Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006, dir. Scott Glosserman)
I've been trying to avoid writing up too many recent films, but the truth is there have been some damned good horror movies made in the last few years and this is one of them. It's also a lot less serious and disturbing as the lastcouple of things I've written up. So it's time to even the score between "horribly scarring filmgoing experiences" and "oh yeah, movies can be enjoyable sometimes" a little bit.
The "deconstructionist" horror film sub-genre There's Nothing Out There started and Scream continued has led to this-- Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon is the new king of the genre, hands-down. Behind the Mask is the name of the documentary being made about Leslie Vernon, a new killer hoping to join the ranks of his heroes: Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, et al. The film presupposes a world in which these characters actually exist, and that killing is an open market-- anyone with the dedication and training can make their name at it.
Leslie Vernon has decided to allow documentary filmmaker Taylor Gentry an inside look at what it takes to become a career mass-murderer. He explains the rules he must follow, and how his ultimate aim is to find the perfect Final Girl: that one girl who's left alive at the end to destroy him. The film switches back and forth between documentary footage and interviews with Leslie and scenes of the film that Leslie is setting up, all the prep work leading to a final slaughter at his abandoned childhood home out in the country where (if all goes well) he'll have his perfect showdown.
While it's a lot of fun to hear the characters talk about the accepted ways of behavior and strict adherence to rules that cause people to do completely wrong things in these situations, the best part of the film is Leslie himself. Nathan Baesel gives an excellent performance, making Leslie a funny, charismatic guy who's just confident and assured enough that it's okay if he's a bit of an asshole. And, you know, mass murderer. The scenes with his mentor Eugene are also really funny. For example, we learn that Eugene is retired but still trains by doing things like staying buried in a coffin for days on end, just to keep in shape. Eugene and his wife are parental figures for Leslie, and their concern for him is genuinely sweet. This little touch is just one more thing that sets Behind the Mask apart from overly ironic or wacky horror comedies.
The film eventually turns completely into the slasher film that's being set up for its first two acts, but manages to keep the viewer off-balance and guessing with a sneaky plot twist. Even this is that rare twist that doesn't feel like cheating on the part of lazy writers-- you might see it coming, but it's fun anyway. The film also surprisingly isn't very gory, and might well appeal as much to fans of Christopher Guest's mockumentary style as to horror fans. Make sure to watch the credits all the way through, and not just because it probably wasn't cheap to get "Psycho Killer" licensed for the film!
From the trailers and images available, Marebito looks suspiciously like another "long-haired ghost girl" J-horror throwaway. The fact that it was directed by Takashi Shimizu, director of Ju-on (The Grudge) and its various sequels (and American remake) doesn't help. However, Marebito is actually a very different beast than the technology-obsessed ghosts that haunt so many of the avalanche of samey Asian horror films that have been unleashed since the success of Ringu.
Director Shinya Tsukamoto (Tetsuo: The Iron Man) plays Masuoka, a videographer obsessed with fear who films a violent suicide in the subway. Masuoka is alone, jaded and completely desensitized to human suffering. Divorced and estranged from his wife and daughter, he lives in a small apartment crammed with video and editing equipment, and finds himself compelled to revisit the scene of the suicide repeatedly. On one visit, he makes his way into a deeper part of the subway, then deeper still into dark, seemingly endless caverns that run beneath the city. When comes out the other side, he finds himself in a vast (and decidedly Lovecraftian) mountain range deep below the earth. He discovers a nude girl chained to a rock and takes her back to his apartment.
The girl is mute and acts like an animal, and she refuses to eat. She also appears human, but has vicious, razor-sharp teeth. Masuoka discovers that the girl must feed on blood in order to stay alive and so begins a murder spree to keep her happy. When he can't be at home, he watches a live video feed of his apartment on his cell phone. Things get even more complicated and disorienting when his ex-wife begins calling him and asking to see their daughter.
Like many psychological horror films, Marebito is intentionally ambiguous on many points. Did Masuoka really find another world beneath the city? Is the girl in his apartment his daughter? Has he been driven mad by his isolation? The film denies answers at every turn, making it much more intriguing than most by-the-book J-horror stories. The film moves at a glacial pace, which makes its intensely violent scenes all the more shocking-- especially effective and unsettling is a scene where Masuoka videotapes himself murdering a woman to feed to the girl, his face completely devoid of any emotion. One gets the distinct impression that Masuoka is a stand-in for media junkies in general and possibly horror fans specifically: after constantly immersing himself in the most horrific images imaginable, is it any wonder he finds none of this particularly unusual?
Marebito is a much darker, more complex answer to Ju-on's simple (but inarguably effective) haunted house scares. It definitely displays that Shimizu is capable of much more than just endlessly rehashing the same scenes and characters for remakes and sequels to his most popular creation.
Family Portraits is a DVD collection of short films by director Douglas Buck: Cutting Moments (1997), Home (1998), and Prologue (2003). The films aren't directly related, but share some concepts and themes. They really don't fit together in the same way as, say, Todd Haynes's Poison. And, to be honest, one of them (Home) is pretty weak. However, that might only be because the other two are so much more idiosyncratic and powerful.
Cutting Moments is probably the most notorious of the three. The film shows the events leading up to the murder-suicide of a troubled married couple whose son is being taken away from them. There are insinuations that the husband has molested the boy. As the separation looms and questions go unanswered, the husband reads his newspaper and watches football while his wife tries to keep things together and the son doesn't seem to know or care that anything is wrong. One night as the husband watches a football game, his wife dresses up and puts on makeup in order to get his attention. When it doesn't work, she returns to the bathroom to strip down and starts scrubbing her lipstick off. With steel wool.
There is exactly one short scene, just before the film plunges into gruesome grand guignol, that is entirely unlike anything I have ever seen: the wife returns from the bathroom, covered in blood, and stands before her husband again, exactly as she did the first time in the red dress. He looks at her and his face breaks. He stands and touches her face as she continues to look directly in his eyes; he begins to cry. That mixture of horror, tenderness, and heartbreak is the film's real emotional gut-shot. The scene after it, where the husband carves up his wife and then himself, is completely redundant. Still, the short garnered Buck a lot of attention and must have ratcheted up expectations for his follow-up quite a bit.
Home is a much more straightforward story about a man who has a miserable, abusive, repressive childhood and who grows up to be a miserable, abusive, repressed businessman who murders his wife and daughter one morning before he goes to work. The sense of inevitability puts a damper on the story and leads to impatience. It's pretty obvious where all this is leading from the start. While the film has some interesting images and a great final scene, it's easily the weakest of the three shorts.
The last film in the collection, Prologue, is the real reason to get this DVD. A young woman who was savagely attacked and left for dead returns to her home after a year in the hospital. Things have changed-- her boyfriend has moved on and gotten married. She has no memory of her attack or who her assailant might be. In a parallel story, a retired postman and his wife go about their routines and wait for word from their long-lost daughter. The two stories eventually intersect as the film moves toward its devastating climax.
Buck's short films show that he is definitely capable of creating astonishing moments of unease and getting incredibly powerful performances from his actors. The acting in all three films is uniformly excellent, especially in Prologue (which is as subtle as Cutting Moments is blunt). Given the amount of talent Buck obviously has, it's somewhat perplexing (and worrying) that his debut feature is a remake of Brian de Palma's Sisters that has been completed and shelved for over a year. Hopefully we'll have the chance to see it before too long-- given his amazing short films, I'm very anxious to see what he does with a feature.
(Pictures, Quicktime trailers, and other information regarding Douglas Buck and Family Portraits are available at Glass Eye Pix.)
As I mentioned last time, George A. Romero is one of those filmmakers who have been simultaneously blessed and cursed by creating a film so ingrained in popular culture that he can't help but be associated with it. And it makes sense-- he practically invented horror movies with Night of the Living Dead. I'm exaggerating a bit, of course, but I imagine it would be difficult to find someone who hasn't at least heard of that film. But between making genre-defining masterpieces, Romero made some smaller, lower-profile films that are arguably just as good (if not as massively influential) as his Dead films. Martin is my favorite.
Martin (compellingly played by John Amplas) is a young man who believes he is a vampire. In the film's intense opening sequence, Martin stalks a woman in a train before attacking her and drinking her blood. When he's not stalking women and having elaborate fantasies about his romantic vampiric adventures, he calls in to a local talk radio show and explains what it's like being a vampire in modern times. It's tough! For example, Martin's guardian Tada Cuda hangs up garlic all around the house and forbids Martin from associating with his granddaughter Christine. Christine, as it turns out, doesn't even believe Martin is a vampire.
And maybe he's not. One of the core questions of the film is whether Martin is who he says he is (an 84-year-old vampire who appears 17) or whether he's just a delusional sociopath. Regardless, Martin is definitely a monster: he murders, drinks blood, and admits in one of his radio calls that he's never had sex with a woman who wasn't drugged senseless. Tada Cuda, convinced that Martin is actually a vampire from the old country, vows to destroy Martin after cleansing his soul. In the meantime, he gives Martin a job working in his grocery store.
Martin's interactions with other people are difficult and sad: Christine feels sorry for him and becomes a friend, but she's stuck in an abusive relationship with a young thug named Arthur (played by legendary makeup artist Tom Savini). Martin begins a tentative and potentially dangerous affair with a married woman who frequents the grocery store, but she is as damaged (in her own way) as Martin. He finds solace only through his fantasies, which play out in moody black-and-white parallel sequences during the scenes in which he stalks his victims.
By the time the film is over, there are still many unanswered questions. As repulsive a creature as Martin is, Romero and Amplas create a surprising amount of sympathy for him. The audience will likely feel the same as Christine, more sad and confused at his fate than anything. Martin is very dark, but has moments of bleak humor and a unique style-- the parallel scenes of Martin's real-life attacks and their highly romanticized fantasy counterparts are pretty amazing. For anyone interested in checking out Romero's filmography beyond the Dead films, Martin is a great place to start.
In the Mouth of Madness (1995, dir. John Carpenter)
John Carpenter will always be known as the guy who wrote and directed Halloween. Just like George Romero will always be the Night of the Living Dead guy to most casual movie fans. This is not because these men haven't made other great films, but there's no question that the combined number of people who have seen Martin, The Crazies, and Bruiser falls well short of the number of people who have seen Night of the Living Dead. They have been blessed/cursed with the creation of a hugely popular, iconic film that has moved on into Legend territory. That said, John Carpenter's track record is considerably more inconsistent than Romero's-- I'm looking at you, John Carpenter's Vampires.
However, Carpenter has also made some great films that are as good as Vampires is inexcusably awful. The Thing is one of those rare remakes that greatly improves on the original. Escape from New York and Big Trouble in Little China are goofy, ridiculous fun. But one of my favorite Carpenter films is one that seems often ignored or dismissed: In the Mouth of Madness, which is also one of the best H.P. Lovecraft films ever made.
Sam Neill stars as private investigator John Trent, hired by a publishing company to track down Sutter Cane, their most popular author. Cane has gone missing and took the manuscript for his latest novel with him, so it's Trent's job to find Cane and/or retrieve the book. Trent sets to work and discovers that Cane has left a series of clues in the artwork for the covers of his books that create a map that leads to Hobb's End, the sleepy New England town in which many of Cane's books take place. That doesn't actually exist.
Then things get weird.
In the Mouth of Madness features numerous references to ancient cosmic forces, and was obviously written as a tribute to the work of H.P. Lovecraft. Carpenter even manages the rare trick of making the film seriously disorienting, especially toward the end. And especially on the big screen-- this is a film made for late-night shows. And even though it's not an adaptation of a Lovecraft work, In the Mouth of Madness succeeds more than almost screen adaptation in evoking the kind of mind-bending cosmic terrors Lovecraft so effectively conjured in his fiction.
Fred Dekker should be a household name. And maybe he's getting there-- 20 years after its original release, his second film, The Monster Squad, was finally released on DVD thanks in part to its dedicated (and vocal) cult following. The Monster Squad is a lot of fun, and it's no wonder that kids who saw it back when it was first released care so much about it. After the film's failure to garner an audience in theaters during its original release, however, Dekker went on to direct only one more film: Robocop 3. The critics were not kind, and fans of the franchise were even more vicious. Dekker dropped off the radar for years until the fans started clamoring for the return of The Monster Squad. It's great that The Monster Squad is available to everyone now, but the greater injustice is that Dekker's excellent debut, Night of the Creeps, still isn't.
Night of the Creeps plays like a precursor to Peter Jackson's Dead Alive: both feature overly complicated, melodramatic storylines joined with gruesome violence. The film opens in the 1950s: an alien experiment is jettisoned from a spacecraft and makes its way to earth the same night that a serial ax murderer takes his latest victim. The film then jumps to present day (1986, specifically) where a couple of nerds named Chris and J.C. are crashing a frat party. They want to pledge, but their assignment goes awry: they accidentally wake up a man frozen in cryogenic suspension in a basement laboratory on campus.
Turns out there was a good reason for this-- the man was infected by the alien experiment, which turns out to be large, black creatures that look like leeches and who multiply by crawling into the mouth and then making their way to the brain, where they gestate and then explode. The frozen guy staggers out of the lab and begins a chain reaction in the classic zombie film style.
Meanwhile, a bitter police officer (the absolutely hilarious Tom Atkins) who has a mysterious tie to the ax murders back in the 1950s believes the ax murderer is on the prowl again. His investigation and the rapidly multiplying space slug population finally come together on the night of the big formal, leading to the film's fantastic climax of sorority girls in formal dresses versus an army of frat boy zombies in tuxes.
Night of the Creeps is very much a 1986 film: the hair styles and clothes leave no question when the film was made. But it also holds up exceptionally well, mostly on the charm of its ridiculous story, the quick pace, and genuinely funny dialogue. There aren't a whole lot of surprises, but each twist is played out with the requisite dramatics (like Lionel finally standing up to his mother in Dead Alive). Dekker has stated in recent interviews that Night of the Creeps is still tied up in rights issues, and it may be a while before we see a new official release. But if The Monster Squad can make it, there's always hope.
Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971, dir. John D. Hancock)
For years, Let's Scare Jessica to Death was another "lost" film. Released on VHS years ago and only just released on DVD within the last year, the film mostly existed in the memories of those who caught it on late-night television. Look around the internet a bit and you're sure to find people who saw it on TV when they were small and remembered only a few things. Almost universal among these memories is the fact that the viewer was creeped the hell out.
Zohra Lampert stars as Jessica, recently out of a mental hospital for undisclosed issues. Jessica moves to a house on a secluded island near a small town to get away from the city. When she and her husband move in, they find the house already occupied by a drifter named Emily. Jessica, her husband, and their friend who helped them move become fast friends with Emily and ask her to stay. But Jessica encounters a strange, seemingly mute girl in the countryside near the house, and the locals in town are considerably less than hospitable. And it seems Emily may not be who she says she is...
Or Jessica might be losing her already fragile grip on reality. The film's sound design (and "electronic music by Walter Sear") is creepily effective in helping get into the head of the main character and keeping the audience off-balance. There are also a few moments and images of surreal unease that will definitely stay with the viewer for a long time. While it has a few moments of unintentional humor and its pacing is a little off, Let's Scare Jessica to Death still manages to create and sustain a thick atmosphere of dread that carries through to the bizarre, unquestionably scary finale.
Luckily, you can get creeped the hell out at home any time thanks to the recent DVD release, which was long overdue. Last year during the film's showing at the Music Box Massacre (a 24-hour horror movie marathon held at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago), the climax managed to have the entire theater full of horror fans sitting in stunned silence. I can think of no better endorsement.
In horror films, like any other big blanket genre, there are many recognizable sub-genres. There are zombie movies (world full of zombies, some people hole up somewhere, bad stuff happens), there are slasher movies (bunch of people get knocked off in different ways for an hour and a half), there are sub-sub-sub genres of vampire movies (techno vampires/romantic vampires/______ vampires/blah blah blah), etc. etc. etc. There are simple formulas, courses of action and character behavior that have been established and that filmgoers expect to see followed through. Countless horror films every year are churned out direct-to-DVD and sometimes into theaters that play by rules, live up to expectations, and fit very neatly into their genre.
So it's rare and exciting when a film comes along like Zombie Honeymoon. Sort of the low-low budget American cousin to Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead, Zombie Honeymoon takes a familiar subgenre and tries to do something genuinely new with it. However, whereas Shaun of the Dead mixed Romero-style zombie apocalypse with clever romantic comedy, Zombie Honeymoon makes the story more personal and basically treats being a zombie like a terminal illness in a made-for-Lifetime movie.
Newlyweds Denise and Danny bolt from their wedding to take a honeymoon house-sitting for friends who live by the ocean. While out sunbathing after some surfing, a shambling creature clambers out of the water and bites Danny on the neck before collapsing. The newlyweds rush to the hospital where it appears Danny is fine, but he soon finds himself possessed by a desperate, raging hunger for live human flesh. Denise finds out about it and first flees, but she loves him too much to leave him alone with his sickness and so she tries to make the best of it. Which gets progressively more difficult as Danny's flesh rots as fast as his murderous hunger intensifies.
Despite its low budget, Zombie Honeymoon packs in some effectively gross effects, most notably for Danny's decomposition. Anyone coming to the film expecting gore certainly won't be disappointed, although they'll probably get tired of how the film plays the story and characters straight. A little too straight, actually. Some of the acting goes a little over the top, but for the most part the emotions are true to what you might imagine people in this situation would experience. That irony-free take on the story is another thing that makes Zombie Honeymoon unique.
While it certainly has moments of dark humor, the fact that the film refuses to go zany with its characters is very endearing. It may be a film that I admire and enjoy more for what it wants to be rather than what it actually is, but the fact remains that in a stale subgenre full of copies of copies of copies of copies, Zombie Honeymoon stands well outside the crowd with its bloody heart on its sleeve.
The Reflecting Skin is one of those "lost" movies that has been out of print for years and is extremely difficult to get hold of. There have been DVD releases of the film in different places around the world, usually short runs that end up going for hefty prices on import sites. It's probably because the film is tied up in the same kind of legal junk that has held up the release of other "lost" films such as The Monster Squad, which was only recently released on DVD after being long out of print on VHS. Although there's no doubt that at least one of the reasons The Monster Squad finally made it to DVD was a vocal fan base clamoring for its release, and it's difficult to imagine a similar fanbase rising up to support this film. Mostly because a lot of people who have seen it probably don't really want to talk about it.
There is no question that The Reflecting Skin is one of the most seriously disturbing films I have ever seen. I saw the film once, over a decade ago, late one night on a cable movie channel, and its horrific images and sense of overwhelming foreboding have stuck with me. It is truly a film that creates nightmares.
Taking place in the rural Midwest in the 1950s, The Reflecting Skin makes excellent use of endless acres of fields to enforce the concept that the characters are living somewhere completely separate from the world at large. The film tells the story of a young boy named Seth Dove and one Summer that changes his life and those of his family-- a coming-of-age story in a way. Only one with absolutely no hope, and with events that may not be supernatural but are all the more unsettling due to their relative plausibility.
Seth's older brother Cameron (Viggo Mortensen) has returned from a tour of duty in the military and becomes romantically involved with an English widow whom Seth believes to be a vampire. A car full of greaser thugs tools ominously about the countryside while Seth and his friends torture animals and terrorize the poor widow. It also comes out that Seth's father may be a serial child molester. In the middle of all this confusion and horror, Seth finds a dead baby in a barn and, mistaking it for a "guardian angel," takes it home to confide in.
The film is gorgeously shot and the actors are uniformly fantastic. Writer and first-time director Philip Ridley does an amazing job of keeping the events of the film and the actions of his characters grounded in reality. All of these aspects of the film add up to a powerfully effective, profoundly unsettling experience. It may not strictly be a genre horror film per se, but it's easily one of the scariest films you're every likely to see.
The fact that the film remained out of print even while Viggo Mortensen was at the height of popularity during The Lord of the Rings is a testament to either the depth of red tape in which the film's rights are buried or the sheer reluctance of any DVD house to put out such a polarizing and difficult film (or, more likely, both). Ridley's film career has, to date, been sadly short. After The Reflecting Skin, he has since directed only one other film (The Passion of Darkly Noon, which I unfortunately have not seen) and then, for all intents and purposes, disappeared. It's a damned shame, really. Maybe one day someone will realize they own the rights to The Reflecting Skin and give it the release it deserves. Until then, good luck finding a copy. And good luck trying to sleep after watching it.
Takashi Miike has made a career of cranking out several movies a year, with no small percentage of those being brutally violent and/or curiously surreal and/or super weird and/or insanely boring. Sometimes he does specialty films: Ichi the Killer is almost all brutal violence, Gozu is a blatant homage to David Lynch's trademark small-town surrealism, The Happiness of the Katakuris is a musical about murder and suicide with claymation sequences, and The City of Lost Souls (despite a few intriguing images) is almost all just really, really boring. Miike's fans in the U.S. tend to consider his films more "arthouse" than "grindhouse," although the man himself has repeatedly claimed that he makes films not for any intellectual or artistic reasons, but because it's his job.
So it's not terribly surprising that One Missed Call is something of a black sheep in Miike's filmography. It's a virtual remake of Byeong-ki Ahn's Pon (Phone), released just a year before One Missed Call. Pon was a massive hit in South Korea, and the constant cycle of remakes that horror fans have been bitching about for years here in the states is nothing compared to the insane proliferation of remakes, sequels and knockoffs that followed in the wake of such Asian horror blockbusters as Ringu. One Missed Call is Miike's stab at a big mainstream J-horror film, and while Japanese audiences ate it up, many Miike fans in the states turned their noses up at such a blatantly mercenary enterprise.
Which is their loss, really, because One Missed Call takes the basic story of Phone (haunted cell phone with eerie ringtone leads to death for a group of teenagers) and does it considerably better. Plus, it's still very much a Miike film: the death scenes are gruesome and the ghost is highly disturbing, especially during the film's impressive climax. Where Phone attempted to shoehorn in subplots about decidedly non-supernatural revenge and plodded along with overly deliberate (i.e. sloooooooow) pacing, One Missed Call substitutes nasty jolts, horrific violence, and pitch-black humor to keep things lively even with a longer running time.
Unsurprisingly, One Missed Call is being remade for American audiences. The remake is being released in January of 2008, and the trailer for it is (also unsurprisingly) not very reassuring. Here's hoping the studio stays true enough to the spirit of Miike's take on the material enough to stick with a hard R-rating. Although I won't be holding my breath on that one.
There's Nothing Out There (1992, dir. Rolfe Kanefsky)
It's hard to talk about There's Nothing Out There without also talking about Scream. Released in 1992, There's Nothing Out There beat Scream to the "deconstructionist horror film" punch by several years. And did it much better and more honestly-- i.e. with fewer bigger words-- than Wes Craven's slick, (relatively) big-budget franchise.
There's Nothing Out There starts off with seven "youngsters" going to a remote cabin in the woods for a weekend of partying. A mysterious force starts picking them off one by one. Sound familiar? The hook here is that one of the seven kids is an annoying bastard who works at a video store and has literally seen every single horror film the store carries. He knows there are rules that the villain (and victims) must play by, and as it becomes clear that something is bumping off the party members, everyone turns to the video clerk in hopes of surviving the weekend.
First-time director Rolfe Kanefsky obviously made this film with almost no budget, but it's just as obvious that he and his cast were having a great time. He also clearly knew that enthusiastic performers, brisk pacing, and gratuitous nudity can easily take the place of name Actors and expensive prosthetics any day. There's Nothing Out There is almost in the same meta-territory as Wet Hot American Summer: it is a ridiculous, goofy no-budget horror film that simultaneously acts as a parody of and loving tribute to ridiculous, goofy no-budget horror films.
Sadly, There's Nothing Out There is out of print again-- originally released on VHS, the film went on to air on cable movie channels for a while before being released on DVD in 2001. Hopefully another DVD house will put it out again before too long. In the meantime, though, you can get it from Netflix and if you still have a little video store in your town, maybe some old VHS copies are still floating around.
A quick word of explanation: in order to prevent myself from not moving off my bed and playing Persona 3 for at least a little while each day, I have decided to try a project wherein I write up 1 horror movie per day for all of October. Yes, I realize I'm four days behind. Yes, I know you don't care. But! It is something to do that is not sitting in my dark room trying to improve my Charm so I can smooth-talk the manager of the swim team and thereby more quickly power-up my Personas in order to defeat hideous monsters. NEEEEERRRRRRRD.
In any case, the movies will sometimes be big ones everyone has seen, sometimes smaller ones that are harder to find, sometimes not strictly horror films exactly. But here goes.
I had a whole thing here about how depressing the box office results have been for The Abandoned, the first real honest-to-God grown-up horror film to come along in quite some time, but the more I thought about it the more I wanted to go drink a bottle of detergent. So never mind.
The time has finally come to spare my friends from constant talking about dumb nerd junk nobody cares about. The time has come to make datamemory an official, loosely-defined nerdblog. The time is now. I will kick this off with a couple of bad ass games I am looking forward to:
Aquaria is an upcoming independent 2D adventure game from Bit Blot. It looks gorgeous-- this is the "full trailer" for the game, in development for some time now and looking spectacular. The game is to be controlled completely with a mouse and its two buttons to keep it simple and accessible. While 2D games of any sort are a dying breed, this game definitely drives home the point that there's plenty left to explore in gaming's past. I'm anxious to see more and play it; I really hope the game gets picked up for console release at some point. With the new avenues of online distribution, I think a game like this could get an audience it would otherwise never access.
Granado Espada is a Korean-based MMORPG that I've been keeping my eye on for a couple of years now, and it's finally coming to the US this Summer as Sword of the New World. The game keeps the basics of MMORPGs-- huge worlds, interaction with other players-- but the hook is that you have a party of three characters you build up individually and you can join up with other parties for large battles. The three-character party mechanic is to root the game more clearly in RPG tradition, and it's basically exactly the sort of thing that I've been hoping would happen to the genre. It's also basically the only thing that I think could interest me in the genre to begin with. With this, Bio-Shock, and Spore coming, I'm really really really going to need to get a new computer.
And then I'll post my pull list for your scorn: 52 (limited series) Batman (Grant Morrison run) Crossing Midnight Ex Machina The Exterminators Jonah Hex Justice Society of America The Spirit Tales of the Unexpected Featuring The Spectre (limited series) The Trials of Shazam (limited series) Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters (limited series) The Walking Dead Welcome to Tranquility
Yes, I'm reading about 90% DC Comics. I have a bizarre inner pendulum that seems to swing back and forth between interests I had when I was a teenager, and almost nowhere else. The pendulum has officially swung back into Comics, enabled greatly by my friend horty_pie (aka comicpedophile). So far this year I've read Essential Man-Thing, Showcase Presents Green Lantern Volume 1, Junji Ito's Museum of Terror books 1 & 2, Sam Kieth's Batman: Secrets trade, and I have a backlog of about 7-8 other books waiting (although 4 of these I have read as individual issues: Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers of Victory trades).
I'm not sure what it is about comics that has me so excited again-- it's definitely not simple nostalgia, because there was nothing like The Exterminators around when I was a teenager. Well, there might well have been, but living in central Indiana and only making it to the comic shop when my parents felt like it (it was all the way in Indianapolis!) prevented me from branching out too far beyond DC, Marvel, and Dark Horse books. There's definitely some of the excitement of being young and reading them, though. I still clearly remember one day when my parents had taken me to Comic Carnival in Indianapolis and this guy in line in front of me was buying a huge stack of books. I was amazed, and my dad (jokingly, I'm sure) told me that one day when I had a job I could buy that many comics whenever I wanted.
A little over a month ago, I finally did. I hadn't been to the shop in about three months to pick up my pull list books due to work and not having the money for them, and I walked out with a mighty pile. It was exhilirating, and I was anxious to get home and start reading.
So... yeah. I'm assuming not too many of my friends had similar experiences, so I moved this sort of thing over to this journal. We'll see how it goes.
Korean MMORPG Granado Espada finally, finally coming to North America! I've been keeping my eye on this one for a couple of years now as it's basically the only MMORPG game I've ever seen that I've been really intrigued by. Instead of a single player leveling and blah blah, you have a team of three characters (Final Fantasy XII-style) and you directly control one of them at any given time.
I'm planning on writing more stuff here soon. I apologize for being gone for months again. Seriously, it's going to get good eventually.
This information, coupled with the news that sneaked by me a while back that Nintendo's Wii development kit runs less than $2,000 has me wondering if Nintendo's plan for their new system might work out even better than they hoped or any of us expected.
( This is really, really long. ) Eventually, I suppose, I might actually be able to afford one of these systems. Here's a hint: it's not the Playstation 3. I'm a big fan of Sony, and I know a lot of people who have derived countless hours of enjoyment from their Playstation and Playstation2 consoles, and not a single one of them plans to buy a PS3 any time in the forseeable future. Pricing your product out of your dedicated fans' means is a no way to launch a new console. Maybe if Sony can manage another PSP price drop before too long, a couple more people will buy one of those, and Sony will be saved!
But probably not. At the moment, it looks like Sony is well and truly boned.
Rule of Rose System: Playstation 2 Release Date: 5 September
Last year, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas got the whole games industry in trouble. Ire was raised, umbrage was taken, all over some peach-colored textures and some awkward, suggestive animations. It didn't help matters that the game featured, you know, the ability to do all sorts of anti-social activities like running over cops, shooting hookers, crashing airplanes into buildings, etc. Surprisingly, however, there were at least two games that managed to sneak under the radar that were much more graphic-- God of War (featuring the PS2's first bare breasts and situations where you have to kill innocents to gain health) and The Warriors (where you get money by mugging people and/or stealing car radios, and then using that money to buy drugs to gain health). Maybe it's because those games don't take place in a reality as cartoonish as Grand Theft Auto, so their approach to mature themes and explicit content were less conspicuous.
I hope the same applies to Rule of Rose, because otherwise there is going to be a shitstorm of extraordinary magnitude when this game is released.
Rule of Rose is a "survival horror" game in the traditional gameplay sense: you play a character controlled from a third-person perspective with a camera that follows you around and (likely) swings to dramatic angles every so often to highlight important areas and scenes. The game has received some comparison to Capcom's Haunting Ground in that your character has a dog companion to help find items and fight monsters. The look of the game is dark and bleak, and it features well-rendered cut scenes that advance the story.
The thing that makes Rule of Rose different is the storyline and the subject matter, which have already attracted some controversy. Taking place in England in 1930, "the year that marked the start of the age of the great zeppelins" (according to the game's official site). The main character of the game is a young girl named Jennifer whose parents are killed in an airship accident. She finds herself at the dilapidated Rose Garden Orphanage that seems all but abandoned except for a few other young girls, three of whom have named themselves "The Aristocracy of the Red Crayon" and given themselves titles of Duchess, Countess, and Baroness. They act as cruel masters, demanding that Jennifer and another girl (Amanda) bring them gifts and offerings in exchange for their benevolence and protection.
There is at least one adult lurking around, a large man seen in trailers for the game watching Jennifer and attempting to grab her while hiding in a dark closet. There are also some sort of (apparently) supernatural enemies, but it seems that the most disturbing and unsettling characters are the Aristocracy themselves. Amanda is given the title of "Poor," clearly because she is, unlike the Aristocracy, obese and dressed in plain, unremarkable clothes. Jennifer is called "Beggar" since she is new. Clips show the girls torturing Jennifer in a variety of ways: tying her up, stepping on her face, rubbing a rat against her cheek, pouring water over her, and viciously mocking her.
The game looks terrifying, and the creepy undercurrent of eroticism makes it even more disturbing. Here is a long, pretty intense "trailer" for the game that shows quite a bit of footage from the game's gorgeous (and unsettling) cut scenes. Here is one where a fan cut together all of the game's Japanese trailers into one six-minute video. This is clearly not a game meant for kids, but since it features a cast mostly made up of children it is bound to attract negative attention.
The catch, though, is this: Rule of Rose looks like a completely different kind of story that what we're used to seeing in this or any other genre of game. There are horror games, but I can't think of any game that uses the cruelty of children as a jumping-off point for a dark, serious-minded story. The game also features some genuinely beautiful and surreal imagery-- watch the Gamevideos trailer and you'll see the airship from the opening of the video return as a giant fish swimming lazily through the rain over the English countryside near the end. I'm reminded of the reviews of the French film Innocence (which I haven't seen yet), which takes place at a boarding school for young girls where no adults appear to exist and much of the film's surrealist bent arises from the simple fact that children are strange creatures.
Rule of Rose has the potential, if its storyline is handled with intelligence and care, to bring truly mature subject matter in console games to a level we haven't seen since Silent Hill 2. The game is supposedly being released in the US completely unchanged from the original Japanese version (see the Gamasutra developer interview for more info), but looking at the game's official site it's clear that at least one detail has been changed: Jennifer is referred to as a "19-year-old girl." Hopefully this doesn't mean that other aspects of the game have been altered as well.
Is there any single image that says Sega Genesis more than that screenshot of Altered Beast?
Classic game collections are very popular, which isn't surprising. There are a lot of classic games with nostalgia factors through the roof, and longtime gamers are more than willing to shell out $20 here and there for a collection of beloved games we haven't played in years. The problem with these collections is that often I find myself picking them up and neglecting them very quickly. Even the incredible Capcom Classics Collection only held my interest for a short while before I was back to Guitar Hero, We Love Katamari, and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. One of the major issues with these classic gaming collections is that they're almost always made up of arcade games, which were designed to be played in short, quick bursts while forcing as many quarters out of the player as possible.
Even worse are the collections of games for ancient systems like the Atari 2600 (Activision Anthology) and Intellivision (Intellivision Lives!), games which are (by and large) almost unplayably primitive. All of these games are meant for quick play, but some of them are still very good and stand up to playing for years and years and years. I cannot count the number of man-hours I've poured into Ms. Pac-Man and Galaga. But these collections fall by the wayside when I get sucked into something with gameplay that was unimaginable when these classic games were originally released, or by a storyline that Final Fight can't really keep pace with.
When I was in high school, I had a Sega Genesis system. I loved it. Before that, I had a Sega Master System, Sega's ill-fated (in the US, anyway) competition against the Nintendo Entertainment System. I moved up to the Genesis and kept my SMS games and found many games to spend countless hours in. I miss those games, and I have been waiting years and years for Sega to finally put something together like this. I nearly cried when I read this story with the full list of games appearing on the collection.
I will go to my grave defending the original Phantasy Star games as one of the greatest series of role-playing games ever made. I played all of them but Phantasy Star IV, which cost $80+ when it was released. The Sega Classics Collection features Phantasy Star II-IV, and that is a hefty value for a $20 disc. I'd pay $20 for a playable version of Phantasy Star II alone, it's really one of my favorite games of all time. The fact that the first Phantasy Star is not on here to round out the collection is disappointing (it was released on the SMS), but this will certainly hold me over until Sega loses their shit and releases a Sega Master System Collection.
Which, actually, will probably be sometime around never.
In addition to the Phantasy Star games, Sword of Vermillion in on here. That's another 50-hour+ RPG game. Many of the games in the collection, though, fall under that category of quick-and-dirty games (not coincidentally there are several arcade ports), and the two Sonic the Hedgehog games (and Ristar) are available on the Sonic Mega Collection Plus that's been out for some time now. It would have been great to see Sega use that space for more obscure games that were no less important-- where are Shining Force, Landstalker, Herzog Zwei, and the Streets of Rage games, for example? Is anyone really going to spend more than thirty vomit-inducing seconds trying to play Super Thunderblade? Do we need threeEcco the Dolphin games? And why did Sega dump the awful Genesis port of Virtua Fighter 2 on here but leave out ToeJam and Earl?
There are a lot of things to nitpick about this collection, but hopefully (hopefully) we'll see a Sega Genesis Collection Volume 2 before too long. As it stands, there's a lot to love about this group of games, and there's a vast amount of gameplay in the four RPG games alone. I hope more companies do this-- if Square saw fit to release a disc with the first six Final Fantasy games in one place, in their original incarnations, along with some of their other, more obscure games, it's hard to imagine them not selling a billion copies. Maybe we'll see more of this once the Wii Virtual Console and Xbox Live Arcade start to get bigger.
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