Brief reviews for no particular reason except that I think it's funny to have read/watched these all this week:
The Call of Cthulhu (1928) - Ah, yes. HP Lovecraft. A man who will not sodding stop describing the indescribable. I fear I am never going to be able to find the ol' squid dragon anything less than risible and certainly a story where the 'lawks! Other races!' brand of Lovecraftian horror is so prominent was never going to sell me on it. I suppose this isn't terribly thin gruel to have derived an entire sub-genre from. It's a decent scrap-book of collected 'accounts' and some of imagery -- as has long since been proved -- has potential. But my word, there are better ways to sell vast aeons and unknown depths than restating 'there are vast aeons and unknown depths' every other paragraph. Also the final note of Cthulu going 'splat' and reforming after a steam yacht ploughs through his midriff just makes me laugh. Oooo the great big elder god with the consistency of wet jelly. Terrifying.
Ghostwatch (1992) - So I have long had the received understanding of this being the one where Parkie scared everyone by pretending ghosts were real for Halloween, meaning it's very interesting to watch it at last. And it's good. Very effective 'real' horror, making excellent use of the camera as an instrument for storytelling. It's anchored of course by roping in several prominent BBC personages to help sell the story. Michael Parkinson did a bang-up job of turning his usual brand of asinine talk-show fare into the core of the production. He's not really acting, as such, but I think having him continuing to act like a slightly flustered host in the background while all hell is breaking loose is a very effective juxtaposition. That's kind of how one always imagines the BBC would react if monsters showed up. Plus, Sarah Greene and the actual actors do a truly brilliant job, especially the kids. Shame they had to cram in a horrible transphobic backstory for the ghost. It definitely needed something to tie it all together towards the end, but... yeah. Hate that they leapt to this, in particular.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners (2022) - Sure is a cyberpunk story, innit? Ah, I don't know. It's not bad by any stretch of the imagination but it didn't grab me, at least partly because I've seen this kind of tale done many, many, many times before. Also they kept doing a three beat repetition of key action moments that seriously annoyed me for some reason. While I'm not completely averse to it as visual emphasis, the execution grated for reasons I can't quite articulate. Maybe the timing of the shots was a bit too protracted, or the angles chosen could have been more striking? Not sure. But yeah, ultimately, the most I got out of this was the itch to pick up that Iron-Blooded Orphans heist side-story I toyed with years ago again. Though perhaps doing that right after complaining about having seen this kind of story too often would be a bit self-defeating?
As I have been going through it. 😿 not being able to see my favs perform.
Anyways
Hellbound - 3 stars slow start and you see people get beat down and bought back to life to just get curve stomp by three giants. 😫 They were live-streaming it .
People don't try to shoot them down or anything so was frustrating to watch.
One ordinary day - 5 stars I know only two episodes but im hooked!! The main male leads his dramas never miss plus they always have such a fun twist.
Happiness - 4 stars 💫 🗿 Zombie's lives matter in a plot. I'm in it for the main actress 😍 she can do no wrong in my opinion.
What not to do when stuck in a horror movie and everyone doing stupid stuff? . I still love it a lot.
18 again - I started watching an old drama because I couldn't find fight my way 😕 so had to make do. Somewhat funny and I laugh a lot when they reference some of the song choices from other dramas it was great to touch. Plus hot guys 😌 my eyes are please.
Ongoing ~
Shadow beauty ~I give 5 stars cute drama. 💌 A teen who wants to fit in while realizing she just needed someone to talk to.
Short review
- Shadow beauty ~ five stars 💫
~ One ordinary day~ five stars
Hello !me! ~ five stars funny
Mad at each other - 4 stars ( kinda annoying but enemies to lovers arc )
Yes, the Nicolas Cage version. He Cages in all directions, and what can I say, it’s a fun time. He attempts to sound like he’s from the South with mixed results. Bonus points for Lee Scoresby from The Golden Compass movie making an appearance.
Also Eva Mendes is Eva Mendes, gorgeous as always, doing her best in a film that has her chasing after Nicolas Cage because...reasons? I guess?
The slight letdown here is the demonic bad guys. Blackheart (no really, that was his name) and a bunch of other demon lackeys. Still not clear on their motive but they dressed like rejects from the set of ‘Underworld’ and were just not very fear inspiring.
One demon is just...wet. And mucky? He’s gross, is my point. Probably what causes my hair to look like cotton candy on one of those cold, humid days. But he could probably be taken out by some quality paper towels (had Johnny Blaze done that, it would have been the greatest film ever made).
Another demon is...wind? You can’t punch him ‘cause he just like evaporates. Which means, a quality Hoover could probably get it done. MY GRANDMA COULD HAVE TAKEN HIM OUT, IS MY POINT. (Although GR did create a lasso wind tunnel so that’s largely the same principle.)
Getting killed by one of the Dark Crew (that’s what I’m calling them and u can’t stop me) isn’t so much scary as...vaguely menacing and kind of annoying.
Like, if I got taken out by one of those assholes, I think the most likely scenario is that I died of embarrassment. Or maybe annoyance. My last expression would basically be this:
This Halloween I sat down and played a bunch of vampire themed games and decided to review them. First up, Vampire Legends: The True Story of Kisilova, Dracula: Origin and Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. I might get around to Vampire the Masquerade: Redemption and Dracula: Love Kills in a later post.
I use my own 5-scale gradation in this:
0: Either I couldn’t force myself to finish it, or I was more relieved it was over than anything else.
1: I had no fun, but there might have been something fun in there… maybe…?
2: More bad than good.
3: About evenly good and bad. I actually start having more fun than not.
4: A solid entertainment piece. Has it’s blemishes, but despite that I like it.
5: Almost perfect (perfection is a myth). I had lots of fun and am satisfied.
(Semi-minor spoilers below. Unless you’ve gone quite far into the games, you likely wont suss out what’s happening until it’s happening.)
Vampire Legends: The True Story of Kisilova: You’re an investigator for the Hapsburg Empire going to the small town of Kisilova, recently beset by a killer leaving bloodless victims behind them. Rumors of vampires abound. After a series of mishaps the rumors do not feel so farfetched. Especially not when a mysterious, young woman enters the picture.
(Left: The Beginning of the Adventure with our buddy and hint machine. Right: The first of many, many hidden objects screens in this game.)
Okay, it is a point-and-click visual novel adventure thing that’s really short (less than 5 hours, and I think I left the game — and the clock — running for a while at some point), and also cheap. It was enjoyable enough, the music was forgettable but good enough, the graphics nice and atmospheric enough and the story was short and serviceable. The problems mainly came through the game-play; this game relied faaar too heavily on hidden object minigames, and those were unskippable, while all others were skippable after a short while. Fortunately, your partner can give hints to speed things along. As for my final decision in the winter-themed bonus chapter? Well, it was Halloween so I thought “why not?” and that was that for Europe. I always try to pick the most supernatural decision whenever I can lol (see Squirrel Elves in the Witcher franchise, or picking spell-sneaking classes in the Elder Scrolls).
My biggest problem with this game, however, is that I need to resize the resolution on my ultrawide monitor to play it without horizontal stretching distorting the art. The Options menu is seriously lacking in Options (actually, that whole menu is a mess that looks more at home in a Free-to-Play mobile game).
All in all, I generally liked it and its short nature meant that except for the hidden objects minigame, most of it didn’t outstay its welcome and it was really cheap (less than 4€ when I bought it, which is about the right price IMO. I think regular price is something like 9.99€?) so worth it. 3/5.
Dracula: Origin: You are Van Helsing. Yeah. That guy. And you have a missing friend, Harker, who had something to do with Dracula, and you have a pretty friend named Mina who ends up targeted by Dracula and now you must rush across the Old World to save her from a curse.
(Left: Yup, same dev as the Sherlock Holmes games. Middle: Vampires don’t like garlic breath. Right: Dammit Mina, I gave you ONE job. One. Job. All of this slow walking could have been avoided!)
Ah. Frogware. I generally like their Sherlock Holmes games, but this game… It felt more like a waste of my time. Oh, I’m sure there is a good game in there that isn’t a waste of time. Unfortunately, it is hidden behind the biggest time-sinks in the game: Van Helsing walks at half the speed of a normal person at all times and speaks really slowly, in conversations that has no branches, yet they will periodically be interrupted so that you can click on the next topic in the list (that wont reveal the next topic until you’ve listened to the topic listed before it). There’s this scene during a cave in when he says something like “quickly, we must make haste to escape!” and then you click on the exit and he waaaaaaaaalks slooooooooooooowlyyyyyy through it. It certainly doesn’t help that he must cross the entire span of the screen and backtrack locations many times and… AGH! RUN YOU FOOL!!
And, well, Frogware adventure game with its strange clues and non-clues and objects. There’s this bit in the first outdoor area when you have to capture some flies. Now, if you have followed the story logically, you will have a jar and a lid in your inventory. Easy, peasy, just click the flies with the jar, right? Nope. You must find a mourning veil hidden in the cemetery (that is large and that Van Helsing waaaaalks sloooooowlyyyyy through), use it on the flies and then combine the fly-ridden veil with the jar to get a jar of flies (I wont say what for because of spoilers, but, well, I don’t recommend eating during the Cemetery/Mansion part of the story if you have a phobia against bugs). There are also several objects that are basically five pixels on the screen because of the angle we’re viewing them at that we must find to pick up, and on the whole, I had more frustrations than fun with this story. Like, there’s even this puzzle minigame with a picture of Minos, the Labyrinth and the Minotaur and you find thread/string in the same house and wouldn’t you know it! The thread/string has nothing to do with the minigame and the minigame has nothing to do with the legend of the Minotaur!
On top of that, well, lets just say that the Egyptian section has quite a bit of stereotyping (think Victorian stereotypes of Egypt and its people in a modern game. Also, potential racism against white people must be prevented at all costs, including lying to a bereaved family), and when we run into our first, unliving female vampire she of course wears a top made of strips of cloth and a sheer skirt (you’d think a rich vampire’s favorite mistress would own a nice dress at least, but nope), and every woman (including dead of non-vampiric variety) have their beauty commented upon (and, of course, a young, pretty girl’s defilement/death is a tragedy, which is why it is so important to include that she was pretty).
And, well, this game markets itself heavily with Dracula at the forefront, not Van Helsing, yet while Dracula is the main antagonist, he only has a few, brief scenes, which were disappointing. All in all it was a 1/5.
Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines: You are a fledgling of one of the Camarilla clans, recently thrust into the secret world hidden by darkness, and more specifically into one of the most fucked cities of the World of Darkness. After your illicit embrace into the undead by your executed sire, the Prince of the City has graciously offered to adopt you, provided you prove yourself worthy to the exacting clan of rulers. Except the prince’s domain is built on quicksand, and this is Los Angeles; the birthplace of the modern Anarchs, and one of the domains of the Kindred of the East, on top of the eternal, political dance all Kindred must dance, and you, baby vampire as you are, have no allies and no clue as how to proceed except to survive.
(Left: Told ya Velvet is a mascot in this game. Middle: Did you know that Mercurio was meant to handle the Voerman sisters and we wouldn’t have to go through sewers and a haunted hotel if he did his job? Right: Apparently the Chinese are masters of Japanese swords and the Ventrue need no neckbones...)
Here’s the thing about VtM:B: It is a very enjoyable game and definitely the definite vampire game out there. It also has no story for your character. “What about the Ankaran Sarcophagus?”, well, your character participates, but it does nothing to answer the questions we are immediately confronted with in the opening of the game: Why would our unknown sire, an upstanding member of Kindred society, break one of the Traditions (pretty much laws set in stone for all Kindred over the entire world) to embrace us? Why would the prince, whose sole job is to uphold the Traditions, then break one of the Traditions and allow the ill-begotten progeny live?
Except for the opening of the game, we never hear from our sire again, nor the questions raised during the opening. And that makes our player character a bit superfluous when any random neonate could serve just as well.
So if not story-telling, what does VtM:B do that makes people sing its praises? In short? Characters and the World. It is incredibly atmospheric and while characters don’t develop (vampires are static by nature in this world, and most characters in the game are entrenched in their places and wont be shaken by some random baby vampire showing up), they are all very distinct and written in different tones. However, if you’re not role-playing as an ignorant fledgling, but meta-playing with some Vampire the Masquerade lore known, you will feel extremely railroaded (if your character had any inkling of who Smiling Jack is in the World of Darkness, they would never believe his coarse but kind uncle-figure thing he’s got going on. Because even before a certain hugely Biblical spoiler got involved, Jack was an imposer, liar, manipulator and mass-murderer who has sired many, many thin-blooded vampires and abandoned them to their fates. There’s a reason why only ignorant neonates like Nines’ gang admires and likes him. What I just said is not a spoiler for the game, btw, because it never comes up because your character is an ignorant fledgling being manipulated and deceived by literally everyone. Maybe Velvet and Bertram don’t, but Velvet might seem so sweet when she convinces you to be her knight because of Presence and acting, and Bertram is a Nossie and they have major secrets within secrets).
And while it is easy to sink into the world of the game and roleplay, thus mitigating the railroading feeling above. This game was clearly written with an audience of White Male Teens in mind. We have Velvet (of the fashion-conscious Toreador clan) show up at the prince’s court in Elysium in only a lacy basque, g-string and thigh high fishnets, tall heels and not as much as a peignoir thrown on top. Yeah, she attends an important society function in her fetish underwear. Then we have the explicit sex life of game cover-girl Jeanette (yeah, the one dressed like a dilapidated school girl), and those two are THE female mascots of the game.
The less said about the Orientalism and the Kindred of the East the better, but that segues into how around the time you reach Chinatown, the game starts losing its luster and strengths. Okay, so if you’re sensitive to that kinda thing, you might notice it a little bit in Hollywood, but by the time Chinatown rolls around, you might notice how it is less immersive and how it starts to feel more and more gamey (specifically, Action gamey), and you get less options that isn’t some variant of “kill it”.
On top of that the game has technical issues if you do not use the fan-made patch (I always use Patch Plus, which restores cut content and quests, as well as ReShade for better anti-aliasing and sharpness), and it still has a few cropping up from time to time. At least it works perfectly well in ultrawide resolutions?
Still it has that charm, and despite its flaws and how I can think of a dozen complaints at the drop of a dime, I still love playing it. So it’s a 4/5 from me.
Let that be a lesson to all you blockbuster filmmakers out there. If you want to get the audience's attention, hire Shirley Bassey to belt out spoilers while shots from the movie project onto a nude woman's gold skin.
It’s particularly hard to pick a favorite moment in GOLDFINGER since the entire movie is stacked with exactly what you’d want in an EON-produced flick about Her Majesty’s best secret agent. GOLDFINGER is the definitive Bond picture - it solidified the formula that every sequel has so closely followed. It may not be my own personal favorite, but it's damn near close. You have Oddjob, Pussy Galore, her entourage of flying female aviators, a gold-obsessed villain with a crotch-crocheting laser, a sleepy army, a bomb that goes up to 007, a tricked-out Aston Martin, and John Barry's brassy fanfare.
Is there one scene that sums up this picture? If anything, I’ll have to go with James Bond's discovery of Jill Masterson’s gold painted body. It’s THE image that is still used to sell the movie.
If you’ve never seen a Bond movie, spend your next two hours with this finger.
There’s the makings of something interesting here. I really enjoyed Vaughn’s colorful take on historical events in the opening scenes and the dancing Rasputin fight was entertaining. But there’s a lot of loose ingredients that don’t seem to mix together. The main plot is so linear and Conrad’s story is so repetitive — at the expense of the development of every other character — that once Conrad dies, we’re left with a couple well-choreographed fight scenes between 2D characters and not much else.
