Don't Breathe 2: How One Scene can Ruin a Movie

 

Don't Breathe was a lackluster horror movie released in 2016 about a blind man defending his house from a bunch of criminals trying to rob him.  The blind man, is of course, some kind of ex-army guy and despite his affliction is more the capable of doing some unspeakable things to the assholes invading his home.  The movie climaxed with a really gross twist involving a turkey baster and then ended in a way that my memory didn't retain for the most part but I think there was a jump scare from a dog involved.  The writing was fucking awful but the premise and action was enough to at least carry it into a solid "meh" rating where I came away not loving it but not hating it either.  A middling day at the cinema where I at least got to enjoy some time with a friend.

Well, at time of writing I'm currently suffering from the flu and while laying in bed unable to sleep I decided to start looking through the Netflix listings only to find that Don't Breathe got a sequel released all the way back in 2021.  I had no idea this had even come out and so I immdiately tapped the poster and gave it a watch and while at its core its a sort of average gore-fest action film, there's one scene that happened early on that made me frustrated with the rest of the film

Spoilers from here but do you really give a shit?

The film follows the same blind man from the first film who has now aquired himself a daughter that he is extremely protective of.  Behavior that, if you saw the first film, is at least somewhat understandable.  After some establishing scenes with him and the daughter these 4 guys turn up in an attempt to kidnap her and this is what kicks off the high-action blood and gore.  There's one scene in particular, though, where the entire plot just falls apart and it lodged itself into my brain so hard that it ruined the rest of the movie for me.  The blind man had fashioned a metal container box in his basement for his daughter to use a sort of panic room as he goes around and deals with the bad man.  Early into the fighting he tells her to get in there and she complies.  One of the dudes trying to get her chases her down into the basement and when he realises he can't get her out, he grabs a nearby hose and starts flooding the box through an air-hole at the top, I suppose in an attempt to make her panic and leave.  She doesn't leave and eventually the blind man fights his way down into the basement to take on this dude who then proceeds to pull a bit of electrical wire off the wall and hang into into the box to electrocute the girl inside.  They fight, blind man wins, girl doesn't get electrocuted because the wire is pulled away but nearly drowns and she is let free and the movie continues.

Later you find out that the girl is actually the bioloigical daughter of the guy invading the house, a meth cook who's been in prison for a long stint after his lab blew up and he wants her back.  This twist immediately sent my flu-medicine addled brain into storm of confusion.  Why the fuck would that guy attempt to kill the girl if its the boss of his daughter?!  They all seemed to be in on it, surely it's a fucking awful idea to kill your bosses only child just so you can win a fist fight with a blind man.  It may not seem like a big deal but then the twistier twist is that he doesn't want his daughter back because he's a good father, he wants her back so he can harvest her heart and give it to his dying wife!!!  The previous scene of the girl drowning in a metal box came flooding back into my mind like "wow, you're goon nearly completely fucked you at the 30 minute mark" and I'm baffled as to how no one read that in the script or pre-production and didn't bring up this giant gaping problem with the plot.

I actually think this is a worse twist than the turkey baster because that just seemed like a needlessly written garbage plot point for shock value but this is the foundation of the entire story just being disregarded for a cheap bit of character peril.  

The rest of the movie was fine, I guess.  Another case of not shitty enough to be upset about and not good enough to remember in any capacity after I finish writing this post.  A completely average movie with some, once again, awful writing only worth watching if there's literally nothing else. 

Detention Quick Review

 

Detention is a game I've had my eye on for a long time and now I have finally got around to playing and finishing the game so I want to spend just a little time sharing some of my thoughts on it. 

The game starts out with you playing as a high school student called Wei who, during a storm, finds himself trapped in the school with a girl, Rey.  They interact for a while and then Wei ends up hung upside down in the school assembly hall dead and the story then focuses on Rey as she explores the school to try and escape.  I dont want to go into too much of the story after this point because Detention is very much a one and done kind of game where things are best experienced for yourself.  The story isn't anything incredible but its well executed and interesting enough to hold your attention for its fairly short play time

Gameplay is done entirely on a 2D plane using the mouse.  If your familiar with old point and click adventure type games then that's the kind of style it has.  You walk around the environments finding various odd items for various odd puzzles which you solve for various interpretations of keys for various interpretations of doors.  It's actually quite a good job that the story for Detention is interesting because as a game, it's a bit shit.  The puzzles are insultingly easy at pretty much every stage of the game with usually the thing you need to solve a puzzle being either in the room of the puzzle itself or just every so slightly down a hall with few exceptions.  The only time I got "stuck" in Detention was during a puzzle sequence involving tuning a radio to change rooms and I was only stumped because the shadows of one of the rooms was hiding a door.  I fired up a guide, saw the sentence "exit the door on the right" and then closed the guide and did the rest of the game no problem.  The only other element to the gameplay is the "enemies" that occasionally stalk you in the corridors.  They come in two flavors and both are thwarted by pressing the right mouse button to hold your breath.  If for some reason you are killed by one, the game makes you walk up a mountain path for 15 seconds and then drops you off at a checkpoint.  

While Detention sort of sucks shit in the gameplay department it does much MUCH better with it's horror.  Games that look like they could have been made in FlashMX 2004 usually piss me off but the old Newgrounds-y style art coupled with some decent sound design make for a rather unnerving atmosphere.  There was one moment where I had to pause the game and go do something downstairs and the weird noises coming from my room were enough to make me trot back upstairs and close the door to shut them out because they were sort of making me uneasy.  Also, one thing I cannot praise this game for enough is the TOTAL lack of jumpscares.  Not a single one.  A lot of horror games/movies rely heavily one loud noises coupled with an orchestra sting to force a scare out of you but Detention does not do this EVEN ONCE and for that it must be highly commended.  A lot of the fear in Detention comes from its strange, nightmareish visuals and it does this nice thing of occasionally flashing something weird at you for just a frame or two and then never bringing it up again.

Minor spoiler here so if you dont wanna hear it skip the next paragraph 

One of the puzzles involves finding a box cutter and slitting the throat of the strung up body of Wei in the second chapter.  When you do this and get the item or whatever it was you get for the puzzle, as you click out off the screen, Wei opens his eyes for just a moment as the screen fades to black and fades back into the main game.  If you click him again, his eyes are closed, it never happens again.  It's a fantastic way to unnerve a player and it uses this technique sparingly enough to keep you guessing at every turn.

Spoilers over

It's nice to see a horror game take a more subtle approach to scaring the player than the usual loud noises, monsters made of bacon and chase sequences that we've come to know all to often today.  Sure, Detention isn't particuarly great as a game but it's trying to tell you a nice, creepy little tale with some nice creepy imagry and at that it succeeds very well.  If you dont want to take my word for it then consider that it was good enough at what it did to have a movie made of it, which I will be checking out myself at the first possible opportunity.  It's extremely cheap on Steam so go pick it up and give it ago, you proably won't regret it

Sonic the Hedgehog Trailer

So the trailer for the new Sonic movie dropped and OH BOY what an experience that was to watch for the first time.

So I think everyone in existence who saw the design of Sonic for this movie recoiled at just how awful he looks in this film.  He just looks....weird.  I think what they were trying to do was to make him look "realistic" but now we have this..thing..that makes just a little bit of sick come up in the back of your throat every time you see him.  For me personally it's the teeth, whenever he opens his mouth and I can see his teeth it just weirds me out for some reason.  Whoever designed that and whoever OK'd that design really needs a slap upside the head.

But that aside, the trailer actually sort of impressed me.  It's not going to win any awards but if you go in expecting a dumb bit of fan wank based loosely on some video game source material this looks like a good bet to me.  Jim Carrey as Eggman/Robotnik really made that trailer for me, from those small clips I already really enjoy the performance he's giving out with it.  I mean, for a Sonic movie to be "true" to its source material all it really needs is Sonic, Eggman, robots and sonic destroying those robots.  In the trailer it shows Eggman chasing Sonic and some dude in a car where Sonic then gets out of the car and spindashes Eggmans vehicle causing it to fly off the road.  Sonic quips at him and then Eggman sicks some robots on him.  Can't get much more Sonic than that without making the movie just a 90 minute lets play of the first game.

For anyone who looked at that trailer and threw their hands up angrily like "oh my god what the fuck is wrong with these people?!" my reply to you is "what the fuck is wrong with YOU!?".  Video game movies have been shit since the dawn of video game movies.  Just because you ironically like the original Mario Brothers movie doesn't change the fact that it's a steaming pile of shit that has nothing to do with Mario.  I can hear people screaming at me now like "But Silent Hill is a good video game movie", which it's not.  Even the Mario Bros movie didn't misunderstand the source material quite as hard as that movie did, Silent Hill isn't just hot garbage but it's offensive hot garbage.  On top of that, don't forget the piles of boring, forgettable, shit video game movies like fucking Hitman and Warcraft that have come out over the years.

This will either be a good bit of stupid fun and be remembered for being so bad it's good OR it'll be a boring pile of nothing that everyone will forget about in 6 months after it's release.  I for one, can't wait to see it, I'll be in that line for the theatre DAY. ONE.

Die Hard Isn't That Bad

So usually when I come to near the end of a game or after I've finished it I'll do a blog post on it,  I've you've been watching the stream you'll have seen I'm doing a 100 game NES challenge and I've not really talked much any of the games I've finished on here so I want to talk about the game that was, so far, probably the most fun.

Die Hard came out in 1990 for the NES and basically follows the same plot of the movie.  You are tasked with stopping the crooks of which there are 40 in the building and you have to kill them all before the timer runs out and they get away with a bunch of money.  It's a simple game and it's easy to pick up and play in short bursts thanks to  the in game timer keeping a single attempt down to about 30 minutes.

Now the game ain't perfect by any stretch.  In fact, there's a hell of a lot wrong with it really.  The two big problems with it, for me, are the controls are sort of crap which makes aiming shots and killing crooks way more stressful than it should be and the foot power gauge mechanic.  I get that it was a thing in the movie and of course, if you walk over broken glass you're gonna fuck your feet up but in this game the gauge drops just from running.  Considering this is a game where time is very much of the essence, the fact that you are punished for running is BEYOND stupid.  This games lack of quality however has been well documented by our good friend, The Angry Video Game Nerd.  The episode he did on this game, while entertaining, I think gave it a bit of a reputation that it doesn't deserve.

If you can get used to the shit controls and stupid foot system it's actually quite clever.  For example if you kill a crook and steal his radio, you can listen in and find out where the other crooks are going.  The crooks will of course wise up to you though and stop radio chatter, but if you used the radio to call the police, they will contact you and tell you where crooks have been spotted throughout the building.  If you go into one of the lower floors and blow up a computer you can fuck with the hackers efforts to open the safe, thus giving you more time to kill crooks or if you spend too much time crawling in vents, the crooks will start attacking you through the vents.  It's nice to see the game react to the way your playing and there's even a way to cheese the game by getting all the crooks to fight you at once at the end but this is stupidly hard to achieve.  There's also a pretty decent number of endings for a game this old, most of them being "you lose" endings but my favorite is that it's entirely possible for you and the final boss to kill each other at the same time and the game will be like "You saved the day but you died as well, GAME OVER" and I can't think of that many games that give you an ending for a double KO.

So if you saw that AVGN video and wrote of Die Hard as just another shit movie tie in game, I implore you to give it a go.  If you have no idea what I'm on about then go give it a go anyway because despite all it's glaring flaws its a surprisingly fun game

Ready Player One

This is part of the series of posts I'm calling "Films wot I watched on the plane" and it's not going to be very long because I can sum up my feelings on Ready Player One in two words.

Complete abomination

Now if you didn't close your browser right there allow me to elaborate. Spoiler free

Ready Player One follows the adventures of some kid in a slum called Wade Watts.  Set in the future, Wade along with millions of other people spend most of their days in a sort of weird super-future version of Second Life called The Oasis.  With this being a family movie the plot can't be "if you die in the game you die for real" so all dying in the Oasis means is that you reset back to level 1 and you lose all your shit.  The plot actually revolves around the guy who created the Oasis dying and leaving behind a sort of gamer will where he has hidden 3 keys around the game world and any player who finds them basically becomes the owner of his company and therefore, owns the Oasis.  This of course attracts the attention of a big evil company called IOI and if they find the keys that would be like EA becoming the one and only game developer and publisher in the real word.  So Wade enters the game with his avatar Parzival and teams up with a bunch of other misfits for a wacky adventure in the virtual world.

Now despite the fact I think this movie is a complete abomination I will have to concede that if you don't play video games and know nearly nothing about them, you'll probably quite like it.  It's competently made, the acting is fine (I guess) and it's full of special effects and bombastic sequences that if you're just looking for a stupid popcorn flick then you'll probably garner at least a little enjoyment from it.

The problem arises when you're a viewer who quite enjoys games, which is kind of ironic because you'd think that would be the movies main audience.  While the movie isn't terrible (it's definitely stupid though) it's just sort of insulting.  Not because it takes liberties with how VR works or the way games are sort of in general but because of all the fucking references.  It's a bit like your dirty uncle coming to a party and then trying to show off to all the young people because he used to play Atari and has seen pictures of characters from Overwatch.  The game shoves all these referential bullshit on screen and EXPECTS you to jump up and down like an excited child, point and be like "OH MY GOD THERE IT IS!" but all it makes me do is roll my eyes so hard that you could power a small country with the kinetic energy.  Yeah I get it guys, you know what FPS games are and you've seen that one episode of AVGN where he talks about the Atari game Swordquest.

That's about as much as I can say without spoilers so I'll end with this.  If you don't enjoy video games (and therefore probably aren't reading this post) you might like it.  If you DO enjoy video games then just stay away and instead of wasting your time with this go play an actual game for 140 minutes instead.  

Rampage (Movie)

Of all the games that you could make a movie of, why in the name of FUCK would you make a movie out of Rampage?!  I mean look at it.

It was a fairly simple arcade game released in 1986 where you controlled one of three large creatures as you punched buildings until they fell down for points.  How the fuck do you make a movie out of THAT?

Well they did it by hiring The Rock and having him be best friends with a CG gorilla that he communicates with via sign language because they were ripping off Jurassic World.  The movie starts with Evil Corp having an experiment they were conducting in space go wrong and the containers of evil juice they were working on drop to earth.  A wolf, crocodile and of course, The Rocks gorilla get a face full of the evil juice and turn into giant...RAMPAGING....monsters (eh! EH!?!).  The monsters get mind controlled by evil corp to come into town and start smashing it up but because the rock is best buddies with the gorilla he talks him down and together they kill the wolf and the crocodile and save the day (oh yeah, spoilers).

It's not so much that the movie is bad, because when the source material you're working with is so basic it's hard to fuck it up, but it's just PAINFULLY pointless.  Almost every big action movie released in the last 10 years, action movies better than this, have bits in it where buildings get smashed.  Only difference between those movies and this is the incredibly stupid relationship between The Rock and his gorilla so if you're life long dream was to see The Rock get flipped off by a CG ape then this movie was clearly made for you.


It's not bad enough to laugh at or be angered by like House of the Dead or Bloodrain but it's also not good enough to warrant a real watch either.  If you REALLY want to see it then wait until you can find it in a Tesco's bargain bin for £1 but until then just play the game instead.

Don't Breathe

Just before my New Year holiday started I went to go and see Don't Breathe which at the time had just come out in Japan.  First thing to note is that this is the first horror movie I've gone to in a while where I wasn't expecting pure garbage from the get go.  With other movies like Gekijourei (which was crap) and Sadako Vs Kayako (which was surprisingly awesome) my expectations going into any movie (or game for that matter) from this genre are fairly low but with this I was quite excited.  I'm going to keep this post as spoiler free as possible so if you've not seen it and you want to, don't worry.

The premise is a simple one.  3 kids who live in Detroit hate their lives, probably can't find jobs and have therefore resorted to thievery.  One member of the group has a father who works for a security firm so they use his collection of house keys and security system know how to break into places and steal valuables (never money) and then sell them off to try and raise funds for a permanent ticket out of town.  One member catches wind of an old man sitting on a ton of money and after some deliberation the group decide to rob this guy for his cash rather than his stuff on the condition that they make it their last robbery ever.  However, despite finding out that the old guy is blind and alone, things go awry after they get caught and Mr Blind starts wrecking their shit.

Generally speaking the movie is pretty enjoyable with lots of great set pieces that sort of act like a visual roller coaster.  Lots of tension in dark, quiet rooms followed by HOLY SHIT.  You could argue that the movie is making and over use of jump scares but the enemy of this film is a blind guy, of course he's going to sit quietly not doing much before his super hearing gives him a good idea of how to attack and then BAM! act of super violence and the trailer made it very clear that there was going to be lots of that.  Without spoiling anything though, there are a number of jump scares that involve a dog and anything involving the Don't Breathe dog is just pure cheap bullshit.

While all in all it's an enjoyable experience there's a couple of glaring problems that I just can't quite get over.  All the characters are heavily unlikable and I couldn't quite internally cheer for any of them.  The three main characters, the ones that we're supposed to be sympathetic too are criminals robbing and old blind man.  I'm still wondering why they can't just get normal Detroit jobs and save the money to leave that way.  Even when they do leave, if they are so unemployable that they had to resort to thievery then what makes them think that moving to a new town will just magically solve that problem?  Yes and I know there's more to it than just that for the girl of the group but I'm sure she could have done something other than just heartlessly robbing people.

I actually spent most of the movie rooting for the blind guy to kill them all off.  He's just an old man turned blind from fighting in a war and on top of that his wife is dead and his daughter got ran over.  I think he's well within his rights to stick it to a bunch of petty thieves trying to take away the only thing he has left.  But then, without spoiling anything, he fucks it up and he out-dicks the main dicks by about a million times.  It was the only point in the movie where I thought "ok, now you're going a little far".  I mean I'm not against a little bit of gross out horror but I felt like mercilessly boarding up his house from the inside made him "enemy" enough and this weird sub plot which I can't really talk about with no spoilers was a desperate attempt to make him seem really terrible and the three stooges seem like heroes of the day when in reality it just makes everyone a huge prick.

So there you have it, an overall enjoyable film with a cast full of pricks and a plot twist that will make you do a little sigh and go "c'mon, really?".  Still though, you could do a lot worse so give it a go if you're a horror fan needing to fill the void a little.  Just as a little gaming related side note, I can't help but feel that Don't Breathe would work really well as a VR title, just sayin'.

Rogue One

Recently I saw the new Star Wars movie, Rogue One and if you're worried about spoilers in the upcoming few paragraphs of text then don't worry yourself because I'm not about to do that to you.  I'm just here to share a few thoughts about the movie in general.

Rogue One is a spin off title in the franchise that's set between episode 3 and 4 and follows the adventures of Jin and her struggle to get the plans for the Death Star.  I know I mentioned spoilers before but if you can't predict just how the movie will end from just the synopsis then you're a bit of an idiot.

Anyway let me start by talking about something that I didn't like about the movie which is the first handful of minutes of its run time.  You get sort of an information dump with the movie switching between many different people, places and even throwing in a handful of flashbacks.  It introduces almost all the characters and locations straight away and for me personally this was a little much.  I found myself getting confused as to who was who and where they were and what they were doing.  Eventually though the movie stopped dumping information into my face and after that it was a highly enjoyable experience all the way to the end.

Everything about this movie is pretty much on point.  The acting, special effects, set piece moments are all really good with one of my personal favorites being a blind Donny Yen beating this shit out of a bunch of dudes with a stick.  It's the sort of fight choreography that I don't think we've seen in a Star Wars movie before so it was pretty cool to see.  Although while the ground combat is entertaining to watch, I can't help but feel that it's the space battles where the movie really shines and there's a certain scene involving a star destroyer that had me grinning ear to ear like some kind of school boy.

Now I'm no Star Wars fanatic.  While I think these movies are very good I'm not quite as clued up on the universe as many other fans I feel.  That said, sitting next to two people in a bar who are HUGE fans and listening to them gush about this film should be a good indication that it's worth seeing.  Even if you aren't much of a Star Wars fan it's worth going to see and you won't have to worry about being lost with what's going on because it's a prequel to the good trilogy so you're coming in right at the start technically speaking.

Now maybe with the success of these movies we can get another Rogue Squadron game because they were pretty good.

Parasite Eve: Bigger Than You Thought

Parasite Eve is one of those games that isn't so widely known I feel.  The first game was a sort of action RPG affair and the second game played a bit more like a survival horror title with RPG elements. They were both pretty good and while the 3rd game on PSP was a little bit shit its absolutely a series worth checking out.

However what some fans might not know is that Parasite Eve is a bigger series than they might think.  This is especially true if you lived in the UK because we never got a PS1 release of the first game which is really weird.  Allow me to fill you in on a bit of extra series background that you may have not known about.

The first game was released in 1998 in both Japan and America for the PS1 and that's where you think the series started but you would be quite wrong.  Allow me to introduce you to a dude called Hideaki Sena

This guy isn't a game developer of any kind but a pharmacologist.  In fact, right now Dr Sena currently gives lectures on microbiology in Sendai, Japan but the other thing he likes to do is write books and the most famous book he wrote was titled Parasite Eve.

I can't give you a plot synopsis because I've not read it but if you head to the wikipedia page for the book there is one there.  This book kicked off the series back in 1995 and after the books success Square teamed up with the books publisher and created the first game which is actually a direct sequel to the book.  From there we got all the entries that we already know about which are the two PS1 games and the 3rd Birthday for PSP.  However, there are two more pieces of Parasite Eve media that you possibly didn't know about

There's a collection of Parasite Eve manga books, the first of which (pictured above) is based on the novel while the ones that followed were based on the games.  These were published in 1998 and as far as I know, have never seen an English release.  At this point I'm sure you might want to go online to see if there's a fan translation but at time of writing I've not been able to find one.  Even the google image search shows a total of 0 images with replaced English text so if you want to read it, it'll have to be in Japanese.

The other thing is a movie, of course based on the book, which I have also not seen but it has a 5.9/10 on IMDB so it can't be THAT bad.  It's actually not that hard to get hold of so give it a watch if you get the chance.

The last time we saw some Parasite Eve content was in 2010 with the painfully average 3rd Birthday and since then it's been a little bit forgotten.  It would be nice to see some new content for the series but maybe better to let it rest while the majority of the stuff produced for it is still good.

Lights Out

So recently I saw this movie in my local cinemas so of course I have to do a little blog post about what I thought about it.  I almost completely ignored this movie because it states at the top of the poster that it's produced by James Wan of The Conjuring fame.  The Conjuring was a particularly shitty horror movie that I watched on a plane once so my expectations for Lights Out were fairly low.

The first thing that struck me when I started watching this movie was that some of the scenes early on are very reminiscent of viral video I saw on Facebook one time.  Here's the video

Well the reason is reminded me of this short so hard (which during my viewing I had forgotten the name of) is because Lights Out (the movie) is based off this short film of the same name from 2013.  So almost all the information you need to know about Lights Out is contained within this short and the movie version is just a longer a version.  One thing to mention is that they did change the ghost a bit and now its sort of a reverse Witch from Left4Dead which goes berserk in the dark instead of when you shine lights on it.

Anyway this is going to be a spoiler free short review so I'm not going to go into much more detail about the plot.  The movie relies heavily on jump scares which is a little disappointing but there are a few moments which generate some tension and some really clever stuff going on in the climax which made it considerably more entertaining than The Conjuring.   It's short of a shame that it went for so many jump scares really because there are a few good scenes where characters are walking around in the dark and your not quite sure where the creature is going to come from.  When they did have the monster attack though it was always a loud, screamy affair that just blew all the tension away and just left you feeling like you've been punched in the face.

One thing that did strike me is just the incredibly attractive cast.  The main character is played Teresa Palmer who is just crazy hot and even her boyfriend portrayed by Alexander DiPersia was giving me a bit of a man crush.  Even the ghost was played by an insanely attractive woman, Alicia Vela Baily, I mean just take a look at her.

If she wants to invade my house in the pitch black and hack me up then by all means.  I know having attractive actors and actresses in these movies isn't uncommon but for some reason in this movie it felt as if they were almost photoshopped into reality.

Anyway, Lights out won't leave you feeling upset that you spent your precious time watching it but it's nothing special and you'll probably forget about it in a few months.  If you want to save yourself the price of a ticket or a DVD then just watch the short on repeat for 2 hours, you'll basically get the same experience.

Sadako Vs Kayako

So recently I saw the recently released Sadako Vs Kayako, a Japanese movie that's been getting a lot of hype behind it.  Remember way back in 2003 when we got Freddy Vs Jason?  Well this is like the Japanese version of that only Freddy Vs Jason was kind of crap and Sadako Vs Kayako is fucking AWESOME.  Just in case you aren't familiar with these names, Sadako is the ghost from the very well known "Ring" movie and Kayako is the big nasty from "Ju-On" or "The Grudge"

The hype campaign for this movie has been pretty big in Japan.  There's been posters, leaflets, the obvious things like trailers and other content but some of the publicity stuff has been a little strange.  For example, there's an instagram account called Kayako With Toshio which pictures the evil duo from The Grudge in rather mundane settings such as seeing Toshio off to school or having noodles.

https://www.instagram.com/kayakowithtoshio/?hl=en

Even stranger than that was a TV segment during a baseball game where the two characters were put on the field to face off in a spot of batting and pitching.

Strange hype aside though, the movie is actually fucking incredible which is something I didn't think I'd be saying about it going in.  I expected yet another shitty, cliche Japanese horror movie in the same vein as something like Gekijourei but banking on the popularity of the two evil ghost characters.  But instead I got a fantastically fucking stupid yet awesome beyond words cross over movie ever with some genuinely unsettling moments in between.

One thing you have to understand about Japanese horror movies, especially of this kind, are very formulaic.  Usually they are stories about a curse or some kind of rumor going around, then the hero gets cursed and some fucked up shit happens.  Following that, they find someone who is super knowledgeable about said curse and they proceed to enact some insane plan in order to remove the evil ghost from the persons life.  It's not a bad formula but it's so played out at this point that when a new movie does it the only thing you can really gamble on is if its going to be a happy ending or an everyone dies ending and everything before that you could predict like the worlds best clairvoyant.

However, while Sadako Vs Kayako does this for it's first half, once it gets it's boring shit out of the way it flies completely off the rails into insanity.  Luckily, the stupid shit that goes down after the movies half way mark isn't the kind of stupid shit that makes you sigh and rolls your eyes but it's the sort of awesome stupid shit that has you holding back cheers of joy, sort of similar to the reaction you have when watching an Expendables movie.  I can't do it justice without heavy spoilers but please, do yourself a favor and go watch this movie, you won't regret it for one second.

I think most people, like me, weren't expecting a lot from this movie so it ends up being a pleasant surprise.  Don't take it too seriously and just sit back and enjoy the roller coaster of retardation that is Sadako Vs Kayako.

A Tetris Movie?!

Tetris is one of those games that everyone and their dog knows about.  It's one of those games that is almost synonymous with the word "gaming".  Even people who generally dislike video games can get a good kick out of dropping blocks into neat lines for points.  It's simple, fun, puzzle gaming bliss.  

So while I'm doing my usual morning routine of wasting time on the internet I come across some strange news that there is a Tetris movie in development.  Now I understand why people may attempt to make movie adaptations of other games since they have a story to work with but Tetris? Not much to go on there for a film.  

Ah, but wait of course!  Tetris and its development has a sort of rich history. Originally developed by Alexey Pajitnov as a means of testing hardware for the Moscow centre of Computer Science, things got a bit complicated with licensing rights and publishing thanks to the Soviet Union.  With that in mind there is actually a decent idea for a sort of documovie about the history of one of gamings biggest and most beloved titles. 

But it's not about that is it.....? 

Information on this movie is proving to be a little hard to come by but from what I can tell so far it's going to be a 3 part sci-fi epic.  I can't even begin to imagine the levels of retardation that are going to come out of this movie, I'm expecting something on the same level as Pixels at this point.  

Maybe they were inspired by this image from the Amiga version 

But even then fuck knows what they are gonna do with that.  It'll be a standard space story but every time the ships engines fail the engineer has to get 100 line in Tetris? 

Sort of hoping the project falls through and it goes away so this buffoonery can go away. 

Video Game Movies Don't Work

So I'm pretty sure this is a point I've made before, but with news of the Warcraft movie on the horizon it's something I feel like I should repeat.  Video game movies do not work, they have never worked and I feel that until I'm proven otherwise, will never work.

Now, does this mean that you can't look at something like the trailer for the Warcraft movie and not be excited?  Well no, if you're a normal punter then you have every right in the world to be excited, I mean their making a movie of fucking Warcraft for God's sake, just expect all that excitement and wonder to fade away once you actually get in the cinema.

What I'm not going to say is that video game movies don't work because of a lack of talent.  Unless you're Uwe Boll, chances are your going to hire some semi decent actors and have a director that has his head screwed on straight, it's just that these kind of movies are doomed from the get go.  This is because video games and movies are two VERY DIFFERENT ways of delivering entertainment and they don't really translate well from one to the other.

Silent Hill is a great example of this because it's a series that I hold so close to my heart that I can easily point out things that are wrong or things that don't work when it's done within a movie.  You see, Silent Hill games are legitimately scary because the effect of the horror when delivered through the game is two fold.  On one level you're scared by things like the sound design, the visual design, the monster design, things in the game that are designed to generate that feeling of fear.  However you're also getting the sense of fear on another level because those things are happening directly to you in a way.  From a game play standpoint you're terrified because you're managing health, ammo or you might be worried about losing progress.  What Team Silent did with the original games is marry those two ideas to create a truly frightening experience.

When you put this into a movie you lose some of what makes Silent Hill special.  Sure, there's freaky shit happening on the screen but you're nothing but a passive observer.  The story must go on because there's still run time in the movie so you essentially lose half of the fear factor.  Silent Hill is sort of a bad example in one respect because the writers idea of "horror" for the movie was a load of crap but I'm sure you see where I'm coming from.

Not only this, but you have to condense a game, which will usually run for 8-10 hours on a first play through in a movie run time of about 2 hours.  I'm sure it's no easy task to adapt something of that length and as a result people who know these games games backwards and front are left disappointing and angry because things were changed and adapted in order to suit the run time of a film.

The same is true for Warcraft, if you just want to see a movies about orcs and humans bashing each other with swords then I'm sure you'll have a good time but all the people who are invested in that series, which is a well fleshed out series, will be left wanting and probably upset.  I'd love them to focus on just a small part of the series and do it really well but even then you'd upset people by not having the same scope that the game series has built up over the years.  The movie is titled Warcraft, not Warcraft: <insert major story event here>.  Even with the title alone you've set the scope too wide and are setting yourself up for failure. 

The same is also true the other way round, video game movies generally suck ass because recreating that experience into a 10 hour game that feels world £40 is really hard.  Not only that but they pretty much have to be made while interest for said movie is high, which means that development is usually rushed and the games suffer mechanically as a result.  It might have been a little easier back in the day with things like Batman because all you had to do was make a platformer with a couple of nods to the movie that you were basing it on but now it's much harder and as a result video game movies are usually regarded with some kind of scorn or are just flat out ignored.

One day I hope I'm wrong about all this and they make an awesome video game movie or vice versa but to me it feels like the mediums are just too different from each other and when you factor in time, cost, manpower and a bunch of other stuff it almost seems futile to try.  All these adaptations suck but I admire peoples willingness to try

Gekijourei

So a few weeks ago I went to the cinema and saw this horror flick and now I'm finally getting a chance  to sit down and say a couple of things about it.  First just for people who have no idea what the title means let me explain those weird squiggles for you.  "Gekijou"  is the Japanese word for a theater and the "rei" means spirit or ghost.  So I guess a loose, shitty translation of the title would be Theater Spirit but that sounds shitty so I'll stick with calling it Gekijourei for this post.

So the movie follows a young girl called Sara Mizuki (played by Haruka Shimazaki for AKB48 fame) and she is hired to play a role in some stage play for some skinny prick.  She is joined by some other try-hard wannabe actresses as tension builds during the preparations for the performance.  While all this is happening, an even doll possessed by a ghost is going around offing people and it's up to our plucky heroine to put an end to the ghost, save the day and save the production.

To cut a potentially very long post short, this movie just isn't all that good.  It has a few moments but they are too short and too few and far between to make sitting through the whole thing worth it.  If you have ever seen a Japanese horror movie before like The Ring then you've seen this.  It's about a cliche as it gets and you can see the "twists" coming from a mile away.  Just go and watch any Japanese ghost movie and replace the word "ghost" with "doll" and you pretty much have the entire plot of this film.

I want to say that the acting wasn't particularly bad but I think that's because I went in with absolutely 0 expectations from any of the talent.  Haruka Shimazaki especially, being an AKB48 pop star idol, I was expecting her performance to be just complete cringe worthy bullshit but she played her part well enough.

That's all I really have to say about this film, it's not shitty enough for a long rant and it's not good enough to gush over in any kind of way.  It's just one of those "meh" cliche Japanese horror movies that you watch and then forget about  about a week later.  It speaks volumes when one of the highlights of the movie going experience for me and my friends was laughing at the guy 2 rows back who had fallen asleep and was snoring loudly.

Still, if you've not seen any Japanese horror movies before or you're one of those creepy weirdos who likes AKB48 and wants to watch Haruka Shimazaki make terrified faces at the camera then maybe you'll get a kick out of Gekijourei.  Otherwise, avoid it because it's going to be one of those shit £5 DVD movies that you'll see about a million copies of in the "Foreign Cinema" section of your DVD store.

The Gallows Movie Review

It's weird, even though you can tell a movie is going to suck some extreme ass just from the trailer I'm still willing to give it a try because it's horror and I'm always holding out for some really good horror movies.  However, The Gallows does not deliver and just generally speaking isn't very good.

The story follows 4 high school students which all fit a common American high school stereotype.  You have the asshole and his girlfriend, the jock-come-actor who sucks at what he does but carries on because of his crippling crush on a girl in the theatre group and the annoying, up her own arse theatre girl.  The asshole and his girlfriend decide to try and bail out the jock-come-actor from a stage play he is about to perform by sneaking into the school and night and wrecking the set.  After sneaking in, the theatre girl follows and catches them but they get locked in the school and then shit starts to get real.  The stage play that was being performed called "The Gallows" was performed previously by the school but a freak accident involving the gallows prop meant that one of the actors end up hung, so his evil ghost is roaming the school and is out to kill the 4 characters.

The story itself makes sense in the context of a ghost movie but the fact that it's one of those "found footage" type films throws some stupid questions.  At the start of the movie it tells you that it's video evidence being held by the police but at multiple points the perspective switches from a camera to a phone to a booth camera to a police mans shoulder cam (?).  Am I supposed to be believe that some cop sat in a room and edited these videos together so that we would know what was happening to each of the characters during all the chaos?  Found footage movies are pretty stupid

The movie also fails to deliver on any actual horror and instead just jump scares you for the entire film.  Lots of first person wandering around in the darkness followed by loud bangs, insane screaming and things suddenly jumping into the camera.  I could recreate the entire experience by standing in a pitch black room holding 2 frying pans.  I'd stand near you, wait 30 seconds then have someone turn on the lights, slam the pans together and scream "BOO!" and then flick the switch again.  Do that for an hour and you have the same horror experience as The Gallows.

It's not good as a horror movie but it suffers from the problem of not quite being bad enough to laugh at or be angry about.  That means it falls squarely into the realm of just plain old boring so I would easily recommend staying well away from this one

Pixels Movie

A few days ago a few of my friends started posting a trailer for a movie called Pixels on Facebook.  The first thing I saw as I scrolled past it was a giant Pac-Man eating a fire truck as it exploded into pixel blocks.  So of course I had to go on YouTube and check this shit out.  Before I say anymore you should also go and check out the trailer.

I'm a little torn on my thoughts with this trailer.  Part of me thinks it looks awesome and the idea of a video game themed alien invasion sounds kind of funny and considering that this is supposed to be a comedy then that's already a point in it's favor.  Also I really like the way the characters look, I think that shimmery effect lookin' thing on the video game characters looks awesome.

The reason I'm torn on it though is because it looks like it's going to be all referential comedy which is the worst.  It's like they as just going "HEY GUYS! LOOK AT PAC MAN! YOU LIKE PAC MAN RIGHT?!" and when they are not doing that some of the "jokes" are just flat out bad.  There's a part in the trailer where Donkey Kong chucks a barrel and the guys like "it's just a barrel, how bad can it hurt?" where it then precedes to explode right next to him and knock him for 6.  I'm not going to be entertained JUST because you put a big fat Pac Man on the screen and you have to do more with the jokes than just "barrels explode lol"

The gag featuring the Iwatani where he gets his hand bitten by his own creation made me smirk a little but that gag is ruined now because you went and showed it in the trailer and I doubt I'm going to find it as funny a second time.

Also Adam Sandler.....

But whatever, despite the movies probable suckage I'm still willing to go check it out and I'll probably have some fun with it.  Fingers crossed that the movies writers actually write some clever jokes but considering it's a movie about video game cameos in an action/comedy film I HIGHLY doubt it.

Also didn't Futurama do something like this once?

Why no Battle Royale Game?

There's a lot of movies that game video game adaptations and unfortunately most of them are complete shit and aren't worth bothering with.  A lot of these games are usually rushed so they can ride the hype of the movie release and as a result play like trash and just aren't worth playing.  However, if there's one movie that never got a game that absolutely should have had one it's Battle Royale.

Battle Royale is old as fuck but just in case I'll give a quick synopsis.  The movie follows a group of high schoolers as they are roped into the Battle Royale, a death game that takes place on a deserted island.  The idea is that each student has an explosive collar on their neck and they must kill their fellow students until only one remains.  If they fail to achieve this goal by the end of a number of days then every ones neck bombs detonate and they all die.  At the start of the film they are all given a bag with a number of tools and a random weapon and then they are let loose on each other.  It's a really good movie and I'd suggest that you go watch it if you haven't already.

Why has no one considered making a game based around this concept?!  In an age where multiplayer shooting games and roguelikes are stupid popular you think a game like this would be in a good position for a video game adaptation.  The best part is that it wouldn't even have to follow the movie that closely strictly speaking.

You could just have the player on an island with a randomly generated set of equipment running around trying to kill other players.  The layout of the island could be random as well as the equipment and survival elements such as finding food/water and other resources could be a core part of the game play.  If you did want to follow the movie you could give players the option to band together and try and beat the game itself but then there would have to be some kind of meta game going on to stop people just doing this every fucking time.

My rough idea probably isn't all that good but I imagine if a group of talented developers sat down and thought about it a Battle Royale game (or game with a similar theme) would be really fun.  Playing a game like this online would also be really fun I imagine so I'm hoping someone stumbles on this post and steals the idea.

Probably not though, I'll keep dreaming.

As The Gods Say (神さまの言うとおり)

Damn, I've not made a post in a few days thanks to quite a busy weekend of doing stuff with the wife and streaming.  One of the things that I did with the wife that kept me away from making posts was popping down to a cinema to see a new movie!


神さまの言うとおり or "As the Gods Say" for those of you who don't read Japanese is a "horror" movie directed by Takeshi Miike and based off a Manga of the same name.  I put the word horror in inverted commas because it's not so much a horror movie and it's more of a Death Game movie, but I'm not sure if I said "Death Game" movie people would know what I'm on about.  If you're unsure what I mean by "Death Game", just think about Battle Royale and you'll probably understand what I mean.

The story is about a group of high school students who get caught up in a number of deadly games conducted by Gods taking the form of fairly innocent icons of Japanese culture.  For example, the movie opens up with the scene in the above picture where a group of students have to play "Red Light, Green Light" with a Daruma (traditionally a symbol of good luck) sat on the front desk.  If you're unfamiliar with "Red Light, Green Light" the idea is that the person who is "it" turns round during a green light and can turn at any time and exclaim "Red Light!".  If you are caught moving during a red light, then you lose and have to start over.  In this movie however, if the Daruma catches you moving then your head explodes and you die.

A small group of students survive this opening scene and move on to play a variety of other children's games each with their own deadly twist.  Each game is quite gripping because the solution for the characters to win and move on isn't immediately obvious and you never know what dirty trick the enemies are going to play next to kill off a few more members of the cast.

I greatly enjoyed this movie but I have to say that I've not read the manga so I'm not entirely sure about how it stacks up to the original story.  A long time ago I saw a movie adaptation of another manga called Gantz that was changed so drastically it just pissed me off more than anything else.  Maybe fans of the manga wouldn't enjoy the movie as much as someone going in with no prior knowledge of the source material.

I had a number of nitpicks with the film but it didn't ruin the overall experience and I would totally recommend this movie.  I'm hunting down the manga to see how it compares (which can be read in English if you know where to look) and I'm sure one day a version with subtitles will be uploaded somewhere for all you non-Japanese speakers.  

When that day comes, watch this movie.  It's bloody good fun.

Kuime [喰女]

I know I don't usually do posts about movies but this one was just SO DAMN GOOD that I feel like I have to write something.  Information about this movie is extremely hard to come by on the internet and any sites that do have any entries only have a vague couple of lines and a cast list.

Kuime is a Japanese supernatural horror movie about an actor who is filming some kind of Samurai type looking movie thing.  As far as I understood it he was the main character and his girlfriend was playing the lead female role.  It becomes apparent very early on in the movie that the relationship between our two main characters is not a good one and after filming he's going off and fucking around with another member of the cast.  It's from here that all the weird ghostly shit starts happening and stuff gets all kinds of crazy but if I try and outline any more of the plot I'm worried I might spoil something.

So last night I went to the cinema to see this movie and the majority of the film is spent watching the characters act out this traditional samurai drama thing and then a couple of scary things happen and the movie ends.  When the credits started to roll and the lights in the theatre got brighter our initial reaction was "what the fuck was that?!" Not because the movie was bad but because we had absolutely no clue what had just happened on screen.

Nothing made any goddamn sense to us.  Sure, it was a cool horror movie but it seemed like one of the most non-nonsensical movies ever with all these weird disconnected things happening between a movie production and a haunting.  But then it clicked for one of us and after doing some research I realised that Kuime might just be one of the best horror movies I've ever seen in my goddamn life.

The movie production that is being filmed in the movie is for an old Japanese ghost story called Yotsuya Kaidan.  Yotsuya Kaidan is a story from 1825 about betrayal, murder and ghostly revenge and once you understand that it's not just "some samurai drama" then all the strange shit going on in the movie makes a hell of a lot more sense.  Some understanding of how Japanese ghosts work may also be required to fully "get" the film, but once you do and everything clicks you can truly appreciate it for just how great it is.

I do understand how that last paragraph makes me sound.  It makes me sound like I'm saying "oooh, look at how much *I* understand about Japanese culture and stuff! fnar fnar fnar"  which is not how I want to sound but if I try and go into more detail I'm going to spoil everything and I don't want that.  You just need to see the damn thing first and then you'll understand what I'm getting at.

The only other problem with this film is the language.  I'd say my Japanese is pretty good but a lot of the time people are talking in ye' olde Japanese which makes things a little hard to follow at times.  Even the two native Japanese speakers I saw the movie with came out commenting on just how hard the language was so once again, I'm not trying to show off, shit is genuinely tough to understand.

It's kind of a shame though because I know that if any western critics get a hold of this movie they aren't going to like it.  When people watch a movie they just want to relax and watch a fucking movie.  They don't want to have to take a history lesson and a 1800s Japanese Language course just to enjoy a film.  I just happen to be really into Japanese ghost stories and folk tales so looking all this stuff up and having the movie fall into place for me was an absolute joy.

Kuime is not for everyone but if you like Japanese supernatural horror movies and you're willing to clue yourself in a little bit then it's absolutely fantastic.

The Ao Oni Movie

Yesterday I finally got round to watching the Ao Oni movie in the Cinema which means it's now time to jump on here and jot down my thoughts about what I witnessed.

The only problem is I don't really know how I feel about what I witnessed.  Part of me wants to fly into a rage about how shit it was but then the other part of me wants to give it some concessions.  Remember, pretty much 100% of all video game movies suck complete bollocks but Ao Oni falls into the camp that something like Advent Children is in of "watchable".

Plus I'm willing to give the movie a bit more slack than usual because its source material is a fucking game made by like, 1 guy with RPG maker so it's not like whoever the people behind this movie were really had a lot to work with.

There will be spoilers ahead but if you're watching the movie before playing the game then you need a slap anyway.

So they movie starts out with some kid committing suicide and his sister (played by Iriyama Anna of AKB48 fame) placing some flowers.  Fast forward a bit and she's sat at the bank of a river playing what is basically an in universe version of Ao Oni created by some dude called Shun.

Now already I have a fucking problem with this because Anna and Shun are characters from the fucking novel.  I've not read the goddamn novel yet and I've got such a big reading list to get through that it's going to be fucking ages before I get round to doing that.  But really, if you're going to make a movie based of a highly popular VIDEO GAME then why the flying fucking arserats would you link it with the fucking book of all goddamn things.  This makes things overly complicated because now I'm not sure if it's a movie of the game or a movie of the book or a mix of the two.  Judging from what I saw it's a mix of the two but I wont know that shit for certain until I read the fucking book. 

I'd just like to point out that the book hasn't been released outside of Japan so this is a nice big middle finger to you non-Japanese speaking fans of the PC game.

Anyway, Shun gets coerced by some guy to go up a mountain to some spooky house because they have to do some shit with a box.  So Shun and all the characters from the game go to the house and Anna tags along because she's worried about Shun or some shit and then things kick off with the Oni.  Well, I say things kick off with the Oni but nothing actually happens for a good 20-30 minutes of movie time.  Then a lot of time after that is just the group running around being terrified of things but finally someone gets murdered and things are on in full swing.

This is where all the good stuff happens for a while with people being chased, solving mysteries and being murdered by the Oni.  There's even a sort of cool plot-twist where Shun comes to the realisation that everything going on in the house is exactly the same as his real life Ao Oni knockoff so for a while Anna and Shun have a bit of a leg up on the big nasty before things go tits up again.

It's that moment where things go tits up a second time where things start getting really weird.  It turns out that Shun is actually a ghost and he was murdered by Takuro who has gone from semi-leader character in the game to over the top high school bully for this movie.  For some unexplained reason Anna is the only one who can see and converse with Shun and that's how she avoided Oni slaughter for such a significant part of the movie.

But this doesn't make any fucking sense because we see SHUN solving puzzles and collecting keys round the house while Anna just stands there so is his ghost real or not? and if it is why can only Anna converse and see it.  It just doesn't make any fucking sense and while initially it's a cool twist it just really throws a wrench in the plot for a bunch of different reasons

Anyway, there's a bit more running and a bit more murder and the film culminates with Anna being locked in a room alone, with everyone else dead and nowhere to hide from the Oni.  She flings open the door to the room and walks into a white light where she ends up on the bank of a river with Shun again like at the start of the movie and after a little chat credits roll.

I couldn't figure out what the fuck just happened and the Japanese friend that was with me couldn't figure out what happened and we left the cinema in a confused mess.  At first we thought they were all dead but then we thought maybe none of them were dead and it was all just Anna's fantasy for how she wanted Takuro to die a horrible death for bullying her brother to suicide or some shit.  The problem is that it doesn't matter what line of thought you take there is always some event from the movie that fucks things up and just invalidates everything.

I know my explanation of the plot wasn't very good but if I tried to cover everything then it'd take all day but just go and watch it and you'll see what I mean.

Generally speaking though, it's not a bad movie but really at the end of the day it's just another "meh" horror movie for the pile.  Also it's really funny watching Iriyama Anna try to act because she's fucking terrible at it.  It doesn't help that she's doing a lead role with Kenta Suga who has a metric fuckton of acting experience thanks to his child acting roles and while his performance isn't award worthy it's pretty night and day between the two.

The final thing I have to say about the Ao Oni movie is that there is a lot of missed potential here.  There is SO MUCH stuff from the games that could have been made into interesting scenes or plot points in the movie that got ignored for no real reason.  The biggest example of this is that there is only one fucking Oni.  In the game there are a bunch of Oni things of all sorts of shape and size but they never thought to use this fact because I guess it would take up too much on the special effects budget or some shit?

Still, as far as video game adaptations go, it's OK.  If you're a fan of the games then you'll get a kick out of seeing a bunch of pricks run away from a big blue monster and there are a couple of little nods to the game that are done just well enough to make you smirk but not ham fisted enough to upset you.

To sum up how I felt about my movie-going experience, I don't feel like I wasted my time with it but it could have been so much better.