Frezno's Games Of The 2019 Thing!

Ahh. Now that was a hiatus well-earned. Things are going to get real busy around here in the new year, both because the Doctor Who First Impressions are coming back and because of yet another massive screed about a utopian idealistic show. So yeah. Did you expect anything less of me? You know the drill at this point, which brings us to the topic of the moment: Games I Played In 2019! I've kept a record of all the stuff I played, and now that the year is all but dusted I'm going to talk about them. Some of them are great, some of them were bad, some of them... just kind of okay and mentioned in passing. Get yourself like, a coffee or something, and let me tell you about my Games Of The Year for 2019. It'll be fun. No, really. I promise.

(WORST) GAME OF THE YEAR 2019

Biolab Wars (Switch)

I almost feel bad for putting a spotlight on this poor little thing. It was only 2 dollars on the Switch Eshop, it's about an hour long, and thanks to the gold coins I technically didn't pay for it. Nevertheless, it was still really quite bad. On the surface, it looks to be sort of a Contra-esque game, but the vibe I got was a little more Mega Man with a deliberate focus on slower platforming challenges. It's hard to express the disappointment of this game without just letting one experience it, but I will try. It uses B to jump and A to shoot, which just feels awkward on a Switch controller and led to a lot of crossed wires and confusion. More to the point, it just does not feel good to play. It's very limited with its weapons, and things soak up just enough damage that they always manage to get a strike off towards you first. It is a slog, through and through, and for that it earns the stinker award. Not a game I'll be going back to any time soon...

BEST "ABOUT DAMN TIME" GAME OF 2019

Resident Evil 4 (Wii)

14 years. It's been 14 damn years since this game came out and haunted me for very personal reasons, but I have at last managed to blast my way through it. I have to say, it's quite the excellent little gem and still holds up. There may be a naysayer or two telling me the Wii version is the baby easy version and I didn't "really" beat it, but to them I cite the Battletoads Defense. I beat Battletoads. I earned this. Giving me the precision to aim my gun with my own arm helped me get good at this in a tangible way I could really feel, but it never felt too easy at the same time. Okay, so maybe I made the final boss a chump by saving that other rocket launcher for it, but other than that. This game didn't get its legendary status of having revolutionized character action games for no reason, after all. 14 years on, it still holds up and was one hell of a wild ride that I'm glad to have caught up with at long last. Speaking of...

BEST RPG OF 2019

Tales Of Symphonia (PS3)

Ah, at long last. This is the game that my pals stopped playing with me during our meetups because Resident Evil 4 came out. To polish them both off within six months of each other is cathartic. At its core, Tales Of Symphonia is a fairly good action RPG that felt more like a strategy game for me at times, swapping between the characters all by myself to queue up spells and whatnot. Story-wise, it's a whole other thing that really resonated with me. Not to give too much of this 15 year-old game away, but it very much is about the organized systems of this world all conspiring together to serve the petty whims of a privileged few. Thousands of years of suffering, torture, death, and false hope, all propagated by the hands of one masterminding asshole with noble intentions turned to bitter rage. Tearing it all the fuck down was satisfying as shit. Really, what else is there to say? If I haven't spoiled too much already, it's worth a go around.

HARDEST GAME OF 2019

Mega Man ZX Hard Mode (DS)

We're running with a bit of a theme, here, as we hit the third entry in a row that's "I did something I should have done a long time ago". Mega Man ZX is, frankly, the game that made me want to get good at playing hard games. I'd like to think I partly succeeded in that goal, but I had never actually cleared the game that started it all on its hardest difficulty setting. There's good reason for that, as Hard Mode ZX doesn't fuck around. You have a piddly little lifebar where you can take all of three hits, and there are no heart tanks to boost it. You have to beat the game with that, and you can only find one energy tank to boot. It was grueling and meticulous, learning boss patterns and playing cat and mouse with each of them to eke out a victory. Then I had to take them all on in sequence and beat a multi-phase final boss. Needless to say, my heart was pounding out of my chest when I pulled that off. I'm proud to have put a cap in a personally resonant hard game, and I'm really looking forward to the Zero/ZX Collection on Switch in February.

BEST "NEW OLD" GAME OF 2019

Blazing Chrome (Switch)

Why in the holy hell did I buy Biolab Wars in December for my Contra-like fix when Blazing Chrome was right the hell there for me in July? I'm so glad it was, too, because this game is the legit shit. I cannot believe there was a world where I considered buying the "official" Contra game released in 2019. This thing blows it out of the water. The "loving tribute" games usually manage to pull off this quite well, and when you add the track record of developers Joymasher (who created the also excellent Oniken and Odallus), you've got one hell of a Contra-like on your hands. Aesthetically it will remind a Contra fan of Contra Hard Corps, which is a very good game! Blazing Chrome is also that, but I'd probably rather play Blazing Chrome if we're being honest. Gorgeous pixel art, great run and gun action, and a game that's hard but not too hard. Holy hell I loved this thing. I got to go through it on co-op a while back with a friend as well, and it was a good revisit that held up just as well as the initial plays in the summer. Like ZX, it's a game I was more than happy to put the work into to get good at. Maybe one day I'll put more into it and do its hard mode, but for now I'm good.

BEST GAME ACCOMPLISHMENT OF 2019

Metroid Zero Mission All Endings (Game Boy Advance)

Alright, look. For years I kind of gave Zero Mission the side-eye because I loved the original game and this felt to me like it was stripping away the ambiance to homogenize it into a Super Metroid-like (because Metroid Must Be Alike). Turns out AM2R was the one I had to be worried about for doing that, but then a friend of mine started doing this challenge for themselves. I was intrigued and had never done it before, so I dusted off my copy and set about doing it myself. What I found was quite a lot of depth and intrigue in how I had to plan things. Getting 100% on a time limit meant mapping things out and plotting optimal order of item acquisition. Getting a lower time meant knowing what to grab and when was best to grab it. The game accomodates this at at every turn, even if it seems impossible at first. I still adore the ambiance and spookiness of the NES original, but I have to say that Zero Mission sold me on its merits after I played it eight times in various challenging ways. Not a replacement for the NES game, but still very good and incredibly well-designed. I'm happy I pulled this off.

BEST "BABY STEPS, I'M GETTING THERE" GAMES OF 2019

Fire Emblem Echoes & Fire Emblem The Sacred Stones (3DS/Game Boy Advance)

So this one requires some setup. In March 2018 I impulse bought Fire Emblem Echoes, a game in a series I never really got into in the past. I wrote a bit of a thing about me liking it but then never actually finished the game, stopping about... 60% into it, maybe? It actually got a special section at the end of last year's GOTY list called "The Unfinished". Well, I dusted it off and powered through this year, but it was on Casual Mode so I didn't have the nail-biting hell of permanent death hanging over me. Still, it got me into the right mindset, and I played another Fire Emblem game I remembered liking and getting far into; The Sacred Stones. This one does have the permanent death, but you can also level grind in between battles. I really enjoyed Sacred Stones, and I amassed a pretty good murder squad by the end of it. This category exists to highlight these two, and how their graceful concessions to Fire Emblem's perceived hard edge helped me to get my foot in the door. I should mention I also bought Three Houses on impulse this year, but only played an hour of it. I did, however, start it on Classic Mode. Maybe 2020 will see me further break through this hard game barrier and really enjoy this series. We'll see, but for now, special thanks to the two esoteric, weird, and easy ones.

BEST CO-OP GAMES OF 2019

Monster Hunter World & Stardew Valley (PS4/Switch)

Games can be extra special when you play them with friends, and these two very good games got rocketed up to that extra special status thanks to that. We'll start with Stardew Valley since I did that first. I played this game exclusively in co-op over the summer with one of my best friends from high school. Every week, on his two days off, we'd set aside a few hours to play together and co-run a farm. Laying back on the couch in the cool basement on a warm summer night, Switch laid out in portable mode on the table while the tablet with a voice chat active sat on the floor beneath me so we could talk as we played. I ended up focusing most of my time in Stardew Valley on fishing, since the load of running the farm was shared between us. What all this ended up doing was making Stardew Valley an incredibly soothing unwind after a hard and hot summer day. I could kick back, get away from the heat and the work, and just fish on a pier while talking to a good friend. Stardew Valley almost made Game Of The Year for that alone, so you can believe that this was incredibly important to me. The same friend later gifted me his old PS4 for my birthday, and I got myself a copy of Monster Hunter World with it. Now, by contrast, this is not a relaxing game. It's high-paced action with deadly shit that wants to kill you, but I played what I could solo. When I couldn't or didn't want to deal with the harder stuff myself, that's where friend assistance came in. It gave us a fall routine, not unlike our Stardew Valley fun, and it also helped me grow stronger in the game. I did beat some of the tougher challenges in Monster Hunter World all on my own, including the final boss. As of this writing I have yet to delve into the Iceborne expansion, but that will come in due time. For now, I want to sit back and relax as I thank my pals for their generosity, and making these two lovely games stand out that much more with their help.

GAME OF THE YEAR 2019

Sayonara Wild Hearts (Switch)

My criteria for Game Of The Year has always been a game that fills me with a particular positive emotion. Love, friendship, inspiration. You know. Sappy shit like that. Emotional resonance is the key to winning my heart and being the best computer game I played in a year, and Sayonara Wild Hearts is filled to the brim with that. Even before you get there, though, the presentation is absolutely stunning. Its gameplay is part rhythm game, part fast-paced dodging and weaving action reminscent of a certain Turbo Tunnel from a certain infamous hard game. All of this is conveyed with bright and stylished visuals, giving the game its own unique feel... but, let's get right to it. Sayonara Wild Hearts lands because of that incredible soundtrack. Its soundtrack is almost an album unto its own, merely using the medium of games and going fast on a motorbike or flying tarot card in space to tell a moving and inspiring story about loss and love, heartbreak and healing, regret and remembrance. It is simply beautiful, and helping matters for my own personal resonance is the fact that the game was suggested to me by quite the special person. Finishing Sayonara Wild Hearts, on vacation and away from that person while also reminded of them thanks to this stylish video game we could bond over when I got home? That was something truly special. I can't thank you enough for convincing me to get this game, and I hope I've convinced you at home to give it a shot as well. It's every resonant thing I could want in a game, and it easily earns Game Of The Year for me.

...AND THE REST

It's fun to make up categories for very special games, but sometimes there are runners-up that could also fill that category. Sometimes there are games you can't easily categorize quite like that. Sometimes a game was just okay, but not bad enough to be ignored on one of these lists. That's where And The Rest comes in, to highlight the rest of the interesting experiences I had this year. These games aren't lesser, and some of them are better than some of the things that got categories, but... well I'm not going through it all again. Let's roll them!

Splatoon/Splatoon 2 (Wii U/Switch)

Yeah. I played some Splatoon this year. It's neat. I paid for a used copy of the original Splatoon years ago but only had a CRT, so I didn't get much use out of it. I dusted it off and played some multiplayer, and found it was interesting. Then I did the Octo Valley campaign and enjoyed its style enough to grab Splatoon 2 on the Switch. I haven't touched the Octo Expansion or any single-player, but I did manage to have good times in a few of the Splatfests before they ended. I'm not great at Splatoon or anything, but it served a fun little purpose a handful of times this year.

Mega Man X6 (PS1)

I wrote a whole thing about this... interesting experience back in January. I still don't know if it was a bad game, or if I played it badly. It's such a strange specimen of a mainline Mega Man game, and it's wild to compare it to ZX's Hard Mode. Their difficulties are nothing alike, but since X6 was one of the only computer games to get a deep dive write-up from me this year, I figured it deserved a slot down here. Good work, you... strange game, you.

Blaster Master Zero 2 (Switch)

I enjoyed Blaster Master Zero for what it was in 2018; a very good re imagining/retelling of a B-list NES game with fancy bells and whistles. Blaster Master Zero 2 is more of that, and though the mists of time have obscured a lot of the specifics of what made it great, I do remember it being solid enough to be worth playing, and thus solid enough to get on this list. Nice one, Inti Creates.

Gato Roboto (Switch)

A fun, short, and very cute Metroid-style adventure featuring an adorable kitten running around in a mech suit doing the usual exploratory platformer thing of exploring and getting new items to do... more exploring. Fairly breezy and simple, all things considered, but it had a great deal of charm. It's quite nice, and I recommend it.

Final Fantasy II: Mod Of Balance (Game Boy Advance)

For some ungodly reason which still eludes me, I attempted to play the infamously bad Final Fantasy II with a supposed balance patch to make the thing... more balanced. At this point, I am convinced this is one of those games with no middle ground, except the middle ground in this case is "a well-balanced game with just the right amount of challenge". It is either a difficult slog or a ridiculously easy slog, and once again it was the latter for me. I almost wrote about it because of this, so I'm giving my own foolishness the nod here.

Slain: Back From Hell (Switch)

A difficult action platformer with a gnarly heavy metal theme going on. You know, I think I'd have to look up a Youtube video to remember most of the tricky stuff in this game, but I am remembering equal parts innate frustation and hard game satisfaction. Let's call it okay, if not a little unmemorable in my scatterbrained head, and move on to another highlight of the year.

Super Mario Maker 2 (Switch)

Yes, this ended up down here. I mean, it's Mario Maker on the Switch. It is, in the end, very nice. I did enjoy the added story mode levels and had fun going through them, and there was some fun had in building my own levels and playing others. It didn't quite hold my attention all the way through the year, but I'll blame that on my own scatterbrain rather than the game. It's a lovely experience, and I can tinker with it again one day if I have down time and some fun level ideas come to me.

Etrian Odyssey Nexus (3DS)

The series finale of the 3DS, if only Persona Q2 didn't come out after it. I love the hell out of some Etrian Odyssey, and I was excited to dig in to this loving tribute swan song to the series as the era of dual screen handheld Nintendo consoles faded away. It's an absolutely great game, and the only reason I didn't put it on the RPG thing over Tales of Symphonia is that it's about 25% too long for its own good. Long enough that I played it for three weeks straight and then shelved it for six months because I'd burned myself out on the dungeon crawling. Still, I did come back to it and get through some tricky challenges to finish the thing. I adored it, even if I had to let that adoration recharge. A fitting end to the series, unless Atlus and friends can figure out a way to make it work on the Switch.

River City Girls (Switch)

I mean, it's very good. Not quite on the same level as Blazing Chrome when it comes to "new old" games, but very good nonetheless. It's cute girls beating the shit out of everything in sight for 5 hours, in a charming and well-presented way. Some of the beating the shit out of things is just a wee bit bullshitty, though, in that old beat-em-up way, which is a bit of a sour note. I still enjoyed this, and it's again fun to play in co-op with pals. Worth the wait when it was announced.

The Legend Of Zelda: Link's Awakening (Switch)

It's good. I don't really know if it was "80 Canadian dollars plus tax" good, mind you, but it's good. You have the rock solid foundation of one of the Game Boy's top games, with quality of life improvements and one of the best new coats of paint I've ever seen. Seriously, this game is beautiful and adorable and that alone is almost a selling point. Its new additions range from helpful to "okay that's there I guess". It even brings back the Trendy Crane Game, the easiest Zelda minigame that absolutely nobody had any trouble beating ever! I just wish it didn't cost me so much money to play a really really pretty Game Boy game from 1993.

Pokemon Shield (Switch)

For the third time, I have to throw up my hands and say "yeah it's good". It's another fun Pokemon adventure, but it didn't exactly completely light my world on fire which is why it's here. I still blazed through the main game in a weekend and had an absolute blast, and it's quite breezy with its quality of life improvements. Thanks to them chopping out half those Pokemon, I was able to complete the Pokedex again! Oh, and I look absolutely stylish in it. Yeah. Quite fun.

Shovel Knight: King Of Cards (Switch)

So this is how Shovel Knight ends. Intriguingly. The new King Knight expansion has some things to like about it. King Knight's moveset and playstyle is definitely interesting, with its dash and bash mechanic offering a balance between feeling great and puzzling your way through platforming challenges. I appreciate the move to a quantity of shorter levels, each with their own set of collectibles within, as it helps makes things nice and breezy in short bursts. I just really don't like that goddamned card game. Yes, it is kinda sorta optional. Yes, you can pay gold to cheat at it. Yes, it gets more tolerable as you go along and earn better cards with better pointy arrows. It still filled me with despair and dread when I saw I "had" to play more of it, and that's a real downer in an otherwise neat capstone to Shovel Knight content. Also the final boss sucks ass and is kind of unfair and unfun. Yikes.


Okay, that does it. Thanks for sitting through however the hell many words that is, and I offer my apologies to my future self who gets to spend Sunday morning and afternoon banging this together into the form of a coherent post with italics and image links and shit. Oh no I just gave you more work, didn't I? What's that? (Intrusion from the future: You son of a bitch.) Can't hear you over the time differential. To all of you at home though, I hope you enjoyed the list and that your 2019s were full of fun and good times all around. It's going to be a very interesting 2020, as I have not only some good new posts lined up but some good new games to crack into. Maybe I'll be writing about how good they are in a year's time! We'll find out. Until then, you all have a good one, and a very happy New Year to you when we all get to it! Much love!

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 31 (Halloween [2018])

Boo.

At last. We're here. Spooky night itself. I just have to finish this and then I'm free! Free from spooky analysis, at least. We've even got a really good movie that I just finished not 5 minutes ago. I watched it in the dark and everything. Honestly surprised at how few kids interrupted movie time for me to give them their treats, but that's just how it be with small town life. We're even going out on a really high note! It's that Halloween movie that came out exactly a year ago today! I had to watch goddamned Halloween 4 instead of going out to see this and writing about it last year. Not so this time. Now we're here for real, and I've finally seen the thing. Wow. It's one hell of a movie. I'm gonna talk about what I liked about it for an amount of time, and then this whole wild Halloween marathon adventure will be over. Hop on in, it's the train to SPOOKYTOWN!


It's another one of those Godzilla 1984-like situations here, where the people in charge just go "right, fuck all this other shit, only the first movie happened and we're building on that for the anniversary.". Rather surprisingly for me, this also includes throwing out Halloween 2. It's been two years, but I'm pretty sure Halloween H20 counted Halloweens 1 and 2 as canon. Here, though? Nope, we're just following up on the 1978 original. No Laurie Strode as Michael's sister, Dr. Loomis lived past that Halloween night, just... a sequel to the first. They even lampshade it which got a chuckle out of me. Okay, movie, I'll let that one slide. There are a lot of little cute callbacks to the original, some of which have a point beyond just whooshing a nostalgic chuckle out of you. (Okay, their variation on the bedsheet ghost is a good twist that has you laughing in a morbid moment of tense anticipation. Which is exactly on tonal point with the scene from the original it's referencing.) I like the cinematography and editing a lot, too: there are some fun cuts, and a lot of cute tricks like continuous shots, both tracking and static. It's a very slick and put-together movie, but I'm not one for pointing out cool film school tricks. No, I'm here to be the passing-grade English student that I am and point out thematic resonance and stuff. So. The ballad of Michael Myers and Laurie Strode, 40 years later. Let's get into that for a bit.


Oddly enough, the theme I got from this is that Michael Myers exudes a sort of aura around him, which manifests itself in quite a few different ways. Notably, the aura of fascination over him and his crimes. This shows in the opening moments with the British true crime podcast duo, who are an effective device the movie uses in several ways; exposition to get us up to speed with the current status quos of both Michael and Laurie, and then as fresh bodies for Michael to murder in a pretty fucked-up scene at a gas station bathroom. I was honestly surprised they got killed off so quickly, but I guess they'd served their narrative function and were used for the scares. More interesting is Dr. Sartain, this movie's version of Dr. Loomis (and Laurie even textually says this) who fills the same narrative function... to a point. Recall that Loomis spent time trying to understand Michael Myers before deciding he was evil incarnate and had to be locked away. Sartain has spent 40 years studying Michael, trying to understand him.... and it's both a fascination and obsession. It ends up making him turn heel and knife a sheriff to protect Michael, even going so far as to briefly don the mask. The fascination and obsession in understanding Michael turns Sartain into Michael. Last, but certainly not least, we have Laurie Strode, in this movie a paranoid recluse who's all but alienated her family from her anxieties over Michael coming back to finish the job. Her wounds are more psychological, of course, but in the end the movie is basically mirroring her with Michael in a strange way. She's obsessed and determined to kill him, just as he's obsessed and determined to just kill in general. At least two shots of the movie go out of their way to reference iconic shots from the 1978 movie, only with Laurie in the place of Michael. I see what you're up to there, movie. Very slick.


If I have a complaint here, it's that Laurie briefly falls into horror movie trope levels of letting her guard down during the climax where Michael is attacking her stronghold. I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand, I don't want to be a naughty nitpicker and wagging my finger because OH NO THE TRAUMATIZED CHARACTER UNDER SEIGE BY HER NEMESIS ISN'T ACTING WITH FULL LOGICAL EFFICIENCY, DIIIING. On the other hand, Laurie has been preparing for this for 40 years. She should kind of be a step above basic tropes like "investigate the noises instead of staying in your bunker and waiting with your gun for Michael to come to you". On the other hand, she is traumatized as hell from all of this... It's a very tricky tightrope to walk! In the end, though, it all works out and this is a really great sequel to Halloween... but it's by no means the end. They've got sequels planned for 2020 and 2021. For the love of god. Okay. We'll see how those go, but as for me? I'm done. That's another Halloween marathon in the bag. Here's where I'd usually make a terrified joke about NaNoWriMo tomorrow, but honestly I'm relieved for that! It means I get to watch things that aren't spooky and write about totally different things! You have no idea how much of a mental breather that will be for me! Anyway, this is me, signing off. See you for... let's be real, unless something big pops up, it'll be the Games Of The Year list in December. Until then, y'all. Thanks for reading.

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 30 (The Simpsons: Treehouse Of Horror II)

Back to this again. It's a bit of a short thing, given I only have 25 minutes of TV to work with, but I'm on a deadline due to other things going on tonight. That and I'm a little burnt out from this spooky month. I am looking forward to tomorrow's view, though, as it's something I've never seen before. You can probably guess what it is, but in the meantime here's the second Simpsons Halloween Special, from 1991. Somehow it has been three years since I did a Simpsons Halloween special. That was the first one. It managed to give me a lot to talk about, and I even worked in some personal Simpsons history. Again, as with Beetlejuice, my insistence on doing things in order means we hit a Halloween special that never was my favorite. It's fine for golden era Simpsons, sure, but just doesn't stand out in the nostalgic mind compared to the later ones. Still, we're going to take a crack at it. What's fun about these early specials are both the Marge warnings at the top, and the idea that they have a framing device. Both of these get dropped pretty early on, but the former at least makes me remember that pearl-clutching people lost their shit at the Simpsons being a bit irreverent and rude. For fuck's sakes, I think there's one scene with blood in this entire thing. It's goddamned tame by today's standards. Our framing device is simple, almost perfunctionary. "Oh no the Simpsons ate too much Halloween candy and had nightmares". Let us delve into some of these nightmares.


They're not titled segments or anything, but Lisa's nightmare is just the Monkey's Paw. The Simpsons get a cursed monkey paw and make wishes that backfire. Actually, that's not even entirely true. The subtle subversive comedy of it is that the wishes only backfire if they would benefit the Simpsons in some major way. We see this when Maggie makes the first wish for a golden pacifier, and Ned Flanders gets the paw at the end. That's the gag. It works fine for them, but for any other substantial benefit it's curse time. This is evident in the wish to make the Simpsons rich and famous, which also serves as a little meta-commentary for Simpsons mania. The Simpsons are a big name, they're on fucking everything, and people are sick to death of them. Oh. Oh you sweet summer children of 1991. You have no fucking idea. Even Lisa's wish for world peace gets shit on with a Kang and Kodos invasion. There's a lovely bit with Homer's last wish, and then everything goes fine for Flanders. It's a fun retelling of the Monkey's Paw, and it's actually saying some things which resonate with the state of the Simpsons now. Wild. What's next?


Oh it's just that one Twilight Zone episode with the spooky kid that sends you to the cornfield, but it's Bart with the powers. I would be remiss if I didn't mention the anecdote connecting the Simpsons with this specific Twilight Zone story. Nancy Cartwright, the voice of Bart, previously had a part in the Twilight Zone movie during the segment remaking that spooky psychic kid story... and her character dies by being trapped inside a cartoon. Ha. Ha ha ha. Holy shit. Despite a few cartoonish existential horrors, for the most part this one plays its joke simple enough. Ha ha ha it's Bart doing wild shit with his unlimited psychic powers, and everyone's acquiescing to him. (Okay, but the Bonerland callback gag is something else entirely.) Then it becomes a story about... taking Bart to therapy? And bonding with Homer, who he'd previously turned into a jack in the box? And this is the nightmarish part which makes Bart end up screaming. Wow. Fucked up. Uhhh let's go to the last one?


It's Frankenstein. But with Mr. Burns. Pure capitalism at work, as he hopes to make robot workers who will work harder for him, presumably to make him richer. I got a chuckle out of "Behold, the greatest breakthrough in labor relations since the cat-o'-nine-tails!" because ha ha ha capitalist hell world. Anyway they steal Homer's brain for the thing, and what should be a violent dissection of his brain becomes utterly comedic and yet not lacking at all in grotesqueness. The top of his head rolls off like a ball once it's cut off, and Mr. Burns severs the spinal cord and puts the thing on his head, with the immortal line "LOOK AT ME, I'M DAVY CROCKETT!". Of course the plan for unfettered capitalism is ruined because Homer is the laziest thing alive, even in a robot body, and we get a big twist of Mr. Burns grafting his head onto Homer's, ha ha ha special end. Yeah. It's fine. A few good jokes, a general fun time. I honestly don't have any more to say. Only one day left, and then we're free. See you tomorrow for spooky times.

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 29 (Beetlejuice)

I probably shouldn't be covering this specifically, in terms of a nostalgic thing I remember from my childhood. If we were going to go from that angle tonight, I'd have to be doing the animated series, which I watched every Saturday and found to be a totally irreverent and strange thing that nonetheless entertained me, even if it was all full of puns that would make one groan. No, instead I dusted off a Beetlejuce DVD (which had three of the cartoon episodes on it anyway as extras) and fired up a weird Tim Burton movie. Oh, Tim. You're a filmmaker whose work I... kind of like, sometimes? I enjoy your Batman movies, but if we're going to be honest with my nostalgia then the sheer joy of seeing Batman Forever when I was 10 kind of beats you out. The best thing the Tim Burton films did, in my eyes, was inspire Bruce Timm to make his own cartoon. See, there I go, tying it all back to how I should be talking about the cartoon adaptations instead of the movies. Okay. Look. Let's get back on track with the rambling, for just a bit. This movie's fine. It has its issues and I'll get to those, but I get the vibe it's going for and the vibe it's going for is pretty neat in places! Let's discuss those places.


Funny enough, other pieces of media were jingling in my head as I watched this film. It's impossible for one of them to be an inspiration for this, given it came 30 years later, but the other could have been rattling in Tim Burton's head as he came up with it. I speak, of course, of both Zombie Land Saga and The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. Stick with me here. When I wrote up Zombie Land Saga, I called it a piece of reverse dissonance: an absolutely horrific premise played as a comedy. That's the same tone I get from Beetlejuice: we get to know the Maitlands over the course of a few minutes, they're a happy couple, everything's going great, and then they fucking die. They're dead! Instead of shambling reanimated corpses, we have the restless spirits of once-living people. It's a ghost story, yeah, but played as morbid comedy. Death is played for laughs here, and that's where we get to the Douglas Adams parallels. The afterlife of this film's setting is so utterly bureaucratic that it's hard not to think of Adams here. The Maitlands die and all they're left is a confusing handbook written in befuddling jargon, rather than explaining the rules of their spiritual life straightforwardly. There's waiting rooms and queues and goddamn offices on the other side. Death is no peaceful repose, it's an eternity of stressful working as a fucking office clerk for dead people. Holy shit. Maybe that's hell. Working in a fucking office for all time. It was enough for our title character to go off and become a goddamned freelancer, so there we go. Actually let's talk about him and some other stuff before we go.


He's some kind of huckster, obviously, advertising himself like some sort of anti-Ghostbuster, all flash and panache and supernatural TV ads. He's also just kind of the worst, which surprised me from my memories of the cartoon show. Sure, he was kind of a jerk and a prankster, but this movie guy is outright fucking terrible. Especially to women. Let us just say that certain aspects of this movie have not aged well. Especially the climax of trying to marry Winona Ryder to like, get out of being dead or whatever. This comes out of nowhere, is also kind of resonant with the idea of death's rules and regulations not being explained to you, and is really gross. Speaking of gross, Jeffrey Jones is in this. Eugh. What I find interesting is Delia Deetz's weird abstract idea of modern art, and how it both kind of fits the Tim Burton aesthetic and is also treated with some derision by like everyone else. Weird. That, I guess, is a good place to leave off with this one. It has some wild stop-motion stuff in it (because Tim Burton), some good ideas, some bad ones. Yeah, it's like... fine, I guess. Really it just makes me wish I were watching the nostalgic cartoon. I may have watched the wrong Beetlejuice tonight. NO SHIT WAIT--

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 28 (Annihilation)

Whoa. We've got a real big one here. I mean, wow. This is only my second go-round at this movie, since I watched it about... ten months ago, I want to say? Which makes this weird strange sometimes visceral thing associated with the holiday season for me. Make no mistake, the grim and gruesome shit that occasionally pops up, along with some of the existential horrors present, make it a perfect fit for this season... but it's far more than just a spooky mood piece with some gory bits. This movie's practically drowning in symbolism and metaphor, and you could deep dive through it for thousands of words. I'm not qualified to do that, and these are only quickies, but I did a little digging online myself to find some stuff worth talking about. As long as I get a post's worth out of it and don't massively misread the movie, I'm fine. My sources are resonant enough that I shouldn't do the latter, and as for the former... have you been here before? I'm the goddamned champion of dragging a point out with needless bullshit in order to hit a reasonable quota. For god's sakes, I'm doing it right now with these run ons that delay us out to make a decent-sized opening paragraph. It's a wonder I'm allowed to do this. Well then. Annihilation. What do we make of that?


I'm not being coy, I'm literally analyzing the title again and making a big deal out of it. Annihilation is the key word of the whole movie, and most of the big crunchy themes in the film are metaphors for it. The relationship between our protagonist Lena and her husband Kane, "annihilated" by both his disapperance and her infidelity, for instance. Totally something you can read into, but there are far bigger metaphors. Ones that work on multiple levels with multiple pieces of the film. Cancer, for instance. An annihilation of healthy cells. We open the movie with Lena teaching a class about cancer cells. Dr. Ventress, leader of the expedition, has a terminal cancer. Sheppard's daughter died of leukimia. Then there's the Shimmer itself, a strange and weird expanding thing that keeps growing, taking over the life within it and changing it. A tumor on the world itself. Change is another powerful metaphor within the film, and you can see how all of these things are intertwined with each other. In a dark sardonic way, what is change but the annihilation of who you used to be? The Shimmer is literally changing the DNA structure of things inside it, refracting them into all sorts of strange forms. what remains is different from what came before, and what came before is... you guessed it, annihilated in one sense of the word. The movie is asking questions of our capacity to change, as well as our own capacity for self-destruction. Every member of the expedition suffers their own form of self-destruction, and it all hinges on another theme; trauma.


As much as we as people change, trauma is a thing that sticks with us. This is something explored within the film, in its own way, as the different traumas of the characters are what ends up being their... annihilation. They change, yes, but the trauma remains and it is what undoes them. Sheppard, whose child died from random factors she couldn't control, is killed by a random bear attack she didn't see coming. Anya, hotheaded under pressure, loses her cool and is also killed. Josie, holding on to life, becomes part of the Shimmer. Dr. Ventress's own body betrays her, her cells destroying themselves. It's only Lena who manages to survive her own trauma, her own annihilation, by accepting that part of herself. Only then can she escape the rainbow alien mirroring her (Okay, I had to mark out for some mirror stuff). The final shot shows us Kane and Lena, irrevocably changed by what they experienced in the Shimmer. Whoever they were before going in, they've been annihilated... and yet, something of them remains. Enough of them remains to embrace, ready to live on, to move on. To change even further. So yeah, this was a pretty basic analysis and you have my apologies if I glossed over something, but wow. This movie is a hell of a movie. Check it out, make your own reading, your own deep dives, and like... enjoy and stuff. God we really only have three of these left, huh?

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 27 (Godzilla 2000)

I swear, Toho's Godzilla output post-1984 was designed to trip me up and confuse me. The movie titled Godzilla vs. Biollante isn't a big dumb campy monster brawl movie, but a thoughtful introspective look at Japan's changing times and its spirituality. Godzilla 2000, a title that doesn't promise much other than Godzilla in the year 2000, is the kind of campy monster movie. This is also, somehow, Toho's "response" to the 1998 American Godzilla. Which is a movie I actually kind of like, for nostalgic teenage reasons. Yeah, according to the history, Toho was kind of done with Godzilla in the 90's and they let Roland Emmerich and Tri-Star play with him in the hopes they'd do something interesting. Given that Godzilla 1998 is about as beloved as, say, Castlevania II, Toho was pressed into giving the big stompy boy another shot. What they crafted ended up going for another six movies, a whole "Millennium Series" if you will that culminates in some sort of goddamned 50th anniversary special where Godzilla fights all of the monsters. I hear things about it, so we won't tread there. Instead let's see what we can make of Godzilla 2000.


Well, it fires on all cylinders from the word go. No slow burn, no thoughtful human drama setting it up, just... HEY FUCKERS IT'S GODZILLA! TWO THOUSAAAAAND!!! I should clarify, the original version was released in 1999 but it was still called Godzilla 2000. This will be important in a moment. What have we got here? A bunch of Godzilla trainspotters, in a sense, called the Godzilla Prediction Network, who go out hunting for Godzilla so they can warn people to evacuate or whatnot. It's interesting, then, that the trio here kind of slot into the same roles as people from the 1998 Godzilla? You've got the sciencey guy, his science colleague, and his reporter friend. Sure, the science colleague role is his daughter instead of a potential second love interest, but you can see the parallels. In doing more research, it's strange to see that certain plot elements from later episodes of Godzilla: The Series (the Saturday morning cartoon that was the sequel to the 1998 film, for those of you keeping score at home) show up here. Hmm. For all the Internet will rally over yelling that the 1998 film "doesn't count", a lot of it sure did show up in proper Toho Godzilla, huh? Hmmm. Anyway, I gotta give props to the opening bits here. We've seen Godzilla attack by night before, but this is a foggy night. The hazy half-formed glimpses of a giant thing attacking from a veil of fog? Holy fuck. This is atmospheric as all hell. It's definitely something I've never seen before.


Speaking of things I've never seen before, A GIANT FLOATING ROCK! That's Godzilla's nemesis in this movie. A giant floating rock that gets lifted out from under the sea by a research team, and is actually some sort of alien spaceship which lay dormant underwater for millions of years until science re-activated it with light. There's a line from the scientist who led that team where he laments his folly, and I'm like... Wait, that doesn't quite track with me. A folly is when you go against Japanese spirituality to play God and put your daughter's essence into a giant plant monster. You were just like, exploring the ocean and found a cool meteorite. Not quite the same. It's when the alien ship hacks into Japan's computers to assimilate data on Godzilla and Earth and whatnot that we get our window into the current anxiety within this movie. It's so cute, this. You probably got it already, but like... a movie made in 1999 that has all of the computers going berserk and freaking out. It's Godzilla taking on the metaphor of anxiety over fucking Y2K! The shit where we all thought every computer was going to self-destruct because they'd roll over to 1900 or some shit! Oh my god! That's such an of its time concern, and it only adds to the charm of this movie. It really just wants to be a fun sort of "don't take it too seriously" romp with alien spaceships and the Y2K bug as alien infection (and indeed, the aliens' goal is to kickstart a new 1000-year empire, right at the cusp of the year 2000, so add in a bit of era changing only for the calendar year). Oh, and think of this too: th ship eventually assimilates Godzilla's DNA and mutates itself into a Godzilla-like creature with amazing regeneration powers. Kind of like the movie drawing inspiration from 1998's film? God, even the design of the monster, Orga, kind of looks like the Amercian Godzilla if you stare hard enough. It's wild, it's gonzo, it's a little visceral near the end... and it's actually kinda fun. I wouldn't call it my favorite Godzilla film, but you know what? You can have a good time with it. I think that's enough talking about giant monsters for this year.

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 26 (Godzilla Vs. Biollante)

FEED ME, SEYMOUR!

Boy, this one eluded me for a bit. I mean the things it's doing really just flew right past me on the first watch. I won't lie. It took me no less than a messup leading to an anxious episode, a few days of thoughtful pondering, and plenty of study and discussion before I was ready to give this another go. I won't go into that any further, and will instead ask a simple hypothetical: What does Godzilla vs. Biollante represent? Luckily for me, there was a nice big easy metaphor for me to hang my coat on with every other Godzilla film I've covered. The original is an obvious parallel with Japan's horror over having atomic weapons used against them. Godzilla 1984 reboots the series and uses the original to parallel with the anxieties of the Cold War, and Japan being caught in the middle. Shin Godzilla is, among many other things, tackling the specifics of government's responsibility in the midst of a natural disaster. Godzilla vs. Biollante, on the other hand, has no immediate massive historical event for you to hang your metaphors on. Well, if you're from North America and not thinking very hard about it, that is. Even the title may fool you into thinking this is one of those sort of goofy kaiju battle movies, and if you go in expecting that you will be disappointed. What is here, upon much closer reflection and attempts to understand the particulars of another culture's sensibilities and anxieties of the time, is quite interesting. Allow me to lay out a few of them, in brief.


The major thing underpinning it all is the generational change. The change in emperors in 1989 led to a change in "eras" of Japan, so to speak. So, 1989 was the start of the Heisei era in Japan, and this led to certain anxieties over Japan's place in the world and what this changing of the guard would mean. So, this manifests in a few ways in the movie. You have the older characters musing on their place in this new age, and a focus on the youthful energy of the next generation. You can see this with the military commanders: Gondo of the old guard is a burned-out man with some skepticism of the new way of doing things, and it's Kuroki, the new guy in charge of Godzilla defense, who proves himself with lots of new ideas and inventions and whatnot to protect Japan from Godzilla. Not all of them work perfectly, mind, but he's proving what the new guard can do. This theme is far stronger when we get to the character of Miki, who's an esper with psychic powers. Psychic powers? In a Godzilla movie? Yeah. Makes you go "huh?" at first, but it fits with this theme. Think Gundam and the Newtypes. Never seen Gundam? Well uh. Newtypes are the natural evolution of humanity as they venture out into space. Very abridged version as I'm not here to talk about Gundam, but Miki and the espers are the heart and soul of the new generation, with their powers attuning them both to sense Godzilla and giving them a sense of the spiritual world... which brings us to Biollante.


Putting Biollante's origin on paper makes it sound completely ridiculous. A scientist who lost his daughter Erika five years prior combines the regenerative cells of Godzilla with both the DNA of a rose and his dead daughter, creating what eventually becomes a massive goddamned floral kaiju that transforms into an Audrey II-looking thing by film's end. Now what in the fuck is going on here? The answer is an innate sense of Japanese spirituality. Erika isn't really gone in the traditional sense. Her father, Dr. Shirigami, has her cells, and according to Japanese spiritual beliefs every part of us is imbued with our soul. He's bringing her back to life, and effectively making her immortal thanks to those Godzilla cells. It can be tempting to read this as some sort of Jurassic Park-like moral about the folly of genetic engineering, but Shiragami's fault isn't so much playing God as it is going against the natural harmony of spirituality. Indeed, by giving this creature life with Godzilla cells, Godzilla resonantes within Biollante as well. They're the same cells, so they're the same creature and that essence takes over eventually. Godzilla is a vengeful engine of destruction, and so Biollante throwing down with it is eventual. The kaiju fights, though brief, are real brutal and visceral in this one. If you do enjoy a good monster spectacle, these bits are pretty good for that. There's so much more I could cover, like the espionage subplot that takes up a good chunk of the movie (presumably because the people in charge really wanted some James Bond-esque action)) but I think I'll leave a lot of it for you all to discover. If you're looking for a long and drawn-out clash of the monsters? This ain't it, chief. If you are looking for a surprisingly thoughtful and introspective film about Japanese sensibilities circa 1989 which happens to have some monster fights? This is a good one to throw on. Nice one, Toho.