretsuden, the Samurai Shodown RPG, with the help of a guide and that was pretty damn labor-intensive. Good game and fun, but a lot of work. I also had the Saturn’s Japanese-language Grandia in my to-play stack. I really didn’t want yet another guide-aided slog. So I didn’t buy it.

Flash forward nearly ten years, and I see copies of a game called Baroque at my local GameStop in both the PS2 and Wii sections. WTF? Cover art and screenshots looked sort of like the game I thought of as Baroque, but not as dark and evil. Yep, plot description seems to jibe with my memory. I looked up online to be sure. Sure enough Atlus USA published remakes of the RPG Baroque in the United States. Not only was the game now totally accessible to my English-speaking self, but a lot of additional information was also in the form of an online mini-community. And while trying to avoid outright spoilers, I was reading that Baroque’s graphics were brightened up, the mechanics for controlling and fighting modernized, but that it was still considered a grueling hardcore dungeon crawl (original Wizardry came to my mind reading that stuff).

I’m already on the fence about RPGs as it is. Given that I used to play pen & paper role-playing games, and used to work for Games Workshop (not an RPG company, but fantasy toy soldiers and a lot of its customers and staff are also role-players), you’d think the genre would form a regular part of my balanced breakfast, but not so.

My indulgence in RPGs has never been more than occasional. I’ve racked up far more minutes in action games with RPG elements; basic item management and leveling up as games such as Odin Sphere or Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. But actual role-playing games I have played I can probably count without having to include my toes or other appendages. Two real reasons: one, I’m impatient with the learning curve and strategy aspects. While I like ‘exploring’ well-conceived game worlds, I want to just get to it. And I am (or believe I am) suck-ass at the more think-y aspects of many games including puzzles and tactics. Two, RPGs typically require A LOT of time put in. I play a lot of video games for a working parent, but sometimes it can be sporadic. I mostly go for short-burst pick up and play games that suit my lifestyle. So that’s why my ‘currently playing’ list is so dominated by arcade games like fighters and shooters. When I do have some kind of long-play title I’m working on, it’ll be an ‘action-RPG’ (SOTN mentioned above), or some first or third-person shooter, games that are not nearly as intricate and attention-demanding as RPGs are. I’m also pretty easily immersed. I don’t require dense, novel-trilogy levels of detail. I grew up as an arcade gamer and so it isn’t so easy for me to find the patience for games that really drag out at all, let alone to the levels many RPGs pad themselves out for maximum perceived value.

So weirdly, I am in some aesthetic ways someone who should like RPGs, but based on practical concerns I tend to shun them. Every now and then I'll get enough of a hankering. Most recently I played through Skies of Arcadia on the Dreamcast. I also bought the Virtual Console version of Chrono Trigger, like two weeks ago, but my kids have beaten me to that one for now. Baroque’s bizarre science and religion mash up story… revealed as your character continually cycles through death and rebirth…looked pretty intriguing. That the play style involved some ‘roguelike’ features; randomized dungeons, complete reset of characteristics and items upon death, just made it appealing to the so-called hardcore (okay, masochistic) side of my gamer self.

In any case, I chose to go with the Wii version. And the wiimote/nunchuk combination works fine with the game. The combat in Baroque is rather action game-y and the part of the game that resembles ‘standard RPG’ mechanics the least. You have to actually run around and fight in real-time. You can avoid enemies or circle around them to strike when they are vulnerable. My understanding is that this was tricky in the Saturn original. The dark graphics and the limitations of a first-person view made fighting difficult. Switching to third-person and clearing away the murk makes Wii Baroque much less frustrating, although it is still tough until you learn what you are doing. These fixes came at the expense of much of the game’s evil atmosphere. It may have made things difficult, but Saturn Baroque had a grim, grimy ambience that is lost to a shinier (but still fairly plain) new version. The soundtrack has been re-done too. The new one is fine to me, and quite fitting for the game, but players of the original frequently say it isn’t a patch on the Saturn’s moody industrial tunes. The story itself is largely unchanged.

Now having spent a considerable time with the game, I do find even the new version to be problematic. Most players used to other games would probably find the combat inflexible, the dungeons repetitive, and the dying/resetting aspect quite off-putting. None of that bothered me. The graphics, sound, music, and controls; none of these are cutting-edge, but they all came together for me personally.

Nope, my difficulty comes from the very heart of the game designers’ philosophy, and one of the things that made me want the game a decade ago. The way the mysterious plot and the in-game objectives are doled out.

As I said in the beginning, Baroque hides the particulars of its narrative points under layers and details. At first, you play and are trying to just figure out how to survive. Then you are trying to figure out how the items work or interact with each other. Then you are trying to figure out how to find or keep the best items. THEN you want to figure out what to do next. Apart from just going through the dungeons—what is the point? Well, NONE of this stuff is spelled out for the player. The manual has a lot of words in it but doesn’t really put the system together. The manner in which items are used for various effects (there’s no magic system) is discovered through trial, error, and numerous deaths. The non-player character dialogues are cryptic in the extreme, but critical to the game. All of this reflects the Japanese original quite accurately and effectively simulates your avatar who, in the story, has no memory and no idea what to do. Story and objectives are progressed by hearing dialogues, but it can frequently take many conversations with multiple characters just to dial in a single goal. And the whole time you are running around trying to find these conversations, you are highly vulnerable and still trying to work out other basic aspects of the game, like trying live long enough and not just die and repeat the upper few levels of the dungeon…again.

Most dialogues are triggered by items given to the speaker. There are hundreds of items in the game, with the player having a limited inventory. So again, a lot of running around and experimenting. This may be the first collect-a-thon type of game where collecting every goshdamn thing is integral to the story and not just a bonus for completists. You can complete a Mario game without finding all the stars, but in Baroque, you really have to pay attention to what you’ve acquired so you know what moves the game itself along. Add to THAT enemies and objects that can take your shit away from you… and yeah, a TON of work. And you MUST die multiple times. On paper that seems like a cool, hardcore concept, but in practice it isn’t so simple when the game severely limits what you will be able to keep with you the next time you resurrect. There IS a system for moving items around or hanging on them for your next incarnation, but the way its done is all part of the game’s strategic underpinnings… and while I wouldn’t say it is tedious exactly… it is a lot of work.

The game lets you save after each completed dungeon level. So I kind of found myself keeping a couple of save points running at all times, so that I could revert to a previous happier moment if something untoward happened, frequently the loss of a needed item rather than a death. I generally didn’t allow myself to ‘die’, as it were, until I’d gotten to the end of each dungeon run, where you have to either die or be absorbed by the game’s deity. Which usually furthers the narrative.

At this point, near the completion of the game, I’ve had numerous restarts from save points but my character himself is on his eleventh incarnation. From my understanding this is pretty fuckin’ speedy. A lot of players have logged many many more hours than I have. Here’s the thing, though. This is a game for completionists. For players who like to winkle out every detail and every nuance. It is for gamers who don’t mind plugging through the same hallways and rooms, because there’ll be some other weird item to find or slice of dialogue to hear. The game has extensive screens for tracking everything you find. I get the appeal of this, and I even find it compelling myself to a certain point… but it isn’t for me. I made time for an RPG, but I didn’t make time for the most demanding collect-a-thon I’ve ever heard of. So I did something I’m not proud of:

I used a guide.

Not just for one hint. Not just to find some devilishly well-hidden item. I mean I used it EXTENSIVELY.

It happens every now and then that I’ll hit up an online guide or walkthrough when I’ve reached my limit on trying to figure out an objective. That’s probably my most common reason. I can’t get my head around the various clues given in the game, if in fact there are any clues—some games as we know, don’t always work logically—so I hit up some online help to connect me to the next step. Less frequently I might look up tips or strategies to beating a troublesome level or boss. But in the main, I consider it pretty easy to get too much help and spoil the experience. So I try to be judicious. This is really the way most mature gamers use helps or walkthroughs, but it has been a bitch to explain to my son, who doesn’t understand how figuring shit out is ‘more fun’ than having your hand held through the whole thing. I’ve resorted to hazing and sarcasm to keep him away from guides.

If I’m going to use help in any significant way, I’ll buy the actual printed official book and use it AFTER I’ve completed whatever basic story mode or campaign is the backbone of the game. As I said, I’m not a collector-maniac in video games, but sometimes it is cool to continue to poke around for stuff. So for some games like Bayonetta, Vanquish, or Brutal Legend, I liked the game worlds so much that it was fun to buy a guide, and explore to get to previously unseen areas or find items or learn to play the game better or in unconventional ways. I don’t think looking under every rock and tree is loads of fun, but having the guides gives me a bit more incentive to spend some extra time in a game world without the tedium of endless clueless searching. I also frequently buy guides for fighting games. For some reason I just prefer my move lists in front of me in print, rather than pausing the game to look it up onscreen.

I avoided buying Saturn Baroque because I didn’t want to eke through it inch by inch using a guide to get around the Japanese…but that feels like what I did with the English version anyway! As I was playing, early on it became apparent I would not have the patience to work the details of this game out on my own. So I went to a walkthrough intending to just learn how the items, item combination, and inventory system worked.

But as I played and discovered that every single tidbit of information (necessary and otherwise) was going to be delivered in the same obtuse, miserly manner, I caved and started fishing out what my actual goals and objectives were. Who to talk to, where they were located, and what item to give them. I managed to avoid actual plot spoilers, so the central desire to find out what ‘the story’ was about remained for me, but that was about the only discovery aspect I got to experience. As much as I hate using a guide it is hard for me to say this actually ruined the game for me. I would like to stumble upon meaningful events on my own, but the amount of play time required for this was just more than I could possibly afford. So I sort of reduced the actual play mechanics to the same level of directness that almost every other RPG employs. ‘Take this magic book to the wizard who lives in the tower’ might be something an NPC would say to you in your traditional role-playing game, so I kinda forced that onto my game of Baroque. I’m not thrilled to admit it, but as compelling as the story is, I would NOT have stuck with the game if left entirely to my own devices. Life’s too fucking short.

In hindsight, I can now see a sort of ‘play formula’ that I could’ve used to get through the game without a guide to the objectives. It’d still require that the player know more about the basic mechanics than the manual or the game really tells you, but I could write up a breakdown that would leave all the surprises and discovery intact while giving the player a better shove out the gate. And in fact, some people have done this; they just aren’t quite ‘explanatory’ enough, I don’t think. Maybe I should start up a page on this blog for this purpose. ‘KOG’s Truly Useful Guide To Baroque’.

Here’s an odd final note: Like some RPGs (and a few other types of games), Baroque has a post-campaign scenario, an endgame. If a player completes these epilogues it’ll usually net you the complete, true, or additional ending. Chrono Trigger is pretty well known for this, allowing you to take your fabulously leveled-up protagonist back through the story, now able to take on the final boss at his earlier appearances in the game and so get a different ending, depending on where in the chronology you destroy him.

After Baroques’ credits roll, you strangely find yourself resurrected yet again. Ostensibly, this would help the collecto-freaks this game caters to continue to work at filling in all the item slots in the database, but supposedly if you accomplish such-and-such-and-such (yes, I used the guide to see if there were, in fact, any goals in this endgame) you actually bring some dead NPCs back to life and redirect the course of events again. The such-and-such-and such are actually pretty complicated, involving hunting down dozens of items and bringing them out of the dungeon over the course of multiple runs. So I figured that was pretty much all she wrote for my continued involvement. As I said, this game makes fanatic collecting a literal part of the game, and there’s this huge stretch ahead that I didn’t really want to indulge. But on a whim, I thought I’d just check out the dungeon one last time, seeing what was different now that I’d ‘saved the world’.

Not much was. BUT. At the bottom of the dungeon, I got the dialogue saying I’d triggered the final set of events. I didn’t DO the such-and-such-and-such that the guide says you need to do. I just played as well as I could and then went back in one more time for old times’ sake. So just to test if I really was in the final stretch, I entered the dungeon and headed right for the floor the guide indicated would house the first set of ‘final’ enemies. And there they were. I was loaded up on invincibility items (just in case) and it wound up that I needed them. Then I actually killed the creatures. So now I find myself somewhat jazzed at the idea of actually completing the full story arc, which seemed like a lark only a day ago. I don’t know how it happened, but I am only three or four dungeon runs from finishing the narrative aspects of the game. One run for each set of the final enemies. It seemed like I was going to have to resort to reading the dialogue online or watching Youtube clips of the final section, but I’m glad I held off on doing that.

In a day or two, the game should be done, and I’ll feel really fortunate that somehow, using a guide, I manage to play this intriguing, difficult game while divesting myself of all the bullshit in it that would’ve made me throw in the towel ages ago. Despite my guide-guilt I feel like it’s a really good game, but there’s so much about it that makes it difficult to just outright recommend.

(image kyped from Daily Record UK)

Musical Roundup

Bought a bunch of music over the last month, and I probably ought to at least say a few words about it, particularly since I don't keep a 'what I'm listening to' box in my sidebar. My 'current' music choices just change too rapidly. These'll just be quick, though some might merit a bit more detail in a later posting. Not all of these are NEW new. They are just new for me, but I've gone through a pretty serious drought in music buying for like a year now:

November's Doom- Into Night's Requiem Infernal. Doom/death metal. Circles around the same musical camp as Opeth, but less progressive and fewer clean vocals. They actually picked up the pace on more songs with Novella Reservoir and everything after and this is along the same lines. Just about any metal fan would like this musically, and the lyrics are more personal (typical of Doom Metal like My Dying Bride), but if you can't get around death vocals steer clear.

Children of Bodom- Relentless, Reckless Forever. Symphonic power thrash. A stunning return to form for Children of Bodom, who've played with simpler, more accessible songs over the previous two (non-cover) albums. But if you'd missed the old symphonically-inspired CoB, here's your tonic. I'd never have said Laiho and band had descended to Nu-Metal or anything, but some fans were just that put off. I was just kinda bored. I mean I own the last two, but I hardly ever listen to them. This one goes into rotation with Hatebreeder and Follow The Reaper! Fucking-A.

Evergrey- Glorious Collision. Progressive Metal. I love Evergrey. Especially Tom Englund's vocals. The guy has a somewhat smoky voice like Bob Seger or Joe Cocker but far more musical and soulful. Hell, when I met Tom, the conversation I had led me to start buying New Rock Boots! But. Evergrey is one of those bands whose style is so distinct and unvarying that they start to sound same-y. Which is weird to say about a so-called progressive band since the hallmark of the genre is variety. A lot of people dissed past a album Monday Morning Apocalypse because it had more power chord melodies and less Evergrey-style staccato galloping, but I found it really refreshing. Then when they followed that up with Torn, it was back to the rut. They're like Katatonia, whom I wrote about in a previous entry. I love 'em but I can't listen to a lot of the material in one stretch because it is just so similar. Thankfully Glorious Collision mixes in some shit similar to MMApocalypse with the typical Evergrey to vary things. The album isn't disjointed either. Whew. Thanks Tom.

Eisbrecher- Eiszeit. Industrial metal (or the German-identified genre, Dance metal). This is a weird one. Eisbrecher is firmly in the same genre as Rammstein. So much so that they are frequently called a clone of the more famous band. In this record, they branch out and have a lot of tracks that don't sound much like Rammstein... or at least 'typical' Rammstein since those guys can go pretty left field too. But Eisbrecher's choices are pretty odd. It makes for interesting listening, but it'd be really difficult for me to say I like it all. Might be a grower. I'm not going to bitch about it because trying to move out from under Rammstein's shadow is commendable. Maybe different choices are needed.

Rotersand- 10 23. Industrial/EBM. Rotersand may be my new favorite amongst the EBM and Futurepop style of outfits. More varied and unpredictable than The Covenant or VNV Nation. Heavily influenced by Pink Floyd if you can believe it. That makes it sound like they wouldn't work up any dance floor music, but Rotersand is incredibly good for that, though they have some slower stuff... and almost always open with a track that sounds literally like Floyd. I can't really say this album is 'more this' or 'more that' than any other because they are all over the tempo and mood maps on each record... except perhaps Truth Is Fanatic, an early album that is probably more 'typical EBM' than anything since. Highly recommended if you like Industrial club music but don't need to stay in that mode the whole listen.

Funker Vogt-Blutzoll. Industrial/EBM. If you've heard Funker Vogt you know what to expect. The album is typical of the group. It has a decent variety and is high quality but nothing grabs me by the boo-boo like the track Paralyzed from Aviator.

The Devin Townshend Project- Addicted. Heavy Metal. That tag doesn't really describe Devin's work all that well, but I'm loathe to try to circulate a new genre term that attempts to describe his wall-of-sound style. Devin, the mad scientist of metal, is currently working on a four-album series of which this is the second. I skipped the first, Ki, because I was a bit put off by it. Each of the four albums is to have a signature theme-style and I didn't dig what I sampled from Ki. Now I think I have to go back and get it. Addicted is amazing. This would be more like what I'd call typical of Devin's 'other' projects... the ones that aren't Strapping Young Lad. So if you like Ocean Machine or Synchestra, here you go. In addition, he drafted Anneke von Giersbergen (formerly of The Gathering) and she sounds fucking awesome. Her own current work is in a pop band, but she has not lost any of her ability to power right the hell over big instrumental sounds. Like organised crime families, once you're in metal I guess you can never really get out. Devin himself is no slouch. Capable of very melodic soft singing, reaching pretty high notes, or screaming fit to make your spine curl up into a coil. Everyone should want to have Devin's baby.


Okay. That's all for now.

The Dynamite Is Kind Of A Dud

Okay, I'm firmly in the half of Napoleon Dynamite's audience that thinks 'WTF?'.

On paper, I should like this movie, or at least see the merit in it. It is unconventional and weird. It has an outsider/marginalised hero. The humor is, um, unusual. Its chock-full of quotables and lexicon nominees.

But I feel like a total mainstream lamer fuck. I just don't get it. I mean I feel all the things that fans of the film feel apparently... but only for about ten minutes. After that, it just doesn't keep up even a minimum effort to entertain. Its almost bad-documentary dry (or as boosters like to say 'subtle'). After those ten minutes you've met almost all the characters. Seen them be incredibly awkward (frequently making you the viewer uncomfortable), and then you (at least I) am expecting these characters to be put through some ordeal, be it fish-out-of-water scenario or rise-past-limitations/expectations story. But that never happens. The whole film is just a slice of life for weird Idaho-ans. I guess the arrival of Uncle Rico is supposed to be the world-shift challenge that Napolean and company meet, but everything comes off like they'd just find something else to behave exactly the same way about whether Rico was there or not.

I thought the funniest character (in the conventional sense) in almost every way was Rex, the martial arts instructor, who coincidentally is played by the only veteran comic actor in the film, Diedrich Bader, the mulleted neighbor in Office Space. He isn't the ONLY funny thing about the movie, but he really had me fooled at the beginning that this film was going to be entertaining. That was a bad assumption on my part. Rex is NOT the only funny thing but the real laughs are so few and far between. The payoff in Napolean's dance scene is pretty awesome, but really doesn't make up for all the tedium in getting to it.

The film made the interesting and effective choice of looking like it is firmly set in the 70s, yet with the 80s cassette audio tapes and VHS video tapes being the common media in use... and that set alongside the concept of the internet and chat rooms. So if nothing else the look of the film is as odd as the characters. And I'll say this; wow, what a transformation for Napolean, Kip, and Deb. Holy shit, they look almost nothing like their real selves. Jon Heder (Napolean) in particular, just dis-afucking-pears.

Anyway. I feel so totally un-hip, but I just can't bring myself to like it. I still can't really figure out why it was made... what the point of it is. Maybe it's some delayed action thingie that'll strike me when I'm out riding a bike or taking a shower. You'd think with all the shirts, quotes, and paraphernalia that have been swirling about since its release, that even a dense old shit like myself would be in on the joke.

Maybe my kids should watch it then they can explain it to me.

Le Cinema Du Beatles

I recently watched Julie Taymor's Across The Universe, a live action (with some animation) musical drama set in the 1960s and 70s to music from The Beatles. I'm a big fan of The Beatles (not as odd a fit for a metalhead as you might imagine) and was looking forward to the film. I'm not a follower of Taymor's work per se but I liked her Shakespeare adaptation, Titus.

Across The Universe was odd. On the one hand the perfomers made mostly credible performances (particularly Dana Fuchs) and it was well filmed. But the literalization of the songs... that is, setting the songs into contexts within a real-world story was really jarring. When I listen to The Beatles I don't necessarily have a specific set of mind-pics to go with the tone and lyrics. The closest thing might be the old-fashioned and cliche answer of 'psychelic imagery'.... more or less like the animated film Yellow Submarine. I just know concrete 'romantic drama' scenes, however appropriate they might be to the time The Beatles reigned, just doesn't work. So this film might be the worst case of 'doesn't go with how I imagined it' that I've ever seen... and as I said, I don't have specific imaginings for the songs. The trippy scenes (I Am The Walrus, Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite) were the most 'accurate' to me.

I'm not an acid-head or anything, but Yellow Submarine (and earlier live action Beatle films as well as the album covers) probably have limited my view. In addition I'd have to say that Yellow Submarine is an incredible film itself, almost criminally underappreciated today. I can't believe how much my kids like it too, considering the time it was made, the Peter Max art style, and how 'dinosaur days' The Beatles themselves are. But you can't kill great music it seems. The children wanted, and have had, The Beatles on their ipods for ages now.

I think Across The Universe was an okay film and I have to respect it for attempting the herculean task of trying to make a 'new' Beatles picture, as it were. Particularly trying to make it literal. But I just couldn't get hip.

Too Much... Even For Me

In the sidebar at the time of this writing, I'm listing under 'Last Watched' the 'film' Mega Shark vs Crocosaurus. I have, for the first time since starting this blog, put 'partial' after the title because I just couldn't get through it. I barely got through twenty minutes actually.

Yes. Yes.With that title I should've known there's no way the movie could be good. But I love giant monster movies, though mostly the ones I like fall under Japanese kaiju films or American and European B-movies (or Harryhausen films) from the 1950s. I can't really recall an American giant monster film I've ever enjoyed apart from the recent Cloverfield from J.J. Abrams.

But I was at least hoping for a 'so bad it's entertaining' experience. I didn't get that. Instead I lost twenty minutes of my life and untold brain cells feeding that dreck into my eyeballs. Totally drunk and with a bunch of friends wouldn't improve this. At least streaming on NetFlix lets you check something like this out without the commitment of a drive to a store or even the effort of putting it out in your mailbox.

Yike.

And get this: the outfit that made it, The Asylum, specializes in these direct to DVD releases... AND this film is the second Mega Shark masterpiece. That's right, if The Asylum were thinking what most studios do with sequels... making them bigger and better this atrocity actually ups the ante over the previous Mega Shark versus Giant Octopus.

These are like parodies of movies you'd find on billboards within other films or video games.

Nin2 Jump Pisses Me Off

Cave put a tiny new game up on Xbox Live Arcade, the score attack platformer Nin2 Jump. A big departure from their usual forte, bullet hell shooters, this download title I'd describe as the art-style of Okami mashing up with the quick and deadly get-thru-the-room play of Super Meat Boy. In addition it has mechanics that look superficially like the grapple arm from Bionic Commando. You use this 'manriki' chain tool to lift yourself over spike beds and past buzzsaws or target enemies for you to then power through.

I love the shadow play art style. I don't find the 'kids in the audience' flourish to be distracting. I'm used to bullet hell shooters so I don't find the occasions where the screen fills with stuff to be confusing. I like the quick restart and one-more-go addictiveness of the game. The bosses, like Fujiyama illustrated above, are really neat and different. There's only one thing that really gets to me, and it is kind of important.

The controls.

Wow, do they suck. I cannot, absolutely CANNOT get the chain weapon to go where I want it to. As stated, you must use this thing to get around the hazards. Sometimes you even need to do something fairly dextrous like use it to anchor and haul yourself horizontally in mid-air while falling down towards some spikes. In most games, with a little practice I find this sort of thing pretty easy. I've played A LOT of platforming games in my time with similar mechanics. In Nin2 Jump it makes me want to eat a gun. The chain does not shoot out in the same direction as I'm indicating on the controller with any consistency. The game does not register a button release (so that you haul up on the chain to safety) with any regularity. Most of the time pulling off even simple moves is sheer luck. What does it say when World 2 took ages to complete because of all the chain bullshit, but World 3 took one-quarter the time, because it has no traps, just enemies to defeat, and that requires timing and gauge management... not precise manipulations of the chain.

I'm reading online how the game is just so easy. Oooh, you'll have no trouble at all with the story mode. Motherfucker. Did I get some kind of bum controller? It isn't having problems in any other game! I'm all for challenge, but not when the challenge is inherent in control difficulties. That's like some hold over from old frustrating 8-bit games. I HAVE read one or two people say this game's controls give them fits... so I'm not totally insane.

I want to love this game. Most games from Cave make me all tingly down there. But this is just nuts!

Read The Book First

For all the visceral horror films I subject myself to, sometimes something quieter is in order, and often all the more disturbing. See The (original) Haunting or The Last Wave.

Months and months ago, I read Kazuo Ishiguro's dystopian fable Never Let Me Go. It was an incredibly good read. In the writing of this blog entry I'm going to be really vague, because the growing horror of the premise is a key part of the book. Ishiguro writes stories of longing and loss, sedate and melancholic. Never Let Me Go doesn't break with tradition. BUT. There are additional threads of mystery (at first) and then genuine horror (later) that I found gripping even long after I'd turned the last page.

A very English setting (and how the English love their messed-up-government-run-future-society stories) seen through a Japanese lens of melacholy pretty much sums up the aesthetic of the novel and British/Japanese Ishiguro himself.

The movie does a pretty good, though inferior, job of presenting the story. The settings look correct, the actors are all great, and the soundtrack, atmosphere and act cards all 'feel' like the book. But the film makes the INCREDIBLE misstep of revealing the mystery from the get-go. Having seen the film all the way through and digested it, I can understand why it was done this way... the first act is much shorter and less detailed in the film because the filmmakers want to spend more of the film's standard running time in the other acts. That was THEIR emphasis and I get it. I just think it was a huge mistake. And more than one reviewer agreed with me.

So, here's the deal. READ THE BOOK FIRST. Do not look up any summaries on the internet. Do not read any reviews of book or movie. Do not read the blurb on the back of the novel. Do not allow yourself the chance to have anything given away. The mystery is NOT the only aspect with teeth in the story, but it adds GREATLY to the atmosphere (and the book and movie are big on the atmosphere) if you go in ignorant. Here's all you need to know:

Alternate late-20th century history, so don't find seemingly glaring differences from our reality all that strange. English boarding school/drawing room type drama (like Ishiguro's Remains of the Day). Slow, melancholic pace, but atmosphere of foreboding and menace builds like a J-horror film. Coming of age story in some ways, though nominally science fiction.

If any of that sounds interesting at all do yourself a huge favor and read the novel first. I CAN recommend the movie... but the film loses little of its mystery if you've read the book because it is just going to tip its hand in the first quarter hour anyway.

Nolan's Mind Games

I'm a real latecomer to the herd of people who've seen Christopher Nolan's epic mind-bender Inception. I thought it'd be beneficial to take in Memento right before that too, since for some reason THAT film eluded me on release as well.

Both of these films have been hyped to heaven by my friends and people online. While I think both films were fine compelling experiences, I don't think they deserve all the accolades, in particular Inception which I have on friendly authority is 'the best film ever made'.

Nolan's direction in both movies is fine. I think he strikes a great balance between confusing viewers and leading you to formulating your own conclusions, important particularly in Memento where the protagonist is just as unknowing as the viewer.

Also in Memento he twist ending isn't shocking because you come into it almost gradually (which Nolan intended) and many probably guessed most of what the climax contained before then. The mind-bending part is how the movie conveys memory and context and keeping you watching on two levels the whole time. I found some aspects rather unbelievable (the tatooing, that he'd have time to reacqauint with the notes every day, etc), but this is the kinda shit more considered in hindsight than jerking me out of the movie while I was watching it. I don't know enough about the real-life memory disorder to have been analysing it at the time. But here's the thing: this movie was hyped to death. If I'd just watched it on its own it'd have been an above average movie with a remarkable way of conveying chronology-- only Irreversible really comes to mind as similar. But everyone was 'oh you gotta see it, the ending is just unbelievable!' or 'you'll be blown away by the twists and turns'. Well, I wasn't. I guess maybe my imagination went the wrong way when I heard 'unbelievable ending' and 'twists' to where I was expecting a film as wrenching as Se7en.

Then Inception. Again with the hype only on a monumental scale culminating in eight Oscar nominations. With this movie, Nolan also does nothing really wrong, but it just doesn't go anywhere particularly affecting for me. Like Memento, you are challenged to keep track of what's what (this time perception as opposed to memory), and I think it is great that a film, especially a mega-budget one challenges the audience to do more than just sit there and take it in. But again, it's a thinker that after it is over didn't leave me pondering it. Not even the fabled spinning top at the end. Nolan says he's had so many people ask him about this, but for me, I saw it, noted the ambiguity, made my decision about what it meant right then and there, and moved on. I guess it wasn't ambiguous to me REALLY at all. In the case of Inception I think all the hype led me to believe it was 2010's The Matrix. For me, it wasn't. The Matrix had a 'twist' that was affecting (and thank heavens I saw it opening night). When Lawrence Fishburne finally holds that battery up to Keanu Reeves, that one scene was stronger to me than anything in the entirety of Inception. I think Inception is tighter and 'smarter' in a lot of ways than The Matrix is... but that wasn't enough. Not for all the 'best thing ever' shit I've been hearing about it. Like some reviewers I really wish the dream sequences had been a bit more 'out there'. I realise remembering dreams is tricky, but it is pretty well established that logic in dreams is different or non-existent. The dreams in Inception are incredibly consistent and well-ordered, however much common physical laws seem to bend at times. I think more 'insanity' was probably in order.

Neither film has anything really incompetent about it. Nolan's done good. These movies are just victims, to me, of the hype machine. But if I'd seen them when they first came out (and I think seeing Inception on the small screen for the first time really did it a disservice) I think I would've been dismayed by all the hype to come out subsequently.

Days of Yore, I Mean Gore

The game that almost singlehandedly started video games down the road of intense-scrutiny-for-content and provoked the creation of an industry rating system, is back and bloodier than ever.


Released in the heyday of arcades, MK was the major American contribution to the fighting game scene. Not as technical as Street Fighter (Japanese) and not as cutting edge as Killer Instinct (UK), Mortal Kombat relied on players wanting to return to it time and again to see all the wild stages, catch up on the cheesy story line, and indulge in all the characters’ ‘fatality’ possibilities.

If any fan is completely honest the fatalities (and their offshoot ‘babality’ and ‘friendship’ finishing moves) are the main draw. For everyone. Don’t pretend the story or depth of mechanics was the reason you were there. The graphics, digitized photos of actors mostly, were something of an eyesore even back then. Nope. You came for the gore. And since MK was an equal opportunity offender it was one of the few places where you’d see buxom female characters eviscerated or decapitated with the same aplomb accorded the macho males. Boobs and blood. An American exploitation tradition!

For those that bothered to pay attention, Mortal Kombat did have a back story that was more than ‘buncha people fighting to be the best’. See original MK movie. It was a corny tale of interdimensional overlords and ancient deities. Martial Arts temples, assassins and prophecies. As the series went on, the designers tried to flesh out the story line further to give nerds a high road to hang on to when they attempted to justify playing in all the boobs and blood. But up to now with eight episodes under its belt (and some non-fighting game offshoots) the plot has gotten so convoluted and repetitious that only the most diehard adherents have still kept track of who is who and who does what.

I gave up after Mortal Kombat 3. I was never a REAL Mortal Kombat player. I already had Street Fighter and Samurai Shodown. I checked in with Mortal Kombat to see what the controversy was about and dork around with the fatalities. I kinda knew the story from watching serious players play. Then when the next two sequels came out, I dallied enough to see new characters and note where the ideas were going. I might’ve bought MK2 and/or MK3 for my Genesis. All this stuff was ‘okay’ to me. I think I exclaimed ‘oh shit’ just like everyone else the first time I saw a head get popped off in a welter of gore. But after that, the ugly characters and unorthodox input methods (kudos for not copying Street Fighter but still weird) just turned me off. Along with the story line getting too dense for its own good, I guess the edginess kinda bled out of the games too. The DC versus MK game from not too long ago is supposedly pretty flaccid.

I haven’t bothered with it in years other than to note ‘oh, they’re still doing Mortal Kombat’ whenever the series was milked again on another console. But in 2010, folks seemed to be getting pretty excited about the new installment titled simply Mortal Kombat, but tagged MK9 in gaming circles to distinguish it from the 1992 original. The promo materials and statements made by the developers showed a return to what made the first three games, uh, ‘great’. Blood, boobs, and the original storyline—revisited through a timeline alteration plot hook analogous to the one in JJ Abrams recent Star Trek reboot.

Oddly, I found all this news to be kind of boner-inducing to me too. The things that made me NOT stick with MK back in dinosaur days were still in place. Same characters, same control scheme. But the speed and power of today’s consoles has given the character (and by that I mean the atmosphere and bloodshed) a new lease on life. Additional ways of dealing gory mayhem have been added along with a lot of nods to the first three games. I was really surprised by how much I recognized considering my limited time with Mortal Kombat in the first place. And wisely (just as Street Fighter IV has done) they kept the 3D characters fighting in a 2D plane.

So now having bought the game (released yesterday), it is pretty much everything I’d hoped for. The new polygonal character models, while still kind of stiff and unattractive, are way easier to look at than the old sprites… and that’s saying something considering how much I love the sprite art in old games. With the new Street Fighter releases, the characters look fine, but they aren’t literally better than a lot of the earlier generations. SF3 and SFAlpha’s fighters are well-drawn cel-animation-style 2D sprites. Their 3D polygon versions on current machines are also high-quality and recognizable… but kind of like comparing apples and oranges if you try to decide which is better. With Mortal Kombat there’s no real debate… at least not if you look back at the old games that this new iteration is referencing. The original sprites were photos of actors in not-good costumes, incredibly crude and not having aged well at all. The new characters, stages, menu screens, everything is very detailed and just drips with menace and hellish atmosphere. It’s like what the designers of the originals were trying to convey, but the tools were so crude players had to dig down pretty deep in the imagination to fill it out. The stages are awesome looking, with a lot of disturbing background imagery and updates to old stage themes. The in-game character art (like on the matchup screens) is decidedly amateurish though… looking quite a bit worse than many of the fighters’ polygonal models. Okay, the Raiden polygon model IS uglier than the matchup screen drawing. Sorry, Raiden actor!

The input method is still really hard to get used to. For someone to whom the Street Fighter method of blocking and inputting specials is second nature, this game is a pretty drastic change. But the fatalities, new x-ray attacks, and general weirdness compel me to stick with it. At least to get through story mode, see all the bloodshed, and tackle most of the challenges. With all the bizarre moves (lots of projectiles, teleports, distant grapples) and overpowered x-ray attacks I’ll probably never really jam on this online the way I’m currently doing with Street Fighter. It just doesn’t seem serious enough… an odd thing to say considering the mature nature of the game, but it definitely revels in its over-the-top B-movie props with considerable macabre humor. But I mean ‘serious’ in mechanics and balance. I guess time will tell whether the tournament players get a functioning, competitive fighting game out of it.

Perversely, this may be the game that sells the fighting genre to my son. I’ve had some serious reservations about allowing him access to this game—this iteration doing absolutely nothing to dispel MK’s rep for excess. But, I’ve been gradually allowing him to watch more mature movies (with relevant content discussions) like the Terminator, Matrix and Aliens series. Stuff with more cultural ‘weight’ than just any old film with a lot of head shots and sex scenes. So while this game is rife with even more violence than any ten movies put together, it is also decidedly more unrealistic or immersive.

That’s probably the key. Mortal Kombat is kinda cool now… but not very immersive. My kid has never really gotten into fighting games because for one, as far as his friends are concerned, it is a dead genre. And two, he had a lot of trouble with the command inputs. Fighters are traditionally joystick-friendly with their quarter-circle and dragon punch inputs. They are not so easy on a standard controller. And my kid is a controller (or wiimote) kid. With MK’s tap-tap input method, he has found a scheme that will work for him.

And he’s loving it. He loves the fact that he CAN do the moves, apart from the most complicated—the fatalities, but he’ll get ‘em. He’s just intimidated. And of course there’s the not-so-secret glee of all the bones cracking and ogling all the scantily-clad polygonal breasts.

He MAY just go to a joystick for this game eventually, and then I’ll have him! Brainwashed! Maybe he’ll migrate to my fighting games before too long and then I can kick my kid around the room in a way the law won’t frown upon!

By the way, hope you get to play this before too long, Australia!

Trilogy of Swedes

Finished up watching the trilogy of movies based on author Stieg Larsson's so-called 'Millenium Trilogy'. I have not read the books, but my understanding is that the movies are a close adaptation.

These are good films. Their popularity in Sweden (and elsewhere) is understandable and warranted. The unlikely duo of characters Blomqvist and Salander is pretty compelling. And the films have enough of a european sensibility that they go places and emphasize things a Hollywood film... at least one that had a big budget and A-list stars... probably wouldn't. I don't envy the American remake's task of living up to this series.

The remake has a number of things going for it: if David Fincher stays on as director he is probably EXACTLY the guy for this material. Most of the cast (Daniel Craig as Blomqvist, yay!) attached seems suitable. Choices like keeping the location in Sweden, and getting Trent Reznor for the soundtrack... that's what I'd do! The first film (and book) The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo probably has the most disturbing material in it. Not to the levels of Fincher's Se7en, but pretty strong. So duplicating the assets of that groundbreaking modern noire might be a really good idea. Most controversy around the remake centers on Rooney Mara cast as Lisbeth Sandler. I have no experience with Mara's acting chops, but she will have her work cut out for her. Sandler in the books and Swedish films is a hardbitten cypher of a character. And while naive (austistic/Asperger's), she's a tough, capable protagonist with both computer-savvy skills and potent physicality. She can hack your files and kick your ass.

On the one hand, I'd prefer not to blow the twists and turns in Fincher's movie, but now that I've seen the originals I think thriller fans probably need to watch them now: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest.

Faded Old Biker

Even if you’re a biker film fan from way back, I’d recommend staying away from Larry Bishop’s Hell Ride.

The story is that Quentin Tarantino, director and frother for all things in genre cinema, was introduced to Larry Bishop by an actress of mutual acquaintance. Larry is the son of comedian Joey Bishop and has an acting history prominent in biker gang films during their heyday, later appearing in other films as a character actor, and directing a mob film that is considered one of the worst ever made.

But Tarantino loves him for his biker filmography, particularly Savage 7. So after a home screening, he tells Larry that he (Larry Bishop) is destined to make the ‘greatest biker film of all time!’. So Larry rounds up some actors he likes, gets a few of Tarantino’s regulars, and some wannabe porn actresses and cranks out a film with himself as the star.

I think it has fallen well short of that ‘greatest’ thing.

Biker films are one of the few ‘genre film’ genres that I have almost no real experience with. I’ve seen Easy Rider and Hell’s Angels On Wheels, so I’ve had my brush with the royal triumvirate Hopper/Fonda/Nicholson, but that was a long time ago.

And the whole biker gang ethos (uh, actually the cinematic version of it, I guess) never really grabbed me. I just can’t identify with it, even though metalhead fashion (and therefore MY dress sense) is influenced heavily by biker culture. I don’t really know how authentic or relevant those old films were, I just knew when I saw them that they were a product of their times and I got reasonable enjoyment from the nihilistic attitudes and scenery-chewing on display.

Hell Ride has nihilism with a weird sense of honor in the protagonist, and just plain boring bad acting in place of scenery-chewing. Dennis Hopper and David Carradine are both in the film and are probably the best part about it, though neither is brilliant… Carradine only getting about two minutes of screen time. Dennis actually gets some of the best lines in the movie, but he is basically playing himself… so there you go. He’s just as funny in the DVD extras.

Director Bishop is probably trying to tap into some of… whatever it was that Tarantino liked so much in Savage 7, but he just didn’t do it for me. Scratchy voice, fake tan, weird sideburns. It is a fair difference from the real Bishop, who you can see in the extras, but I wouldn’t call any of his performance good.

Tarantino regular Michael Madsen is in the film and was probably my main draw for ordering it up on my NetFlix queue. The reality having watched the film is decidedly mixed.

I think Madsen CAN be really good, but he requires direction. From an ‘real director’. So you get these cool things from him in Tarantino movies or Tony Scott’s True Romance (dialogue by Tarantino). The film is also thick with speech that tries to emulate Quentin’s wordy cleverness, but fails miserably most of the time… and the few times it does work it's typically Hopper or Madsen delivering. But Madsen is really inconsistent. I was alternating between ‘cool’ and ‘yeesh’ practically every other line he uttered. Quentin’s dialogue in movies is usually hip upon a film’s release, but kind of ages badly upon subsequent viewings. The lines in this movie have that spent hipness from the onset. Like your listening to shit that would’ve been clever 20 years ago.

That might be the problem with a lot of the movie. On the one hand it is trying to tap into an attitude and an ethos from the past. On the other it is trying to marry them to present-day trappings and sensibilities. The movie is set in 2008, though you don’t see cell phones, computers, or soap-shaped automobiles. All this is mushed together with some artistic choices taken from the grindhouse cinema of the 70s. I don’t really know if biker films were a staple in grindhouses. You’d think it’d be a great fit.

But in Bishop’s hands it is just awkward. Not nearly as enjoyable as similar excursions Death Proof (Tarantino) or Machete (Robert Rodriquez). In the Special Features section Bishop talks about how he could and did take the movie to extreme places that a release in the 60s could never go, but the violence and sex aren’t particularly graphic or shocking even for a grindhouse feature from the following decade. The only thing I noticed was all that extreme compared to its inspirations was the number of times the f-bomb was dropped.

Grindhouse cinema attracted moviegoers because the audience thought they’d be seeing something you couldn’t see in films shown in mainstream theaters. Being so low budget you weren’t going to get exotic settings, great actors, or eye-popping special effects.

Usually it was exploitative subject matter, frequently coupled with bouncing nudity. If you were particularly lucky there might actually be an act of graphic violence shown that no big budget picture would stomach. Getting all of that together (untouchable subject, nudity, uber-violence) as in I Spit On Your Grave, you basically got the trifecta of grindhouse and would probably leave the theater genuinely shocked or affected.

When Robert Rodriquez made Planet Terror a few years ago, he knew that audiences were going to want an experience that made them feel like an audience felt in the grindhouse era, but that the ACTUAL grindhouse material would not be enough. There’s material on broadcast television now that is sleazier and a bigger train wreck than 90% of what appeared corner theaters. All the tropes, stereotypes, film tricks, etc from seedy grindhouses can be in place but if you don’t take into account all the sensory and information overload that has taken place since then… your film will be dull and underwhelming.

And that’s basically what happened with Hell Ride. It is kind of struggling to catch up and BE a shocking, impactful picture. There are a few good moments in it. Hell, I’ll even say making a biker gang movie that isn’t a period picture is probably pretty daring. I’m not even sure the characters in the movie have real-world equivalents on any level. I’ve seen bikers, but are there still ‘gangs’? Do they still carry on their anarchic criminal pursuits? I dunno!

If the movie was entertaining or even shocking in any way, I might want to Google around and find out. But it wasn’t and I don’t.

RIP David Carradine and Dennis Hopper.