Child's Play (2019) and Crawl (2019)

so, uh.

Look. Refusing to have optimism for horror remakes is like playing blackjack and asking for a hit at 12. Platinum Dunes taught us all to never trust the dealer, so when news of the Child's Play came out without the involvement of Mancini or Dourif, the only sane move was to expect the worst.

I also harbored perhaps too personal feelings about this, since Child's Play was the only horror franchise to scare me growing up. This can betraced to me running into a frankly fucking terrifying cardboard display of Chucky at the local rental place, but from about 1989 to sometime in the mid-90s when I watched Child's Play 2 and realized how actually non-frightening the series is, i refused to even approach the 'Cs' of the horror section. This isn't to say I'm a passionate fan of the series, but like DOOM 2016, I was all raring to go about calling this film a big piece of garbage horror.

i mean you're five and you see this towering
over you, how are you supposed to react

And while I wasn't hilarious off base as I was with DOOM, Child's Play 2019 is...good. Not great, but the quidessential 6.5/10 film, something that manages to barely crawl through a significant number of missteps and questionable plotting decisions to end up at something I did not really regret watching.

I've put this review off far to the point that everyone that was going to watch this movie has seen it, so there's no real point to a plot summary, right? (or uh SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT OBVIOUSLY) Everyone's already made the fucking Treehouse of Horror joke and the "oh it's 2019 and you're making a horror movie about a killer app uh real fresh" observation, shut up please. I've never believed that the setup to the horror really matters, but how the horror expands on that setup while also having some form of entertainment. And for a majority of the film, Child's Play does this actually pretty well, charting a course through the sweet spot of remake ocean where it's not just a brainless retread while also not going so far off the reservation you have to call Adult Protective Services to explain that The Wicker Man walked out the back door with just a pair of diapers on.

A large credit to this goes to Mark Hamill. Obviously my incredibly wrong tweet was primarily meant as a joke, but I didn't really have much hope that Hamill was going to do much with this role aside from use it as a way to buy a smartphone that let him write tweets about President Orange Man using just his brain. But he makes it work?

A movie about a killer doll is going to be carried by the killer doll, and Hamill's Chucky is enough of a different creature from Dourif's that it lowered my defenses pretty quickly a few minutes into the movie. At least at the start, there's no overt guile or maliciousness to Chucky, just a lonely doll latching onto a lonely kid, and then suddenly the shitty boyfriend to the kid's mom is decapitated in a watermelon patch in a...*reads script* Chicago suburb. Is that a thing?

Most reviews I read about the movie bemoaned the first half of the film as slow and plodding, but I actually found it to be a sort of charming/creepy journey, platonic Fatal Attraction while occasionally talking about apps. Had the film carried this aesthetic forward I probably would have enjoyed this film much more, but for whatever reason, the whole murder motivation of "Andy is my best friend, and nobody hurts my best friend" gets boringly twisted and modified on until he's just another goddamn generic murder doll. I know it's inherently ridiculous to bitch about a killer doll's character, especially one spurned by the "turn dial to EVIL" conceit, but it feels like a pretty wild evolution of Chucky's intelligence to start out by repeating curse words to straight up grasping the concepts of "blackmail" and "maniacal ranting over store VA systems."

Another weakness in the movie's second half is the introduction of my least favorite horror thing: the Spunky Kid Club. I hated this shit in The Goonies, I hated it in The Monster Squad, I hated it in IT, I'm sure I'd hate it in Stranger Things if I ever bothered to watch it. Feel free to attribute a relatively non-socialized childhood to it, it is a bias and after 20 years of feeling like this it is likely never going away. So when I saw the trailers to Child's Play and saw the snippet of Andy with his Very Ethnically Diverse Crew holding weapons with the voiceover of WE HAVE TO STOP HIM, I was very nervous I was going to be held hostage by the powers of friendship once again.

So it was with much relief that I can say that that particular part in the trailer was very much a red herring likely designed to draw in you Stranger Things normies. That group of friends is in the movie to a substantial, but they are almost a total non-entity in terms of affecting the plot, aside from occasionally pissing Andy off to the extent that he does a dumb thing. While it's a little irksome that we have to be subjected to yet another "tuff gurl that doesn't take guff from smelly boys" trope, it's comforting that the movie didn't fall down that particular rabbit role. Still, if the whole subplot was completely disposable, I have to question why it was even important to even make Andy have friends, especially since one of the interesting aspects of the first few Child's Play entries was that the original Andy was an incredibly weird child even before Charles Lee Ray entered his life. I get that this movie wanted to differentiate itself from those originals, but making a central character...less unique doesn't seem to be the best way to go about it.

At the same time, do you know what one of my favorite horror things are? It's big explosive gore finales! Nothing is so wonderful a capstone to my stupid horror brain as an over-elaborate series of kills. I've stated before that Wishmaster is my guiltiest of pleasure, and a large part of that is the fantastic finale in the art gallery. So imagine my hope springing when a constant in every Child's Play review is the hyping up of a big finale scene! The excitement was through the roof! Finally, I could point to something besides Cabin in the Woods as a mainstream example of what I was talking about and not have to attach a ten minute side rant about how I actually didn't like Cabin in the Woods!

Obvious big spoilers, but holy shit what a disappointment. You'd think the setup of there being a homicidal doll able to connect to every electronic device in a big box store would lead to an absurd bounty of gore riches, but here's all the ways people die in this ARMAGEDDON OF MADNESS:

1- chucky knives a guy inside a suit.
2- a flying drone slices someone with its propellers
3- a bear chucky somehow mauls people with its claws
4- repeat kills 2 and 3 like five more times

Watching this in the theater crushing, to say the least, and kind of a metaphor for the movie as a whole. Child's Play is an honestly strong remake concept strengthened by strong performances and production value, but time and time again the ideas introduced are never followed through with, so that by the end of the film we're left with generic, tropey conflicts that resolve exactly how you expect them to go. It's honestly a shame, but at least Child's Play gave me some Big Thinks.


You know what didn't give me any Big Thinks?

The best things I can say about this movie are that it does a really good job making you feel like a small brained reptile waiting for something to happen, and it is definitely the second best Alexandre Aja movie about killer things in water.

The movie is about a daughter and father in a flooding basement that is infested with crocodiles. Sure, there's some ancillary character building about  these two characters, but it is some bald-faced perfunctory bullshit. During a scene where the two characters reminisce about the daughter's competitive swimming days, a good half of the theater got up to use the bathroom, as though the movie was summoning a gestalt intelligence into the audience so that we all instantly knew nothing interest was going to happen for about five minutes.

To be fair, I don't mind that the movie can't hardly wait to get straight to the crocs and various setpieces. A less confident director would no doubt have whipped up some godawful subplot where every fifteen minutes or so we have to watch a scene of another family member trying to reach the Croc Basement. This movie almost immediately sets you up for the coming eighty minutes, and that's great.

What's not fine is that the coming eighty minutes are just kind of all right. I alluded to Piranha 3D above, I reviewed it before and I stand by that review that it is a really fantastic underwater killer movie. Part of what made it work was paradoxically that the movie had absolutely zero respect for any of its characters, so guessing who was going to be skeletonized was sort of fun. I'm probably not spoiling anything to say that from the very outset it is boringly obvious that we are not going to see any substantial chomping of either of our family members in Crawl, and boy oh boy did this drain the tension from the film. I'm not some bloodthirsty boi demanding his TRIBUTE, but in a movie like this, if we know that the worst our heroes will suffer from will be some psychologist bills from treating moderate jump-scare-itis, all that we're going to be waiting for is some dopey secondary flesh sacks to roll in for their inevitable demise.

They do show up, but even here it's just so unsatisfying. A lot of people have made jokes that the film feels like a higher budgeted Syfy original, and to an extent that's true, but even the shittiest Syfy creature features can space out deaths better than Crawl did. We just get two concentrated doses of random shitheads bumbling into the water and going OH NOOO CROCSSSS and then dying in ways that made me check the internet after the film finished to see if it really was rated R. The deaths aren't bad to the level of say, the average Syfy original "shark touches a person and they turn into a water balloon filled with blood," but gore is...kind of an Aja thing? It was still enough to make the family that had brought their four year old daughter into the theater to leave, so maybe my standards are too high?

And yet, despite that and the obvious plot armor of the two main characters, as long as the film stays in the crawlspace, it's still pretty okay! Aja does a strong job of immediately blocking out the various part of the basement, so if you're paying a degree of attention you are able to place where everyone, scaley friends included, are at any given time. The film almost has some...heh...high tension at certain spots.

Then they (spoilers again but if you saw a single ad spot for this movie you already know what coming) get out of the basement and everything goes to shit.

Have you ever played a video game where you spend the entire time struggling against a single villain, the Prime Bad? You and the enemy engage in a game of cat and mouse, slowly learning each other's motivations, but eventually you triumph. And then, in that moment of glory, the game slowly shuffles forward holding a stack of papers, telling you that no, actually, there was a PRIMER BADDER behind your enemy, and actually the game is not done yet because you have like two more boring dungeons to get through before you face some guy that wasn't even mentioned until you defeated your sworn enemy?*

It is one of the clunkiest, goofiest things to happen in a video game and it somehow happens in Crawl. As opposed to the confined, claustrophobic aesthetic of the rest of the movie, now suddenly we're ping-ponging across rooms and streets while crocodiles are launching into windows like Taliban sleeper agents. The whole final sequence only lasts for about ten minutes, but it felt longer than the rest of the film for how bizarrely it clashes against everything we saw before.

Still, if you like the whole concept of killer reptile creature features, it's not like we're living in some sort of cinematic herpatological golden age where we can afford to be picky. Just, uh, take a word of advice and leave once they get out of the basement. Pretend the dad has to box Leatherface from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to escape and then they get gay married. I don't know. The world is your oyster, except the oysters now have teeth.

*: we call this the okami shuffle, or the far cry 3 fandango

Doom: The Movie The Show The Experience (2005)

Man, how about that doom annihilation trailer huh? Definitely came out of left field, and most likely will leave out of left field very shortly on release. I suppose that this is the nature of direct to video, a lazy investment by universal to see if schlorped out video game adaptations can turn a profit and besides-

Um, excuse me. Now, as I was saying

I would really appreciate it if you stopped interrupting, also honestly the original DOOM film was

ok what the FUCK is wrong with you, have you watched that film lately it's

stop please

FUCK OFF

WHAT DO YOU WANT

I don't want this review to be taken as a defense of Doom Annihilation. That trailer did not look good, but it's also a sub minute long trailer. This being 2019, so there's no real shock or disgust in my voice as I state that I have seen 20 minute long videos on youtube discussing this minute long trailer. This is the way things are right now, where any kind of social justice in my video games results in a feeding frenzy over a couple of days as people like THE RAGEAHOLIC and THE MONOCLED PLUM bang on the drum that those fucking feminists are at the gates yet again!!!!

Again, I'm pretty sure the movie will be fucking terrible. My only log to add to the fire in this regard is that I find it hilarious that the primary actress for the film got her start as the final girl in BLOOD MONKEY, which was one of my earliest reviews. The wheel ever turns, I guess. It's possible even with such eyebrow raising moments as DIE DIE DIE we'll get some kind of low budget surprise like Dredd and wait actually if that happens it won't matter because everyone upset at Doom Annihilation except me has stopped actually thinking about movies. I say this because these youtube comments trying to rehabilitate Doom 2005 are everywhere, and no one that actually watches movies with any degree of active thought can remotely consider that film to be anything but straight garbage.  

Doom 2005 is not an actively incompetent film. This is not a Legend of Chun-Li or Mortal Kombat Annihilation, where every frame drips a quiet aura of desperation by everyone involved, a frenzied prayer that they wake up and they're not having to block out a scene where a guy with plastic arms is trying to punch out a cgi moosemanasaurus. But these wailings are still some kind of emotion, which is more than I can say for the overall vibe of Doom 2005, which I could most charitably describe as "inert," and less charitably describe as "a fucking unbelievably boring drag." If Doom 2005 could be described in DOOM terms, it would be walking into a friend's room after he's cleared out a level and spending an hour watching him wander around looking for the last secret despite the fact he's maxed out on everything. Eventually he opens a wall behind the start point to find two imps and a single 4 shotgun ammo, and you realize your lifespan is forfeit.

For those who have blessedly forgotten about this film, the plot is "bad stuff happening on mars, marines gotta stop it." There's a lot of convoluted ancillary plot lines to this film, but they don't matter because none of them are remotely relevant. For instance, the film's opening crawl explains that people get to mars via an ancient martian device called THE ARK which teleports people to earth via the capri sun pouch liquid metal cgi. There's some throwaway lines about HMM MAYBE THE MARS PEOPLE ARE OUR ANCESTORS and OH NO THIS TECHNOLOGY CUT OFF A GUYS LEGS ONCE, but ultimately it's just a way for the characters to awkwardly shuffle around from one set to another. Or a subplot about how the main marine, played by Karl Urban, lost his parents to mars research, and while you might think this could have some sort of thrilling revelation along the lines of "karl ur mum's actually a martian" all that comes out of it is a hilarious scene where he stares out of a window as an audio flashback to his parents falling off a cliff plays.

Speaking of the marines, this movie answers the question "what if you made Predator or Aliens, but replaced almost all the humans with six foot tall bowls of salad?" Pretty much everyone in this film is a forgettable dialogue tube, and yes, that includes The Rock. One of the more confusing decisions in this film (and that says a lot) is to write a recently retired wrestler known for his dynamic, charismatic style in and out of the ring as a staid, muted Marine Sarge who's obsessed with DA RULES. I mean, if you wanted a batch of mumbling muscle to snarl out his lines and not do much else, you could have gotten Steve Austin (ba dum tish). Even the scene where he gets the series's iconic weapon, the BFG, he just mumbles out "big fucking gun" (ha ha just like the instruction manual) and then stares at like he's trying to figure out a hard math problem. Truly LETTING LOOSE. 

Likewise, Karl Urban is just sort of there, and while it's tempting to sort of excuse this one as Urban has always sort of existed as a grimy, stoic presence, there's no central premise to what's he's supposed to be.  Presumably he's supposed to be conflicted and filled with anguish about returning to the place his parents died, but again this plot point just results in a pointless flashback they couldn't even bother to film, and otherwise his main emotion in the film is "grouchy."  It's a little confounding to me that people can't stop screaming about "a girl can't be doomguy!!!!" while this movie's ostensible doom marine spends 90% of the movie sulking about like he's five years old and having a shitty birthday party but that's okay because he's a dude? 

Hm! Hm!

Pretty much no one else does much better thanks the writing. This isn't even at slasher film level where every character has some sort of archetypal character trait, we're talking "this guy is young," "this guy has a chaingun," "this guy wants to fuck karl urban's sister and his black so he has a big weiner," or my personal favorite "this guy is japanese and has two lines before being decapitated." Rosamund Pike plays that sister, who walks around in padme's white nipple outfit from Attack of the Clones, acting sort of arch while mumbling out this film's terrible explanation for why there are monsters. For better or worse, since this is 2005, she doesn't actually do anything, though I'd say this is probably for the better since otherwise we'd get some awful "yeah I'm a girl but I can shoot a demon" female empowerment via hollywood committee nonsense.

speaking of penlights this movie is dark as shit

The one actual exception to this rule is Richard Blake's Portman.  You might remember him as the libertine drug dealer in Mandy, or as the only remotely good part of Rob Zombie's 31. For reasons I don't fully understand, unlike everyone else Blake gets to play to his role, that being a cheerful embodiment of perverted id. His first line is about him planning to spend his vacation locked in a hotel room with "three ladyboys" (man I love 2005), and just spends the entire movie leering, whining, and undermining authority. And yes, this is a pretty standard character, but Blake plays it well, and when you're trapped in a movie where everyone else is a moving corpse, you tend to cling to the one beacon of light, even if it's a five-year-old penlight.

I actually rewatched Doom 2005 for this review, and I had to stop it roughly 4 times because I felt like I was smothering my brain with a pillow if I watched this shit for over 30 minutes.  When I watched the film in theaters on release, I remember being most upset over them fucking with the basic plot of Doom 2005, and this is the general sentiment I see from most people when they complain about the film. The premise of every Doom game has been "demons from hell have invaded a place, kill the demons." Seems like a fairly simple thing to adapt to the screen, yes? So instead let's have a convoluted explanation about how the mars people had an extra chromosome that can make you superhuman, but can also turn you into a MONSTER. Ignoring how this is already a medical thing, the movie spends so much time trying to lay the ground rules for this dumb bullshit when ultimately it comes down to, "it's zombies, except they eventually digivolve into Doom 3 imps."

Still, while this is all very dumb, I found while rewatching it that I didn't really care that much about them throwing out the basic premise of Doom. If we've learned anything from how studios treat stupid nerd properties, it's that no producer can resist fucking with established formulas to put in their own surreal, abortive ideas. When you consider that, it's honestly kind of a miracle this film even has the actual Doom monsters. No, the real sinister aspect of this modification on the Doom mythos is that it gives rise to an idea I've seen posted over and over in defense of this stupid pile of shit:

"it's not a great doooooom movie, but it's a great action movie!"

And sure, I get the idea here. It doesn't matter if the characters are basically unleavened corpse loaves, or if the basic plot shouldn't have even gotten past the cocktail napkin stage, as long as you have some epic moments, right? I get that, and that's the real issue with this movie: it's boring as fuck.

MARINES GET IN HERE

Do you want the Doom 2005 experience? Download a windows 95 emulator and play the 3D Maze screensaver for an hour and 20 minutes while muttering "room clear" under your breath. Someone watched the ten minute sequence in Aliens where the Colonial Marines are initially sweeping the colony and thought, "this is good, but what if it was five times as long and was just over the shoulder shots in poorly lit hallways?"  So much of this movie is just people going in rooms and shouting "clear," interspersed with scenes of Rosamund Pike playing with her Creepy Crawlers oven and bug moulds.

When the action finally begins about halfway into the film, it actually gets worse. Aside from an admittedly entertaining scene where a marine brawls a demon in an electrified pit by using a computer monitor as a modified ball and chain, there is no combat in this film that feels remotely creative. Oh no there's zombies pew pew pew got them.  Oh no I got snucked up on and knocked to the floor and the demon is jumping around help. Oh no there's a lot of zombies let's stand still and fire the guns non stop whew.  Especially egregious are the like three scenes where someone sees a baddy but it runs behind a corner, then runs around like three more corners while the marines are just a little too late each time. Congrats, Doom 2005. You're a reinactment of me chasing my cat around after it knocks over my gamepad, except on a 50 million dollar budget.

Action films should be an exercise in allowing the viewer to vicariously experience impossible, exhilarating situations that put your adrenaline to a glorious high.  People compulsively rewatch their favorite action sequences in order to recapture that feeling of kinetics.  I cannot reasonably imagine a person who puts in a blu-ray of Doom 2005 and eagerly skips to the climatic kungfu duel where The Rock and Karl Urban's stunt doubles struggle to finish before the audience remembers that Mortal Kombat was released a decade earlier. I mean, I could imagine it, I just don't want to.

Oh, but I hear you. "What about the first person sequence, mr hater man? there, the audience member is thrust into the role?  surely you've never experienced anything like-"

I have never fully understood this particular last-ditch defense of the movie. Is this really what people say makes the film worth watching, the true reward after 80 minutes of blase alien chases? If you believe this, I beseech you, rewatch one of the roughly 500 youtube clips of the scene.  Try to ignore the inclination to mindlessly rave about it and ask, "what exactly does this clip have that any given light gun arcade game's attract mode not have?" 

The answer is that it did probably did not take thousands of manhours to create the attract mode for House of the Dead 2, and while it is true that the effort of creation can sometimes justify something stupid, I don't really think it applies here.  There is nothing remotely striking or overwhelming about this sequence; a gun floats in midair and shoots zombie extras and cgi monstermen as they slowly run towards him. Eventually he fights the miniboss (a monsterman with a chainsaw) and the final boss (one of those trash bullet sponge pinkies from Doom 3). These fights have an ostensible "melee" component to them, with melee meaning "have the camera shake uncontrollably any time two objects touch because this shit is already awkward enough." Even when I saw this in theaters the first time, when I genuinely wanted to mise-en-scene myself in as the Doom Slayer, I felt a certain degree of emptiness when it all ended. Now, knowing what I am actually looking at, the feeling is incomparably worse.

Coincidentally, Doom 2005's first-person sequence is almost equal in length to another famous rampage segment:

Ok, ok. I know it's a little unfair to compare The Terminator to Doom.  But the police station massacre in The Terminator is fascinating for another reason: despite not dogmatically adhering to the surface concepts and patterns of how to film and recreate a first-person sequence, or hell, existing even before first person shooters were a concept, it captures the particular reason I enjoy this stupid genre a helluva lot more than anything Doom could even hope to grasp in its clumsy imitation. Arnold's T-800 is a true unstoppable presence, a methodical walking armory that, despite the coordinated effort of his enemies, brings in a rain of chaos. There's even an element of intriguing dichotomy in the viewers reaction as, while we full well know that Arnold is very much the bad man here, his presence nontheless exudes the brutal coolness that all fps nerds aspire to (there's probably an article somewhere on how T2 was weakened by making Arnold the hero while robert patrick looks like someone's obnoxious stepdad). And naturally, it helps that there's none of that awful low-rent cgi to clutter up the rampage.

Ultimately, I understand that most of the people that posted these stupid comments as seen in the beginning  barely remembered Doom 2005, and were most likely just shitposting to exemplify how bad they expect Doom Annihilation to be. That's fine, or at least better than tweeting death threats to Annihilation's director. After all, I just wrote (soundless screaming) 2500 words about a film I hadn't thought about for a decade until I read these comments. So who's really laughing here?

Not the Doom Slayer. He's a tough guy, after all.

Touhou: Luna Nights (2019)

I don't think this is a huge surprise if you've taken a look at my archives (and you have read through them, right, otherwise how are you going to find all of the incredibly problematic stuff I've written through the years), but if there's a game series I've been enthusiastic about, it's the modern portable Castlevania series.  I've played the absolute worst of them (it's harmony of dissonance, how can you even ask that) multiple times, and just hearing "Dawn/Aria" fills me with a certain, not entirely unsexual pleasure.

For me, the concept of the metroidvania has always been built around the design philosophy of exploring a place and utterly dominating shitheads with your array of powers, maybe occasionally taking a break to enter and re-enter a room over and over to force a monster to drop some tasty upgrade.  Game Boy Castlevanias are, at their core, a COMFY series.  This is not to say that they're simple affairs, but even at their most difficult, you never feel as though you're being expressly punished for your bad choices.  It was expected that running into a boss for the first time was going to result into you getting batted around like a yarn ball, but careful play would still always tend to result in a win.  And even if you died, who cares, because it is CASTLEVANIA LAW that the save point be right next to the boss room.

You see where I'm going with this, right?

Look, I get we're in the midst of "The Metroidvania Renaissance."  People won't shut up about it, and it's certainly a truth that it feels like we're getting a critically acclaimed title in the "man walks in contained game world and picks up double jump two hours in" conceptual sphere.  I just...can't get into them?  I've played a large share of them, and most are technically very good games!*  But goddamnit, they just don't feel like muh old castlevanias.

This game to a head with Hollow Knight.  Want to hear the gamer confession equivalent of "I murdered my parents?"  I stopped playing Hollow Knight with only like four bosses to fight.  I know, feel free to take a moment to sit down.  Hollow Knight is technically a very, very good game.  The problems I have with it lie within myself, not the game, but I had to accept that I just was not having much fun playing it.  It's...not a comfy game.  This is the case with most modern metroidvanias: fights are no longer brawls where the player is given free reign to smash shit how they see fit, but complicated math problems where the slightest error results in you getting set on the back foot immediately.

I'm saying all this because THANK FUCKING GOD for Touhou Luna Nights for reaffirming my love for the genre.

Luna Nights was developed by Team Ladybug, a small Japanese dev team probably most known prior for "SYNCHRONICITY PROLOGUE," a free metroidvania set in the Shin Megami Tensei universe with what can best be described as the Ikaruga polarity gimmick.  It was a good game, though mostly as a proof of concept that the development team clearly understood the dynamics of the genre.

As noted in the full title, Luna Nights is set in the most weeb of weeb universes, Touhou.  As someone with basically zero experience in that universe aside from the basic concept of "cute youkai girls shoot each other," I can give you The Yersinia Guarantee that unless you just fundamentally hate wholesome anime women, not understanding the plotline will not detract from the gameplay experience.  Suffice it to say the plotline can be boiled down to "you are the touhou in castlevania, get out of the castlevania by fighting the other touhous."

No, what really matters is the gameplay, and Luna Nights here is a glorious parade of "make the player think he's a genius" asskicking.  The most immediate difference between Luna Nights and standard castlevanias is that your character attacks primarily by throwing knives.  While this makes a lot of combat safer than your average whip boi, the drawback is that any attack drains your standard magic meter, and magic regenerates slow as hell in this game.  So what's a gal to do?

Stop time, of course.

Here is the game's big, glorious gimmick.  At any time, your character can slow time for a few seconds, or just straight up instantly freeze all action while being able to move normally, although gated to a separate meter that rapidly depletes the more you scoot around.  While frozen, getting close to enemies results in them vomiting up magic refills, creating an obvious and satisfying gameplay loop of wildly attacking the bads, stopping time, eating your magic flakes, then wildly attacking some more.  The game introduces new wrinkles to this system at the pretty rapid clip via specifically colored platforms and enemies which react to time stop in various delightful ways.

As an advanced technique for TRUE metroidvania aces, Luna Nights references Touhou's shmup origins by allowing you to regain lost life by "grazing" enemies in normal time, which is to say getting real close to them.  Unfortunately, if there's a weakness to the core system, it's probably here, since the amount of life regained from grazing is way more generous than it should be, so that you never have to worry about being a low health once you've learned the actual hitbox of certain baddies.

But maybe that's the point?  The entire drive of Touhou Luna Nights is to steamroll everything in front of you.  There's none of the tense "will i or won't i survive" boy scout roguelike bullshit that every other modern metroidvania wallows in.  Who cares what the health meter is at?  Just relax and look at that sumptuous sprite work!

And man oh man is this game pretty.  I know we're all kind of sick of low-res pixel art, but just look at this, which also serves as a nice reminder that I absolutely cannot explain game mechanics (spoilers for the first few stages of the game if that's a problem):



That protagonist animation is just obvious pandering for Alucard's walk cycle, sure, but holy shit I don't care.  Unlike say, I don't know, BLOODSTAINED, there's a clear amount of work put into each and every sprite, even the ones that don't make a whole lot of sense within the game.**  The smoothness of movement ties in especially well with this game's predilection for platforming; it's far less grating to be knocked to the bottom of a room by the bog-standard bladed clock gear when you get an infinite kick from how your character looks and moves.

All of this comes together with what is arguably the most important part of any metroidvania:

no, not the VIBRANT WORLD.  seriously whoever advanced the concept that what truly defines the best metroidvanias are the "wonder-inducing settings" deserves a tap in the noggin.

It's the bosses.  And oh geez, aside from the first boss (who serves as the obvious "do you remember how to do the time stop" training post), every boss in this game is an absolute triumph.  The previously mentioned gameplay loop of attack/time stop/graze for more magic is perfectly accounted for in the bosses' rhythms, while their attack patterns do a good job of calling back to Touhou's shooter origins while avoiding the obnoxious bullet hell excesses of certain other platformers.*** Unfortunately, every boss cycles through their attacks in the same pattern; while this isn't a big deal when you're just trying to bonk a witch gal with underhand chainsaws throws without getting bonked yourself, it did lessen the enjoyment a smidge during a subsequent playthrough.  Even accounting for that, the boss fights are the crown jewel of this game, and thinking back to them still gives me that aforementioned metroidvania pleasure like when I think back to the fights against Gergoth in Dawn of Sorrow or the first part of the final boss in Portrait of Ruin.

OK, so now it's the point of the review where I tell you the one thing that kind of SUCKS about the game, which for once in my reviewy times I didn't really want to deal with, because ultimately I think Touhou Luna Nights deserves as much support as possible****: this game is short.  There's a total of five stages in the game, and assuming you're some kind of degenerate and not rooting around for all the hidden walls, a total of thirty minutes playtime for each stage is a reasonable assumption.  I bought the game while it was still in early access and at a reduced price so I have zero regrets, but it's harder to argue that 18 dollars for roughly five hours of gameplay to reach 100% completion is entirely sane if you're operating on any sort of budget.

Don't take this to mean that I buy into any time/value money game judgement bullshit, as anyone that argues that shit like Hollow Knight is better solely because it's constantly 10 dollars for OVER THIRTY HOURS OF WALKING DOWN DARK HALLWAYS instantly registers in my book as an idiot.  Still, I can also recognize that times is tough in the nightmare world we're currently living in.  On the other hand, for that short time, this game is just a constant cavalcade of new joys.

So fuck it, who needs to save for healthcare coverage? Change into this maid outfit and let's go to town.

*:if you're curious what I consider not to be good, the answer is primarily Axiom Verge, which I may review one day but suffice to say it's The Babadook of metroidvanias: a clunky, unsatisfying experience loved by idiots who want to make it seem like they totally get the genre they're bellyflopping into
**: seriously, is frankenstein canon in the touhou universe?  Also yes I saw the bloodstained "art upgrade," but no amount of pristine new paint jobs can hide the fact that 2.5d is a art style that should have ended with the nintendo 64.  I'll withhold my actual opinions about the game until I play it, but the obvious guess is "it's going to be order of ecclesia 2, which is to say it'll grindy in the most boring ways possible, have obnoxious boss battles, and be inexplicably in love with its lore"
***: no i don't want to talk about rabi ribi
****: really though a special "fuck off" shoutout to every gaming journalism website that isn't RPS or siliconera who had plenty of time to write articles about people being mean to them in Apex Legends or yet another fucking Overwatch League article but couldn't be bothered to even put out a blurb for a genuinely good modern metroidvania

Velvet Buzzsaw (2019)

Oh hey, blog.

So it's been awhile.  We've done okay.  But perhaps it is time to discuss.  To plan.  To shout into this endless void once again, glory be.

---

Velvet Buzzsaw was a movie tapdancing on my periphery for some time.  Hey, I said, I liked Nightcrawlers, but now it's got all these big cool actors, and what's that an apparent mid-90s horror aesthetic?  How can this go wrong, I thought, letting my netflix subscription roll over for another month, feeding the Great Beast.

The answer, obviously, was Netflix.  Look, more writer-er people than I have discussed the nature of modern day Netflix's filming strategy, that bizarre amalgamation of artistic and commercial goals powered by a degree of data analytics that induces the fetal position if you think too much about it.  It's probably a slightly better system than the nightmare world of modern hollywood, a sort of modern day renaissance patronage system where artists are given reign to create their own ideas, provided those ideas are sufficiently within the parameters of Netflix's machine mind in an attempt to create the new hit.

The obsession Netflix has with these chimercial audience spanning pictures  honestly fascinates me more than the stready drip feed of content that it provides.  Has there even been such an attempt to create entertainment via the careful study of what people are watching, an endless refinement until we get to some kind of 90-minute 1080p singularity that we will binge watch, over and over, until our species dies from inactivity?  It's the most banal Philip K. Dick story ever written, but that's still better than most of what occupies our life these days.

This constant sloughing towards the movie plot summary equivalent of the Anti-Life Equation is what drives every piece of Netflix content, including Velvet Buzzsaw.  The basic plotline tries to hit three or four different concepts like an extremely serious/unsexy twister game: Gory Horror! Wry Sendup of Art Culture!  Ensemble injokery!  There's the obvious parade of stars that get easy money and possibly a little teeny tiny boost to their social media (chant the birdbox with me, Oh Sandra Bullock, but we were always behind you).

When I watched the trailer, I was excited, because here's the other thing about Netflix: in terms of horror, it fucking sucks.  Unless you're really into slow moving ghost dramas or complete and utter garbage like THE OPEN HOUSE there is really nothing to justify a randy old horror hound like me to keep paying for a sub.  This is understandable, since (warning incoming shill) Shudder's brilliant curation of horror and cult completely trounces any other service in this field, so it's a waste of time to compete seriously.  But Velvet Buzzsaw seemed to maybe be a sign of turning a corner, of horror with a more fun bent.

Boy, was I wrong!

For those that haven't been strapped into the internet social media ludovico machine and been forcefed buzzworthy trailer after trailer, Velvet Buzzsaw's nominal plot is about a disturbed deceased artist's works being appropriated by the art world, and the art world's subsequent supernatural punishment for this transgression, but the real plot is "ho ho the art world sure is shitty."  The closest thing to a central character is Jake Gyllenhaal as the powerful art critic MORF VANDEVALT, that name being the only actually funny joke in the entire film.¹  

Jake's performance is one of the two things I can unreservedly appreciate about the movie, though it's helped by the fact that MORF VANDEVALT is the only character in the film with any actual degree of depth.  Despite the field of talent present here, everyone else is pretty well reduced to the dreaded "This character trait, BUT ALSO this somewhat opposing trait" type characters, such as:  

Rene Russo's gallery owner is ice cold, BUT ALSO regrets her own days as an artist!  
Toni Collete's art curator is super helpful, BUT ALSO in it for her own selfish gains.  
John Malkovich's artist is completely extraneous, BUT ALSO clearly a way for John to make a easy monthly payment on his Real Doll harem!

i was going to populate this review with bad velvet buzzsaw fanart
but I actually like this piece oops.  credit to clara martinez murcia

As an aside, I'd like to give a quick tip of the hat to the screenwriters for their ability to make MORF VANDEVALT (okay I'll stop) pleasing to both critics and people that hate the critics.  Obviously a lot of people are going to get a kick out of how the self-assured critic is confounded by the disintegrating unreality of the situation he finds himself, but while he's an object of ridicule, the blow is softened by the fact that almost everyone in Velvet Buzzsaw is equally reprehensible.²   It's also worth noting the subtle ego stroking given to the critics (perhaps in the hopes of a better rotten tomato aggregate, who even knows) in the fact that, at least in this universe, art critics have some semblence of power, with Morf's judgements making or breaking the relative value of any object d'art that he trains his words upon.  This notion that traditional critics have any sort of power besides enraging idiots into sending death threats to them is the most fanciful moment in a movie that also has a scene where a guy is attacked by gorilla arms coming out of a painting.  But in a world where I have about a millionth of the taste making power of a 20-year-old guy who hates washing his hair almost as much as he hates female characters without boob windows, sometimes fantasies are nice.

Back to the actual object at hand, the reason for having this many disposable characters is to cheerfully butcher them in various art-related ways. This is what we were all here for, right?  And here is where the film really goes off the rails.

Firstly, any time not spent in a kill sequence, and especially any time where MORF VA...Morf is not in the frame means you're going to be mired in a big vat of nothing.  It feels kind of unfair to complain about this since it's not like most horror films don't suffer from inability to be interesting when people aren't getting machete'd, but the scenes in Velvet Chainsaw just feel...ephemeral.  I had to stop watching about a third of the way through and on restarting the next day I could barely remember what the fuck was happening, aside from "everyone is very cross" and "schemes within schemes."  If the film was less committed to the horror element and more to the black comedy, I may have felt the need to pay more attention, but the knowledge that most of these people were going to be canvASSed essentially nullified that compulsion. As is such, I treated most of the scenes in this movie like waiting for a friend to show up in a party I didn't really want to go to in the first place.  Of course, then the friend shows up and he's reeking of cheap booze, rotisserie chicken, and the foreknowledge that your waiting has only led to a quiet tragedy. 

Here's the thing. This movie has really really nice set pieces.  One of the few perspectives I can really offer to watch this film is if you're the kind of person that gets off on spending an entire day in an art museum.  I'm sure someone will slob their knob onto the comments here an explain that ACTUALLY the art in this film is very DERIVATIVE but whatever I liked it.  How does the movie utilize these touchstones of imagery, though?  The answer is really fucking badly.

(spoilers here i guess)

For example, there is a BIG METAL BALL that people put their arms into.  I wonder what will happen when one of the characters does this!  I bet there will be some interesting fakeouts like oh it just cuts the arm off and they die.  Here's a creepy robot mannequin how are they going to play around this old horror convention oh it just comes to life and does a neck snap.   Oh there's an art gallery full of weird colors, i wonder what might happen here oh the colors flow into the person and they become a graffiti.  OK, I guess that one is a little less obvious to see coming, although it still smacks of the classic Kane Hodder scene from Wishmaster, so whatever.

I'm not saying that every scene o' death in a horror movie needs to be some kind of rube goldberg/final destination keep 'em guessing every second kind of thing.  Directness is a virtue, but here it feels like they showed the screenwriter each central scare object, gave them ten seconds to think of a way it would kill a person, and just went with that.  It's a little mortifying to have a movie with the vaguely high concept of the power art wields in our life, and then execute that concept like it's a third-rate 80s slasher, the ones where the only surprises are that the film pulls the "it was only the cat jumping on the chair psych here's the killer" card twice.

So fifteen hundred words into this, here's why this movie broke my mental writing impasse.  Shortly after watching the film, I dipped into a couple reviews of the film to see if my own mind perspectives comported with those who actually get paid for saying shit about media, as is my wont.  But there was another reason: something about the film was triggering memories of horror past, but I couldn't put my desiccated finger on it.  Then I ran into the review that ended with a snarky comparison of the movie to a full length Tales From the Crypt episode.

OKAY SO LET'S JUST BE CLEAR, I am not saying that this movie feels like something from Tales From the Crypt.  That is something only an idiot desperately trying to flaunt some illusionary nerd cred would say.  Except at it's absolute worst, whatever faults any given Tales From the Crypt episode had, they would not have long periods of nothing happening or kills that denied the insane, wonderful nature of horror.  But it did make me realize that the resemblance I was remembering was from a horror anthology.  This drove me a little mad, since if I have one inherent weakness, it is the short-form television horror.  I ran down the list of suspects: Tales from the Darkside, Monsters Masters of Horror?  But all were incorrect, the slipper wouldn't fit baby, so what was a hip cat like me to do?  I thought harder, scratching the bottom of memory.  Freddy's Nightmares, The Hitchhiker, fucking Are You Afraid of the Dark?  

Things were looking dire, then it hit me.

So a little background for probably anyone reading this, because despite being on NBC, Fear Itself is about as obscure as it gets for this subgenre.  Fear Itself is technically season 3 of Showtime's Masters of Horror, whose gimmick was that each episode was directed by a different established horror director.  While this was largely not false advertising while the show was Masters of Horror, by the time the concept rolled into NBC, we got episodes directed by the guy who helmed Bride of Chucky and Freddy vs Jason.  Needless to say, the show flopped and about half of the episodes were never even broadcast, though they appeared later on..heh heh, Shudder.

So you might be wondering, what was Fear Itself like?  The answer is "exactly how you'd expect an hour-long primetime network horror anthology in the late 2000s to be." That is to say, wildly divergent on quality but generally exhibiting the same qualities of being stuffed with filler, curiously unscary, and gotcha spooks that one always sees coming.  And that's...just what Velvet Buzzsaw was.  It's honestly fascinating to me that this is ultimately what Netflix's original horror offerings (and really almost all of their non-horror offerings) come down to: intensely forgettable scraps, except with an absurd budget fueled by my inability to cancel the goddamned service. 

And baby, that's some real horror.


^1. Unfortunately, the humor in Velvet Buzzsaw is probably only going to be funny to you've never seen a Christopher Guest movie in your life. We're talking "clueless gallery owner praises an artist's pile of trash as a daring new concept" levels of on the nose type jokez. ↩
^{2. Also it's kind of sad to say but it was nice to have a bisexual male character who isn't portrayed as having the libido that operates in the same manner as the tasmanian devil?} ↩