As a deck building game, Shelter is pretty simple. Before an encounter, you take your pick of any twenty cards from your collection. You also get to pick a survivor to accompany you, which adds a few extra cards to your deck. The riot cop gives you some nifty stunning equipment to buy you free turns, but are you sure you can do without the soldier’s bad-ass L22-A2 carbine? As for the girl with the construction equipment, she spends a lot of time on the sidelines. Sorry, miss.
At the beginning of every turn, draw your hand up to five cards. Spend your action points putting cards on the table or using the ones you’ve already played, which is usually a matter of firing your gun cards at zombies. The hunting rifle pierces armor, but the Baretta gets off more shots. Do you use your hollow point rounds yet? Which gun gets the reload card? At the end of your turn, you can put a single card at the bottom of the deck if you want to get rid of something you can’t use yet or if you just want to cycle your deck faster. Simple.
Then the zombie player gets to play his deck. He’s not really a player, though. The zombie side of the table is a face-up dummy hand drawn from this encounter’s zombie deck. The zombies on the table follow simple rules — basically they crowd forward and attack — and then new cards are played from the zombie hand by rolling dice. Shelter is a solitaire game that uses cards, dice, and a simple deck-building concept to present zombie sieges.
After the jump, did I mention that it’s an iPhone game? Continue reading →
Man, Australians get no fun. Yesterday, we reported that Saints Row IV had been refused by the Australian Classification Board. Today, word comes from developer Undead Labs that its open-world zombie survival game has also been given the dreaded “Refused Classification” judgment effectively banning it for sale in the territory.
We’ve run afoul of certain prohibitions regarding the depiction of drug use. We’re working with Microsoft to come up with options, including changing names of certain medications in the game to comply with ratings requirements. Whatever our path forward, it’s going to take a bit.
I know this is frustrating – believe me, we’re frustrated too – but each country has the right to set its own rules about content, and it’s our responsibility to comply with them. Rest assured we’ll do everything we can to find a way to get the game into your hands. Stay tuned.
Polygon was able to confirm via Board documents that self-medication seems to have been the objectionable content that resulted in the refused rating.
I love the sound of this muscle car’s engine, especially as I slow down to cruise by a farmhouse I spotted from the main road. Should I go in? Are there survivors in there? Is it safe to look for salvage? My stamina is low, so I could use some food. And we’re in dire need of food back at the base. Three of us are weak from hunger. However, my machete broke when I foolishly tried to clear out an infestation at the gas station back there, and I only have four rounds for the shotgun. Do I head home and hope someone else found some food? Or do I make the one last stop?
After the jump, if the zombies don’t get you, the decisions will Continue reading →
Michael J. Bassett might be the new Paul W.S. Anderson when it comes to translating videogaming absurdity into cinematic silliness. So if you’re willing to sit through a Resident Evil movie, there’s no reason not to sit through the latest Silent Hill movie. Bassett is an ideal man for the job, considering his Solomon Kane is another one of the best worst things you can see all week. Say what you will about the guy’s movies, but he’s got style and he knows how to gather watchable actors. This Silent Hill features Carrie-Anne Moss as Edgar Winters, Malcolm McDowell as a really lame boss fight, Sean Bean sitting out most of the action, Martin Donovan as a detective you’ll forget was in the movie before it’s over, and Michelle Williams look-a-like Adelaide Clemens showing the sort of commitment that will serve her better in her small role in The Great Gatsby and in her kick-ass turn in Versus director Ryuhei Kitamura’s surprisingly good No One Lives.
Of course, you don’t come to Silent Hill for the human players. Revelation does an admirable job collecting a bunch of cool sets and weird creatures, all loosely connected by what might be a story. Pyramid Head moonlights variously as a carny, a prison warden with an effective solution for grabby inmates, and even a Big Daddy. The nurses are disturbingly erotic in a way that I’m not sure I noticed playing the videogames. And the movie’s counterpart to Silent Hill 2’s disturbing mannequin rape is a wonderfully creepy introduction to a new creature as memorable as anything from the games. What sense does it make? What story does it tell? What do we find out about the town itself? What motivates the characters? Forget it, Tom. It’s Silent Hill.
Silent Hill: Revelation is on VOD, Blu-Ray, DVD, and Netflix.
State of Decay developer Undead Labs has some good news and some bad news. I know you like your dessert first, so there’s this tidbit in today’s blog update announcing that they’ve passed a half million copies downloaded.
We’re working on a pure sandbox mode for State of Decay, in large part because you asked for it.
State of Decay is already an open-world game with scads of freedom, but it’s got particular story beats that might get old after, say, a second play-through. But it’s also got more than enough gameplay to sustain a completely wide-open unscripted sandbox experience, and I’m delighted Undead Labs will see it through. I just hope we can name our own characters, because I already have my share of baggage with the existing characters.
Now I’m going to give you the damn veggies. It looks like the first patch will download but it won’t install. There’s some confusion about how and even whether this actually happened. But if you were like me and holding off for that handful of fixes before continuing your game, you might want to hold off a little longer. Which will get you that much closer to the sandbox mode.
Ever wonder what kind of horror movie Mark Duplass would write? Frankly, me either. But the answer to that question is Black Rock, directed by and starring Katie Aselton, who has worked with Duplass in quirky indie comedy fare like The League and Puffy Chair.
It opens with — stop me if you’ve heard this one — three women going camping. They drive a little boat out to an island utterly devoid of anything resembling scenery or likely camping spots. This being a horror movie, there are bad men out here. When it comes time to toughen up and survive, the scenes play out like acting workshop exercises. “Okay ladies, in this scene, you’re a football team getting psyched for the big game. Go!” They even smack each other on the head to show they’re serious. But this stuff is practically Brando compared to the villain, a pale willowy nerd mistakenly cast as a ruthless war-hardened psycho.
The most notable thing about Black Rock is its take on nudity. Plenty of horror movies include pointlessly titillating nudity. It goes with the territory. Black Rock takes a briefly courageous approach, but quickly turns timid. The actresses put their clothes back on and you’re back to watching a typical horror movie. It all ends in a ridiculous rough-and-tumble finale with all the brutality of a pillow fight, but with bad bruise make-up and a little fake blood.
Black Rock is available on video on demand. Support Qt3 by watching it on Amazon.com.
You can usually tell early on when a no-budget movie is going to be a waste of time. It’s clear early on this isn’t the case with Resolution, which has a deliciously creepy slow-burn script, a confident style by co-directors Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson, and two appealing leads. Vinny Curran is a gloriously bearded redneck junkie and Peter Cilella is the friend who single-handedly conducts his intervention. Curran has the showier role and he’s in over his head at times. But Cilella is particularly good as the exasperated straight man, with all of Greg Kinnear’s appeal and none of the smirk. And most importantly, they’ve got the kind of chemistry to make what they’re doing believable.
The intervention angle is mostly a set-up to get these two guys to linger for a few day in one of those cabins in the woods that you might see in movies such as, well, The Cabin in the Woods. To imply there’s anything meta going on could be a spoiler. Suffice to say Justin Benson’s script is no stranger to Cache, one of Michael Haneke’s finest, most intricate, and most infuriatingly elusive movies. Resolution manages to do far more with things that go bump against the camera than any mere special effects. And once the ending rolls around, there’s no denying this is a movie that has earned its title.
And hey, look, they even got Bill Oberst Jr.!
Resolution is available for video on demand. Support Qt3 by watching it on Amazon.com.
My favorite part of Microsoft’s Xbox 1 presentation was game studio VP Phil Spencer coming out in a State of Decay T-shirt. He must be pretty happy about the sales of Undead Labs’ open-world zombie game (it’s second only to Minecraft for the numbers of copies sold in two days). And it couldn’t have happened to a nicer game. State of Decay is a fascinating contrast to Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us, which has considerably greater production values, meticulously engineered and calculatingly effective emotional beats, and the same vivid characterization that made Uncharted so successful. But for all the raw manipulative power of The Last of Us, I can’t stop thinking about State of Decay while I play. Undead Labs knows well something too many larger studios forget as they chase their larger ideas: good game design will lead to good storytelling, but good storytelling in no way guarantees good game design.
Unfortunately, Spencer’s tastefully informal blazer covered the edges of the game’s name. Puzzled viewers must have wondered what Ate of Dec was. Furthermore, Spencer faithlessly changed into another T-shirt later in the presentation, shilling for something called Apy while showing off the new game from Superbrothers’ developer Capybara Games.
State of Decay, a supposedly open-world zombie survival sandbox, doesn’t seem very sandboxy at first. Two buddies are coming back from a camping trip only to discover the zombie apocalypse happened while they were out of range of cell phone service. Don’t you hate it when that happens? So they throw in with a handful of survivors at the ranger’s station to play a sort of third-person sneaker with some headshotting, meleeing, resource management, and even driving. Some scripted stuff happens. So far, all this could have happened in Dead Island: Rip Tide.
But I hadn’t met Ondrej yet.
After the jump, things that absolutely couldn’t happen in Dead Island: Rip Tide Continue reading →
Although I’m a sucker for the “just add zombies” approach to game design, I’m not sold on its viability for boardgaming. I know there are some co-op zombie games. But I’m over co-op boardgaming that doesn’t have some sort of traitor gimmick. There are probably even games that stick some poor sod with the role of zombiemaster. But I was convinced zombies aren’t a good subject for boardgaming.
And then I played Dawn of the Zeds and realized I was dead wrong. Victory Point Games has done a dead-on job of expressing zombie mythology, and they’ve furthermore done it in a solitaire game, so I don’t even have to press my friends into service.
After the jump, when there’s no more room in hell, the dead shall walk the tabletop Continue reading →
One of the most insidious formulas for a horror movie is to let you hang out for a while with people you get to know and like, and to then do terrible things to them. Wolf Creek and Black Water, for instance, are examples of horror movies in which nothing horrific happens for a long time and the movie is all the better for it.
The latest crop of bad horror movies — many of them found footage — gets this all wrong by forcing you to sit for a long time with unlikable characters played by bad actors. By the time anything horrible happens, you couldn’t care less. In Aftershock, mostly forgettable bad things happen to an unlikable bunch of snotty Chileans with a couple of foreigners sprinkled into the mix, including Eli Roth, who perfected bad things happening to bad characters to bad effect in his wretched Hostel series.
Roth didn’t direct Aftershock, but you’d never know considering what artless trash it is. It consists of a half hour of three dude hitting on chicks in nightclubs. Kill me now. Eventually, a low budget earthquake happens, a funicular crashes but they didn’t have the budget to show it, local hires playing escaped prisoners tastefully rape one of the actresses and burn Roth alive with CG fire, the heroine and a surprise bad guy flop around contentiously in a poorly lit cave, and then a really chintzy CG tsunami shows up for the final shot. Aftershock is ultimately like one of those cheaply made “bad weather” Sci Fi Channel movies, but with an R-rating made pointless by the fact that the director was clearly influenced by either Roth’s Hostel movies or the sorts of crass 70s exploitation horror that Dimension Films would never let him shoot.
Aftershock is available for video on demand. Not that you should care.
Kiss of the Damned has a promising pedigree. The director, Xan Cassavetes, is the daughter of John Cassavetes, so it’s no surprise that she gets how to do an homage to movies from the 70s. In this case, Italian horror. But she’s also the daughter of Gena Rowlands, so you’d think she’d know the importance of casting good actresses, particularly in a movie about three female vampires.
Unfortunately, this occasionally intriguing homage can’t bear up under the weight of its three awkward performances. It opens promisingly enough with Josephine de la Baume, unconventionally lovely in the way that people are lovely in movies made 40 years ago, as a vampire who reluctantly falls in love because sometimes guys are just so darn persistent. There’s enough style and sexual heat in these early scenes that you might think you’re in for an adult version of Twilight (pictured). Sounds good! Remember that scene in Coppola’s Dracula movie when all the naked vampire chicks writhe invitingly around Keanu Reeves? I sure do.
But then Roxane Mesquida shows up as the bad sister vampire. In the surreal horror movie Rubber, her nearly impenetrable accent lent a touch of hilarity, particularly when she tried to coax the killer out of a house by voicing a booby-trapped mannequin. But here her accent just makes her hard to understand. I suppose bad English in an English-language movie is another way to represent the exotic, timeless, and worldly quality of a vampire.
Finally, there’s Anna Mouglalis as the mother figure standing between the sisters. Mouglalis has a long list of credits, which includes playing Coco Chanel to Mads Mikkelsen’s Igor Stravinsky. But by the time she’s called in to lend some gravity to these squabbling vampire sisters, Kiss of the Damned has long since left the realm of the sexy and stylish and wandered into a maze of camp and bad acting. I suppose it is an adult version of Twilight after all.
Kiss of the Damned is available to watch instantly at Amazon.com.
When you talk about Moon, there’s no reason to point out that Duncan Jones is David Bowie’s son. But when you talk about Antiviral, you can’t very well not point out that Brandon Cronenberg is David Cronenberg’s son. The younger Cronenberg channels his father’s body dysmorphia with scalpel precision, stark insight, and the same dreamy malaise of David Cronenberg’s best movies.
The subject of Antiviral is celebrity obsession, but not in the obvious way. This isn’t a satire, but it makes the same point as satire in the context of futuristic biopunk noir, with disease as a metaphor and McGuffin, with the subject matter being the unlikely intersection of disease and beauty, blemish and perfection. The world it presents is new, imaginative, and unsettling. It’s impossible to get through Antiviral without wincing several times. It’s not gore so much as squick factor, which is far worse than mere gore. I can watch Michael Ironside’s head exploding till the cows come home. But the early simple medical procedure in Antiviral will put you off your lunch. It’s only going to get worse.
Antiviral wouldn’t work without the fascinating Caleb Landry Jones in the lead role. His performance, which consists largely of lurching, is a thing to behold, every bit as integral to Antiviral as Jack Nicholson is to Chinatown.
Antiviral is available on VOD. Support Qt3 by watching it on Amazon.com.
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.
ABCs of Death, a wretched horror anthology in which 26 directors around the world were each given a letter of the alphabet to use as the basis for a short film, captures what it’s like to be a fan of horror movies: lots and lots of dreck, some of it gross, much of it inept, almost all of it forgettable. Yet buried underneath it all, you might find a rare gem. Are the three gems in ABCs of Death worth the 23 other shorts you have to sit through?
It won’t be easy. These shorts range from tedious to dull to flat-out “what the hell were you thinking, Ti West, because now you’ve made me like House of the Devil a little less?” They imply a Japanese preoccupation with farting and jacking off, as well as other countries’ directors expressing their fascination with turds and furries.
But the reasons to persevere are D for Dogfight, Q for Quack, and P for Pressure. Marcel Sarmiento, the director of the uneven but interesting Deadgirl, directs the sleekly hilarious and beautifully textured Dogfight, which is literally about a dogfight. The centerpiece of this live action short is a really awesome dog performance. Adam Wingard, the director of A Horrible Way to Die and the framing device for horror anthology V/H/S, seems fully aware of the futility of doing anything meaningful with five minutes and a random letter of the alphabet, particularly when his letter is Q. Both Dogfight and Quack realize that a good option for a horror short is a touch of black humor.
But then there’s Simon Rumley’s Pressure, which is hands down the best thing in this anthology, partly for how it plays with its title (few of these directors seemed to give a damn about their assigned letter, much less whatever word they came up with), but mostly for how it’s actually a horrific short about a character instead of just a hurried concept. Pressure makes the point that horrible things aren’t always only horrible things. This should come as no surprise if you’ve seen Red White & Blue, Rumley’s masterpiece revenge story, arranged in a heartbreaking lattice of confessionals, cross-motivations, and character reveals (Red White & Blue is available in Netflix’s instant view catalog and I cannot recommend it enough to anyone who can handle Jacobean excess). Pressure is exactly what I would expect the director of Red White & Blue to deliver.
ABCs of Death is available on video on demand services. Watch it here to support Quarter to Three.
