Among the many failings of The Walking Dead is stranding a good actor like Dallas Roberts, whose job as Woodbury scientist Milton Merle is to look concerned while less capable actors talk at him. To realize that Roberts is a good actor, you’d have to see what a perfect foil he is to Liam Neeson in Joe Carnahan’s existential survival drama The Grey, or you’d have to notice his small memorable role in the overlooked evil kid thriller Joshua. Because you certainly wouldn’t know he’s a good actor from Shadow People, in which Roberts is miscast as a burned-out, world weary, supposedly mellifluous radio talk show host who sometimes looks more like Val Kilmer than Dallas Roberts.
Shadow people are a silly concept pretty much invented by radio talk show callers who didn’t have the imagination to actually come up with something scary. The idea is that you see them out of the corner of your eye, or as you fall asleep, or some other time when you can’t really get a good look at them, which is convenient for the sorts of inarticulate folks who call Art Bell. One of the few decent things this movie does is flesh out the shadow people backstory by suggesting they were imported into the modern Western world from Southeast Asia, with the implication being payback for the Vietnam War. It’s less clever how the movie then supposes a viral social media propogation, as if you haven’t seen many horror movies since The Ring.
But it’s downright crass how Shadow People pretends to blend “documentary footage” with dramatization, a conceit ripped off from The Fourth Kind, right down to the refusal to credit the actors playing the characters in the documentary footage. As if this weren’t enough, the movie ends with a bibliography consisting of about eight things the writer/director claims to have read. Next time, I recommend he watch a movie like Mothman Prophecies, which demonstrates that it’s entirely possible to make a creepy movie out of the goofy lore that comes from late night talk radio.
Shadow People is available now on DVD and video on demand.
I’m mostly uninterested in the ongoing SimCity furor, partly because I’ve been playing a really good EA citybuilder instead, but also because the furor is focused on the wrong things. The issue I care about isn’t the launch problems (those tend to go away) or that EA lied (for politicians and videogame publishers, that’s called “talking”) or the inherent evil of always-on DRM (we’ve long since lost that battle, because while everyone was beating up on Ubisoft, Diablo III sneaked into our rear) or that the simulation isn’t simulating an actual city (abstraction isn’t just for boardgames anymore). The issue I care about is the one getting the least internet furor mindshare: the fundamental design of tiny interconnected box cities lending each other a hand doesn’t work as it’s supposed to work. And furthermore, assuming it will work in a later update, it’s not implemented very well. But because everyone else is gnashing their teeth about one of these ancillary issues — Server instability! EA lied! Down with DRM! Sims should only sleep in their own houses! — there’s little incentive for Electronic Arts, a publicly owned company that changed the ending of Mass Effect 3, to actually make their potentially good game that already sold 1 million copies work the way it was designed.
But the good news is that EA, the publicly owned company that changed the ending of Mass Effect 3, is going to give you another game! In a press released titled “SimCity make nice”, which sounds like poorly translated forced cheer from across the Pacific, Electronic Arts announced that players will soon receive a free game of their choice from the following list:
Battlefield 3 (Standard Edition)
Bejeweled 3
Dead Space 3 (Standard Edition)
Mass Effect 3 (Standard Edition)
Medal of Honor Warfighter (Standard Edition)
Need For Speed Most Wanted (Standard Edition)
Plants vs. Zombies
SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition
That’s definitely a make nice list, since it has only a single stinker. Care to guess which one?
I might go so far as to say Lego Undercover City — WiiU only, I’m afraid — is the best Lego game I’ve played. Don’t hold me to that just yet. I’ll have more to say in the review later this week, but suffice to say Undercover City strikes me as the purest expression of Traveller’s Tale’s gleeful Lego gameplay so far.
For all intents and purposes, Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate is also WiiU only, but it has limited connectivity with the moderately gimped 3DS version. I skipped the last-gen Wii version of Monster Hunter (this is basically the same game, but with extra content, HD graphics, and full multiplayer support), so it’s all new to me. But having played Monster Hunters, I’m experiencing an overwhelming sense of “here we go again”, equal parts dread and excitement. Getting deep into a Monster Hunter game is as easy and nearly as dire as falling down a sinkhole.
Also WiiU only is the WiiU version of Need for Speed: Most Wanted, which features unique multiplayer shenanigans involving the gamepad. I’m hoping this will compliment ZombiU as a go-to game for people on the same couch who are a little too dignified to resort to party games.
If you’re interested in action heroes the size of refrigerators and with about as much personality, Microsoft has a new off-season Gears of War release, this time created by the folks who made Bulletstorm. And if you want a platformer that demands skill, Alien Spidy is incredibly gratifying when you get it right and incredibly aggravating the rest of the time.
