House of Sayuri

 I watch a lot of stuff on Netflix as a result of having kids and needing to commute to work and as a result of this I end up watching a lot of weird shit.  House of Sayuri was advertised to me at the login screen and being a bit of a sucker for Japanese horror I felt like I had to check it out.  I thought I was getting a serious horror movie but instead I got one of the weirdest films I've ever seen and I'm not sure if its supposed to be a comedy or not.  Spoilers for a aggressively 4/10 movie lie ahead. 

The movie starts out with a family having dinner and there's one extremely hikikomi member that the mother tries to coax out to eat with the rest of them.  This pisses off the hiki and causes her to exit her room with a baseball and go to town on them.  It then cuts to another family who have bought the house as they move in.  The family consists of the parents, 2 boys, a daughter and the grandparents, things seem nice at first but things very quickly start to get ghost-fucky.  You can see where this is going right?  The daughter ends up getting possessed and smashing the younger brothers face into a wall as the inciting incident.  After a decent amount of spooky ghost shit, it all culminates in all but the eldest son and the grandmother being dead as the possessed daughter kills a bunch of them and then stabs herself in the neck with a kitchen knife.  I'm obviously being pretty wishy-washy with the details but the point I'm trying to make here is that up to the family getting killed, Sayuri is playing itself as a pretty straight faced horror movie but then the film just does a tonal shift so insane that I actually might have got a case of actual whiplash from it.  

The grandmother in this family up to the mass murder was characterised as a doddery old lady, probably with dementia, not really being able to do anything for herself and spends most of the early scenes getting distracted by the obvious ghost shit that no one else can see.  At the end of the scene where the possessed sister stabs herself, the ghost shit somehow pulls her violently out of her dementia ridden elderly-ness and she becomes a turbo badass and she becomes a sort of weird mentor to the eldest son as they train to resist and maybe even beat the ghost thats haunting their new home.  This manifests in the story as basically working out, eating well and telling the ghost to literally just fuck off whenever it turns up.  Like it feeds on fear and mental anguish or something so if you just tell it to take a hike when it starts being spooky its got no choice but to just leave.  Pennywise from Temu, I guess, since it doesn't shapeshift and can't hurt you otherwise.  This entire mid-movie sequence is presented as a comedy, with the grandma being an extremely over the top, larger than life woman who slaps the elder son around like a sort of loving drill seargent into not being scared of actual ghosts.  

While all this is going on, the grandma is also investigating the cause of the haunting as aside from not wanting to move out of the new house, she also wants revenge for her dead family.  This is where the movie takes yet another tonal shift as the final scene gets weirdly dark out of nowhere after the entire second act being so comical.  It turns out that the hikikomori in the opening scene, the titular Sayuri, was sexually abused by her father and after she died at the hands of her family she became a ghost.  The grandmas plan here is to bring Sayuri's family back to the house and offer them up to the ghost so she can banish it.  The ghost kills the family that caused the haunting, the granda gets to watch them die, win-win.  Although none of this works and what we get is a surreal scene where the grandma turns into a slasher killer, at one point killing a dude by shoving a crowbar up his ass and then the ghost is beaten by the eldest son who does what I can only describe as "mild anime shit".

It's an absolutely insane movie and I can't work out who its for.  There's some decent horror stuff in the first act but the tonal shift at the half-way point spoils it for anyone who was enjoying the movie that way.  I also can't see dark-comedy or comedy-horror fans enjoying it because the comedy isn't very good.  You get a light chuckle out of the grandmas awakening and a little guffaw the first time the ghost gets told to fuck off but after that its just sort of dull.  But then it takes its third big shift where it gets all heavy with its subject matter and the characters your supposed to be rooting for suddenly become just kind of cruel and weird.  Maybe there's something I'm just not getting about it but to me it feels like House of Sayuri was directed by a guy who just had no real idea of what he wanted to make.  Like he was in the middle of making a horror movie but then just woke up one morning like "Oh! actually I want to make a comedy now!" but instead of scrapping the horror film he just kept it and slapped his weird comedy plot on the end of it.  

I don't think I could seriously suggest that anyone go out of their way to watch House of Sayuri but I can maybe see it having a place at a drunk bad-movie night.  If you've got a room full of drunk friends and you all just want to gawp at some insane bullshit then maybe it has some value but otherwise, don't be fooled by the slick poster and just skip this crap.

I Have A Gambling Issue

 

Slot machines are absolute dogshit and I hate them

Let me take you back to the year 2010, when I had come to Japan for the first time as an exchange student on my Japanese language course.  While at the university I met a girl who had a fairly deep interest in slot machines.  I saw her once sitting in the communal study space reading a magazine and when I asked her what she was reading it turned out to be a strategy guide (?) for a recently published Evangelion themed slot machine.  The magazine outlined how the machine was played along with how to trigger its various modes and even had these big ass diagrams of the reels.  After a short conversation about it I tagged along with her to the local Pachislot place where I gave it a try for myself.  I got 5000 yens worth of tokens, took a few spins of the machine and within about 20 minutes all my money had gone.  I wasn't expecting to win and I wasn't expecting to play for a significantly long amount of time but I was expecting to at least get a bit more than 20 fucking minutes.  In that moment I vowed never to play slots again and left the place.  

But the truth is I don't actually hate slot machines, I hate losing large sums of money in small amounts of time so when you tell me that I can play fakey rougelike video game slots with no risk to my families financial situation I'm fucking all in on that one.  

Cloverpit on its surface is a very simple game.  You are locked in a small, somewhat Saw-esque room, with a mini slot machine and an ATM.  The ATM tells you that you have to pay it a certain amount of coins within a certain amount of rounds or you get ejected into the abyss below.  If you pay the coins then your debt goes up and you do it again until you either win a key from the game master or the debt gets too high to clear and you fall to your doom.  That by itself would only be fun for a few tries but Cloverpit mixes things up by giving you trinkets that can modify your luck or modify the value of things on the machine greatly and now you get the true addicting quality of the game.  Not only are you pulling the literal slot machine but you are also pulling the trinket machine and when you get that pefect mix of items and circumstances that make one value on the reels super high and then you manage to finesse your way into an insane jackpot and that rush is basically unmatched.  It gives the game a real "just one more run" quality where a failed run can be frustrating but then "if only I had gotten <trinket> that time" and so you play again hoping to get your ideal setup.  Couple that with an additional phone mechanic where every round a mysterious caller gives you a chance to change things like the value of things in the machine or give you free shots at rerolling trinkets and all the moving parts make for a truly compelling experience.  

On top of all that Cloverpit offers a number of challenges to keep you spinning for hours and hours.  The game has a number of endings that can be achieved by fulfilling a number of conditions that amount to the gambling equivalent of self-harm and the game reaches Kaiji levels of fever pitch when you have these conditions active.  Not only that but you can also activate a number of "memory cards" which are like special challenge modes that make you rethink your approach to the machine and your trinkets.

There's just no better feeling in the world than when you're behind on tokens, its the last few spins of your final round, you have a high value mark on the machine but you just cant get it to come out.  Then you hit the lever, your luck trinkets all pop at once, the reels line up and the machine goes apeshit as your high value marking hits a jackpot, you go from guaranteed death to two more rounds of safety instantly, absolute euphoria.  Thank god these developers only made a fakey video game slot machine because if you hired them to make a real one then there might be a lot more people filing for bankruptcy in the world. 

BUT THATS NOT ALL 

 Scratch cards were also a thing I quite enjoyed in my student days.  I'd grab one whenever I did my grocery shopping and just the act of winning a fiver would get me giddy for the whole day.  So when I saw an incremental game based around doing scratch cards I had to buy it right away.  

In Scritchy Scratchy you are trying to avoid your shitty dish washing job by winning at scratch cards.  If it was just that it would be kind of bullshit but there are upgrades for you to buy that allow you to manipulate your luck and win more consistently.  From there you buy more expensive cards that have higher payouts to increse your luck to repeat this cycle seemingly ad-infinitum.  Eventually you are granted the ability to buy a "final ticket".  You scratch it, lose and it causes you to die.  

From here you get another upgrade system that allows you to manipulate your luck and payouts even further and you keep scratching cards and unlocking more stuff until eventually you win that final ticket and I will not spoil in this post.  It's a simple little incremental game with a theme that appeals very specifically to my vices that also doesn't overstay its welcome and has the good sense to roll credits just as its getting obnoxious.  A lesson that a game like Cookie Clicker could really benefit from.  If potentially life ruining bits of cardboard appeal to you as much as they appeal to me but you don't actually want to financially cripple yourself, Scritchy Scratchy is a game that you should grab off Steam ASAP.  

The reason I say I have a gambling "issue" rather than a gambling "problem" is because, thankfully, my weird urge to gamble can be completely satiated by games like this.  I think I owe a debt of gratitude to things like Cloverpit, Scritchy Scratchy and the Yakuza series casino (to name one example) for allowing me to indulge in the thrill of the game without any of the real consequences that would send me down a potentially very dark path.  Even if you aren't weirdly tempted by the casino lifestyle like I am though, these two games are very good and you should grab them anyway 

LETS GO GAMBLING