Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance

Imagine you're a small, parasitic organism from outer space.  You can spend literally thousands of years floating through space in suspended animation, until eventually you beat the odds and successfully survive the heat of entering a planet's atmosphere.  Once you have awakened, you immediately begin to search for the strongest source of psychic energy in a small area, then quickly begin to invade that sources.  The source is not extinguished, but you gain control, quickly assimilating the sources' knowledge, memories, and goals.  You understand that you are the designer of one type of planetary entertainment called video games.  You helped to design one under appreciated game about a monster in a castle beating up other monsters.  A sequel was formed by a different part of the same company, but for whatever reason, they have now turned to you to produce the new game, which is to be known as Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance.  Despite your parasitic nature, the passive psychic gestalt of your species renders the goals of the host into your own, and you are overjoyed that your lifespan will last exactly as long as the projected development cycle.

You carefully analyze the preliminary meetings.  The previous attempt at Monster Killing Castle was not disliked, but apparently some were less than pleased that the audio overshadowed the graphics.  Some people in the room nod at this observation, and you sense the time to strike.

"Clearly, we must put everything into graphics.  My graphics in my game were good.  Use all of those."

A lesser creature, bowing, explains that if you are referring to trying to use sprites from Symphony of the Night, that would force severe cutbacks into the music.  Emulating funny American television stars, you shrug, and begin to plot the series of events that will result in the creatures body being impaled on a fence post several days later.  Despite wisely not taking responsibility for the action, subordinates begin to avoid you after meetings.  And graphics do proceed well.  Occasionally, there are fleeting attempts by others to make you care about the fact that the music sounds like recording a tone-deaf kazoo in a paper bag.  But you understand the gamers.  They will hail you, even if they could not even comprehend you.

You begin to study your game, the so-called symphony.  The gamers have begun to find it, to love it.  You understand the species well enough that putting in the same few concepts with the smallest improvement is a deeply admired characteristic of video games.  You realize the best path is just to take the symphony, and improve. 

One problem brought to your attention with the previous game was the difficulty.  Gamers could not simply stumble their way through every situation in the first try.  Unacceptable, but the symphony provides the way.  Simply give weapons that will destroy every problem regardless of situation.  But then the overlord informs you that, again, data restricts the game from incorporating all the different weapons from your symphony.  You consider slicing his throat, but then an idea takes hold.

"Not a problem.  We will simply give a whip, make it unfun to use.  The subweapons will be the key.  There will be things that you can attach to subweapons to render them literally unstoppable."

The overlord thinks you are going places.

Ideas come faster and faster.  The symphony had many bosses, so you will also include many bosses with insultingly simple attack patterns.  Create shopkeepers that allow you to buy armor to bypass any problem that might occur.  Hidden rooms hurt gameflow, remove all of them and instead just create rooms that go absolutely no where without reward for their exploration.  People liked that one boss with all the bodies attached to it, make two of them and make both of them almost as terrible as the bosses that are just bigger versions of regular enemies and almost as easy.

But these are appetizers.  The main course is being prepared, as someone with poor grammar would say.

There have been questions about how one can deal with all these bosses.  The memory limitations, always, like a monotonous drone, the same drone you hear when you have procreative relations with other members of the species.  But you know. 

"Two castles."

Uncomfortable shifting.  Someone still dares to speak.

"I guess we could do something like an inverted castle.  It might be seen as a bit of a ripoff of Symphony, but still..."

"No," you interrupt, "it will be the same castle...but different."

The same man, same insect.  "So identical in layout.  Okay, so we'll still have the first castle be where the player gets all the movement-based abilities, and the second be sort of a sandbox type area..."

"No.  Switch between castles.  Constantly."

"So is the second castle going to be harder, or...I feel like I'm missing something here."

"Some places in second castle harder than same area in first.  Others easier."

The man takes off his glasses.  He seems frustrated.  "So, just to make sure I have this right.  The character is going to be going between two huge castles that will be entirely identical in layout, with few clues about exactly where he's going and the next destination having absolutely no relation to where you just were.  Am I getting this?"

You have begun to gain an appreciation for certain artists that draw "horror comics" in this country, for they seem to preview the sorts of scenes that you create, have unfortunately created just after the man talks, his limbs and blood and still screaming head careening off the walls and your painstakingly crafted castle map.  As your body shifts back into a form that the gaping bystanders can comprehend, you add: "I think we should have like three different keys too."

You're so proud of your game.

Tales From the Hood (1995)

s Why are black-centric horror films generally pretty awful?  By black-centric, I mean the modern trend of hollywood equating movies with a black cast to have some sort of an "urban" bent.  Generally, this sorts of films are the most generic possible plots with the addition of some terrible THUG LIFE aspect.  I rarely see them in video stores, but apparently there's some dark and sinister subsection of BET that's producing them, since they seem to premiere a new take on "VAMPIRE GANGSTER HEIST INSERT WEED JOKE HERE" every month or so.

There are exceptions, of course.  Most would probably point to The People Under the Stairs and Candyman, films that used the whole notion of black people being the underclass to more affluent white people and added a horror bent to that.  However, I'd also argue that Tales From the Hood should also be considered a classic in this category.  If the title doesn't make it obvious, Tales From the Hood is a horror anthology, divided into four stories with an extra "framing story."  The latter involves three INNER CITY youths planning a drug deal at a funeral home maintained by a mortician whose face pretty well determines how things are going to end up here:

 oh hai guys clarance williams iii here

The mortician, being the one with the drugs, is able to leverage his way to telling the four main stories.

Three of the four stories are pretty generic (though not really bad) social commentaries with a horror twist.  The first involves a former black cop who quit the force after seeing his corrupt cop partners beat and murder a black activist.  One year later, he lures the cops to the gravesite of the activist for revenge purposes.  It's basically the Thin Blue Line version of Creepshow's "Father's Day," even to the point of the zombie activist (whoops spoilers I guess) having telekinetic powers.  Still, it gets to the point quickly enough, and there's nothing technically wrong with this story (nor really any of the other stories).

The second story is all about domestic violence, with a kid telling his COOL AND HIP BLACK TEACHER that he's all bruised up because there's a monster beating him up.  The monster, of course, is his stepfather who has a tattoo of MONSTER on his arm.  Monster, monster, monster.  Happy ending due to child apparently having power to kill people by ripping up his drawings of them.

The final story involves a evil gangster who is arrested for his crimes, but takes an offer of freedom by participating in a "rehabilitation program" that is basically the Ludovico Treatment, but with more spinning chairs and nurses in weird latex fetish uniforms.  I'm not sure whether it or the Monster story is the worst one of the bunch, as while the final story features some shocking and provoking actual photographs of violence against blacks, the impact is diluted both by the pictures being intercut of footage of guys in bandannas jumping around firing guns, and the program director (who is basically a solemn Whoopi Goldberg) telling the gangster, "Cain was the first murderer, Crazy K.  He killed his brother HOW MANY BROTHERS HAVE YOU SLAIN?!?!?!"  I understand the message is that black-on-black violence is just furthering the cause of racists, but there has to have been a better way to express it.  Eventually, the gangster fails the treatment, and is sent back to the moment he was arrested, except now instead of being arrested, he's killed by the three gangster in the framing story.

Oh yeah, and then when the gangsters are finally revealed the coffins where the drugs are purportedly kept, they instead find their corpses and oh wait the mortician is actually satan.   

Ultimately, I just wanted to use this review to talk about the third story, which is easily one of my favorite short horror tales, KKK Comeuppance."  When you open with a political ad stating: "You can give it any name you want.  The fact is, affirmative action, quotas, reparations, all mean one thing: Another qualified individual won't get a job or an education simply because he's not the right color.  I thought that's what we were trying to get away from," dissolving to the picture of the whitest person imaginable, you know whoever wrote this had some fun.  The whitest man alive is running for senate, was a former Klansman, and every thing he says is basically what I unironically heard while living in Arkansas.  He's also living in a house that was the site of a former slave massacre which resulted in alot of displaced souls until a later owner transferred all of the souls into dolls.  There's even a picture hey why is one of the dolls whited out???

this was basically what reading highlights as a kid was like

Like all killer doll stories, we get scenes of the doll inanimate (though still able to trip an Uncle Tom image consultant down the stairs), randomly appearing in spooooooky places.  Eventually it reappears on the staircase, prompting KKK Guy to declare that "THERE WILL BE NO REPARATIONS" while throwing a bowl at the doll, and declaring war on a "VOODOO BITCH" while impaling a painting of her with her dolls with an American Flag.  Eventually the doll attacks directly, but is quickly subdued, and tied to a dartboard, though KKK guys uses a shotgun in lieu of darts.  All looks well as "NOT EVEN SOME VOODOO NEGRESS BITCH SPELL CAN OVERCOME THE POWER OF A DOUBLE BARRELLED SHOTGUN," but the painting now suddenly has roughly six dolls whited out.  White supremacy oopsie, as now he's dealing with a whole bunch of "YOU LITTLE...NIGGLINS."    Also, the original doll returns, and the double barrelled shotgun isn't so helpful now, so he retreats to the previous room only to well

 

 

 (seeing this as a 10-year-old really had a profound effect of my attitude towards other races)

In perhaps the most subtle bit of writing ever, KKK Man covers himself with the American flag as the dolls approach and you get the rest.  Again, easily the best story of the bunch, in acting, writing, and general horror movie vibe, like a top-tier Tales from the Crypt episode.  That's the complement, by the way.

Again, it's not really a must-see horror film, and one could even call it a series of spooky morality tales with the exception of KKK Comeuppance, but it's still probably the most socially challenging horror film about black people (and really in general, unless you count silly WHITE PEOPLE PROBLEMS), which is fairly depressing when you think about it.

Scott Pilgrim, World, Etc.

You know what the big fad in Scott Pilgrim reviews are? Giving some sort of a rundown of your nerd cred, or lack thereof. Maybe it's a little unfair that some reviewers are dismissing the film based on the type of eternal heavenly audience that is going to be seeing this movie, but it's not like the movie is welcoming your average moviegoer with open arms. This isn't like your average summer comic book film that at least pretends to pander to your grandmother with a wacky rundown of the plot or having Stan Lee stare around to make you feel safe. Scott Pilgrim kind of hates you, Mom.

That's all I'm going to say regarding some subjective review of the audience FOR NOW. I do think it's important to note that I've read all but the last volume of the printed Scott Pilgrim series, and I haven't read the last one because the Wikipedia summary of it sounded fucking awful (I'm not going to spoil it except to say the strength of the series lay in the cutsey intermeshing of the banal with the fantastical, and in the last volume it looks like O'Malley went FUCK THAT MAKE IT LIKE A REAL VIDEO GAME), so yes.

The strength of the film version of Scott Pilgrim, and its fundamental difference from the print version, is probably that I don't really have to bother explaining the plot of the film. Wright clearly doesn't care about the niceties of the plot, but just wants to fuck with fight scenes and wacky pop-ups that are like a 14-year-old's (who has never been on the internet) introduction to post-modernism. This meshes most closely with the first volume, which clearly had no idea of what was going on but had more fun with a myriad of strange in-jokes and video game references. The movie sort of follows the second and third volumes, "sort of follows" code for "basically just include the fights from those volumes." After that, where the comic gradually disintegrated into a bizarre soap opera of itself, Wright just ignores all that retarded emotional subtext and just has Scott Orgasm a Girl to Death.

(I've seen more than a few posts from nerds saying that it would have been better if the film had been split into two parts, which mystifies me. Honestly, I wish I'd never read the comic and just seen the film, as it's a far better product than the original, and lengthening it by a few hours would have allowed all the stupid emotional shit to drip in. And besides, haven't you people seen Wright's other stuff? I love the man, but he is -terrible- at those kinds of scenes. OH NO MOM NO MOM.)

If anything, the film really is worth seeing just for the cinematic trickery, if you're into that sort of thing. I'm sure there are movies that would have accomplished the feat better with the budget Wright had, but currently I can't think of any movies with the same sort of literal kinetic flair as here. In other words, imagine that Speed Racer abomination if it had been made by someone with an eye for what the kids like besides trenchcoats. Oh yeah, and most of the performers are pretty good and the soundtrack didn't make me want to kill myself!

Did you notice I said "most?" Eh-yes.

Now, I'm not some horrible movie snob. I know that Cera occupies a certain sphere of movie hyperlink that, once implanted, will more likely than not attract a certain folk who otherwise would not see the movie. But Jesus Christ, I am so sick of him. He is a horrible man who while I do not wish ill toward due to his passive luck in Hollywood being happy in him having the same fucking role over and over and OVER, I also hope something happens that stops making him some ersatz indie darling.

The worst part is that there were better choices here, even if you look at obvious actors. Was Jospeh Gordon-Levitt too busy or something? Fuck, even Zac Efron (I WATCHED SEVENTEEN AGAIN AND FUCK YOU IT WAS KIND OF FUNNY) would have been a better Scott substitute. Again, the movie wasn't totally ruined by Cera's perpetual puberty machine, but part of my brain was constantly muttering about how after I read the first volume, I remarked to myself ,"GEE I WONDER IF MICHAEL CERA WILL GET THIS ROLE" I don't want to get all deeply critical about a fucking fake manga, but the Scott in the comic generally had something of a backbone conflicting with his laziness. Cera's Scott is just an enormous whiny pussy, and part of me suspects that certain omissions and changes to the plot were Wright's attempt to rebalance the story around this new re-characterization of the protagonist.

So, yes. I liked the movie, albeit as a distraction from the crushing conga line life, even moreso than the comic.

Other random musings, some vaguely spoilery:

1) HOW IS M. NIGHT STILL ABLE TO GET MOVIES. I also am not understanding that for a movie about a demon on an elevator, he did not call it HELLIVATOR. Oh wait, I do know, M. Night is a humorless prick who still thinks people take him seriously.

2) Am I the only one who was a little unnerved how Wright focused on Wallace's promiscuity? The comics certainly contained their fair share of references, but the movie possibly had more HEY LOOK THE GAY GUY IS KIND OF A SLUTTY SLUT. Still, it's better than how gay people are treated in most movies of this type (that being a magical creature that solves all problems of the heteros).

3) Possibly the only good thing at having Cera as the main character: Ann Veal as the evil lesbian ex-girlfriend.