Kirby Super Star Ultra

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

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

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

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

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

Kirby: Squeak Squad

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Kirby: Canvas Curse (2005)

I really like Kirby games.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eventually.

So is today wacky opposite day in game reviews

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

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

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

Earth is weird.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zombie Apocalypse (2011)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fuck this fucking movie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

oh

oh wait

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

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

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

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

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

Unless.

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

No.  

No. 

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

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO


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