Talking about Reviews

ENWorld has a good post about reviews...a plea for more, really. I posted a comment there and then realized I have an open post spot for today's blog and should relay that thought here, too. So:

My general experience with reviews in this hobby (and no doubt others) has been along these lines, however: people usually post reviews of product they like, or were predisposed to like. It is not too often that you see a critical or negative review unless the poster was already predisposed toward disliking the product, or was so amazed at how much he disliked it that he needs to share his experience. Gamers seem to be notorious for judging a product after reading it, but far less often actually discuss the product from an actual play session, or even just attempting to work with the mechanics. On my own blog I tend to string out game discussions on product to several posts, exploring facets of the rules and leading up to an actual play experience. I have found I am rarely disappointed that even the cleanest ruleset reveals some interesting warts once actually engaged with at the table. For this reason, review posting online is good....but the typical results of those reviews do tend to follow Sturgeon's Law in both directions (for both the quality of the products and the quality of said reviews).

I'll point out one thing, though: no one has quite managed to capture the lighting-in-a-bottle with a review process that is Amazon. Hell, I may buy mostly on site X, Y and Z but I always go to Amazon first to read the reviews. Every online site that aspires to provide useful reviews should look to the way Amazon does it as a model to aspire to.

Review: Resident Evil: The Final Chapter

This is a good week to be a Resident Evil fan. We have a new entry into the game series (RE7) that is genuinely amazing....more on that one later....and also the final movie in the "Alice's adventures in Umbrellaland" series of Resident Evil films starring Milla Jovovich.

I've had a great deal of fun with both the films and games of Resident Evil over the years, and always appreciate that the first RE game marked my foray into "modern" gaming on the Playstation 1. Prior to that, it was a wasteland of suboptimal, graphically terrifying PC games for me, and in fact the PS1 was my first machine that could run anything interesting at all, as well as my first console since my childhood Atari 2600 days. This year in 2017 marks an interesting transition for the franchise, which, like the monsters it portrays, has grown in strange and weird ways. Resident Evil: The Final Chapter is no different, offering up a movie that closes out this chapter of the franchise while RE7 opens up an entirely strange and new direction for the games.

Unlike the last several Resident Evil movies, the latest film isn't nearly as campy and stupid, making it hard to poke fun at the film. In fact, if you hadn't seen any of the RE movies since maybe #1, this film could arguably stand on its own....so long as your entire focus is on enjoying a zombie apocalypse film that keeps making allusions to prior events. They give you a decent enough recap at the start, and even fill in some odd holes from the dawn of the series (the kinds of holes this series takes for granted, normally), and then dives in to the current plot. In fact it even eschews the traditional "wrap up the ending of the last film" format by cutting to the chase....we know there was a crazy battle in the ruins of Washington DC but the film starts more or less "the day after" that fight, and moves in to Alice's last trip down the rabbit hole.

I'll get this out of the way real quickly: much like with xXx: The Return of Xander Cage, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter is actually a lot of fun and quite enjoyable, so long as your in to that sort of thing. Which thankfully I happen to be, because otherwise I'd be having a real crisis of confidence in the state of films right now if I didn't. They are both action films predicated on the glory of on-screen excess and madness that is particular to their action-film visions of the universe. They both rely on spectacle over plot, action over story, and the "doing of stuff" over character.

Alice is promised an end in this tale, a conclusion to her story, and we do get that. I am kind of hopeful that this means we might eventually see a series reboot which tries to tell a RE tale closer to the games....but then we get into that tricky gray area where we have to admit that the games have their own special world logic, pacing issues, character development failings and weird plot holes (though none quite so spectacular as the films in aggregate).

The storyline of The Final Chapter wraps up Alice's tale (more or less), brings back Claire, brings back (no surprise) Wesker (and also wraps his tale up), along with gratuitious appearances by all of the Umbrella evil gang....especially the Red Queen and Dr. Isaacs, who's been "dead" for a few movies, actually. It does not clarify what happened to Leon Kennedy or Ada Wong....but I'm not fretting, their arbitrary appearance in this franchise remains one of those "visual nods" to the games without much effort to explain their existence in the weird mirror universe of Alice.

Here are a handful of my spoilerific observations on this movie (yes, SPOILERS AHEAD):

1. For much of the initial scenery this movie looks like they took a tab from Fallout 3's style.

2. As the plot progresses and it is revealed that the entire cabal of Umbrella is cryogenically locked away for awakening after the apocalypse ends, many "motivational" plotholes get nominally filled. This is good! Also, judicious use of clones to explain motivations, appearances, and reappearances was sufficient to help clear up some old (and new) plot detritus. But some of the motivations of prior villains in other films are suddenly cast in to doubt. Why, for example, did Wesker do pretty much any of the stuff he did in prior films? Why was it necessary to wait ten years to release the anti-virus? Why--if near as I can tell that was the goal all along--did anyone left at Umbrella oppose Alice's desire to do so, if it insured they would awaken to their brave new world?

3. Who set the bombs to blow up the cryotubes? I might have not followed this properly, but I was under the impression that no one had a good opportunity to do so.

4. Wesker died like a dog in a trap. Seemed like an oddly fitting end for Movie Wesker, but entirely out of sorts with the vicious mutating Wesker that haunted the video games.

5. I thought the Isaacs clone was motivated to cast down the Umbrella elite, knowing he was a clone. But in the end he seemed genuinely surprised to meet the Real Isaacs. So what, then, was his actual motive for baiting an army of the dead right to the entrance of the installation?

6. They try to clarify that the infection of the world actually started deliberately....but it doesn't quite jive with the first couple movies. I guess it explains how a post-nuked Raccoon City wasn't the source of the infection evident by the time of "Resident Evil: Extinction" but in fact it was Umbrella Corp deliberately infecting the population.....but at the same time, the prior movies held up on their assumptions just fine without this extra layer of Machiavellian scheming.

7. Do you remember the names of anyone else in this movie other than Alice, Claire, Isaacs and Wesker? Me neither. The entire population of survivors were pretty much just there to have a "visual recognition" and then their moment of doom.

8. Wesker still died like a dog. Hah!

9. That anti-virus sure did disperse quickly. Like....insanely quick. But this is RE science so yeah. They kinda clarify it will travel on the winds in the end, but that only lampshades the whole "army of zombies fall over" scene just prior. I guess the army was downwind?

10. I am officially impressed at how many frickin' times that laser trap corridor has made an appearance in the movie now. Officially it is like a character unto itself. The laser corridor is to RE films what the Necronomicon is to Evil Dead movies.

11. Fridge Moment: even if they were evil, I bet a fair number of the Umbrella elite would have been very useful alive to help rebuild society. Then again.....I guess they did cause the apocalypse....

Okay....so this was a fun movie, slightly less stupid than the last three, and slightly more energetic than many zombie survival horror films out there. It was all about the action, the LOUD NOISES as zombies pop out and the monsters. Also, a promise I think from W.S. Anderson to his wife Milla to get her off the film sequel treadmill she's been trapped on. To that end, a solid B+, for a solid B Movie!

B+

Review: Pathfinder Chronicles - Heart of the Jungle

This is an easy review for me because I've used this book extensively over the last three years. Heart of the Jungle was one of the earliest Pathfinder RPG releases after the Core Book came out, and focused on two elements: adventuring in the Jungle wilderness and the region Mwangi in Golarion. As with most Chronicles books, the content here is going to be about as useful as you are willing to make of it, with a mix of general content that can be applied to any game mixed with campaign-specific content that you can cut and paste from or just mine for ideas; the most use will be gained from a GM who needs lots of rules and setting material, and uses Golarion, of course.

Luckily, Mwangi is very much designed to be an archetypal Jungle Land, a quasi not-Africa designed in the vein of many campaign settings from the old 2E era of AD&D, in which thematics and setting were designed to evoke the sense of a certain style, region, culture or genre without having to rewrite the whole game to accommodate the exotic feel.

The first chapter looks at Life in Mwangi, with some useful general content that anyone can take advantage of. A discussion of natural hazards, plant life, useful diseases and infections and other dangers (from insects swarms and weather to quicksand and humidity) are all useful to any jungle campaign you might want to run. The material is not so rooted in Golarion that it would be at all problematic lifting this content for your own campaign.

Denizens of the Expanse continues this chapter with a more Golarion-specific discussion of the many monstrous, demihumand and human races of the region. It's worth reading and you could easily lift some ideas for your own setting here without much difficulty. Not sure what your jungle elves would look like? Borrow a few ideas on this elven culture descended from a great ancient kingdom now lost in the untracked wilderness. About the only problem with this section right now is it includes no ideas for additional races and monsters after 2010.

This chapter wraps up on a section about village life and religion in the region. There's barely anything on village life outside of basic organizational stuff; no one who wrote this book went and did any extensive research on any period of any particular African culture from which to model Mwangi civilizations, best as I can tell. Likewise, the religion section is really just a way to frame the ur-patheon of Golarion in the context of local belief systems and rituals. It includes no folklore or mythology specific to or derived from traditional African belief systems.

The next chapter is Mwangi Campaigns. This section is where you're going to find the largest volume of Golarion-specific content, but the first few pages are useful for any GM interested in ways to setup of a Jungle-exploration themed campaign. The subsequent material is actually well worth reading through for ideas you can mine, or lift whole cloth and drop into your own jungle settings; little here is so specific to one setting that you couldn't extrapolate easily enough. Note also that there are plenty of useful maps of the wilderness and cities in this world.

Lost Kingdoms is up next, a section on the ancient ruins and lost history of Mwangi. Like the previous section with its focus on the modern settlements and cultures of the region, Lost Kingdoms provides plenty of interesting details from which you could readily cut-and-paste to your own game, or borrow from as you see fit.

The book wraps up with a smattering of monsters and some useful encounter tables. Here we have the high girallon (anghazani), botfly swarm, giant botfly, hippopotamus and tobongo (Mwangi treant). A nice smattering of extra monsters.

Overall this book is a must-have for GMs using Golarion as a setting and an interest in running a jungle campaign. If you want some content for jungle adventures but don't use Golarion, then you'll get about 26 pages of material which you can use as presented, and an additional 38 pages of interesting setting material that is fairly easy to lift and plant in your own games, or borrow ideas from. For me, it was essential to a series of jungle-traversing campaigns I ran in 2010 and 2011, and a book I keep on hand to this day because of it's overall usefulness.

Because most of the general content in this book contains Pathfinder rules and terminology, some of the content of this book would require conversion for use with a non-Pathfinder ruleset. The setting material is universal, however, and could serve as a springboard for any D&D-like. Note, however, that for OSR games we have Spears of the Dawn, which I would recommend to old school gamers over Heart of the Jungle as a more useful resource overall.

Review: Team 7

Team 7 (issues 0 through 8)

When Team 7 (and it's sister title Team 6) came out as a set of miniseries during Wildstorm's "Still Part of Image" heyday (such as it was), it served as a sort of bridge between several characters and series, tying in a number of the more venerable characters in the old Wildstorm universe together, via a rather complicated backstory set during the Cold War and later. The Grifter, Lynch, Backlash and others were all part of this Vietnam Era team on which various experiments (a throwback to MK-ULTRA and such) led to a curious mix of war heroes with psychic abilities. The team survives a variety of harrowing encounters before splitting to the "present" of the nineties at the time, and to their own titles and future lives as costumed vigilantes.

Team 7 drags a metric ton of Wildstorm and DC characters into a potpourri in similar fashion, with Cole Cash (Grifter) rubbing shoulders with Lynch again (albeit for the first time in the New 52), along with a younger Deathstroke, a younger and thinner Amanda Waller (formerly of Suicide Squad last I checked), a younger Dinah Drake (alias the Black Canary) and more.....even Steve Trevor of Wonder Woman fame appears at one point (pretty sure its the same guy...he's a pilot and all that). This bizarre mixture of characters comprises an ongoing eight issue medley of madness in which the Wildstorm universe is mashed into the DC continuum.

Arguably some of this shift is necessary; there are plenty of DC characters that have backgrounds that fit the Team 7 dynamic well, and the book demonstrates this handily. Likewise, some of the old Team 6 and Team 7 characters are simply no longer with Wildstorm...some were properties of Top Cow and other Image Comics publishers; such is the hazard of the great and sort of failed Image experiment.

Anyway, Team 7 takes the potentially great premise (the secret history of various heroes in a sort of spec ops quasi-military outfit, filling out the backstory that helps explain the present) and manages to weave some great stories even as it makes mince meat out of certain characters....including characters many of us might have liked to see reimagined in the actual New 52 universe.

A few spoilers ahead: Caitlin Fairchild appears and is apparently assimilated borg-style by a rogue Spartan who actually appears to be a creation (?) of Gammorah's evil mastermind Kaizen. This same event leads to the creation and destruction (?) of Ladytron, who gets enough screen time to look vaguely like who she's supposed to be before either disappearing or dying. It's not that these characters are absolutely dead and gone....they could be....but this book left a lot of cliffhangers and "no explanations" to questions I can only assume may be answered elsewhere. Maybe I just have more reading to do. Still....this is not how I would have written Caitlin Fairchild (from Gen-13) or Ladytron into the DC universe.

In the end the plot and pacing gets really wacky as the tale progresses. At times I felt like the writer for this book was at best mildly familiar with many of the characters, and it was rather unsatisfying to see Lynch brought in (as an example) to found the team, yet his presence is all but eliminated before the book concludes...despite some hints that he's still around and alive. Foreshadowing? Maybe, but it felt more like "rushed, and couldn't wrap up the intended script," to me. I head this book may already be winding down....this could either be the reason for the feeling of rushed plots or a cause of such.

Anyway, if you're a fan of the old Wildstorm/Image era of Team 6 and Team 7 then this is going to be a pale shadow of what once was. If you're a DC fan who is not too familiar with the Team 7 notion, then you may find this book a lot more enjoyable as your stake in the Wildstorm characters abused here is not going to be as problematic.Indeed, the DC characters tend to shine, being placed in the more visceral environment of a Wildstorm-flavored plot, and when characters like Eclipso appear it's got a real nasty, interesting vibe to the whole tale.

I still can't believe that they brought in Spartan as some sort of Gammoran robot and Majestic as some sort of byproduct of being assimilated by said robot (it's becoming painfully clear that the Kherubim did not survive the transition to the New 52 universe). That entire plot was.....so poorly executed.....it's just beyond words how disappointed I am in this series' run through issue 8 so far.

Review: Zombie Pulp

Right off the bat: this was a fantastic read. It might not be for everyone, but if you happen to really enjoy visceral, gore-soaked pulp fiction full of zombies, murder, revenge and madmen then Zombie Pulp is barking up your hangman's tree.

Tim Curran is a prolific author, who has perfected the art of horror fiction, with an especially keen sense of both pacing and a talent for descriptive gore. His zombies are very...meaty....and his descriptions of monstrosities make them hard to forget and easy to visualize. He's got exactly the sort of talent for writing this sort of fiction, and it really pays off.

Zombie Pulp is a rare collection of short stories in that every single tale in this volume was at least enjoyable and worth reading. I rarely encounter a collection like this, where I skipped nothing, it was all captivating. That's pretty unusual. Even if you obsessively read every story in a given collection, it's often with the sense that maybe...just maybe...some of those stories were weaker than the others. Not so here. The weakest tale in Pulp Zombies is still heads and shoulders above the zombified competition.

Here's a run down of what the book offers to pique your interest:

Shelter: A holdout in the zombie apocalyptic wasteland barters with life by offering up victims through a lottery system. Is Doc, the head of the compound, just cruelly earning his own life and using survivors, or is there something else at work here? Creepy zombies with a habit of speaking their mind like undead Torrets victims.

Corps Cadavre: An inmate at a prison gets light duty on the graveyard shift at the mortuary, which is freshly stocked from the latest round of riot victims, heart attacks and more. The problem is, there's a guy who takes that shift and has done so for decades, and he's got a unique way of disposing of the corpses.

Emily: A mother is obsessed about her recently deceased daughter, and seeks a means of bringing her back from the dead. She succeeds, of course, and because this is a zombie anthology there are no miracles involved in this process. Mother spirals into madness as daughter learns what it means to be one of the living dead.

Dis-Jointed: Revenge from the grave as some hit men deal with their victims through a process of dismemberment and burial in the deep woods, only to find that they're next on the hit list.

Piraya: Zombie piranahs, need I say more? Second goriest tale in the book behind Mortuary.

They Walk By Night: A private eye and a detective run into a problem when recently deceased criminals start popping up again, and they think it might be tied to a recent serial killer that they caught, and who died in prison unexpectedly. Good noir feel mixed with zombies.

Mortuary: This was an interesting and weird tale, written I feel for its obsession with utter and total gore, and a complete lack of interest in keeping any protagonist alive. A Waco-like scenario is unfolding as the ATF prepares to bust into a suicide cult complex that may or may not be well armed. What they get is....zombies, of course. Probably the goriest tale in the book.

Euology of the Straw Witch: A tale of the old west....or maybe just a very economically depressed backwoods town (just occurred to me that the exact timeframe of this tale is a bit ambiguous, although it's definitely sometime before 1940, I'd say), about a man who misses his mother so much he seeks out the help of the mysterious straw witch to bring her back, with the expected results one might imagine in a tome of this title.

Monkey House: A story which answers two questions: first, why not primate zombies? And second, why you should never leave your hardened post-apocalyptic bunker just because it's been weeks since you've seen a zombie. Although the gore level on this one was through the roof, a lot of it involved depraved simian zombies and therefore wasn't quite as disturbing as a few other tales...but that said, this one managed to hold an abundance of excessive grotesquerie.

The Mattawan Meat Wagon: the story here is similar to Shelter (and could take place in the same universe for all I know), this time about survivor towns which periodically load up the sick and elderly and drop them off in the big cities where the zombies have overrun everything. A driver and his rider, a young man, are about to meet some unfortunate turn of events in the course of this action. A pure gore fest, I felt there were some missed opportunities in this story. Without trying to spoil it, the boy who takes off in town just sort of...dies....and I really felt that was leading somewhere, since he was originally from that town. When it didn't, I was disappointed.

Morbid Anatomy: A lengthy novella tops off the collection, focusing on an interesting spin-off from Herbert West's time in the Great War. The story is told in two parts, which eventually converge (while still remaining essentially separate), bouncing between West's aide and assistant Hamilton, who manages to maintain an affect of mild contempt for West's activites with restoring the dead to life, even as he helps support the vile doctor; on the other side if a war reporter named Creel, who has an unhealthy obsession with death and is finding even the Great War or WWI is perhaps too much for him. This was a great tale because not only was it the slowest of the lot in terms of pacing, it was also a bit stingy n the gore. When the zombie element enters the picture, it's in contrast with the horrors of what has already been happening as a recourse of World War I's notoriously dehumanizing and destructive course, which makes for a fascinating juxtapose. When Tim Curran dabbles in Lovecraft his own spin really makes it special (see the Hive series for another example) and this is no exception.

Love gore-drenched zombie horror? Get this book! At times it reminded me of the golden age of EC Comics, brought into the literary medium. If one tried to classify this in terms of current genre form, I'd label it one part splatterpunk, one big part zombie fiction and a dash of Lovecraft for good measure.

A+++

Available here at Amazon.

Why the new Star Trek is more consistent than you may think - and the parts where it dives into the deep end of crazy

I caught Star Trek: Into Darkness Friday night and it was a real fun movie to watch. Like it's predecessor its more of a spiritual successor to the franchise, lacking some of the grace and philosophical introspection Trek has sometimes been known for in the past. Like Trek in general (and the first Abram's movie in specific) it's full of pseudo-science, science gaffs, and some occasional plot holes you could pilot the Enterprise through. It has an early reference to a "cold fusion bomb" that was such a bad choice of name for the actual device they deployed that I felt like the screenwriters were deliberately screwing with us, for example.

I'll take a moment here to give you my grade on this movie before the spoiler-laden rants below: A solid A+ for general enjoyment, with a C+ for coherence; to contrast with the 2009 Trek film, I'd have given that an A+ for fun and a D for coherence. So in some regards this film is an improvement. I'd also add this caveat: if you are a hardcore Trekkie, the kind who is bothered about why the new movies don't properly emulate the look and feel of the tech from the 1967 series, then you probably already know you hate this movie but that's okay because it's not really for you. It's for Trekkies like me who feel that the rigid adherence to canon had made Trek a wallowing mass of nonsensical contradictions over the years, have accepted that fact, and moved on.

Spoilers ahead, just a warning!

Despite all this, there's an interesting internal coherence going on in the movie that is surprisingly decent, although it may not seem so to non-Trekkies unfamiliar with some of the tenets of the franchise universe, or hardcore Trekkies blinded by the trees and thus missing the forest. For example, in the first Trek movie in the new universe we saw most of Earth's armada devastated by Nero's planetcracker while it was destroying Vulcan. Cut to three years later, roughly, and we find that Earth's fleet is nowhere near up to speed, and a lot of private or hidden resources are being sucked into a defense program to build a Dreadnaught, all at the direction of the Grand Admiral himself. So when, at the film's end, we see that same dreadnaught fighting the Enterprise, some people have wondered where the hell Starfleet's other local ships were. The short answer: the Admiral probably ordered everyone away, to give him breathing room to polish off the Enterprise. Later, when the dreadnaught is piloted by Khan and plows into San Francisco, it's probably not shot down precisely because the ship has all of the Grand Admiral's "stand down and ignore us" protocols in effect.

Now, it's the movie's fault for not at least tacitly addressing this (a simple scene in which Admiral Marcus tells Earth's defense forces to stand down would have sufficed) but it makes sense to me in the context of what happened. A second explanation is that this dreadnaught is pretty tough, and no amount of planetary defenses would have sufficed to take it down. A third, and even likelier option which is implied by the movie's own story is that Earth doesn't really have a very weaponized defense force....given that the flagship of the fleet, the Enterprise, is rendered to swiss cheese by the dreadnaught, I have to say that makes a lot of sense. What we're seeing here is a weird mix of the conventional technology of the Enterprise vs. an unholy union of the pre-war tech info brought to the table by Khan, plus the scanned future-tech taken from Nero's ship in the last movie. The fact that they made this new vessel reminiscent of a mix of Enterprise D and E just made it even more interesting.

So why the advanced technology? This is all way beyond the TOS era tech from the original era, right? This technically was already answered by the film makers, who indicated that the presumption was that in the first movie Nero's ship was scanned and details recorded, opening up Starfleet's eyes to a wide range of technological options not previously imagined. I, however, would suggest a different (or amended) answer, which hinges on the whole time travel element: this isn't really even the same universe rewound; Spock and Nero from the first movie slipped backwards and sideways in time, to a slightly different universe, one with slightly different laws of reality and history that extend well beyond the scope of the original series.

Transporters work differently in this Trek. Seriously, they do; aside from the visuals, which actually imply people being surrounded by an array of circulating particles rather than just being disintegrated, transporters seem to be a lot more fidgety, and have trouble picking people up if a bug is walking on them, or there's atmospheric trouble, or any number of other issues. Simultaneously, a very specific portable device (the Scotty super-transporter) can transport a target light years and even his a moving target in Warp. Is this inconsistent? I have a hard time working this one out, and my gut tells me that the problem here is screenwriters who went for Rule of Cool first and "this will mess with our universe's implied assumptions" ended up ignored.

If, however, I try to apply some logic to the way transporters work (and fail to work) I arrive at the conclusion that it's a suggestion that the technology works very differently in certain key ways from the way it worked in Old Trek. I'd postulate it's using some sort of strange quantum entanglement to get the job done, and that the device is "repopulating" the target at a new destination rather than its current location. This becomes trivially easy to do when you know the speed and distance of a target, but something as simple as a ladybug in your hair could screw things up, because now you have another observer and a whole bunch of additional variables to account for. Something like that? Ah, I got nuthin' on this one.

At least they acknowledged the staggering significance of Scotty's transwarp teleporter device as a distinct thing in this movie, being sequestered away by Section 31 for weaponization.

Another thing that I find head-scratching is the whole "Qo's'Nos" (alias Chronos) event. There are a lot of things we can interpret from the event in which the Enterprise warps to the Klingon Homeworld, as follows:

First, the klingons appear to have already destroyed Praxis. Notice in the one space scene with the disintegrating moon in the background? Now, in the implied new history Nero supposedly was captured by klingons and locked away in Rura Pente for twenty odd years before being freed, and after his escape he destroyed the prison world....but going by Star Trek VI Rura Pente was not a  moon in the Klingon system, best as I could tell. This means that Praxis was already mined out and blew up, a couple decades early. This help explains the next issues.

Second, the klingons have a lousy detection grid around their homeworld. Maybe they used to have one but Praxis blowing up fried it. Maybe Chronos (because I refuse to keep retyping the klingon spelling) has been thoroughly mined out and is now effectively a slum planet, and the bulk of the klingon interests have shifted to other worlds, and resources along with it. Maybe they just aren't as technologically advanced. Remember, in Trek VI the Enterprise-A slipped through the neutral zone and only got picked up by a listening post with a very bored guard. The newer Enterprise (which, as I'll discuss below, moves a lot faster) might have just gotten lucky, or been using coordinates provided by Admiral Marcus which was a known dead zone in Klingon monitoring posts. So this doesn't bug me so much.

Finally, klingons do appear to have effective sensor shielding, and maybe even stealth tech by now, given that the Romulans are out there selling arms to the klingons. As such, even if we didn't see the klingon defense ships in stealth mode its reasonable to assume they had either sensor-defeating stealth tech or actual romulan stealth tech that kept them from being picked up by the Enterprise's sensors. As for the intel that they acted on (that the sector on Chronos was abandoned)...nothing in that scene suggests that info was fresh, and assuming Starfleet got that info from its own stealth probes, could be a bit out of date anyway. So this seems like a problem on the surface that goes away quickly.

Now, a quick bit about Khan. Why did Admiral Marcus think finding a sleeper ship of genetically enhanced humans from the eugenics wars was a good idea? This seems like a no-brainer, although it relies a bit on the assumption that this universe is a retcon timeline: Khan and his people were true super soldiers, genetically engineered not just to be the smartest and most cunning leaders of the world (as the TOS Khan was) but to be true killers and super men. Admiral Marcus realized that in the current era humankind was made of survivors that had operated under a clause of nonviolence and peace for more than 150 years now, and that he needed someone who was a product of the tumultuous and vague wars which wiped out most of Earth from the old days to help him conceive of what could be done with the weapon's technology stolen from Nero's ship.

The movie obliquely references Khan's origins as being from roughly 300 years ago, without being specific (i.e. 1996), and this is a younger less factually-focused crew, so it would be nice if the new Trek universe was one which held even less certainty about exactly when and how everything went down in Earth's past, including exactly when the so-called Eugenics Wars happened. Call me a fool of a Trekkie but I still like the idea that Trek postulates a potential future history that spins off from out own, rather than one which spins off from 1967's conception of such. The scene where Khan kicks the crap out of a small army of klingons lends credence to this whole notion.

The bit where Kirk calls up Scotty? Not an issue. The only reason we didn't see more of that in TOS and the old movies was that we didn't have cell phones back then. Other than that, Kirk and crew took plenty of direct phone calls across vast distances, just usually sitting down in front of a vidscreen. Trek has had a long and established history of instantaneous communication, and this is just the new series continuing the trend in a way more modern and familiar to us.

Some of my unanswerables:

1. Why did Khan hide his crew in torpedoes? What possible benefit did he think could come of this action? Did these torpedoes have such a small payload that they had that much room in them, making the idea seem sensible, or did Spock, toward the end of the movie, have to add in explosive charges to the torpedoes as well after removing their stasis-tube contents? I do not feel the movie explained Khan's actions on this, or the full nature of the torpedoes well enough here.

2. What the hell is a Cold Fusion Bomb and why would they call it that? What that bomb did was more of a energy-sapping device.

3. The entire "Enterprise hidden under water" scene struck me as 100% Rule of Cool and not at all feasible. Assuming the Enterprise can sustain itself under water (I reasonably expect it could) I still question why parking it there made any sense. Also, why were Kirk and McCoy faffing around in the alien temple in the first place? WHY???? I assume it was to provide a distraction from the shuttle gliding into the volcano's mouth.....but....still.

4. So they know Khan's blood can regenerate dead tissue. There are 72 additional supermen in the ship's hold that can be used as well, right? Well, I do have a partial answer for this, as follows: McCoy determined that it was only Khan's blood which would do; his other genetically enhanced followers weren't subject to the same level of modification he was. Given that in Khan's TOS and Trek II appearances his people were all closer to sheep and cult followers than genetic supermen like himself, this makes sense to me. It would also explain why Admiral Marcus left them in cold sleep rather than wake them up, because they were more useful as bargaining chips than actual agents of Section 31. That said, my real question is: WHY DOES KHAN'S BLOOD REGENERATE DEAD TISSUE....including radiated tissue? WHY?!?!?!?

5. When the Enterprise starts to fall into Earth orbit, I can't help but notice that that entire scene started closer to the Moon, but rapidly seemed to move closer to Earth, despite the fact that neither vessel was under power. This is an example of Sci Fi authors have no sense of scale. Another example: the fact that as best I can tell it took the Enterprise maybe 20 minutes to get from Earth to Chronos. Even assuming that this timeline's ships had benefited from improved warp technology thanks to Nero polluting the timeline, that's very damned fast.

6. More evidence this is an alternate universe and not just a timeline reboot: Carol Marcus was a weapon's researcher and not the much more green-friendly physicist she was in TOS.

7. Is it just me, or do Trek shuttles still not have a proper airlock?

Hey look someone got some Dead Space in my Star Trek

Movie Review: Oblivion

Today! The first of three reviews of recent movies, all seen by old Dad thanks to the fact that he's stuck in Albuquerque while Marcus and Mom are down babysitting grandma's house for the week.

I saw Oblivion first, and let me tell you how disappointing it was to see that this had nothing to do with the Elder Scrolls. I kid! It was an awesome movie, but with some caveats. Then I saw Iron Man 3, which is pretty much a given in terms of entertainment value, but as a third movie in the series it did the rare feat of actually being better than the first two. Finally there's the 2013 reboot of Evil Dead, which was...well....let's just say two out of three ain't bad.

I'll review Oblivion first:

Oblivion

I went in to Oblivion knowing it was allegedly a halfway decent original SF film, but also aware of the fact that it had Tom Cruise as the lead character, Jack Harper. I think it took me about twenty minutes to overcome my natural dislike of the man and start really enjoying the film....right around the time I realized that this was a decidedly good old-school SF story, the kind they might have written in the late sixties and early seventies, during the first real "new wave" of SF. Why? Because it's all about Jack, who's the quintessential man's man....had this film actually been done in 1970 we'd probably have seen Charleton Heston in the same role. Seriously.

The plot in a nutshell: Jack Harper, along with his mission aide and significant other Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) are assigned to a monitoring post on ruined Earth, where they oversee the safety of massive water collectors/purifiers that refine what is left of Earth's post-apocalyptic oceans and ship it off to Titan, where humanity has (or will be) migrating via the great ship Tet (for tetrahedral). It's about sixty some years after an alien invasion was thwarted, but not before the aliens blew up the moon, and the nuclear retaliation from humanity amid the ensuing chaos of a Lunar death rendered Earth a wasteland.

Amidst all this, Jack serves as a technician, keeping military drones that protect the massive water refineries safe from the "scavs," survivors of the alien army that still live in the radioactive wastelands. Needless to say, Jack has an attachment to Earth, and even as their tour of duty is two weeks from ending, something keeps him from wanting to leave, including strange memories of the world before his time.

This movie is spoiler-laden, but I will divulge none of it; the film is best enjoyed if you go in blind like I did, and you'll definitely get the most out of it that way. That said, here are the pros and cons of the movie without any specific context that would affect your enjoyment of the film:

First, the pros: it's a great looking movie and really brings its world to life. There are lots of little things that help contribute to the mystery underlying the plot, which is exposed gradually to both the audience and Jack in a satisfactory way, and it eventually adds up rather nicely. There are some minor (easily explained/waived) plot holes....and a lot of what seem initially to be plot holes but aren't. Maybe I'll do a spoiler-laden blog about it in detail later.

Jack Reaper, despite being Tom Cruise, still managed to become a decent character in his own right. I was able at some point to forget it was Tom, and that's not easy with his one-act performance.

Morgan Freeman shows up and manages to kick some serious ass. Good stuff.

The film was overall well-paced and surprisingly coherent. They did a good job of creating a future Earth devastated by the loss of the Moon, subject to some very unpleasant stuff.

The Cons: This movie feels like seventies sci fi for a reason; it's very much a male ego trip. Two primary female leads show up in the course of the movie, and both are there to revolve around Tom...er, Jack's story. Ordinarily this might not be unusual for Summer Hollywood fare, but the truth is that at some point it got a little too obvious that these women were just cyphers for Cruise's...ah., Reaper's masculine destiny. The fact that they were each well-realized but poorly represented characters, waiting for Jack to save them (or not) just got a bit too obvious before the end. On the one hand, I was cool with this....I'm a guy, after all....but on the other hand, this is the twenty-first century, Hollywood. Are you seriously telling me that these two women, one a technically savvy support/comms specialist, and the other a bloody astronaut, had nothing better to do than stand around waiting for Tom to save them? Yeah....right....

Despite the cons, this was a great movie and worth seeing. If you love Tom Cruise then you'll be delighted. Oblivion is a solid A.

Reading Resident Evil: Umbrella Conspiracy and Zero Hour by S.D. Perry

Drinking from the Resident Evil fire hose for the last couple months has been fun. This is a franchise that's a roller-coaster of quality, focus and interest across the board, from movies that appear to be whacked-out psychedelic trips through Alice in Zombie Land on down to the original adventure games full of weird puzzles and the current crop which is high-octane cinematic adventure that, like the films, sometimes requires leaps of logic too vast to span. And then there are the books...

The Resident Evil novel series started many years ago and I recall trying to read them and being unimpressed. I have also learned that almost any opinion of literature (fun or serious) that I had during my nebulous "Seattle years" spanning 1996-2005 is suspect, because during much of that time I was running on empty, literally; I worked a night-shift type job for most of those ten years and rarely got more than 3-4 hours of sleep every night, sometimes for months on end without reprise. I was in a strange relationship with my ex-wife and I often was too fatigued, worried and generally stressed to focus properly on anything. It's a miracle I was able to get anything done during this era.

As a result of this, I've often found that books I tried reading and discarded as too derivative, banal, uninteresting or annoying for whatever reason end up being much better now, in my "nicer years," where I get like...6 whole hours of sleep each night, I have a comfortable 7:30-4:30 PM type job, weekends always free, a wife with whom I have excellent synchronization and a son who is a total joy to raise. So yeah, I sometimes find books that I once dismissed to be actually rather fun.

The Resident Evil novels (not to be confused with the movie novelizations) were written by S.D. Perry and focus on actual adaptations of the original games up through Code: Veronica. There are seven books in the series. S.D. Perry is/was a master at the licensed adaptation, and did a very good job of writing engaging, suspenseful but otherwise lite-reading tales of the Resident Evil universe. I've gotten through two of them so far, will review more as we go along.

Resident Evil: The Umbrella Conspiracy

Umbrella Conspiracy starts with a direct adaptation of the events in the original game. it's a bit rocky, as you might imagine a tale of mercenary cops wandering in a haunted mansion full of zombies solving obscure adventure-style puzzles relying on adventure-game logic might be. We are treated to a bit of "pre-game" lead-in, explaining a bit about who the Special Tactics and Recon Squads (STARS) are, a sort of international mercenary outfit (think Blackwater, I guess) that is employed by Raccoon City to supplement and assist the local police department and is ostensibly also there at the request of Umbrella Corp, the pharmaceutical company that pretty much made Raccoon City what it is. We meet Jill Valentine, Chris Redfield, Rebecca Chambers and Barry Burton, as well as the ever-evil Albert Wesker in the few moments we get to know him before he flips his evil switch on.

This was S.D. Perry's first attempt at a novel outside of her work on the Alien and Alien vs. Predator franchises. It's a bit rough, and she does an admirable job of trying to recast the events of the game in a way that works for fiction. When I originally tried reading this I remember being annoyed at specific details, or just how the story was framed relative to the game, which was much fresher in my mind at the time. Today it's been so long that I'm just impressed that the tale is detailed enough to invoke memories of specific events, locations and characters or creatures from the original! So in that sense it's quite a success. Indeed, if you ever wanted to know what the original was about, but didn't have the endurance, dexterity or temerity to find and plow through the game, this book is more than suited to the task of getting you up to speed.

The most amusing bits about this novelization are the pieces which don't quite "fit" with later canon. Wesker here does indeed go evil somewhere along the way, although his motives and complicity in the process aren't as exaggerated or obvious as they later become in retrospect. He also doesn't technically live to the end....but that's a suitable reveal for when he comes back in the future. Other moments, such as Rebecca Chambers and her experiences in Resident Evil Zero aren't entirely in sync with this novel. But as always one can imagine that a fiction like this is an amalgamation of bits and pieces inevitably corrupted by the unreliable narrator if you wish to reconcile the book with the setting canon.

Still, I enjoyed it. This is light reading, and you could easily give this to your younger reader to enjoy; there's little or nothing in the way of purely mature content that I noticed, while an adult looking for something fun to read over a series of lunch breaks (as I did) will be entertained, if not provoked.

Resident Evil: Zero Hour

Technically Zero Hour is the seventh book in the series, but chronologically it happens just before Umbrella Conspiracy, being an adaptation of Resident Evil Zero, which tells about the fate of Bravo Team, the STARS unit that went in to investigate the mysterious cannibal attacks around the Spencer Mansion just a few hours before Alpha team followed. This is one of the Resident Evil games I didn't play all the way through, for various reasons having to do with my horrendous work schedule, troubled marriage and lack of general time during my years in Seattle, so reading it was a chance to fill in some of the gaps in my RE lore.

Rebecca Chambers is a child genius, who graduated from college by age 17 and was hired on to the STARS as a chemical specialist due to her incredible credentials. Presumably she had interesting aspirations for a teenage girl, or maybe the STARS just pay really well...either way, she is the focus of the tale, along with the wanted criminal and accused murderer Billy Coen, recently escaped from a military police transfer thanks to the freakish luck of passing through the remote mountains right when some serious zombie smack-down starts off.

Zero Hour is focused on explaining a few lingering plot threads from the original tale, namely what happened in the first place to cause the outbreak of the T-Virus. If you thought this was fairly evident (if not exactly spelled out) from the first book/game, then you would be right: until Zero Hour the general assumption was somehow, perhaps due to industrial sabotage or sheer ineptitude the virus was released, causing a lock-down at the Spencer Estate and, as it turns out, a previously unseen Umbrella retreat and research compound.

After Bravo team crashes (no helicopter can survive a Resident Evil tale), they spread out to look for evidence as they wait for a rescue from Alpha team. While Rebecca finds evidence of a private transport train to the compound (coming from Raccoon City, presumably) that's been massacred by something spreading the T-Virus, Billy Coen runs into her and they settle into an uneasy truce to survive against the mysterious horrors that are crawling all over the place. As the two explore the train they find evidence of mutated leeches that seem to cooperate like a hive mind, connected somehow to a mysterious stranger. When the train starts up they find themselves deposited at the Umbrella Retreat and Compound, driven to escape the maddening complex by an unseen foe who is bent on helping and hindering them.

Zero Hour is the seventh book S.D. Perry wrote and it is actually very solid, a better read than Umbrella Conspiracy, despite being subject to the pacing and approach of the game's story line. The net result is a more coherent read, and a chance to see what Rebecca was up to prior to her arriving at the Spencer Mansion and running into Chris Redfield. It also helps to set her up for further adventures in the next novel, Caliban Cove (which I shall review next week). I definitely suggest reading it immediately after Umbrella Conspiracy, and not before, despite it being a prequel; it meshes better this way, as the inconsistencies in the timeline caused by Capcom's monkeying with jamming this story line in to the mix are more tolerable with a retrospective approach than trying to reconcile them after the fact. Put another way; Umbrella Conspiracy makes for better reading if you follow up with Zero Hour rather than the other way around. Zero Hour is definitely an improvement all across the board, and worth checking out.

Next up is Caliban Cove, the second novel in the series, and an original story which takes place between Umbrella Conspiracy and City of the Dead (the adaptation of Resident Evil 2). I'm halfway through it right now, but S.D. Perry's chance to shine with an original story is already my favorite. But I shall save details for another batch of reviews next week!

Bad Movie Monday: Vicious Lips

Vicious Lips (1986)

Free of the need to review only horror films (or films that are allegedly horror) I have turned my attention to more random Netflix goodness...or, ah, badness in this case!

Vicious Lips is the tale of a young woman's dreams realized as she becomes a glam-rock singer in an all-girl band about to go big time. Judy Jetson is a fine singer, and is on open mike night at some random dive when she is "discovered" by band agent Matty Asher, who is looking for a new singer for his band the Vicious Lips, after the late lead singer Ace Lucas (amusingly called Ape Lucas in the IMDB credits but I'm pretty sure throughout the film they were calling her Ace) gets hit by a bus or something (wipes out on her motorcycle? Not sure...it all happens off-camera). Oh, and this is all happening somewhere in Spaaaaaace. You see, it's the postmodern retropunk future, the world of the future as imagined through the grainy lens and poor quality set pieces of a 1980's adventure flick.

Where Radioactive Dreams Are Made

Here's the crazy plot of this in a nutshell. This movie is from 1986 so spoilers and all that, in case you care:

Judy Jetson's singing talent is picked up by the Vicious Lips when their cooky trouble-making, double-dealing talent agent discovers her. The rest of the band is like any other 80's era Poofy-hair glam-rock girl band from the 80's....transposed into the 2180's, that is! Or sometime in the future, anyway.

Shortly after their first gig (the music, for 80's style stuff, is pretty good and the segments where they play are done like live-filmed music videos) Matty the agent gets a call from the space-godmistress of rock, a woman who is established in the opening shot of the film to be ruthless and either so influential she can make a man shoot himself or, possibly, she's psychic and can mind control or telekinetically manipulate people. Either way we never see this parlor trick again. Anyway, she has a big event and an opening, so she calls in the Vicious Lips.

With hair like that....I'd stay away from open flames; Ironically everyone in this movie is smoking, constantly

The place for the gig is across SPACE which means a ship is needed, and Matty decides its cheaper to steal a spaceship rather than pay for one. So they do. Coincidentally it's the ship that a serial killer who was known to have "killed 5,000 women" is stowed on board. A serial killer who, as it turns out, looks like a cannibal ape man from Planet of the Apes.

Anyway, the ship is underway, the girls do their thing in classic meandering 80's style fashion (what I have come to realize is "running out the film" or something) when Matty, also a bad pilot, fails to notice his snarky computer screen warnings about an asteroid collision. Bam! Down they go, crash-landing on a desert world.

Matty goes for help....and wanders away to be found, delirious and dehydrated, by to sexy robo-women (I think this is the spot where someone realized that they needed a bit more nudity in the film or something...it being an 80's production and all; up to this point the only nudity has been a triple-breasted alien chick, showcasing several years before Total Recall. Who knew?!?!?

Anyway, the girls hang out on the wrecked ship waiting for help until they get goofy and somehow almost let out the serial killer by accident, before coming to their senses. But too late! He's figured out an escape anyway.

The ship is resting on a dune precipice, and the merry dash to avoid being caught and killed (or eaten) leads to it sliding down the dunes and crashing into an old buried ruin....of the Pleasure Planet complex, apparently. Now the girls escape into this complex, haunted by their mysterious patron, a variety of retropunk undead guys--not retro for the time, mind you; contemporary for 1986, which says a lot about what the 80's thought would survive to the future, culturally, and how it would look; ah, how I don't miss the decade...much!

A lot of nonsense goes on involving zombie punksters, a sudden appearance of the late Ace Lucas, more ape-man serial killer madness and then finally we get to the end when it turns out that Judy Jetson had passed out during her much more normal and uneventful visit to the place where they will be performing for the big time, and a "you were there...and you were there...and even YOU were there, mister Ape Man!" moment essentially transpires. And they all live happily ever after.

It can be hard to tell how much of the plot was intended or accidental when the movie is full of no-name actors, poor quality sound, bad acting, and a muddy plot that starts off as a "girl band gets discovered" tale, quickly migrates to a "road trip in space becomes disaster film meets serial killer" adventure and then ends up being an allegorical tale of Oz. I was genuinely perplexed if they were making this all up as they went along, or if they were actually sticking to a plan.

The Vicious Lips

See this movie if you:

1. Love HUGE FRIZZY HAIR everywhere

2. Like badly rendered derivative "Oz" films

3. Have a fetishistic taste for the wacky glam-rock vs. punk scene of the mid eighties. Like me.

4. Would like to hear a couple decent songs amidst all the carnage.

5. Love watching movies with classic-era badly done shaky starships-on-strings effects.

6. Want to see a triple-breasted woman in a movie several years BEFORE Total Recall.

A perfectly good C for the 80's, although I'd rate this a D- if something like it was spewed out today. It's the kind of film that could only have been made when it came out....any attempt to make a movie like this today would be missing practically every oozing chunk of 80's culture and pseudo-movie-logic necessary for it to work.

Pleasurebots of the Desert World

Thirty One Days of Horror: Silent Hill - Revelation

Day Thirty One: Silent Hill - Revelation

Holy cow, I made it. Blogging random topical stuff related to one's particular interests is one thing. Setting out to specifically meet a quota (for fun and not profit, admittedly) is something else. Still, it was worth it, and the fun in reviewing films for a month has taught me that I ought to do this more often. It's fun to analyze movies, to wonder about what they did right as well as how and why things might have gone horribly wrong.

Speaking of which, Silent Hill Revelation is up next! I ponied up for a 3D matinee showing (so, about $11) and saw it today. I was the only one in the theater on a 5:10 PM showing. Pity horror movies don't scare me anymore, that could have been cool.

In fair disclosure, I forgot to mention that my review of Resident Evil: Retribution was for a standard (non 3D) version and I saw it in a discount theater for $2. By contrast, Silent Hill Revelations was full (matinee) price and was in 3D. As usual, no movie I've seen in 3D since Avatar has been worth the extra few bucks. Also, I would have been less annoyed at this movie if I'd waited to see it for $2 as well....my bad. Wife and kid are out of town for a few days again, had to seize the opportunity while I could!



Watching all these Resident Evil movies as well as Silent Hill Revelations has made me realize what might be going on in the development cycle of game-to-film design. I think it starts something like this:

Studio lands a deal for using the game IP. Marketing howls in triumph.

Early on, game studio hands over the game, the art assets and script used to develop said game. The people picked for set design, costuming and FX go hog wild with the amazing assets laid out for them. This wasn't always so; there was a time (when games still looked like ass and our imaginations filled in the cracks) that the team poo-poo'd the assets and did their own thing, enraging the fans.

The script writers are handed copies of the game and maybe the development script and assets used for the "story" part of the game. It's not in a format that they can assimilate from their screenwriting experience, and they chuck it. Someone is tasked with playing the game, but he's not really one of those "gamers" so he hands the game off to his son, who plays it and when his dad asks for a summary he copies and pastes the summary of the plot from Wikipedia. Second possibility: no one bothers to play the game because it requires too much attention for hopped-up Hollywood to bother so they just cut straight to Wikipedia.

Someone reads the Wiki and culls out all the stuff that makes no sense without context. Then they paste in the stuff that generations of film writing have burned into their heads must be in any film for a perceived demographic.

"This has monsters in it that look sort of like Pinhead. Oh, look at all the pictures of rusted metal and torture instruments, maybe its more of a Saw movie. Hey, the Wiki says there's a cult in town, lets get a metric ass ton of extras to run around populating this place as cultists. What's with the fog? I dunno, the wiki doesn't say much. Let's explain it as ash coming down from a burning coal mine, like that story I read about on Cracked.com. Yeah, that's the ticket."

"What's that fog horn noise? Hey, it must be a fog horn because, you know--fog. Or better yet, one of those old air raid alarms. Who's this triangle-headed dude? Oh, he's...um...pyramid head. The wiki doesn't say much about him. These nurse monsters? I dunno, but wouldn't it be cool if they were all, like, twitchy and stuff when they sensed movement? And it gives the FX guy a chance to hobnob with those models for, like, hours while they slather on that makeup."

The end of development gets close. "Will this appeal to the fans? Sure, we've gotten all the characters named in the game to look like they do in the art stills. But will it appeal to the millions of people who've never even heard of a Silent Hill game? Yeah, we've added in a love interest, and this game's pure gold because its protagonist is an 18 year old girl who's all about being an outcast, so we've got the Twilight crowd element in there. And we've got the father figure for all the old farts who played this game when it was new. Oh, and we've got lots of sudden shocks and spooks and thrills, because we heard that was really big in the game. What...that was Resident Evil? This game was all about psychological horror and shared purgatories? What does that even mean? Hell, it's not like we've got David Lynch directing, anyway! Well, doesn't matter, and it's also not like we're filming hours of someone walking around in fog, right? Bwah hah hah!!!"




And on it goes. The end result is someone who has parsed out a Cliff's Notes version of their target product, glued on art assets to make it look cool, and then filmed the thing. Meanwhile, no one has noticed or tried to understand what anyone who's played and enjoyed the original games are talking about when they refer to psychological horror. There's no connection between the imagery, the monsters, and the subtle underpinnings of deep psychological trauma made manifest in a dark purgatory that is a shadowy mirror of the minds of its trapped victims made real.

They're best hope now is that the movie, which they are already sure will be picked apart by its pedantic, obsessive fans, will instead grab the actual casual movie-going crowd that wants to see a scary movie.

To help this crowd understand, Silent Hill Revelations front-loads a metric ton of plot exposition in the first twenty or thirty minutes. You will not have to guess about what's going on or why. The absolutely bizarre and disturbing elements of the game series in which the player can often make it through the entire game and still not be entirely sure of what happened on that first play through is gone here; it's spelled out so plainly that they might as well have shown a 3D mallet beating it into our skulls. The plot, by the way, is fairly similar to (based on) Silent Hill 3, and in principle it is a fair modeling of said plot....with the caveat that the depiction of said plot was derived entirely from the screen writers using the Wiki to summarize it.

I tried to think about whether this movie was enjoyable from the angle of someone who had no familiarity with the games. It was kind of hard to tell, to be honest; the horror was there, but they periodically threw in hapless victims that Heather, the lead character, stumbles across specifically so she can see them get dismembered. Heather is a decent character here, and I do feel that they nailed, fairly accurately, the onscreen version of the same protagonist from Silent Hill 3. But everyone around her? Horribly two dimensional, put in specifically because the people making this film appear to understand shock horror and splatterpunk gore far better than they understand the more subtle and disturbing undercurrent of gnosticism that powers the Silent Hill universe.




The movie throws a couple fun bones out at the end....if fun means "painful teasers for the small chunk of the audience that actually played all the games," with a quick introduction of the truck driver Travis Grady (from Silent Hill: Origins) and a quick shot of a prison transport that is no doubt transporting Murphy Pendleton from Silent Hill Downpour on board. Surprised we didn't see a lone war vet heading home at the same time, or a guy sitting in a room somewhere, for good measure. The movie also keeps Harry Mason alive all the way to the end, where he stays in Silent Hill to look for his lost wife. A vague, half-hearted allusion to Silent Hill 2? Maybe.

Unfortunately this movie was just more annoying than funny, unlike the hysterical Resident Evil films which won out by virtue of sheer audacity. It was sort of fun to watch, but just not as much as a better film with more effort would have been.  I give it a C-, because it clearly had so much potential, but the only way that a good Silent Hill film will be made is if someone were to talk Guillermo del Toro or David Lynch into doing it. Then, maybe....just maybe....we might get a movie worth seeing.

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Thirty One Days of Horror: Resident Evil: Retribution

Day Thirty: Resident Evil: Retribution

Oh my Zombie Gods but do I have a lot to say about this movie! I'll get this out of the way real quick: SPOILER ALERT. Spoilers all over the place. Spoilers, Spoilers, Spoilers. SPOILERS!

You know what the difference is between bad movies thirty years ago and bad movies today? Bad movies today can (and often do) look like damned good movies, and are often still fun to watch, especially if you watch them drunk, or while suffering a mild concussion or something.

Resident Evil: Retribution manages to be a movie that infuriated, annoyed, confused, irritated, excited and thrilled me all at the same time. I was simultaneously flabbergasted at the movie's brazen and highly tenuous train of logic (yes, even after marathoning the first four last September! Even after watching Deep Space!) and still enjoying this movie like the action movie porn it truly is. Resident Evil: Retribution, despite a couple brilliantly horror-like moments, has all but shed its horror roots and embraced a world of high-tech post-apocalyptic zombie action super hero adventures. It is arguably beating the video games in terms of sheer, unadulterated brazenness. And I just finished the Leon Kennedy campaign for Resident Evil 6, too.....

I remember a time when video game inspired films were pathetic in their poor embrace of the admittedly loose source material. Now we have video game inspired films which make the video game designers look like boring, unimaginative people who need to learn to think outside the box.

(That might be a bit harsh...RE 6 has some moments that make the movie logic look downright spotless comparatively, but more on that in the RE 6 review...heh....)

Okay, enough general exposition! Time to talk about this movie and it's...uhhh....plot?

When we left Alice at the end of RE: Afterlife she had liberated a secret Umbrella ship called Arcadia from the tyrranical grip of Evil Wesker, with the help of Chris and Claire Redfield. Then a literal army of VTOL attack craft loaded with umbrella goons led by a mind-controlled Jill Valentine show up to crash the party.

Cut to RE: Retribution! We open with a slow-motion reverse of the first minute of the conflict, followed by a lengthy and rather elaborate narration by Alice which serves little purpose other than to remind the casual viewer of what the hell happened in the last four movies and how it may or may not relate to what the viewing audience, like test rats, are about to be exposed to. Then it opens up on the neighborhood from Dawn of the Dead (the remake) complete with fast zombies and everything. In fact, I have to say that the zombies get faster and faster with every RE movie. Alice is apparently waking from a bad dream in Raccoon City Suburbia, married to the Umbrella agent from Resident Evil: Apocalypse and with a daughter who is deaf. Then zombies attack and Alice does a fairly good job of escaping, aided by her friend who appears to be a civilian version of Michelle Rodriguez's character Rain from the first movie. Then Alice wakes up, sort of, in a very large and extravagant Umbrella torture/interrogation chamber.

We're about ten or fifteen minutes in here, just so ya know.

So Jill Valentine, still being controlled by a red gem-thing on her chest (which, for what it's worth, is as inexplicable in the games as it is in this film) interrogates and tortures Alice. Actually, I think she's trying to brainwash her into being an Umbrella agent again. Actually, I am not sure what they want from Alice, but I do know that the real purpose of this scene was to demonstrate yet another semi-nude scene of Alice in a two-piece smock just like she wore in the first two films.

Rule 34 dictates that somewhere someone is selling "Resident Evil Umbrella Medical Gowns" online and people like me are risking dismemberment by asking their wives and/or girlfriends to wear them

So after a bit something odd happens; security goes down, Alice's weapons and black body stocking Death Agent of Umbrella uniform appears, and she finds herself escaping...first from yet another reprisal of the laser grid trap from the first movie. My complaints about how in the hell this trap works in the review of that film seem quaint compared to the Escher painting logic that subsequent movies have taught me to expect. But that's neither here nor there....she escapes and finds herself in Tokyo, right before the imminent zombie apocalypse is about to trip, exactly as it appeared at the start of RE: Afterlife. Then of course the zombie apocalypse hits and Alice gets a'killin.

Before long, the game...er, the movie throws its first major twist in: it may not seem like a huge twist to people who have not played the game, but trust me, if you're a fan of the games this is HUGE: Ada Wong shows up! That's not the twist, though. Nope, the twist is: Ada Wong explain everything. Well, almost everything....but she effectively outlines exactly what's going on and why; she provides more plot dialogue, exposition and explanation in a few minutes on film than she has ever done in in 15 years of video games. In fact, Ada's main job in the game universe has been to show up and confound the plot. Here she serves primarily to help make sense of things. Holy crap!

Macho Women With Guns

Ada explains she's here to bust Alice out of Umbrella's aquatic kingdom of evil ruled by the evil computer the Red Queen herself (or maybe a copy of her, since she did blow up in a nuclear firestorm in RE: Apocalypse). It seems Alice is once again very important....and Ada's external ally is ...get ready for it!.....Evil Wesker!!!!! Except maybe he's not evil now. I miss evil Wesker (fear not, he's just feigning not-evilness, luckily). Instead, the Red Queen is the evil one, engaged in endless experiments on clones with monsters to find increasingly more devious ways of destroying all humanity.

So Ada, directed by Wesker (who's video-phoning in his part of the plot) explain that an ancient aquatic North Pole Soviet Military station that was purchased and repurposed by Umbrella Corp. as a distributor of biowarfare weapons as well as a place to demonstrate them by....wow, I can't believe I'm not making this up....by cloning armies of civilians, populating entire replica domes of major cities across the world with said clones, and then breeding and releasing various monsters that are then used to test their overall effectiveness on these vast numbers of clones (that are embedded with flash memories) in the simulated cities. You know- to help establish product placement for out-of-control biogenic weapons that do everything from create zombies to spontaneously mutate said zombies into tyrant super soldiers and more. That's hard to demonstrate without a super-secret James Bondian underwater super lab, apparently. Hoo yah.

I apologize to the mad scientist from RE: Extinction at this point; clearly he was more in tune with the Red Queen's goals than the rest of Umbrella.

Anyway, Ada has allies. It turns out one is Barry (lifted from Resident Evil 1....I still can't say for sure if he is canonically alive in the video games or not), another Luther West, one of the survivors from RE: Afterlife (but in keeping with tradition all characters not directly taken from the movie except for Alice die in the second film they appear in), and then there's Leon Kennedy (not that I figured this out until late in the movie when I heard him called Leon). So Leon's Mirror-Alice-Universe twin finally gets some screen time. At least he's in a film with both Jill (who he doesn't seem to know here) and Ada (whom he's got a thing for).

Take note that at no point do we find out where Chris and Claire Redfield went at the end of the last film. So Luther West somehow survived and made buddies with Leon, Barry and "unnamed destined to die" guys, but Chris and Claire? Who knows.

Alice explains to Leon who the real protagonist is in Aliceverse

The movie proceeds to burn along at a fearsome pace as Ada and Alice try to escape one simulated city full of clone victims and monsters after another, while the guys (some of whom are unfortunate enough to be there only to die, of course) do the same, including having an encounter with the Las Plagas. The tentacle-faced monstrosities, you say? No! The Las Plagas, as if their existence wasn't already muddied by RE: Afterlife's inexplicable introduction of the tentacle-claw face-sprouting zombies (as well as the Really Big Dude with an Axe) wasn't confusing enough, these Las Plagas are actually an army of zombie-soviet-Nazi-soldiers complete with suits, armor and gear that looks like more Soviet-purchased surplus. Or something.

Luckily I have very, very little hair or it would be easier to pull out. Oh my god. Seriously. Here they had a chance to explain or at least rationalize the existence of the Los Plagas and the unmentioned G Virus in the RE-Mirror Aliceverse and instead somebody says, "We need something that can have a cool shoot-out with Leon, Barry and Luther. How about umbrella goons? Naw, we've been shooting a hell of a lot of them, and they're the ones duking it out with Ada and Alice over here...I know! Zombie soldiers with guns!"

Indeed, not only has Alice found the simulated Raccoon City zone (because on the list of major locales to simulate for purposes of bioweapon sales I'd put Raccoon City right next to New York, Moscow and Tokyo) but she's found yet another victim clone of herself, and a daughter she never had but now decides to fiercely protect. Actually this is a pretty good plot twist, second only to dropping Ada in as a center of plot exposition.

Cloned versions of the entire Umbrella crew from the first movie then show up, led by Evil Jill, and a lengthy shoot-out ensues. At this point I am loathe to spoil too much more, if only because the majority of the film at this point is one long scene-changing gunfight, mixed with a few bizarre moments (which I will happily point out!). In order:

A major Resident Evil monster reappears, this time in a deluxe super-size edition: the licker is back, and he's damned big.

Barry is Schrodinger's STARS agent in both the RE-verse and Aliceverse, apparently. 

Barry dies toward the end, so in the Aliceverse we know he's dead. That makes Barry the first official "named" character to be extracted messily from the games who is actually dead in Aliceverse.

Alice finds yet another clone processing plant, and this time it's not just mass-generating clones of her, but of her brand new deaf foster daughter and 48 other flash-cloned souls that I guess the Red Queen took a liking to. Luckily the super-licker chases Alice here and she is forced to blow it and all the clones up with official Umbrella grenades. Not so luckily I kept wondering why the goal of the movie was the assisted escape of Alice when siezing the facility and freeing a vast number of clones who, while still clones, could in theory do a fine job of rebooting the decimated world popuation....but as I've learned from the other movies one does not overthink how the Aliceverse works.

Next time Jill should avoid shopping at Jared's of Umbrella Corp. for jewelry

We do finally get A showdown between Jill and Alice. Alice almost loses this one, sort of. Jill is finally released from the control of the Red Queen, which is a good thing I guess, although I have to admit, Jill's relevance to the plot outside of just sorta "being there" is a bit difficult to fathom.

We also get a showdown between Leon and Luther vs. whatever clone edition of Rain this is....this is a clone of Rain from the first movie who's much more effective at being an Umbrella goon. She pulls out an injector with a Las Plagas parasite (bwuh?!?!?!?!) and injects it (an impressive feat since the needle looked kinda small to inject the bug in the syringe.) As is traditional in both the game universe and the Aliceverse the virus works near-instantaneously, except here it just makes Rain really, really badass.

What....

Michelle looked and acted like she was here for the money throughout this movie

Okay, so everyone fights a lot and in the end Alice and crew escape, to live happily ever after, right? Hah!

 The real surprise at the end is just how they close it out with whatever new, spanky insane ending will set the stage for the next film. If you still want some semblance of surprise, stop reading, because I have absolutely got to spoil it:

They fly to Washington D.C. to a White House under siege (looks like the one in Modern Warfare 2...or was it 3?) and Alice is allowed to enter the Oval Office. At this moment I was expecting them to rip off Resident Evil 6 with an appearance by Zombie President, but No! They did one better! It's EVIL Wesker!!!! He's the president now....or something....and he injects Alice with the T-virus, again, explaining that he needs her hopped up on T-Virus mojo so she can help deal with the last stand of humanity. Cut to the scene outside, as Wesker, Jill, Leon, Luther, little girl and Alice all gather to look out on an insane scene of full military action as the US Army barricades the White House in against a vast, unending army of darkness, led by the Red Queen to exterminate all humanity. RE: Extinction apparently exaggerated how far long the extinction process was, I guess.

The forty-one year old Me was simultaneously apoplectic at how nonsensical this movie was while the thirteen year old Me was ready to drop golden bricks in sheer excitement at how Freakin' Awesome this movie was.

I don't even know what the hell to make of this series anymore, and I can't even think about the plot or the point of it all without feeling like I bruised my brain. I do know that I will see the next one, and I do plan to be mildly inebriated when I do so I can enjoy it a bit more without wanting to wave my fists like a lunatic madman at the screen!

B+ for the sheer spectacle and over-the-top action porn. Giant freaking F for coherence, but who cares anymore? This movie's Alice is well and truly down the zombie rabbit hole!

Thirty One Days of Horror: Silent Hill

Day Twenty Nine: Silent Hill

Aside from Resident Evil I'm a big Silent Hill fan. I thought about doing an overview but then decided that it would be more fun to look first at the original that started it all.

Silent Hill started on the Playstation One as a horror game much in the same style and feel of Resident Evil, but with a murky plot in which you are Harry Mason, an otherwise ordinary fellow it would seem, who loses his daughter after he nearly runs off the road while swerving to avoid a little girl. After county officer Cybil Bennett find him, Harry realizes he needs to find his daughter in the nearby mist-shrouded town of Silent Hill.

Naturally, after a qausi-dreamlike event in which Harry is ripped apart by demonic child-things he finds himself in the inexplicably abandoned town, and begins his search. As he does, reality seems to twist and fold, as he finds himself shunted in and out of the dreamlike purgatory that overlaps with Silent Hill in an effort to find his daughter Cheryl and figure out how she is connected to another mysterious girl who seems to haunt the town. Amidst all this truly malevolent and disturbing monsters (well, for the time this came out they were disturbing, anyway) haunt the town, and make like very difficult for Harry.



Ultimately the storyline proves to be fairly complicated, involving an ancient god, a young vessel, and a soul split in two, with the threat of reincarnation/rebirth forcing the ancient evil to manifest and....well, the game has multiple endings, and the what/why/how of it all can vary quite a bit depending on how well you fare in playing through.

Silent Hill's design was effective and easy enough for the time it came out, though the pre-analog controls are frustrating now. It was notable for its time in that it employed "realistic" character management; you can get winded after sprinting, for example, or take damage that impacts your character's behavior. Later games would expand upon this and make it eponymous with the series trying hard to distinguish it's protagonist as more realistic, in contrast with most video game portrayala.



Silent Hill was the first truly good horror game to come out on the Playstation One, barring Resident Evil, which despite being the first survival horror game was still infused with a bit of the action and adventure element; you could get scared or surprised with shock while playing Resident Evil, sure; but Silent Hill, when it was new, could disturb and frighten you on a much deeper level. It's almost infamous for its imagery, mood, ambient noise and foreboding. There's always a suspicion that something is "not quite right" both in the town and with those trapped there, including Harry. Later games expand greatly upon this and to great effect (especially Silent hill 2, which managed to exceed the high bar the first one set).

Silent Hill today is available on the Playstation network for download (I replayed it on a PSP but theoretically it might be playable on the PS Vita or PS3, I imagine). It's an A+++ game by all rights,  and if you are willing to overlook the dated control scheme and graphics its still better than most horror games out there (and most Silent Hill games after #2, as well).