Kirby Super Star Ultra

I've been deliberately avoiding writing in this blog because I really do not want to talk about Super Star Ultra.  This isn't some ridiculous "oh it's gonna be so bad it hurts my eyyyyyes" reluctance to pass judgment, it's that I just have nothing interesting to say about Super Star Ultra.  It's a good, fun game, but good in such a dull, retreaded way that I'm prevented from gushing about anything.  Like, man, did you not play the original?  Well, you should get this.  Otherwise, I guess it's still okay?  I don't know leave me alone *curl up in fetal position*

One problem I have with approaching this game is that I've played Kirby Super Star for the SNES so many fucking times I don't even know if I like it anymore.  The concept of Super Star, giving the player multiple bite-sized games with slightly different mechanics as opposed to one big boi playthrough is clever enough, appealing to the central attraction of Kirby games (bright, easy distraction from the crushing hell of modern life).  And even now, after roughly two dozen play throughs, I would still be more than happy to redo Revenge of Meta Knight.*  But the rest of the segments?  Fuck, man.  I loved them as a kid, but now the algorithm has changed in inperceptable ways, like I'm in Jacob's Ladder and Super Star is dancing with me but out the corner of my eye I think I see Squeak Squad slowly crawling from between its legs.

Because that's the primary issue of Super Star and Super Star Ultra:  Once again, it's just too lazily easy.  Granted, it doesn't have the unrelenting sameness of non-difficulty that Squeak Squad features, but there's still virtually no point in the main game where something is going to even momentarily throw your dinosaur gaming brain for a loop.  Ultra changes very little from the core games, if anything, though adding a few modes that mostly are somehow even easier (I'm pretty certain at this point I could do the Meta Knight mode blindfolded) or, in the case of the updated arenas, try to respond to the ease of the original game but holy shit I see your padding mall order batman, get out of my face.  The only addition I genuinely like was the return of King DeDeDe, if just for the fact that someone on the staff recognized that Revenge of Metaknight was far and way the best thing the original had to offer.

Ultimately, I guess it comes down to whether one religiously played the original Super Star.  Unless you're some sort of weird Kirby fanatic, there's not a whole lot going for Ultra if you've already beaten the original black and blue.  Still, if for some reason you never bothered doing that, you should thank the gods for your luck and get Ultra, because then you will probably never hate yourself again.

*- I love it when games have those "HOW IS HE DOING THIS OUR DEFENSES ARE SO LAME" baddy conversations that you can hear, to the point it makes me sad when I don't hear them, because they have to be astoundingly easy to program.

Kirby: Squeak Squad

I don't remember much about Squeak Squad, but I remember when I played it.

It was roughly into the second year of law school.  I had borrowed the game from a friend, and was deciding to play it while I got my oil changed.  I hate having my oil changed, from the cost of having it done, the fear someone will do something horribly wrong to my car, to the embarrassment that I, a normally competent human male, cannot change the oil myself.  But I am more terrified of having my engine explode, so here I was, ordering some horrible Burger King abomination and turning on my DS, for the SQUEAK SQUAD.  For an hour, I felt about as challenged from the game as I did using a free hand to move fries into my mouth.  When the car was ready, I saved the game, saw that I was already 35% complete, and said a silent prayer for the people that paid like thirty dollars for this shit.

And believe me, Squeak Squad is shit, for the same reason I can see why people hated Return to Dreamland for the Wii.  Both feature the same goddamned gameplay we saw since the NES days, and while I'm sure that's goddamned exciting to nerds who think retro by itself is somehow worthwhile, it's also snoozetown for me.  I realize I said in my Canvas Curse review that I liked Kirby because it was easy, but there's a difference between easy and easy.  Canvas, at least for half the game, was engaging, but not frustrating, new areas requesting perhaps a few seconds of your brain farting a synapse before proceeding.  There is literally nothing engaging about Squeak Squad if you have ever played a traditional Kirby side-scroller.  Or hell, any side scroller.  Hell, have you ever just held a game boy in your hands?  Congrats, you can probably beat Squeak Squad.


The apparently element of "challenge" is that to fully clear a stage, you need to grab treasure chests.  However, the title bad guys also try to grab it, which means you have to complete some pathetic puzzle and/or fight a mouse boss.  The mouse bosses are sort of fun, but a problem exists in that there are literally only 4 main baddies in the Squeak Squad, and no, their fighting tactics do not change at all.  There is strong guy, ninja guy, mouse in saucer, and main mouse and I don't even know if you fight the main mouse until the end so let me amend my statement to only THREE main baddies.

BISHY SQUEAKY SQUADUU ^_____^ COPYRIGHT FAT GIRL 2009 DO NOT STEAL

I actually visited the wiki page for the game to see what I could remember besides "stupid easy" and "fight the same 4 bosses for treasure chests."  Wikipedia told me that there are apparently modifications to your powers that drastically change how they work.  I DON'T REMEMBER THIS.  Like I think there was a UFO power, but otherwise the gameplay was completely forgotten to me.  I'm generally not one to completely forget something I played to near 100% completion, so I'm going to make a safe bet and assume that the modification powers were both really poorly implemented and completely unnecessary to completion aside from those areas that forced you to use them because we all like that riiiiiight?

Jesus what else am I supposed to say here.  This is not a game, it is a nap simulator with fucking rats and memories of burgers that upset my stomach and my own failure of masculinity.  Do not play this.  Just play Kirby Superstar or OH NO WHAT AM I SAYING END TRANSMISSION

Kirby: Canvas Curse (2005)

I really like Kirby games.

For me, Kirby has always been the perfection of "casual action."  You don't play Kirby to be stressed out, but instead to get slackjawed and murder waddle-dees or some shit.  There's that pink puffball, wonder what wacky adventure against dark matter or another forgettable monster boss he's going to get into.  Oh great, got the sword ability, time to beat the game.

With that purpose of these games in mind, it makes sense why so many Kirby games seem to revolve around villains gimping Kirby in one way or another.  We, the audience playing, don't want to be concerned with a whole lot of unrealized potential in our playing, so thank you Dark Poopsock for making Kirby into a golf ball now I just have to hit him into holes.  Oh great, Kirby is yarn, so much for worrying about copy abilites and and floating, wow these graphics are soooo preeeeettyyyyy.  So on and so forth.  The day that Kirby has upgrade points and combo actions is going to be the day we see a massive commercial failure for HAL.

So roughly six months after the DS launched, we got Kirby: Canvas Curse.  A villain transforms Kirby into a literal ball, and HE NEEDS YOUR HELP.  No, don't touch those complicated buttons or d-pad, this is stylus only.  Just lay the DS down on your desk, and use your free hand for some cookies or something.  Aw yeah.

The big control scheme in Canvas is that, as Kirby is a ball, he cannot move on his own.  You can make him dash by tapping on him, but more convenient and versatile is the ability to use the stylus to paint lines on the screen, which Kirby can ride upon, regardless of height or angle.  The only limitation is that you have a limited paint gauge which refills when you're not drawing, but you will virtually never be in danger of running out of paint unless you're making Kirby ride up 30-feet phallic symbols (hint: this is the best part).  There are also enemies, but they  can be simply tapped on to stun for easy pickins' by Kirby, so they exist entirely as moving power-ups.  Unfortunately, all ability changes do is replace your dash ability with some other sort of vague mobility power that you use maybe two or three times in contrived puzzle sections, some of which involve you not being about to use your paint ability.  I could give you a precise rundown of every ability in Kirby Superstar, but I cannot remember what any ability in Canvas Curse does.  Maybe fire gives you a horizontal fireball??  Ultimately, running completely contrary to previous Kirby games, powers are too lame and useless that unless the game forces you to grab one, you're going to be best off with regular Kirbs.  What a depressing situation!

On the other hand, the painting ability is a wonderful.  Almost all DS games with lots of touchscreen control are pretty awful, or at best suffer in quality due to said touchscreen gimmicks.  Canvas Curse, especially for being released so early in the DS's lifecycle, has the perfect sort of touch control, with only a few points  where I recall going "I didn't touch the screen I did not this is bullshit."  For like half of the game it was like being on a magical cruise where despite some kind of obnoxious guests and a table with a short leg, you still loved every minute.

But then you slowly realize that, while the sights are magical, it's all sort of the same sight and why am I on this boss minigame again.    The touch control is great, but when the entirety of your roughly 8-10 hour gameplay revolves around "draw line, watch kirby roll on line, occasionally draw other line to block enemy shot," boredom crawls in and will not leave your basement.  The environments do basically nothing to liven things up, with you visiting thrilling locales such as "ice stage with ice spikes that fall from ceiling" and "fire stage where lava rises from the floor."  The game rarely adds anything to spice up the formula, so you're stuck gawking at the touchscreen and little else.  There are collectable medals and time trials and "conserve your paint meter" trials, but winning the trials are largely a matter of trial and error, with the hardest stages forcing you hope the camera doesn't lurch out of control and cost you another restart, which I guess invalidates my previous complement about the regular game not having any control issues.  The unlocks are mostly total garbage, with the best things being a few extra stages and having balls of King Dedede and Metaknight, the latter could be fun to play around with if the stage design wasn't so goddamned boring in the first place.

Canvas Curse isn't a bad game, and in the context of a stylus-only near launch game for the DS, it's also pretty good.  Unfortunately, there just wasn't enough content to manufacture a great title.  Would Kirby find his way and not release a game that I had to add a million provisos to?

Eventually.

So is today wacky opposite day in game reviews

Here's Tim Rogers utterly giving up and doing his best to emulate garbage game review language and getting pageviews via trolling about Skyrim in the most mundane way possible (link omitted because god damn if I'm going to give more ad revenue to that chucklefuck and Kotaku).  Can you tell the stylistic differences between his review and Lisa talking about video game cereal???

(no, you can't, you stupid, stupid man.)

And meanwhile, TheBestGamers, who have previously done some of the most obnoxious, hackneyed, and poorly over the top troll reviews, come out with basically the perfect denunciation of Minecraft and what a piece of garbage that game (and its creator/community/illusion that Minecraft is any more legitimate of a form of gaming than Angry Birds or Zynga) is.

Earth is weird.

Slasher Big Battel: Hell Night (1981) vs. Black Christmas (2006)

So here's the story of two slashers that almost made the grade.

Hell Night certainly starts off like it's going to make that grade.  The first half of the movie, establishing the plot of a frat/sorority combo hazing initiates by making them stay in a mansion that was the scene of a family massacre, is great.  Most characters are likeable, nonstandard types who speak dialogue that is fairly clever, sets are appropriately spooky, and there's an undercurrent of suspense deep enough that you almost don't mind that nothing in the film has happened for like 45 minutes.  After all, they've gotta have some pretty spooky scares and satisfying kills lined up in their coat pockets, right?

It's at the 45 minute mark, when stuff occasionally starts to happen, that you notice a certain problem with this film.  You know those scenes in famous horror movies when a victim is slowly moving down a hallway or staircase, the camera slowly tracking behind them as they take one small step after another, and you're left wondering what's going to happen, and then AGGGGGH????  Imagine that, except it's happening every scene and usually leads to nothing happening.  This isn't even an exaggeration.  No staircase, hallway, or hedge maze is safe from 5-minute walkthroughs of agony where the character steps, turns their heads, steps again, pretends to be scared about something we don't hear, steps again, and GOD IT IS JUST A STAIRCASE CAN YOU PLEASE JUST WALK DOWN IT MORE THAN A STEP A MINUTE

I understand the "reasoning" behind the decision.  Hell Night really wants to bring in an element of Gothic horror, in the grand scheme of Byron, Dark Shadows, and a million other films about people wandering around in spooky houses with vague dreads skulking about.  The director even has everyone wearing (i mean aside from the token slut but who cares) period clothes in some effort to trick our minds into thinking that it's perfectly okay to have a 4 minute cave exploration that is literally just two corridors filmed at different angles over and over again.  But there's a fine line between "classically raising tension" and "clearly just trying to pad film length because if any of these people moved at normal speed we'd have been finished with this shit thirty minutes ago."  In other words, if you're going to meld traditional slasher style with something out of a forgotten Vincent Price film, you actually need to include some traditional slasher style in your idiot soup.

It also doesn't help when the primary party in all this wanderdashery is Linda Blair.  I mean Linda no disrespect, but holy god I hope that her acting fee wasn't the reason that the sfx budget in this film is limited to "fake stabbing pitchfork and dollar store monster mask."  Every other actor is clearly enjoying themselves in the picture, but Linda clearly hates everyone and everything around her, viewing the film as just another paycheck summoned from the wailing of a thousand nerdy fans of the Exorcist.  And the only thing to distract us from a chubby 30-year-old pretending to be a sexy coed are slow walks and probably the lamest death scenes imaginable.  Granted, 1981 and everything, but the murders just feel like afterthoughts: "oh no something scary guess I should get my neck snapped or something."  Worse is the fact that deaths somehow get progressively lamer, going from workmanlike beheadings and stabbings to "get bonked off camera" and "most unsatisfying defenestration ever."

If it sounds like I hated Hell Night, that's not true!  I'm hurt by it, since the first half is so goddamned good and spooky and fully deserving of the hype people seem to set towards it, but then the second half devolves into some sort of weird parody of what was excellent before.  Don't do that, films.  My heart, she holler.

Black Christmas, on the other hands, seems to exist purely as the least hype movie in existence.  Critics hated this movie with a white hot passion, and pretty much everyone seems to have followed suit.  I can virtually guarantee that, after watching the remake of one of the grandpappys of slashers, that most of these people just read a summary of the original film and decided that REMAKE EQUAL BAD ARRRRRGH.  Black Christmas is not a great movie, but lumping it in with shit like "Anything from Platinum Dunes" just shows how banal and uneducated most critics are about horror films that aren't presented as some GENRE DEFYING MASTERPIECE.  Let's be clear here.  Anyone who started their review with some adulation of the original are talking out of their butts.  The original Black Christmas was a massive inspiration for alot of movies I love, but taking it on its own merits, there's so many goddamned problems with this movie.  Bored actresses, boring deaths, scenes that go nowhere...wait.  Let's not talk about this anymore.  I feel weird.

What I find so weird about reviews trashing the remake is that they generally treat the film as basically identical to all the other horror remakes released at the time.  You know the type: PG-13, a completely soulless plot where like 3 people get killed, an unceasing feeling that your life is slowing draining out as you watch some CW actress run down another corridor.  While Black Christmas has significant issues, being a pale cookie cutter remake is not one of them.  The plot operates fast as hell, there's a genuinely funny black humor throughout, and while not especially gory, it gets the job done.  The actresses are still CW garbage, but the movie rightfully notices this and thus paints them all in as unflattering a light possible.

Black Christmas is not really a good movie.  The plot is occasionally too ridiculous for its own good, and there's roughly thirteen subplots that seem to go absolutely nowhere since it's basically impossible to identify any of the actresses among each other.  Making actresses unlikeable still doesn't really help with their lack of acting chops, and there's tons of confusing offscreen deaths that ruin the flow of the film.  Still, considering it was made during the second half of the 2000s (destined to be known as possibly the worst time for horror since the 1910s), whatever.  Go watch it on comcast on demand.  It's FREEEEEEEEEEEE.

Zombie Apocalypse (2011)

Zombie Apocalyspe is a stupid mess.  It's clear that there was virtually no budget to speak of, the director and cinematographer had no camera shots available at any time aside from "mid range of fronts" or "mid range of backs," the actors were literally one step above community actors, and the plot just sort of wanders around a map before arriving at the payoff scene that is like spending your life savings at a slot machine only to realize it only dispenses those gross little chocolate coins Jewish people have during holidays.

Despite all that, I'd put it in the upper 50th percentile of trashy zombie films and/or Syfy originals.  Hell, let's say upper 75th percentile.  What gives?

The biggest reason is sort of a damning with faint praise, but have you have seen budget zombie horror?  Zombie Apocalypse is bad, every element of it barely working, but goddamn at least it could be called a horror movie with trashy action that barely works.  Compare this to something like Monster Ark, where you spend a good half of the movie of people talking about the Bible like it is a mysterious artifact only read by madmen and gods, and then segue to people waving their airsoft M-16s at a greenscreen for the other half.  Zombie Apocalypse had the good graces to interrupt scenes of people walking empty streets and CGI explosions to include zombie battles, and while those battles are entirely shoddy CGI (PHOTOSHOP THAT BLOOD SPURT HARDER), they're at least entertaining enough for me to have finished the movie stone sober.  The plot is followable and does have a destination and doesn't try to overextend ambition beyond what it can barely accomplish.

The acting is bad, but at least when they're not being forced to speak utterly awful lines (ARE THERE ANY HUMANS IN THERE), there's sort of a fun awkwardness to their acting, being fully comfortable (Ving Rhames and that chick from Spartacus: Blood and Sand that wanted to ride Crixus's bone included) in being in a terribad zombie film, as opposed to, say, the Day of the Dead where it appeared Nick Cannon and everyone else was being filmed at gunpoint.  The only exception to this is Taryn Manning, whose sullenness in the film is pretty clearly not just acting, but she's virtually a non-entity in the second half of the movie so who really cares.

Indeed, especially for an Asylum film, there's a fairly intelligent apportioning of focusing on characters that you can almost care about, as opposed to the usual Asylum practices of giving the meatiest roles to people who don't know how not to glance nervously at the camera every five seconds.  Maybe they hired an editor with a soul, who knows?  Perhaps the best part (spoiler but again who fucking cares) concerns the role of "token educated dude who in zombie film parlance means he is a flowery dipshit who quotes a line from Wordsworth and acts like he's hot shit.  Of course, he's easily the worst character in the film and one prays for his death, but as the halfway mark, you feel like he's somehow going to make it to the film.  Even worse, he has an awful romance scene with another survivor and now you're virtually sure he's going to survive SO MAD.  But then he gets bitten (due to his own dumbassery), and turns even before he can do anything heroic!  It's a really rare moment of schadenfreude fanservice coming out of nowhere, and while it was probably unintentional considering the rest of the script, one must take what they can get.

So is it worth watching?  There's certainly better zombie films out there, but there's far, far, worse.  If anything, this is a positive step for Syfy and Asylum, so we may as well be nice enough about it as possible.

A Film that Dares to Call Itself "The Thing" (2011) (spoilers because fuck this movie)

Fuck this fucking movie.

My gut knew it wasn't going to be pretty.  Especially when I found out the screenwriter was the same person that wrote (get ready) the Nightmare on Elm Street remake.  But did I know how ugly?  Did I have the slightest conception of the depths that it was going to slobber and fuck over my memories of the Carpenter version?  No.  I was like those Lovecraft protagonists (minus an authorial transference of casual racism), realizing something was wrong but that the breadth was far beyond my grasp, so at the end all I can do is laugh like Sam Neill at the end of In the Mouth of Madness.

Part of the problem can be traced to the whole boneheaded idea of trying to remake The Thing by doing a prequel of it.  In doing so, you've stepped into crazy murky waters, as you're ostensibly creating a new plot while having to sort of hug onto the original plot for protection, like a baby bear with worms.  Not at all surprising in retrospect, My Least Favorite Screenwriter in History handled this the same way he did with the Nightmare remake: Clumsily patch favorite scenes from the original to a shoddy original plot, then go completely off the rails with a wretched ending with enough plot holes to hide a universe destroying morphing race spaceship in.

I'll say one thing and one thing only, as it's the only reason this film got anything resembling positive reviews: it's competently made and acted in.  But hey so was the Nightmare remake, and honestly if you're giving any credence to horror films because of the quality of their effects then go the fuck away.  I guess I can also say that the only thing God I am Going to Punch You Screenwriter-San does right is that he also manages to avoid any romantic subplot, so kudos laced with rat poison for that.  Unfortunately, this leaves the plot.  The opening thirty minutes function exactly how you'd expect, for better or worse.  Spaceship found, alien excavated, science does some retarded shit, alien breaks out and ohhhh nooooo.  Since this was strictly paint by numbers plot wise, I was just sort of bored here.

Then we have the first major divergence from the original.  As you may or may not recall from Carpenter's version, the time period between when the crew first sees the alien in action to when they realize its full capabilities was relatively short.  Here, there's a 30 minute period of Dr. Ramona Flowers going "oh no guys something wrong" and all the dudes going "haw haw we're males."  It makes sense logically, but it's still boring as hell, as that time period is people just shuffling around grumbling at each other.  Then eventually the alien reappears and get ready for a descent into total incompetency.

Some of you are probably anticipating me bitching about the alien being quick.  Honestly, I don't fucking care if it's fast or not, especially as it was the same sort of awkward shambler that we saw in the Carpenter film, there probably would have been not a single moment of tension in the film.  What I do sort of care about is that the alien looks pretty fucking shitty.  The remake Things are generally a simpleton's version of what they remember the Thing from Carpenter's version to be mixed in with nixed Silent Hill designs: full of giant teeth and weird arms going everywhere and decidedly not really scary.  Everything is just clean looking and stupid, missing any of the nightmare unfamiliar murkiness of the original.

So we find out that the alien can mimic, and we settle back.  Finally, some of dat sweet paranoia that made Carpenter's version so goddamned good.  All the characters are in the room, and...wait, they already developed the test?  Okay.  And some guys just escaped, all right, lots of opportunity for potential infections to be developed and questioned later and wait they already revealed the Thing and now it's just an extended chase sequence and what the fuck is going on

Of the many things that pissed me off about this remake, it's this.  I think even Hawk's version had more time devoted to the quidessential feeling that nobody could trust each other, the isolation exemplified within Antarctica.  Instead, one gets the feeling that Holy Shit I'm So Goddamned Worthless at Everything Guy watched the Carpenter version and thought "boy, look at all these people talking, this is so boring, I'm gonna cut this stuff down to like fifteen minutes so I can get to what people really care about, why that ax was in the wall!"  You think I'm joking, right?

“It’s a really fascinating way to construct a story because we're doing it by autopsy, by examining very, very closely everything we know about the Norwegian camp and about the events that happened there from photos and video footage that’s recovered, from a visit to the base, the director, producer and I have gone through it countless times marking, you know, there’s a fire axe in the door, we have to account for that…we're having to reverse engineer it, so those details all matter to us ‘cause it all has to make sense.”

— Eric Heisserer describing the process of creating a script that is consistent with the first film.^[17]

HOLY SHIT WHO FUCKING CARES.  THANK GOD MY IMAGINATION ISN'T ALLOWED TO CONCEPTUALIZE ANYTHING ANYMORE, WHOO 2011 SPRING BREAK HAND ME THAT GRENADE IT'S TIME FOR THE TRUE JAGERBOMB.  

So the remaining 30 minutes of the movie are literally just a space monster slasher.  It's not even a good slasher, but people running in rooms as a giant Thing monster also runs around in rooms and occasionally kills people and less occasionally recreates the kitchen scene from Jurassic Park.  Near the end, one of the monsters takes an ATV to get back to the mothership, and it says alot about the success of this movie that I was fully expecting a Space Mutiny style chase sequence to close things out.  But don't worry, instead we have an Alien ripoff where the lady is menaced by the Nilhilanth from Half-Life but then she shoots him in the weak point.  Then she walks out of the spaceship with her Not-MacReady while he is holding the flamethrower and then he puts the flamethrower in the truck and then the lady kills him because he is ACTUALLY THE THING AND IF HE IS THE THING WHY DID HE NOT KILL HER WHILE HE HAD THE FLAMETHROWER AND WAIT ARE THOSE CREDITS WHAT THE FLYING FUCK

oh

oh wait

so here's a helicopter guy and he's seeing the thing 

and there's the dog from wait wasn't that infected like at the start of the film why is it running out now and I guess that's the most FUCKING INEPT WAY YOU COULD DO A REACHAROUND TO THE ORIGINAL FILM GOOD JOB MR SCREENWRITER

In conclusion, this is what really galls me.  You have a screenwriter going "hurp durp gonna tie up all these loose ends," to aspects of the Carpenter version I don't really care about, while at the same time just creating obvious, ridiculous plot holes to tie other stuff together that I also don't really care about, all while leaving the quidessential themes of the previous films out to die in the Antarctic wilderness.  The Thing is a triumph of autism and boring fanboyism over imagination and creativity, so really just fuck this movie.

...One other thing.  For all the hubbub about how the screenwriter, director, and producer watched the film a million times, they seemed to miss something that would have allowed an ending that would be both creepy and an actually creative twist on something.  Re-watch the opening of the Carpenter version.  Do you notice something about one of the two Norwegians on the plane?  One of them is completely covered in clothes and never says anything, so the gender is indeterminate.  It would have been entirely possible to have Winstead return to camp, completely devoid of emotion, then get shot at by the last Norwegian, then see the dog, have them get into some convenient helicopter and as they pull out, she pulls the clothes around her.*

It's so goddamned obvious that I can't think of why you wouldn't do it and instead leave her for some indeterminate fate.

Unless.

No.  That's not possible.  It can't be.

No.  

No. 

"I, Eric Heisserer, Screenwriter Extraordinary, can see it now! Ramona Flowers and MacReady, the ultimate duo and...maybe something more ;)"

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO


*Edit: On watching the opening again, it's less clear whether the person on the left shows their face or not.  It's more likely that the one on the left was the one that was shot by the Americans, but with the constant film cuts, one could conceivably argue that the two switched positions, so that the "uncovered" face on the right seat threw the grenade and ran (with gun now in hand? WHATEVER) while the uncovered searched for it and was blown up.  It's awkward, but certainly makes more goddamned sense than anything in the remake.

Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

The Nightmare on Elm Street remake was really goddamned bad.  This isn't surprising for anyone.  Perhaps due to that lack of surprise. I didn't really see any critics expend too much thought on the badness.  After all, it's a horror remake produced by Michael Bay's company, Platinum Dunes, which brought out flaccid remakes of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday the 13th.  Literally no one is going to be swayed by anything said about a movie like this, a husk floating on an ocean of stupid teenage buying decisions.  And yet, there's some interesting kernals to glean from this film, which is a shining example of the present trend of modern, studio-backed horror films bringing absolutely nothing lasting to horror canon.

After finishing the movie, I took some time to watch various scenes from the original Nightmare on Elm Street. What's interesting about Craven's version is, for the most part, the scares are telegraphed fairly well in advance.  By this, I mean that while something scary might happen, generally it comes out of some sort of lead-up.  For example, take the death scene of Nancy's blonde friend from the start of the movie.  The earliest sense something is really wrong is when you see the garbage can lid roll from the fence and hit the ground.  There's a good two seconds of the lid rolling before it hits the ground.  Only then do we see Freddy, and not in some quick-cut closeup, but in the distance, a shadowy vision.  Of course, there are sudden jump scares (such as when Nancy runs into the Freddy hall-monitor), but for the most part, scares are delivered by the impact of the images, not simply by impact.

Guess what I'm trying to say about the remake!  Every single goddamned scare in the remake is some sort of lameass "ooooo things are sort of creepy when is the spooking happening huh huh huh NOWWWW BOOOOOOO VOLUME SO LOUD GONNA PISS OFF YOUR NEIGHBORS."  If you're the kind of idiot that freaks out during "scary" video games (truth Amnesia is fucking garbage) and want some more of dat fear factor, then by all means rent this movie because there is not a single five-minutes scene without something like Freddy jumping out of a pipe or a little girl getting a monster face happening.  For gentle viewers that need something more than loud sounds to scare them, prepare to, at best, be gently amused as the movie does its best to imitate your high school's haunted house.  Nothing, of course, is going to stick with you.  I'm not even 24 hours from when I finished the film, and already all the scenes are sort of awkwardly merging and fading together, one after the other, with nothing valuable to remember a week from now aside from "god how do you manage to not include one affecting scene even 976-EVIL II managed that."

The plot is sort of the worst of both worlds as far as remakes are concerned, somehow both mechanically reproducing scenes from the original and adding unnecessary, stupid as fuck complications to the plot.  The first two-thirds of the film are basically the same as the original, save for the previously mentioned jump scares being fucking everywhere, and that Nancy's boyfriend is now a fat ugly Robert Patterson.  It was about at this point I said, "god, can they not do anything original in this movie aside from adding dream scares going no where?"

My girlfriend murmured, still watching the movie, "so you wish for them to alter the plot?"

"Sure, I mean it can't be any worse than what I'm already seeing."

"GRANTED"

"FUCK YOU WISHMASTER"

The film suddenly swerves into new territory at the last third of the film, and boy is it a total mess.  It is now revealed (spoilers I guess) that the remake wasn't happy with Freddy pre-demon biography being "creepy dude who did bad stuff to children."  No, in keeping with the Bay philosophy of leaving nothing to the imagination aside from the full extent of your slackjawed stupidity, it is agonizingly demonstrated that Freddy was in fact a total baby rapist.  The remake tries to trick you by implying at first that hey maybe Freddy was just an innocent victim of childhood overimagination but I can't imagine someone thinking there was a possibility of gray morality in a shitty horror remake, so that's given up like fifteen minutes after.

Of course after the interminable backstory parade the film can't come up with a cleverer way of dispatching Freddy than the "okay I will bring him out of the dream with the power of HUGZ" idea (which was by far the weakest concept in the entire original film), except now Fat Ugly James Patterson remains alive instead of being eaten by his bed.  I don't even know why they kept him alive because he is awful, except probably they couldn't figure out a way to make a blood puking mattress into a cheap scare.  Then ending jump scare because fuck this pissy earth.

Ultimately, I just want to talk about what happened with Freddy.

I don't really mind the new design.  After all, the iconic Freddy is substantially different from the original film's version, which was almost never seen in full light (presumably because the make up was bad, or Craven's reaction to not being able to make Krueger into a skull monster as he originally planned.  The voice, while hokey in its modulated deepness compared to Robert Englund, isn't bad.  The problem is that the remake apparently couldn't decide between the original, dread-filled Krueger and the later sequel's wacky, joking spouting Krueger, and thus decided that what was needed was a jerk Freddy who talks as much as the later iterations, but doesn't make jokes but just acts all weird and rapey.  In other words, they decided the best version of Freddy was the Nightmare on Elm Street 2 version.

Oh yes, the rapey.  So, from a strict perspective, I guess this isn't that surprising.  After all, Freddy has always been more lascivious than most other horror icons, "I'm your boyfriend now" and all that.  And yeah, Craven apparently wanted to make Freddy a child molester before cooler, more intelligent heads prevailed.  That doesn't change the fact that, like pretty much anything else in this movie, making Freddy into a rapist ruins everything good about the film series.  It also doesn't help that the only real ramifications of this change is now we have to have a scene where the main character sees pictures of herself being abused and then get changed into a weird fetish dress (which afterwards I realized was the same one used in Freddy's Dead so I don't even know anymore).  It's just some sort of rat dropping on top that in this hokey, ineptly filmed disaster we also have to get the feeling that the director thought he could even broach real life serious topics.

were it not that I have bad horror...

hey I wonder how xkcd took steve job's death

PHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHBBBBBBBBBBBBBBT

976-EVIL II (1991)

I'm always torn how to review mediocre horror that is fully, gleefully aware of how mediocre it is.  I know how to deal with terrible that overplays its terrible; you call it shit that doesn't get any better because hurr hurr tongue in cheek.  But how do you deal with something that seems to have been developed solely with the intent of entertaining shut-ins who love them some USA "Up All Night" and Monstervision?  I'm not saying that the people that produced Terrorvision or Slugs or basically anything from Full Moon Productions weren't aware that they were developing stupid, cinematically unimportant movies, but there isn't the same overt pandering to my scene as there was in 976-EVIL 2.  I mean, look at this:

yeah, that's a reference to Corman and Monstervision's Joe Bob Briggs.  I don't even

And while it bugs me, truth be told, I sort of liked this movie.

The original 976-EVIL was notable for two things:

• It was directed by Robert Englund
• It had one of the lamer plot frameworks for what amounted to "evil demon terrorizes people" 

I barely remember the first one, honestly.  All I really recall was its surreal mish-mash of various horror aesthetics, with it completely unclear what kind of horror it wanted to be, trying to push heartstrings with the central conflict between the tough softy biker and his nerdy cousin with some weird revenge fantasy and it's just an enormous goddamned mess.

The sequel, to its quasi-credit, has no problems with this.  It very clearly a Nightmare on Elm Street rip-off awkwardly melded with the distinguishing feature of the first film, an "evil" pay phone service that tells your HORRORSCOPE while slowly turning you evil.

So here's the terrifying title shot.

I can't really stress enough how clumsily shoehorned the whole "evil phone service" concept is.  As in here, every so often when something spooky happens, there is a ringing phone but it rings kind of evil like?  Whatever.

Because this is generic late 80's/early 90's horror, we open with a lady getting naked.  I guess the twist here is that after the initial spook, instead of getting dressed to the boos and jeers of a suitably drunk audience, she instead puts on a slightly trashier version of what Sigourney Weaver wore at the end of Alien.  I should note that despite this really trashy fanservice at the beginning, there's literally nothing in else in the way of nudity for the rest of the film.  So if this film is your only hope on those lonely Friday nights, you better finish quickly unless you've got a fetish for horribad early 90's fashion.

Anyway.  She's menaced not very well by this guy:

This is Rene Assa. I kept thinking I had seen him before, but as far as IMDB was concerned, he was just a bit character actor who had this movie as one of his primary roles.  I'm not really sure what to make of his performance, as while he's not a terrible Freddy Krueger stand-in (to the point that they literally have his face start melting towards the end), there's something forced and kind of sad about forcing a 50-year-old man to fart out endless corny one-lines like "let's put...the pedal to the metal, as they saaaaaay."  Sometimes he seems to be having fun and other times he's just embarrassed to be there.

At any rate, Assa kills the woman via college drama club stalactite (no, really, but it's not as cool as you think), but is arrested.  We find out he's been calling the 976-EVIL hotline, and has the hots for his student assistant, who is also the police commissioner's daughter.  We don't know if these two character traits are connected, as this movie (wisely, as far as I'm concerned) skips the original film's plot about being driven evil by the hotline, so we never know if Assa was just a prick, or if he was corrupted by insane phone fees.  The script doesn't help, as there are a few scenes where Assa is all tender and friendly to his assistant, and other times he's all "gonna eat ur soul lol."

Assa quickly gains REAL ULTIMATE POWER, being able to astral project himself, which in this film means really awkward scene within a scene effects.  One curious part of 976-EVIL II is that really virtually every special effect that isn't an exploding car is something from one frame going into another.  Or whatever you call it.  I'm not Tom Savini.

They really should have called the movie We Bought This Greenscreen, We're Going to Use It Goddamnit.

Unfortunately, there's not alot of kill scenes in this movie.  We have:

1.  Assa killing the drunk janitor who witnessed the murder by holding him in front of a semi (with a fairly satisfying gib explosion)
2. A prosecutor, Monique Gabrielle (that chick that got naked in Bachelor Party and Deathstalker II, but not here, hmmmmmmm) having her car possessed and exploding after a really long sequence of her running into other cars.
3. Some dead policemen.

There's actually one more scene, but god help me, it's probably one of the most creative I've seen in a long time.  Don't worry, no explanation is needed here.

Some notes here (AFTER YOU WATCHED IT DON'T PEEK):

1. The decision to hide the awkward effects via black and white is pretty clever. 
2. The subsequent scene was creepy enough that I didn't even mind that the movie was totally wrong when it had the girl say that the end of the movie had the zombies breaking into the farmhouse and eating everyone.
3. I especially didn't mind when they even included the driving gloves from Barbara's brother on one of the zombies reaching from the door.

I'm bewildered by this scene.  In a movie with almost no competence whatsoever, you get an honest to god clever tribute to a horror classic with almost nothing to complain about.  Unfortunately, it's probably the only thing five minutes in this film worth anyone's time.

Aside from Assa, everyone is just bad.  Main girl is bad.  They actually got the biker dude, Spike, from the first film, but I don't know if he was this awful before or what but it's a damned good thing he basically does nothing useful for ninety minutes aside from wearing alot of leather and sharing a scene with Brigitte Nielsen as an occult specialist, which goes about as you'd expect it to when the actors are wearing stuff like this:

The real kicker is the ending.  Everything culminates with the girl trying to kill Assa while Spike's motorcycle fights Assa's astral projection's semi-truck (with more predictable results).  Both fail, and Assa chases the girl to some rocky seacoast and then Spike's Astral projection appears and knocks Assa over the cliff but then they kiss and Spike turns into space dust.

Dumb, but all right.  All we want is a good twist ending.  You ready?  The police come, and ask the girl who killed Assa.  She says Spike, but her dad says Spike died an hour ago.  Then she's arrested for killing Assa.  As she's loaded onto the ambulance, handcuffed, camera pans right to show a phone booth.  RING RING FUCK YOU AUDIENCE THE END.

I'd probably be alot meaner towards this movie if not for that death scene.  I'm not sure I would have hated it per se even then, since it's not like it's trying to be anything more than horror movie junk, but at the same time, it's trying so hard to be that junk I'm not sure what to think.  Reverse ambition?  Maybe I just need to call a helpline or something.

Survival of the Dead (2010) and Mother of Tears (2010)

So, let's review.

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD: A pretty damn good movie, basically having a major hand in transitioning horror from something typically enjoyed only by moms and kids with airbrushed t-shirts of bela lugosi to something that only weird sheltered nerds really care about.

DAWN OF THE DEAD: Best zombie horror film, possible best horror film.  No other comments apply.

DAY OF THE DEAD:  Some people say critically underrated film satirizing the government and the stupidity of man, others say the first signs that Romero is cracking as a director.  Don't see why I can't be both!

LAND OF THE DEAD: A movie that will remembered by my generation as one of the greatest disappointments, a film that we all tried so hard to convince ourselves to enjoy (LOOK DENNIS HOPPER, A FAT SAMOAN NAMED PILLSBURY, UHHH YUHHH), but eventually we all had to admit was just eye-rollingly bad.  Anyone that disputes this probably needs to go back and watch the ending.  I know it's scary, but we all have to face our fears and trucks shooting out fireworks after making peace with the zombies and jesus christ remember when we thought bub was going to be the limit of trying to make the undead sympathetic.

DIARY OF THE DEAD: Just watch, REC, jesus.

Seriously, why do I keep watching these movies?  Romero ran out of creative steam years ago, and now apparently sits on some cursed throne that gives counterfeit issues of Hollywood Reporter with headlines reading "WHERE ARE MOVIES TELLING US MAN IS THE REAL MONSTER?"  Carpenter at least has the decency to try new things, even if they are all uniformly awful.  Oh wait Romero did Bruiser, that counts for something no it doesn't.

So here comes Survival of the Dead, or in a world of perfect honesty, So You Assholes Don't Consider Day of the Dead a Good Movie Huh Well Here's How It Would Have Looked If I Smeared Shit Over Every Aspect Of That Film.  At least with Diary, there was something interesting about seeing Romero try to one up the new generation's love for all that first person nonsense.  It failed miserably, but at least you could argue that Romero was trying there.  Survival, by comparison, is possibly one of the laziest horror movies ever put out in semi-widespread release.

As noted above, the plot essentially is what would happen if you stuck Day in a Ziploc bag, added a cup of clam chowder, and shook for a full minute.  Okay so see the army guys aren't the bad guys sort of but there's an island of warring family clans and one wants to kill all the zombie and one wants to make the zombies eat pigs because that will solve the whole problem???  The plot is dumb as hell, but far more importantly, it's boring as shit.  It feels like Romero had an idea for some awesome setpieces and wacky character exchanges, with the rest of the film being thrown out to the four winds with the hopes that some acceptable zombie fanservice will blow in.

Oh the fanservice.  I'm sure there is a fair share of people who will continue to watch Romero's awful films because oh boy look at all these cool zombie deaths.  Whoa, that zombie got shot in the chest with a flare and now its head is on fire this movies rules!  Wait what's this copy of Dead Rising 2 coming out of my couch noooooooo.  Hey assholes, remember all the cool gimmick deaths in Dawn of the Dead?  There was that wicked helicopter scene AND THAT WAS FUCKING ALL.  I hate to sound like some potbellied asshat who winces when a well-meaning friend dares to get a movie with fast zombies, but a single low-tech gunshot kill in Dawn had more verve and poise than all the wacky "achievement unlocked" deaths in Survival.

So everyone hated Survival of the Dead.  But alot of people really liked Mother of Tears, which was only slightly less dumb than Survival.  What gives?

I think the initially positive critical wave is the same sort of reaction we all had with Land of the Dead, wanting to believe that as a great horror director finally finishes what most consider to be his most important series after an extremely, there is no way it can be bad.  But there has to be something else, since while Land of the Dead was bad, you could at least squint and sort of see the same directing style that Romero had with his earlier zombie movies.  With Mother of Tears, there is literally no way you could argue that this is the same direction we saw with Suspiria and Inferno.  Gone is anything resembling atmosphere or creepiness, and instead we just get lots of murders and spooky chases.  Alot of horror reviewers made much about the film's balls to the walls action, but they neglect to mention that any scene that doesn't involve someone getting stabbed is unrelentingly boring.  Not a creepy boring, but a "shot of walking from train to bookstore for five minutes" sort of way.  My girlfriend fell asleep during the movie, and I don't blame her, as anyone that isn't as invested in Argento's filmopgraphy and/or feels compelled to kowtow to a horror great probably didn't give a shit about this movie anyway.

Fright Night (2011)

So how long has it been since I said I unequivocally enjoyed something????  The Fright Night remake is a good horror movie.  Not great, but not that far from it.

Much credit for this goes to the writing.  Much of the dialogue and sight gags manage to toe that line between being attractive to teenage moviegoers while also throwing bones to dedicated horror fanatics like myself.  That is to say, everything is very "fun" in this movie.  For example, there is the inevitable Twilight joke, but the reference is cleverly handled and quickly removed, while a lesser film would have not stopped going BOY THESE VAMPIRES SURE AREN'T LIKE THOSE SPARKLEPIRES HUH HURR HUR HURR.  Some things slowly fall apart by the end of the film (as in 50% of everything out of David Tennant's mouth, but more about that later), but by then you're impressed with the actually scary parts and everything sort of works out.

Most of the actors and actresses are terribad, but who cares?  I couldn't remember what almost anyone looked like in the original until I rewatched the trailer, but I certainly remember Jerry.  In both Fright Nights, it's a basic truth that while you maybe don't want to see the mortals die, you're way more interested in what this suave and very dangerous Nosferatu is all about.  And by gum, Colin Farrell pulls things off, wisely avoiding aping Chris Sarandon's portrayal and instead shooting for a sort of insular suburbia demon, feeding on people in between viewings of Jersey Shore.*  In some respects, it was probably a conscious decision to fill the movie with relative no-names (OH WAIT THAT GUY WAS CHEKHOV WOOPS), as then the audience will then rapturously await the next scene with Farrell, which are expertly spaced out so we aren't overloaded on his character.  The editor was also brilliant enough to severely limit McLovin's scenes.  I think I speak for everyone intelligent when I was initially timid about the film based on the trailer showing that dude all over the place, but really he's there for like 20 minutes so it's all cool.  Also, fun fact, when you try to make that dude look scary, he just sort of turns into Zoolander.

Unfortunately, no great writing nor editing can save us from perhaps the most unnecessary 3D additions ever conceived.  I'm echoing the choir, but why in fuck's sake would you do a 3D film where every important scene in in the dark?  I don't feel that the 3D effects really harm the film, as both me and my girlfriend ultimately had a grand time laughing at the movie's desperate attempts to justify the use (FREE TSHIRTS FLING), but it still seems weird, and probably says alot about the slow waning of this current horror age that the studio executives felt this movie wouldn't get enough box office sales without such a gimmick.  Shames, shames.  On the other hand, this probably means less torture horror, so hooray!

Really, my only complaint is about Tennant, and I realize it's kind of stupid.  KIDS THESE DAYS wouldn't understand or care about the concept of late-night horror shows, so I get that they had to change the role of the older vampire hunter helper.  But couldn't you have gotten someone better than a vague Criss Angel parody?  I can't think of anything better, but that's why I'm writing shitty blogs like this.  What I could suggest would maybe be a little less Han Solo bitchery.  Did Roddy McDowell complain this much in the original?  Probably not, but even if he did, I'm pretty sure he was less of a ponce about it.

Fright Night is a pretty good movie.  It occupies that same place as the Dawn of the Dead remake, not necessary in any sense of the word, but still fun and scary to watch and certainly heaps better than anything featuring girls crying into cameras as needles are pushed into their knees or whatever.  And it's certainly a more necessary remake than GODDAMNED STRAW DOGS WHY WOULD YOU REMAKE THAT WHY FUCK YOU AMERICA

...excuse me.



*In between amusing little details like that and the understated theme of the foreclosure crisis helping vampirekind, I confidently state that Fright Night is a hundred times more effective parody than Red State is going to be.

Fifteen Hours In Review: Persona 4

They should really call this game Atlus Shrugged because holy shit is this game a fucking slog.  Fifteen Hours in, and I'm only in the second dungeon, which is apparently the hardest one in the game which also makes me concerned about things.  That isn't to say that I didn't get obliterated when I ran into the guys that cast group attack magic which apparently guarantees an extra turn now, but now that I know they're just like every other non-weak enemy and weak to ailments, it'll be a pushover.

The gameplay is better, sure.  It's nice being able to know that my teammates aren't going to do something hilariously boneheaded that will cost me a boss battle.  A better equip screen, sure.  Not having to choose between experience and gold in after battle card games?  I don't know I kind of liked that man.  Everything changed in Persona 4 seems like a reaction based on perceived issues in Persona 3, but some of those issues were charming in their clunkiness.

Most perplexing to me is the method at which dungeoning is done.  As you go into the MYSTERIOUS TV WORLD in the afternoon, now you have to choose between doing some dungeons or talking to random wanks so your mythical duck warrior will be a little stronger when you fuse him.  This is a direct inversion of Persona 3, where only a few night social links were neglected if you quested nightly.  It's not really a big deal since I'm clearing these supposedly hard dungeons in 2 days, but it's still weird and awkward.  Likewise to the new system of not automatically refilling your magic power when you return to the central hub, but instead forcing you to suddenly remember that Persona has physical attacks and pay a fox whose fees...will lower throughout the game?

As mentioned above, the difficulty curve just perplexes me.  Persona 3 took it pretty easy at first, with the first hard boss arriving after two in-game months of relative ease.  Persona 4 kicked my ass almost immediately, but it wasn't so much due to game difficulty as just not having enough ways to fight back.  So here I am at the first dungeon boss, with a design basically designed to kill you a few times, having to mash the circle button for three minutes each time because of course there is not a skip button during this fucking boss dialogue.  Of course you might counter that the Full Moon bosses of Persona 3 had the same endless dialogue preamble, but WHO DIES TO THE FULL MOON BOSSES.

But all these things would just be nitpicks, mere bitching if I could just get into this game.

The biggest hindrance is probably the plot, or rather how the game handles the plot.  Persona 3 wasn't Shakespeare (or hell, even good by anime terms), but at least it presented a strange mystery quickly and propelled you into it.  Persona 4 seems convinced that you, the player, are not fully understanding of any plot point unless it is repeated a dozen times in VOICE ACTED CUTSCENES.  Even now, I'm getting HM WHY ARE THEY PUTTING PEOPLE IN THE TV AWFULLY STRANGE discussions lasting for ten minutes.  I realize that judging by fanmade creative content the vast majority of people playing this game are 12-year-olds, but I think even they understand things at this point.

Also adding to my malaise is the way the game handles deadlines.  Maybe I'm just some adult baby, but I liked the certainty of the moon system in Persona 3.  Roughly 30 days to clear the new dungeon block, cool.  Now I have no idea how much time I really have to rescue people or even when they're going to be captured unless I push away my dysfunctional uncle's daughter away from her quiz show to look at the weather.  It's like the game is desperate to remove any urgency from my playing, which would be fine if I wasn't playing something billed as an anime murder mystery.

I hate all the characters.  Granted, I hated almost everyone in Persona 3, but at least there I got Koromaru and Elizabeth (also, point of order, the persona fighting game coming out better have one of those two in the roster or I will be so het up).  The closest personality to acceptable is New Junpei, if just that the game writers ratcheted up Old Junpei's closet issues a hundredfold.

So it's really bad news that Nocturne finally went on sale, because holy shit I've only played an hour and I'm already fighting stuff and things aren't being explained to be in excruciating detail.  Fuck this game.

my name is diablo iii and I'm in minor threat

So for those that peruse the VIDYA GAME JOURNOSPHERE, you might have heard that Blizzard released a beta of Diablo III along with some announcements about how the game was going to function, to wit:

• In order to defend themselves from the hordes of mods, bots, and Joey Greco impersonators, the entire game will be online only, requiring a constant internet connection to battle.net's all-seeing eye.  To put it another way, kiss your single player offline life goodbye.
• Branching off from that, all mods, sinister or not, are totally forbidden.
• Perhaps most "surprising" (surprising as in "wow didn't think they'd have the balls to do it") part was their announcement that rather than allow third parties to totally wreck the game economy by selling uniques/runes/charms for real cash, now we have an auction house that may wreck the game economy by letting you sell uniques/runes/charms for real cash (articles have mentioned that game gold can also be used, but I cannot believe that gold in any Diablo game will ever have relevancy)

As you might expect from my general attitude to all things new and scary, I'm not really a fan of this.

The internet-only thing is the part that least affects me, personally.  I'm a middle-class white American, a strong wireless cable connection is my god-given right.  I honestly also spent most of my Diablo II life on the ladder, saving up runes and shitty uniques to eventually give my lineage of summon necros Enigma runewords so my murder capabilities would be tripled, so it's not like I have any personal stake in offline single player remaining.  

But hey not everyone that played and loved Diablo II was a middle-class white American.  Stable internet connections aren't a guaranteed infrastructure even in America (or rather especially in America), to say nothing of stable non-dialup internet connections.  I'm not claiming to be some social crusader with an idyllic picture of starving African children running across their village to watch some family beating Nightmare Andariel for the first time, but it still seems fairly shitty to be punishing people for bad internet, especially when the reasoning for it is pretty shitty.

Diablo II's current online life  is essentially gore-drenched hammerdin bots and endless advertisement bots.  It's not a fun place, and if placing all these restrictions on play style removes this specter or severely reduces it, I'll probably drop my WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN act and be sort of happy.  But it takes alot of credulous belief in Blizzard's coding, not to mention an unwillingness to face the reality of hacking in WoW, to believe that within three months of release neither the Chinese or Russians are going to figure out a workaround.   And then we'll be right back to Blizzard playing the reactive houseowner cutting Marmaduke in half with the Grandfather, only for the pieces to regenerate and tell me that I'll get a free Stone of Jordan with a purchase of $10.99 or more.  And with that, the only direct result of this will be people like me fearing an account ban because I dared to join a private server for a content mod that balances the game once Blizzard gets sleepy and just goes "uh buff corpse explosion see you in six months zzzz."

I won't lie, of all of this, it's the lack of mods that bothers me the most out of anything.  Continuing to play the original Diablo II a couple of times after beating it has no real challenge unless you do silly challenges or enjoy being a dickpunched hero and go Hardcore.  Mods that entirely rewrote the game, like Midnight Sun or MedianXL actually made it fun to experiment again and recreate being sixteen  and having no idea how to get past a certain monster.  But I'm sure Blizzard will accommodate me and release lots of DLC with NEW SKILLS and TERRIFYING NEW MONSTERS, right?

Now we come to the part that's really enraged those nerds:  The Auction House.  For all intents, Blizzard has legitimized the practices of getting banned from WoW dungeons because your gearscore is not high enough, or getting splattered by Timmy's hammerdin in PVP because he's spent a hundred dollars on an inventory's worth of 40/15 ias jewels.  The eras of cute micro-transactions for cosmetic shit only is over, now those with the disposable income or welfare checks can bypass the grinding experience with Blizzard's blessings.

In a depressing way, this is probably the best thing for Blizzard to do. If Timmy is going to steal his mother's credit card and pay for his advantages, it's probably better to do so over Blizzard's encrypted channels than something operated by an offshoot of the Russian mafia.  Blizzard is, if nothing else, a company with perfect business sense, and just tapped an income source that was going entirely to benefit fairly scummy people.  Of course, the reality is that all that's really changed is that now the scummy people are going to have to pay Blizzard a percentage of the profits to operate.  Accounts are still going to get hacked, dupes will inevitably be summoned, poor people are going to be given armor with 250% MF and told to kill a certain boss X numbers of times in a twelve hour period or have their already poverty-level wages docked.  I have to respect the Blizzard PR drones that are going to be emphasizing in the months up to the release that this is all to totally curtail hackers and for the benefits of you, the consumer!!! ^_______^ 

In conclusion, this is all kind of pointless bitching.  Diablo III is going to be disgustingly successful financially, we're all going to buy/pirate it, and people that refuse micro-transactions will just play on their private passworded game or the equivalent thereof, occasionally venturing out to a trade channel to dump their wares for slightly better gear.  The sum result of this is that the average gamer gets a slightly lamer game, Blizzard gets significantly more money, and the exploitation that always occurs when sweet lewt, dumb gamers, and intelligent criminals intersect will only increase.

Oh ho ho.  Yeah Yeah.

Jennifer's Body (2009)

There's an intriguing gulf between those critics that liked Jennifer's Body, and those who hated it.  Generally, those who loved it tend to harp upon the film's philosophical intentions and subtext as the reason for the film's season.  Negative critic's reviews were essentially "this movie dumb and not scary fart."

Guess which side I'm on!  Jennifer's Body does contain a number of quasi-interesting ideas and subversions of the horror genre, but as a horror-comedy film, it is complete shit.  It's sort of a cautionary morality tale about what happens when you watch stuff like Suspiria and The Lost Boys and take a ton of notes about the symbolism in the sets and the roles that characters play, but completely neglect what made those films such good entertainment in addition to their cultural viability.  Cody and her director, Karyn Kusama, created a horror film with a mediocre amount of brains, but literally no heart.

The plot essentially revolves around three dull high school characters: Whiny nerdgirl Needy (Amanda Seyfried, continuing the tradition of casting attractive women as lame girls because GLASSES), her long-time bff, super popular cheerleader Jennifer (Megan Fox), and Needy's quasi-nerdy boyfriend Young Neil Chip (Johnny Simmons).  Things quickly go to shit when Needy and Jennifer go to a concert of evil satanic independent rock people (alot of reviews cast them as indie, but it's unclear how Cody intends to portray their genre since they sure as hell don't sound indie, and they make reference to Maroon 5 as their artistic and financial goal), who kidnap Jennifer as a sacrifice to Satan for stardom.  The process then makes Jennifer into an evil demon who has to feast upon the blood of a dude every month or otherwise her otherworldly makeup disappears or something.

Hey, did you catch that?   Has to eat dude's blood EVERY MONTH?  Quite the hilarious tweezt, eh?  If you disagree, well strap in, because  the entire film is full of those cute little surface twists and symbols with no real meaningful message.  I'm assuming that alot of critics thought the intellectual exercises were totally clever and brilliant because they think the horror genre is an endless wasteland of girls getting raped with knives or ghost knives.  Jennifer's Body really does feel like critic food, designed to appeal to some mythical subsection of people that never watch horror movies and think they're intellectuals because they read three articles by Pauline Kael.  The one thing Jennifer's Body does do competently is making you think that the messages aren't really subtle, but you're just really smart for figuring them out, like we're 5 years old and at our church's Easter Egg hunt.  Oh, everyone's just sort of a victim in a different way!  My god, it's like Diablo Cody wrote a love letter to me and I have the secret decoder ring!  Jesus Christ.

I'd probably be more hospitable to the film if there was more to it than "Be Sure to Drink Your Ovaltine and High School is Really Confusing to Girls," but holy shit there isn't.  As horror, it completely fails.  Again, for all the horror that Diablo Cody has purportedly ingested, she apparently missed the twin concepts of terror or suspense.  You know what is going to happen at any given point in the film, and when it does happen it's just some cgi teeth or shadows that shows just enough that you know what is happening (bye implied horror) but not nearly enough that a brownshirt gorehound is going to be impressed (bye overt horror).  As far as I can tell she's going for some sort of exploitation vibe, but there's nothing really violent enough or sleazy sexy enough (unless you count seeing the top half of megan fox's body double's butt as sleazy sexy enough) to count as even a clever inversion of exploitation cinema.

Some people would probably characterize this complaint as saying that I'm just some gross male that can't handle my horror films straying from conventions.  But there's a difference between doing something genuinely creative and different in horror (for example, Dead Ringers or Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer), and just having a movie where a demon girl kills some guys and that's about it.  Removing familiar conventions and replacing it with dead static doesn't mean that the director is challenging the system, it means you just directed Aeon Flux and have no idea how to direct horror effectively.

And guess what it also completely fails in comedy too.  Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried, regardless of their acting talents, are completely ill-suited for Cody's style of dialogue.  While I disliked Juno, Ellen Paige and Michael Cera at least seemed to adapt to the sub-mental rhythm of Cody's wacky word phrases and turn it into something of their own.  Here, the two women just sort of splurt out stuff like "oh that lead singer is SALTY," always emphasizing the wacky words because that's the joke right????  I get a sinister feeling that Cody probably preferred the actresses becoming dialogue tubes to what happened with Juno, because holy shit there are so many scenes of them talking and talking and talking and it's never funny or clever just some goddamned future spaceman language you'd hear in a five dollar tor book.  It also doesn't help that literally no one is going to believe that Seyfried or Fox are in high school, so now we just have people my age talking like Microsoft Mary ate a bucket of Mad Libs.  Johnny Simmons fares a little better since he talks like a normal human being and you can pretend he's in college.  The only actually funny people in the movie, Amy Sedaris and JK Motherfucking Simmons, get like two scenes each where they just sort of move the plot along.  Are you fucking kidding me?

I guess what ultimately galls me about this film is how it's somehow treated as something greater as a horror genre film by some people simply because it refuses to be entertaining and instead spin its english grad thesis wheels.  For example, look at this fucking paragraph by some dildo on Movieline:

Horror and teen comedy are two genres proven time and again to be invulnerable to reviewers (when they’re even screened for reviewers). Put them together, though — especially in a semi-satirical fashion that turns the first genre’s sex-and-death conventions on their heads — and you get a whole lot of dickheads sniping that Body didn’t do enough to adhere to convention. “Jennifer’s Body falls into the dispiriting category of dumb movies made by smart people, in this case a glibly clever writer and a talented director who think a few wisecracks are enough to subvert the teen horror genre,” wrote the Boston Globe’s Ty Burr. Sigh. 

Could it use a more knockout horror blow by the end? Sure it could. Could it be funnier? I guess so. But: That’s not the movie Cody and Kusama wanted to make. It’s ultimately a movie about two teenage girls’ misadventures in victimization — literally (Jennifer's attack by the rock band), thematically (theLast Girl trope of horror movies), and culturally (the media's exploitation of survivors). The jokes are virtually incidental to the friction imposed on women who happen to be two sides of the same coin. Who’s the monster, and who made the monster? Sorry if you wanted Heathers with demons, fellas. Equipment’s cheap these days; perhaps make your own?

SEE IT DOESN'T MATTER THAT THIS MOVIE IS A WARM TURD BECAUSE DIABLO CODY HAS A MESSAGE.  Here's a hint, clownshoes: a horror film can be entertaining and scary and have some clever ideas at the same time!  A friend reminded me of Teeth, which holy shit inverts horror genres and also manages to have some pleasing gore and grossly funny scenes.  Of course, every critic referred to that film as "genre" (and therefore not worthy of serious discussion) because it dared to be entertaining. Two years later, the same people totally nodded at Kusama's pronouncement that Jennifer's Body is totally post-modern horror because nothing surprising or scary or funny happens.

Is it possible to be anti-intellectual when your targets have no actual intellect?

Overthinking Terrible: Woody Allen's Anything Else

Anything Else was so bad that it forced me to question whether I actually like anything Woody Allen has actually done.  This is partially because it's been years since I've seen a Woody Allen film, during that time when I actually paid attention to movie books and tried to keep pace with the hipster towards important films.  Anything Else, unlike the film's incompetent psychologist, peeled away my mental layers until I had to face uncomfortable truths, like David Mitchell in Peep Show:

"Did I really enjoy watching Annie Hall?  Or was I just bamboozled by what all those movie books said how he captured the New York lifestyle?  I don't even like New York.  Or do I say I like him because I'm afraid I'll sound like an anti-semite?  But I like Mel Brooks without hesitation!  Oh no, my series is getting increasingly darker and less humorous!"

Ultimately, I faced my demons and still laughed at Annie Hall clips on youtube ("why don't you get William F. Buckley to kill the spider?"), but my insecurity operated from the fact that Anything Else, unlike other modern Allen movies I've disliked such as Match Point, operates like some gibbering, half-formed clone of a classic Allen film.  All the elements are there: performer-based improvisional comedy, New York eccentricities, sly reference humor.  The problem is that Anything Else takes these concepts and reduces them to their lowest, lamest form, for reasons I'll get to at the end of this review.

The movie operates from the standpoint of Jerry Falk, played by Jason Biggs (yeah remember him?????).  He is a writer who you'll never actually care about.  His only recognizable trait is his total lack of backbone towards all the negative forces in his life, including his girlfriend, played by a visibly regretful Christina Ricci.  He is friends with a HILARIOUSLY idiosyncratic jew, played by Allen himself.  Jason Biggs bitches about stuff for the entire movie, his girlfriend doesn't have sex with him and then has affairs, he moves to California.  That's literally the movie.

Of course, the plot is never really the point of any Woody Allen comedy, but is merely there to set up a framework for funny dialogue and references, but there's almost nothing of the sort in this film.  The worst offenders are probably Jason Biggs's endless fourth-wall monologues to the audience.  Five minutes do not go by  without all action stopping so Biggs can walk around in the set, talking in a faux clever manner about all his issues like a Franzen/DeLillo character after four generations of imbreeding.  Biggs is obviously not equipped to portray this sort of humor, treating the scenes like he's guest-hosting Punk'd.  While Biggs' lack of talent is part of the problem, he's also completely miscast in Allen's suffering Jew.  The film demands someone that looks like they've been shit on their entire life, and nothing about Biggs suggests a total wimp.  Ironically, Biggs might have been a funnier presence if Allen had given his character more bite than the whipped puppy dog that just rolls around whining for tru luv.  That is to say, Biggs would have done better in portraying the original type of Allen protagonist rather than some weird version created by equal parts pressure to make a more teen friendly film and Allen's own obvious misogyny in viewing the "nice guy" archetype as a character people should root for.

Pretty much all the other actors have their humor wasted too.  Ricci is talented, but her portrayal of Allen's nightmares about a dominant feminine personality never quite works.  Throughout the film, we're implored to view her as some mysterious siren that is irresistible to men, but while she's certainly attractive, one never reaches the dichotomy based on the scenes we're given.  For example, after a disastrous attempt by Biggs to rekindle the relationship in a hotel room leads to a visit to the ER, we're treated to a scene where she's examined by a doctor while she's writhing around and flirting with him.  In addition for the scene lasting far too long for the minuscule amount of cuckold humor it produces, it's hard to see why her actions make her so alluring.  There's a sort of a difference between sirens and sluts, guys.  Ricci does her best, but Allen's direction was obviously determined to make her into a one-note hag who is responsible for all of the problems in the relationship, so eventually she acquiesces and evilly quips about how she had sex with another dude to know whether she could have orgasms again.

Allen's character is the best in the film, but that's not a hard hurdle to jump.  Allen plays a wacky, paranoid Jew who miserably teaches at a public school and stockpiles guns and supplies for the return of the Nazis.  It's an amusing enough character, but as the film progresses and Allen gets progressively more violent towards the world and hateful towards Ricci's character, the humor is soured.  Alot of film critics wanted more of Allen's character, which honestly makes me wonder if they understood Allen's films.  It'd be as if Walken's character in Annie Hall suddenly had 40 more minutes of screen time.

All this makes me wonder who the audience in this movie is supposed to be.  The ostensible answer is the teen market, but while that's certainly how the studios marketed it, it's harder to see that as Allen's intent.  Many of the references are clearly not intended for the kids (for god's sake, there's a reference to The Exterminating Angel), and while I guess if you squint really hard, you could call it a romantic comedy, it is a damn black one.  At the same time, the relationships and characters are so one-note that no mature mind is really going to be tickled by what is going on.  Do you see where I'm going with this?

No, it's not aliens.

Moreso than alot of directors, Allen's always used his films as pretenses to help him deal with whatever issues present in his life.  We'd get to see the director's neurosis laid bare, we'd laugh at the inner mind of a funny dude, everything was cool.  I'm not sure if the process started earlier than Anything Else, but this film is a pretty awkward glimpse into someone who still believes he is funny, but is only capable of nervous distaste for everything around him. In retrospect, this helps explain Match Point, which was at least capable of matching a dark tone with a dark subject matter. Woody Allen doesn't care about whether you found this movie funny, this is his ten million dollar therapy session and I guess you can watch but it's going to cost you.

And while that's interesting from a psychological standpoint, Anything Else is still a shitty fucking comedy.