Movies simply can’t do HP Lovecraft*. You have to accept that as a starting point. You’re mostly going to get Stuart Gordon doing deviant things to Barbara Crampton or Jeffrey Coombs chewing scenery. So you should appreciate any movie that manages, however slightly, to evoke Lovecraft more faithfully. That’s the main thing The Resurrected has going for it. It’s loosely based on Lovecraft’s Case of Charles Dexter Ward, but not as loosely as other Lovecraft movies are based on their source material. By the time director Dan O’Bannon made this in 1992, he had earned his genre stripes with Dark Star, Alien, Return of the Living Dead, and the underappreciated Dead and Buried. He had obviously seen a lot of Dario Argento movies as well.
The Resurrected starts out as a slightly clumsy but winsome attempt at an old timey detective noire. This is obvious from the opening credits, soundtrack, and voiceover. John “Hawk the Slayer” Terry and his hopelessly 80s haircut stand in for what I presume was supposed to a hard-boiled protagonist. He’s more poached, or even over-easy. When the hot woman comes into his agency to enlist help finding her missing husband, Terry insists twice that he needs the husband’s social security number.
Jane Sibbett is delightfully awful as the distraught wife. Ten years later, she will be the voice of one of the snow dogs that vexes Cuba Gooding Jr. Chris Sarandon is cast probably because of his vampire role in Fright Night and I couldn’t help but notice he appears in a rather effeminate robe, much like he did in Dog Day Afternoon. The most watchable guy in this movie is Robert Romanus, who you’ll remember as Damone from Fast Times at Ridgement High. So this is where that guy went!
By unfolding as a mystery, The Resurrected captures the investigation aspect of Lovecraft’s stories most often ignored in movies in favor of monsters and magical rites. The Resurrected has its share of monsters and magical rites, but it earns them first. O’Bannon’s previous experience serves him well with the special effects and a nifty dungeon crawl sequence. By the time it’s over, you can almost forgive The Resurrected its “wizard did it” resolution, featuring something unfortunately called “the reflux”. Go ahead, try not to think of the Duran Duran song.
The Resurrected, which somehow came to be listed as Shatterbrain on IMDB, is avaiable on Netflix instant watch.
* Andrew Leman’s brilliant silent short, Call of Cthulhu, excepted
At a Sundance screening of The Woman, some guy sat patiently through the movie and then loudly berated the director during the ensuing Q&A. Then he stormed out of the theater. In the lobby, he held forth in front of a videocamera about how the movie should never have been made.
* In Saints Row 3, every day can be Talk Like a Zombie Day when you pick the zombie voice for your character. You won’t be able to understand a word you say, because you’ll sound like a cross between Scooby Doo and Chewbacca. But that’s okay, since everyone else can understand you.
* Remember the name Oleg. You’ll be seeing a lot of him. In more ways than one.
* You have never seen a hacking minigame quite like this.
Those are a few tidbits from my time with Saints Row 3, which I got to spend a day playing. And I was surprised at what THQ had done to my over-the-top open-world action game. Read about it here.
Yeah, sure Batman: Arkham City is out this week and we’ve all dutifully got our copies. But at least two of us have other picks for our games of the week. Also, how much do you really know about country music? Join Tom Chick, Jason Lee McMaster, and the inimitable Chris “triggercut” Hornbostel with a special Bangles update and some timely advice for how to watch scary movies.
One of the great things about Isolation, a beautifully bleak movie that takes place at the intersection of science, agriculture, industry, machinery, biology, and provincial paranoia, is that it’s so very non-American. Over there in Europe, people freak out about genetic research on crops and livestock (considering a silly movie called Black Sheep, they freak out about it in New Zealand, too). But here in America, we don’t care too much, so long as it doesn’t involve stem cells. In fact, we don’t think much at all about what happens at farms. I suppose people grow wheat, raise cows, and build baseball diamonds. In the last farm-themed movie I saw, Sarah Jessica Parker and Hugh Grant did various shenanigans that rekindled their strained marriage. I think they were on a farm. There were horses there.
But Isolation is about the icky stuff that goes on at a farm. Farm animals are stinky and big and kind of weird. They’re huge bags of meat, really. You can’t even ride most of them. Isolation is about that. It’s about what kinds of gross things might happen where giant bags of meat just hang around all day, pooing and peeing and stepping in mud until they get slaughtered and sent to supermarkets so we can eat them.
This Irish movie is also uniquely Irish in a few ways. For instance, everyone speaks Irish, except for the one guy who doesn’t. The movie makes certain assumptions about people living in caravans that we wouldn’t make in America, where we don’t even call them caravans. The police have the word “garda” written on their uniforms, presumably because “police” would be too obvious (I learned about this from the Brendan Gleeson vehicle, The Guard, which is a gleefully Irish middle finger to America and England). I wouldn’t call Isolation as Irish as, say, Far and Away. But it has a lovely provincial sense of place that isn’t just West Virginia or some other state where they have cows.
Watch Isolation on Netflix instant view here, but don’t get too comfortable. Tomorrow, you’re going to have to go out to the theater.
The spectacularly good tower defense game Dungeon Defenders just came out today, so I can’t fault people online for not yet knowing the ins and outs of the four classes, each of which makes very specific contributions to the defense. But when some idiot wizard — it’s always a wizard, isn’t it? — takes his crystal and uses it to build frail magic missile towers right in front of a spawn point instead of back at the defensive line the other three players have established, it’s almost enough to make me go back to playing horde mode in Gears of War 3. Hey wizard, why don’t you look up “tactics” in your spellbook? Or maybe check the index for “overlapping fields of fire”, “killzones”, and “combined arms”.
It’s hard to be patient with new or bad players in a tower defense game, where your defenses are only as strong as their weakest link. As I said, it’s always a wizard. Next to boss raids in World of Warcraft, tower defense is one of the worst genres for multiplayer with random online people.
Fortunately, Dungeon Defenders doesn’t just have dynamic join to make it easy to find and create multiplayer games. It also lets you to swap in your different characters between waves, when you’re building your defenses. So even if you’re playing solo, you can avail yourself of unique assets like a wizard’s towers, a hunter’s traps, a monk’s auras, and a knight’s barricades. And then you can actually play the level with whichever character you want to level up. And since all four characters share an inventory, scoop up everything you find and divvy up the loot when you get back to the tavern.
And speaking of jerks in multiplayer, I’ve been putting points into my knight’s running speed so he can more quickly scoop up the cash in multiplayer games. I can’t trust those silly little wizards to make the best use of our resources!
The last thing to come out of Project Greenlight, HBO’s reality show in which an amateur filmmaker makes a movie, was Feast. That bad horror movie turned into a trilogy, with each movie worst than the last. In the second Feast, some biker chicks have to take off their tops and combine them with a motorcycle to make a catapult that will fling midget wrestlers across the street. But Feast 2 wouldn’t even rank among the top ten movies in which biker chicks have to take off their tops and combine them with a motorcycle to make a catapult that will fling midget wrestlers across the street. I can’t think of any other movies in which that happens, but I’m holding the top ten slots in reserve, becuase there’s no way Feast 2 belongs on a top ten list of anything.
At the end of the Feast 3, which is not about giant robots, a giant robot comes out of the desert and steps on the movie’s only survivors. Roll credits. That’s how little John Gulager, the son of a famous actor who probably could have gotten his stupid movies made without taking up an entire season of Project Greenlight that could have been used on someone else, cares about his characters.
The year before Feast, one of the winners of Project Greenlight was a guy named Kyle Rankin. He and his partner co-directed Battle of Shaker Heights. After that, Rankin’s next movie was Infestation, which has an ending that many of you will absolutely hate, much like you might hate the ending of Feast 3. But Infestation ends the way it ends because Rankin cares about his characters. He didn’t like the ending he shot, so he used the footage he had to make a very different ending than what he’d originally written. The result is pitch perfect and I love it partly because so many people will hate it.
Infestation is a goofily irresistable creature feature with heart, a budget, and enough twists to keep it lively. For instance, the hero isn’t who you’d expect. It’s as if the traditionally square-jawed former TV star wasn’t available, so they had to use someone from the supporting cast as the hero. And whereas most creature features stay in one place because a) it’s cheaper to shoot a movie in one place, and b) they’re just aping Alien, Infestation has far too much energy to stay at home.
Guess what you’re getting for free for a week? Zen Studios is finally bringing Paranormal from Zen Pinball for the PS3 into Pinball FX 2 on the Xbox 360. And it’s free to play from October 26th until November 2nd.
It’s not a particularly attractive table. It’s got a distinct lack of bright colors and blatantly flashy bits. Instead, it has the Jersey Devil, the Loch Ness Monster, an old plane going down in the Bermuda Triangle, a Hellraiser cube, a cutaway haunted house, those clacky balls that a weird occultist might have in his office, a reverse gravity pocket, and a goofy pop-eyed chupacabra hiding in the bushes. I couldn’t begin to say whether Paranormal is Zen’s best table — there are too many that are too different — but it’s one my favorites along with Secrets of the Deep and Earth Defense Force because of their clear affection for their cheesy theme.
Introversion’s Chris Delay confesses that Subversion, their high-tech heist game, is on hiatus.
…the first thing I plan to do is gut the thing from top to bottom of all the tech fluff that we forced in over the years. Without a core game it’s all a worthless distraction, and I will NEVER again spend so long making tech for a game without having a solid core game in place first. Subversion needs a total rethink from top to bottom, and some long standing sacred cows need slaughtering.
…somewhere along the 6 years of part-time development, we had lost our way. We couldn’t even remember what sort of game it was supposed to be anymore. We’d ended up with a game that looked and sounded brilliant, classic Introversion with its blue wireframe and sinister faceless characters. But there was a massive gaping hole where you would normally see a “core game”. We’d tried and tried to fill that hole with ambitious tech and experimental systems, but you couldn’t escape it.
In the end, after all that development and years of work, you still completed the bank heist by walking up to the first door, cracking it with a pin cracker tool, then walking into the vault and stealing the money. There was no other way to complete that level. And this would be the essential method by which you would complete every level after that. Technology 1, Gameplay 0 – we’ve made the fatal mistake of having more fun making the game than gamers would ever have playing it.
I deeply admire any developer who can say and do what Delay has just said and done. Most companies would throw a few more years of development into the game and then release it to recoup their expenses. Developers should learn to slaughter sacred cows more often.
Now that I’m a bit further into Dead Rising 2: Off the Record, I think I understand what Capcom is doing. This is an alternate Dead Rising 2 timeline, in which Frank West shows up where Chuck Green was originally. I didn’t quite understand this until I met Chuck, which is one of the highlights of Off the Record. And while I appreciate this sort of narrative shuffle in a game where the narrative is so unimportant that you can entirely ignore it if you want, is it enough for a standalone product? Certainly not, which explains the new sci-fi-themed area of Fortune City and the (slightly disappointing) sandbox mode. Overall, I can’t help but shake the feeling that this should have been downloadable content.
Consider Rockstar. The Undead Nightmare add-on for Red Dead Redemption, the South Central add-on for Midnight Club: Los Angeles, and the Ballad of Gay Tony add-on for Grand Theft Auto IV were about the same amount of new content and re-used content as what you’re getting in Dead Rising 2: Off the Record. And while it’s not my place to guess how readily you’ll spend $10 instead of $40, I can’t help but notice the dramatically different asking prices.
Not to mention that I had to deal with Gamestop to get Dead Rising 2: Off the Record. The store had three disks, but none of the salesfolk could find a box. They offered to sell me just the disk.
“I’m not paying full price for the game without the box or manual,” I had told them.
“Sometimes the boxes get stolen,” one of them confided. As if Dead Rising 2: Off the Record boxes were so in demand among shoplifters that three of them had been filched within a week of the game’s release.
“Sir, I can give you 15% off,” another salesperson said in a hushed tone, as if he didn’t want the guy in line behind me to hear. I ended up going elsewhere to buy my copy. If Off the Record had been DLC, it would have saved me both trips.
Of course, the separate DLC for Off the Record was announced today. Next week, for $2, Frank West can don a Terminator skin and do extra lightning damage when he attacks. While I really appreicate what Capcom has been doing creatively, I hate how they’ve been packaging it. And I hate even more that I just spent $40 to support their business practices.
Bobbi Sue Luther should have been the typical acting-challenged slasher heroine/victim, but Laid to Rest does something cute with the usual amnesia gimmick. After Luther makes a 911 call, it’s kind of adorable the way she wants to take shelter at the “police lady’s house”, because she can’t remember the name of a police station. Sometimes you forget more than just your name. Kudos to writer/director/husband Robert Hall for giving her something to do in addition to running away, looking scared, and filling out a tank top.
Also, she’s not alone. For much of the movie, Kevin Gage and Sean Whalen are along for the ride. Laid to Rest imagines an ensemble cast where the final survivor is instead a group of three people who mostly do what you’d expect actual people to do. Gage is immensely appealing as a gruff good-old-boy who knows enough to get his gun and cares enough to be affected by the deaths around him. Whalen is the more traditional comic relief geek whose solution to contacting the police when the phones are out is to email them. Unlike most movies where the phones don’t work, Laid to Rest is well aware of how dumb this sounds.
And what a lovely Lena Headey appearance. Headey is probably best known for 300 and Game of Thrones, but she should be known for a road movie called Aberdeen with Stellan Skarsgard. Road movies tend to be uniquely American. But Aberdeen considers what a road movie would be like in Europe. I’m not sure what Headey is doing slumming it in a low-budget old-school gore-fest about a killer who wears a ridiculous chrome skull mask, but she and Kevin Gage lend the whole thing a touch of class. As much as that’s possible with all this latex and fake blood.
Laid to Rest is available on Netflix here. Warning: don’t bother with the sequel, which is enitrely missing the clever touches that make the first one worth watching.
After nine months, one $40 follow-up, and DLC for the $40 follow-up, Marvel vs. Capcom 3 will get something Mortal Kombat had the instant it was released. The downloadable Heroes and Heralds add-on, which will supposedly be available when Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 is released in November, is a mode where you can earn special abilities for your team as you fight your way through a series of battles. In other words, a series of battles with nifty tweaks and modifiers to vary the challenge level. Capcom takes their sweet time, and when they finally get around to it, they come with their hand outstretched and asking for a few ducats more.
On a related note and against my better judgment, I bought a copy of Dead Rising 2: Off the Record over the weekend. I understood that it would recycle Fortune City, but I had no idea it would also recycle the missions, the bosses, and the survivors. As near as I can tell, I’m replaying Dead Rising 2 a fourth time, but with a $40 Frank West skin that can take pictures to earn xp. It takes real chutzpah to make Electronic Arts’ business practices look charitable, but Capcom manages.
Holy cats, this turned out so much better than I expected!
Driver: San Francisco is a perfect example of how far personality can get you in a videogame. This open-world driving game is nowhere near as technically proficient as, say, Midnight Club: Los Angeles. I never thought I’d see the day when San Francisco seemed so washed out and bland compared to Los Angeles. But that’s more a testament to Rockstar world-building prowess than a criticism of Driver developer Reflections. Because as a game, Driver: San Francisco has personality to spare, with a fantastic funk, soul, and 70s soundtrack; a unique car-shifting mechanic that has you jumping from car to car, complete with a tenuous but effective story rationale; and an open world with plenty of opportunity for exploration and general faffing about. The variety of activities dovetails neatly into the variety of cars, with just enough physics lite to keep this from being a game about steering a rocket, a la Criterion’s Burnout games.
After being all but forced into high-end cars in Forza 4’s online games where no one seems interested in anything street legal, I’m delighted with how the multiplayer in Driver: San Francisco effortlessly and quickly moves through various modes. Tired of a given race? Just wait a few minutes! In one half-hour session, you might drift imports, bounce buggies down a dirt road, dodge traffic in wildly swaying American muscle cars, jostle other players to follow an AI leader, and astrally leap-frog your way to the head of a race (although first you’ll have to figure out how to get past Ubisoft’s screwed up Uplay prerequisite, which means downloading DLC instead of using the broken code that ships with the game). Pay attention, Electronic Arts. This is the sort of wheelsport the Need for Speed arcade racers should have been providing all along.
Most horror movies aren’t too concerned with character development or acting. They just shoot for the lowest common denominator of gore and pacing. A Horrible Way to Die, from a startlingly talented young director out of Alabama named Adam Wingard, is the exact opposite. The trappings are straight-up genre stuff about a serial killer, but the format is a languid character study that lets three very good actors breathe as their relationships develop, coalesce, and finally do what they’re going to do.
The subject at hand is the worst kind of relationship PTSD, with Amy Seimetz’ frail performance as the emotional core of the movie. AJ Bowen, who is unforgettable in an indie horror triptych called The Signal, is the movie’s id, once again balancing a fine line between funny and gruesome. But the real star of this movie is Wingard’s bold camerawork. The handheld camera sways and struggles to find focus, like someone waking up from a dream, trying to find her bearings. If you want your camera on sticks for 90 minutes, with maybe the occasionally dolly shot and a crane shot right before the credits, you will hate A Horrible Way to Die. But if you accept that a camera is just as much a part of telling a story as a script or a performance, then A Horrible Way to Die is a provocative horror movie about three characters and how the director shoots them.
A Horrible Way to Die is available on Netflix here. I heartily recommend the gorgeous Blu-ray version.
(In case you’re wondering what this is, it’s my opportunity to recommend obscure horror films that you otherwise might have missed. I consider this a year-round job, but what better time to do it daily than the two weeks leading up to Halloween?)
Like Trenched before it, Orcs Must Die does a good job with the moment-to-moment tower defense gameplay. It looks great, it’s got charm, and there are plenty of toys to help you bring about the eponymous imperative. But also like Trenched, it fumbles the crucial bigger picture.
