Graham, who posts as Giaddon, joins us to talk Far Cry 3 (not pictured) and to set us straight on all things Twilight. We also discuss Assassin’s Creed 3, Guardians of Middle Earth, Super Hexagon, and Unit 13. And look out, Pocket Tactics. We’re coming for you!
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Here’s some good ol’ boy white trash grindhouse with the slightest whiff of Southern gothic. Its starts off pretty simple. Clayne Crawford (pictured, the unlikely heart of the movie), Travis Fimmel, and Daniel Cudmore are three unbathed violent redneck brothers for hire. Damsel in distress Eva Longoria hires them to get a McGuffin from Billy Bob Thornton. But when the McGuffin happens, Baytown Outlaws takes a strange turn.
Let me digress for a moment. Did you see Hit and Run? Because you should. It’s a collaboration among Dax Shepherd, Kristen Bell, a strong supporting cast, and some truly sexy cars. In Hit and Run, the word “fag” comes up. And even though Hit and Run is a movie seriously in love with the olden days of Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw trying to get away from stuff, it’s also a movie about seriously decent people with modern sensibilities. So the movie’s reaction to the word “fag” is really sweet on a couple of levels.
Baytown Outlaws — in which the brothers freely call each other faggots, as you’d expect — does for “retard” what Hit and Run did for “fag”. What a lovely touch of dignity in a white trash grindhouse action movie. It even allows its characters to progress from shooting people in the faces to pondering the nature of God before shooting a bunch of bad guys who have climbed into trees for no other reason than to get shot out of them.
Not to give Baytown Outlaws too much credit. It’s got its share of stumbles. It’s a minor crime to squander Zoe Bell. She’s best known as Uma Thurman’s stunt double from Kill Bill who got to be onscreen and on the hood of a car in Death Proof. Here she’s little more than a body for a costume and a trigger finger for an absurd shotgun. How hard is it to do a good action scene in which a bunch of sexy whore assassins — the movie even calls them that — fight it out with the heroes in a roadhouse? Apparently too hard for Baytown Outlaws, which has been watching a lot of Terminator and Near Dark. But you’ll have to see Rza’s Man with the Iron Fists to see whore assassins done right. There’s still more ridiculousness in store as several more rounds of McGuffin chasers pile into this particular picaresque clown car of a movie.
While Baytown Outlaws might not have the budget to shoot its Road Warrior sequence with the spectacle it deserves, at least it can afford exactly the right music. And it has a few good actors beyond the three brothers. Andre Braugher and Billy Bob Thornton are slumming it, but the stars of Armageddon and Poseidon are no strangers to slumming it. Although Braugher is obviously enjoying himself, Thornton just seems annoyed he was cast. I guess it’s a character choice.
Baytown Outlaws is available on video on demand. Support Quarter to Three by watching it from this Amazon link.
Bruce Geryk and I appeared on the most recent Three Moves Ahead podcast to discuss solitaire boardgaming, which is something I mostly know from my iPad. But I was glad to get to talk about a really cool boardgame called Nemo’s War, published by Victory Point Games. It’s a real eyesore, but it’s one of my favorite examples of solitaire boardgaming, above and beyond anything on the iPad. Actually, why isn’t Nemo’s War on the iPad, where it could get a little production value?
By the way, that image up there was posted by Blake Phillips on Board Game Geek. It’s how he spent his time during a power outage that lasted several days. If that’s not a case for making sure you have a solitaire boardgame in the house along with candles, extra batteries, and bottled water, I don’t know what is.
Before I answer whether Zombie U (I refuse to call it ZombiU) is the best multiplayer game of the year, I am contractually obligated to talk about the single-player. Which is kind of a shame, because I couldn’t care less about the single-player, despite that it’s old-school bullet-by-bullet survival horror in the tradition of the original Alone in the Dark. It’s also is a bit like Dark Souls in that you’re gradually pushing forward into scary terra incognita, unlocking shortcuts to new areas, frequently punished by a permadeath system that means you can’t get too attached to your skill upgrades. You get to explore this world six bullets at a time, because that’s how many bullets you get each time you respawn with a new character. Six. You’ll be using the cricket bat a lot. How very English in a smarmy Shaun of the Dead way.
After the jump, isn’t this one of those new-fangled Wii U games? Continue reading →
