a briefish defense of John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness

A HERO: ah, okay

I'll do an impassioned defense of prince of darkness as recompense

A FOOL: :p

why are you doing it, again?

THE HERO: what doo you mean

MINDLESS: who are you defending PoD from?

EZEKIEL: the haters

guess you don't understand internet

The more I think about it, the more I think that Prince of Darkness, Carpenter's sullen middle child in the Apocalypse Trilogy, is my favorite Carpenter film.  This isn't some underhanded complement of Carpenter's other films, but rather the extent to which I fucking love Prince of Darkness.  Unfortunately, most tiresome horror nerds will blather about whether Halloween or The Thing is the best, and consign Prince of Darkness to "yeah it was pretty silly" and depending on whether we're dealing with hipster horror nerds or not, someone will point out that DJ Shadow argh fuck all of you.

I'm going to go on record here.  I believe that, especially with Carpenter slowly oozing back into cinema (I am literally too scared to see his newest films, especially with the vague hope that his "Masters of Horror" run means NO MORE CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED EVER FUCKING AGAIN), there will be a critical reevaluation of Prince of Darkness.  The basic critical line on the film goes from viewing it positively as a wacky, silly, occasionally scary spookfest and negatively as a too wacky mess with a boring cast.

Generally, I've seen people express the "plot is too goofy" argument by restating the plot in a tone typically reserved for eye-rolling college professors talking about science fiction.  "Oh, so there's a big green vat of liquid, and that's the ultimate evil, and it possesses people by pouring green stuff in their mouth.  Riiiiight."  It's sort of the offensive version of when writers try to explain their story outline to you and stop out of embarrassment.  STOP THE PRESSES, WEIRD IDEAS SOUND PRETTY STUPID WHEN OUT OF THEIR ELEMENT.  Sure, the Possession by Ecto Cooler is silly no matter how you look at it, but it's also not entirely out of place in this sort of movie, which attempts to conflate absurd concepts with a genuine sense of dread.

"From Job's friends insisting that the good are rewarded and the wicked punished, to the scientists of the 1930's proving to their horror the theorem that not everything can be proved, we've sought to impose order on the universe. But we've discovered something very surprising: while order DOES exist in the universe, it is not at all what we had in mind!" 

Generally, when horror movies attempt to introduce intellectual concepts in their film, they have to dress it up in the most obvious clothes possible to make it clear that HEY THIS SCARY IS SUPPOSED TO BE SMART.  There's nothing smarter in Cemetery Man than in Prince of Darkness, but because the former makes it very clear that its an arthouse film, and the latter masquerades itself in genre conventions, idiot critics who are more interested in fellating Fellini miss the point.  Putting it another way, alot of people attack Prince of Darkness because the weird things aren't weird enough to register as truly thematic.  But if the film went for the truly grotesque, it would undermine the movie's tone, of ordinary becoming something still within intellectual grasp, but ultimately horrible.  The scares: worms, homeless people, late 80s word processors, none really changed, but far more dangerous than before, especially if you pull back the curtain and see what's controlling all of it.

Of course, before this ordinary but unimaginable horror, we have ordinary and unimaginative characters.  Critics have attacked the characters as uninteresting and clunky, but I'd argue that this was at least a subconscious decision by Carpenter.  The film is not operating in a "Good vs Evil" basis, or even a "Fodder and Protagonist(s) vs Evil," but "Evil vs. People Unequipped For This Shit."  Both the rational scientists and faithful priest are completely helpless before what they're facing precisely because of its closeness to normal things.  The irony of the film is that the characters would have had more success versus hellhounds and beholders than some homeless people and a laughing black guy, and that's what makes the movie work.  The closest they come to understanding is when they're asleep, and the more rational they attempt to approach their situation, the worse things get.  The tepid opening scenes of laughable romance show how completely unprepared the main characters are for anything approaching substance, and the only time anyone approaches doing something right is when they just go "fuck it" and let emotions take over.  Of course, the ending suggests that emotions could possibly fuck everything up anyway, so who knows.

I guess all I'm saying is that Prince of Darkness scares me because it's not about killer supernatural squids or guys with big knives, but that the slightest shift of reality can send the ordinary into a ludicrous terror engine that we are not going to be able to deal with.

Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia

God, who fucking cares at this point.  Someone on action button wrote a breathless, comprehensive review of the game like it was a radiohead album, and it honestly impresses me, because I cannot get my dick up with reference to this game.  Sure, I've played it (twice in fact), but that has less to do with its quality and more to the fact that I am a consumerist slave when it comes to whipping weird floating monsters to try to pick up an armor that is going to give a tiny increase to my pain numbers.  I don't have an Xbox 360 because I know I would be endlessly twirling my ever-increasing gut on stupid awful Harmony of Wait Did They Seriously Reuse Harmony for the Title runs.  I can still be all happy when playing Julius Mode on Dawn of Sorrow, but even thinking about Ecclesia is like a eternally ordained desk job: I'll do it and do it well, but fuck if I really care about it.

Oh man a new fighting mechanic where you have nothing but spells and your MP refills really fast when you're inactive.  Enjoy experimenting in the early game when you have nothing but basic weapons that you'll have to constantly switch to meet increasing situations, because you'll never switch again once you get the 3-way fireball spell that registers a hit from each fireball, making your heroine a magical equivalent of Doom 2's super shotgun, except you'll never run out of ammo and never deal with Revenants on ledges halfway across the map.  OH wait, my bad, you'll switch one more time when you finally reach Castlevania and get the multi-hit light-element lasers.  For better or worse, the skills needed to triumph in combat are more primal now, as aside from some totally worthless support skills, all spells are easily gained and never level up.  It's a nice way to avoid endless grindfests and protect hapless developers from having to tweak combat difficulty between those of us that gained 40 levels in the Ghost Dancer Room from Dawn of Sorrow and you lunkheads that dared to play the game like normal human beings.  Sadly, I was so starved for grinding that I spent an hour in my first playthrough killing owls in the same room just so I could level up one support ability that I never even used.

Now, what's that, you say?  ONCE you reach Castlevania????  Indeed, Ecclesia's other gimmick is that the first two-thirds of the game are short, linear areas arranged on a map designed to make game review idiots think that this game is REALLY GOING BACK TO THE CASTLEVANIA ROOTS.  The action button reviewer tried really hard to portray them as some sort of fundamental difference from the typical endless room vomit of previous Metroidvanias, but this is, of course, merely an attempt to sound smart because they are basically the same thing, or at best, bite-sized versions of the paintings from Portrait of Ruin.  They're not bad per se, though the charm dies off when they start reusing settings in the latter half of this particular escapade.

The charm really starts to rot when you start getting the missions.  I neglected to talk about missions in Portrait of Ruin, probably because thinking about them was pretty depressing.  Completing all the missions through the course of Portrait was essentially a simulacrum of working for a boss who is steadily losing his mind.  Your tasks start off fun and lighthearted ("Kill ten axe knights!  Find a piece of meat to beat up!"), get steadily more unhinged ("Kill this rare enemy until it drops its rare item!  Kill five different kinds of enemies to get five rare items!  Fuck around with your equipment until you reach stupid high INT stat!"), and finally go bugfuck insane ("LEVEL UP THREE SUBWEAPONS WITH STUPID HIGH REQUIREMENTS!  KILL OPTIONAL BOSS WITH THIS HORRIBLE WEAPON!  FUCK MY DOG GUARDIAN ANGEL!").  The worst part was that some quests required items that could be sold and never bought back or regained from enemies., which was truly godlike design, especially when you realized that you could only have five available quests at a time, and you can never remove a quest.

So, to be fair, the missions in Order of Ecclesia are eons better, but still awful. Now, the missions are given by townspeople you start to rescue through your journeys.  Very few do not involve grinding, and some involve what in hindsight is possibly the worst thing to happen to Castlevania: the random chest.  Each of the "stages" has chests placed in certain locations.  The chests can be either plain wooden chests, or fabulous metal chests.  Each class of chest can contain one of roughly four items, and the selection changes per stage.  Does this sound a little familiar, players of Harmony of Seriously Why Would You Ever Want to Remind Players of Dissonance?  Essentially, Konami has done it again: gone is endless enterings/leavings of a room to kill a monster, now we get to endlessly trudge through treasure runs until we get 5 gold ores!  Castlevania is  now the fucking Daily Dungeon in WoW.  The only possible good thing is that as you progress in the game, what previously only appeared in the rare chests begins to show up in common chests, but if you were me, missions tended to follow a certain pattern:

1) Get mission, swear that you were just going to wait until the material appeared in common chests.
2) On the first time in a new map, find a random rare chest with the material in it.
3) Emboldened with fortune like a gambler winning big in his first hand of poker, decide that you're just going to ride this wave of luck and get two more of the same material on this map, as this shouldn't take long at all!
4) Sell your wife for a new DS a/c cable because the old one burnt out on your 150th run of SPOOKY STONE VALLEY.  IT'S GOTTA COME UP AGAIN, RIGHT?  RIGHT?

I guess what I'm saying is that I kind of hope Konami is dumb and continues the treasure chest system for the inevitable 3DS Castlevania, because I hate it so fucking much that it is the only thing that will counteract the carcinogens in my brain that will otherwise force me to get the first (terrible) version of the 3DS so I can kill more weird floating things for big money and big prizes.

Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin

Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin is sort of a Christmas Ghost of the Future warning to all Castlevania fans, all some kawaii Death-tan anime girl pointing to your grave that reads "LVL 99, 200.6%, 24:60:60."  I understand the reasoning behind the game's flaws (which is better than I could say for Harmony), but they're still flaws that really exemplify the negative, dull trends that the 2-D castlevania series is heading towards.

Visual and Audio-wise, there's really no complaints.  The soundtrack is probably the best of the DS titles, and only second to Circle of the Moon's glorious nostalgia clambake.  The story is a vague followup to the Genesis's Castlevania: Bloodlines, with the Belmont clan still anonymous in Nebraska in the 19th century, and only Jonathan Morris, son of the Texas guy who I never played in Bloodlines and a magician girl whose lines and interactions with other character is vaguely creepy as hell "you look so young but you're a woman ooga ooga."

Oh that's right, TWO playable characters.  Understandably, the developers of Portrait of Ruin saw how utterly, unstoppably powerful Soma was in Dawn of Sorrow and decided that the answer to this problem was to have two characters, each only about half as powerful as Soma.  You're free to play as either character, but can also have the computer control the second character at the same time.  The AI alternates between "serviceable" and "standing in front of a boss's painfully telegraphed attack."  Thankfully, when your AI ally takes damage, only your MP takes damage.  Of course, since your main source of damage largely comes out of magic and magic-powered subweapons, there's almost no reason to have your ally run into skeletons except to have the girl cast stat buffing spells or do DUAL ATTACKS, which are ludicrously powerful spells that render almost every boss into a pile of giblets.

What my real problem with Portrait can kind of be symbolized in the equipment screen.  After SotN, which admittedly did have eight character slots (though by a tenth of the way though the game you never really cared about what stats could ever mean aside from the one that made the number above bads get bigger), the metroidvania series never went above four equipment slots.  Suddenly, with Portrait we've got eight slots.  Per character.

Now, it's really not that big a deal.  Two of the slots are devoted to your subweapon and combo attack, and most equipment either applies to just one character and is either a clear upgrade or one of those mundane DO YOU WANT ONE MORE CON POINT OR ONE MORE INT STAT rhetorical questions that no one should ever really care about.  However, it also meant that your CASTLEVANIA ADVENTURE is a chinese water torture of endless new equipment that you're probably going to want to compare against until you feel like your character stats are one of those corkboard drug gang organization charts from The Wire.

But that's not the real problem.  Everything about Portrait is like some autist's horrible nightmare.  Aria and Dawn of Sorrow also placed you in some number-crunching grind frenzy, but the operation was simple enough that you didn't really have to think about anything.  But suddenly, with Portrait, it's not enough to kill an enemy, because you need to "master" the whip dude's subweapons by hitting a bad with them and THEN killing them which gives a certain number of points and meanwhile the enemy display in the top screen is telling you how many times you killed the bad and what his favorite color is and DID YOU COLLECT THIS ITEM HUH?  To put it another way, I could mindlessly grind in Aria/Dawn, but Portrait grinding makes me want to take up smoking.  There's just something about the game that forces the player to be way more active about the grind process, and it drives me insane.

The other variation on the formula is the whole concept of PAINTING WORLDS.  See, we're not fighting dracula, but instead a really boring other vampire who makes evil paintings.  So in addition to going through a somewhat truncated Castlevania, you also have painting worlds that you have to overcome.  Three out of four of the painting worlds are sort of fun: evil town, evil forest, evil pyramid.  But then there's the evil circus.  I'm pretty certain no one enjoys the evil circus, which features such things as obnoxious environmental dangers, paths going nowhere, and a weird square design that essentially means that you COULD just beat it with half the map covered but of course Konami knows that you won't do that so you have to do a basic mirror image of the map to find everything AFTER the boss is dead.

So, whatever, you think.  One bad level.  You finally get to the end, and the game reveals "oh yeah, vampire dude created four more evil paintings, and they're not optional."

"Okay."

"Yeah....they're basically the laziest inversions of the first four painting maps."

"Okay."

"And we made the evil circus remix is waaaaaay more annoying this time."

I understand that this was a fairly painless way for the game to extend its length, but I still took a two-month break from the game when I realized I'd have to do evil circus again.  It was still awful though, don't worry!  The cherry on top of this realization that Konami basically has no respect for us retarded Castlevania fans was that the bosses of the new paintings are just total retreads of basic Castlevania bosses.  And of course, Akmodan Fucking The Second had to be the boss of evil circus.

I don't hate Portrait of Ruin, or at least not to the extent of Harmony.  It's just a massively disappointing journey into being forced to admit that at this point Konami's treatment of the 2-D Castlevania series is sort of a fat guy on a couch going "well uh in the next game uhhh we'll have the hero just cast spells and typical weapons will just be spells get it okay gonna sleep now"

and that fat guy's name was dramatic foreshadowing

Nightmare Alley (2010)

I think one reason I really like anthology horror is that it's generally harder to screw up than your typical horror feature.  It's like a short story: all you have to do is introduce your characters, do some buildup, then get to the scares and/or gore and move on to another three-hit combo.  All the basics are laid out to you, just watched Creepshow or either of the Trilogy of Terror films and move on from there.  Of course, the ease one can film anthology horror really heightens my bad reaction when I see a bad example of the sub-genre.

Enter NIGHTMARE ALLEY.  The first worrisome sign is the fact that the film boasts seven scary tales, but it only seventy minutes.  Okay, I think.  It's a little on the short side, but that means more gore and doom per minute, right?  So here's the opening story, which I'm going to describe in detail for some important reasons.

We start with some homeless guy walking in a longcoat that kind of reminds me of The Hitchhiker, which is the last pleasant thought I'm going to have for the rest of the film.  We then cut to two punks (?, see picture below) discussing crazy stuff like moshpits and faggots and how they love to beat up everyone and fuck pussy also faggots suck maaaan.

Then the homeless guy appears next to them and offers them the newest issue of NIGHTMARE ALLEY in exchange for a cigarette.  The punk kids then proceed to denigrate butt rock some more, which for some reason enrages the homeless guy to the point that he pushes one of the kids to a wall and knifes him then pees on the corpse and I begin to really regret watching this on a lark.

The other punk guy, who ran, hides by a garbage dumpster, then proceeds to read the new issue of NIGHTMARE ALLEY.  We see that NIGHTMARE ALLEY is apparently one of those awful 90s indie comics that were drawn with color pencils and a severe lack of talent, and that it shows the punk READING THE COMIC AND THEN GETTING HIS HEAD CUT OFF and guess what happens next.

(also, note that the guy actually says "holy shit" as opposed to "huh," which really harms the presaging legitimacy of this comic)

You may be thinking: "wow, that was pretty dumb, but it's an opening story and I'm sure they get better."  Here's the thing: they don't.  The three-minute film about a killer bum and an evil comic book is easily the best thing this film had to offer.  The reason for this is pretty simple.  For a film where the stories are on average only ten minutes long, they somehow take forever for something to happen, and when it does happen, it's predictable and dumb.  Each story is introduced by a pale-faced guy in a top hat that I'm guessing is supposed to harken back to the Cryptkeeper, but the former's monologues are more along the line of "boy, that really sucked for that guy, our next story is about a guy who's about to have his life really suck."

Every story on here is basically the same awful garbage.  Sure, the plots are slightly different, but they all feature the hallmarks of terrible indie horror:

RPG dialogue:  By this, I mean that every line sounds less like it came out of a real human's mouth, and would be more at home in some 16-bit rpg's blue dialogue box scrolling across the screen.  It's got that stilted, poorly executed diction that is probably an equal result between the screenwriter being hopelessly incompetent and the actors either being too scared to adlib or having the worst improv skills imaginable.

All my friends are actors now:  Granted, this isn't always a bad thing, but it sure as hell is an issue for NIGHTMARE ALLEY, as every person in the film is either a fat, unappealing male or a fat, unappealing girls who want to look like Bettie Paige.  There is exactly one person in the film who isn't either horribly nervous or trying to get over their nervousness by yell-acting.

Nothing going Nowhere:  As I mentioned above, despite each story being around ten minutes, it's amazing how NIGHTMARE ALLEY manages to fuck up pacing so bad.  For fuck's sake, a majority of the stories have filler scenes, such as "guy talking to his cop buddy about nothing relevant whatsoever " or "girl fiddling with silverware for thirty seconds," "other guy walking through dollar general," and of course an endless plethora of cars going out of driveways, down roads, and then back to the same driveway.  On the other end, when you finally get to the scares, they're just as underwhelming.  I'm not saying that scares need to be some big budget feast, but if your story's climax is beyond the reach of your cash reserves, one either needs to rewrite the story or find an entertaining way to suggest things.  For example, say the climax to your "cowboy zombie" story involves zombies entering a town and devouring it, but you didn't get the permit to do the scene in time!  Some filmmakers would find intelligent ways to get the idea across that didn't scream WE'RE BROKE, such as merely showing the zombies approaching the town, or showing a spooky aftermath.  But NIGHTMARE ALLEY is beyond such pitiful conventional theories, and just pans across the skyline of some tourist ghost town while dubbing in burning noises and screams.  

Some internet reviewers have tried to defend the film under the premise of the fact that it's not taking itself seriously and uh the director clearly likes horror movies so leave it alone bro.  And really, it's not fun kicking around a production that never had a chance to begin with.  On the other hand, this was the first thing that came up when I looked for reviews on the movie, so I don't even know anymore what I'm dealing with.  I guess it's nice that the director is having fun with this sort of shit, and I would have enjoyed it more drunk out of my mind watching it with friends, but that's also the case with 12 Oz Mouse.  Is that what you want, NIGHTMARE ALLEY?  To be on the same level as 12 Oz. Mouse?

Actually, you probably shouldn't answer that question.

Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow and Dawn of Sorrow

So eventually IGA regained his sanity and created the best Castlevania on the GBA, and then one of my favorite Castlevanias period.

It's hard to exaggerate what an improvement Aria of Sorrow was over Harmony.  The developers finally managed to get BOTH good graphics and audio in their game.  The story, while still dumb as hell, finally moved away from "oh no dracula" to "oh no the destiny of a pretty unlikeable teenager who actually is dracula's reincarnation."

Soma's magic gimmick is probably the best system the metroidvanias are ever going to see, though there are still substantial problems with it.  Every enemy in the game has the potential to cough up its soul.  Each soul is classified into one of three categories: the typical "up+b" bullet attack, a "guardian" ability that can be toggled with the L or R buttons and are usually useless as hell, and souls that grant various passive stat increases.  One soul in each category can be set at any time, allowing a pretty fun amount of experimentation.  Finally, I can throw bones or operate a vacuum cleaner constructed from bones!  Dawn of Sorrow kept this system, except that now many souls now require you collect multiple copies of the same soul in order to increase their power and appearance.

Of course, there are issues to the system.  The first and more minor problem is that some souls are far, far better than others. Sure, you can throw a bone, but why do that when you can shoot a screen wide bolt of lightning that does more damage than the bone and hits multiple times?  Certain souls just trivialize the game, but of course, one can just ignore those souls and have fun with those that are a little less broken.  Aria is not a hard game, and pretty often just feels like a sandbox inviting you to try to solve the same room with different abilities.

The bigger stumbling block is that the chance a soul will drop is frequently ridiculously low.  God help you if you're curious as to what various enemy souls do, because Aria and Dawn require you to either farm like your very life depended on it, or stumble through the game hoping on the kindness of strangers and random number generators.  This is annoying in Aria of Sorrow, but due to the fact that Dawn of Sorrow requires you to have nine souls of many monsters to see their full abilities, you are just going lose your mind dealing with things if you're a completionist.  More problematic is that since killing monsters gives you EXP, doing any farming is just going to further break whatever new powers you get thanks to shiny improved level up stats.

To give an example, roughly a third through my first time through Dawn of Sorrow, I ran into a room filled with Ghost Dancer enemies.  I knew from my experience with Aria that Ghost Dancers give a soul which increases your luck stat, and since I love random item drops (FUCK YOU MEPHISTO I'VE GOT 250 ITEM FIND), I began to plow through the room over and over again.  There was nothing else in the room aside from some guy called an Amalaric Sniper.  After a level's worth of grinding (above 5 minutes), I finally got a Ghost Dancer soul, and realized that I would need to get eight more to FULLY MAXIMIZE MY LUCK STAT.  I gained seven levels in that fucking room.  In addition, I got nine Amalaric Sniper souls, upon which I realized that that soul was a horribly overpowered bullet soul that was my "go-to" attack for the rest of the game because who cared at that point I was basically stomping over everything.  In a particular act of developer maliciousness, there is an item that increases soul drop rates, but it costs so much money that you need to farm enemies for an hour just to make the bank necessary for a rate increase that really isn't that good to begin with.

Aria/Dawn is really the true successor to Symphony of the Night.  While Circle of the Moon and Harmony of Dissonance played largely like easier, non-linear Castlevanias of times past, Aria/Dawn are just like Symphony in daring the player to because as ludicrously powerful as possible.  A large part of this is that the two games finally went back to giving your character multiple weapon types, and each new weapon is progressively more powerful and viscerally satisfying to use than the last, as opposed to the previous metroidvania titles making your whip a tiny bit more powerful each level.  While Aria/Dawn can't reach the same potential of absolute brokenness of Symphony's Crissingram or Shield Rod, there's still a steady diet of grooming you, the player, into some slaughter king.  One of my favorite parts of Dawn of Sorrow was being able to use enemy souls to infuse weapons into newer weapons.  Reaching the most powerful weapons possible requires the souls of boss monsters themselves.  Holy shit, I can use the soul of Death to make his scythe?  Eventually one can stop caring about boss patterns or silly things like that, and just simply strongarm their way through every encounter, giggling as you one-shot every fucking bad in the world.

Of course, then they had to go and fuck everything up.