DIABLO 3: THE REVIEW OF ALL TIMES (spoilers oh no)

I hate writing reviews for well-known stuff.  It's more fun to present opinions on stuff that hasn't been analyzed to death in endless circlejerks.  In Diablo 3's case, I'll make an exception because I believe my mind has two qualities that are generally mutually exclusive:

1) I am an intelligent, analytical human being.
2) I really really liked Diablo 2.

hey did you check kotaku no because I'm at a gamestop launch party

Alot of things have been endlessly mentioned in criticism of Diablo 3, so who fucking cares about that stuff.  Yes, the graphics are like hot topic brand Vaseline rubbed all over my monitor, my attempt to play through the entire campaign with the music on instead of Drive Like Jehu was an exercise in amazingly bad judgment,  latency is really good at making me never want to play hardcore, etc., etc.  I don't give a shit about the opening day problems, since as I am a normal human being these days I logged on at 6 AM and had no problems aside from achievements not working for a few hours, so whatever.  All I can take from that is that gamers are the most obnoxiously entitled fuckheads in history.

My ultimate verdict of Diablo 3, after getting through Nightmare and watching people play through inferno, would be "fairly tragic."  We have a game that was designed by people that either didn't really understand the full appeal of Diablo 2, or, unfortunately far more likely, are very cynically astute in how dumb gamers operate.

The biggest defense I've seen towards attacks on Diablo 3 are WELL REMEMBER DIABLO 2 VANILLA THAT WAS REALLY BAD TOO.  And they're right, Diablo 2 prior to Lord of Destruction was a complete mess of broken builds and limited item availability.  But here's a problem: Lord of Destruction came out already, but Blizzard apparently thinks you'll never remember that.  We are back at square one, with no charms, runewords, synergies, jewels, so on and so forth.  It's not like these concepts didn't work for LoD, so why the hell are they not in the base game?

I gave this guy sixty dollars

I find it hard to understand why there's so much brain-melting bellyaching over launch day outages, but nothing over the fact that Jay Wilson was either too fucking stupid to come up with any improvements to Diablo so he decided to just sweep LoD under a rug, or so dismissive of you and me that he knew that even after ten years, he could release a game missing a shitload of features the previous Diablo had and it would still be a huge critical success.  Fuck, were the launch day outages planned deliberately for this reason?  I've already muted Diablo 3's music, may as well put on Requiem For a Dream and get carted off to a place where they will inject enough sodium pentathol into my diseased brain that I can treat Diablo 2 as a new game.

And while vanilla D2 had some serious fucking problems, it was at least a massive departure from the original Diablo.  Diablo 3's only gameplay differences from Diablo 2 are that we now have a horrible "link skill damage to weapon damage" system and now there are blinky lights to show you were attacks are coming.  I'm sure it sounded great in Wilson's head: "Now I don't have to worry about people placing a million points in a single skill, you can compare all the skills along a single horizontal line!" The problem is, as has already been found out LESS THAN A WEEK AFTER RELEASE, is that this tends to mean that the only attributes that really matter are your vitality, added damage bonuses, and the attribute for your class that adds bigger numbers to your DPS.  Which means you get shit like this.  And then shit like the comments, where a bunch of mongs go ARE YOU IN INFERNO DIDN'T THINK SO THOUGH THAT HAS ABSOLUTELY NO RELEVANCE TO WHAT IS BEING SAID.

coming soon, skynet automatically arranges your bids by greatest contribution to the doomsday clock!

The upside to this is that if the numbers are right, and rares generally severely outclass legendaries, the real money auction house is going to be completely insane with overlapping markets of people wanting the maxx dps yellows intersecting with the dopey people wanting the pretty unique items, both constantly running into each other until value has no meaning and Blizzard has to shut down the markets at least once a week, like a wall street computer contemplating the ultimate fate of mankind.

Of course, the problem is that the fact remains that uniques, especially worthwhile uniques, are clearly going to exist either for people willing to spend money or the really lucky, so remember those rare but still numerous moments of Diablo 2 when a Ber rune dropped from a zombie or an Ethereal Herald of Zakarum was just chilling in a barrel?  Yeah, expect a closer experience to when you were running The Pit 1500 times and your biggest drop was a 4os Colossus Blade.  That is to say, item hunting is going to be less about the visceral thrill of finding brand name items and instead looking for items that are not hype, but mathematically really strongth.  I'll probably stockholm syndrome myself into dealing with this, but still, what a terrible fucking idea.

Of course, maybe I'll be pleasantly wrong, and Blizzard will realize "oh shit we just made this game into a dumber World of Warcraft let's make these impossible to find rare items sexily worth it."

hahaha

Other things of amusing note:

Blizzard didn't even bother to make a complete game, setting wise.  Sure, Act 1 and 4 are unique, but Act 2 is literally the same progression of settings as it was in Diablo 2.  Hey here's a desert city, here's some deserts, here's some mysterious tombs, here's a hub area to mysterious arcane ruins that run in entirely right angles.  They even added a killer bug tunnel, though to be fair, it is not nearly as obnoxious as the Maggot Lair was (did you feel a chill down your back as I typed that out, I did, let's bundle up closer).  The only real difference is that they removed the palace in place of (get ready) MORE SEWER LEVELS *confetti*.

remember me moohahaha

Act III is thankfully not cribbing from swampworld 64, but is instead just shamelessly rips from Act IV and V of Diablo 2.  They only new environment there were square tower floors which were fun until the dozenth iteration of it and you're just like "okay great I get it blizzard you made a new map idea here's a milkbone."

I'd also like to talk about the story.  Diablo 2's was not good literature, but at least there was a theme: failure and weakness.  You are basically always one step behind from stopping the destruction of mankind, Marius basically is a giant weakling unable to do anything despite having the chance to do so.  It's a downcast, simple story helped by the bleak, ugly visuals.

Compare this to Diablo 3, which has no real theme aside from "you are a giant retard badass."  The reason bad stuff happens in Diablo 3 is not because the Prime Evils are just a little faster than you, it's because they left a plate of cookies outside of town and you decided to eat them while all your friends are killed.  There is a  really important distinction between your character failing because of external factors rather than because he or she is incapable of making good decisions while constantly walking into stupidly obvious traps, and Chris Metzen has a six-figure salary because he cannot understand that.  Meanwhile, Marius has been replaced by a young girl with really weird breast physics, and in the classic new Blizzard style, everything is super pretty and ultimately meaningless during cutscenes.

If there's anything I genuinely like in Diablo 3, it's boss monster modifiers.  Baddy packs suddenly have alot of scary ways to kill you, as opposed to the Diablo 2 model of "nothing matters except lightning enchanted."  On the other hand, monsters themselves feel far less creative in their base abilities, especially by the end.  Sneaky coordination like Oblivion Knights casting Iron Maiden on you while you're busy killing their melee buddies is gone, as are the OH FUCK baddies such as Gloams which made Baal running terrifying for summonmancers.  Speaking of Baal running, there's zero areas of the game where enemies lineup changes for each game.  There was a certain anticipation during a run if you were going to get the configuration that favored your class, or if you were going to have to chug pots like a giant baby while running from those exploding skeleton dolls.  Now every area has the same monsters every single time, and while boss modifiers kind of alleviate this, it's not a complete equivalent exchange.

I'm still on the fence about character abilities.  I've been mostly playing the Witch Doctor despite my realization early on that there is no straight up viable summoner class, and while there's lots of neat abilities, even in pre-Inferno it's becoming obvious that some abilities are just incontrovertibly awful compared to others.  With the Witch Doctor, you are literally shooting yourself in the dick if you don't take the escape skill and the damage leech skill, and since you have those, you may as well take two other cooldown abilities so you can have the massive mana regen skill and then oh boy thousands of combinations!!!  This hopefully won't be such an issue with balance patches and, more importantly, the slow influx of godlike items allowing for more experimental builds, but I think if this review represents anything, it's the guarded hope of things being better no thanks to the actual developers.

So ultimately I have this game, and I will probably spend hundreds of hours on it and the expansions.  I'm not proud of this.  Actually, I'm really not proud of this.  But really, the first step of living a true life is accepting our bullshit tendencies towards self-destruction, so who cares?  I've got a boring 1000 DPS dagger to find before my journey will complete, and I can shoot myself in the head without any regrets.

Shoot Many Robots

First of all.

I think I've made the same observation before, but I'd really like to find the patient zero reviewer of this game that came up with the idea that Shoot Many Robots is like Metal Slug with multiplayer.  It's really an amazing hallmark of the game journalism landscape that literally every goddamned review I've read of this game is that same stupid idea, which just makes one wonder if any game reviewers actually played Metal Slug beyond just credit feeding past the first three stages of any of the games, or maybe just played the GBA version.  Or maybe it's something else that I can't think of because my brain pretty much froze at the concept that a game like this is JUST LIKE METAL SLUG.

Look, I understand you're lazy, and it might be hard to explain run and gun shooters to an audience of mongs that depend on arbitrary numbers to determine their cud-chewing opinions.  But saying Shoot Many Robots is like Metal Slug is like saying Castlevania is just like Mega Man.  Like, you're in stages, the A button makes you jump, and B button is what you use to kill your enemies.  Sometimes those enemies have different attack patterns, and there's platforms that might confuse you!

But here's the big thing:  there is already a sub-category of games that are about a million times closer to Shoot Many Robots than the Metal Slug series, and are probably played more anyway!  What I refer to are the literal fuckton of dumb shooter flash games.  You've probably played one, either on Kongregate or Armorgames or (if you're a 12-year-old babby) Newgrounds.  It's always the same shit, where you control your cool gun guy via WASD, and your mouse controls aiming, a little crosshairs roaming around while your cool gun guy's torso twists around in various disability check inducing manners in order to follow that gunsight.

Shoot Many Robots is basically that game, except ten dollars, a grinding mechanic, and marginal multiplayer.  But since I'm a complete idiot for the aforementioned dumb flash games, I sort of like it!

--

The thing that gets me the most about Shoot Many Robots's gameplay is the way turning works.  Basically, where your crosshair/cursor is determines where your guy is actually facing.  If you move in the opposite direction, your dude does a weird little backwards shuffle that will quickly result in you getting overrun.  I realize that the alternative would probably remove whatever challenge the game has, but I still find myself getting swarmed every so often because I tend to follow the path of the bullets than some teeny tiny red crosshair, especially because the game loves randomly zooming and panning, hurting my old man eyes and making me realize I will never be an MLG Pro Diablo 3 player.  Even worse is that the aiming, apparently due to it being originally for console, is imperfect at following the mouse.  Instead there's about 12 pre-defined directions the gun will fire in, being determined by where the cursor is closest.  This isn't a big deal most of the time since you're facing an endless stream of horizontal terror, but when the game throws out floating turrets and shit your only hope at a quick and non-embarrassing victory is jumping into the air and...shooting at them horizontally.

The core gameplay is thus:  two types of stages, one sort of side-scrolling with killer robots, one arena style overwhelm battels with waves of enemies.  There's a combo meter that reminds me of the shitty fucking combo meter from Metal Slug 4 which determine the amount of game money you make.  Game money is what allows you to buy equipment, which is the game's big selling point.  To be fair, there is a ton of pretty clothes and guns in the game with a ton of varied effects, but it falls into the same pits that pretty much any game with adjustable, level-restricted equipment* falls into:

1) You outlevel 95% of the equipment, and thus have no reason to ever get it or play with it to any meaningful degree, and
2) Of the 5% of that equipment remaining for the max level, 4% is completely useless compared to the remaining 1%.  The game doesn't even try to hide which are the best pieces, since they're the ones that are a million times more expensive than everything else.  Good thing there's a cash shop (unggggh)!

Maps are either recycled about a million times or they're so goddamned similar that I got confused.  There's about 4 types of enemies which are reskinned occasionally to hurt you a little more and take a few more gunshots.  You will never ever really need the secondary weapons that require ammo (I still use the ice beam I got near the start of the game, and have no regrets).  There are EXACTLY two bosses, which is really stupid in a genre that arguably depends more on quality boss fights than any other genre.

And yet, I still sort of like it.

A large part of this is because, while the game is mindless mush, it's still vaguely fun in a world where you can't even really find competent run and gun games anymore, and sometimes you don't want to 1cc Metal Slug X for the three dozeneth time or try to find the hidden meaning of Rush N' Attack.  Stuff blows up good, the idea of being able to punch back bullets is fun, and my brain is dumb enough to get a release of endorphin whenever a cool new gun drops for me.  There's so much wrong with this game, but for the most part I worry about breaking the fragile egg because look do you see any other eggs you dumb cock?  I'm aware of my being an indie apologist, but whatever, consistency is for dumb teenagers.

--

There's one thing I cannot logically argue myself around, though:  the fucking online multiplayer functionality.  It is 2012, how in the fuck does this game not have a lobby system of any sort?  If you want to play online with people, you are limited to playing with Steam Budz, or Quick Match.  What is Quick Match?  Most of the time, something you click that after five minutes of waiting, shunts you back to the menu screen.  If you're lucky enough to get in a game, you have an equal chance of the following:

1) Having everyone leave the game immediately
2) Going to a stage that you are way way too strong for while your teammates are severely underequipped, forcing you to hang back like a protective baby bear because the Shoot Many Robots community is fucking shit at these sorts of games
3) The opposite experience, where you end up hanging out with max level super equipped death dealers in an endgame level where it would take five minutes for you to kill anything, resulting in you getting tons of XP and superior equipment that you won't be able to equip until you reach max level.

I reached the level cap of 50 without playing a single game where I didn't feel I was either completely wasting my time or being a complete waste for my team.  Of course, this could have been solved by creating an open lobby system where you could start games on the stage you were designed to be on and other people could join up too, but I guess that would have required effort.  So now we have a game where you are either the powerleveller or the powerlevelled.

Kirby Super Star Ultra

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

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

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

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

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

Kirby: Squeak Squad

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Kirby: Canvas Curse (2005)

I really like Kirby games.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eventually.

So is today wacky opposite day in game reviews

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

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

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

Earth is weird.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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