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.

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 25 (House [1977])

Wow. Whoa. Wow. Whoa. Wow. Whoa. Before we begin, I'm going to be upfront. I am not going to do this movie justice with words. I don't have them. I do not have the words. I'm going to say something about it, but it won't scratch the surface of what in the holy fuck I put in front of my eyeballs (with great difficulty and generosity from others), not by a fraction. I've wanted to cover this one for years. James Rolfe (remember him?) covered it for his Monster Madness marathon one year and it stuck in my mind. "That one Japanese horror movie from the 70's that's totally bonkers or something, I should do that for 31 Screams.". Well. Here we fucking are. The hand on the monkey's paw curls. I have watched House, and I don't know what the fuck. It's not that this movie is bad. It's not even that it's absurd. I'll make a bold claim, but it's a true one. This is the single most surreal thing I have ever seen in my life. I use that word in its literal sense. Surrealism. A bizarre mix of elements, often jarring and nonsensical. House is as fitting a definition for this as I've ever laid eyes on.


I use both surrealism and the phrase "laid eyes on" in their literal senses. House's plot, as James Rolfe notes in that handy video I linked (which gives you a visual idea of how wild this thing is, but more on that in a second), is pretty standard. Teenage girls visit an old house and a bunch of supernatural shit happens. Okay, I'm oversimplifying. Even the girls are strange and surreal, only referred to by nicknames for their traits. So we've got Gorgeous, Fantasy, Sweet, Kung Fu, et cetera. It's an odd choice, but it works. Somehow. Right, let's get to it. Let's just say it. The cinematography and editing of House is fucking surreal as almighty fuck. Like it might as well be on the fucking moon for how unconventional and gonzo it is. I am literally ill-equipped to talk about all the tricks it does, but let me try and rattle a few off the top of my head. Lush backdrops and matte paintings. Flawless edits without cuts from one scene to another. Characters from a totally different scene popping into frame at the end of the preceding one. The frame rate dropping randomly for an entire scene. A flashback done in old film reel style that the girls riff over as we watch. That's barely scratching the surface. If you can handle a spooky film, please for the love of God just look at this thing. It's incredible and I am simultaneously blown away and completely baffled at what I just saw. Still, I have to make a stab at analysis.


I didn't even get to the horror of House yet. Make no mistake, despite the never-ending cinematic trickery making it feel like some kind of lucid dream, this is a horror movie. It keeps your interest for its first half-hour with its surrealism, but you also know it's a horror movie so you're wondering just how horrific it can be on top of that. WELL. Let me tell you some tricks. A girl's severed head laughing before biting another girl's ass. A piano eating a girl's fingers before eating the whole girl as she comments on her own devouring and her fingers continue playing. MORE WILD SHIT INVOLVING MIRRORS AND FIRE. There's a lot of very specific Japanese symbolism and thematic resonance at play too, like the nature of generational passing of the torch and spirituality. Well, that first one is corrupted because the old guard in this movie is Gorgeous's aunt, who is literally a ghost that eats young unmarried girls and remains alive because of a promise made to her husband who died in World War 2. The resentment and bitter feelings of a ghost from the turbulent years of the war, literally eating the next generation who grew up without such horrors. Holy shit. It's a grim story, amidst all the absolutely surreal stuff, but it's one worth looking at. That's... that's really all I have, I think. My words can't do it justice. Maybe the words of others can, but it has to be seen to be believed. See it. Believe it. God, what a thing.

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 24 (Winchester)

Winchester is... definitely an interesting film. Would I say I loved it? Not really. Liked it? Yeah. This is a somewhat surprising reaction from me, though, considering what I think this movie is trying to do. Well, I shouldn't say it quite that way. It's more what I thought the movie was going to do, followed by what it did do. That's not me being bitter about not getting what I was expecting, either. What the movie is has just as much merit as what I thought it was going to be. So. The Winchester house. A strange labyrinth of twisty passages in the form of a house, built at the whim of a woman who's convinced it has to be done. Part of this DNA is obviously in Rose Red, and since the other half of Rose Red's DNA is The Haunting Of Hill House, I was almost expecting something akin to that level of ambiguity. Indeed, the first glimpse we have of our protagonist Dr. Price seems to be setting that up, as he's a psychologist with a laudanum habit who hallucinates a picture of a deer bleeding on his wall after taking a hit. He takes his stuff with him to the Winchester house, and there's an amazingly built-up jumpscare involving a fucking mirror that plays on the rule of three, but twists it just enough to manage to still scare me. Anyway just before that he takes another hit of the laudanum, and I thought this movie might be about that ambiguity. Dr. Price, sent to evaluate the sanity of Sarah Winchester, slowly slipping into madness himself and questioning his own reality and whether or not the crazy ghosts he's seeing are even real. This being my third movie about a twisty turny haunted house, I expected that to be what was going to happen.


That is not what happens. No, it's all real. The Winchester house is totally haunted as all fuck. This is when we get into what the movie's actually doing, and it's an interesting thing. It's all about haunting, in a way. Well, haunting and healing. What is a ghost? In this case, the restless spirits of people who died at the hands of Winchester-brand rifles. Sarah Winchester is drawing them to her, haunted by the guilt of the lives her brand has taken... and working to heal. To heal both her own sins, and the wayward spirits who linger on and spook. Some of them are more malicious than others, of course, so they get all chained up until they settle down. This is the point of the movie, and it's fascinating. It all goes wrong, of course, when a particularly strong malevolent ghost starts possessing Sarah's nephew and busting all the other ghosts out in ghost pandemonium. He's the ghost of a Confederate soldier whose brothers were killed by Winchester guns in the civil war, so he shot up their offices and died. Now he's back and pissed off and wants the Winchester line to die. Dr. Price is key to this, as he was involved in an almost murder/suicide involving his wife and he was technically dead for a bit when she shot him, with a Winchester, before ending her own life. This means that technically, Dr. Price is a wayward spirit drawn to the Winchester house for healing, and so is his wife. Dr. Price is haunted by grief over not being able to do more for her own mental health, and coming to the Winchester house does help him heal from this trauma of the past. He even kills the Confederate ghost guy with the bullet that "killed" him as some wild form of symbolism. Really, for playing with so many rad themes of healing and whatnot, I should love this movie. Alas, I only liked it. It's fine, though. Worth a watch if you don't mind jumpscares. A bit of a shorter one tonight, but I feel I put my heart into it so that's okay. Moving on!

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 23 (Even More Angry Video Game Nerd Halloween Episodes)

Another year and another one of these. What can I say? James Rolfe loves the spooky month just as much as I do. Hell, he's done a version of this same thing I do in October for over a decade called Monster Madness. The man's a horror nut, and it shows through in his AVGN stuff right around the time of spooky month. In later years they got less and less overtly horror themed, just focusing on spooky games and stuff, but I've managed to pull three from his back catalogue that I can find some things to say about. Really, that's the goal here. To say something interesting about the videos Rolfe puts out as this character. I think we can manage that, so let's start with...

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection: Day 22 (Castlevania: The Adventure)

I ended up here on a pure whim, you know. I was thinking of covering Symphony Of The Night for this spot. I even bought it on the PS4 and was playing a bit of it. Then some stuff happened. New games. Anxiety attacks. You know. Normal life for me. I fell behind on Symphony, but I really don't know what I was going to say about it. I acknowledge its influence and reputation, but it's actually not a big tentpole Castlevania for me. No, far more interesting is this. A redemption effort of sorts. An attempt to understand the draw of something that garners a lot of ire. A positive read of a somewhat janky 30 year-old Game Boy game. Castlevania The Adventure, you see, is (probably) thought of as the worst Castlevania game. The only things I can think of coming closer to its derision are like... Haunted Castle? That's the ultra-hard quarter muncher arcade one. Maybe Simon's Quest, but that's its own negative connotation with "black sheep syndrome" and taking a certain popular exaggerated parody as gospel. Adventure, though? There's just about some legitimate critique to it that's hard to argue against, and who better to play the prosecution than me? Specifically the me of 10 years ago, the me who wrote up all the Game Boy Castlevania games and gave this a 1/5 ranking.(Yes there's no ranking on what I just linked; I had the number scores removed from my work on here for reasons which I won't get into. Let's go over what I had to say, my three main objections.


Point 1, there being almost nothing established from Castlevania in the game, is just not fucking fair and I would slap myself in the back of the head for it. Honestly, if you wouldn't slap yourself in the back of the head over some dumb shit you said ten years ago, you lead a far more perfect life than most. I said that? The person who defends Simon's Quest and Zelda 2 to the death from the aforementioned black sheep syndrome? Past me, you dumbass. I actually want to jump past point 2 for a moment, because I'll make a thing about that. Point 3, the whip downgrading, is actually still a bugbear for me. Yeah, it doesn't feel good at all and I still do not like it. We'll give you that one. Point 2, though, the walking speed of the character being a slow turtle gait... now we get to something far more interesting. It is, on paper, a valid complaint. You do walk slow as shit and it makes platforming/enemy dodging that much worse than it needs to be. The opening of Stage 2, wherein bats come at you from odd angles and are all but guaranteed to drain your whip power, does not feel good at all. Certain platforming challenges require near-perfect timing. It's a strange thing, these flaws. On paper, they should (and do for many!) wreck the game completely and make it terrible. But then, if you manage to endure long enough to get there... you hit Stage 3 of 4, and everything changes.


Stage 3 is a duplicitous dichotomy of design. It is at once a white-knuckle challenging chase of an autoscroller with instant death spikes pursuing at every turn, and a piece of design that feels like total bullshit thanks to the slow walk speed and the whip downgrade system. It will murder you unless you have memorized the where and how of jumping and whipping, and have it all planned out. Perfect execution is required, or you die. It's been the sticking point where plenty of people tap out, my past self suggests it as a form of torture for Simon's Quest haters, and I kind of admire it? This is not a broken stage with flaws that require fixing. There is purpose to its design, and it is the watch in the desert that proves these people knew what they were doing. It was meant to be like this, and I am at once frustrated by its ask of perfection and in awe of how good it feels to pull off that perfection. There is a famous ROM hack which dares to "improve" the game by increasing the walk speed, giving you more freedom of movement. It doesn't work. Stage 3's tension is completely eliminated if you're not required to be optimally running for your life at every second. Walking fast doesn't make the stage bearable. It makes it boring. I've laser focused on Stage 3 since it's the best setpiece the game has, in my opinion: Stage 1 is a decent beginner, Stage 2's cave has some fun gimmicks but also some maze game nonsense for no reason, and Stage 4 is challenging but lacks the high-speed tension of the previous level. Am I saying this is a perfect game? No. Its flaws are... difficult to pin down, though. Sure, I don't like the whip downgrading, but it is deliberate. So is the slow walk speed. As we see, the game was designed to be played like this, and when actually played like this? Good elements shine through. I hesitate to call it great, but you know what? I like it. It sure as shit deserves more than a 1/5, and that's good enough for me.

31 Days, 31 Screams Resurrection- Day 21 (A Cure For Wellness)

"The systems aren't the problem."

Here we go again, from one sanitarium to another. I don't know how the shape of this one is going to go. Could be long, could be short. A Cure For Wellness is a very strange film, quite hefty at 150 minutes or so. Its message is also pretty clear-cut. This is an anticapitalist film... or at least, as anticapitalist as a studio-released movie can be. It somehow manages to convey this, mostly by using a direct mirroring structure and coating what's being mirrored in a whole bunch of gonzo metaphor about health spas and exploitation. The opening, though, is dealing with straight-up capitalism. A totally unrelated man working late but groaning about chest pains who collapses, spilling a bunch of water. Yeah water's a big thing in this movie, get used to that. So that leads our protagonist Lockhart, a hypercapitalist himself, to be sent to retrieve another hypercapitalist from a health spa in Switzerland so he can be brought back to secure a big merger and also take the fall for Lockhart's illegal fudging of the numbers or whatever. Because, you know. Capitalism. Getting all the gain for yourself while some other poor schmuck suffers the consequences. Get used to that too because it's the core of the film.


Let's rip the band-aid off and get right down to it, huh? That's the point of the whole thing, as I said. The exploitation of people deemed lesser, all so a small minority reap the benefits in perpituity. There's a lot of slow build psychological horror going on in this movie, to its credit, but I'm happy to say I pegged the anticap reading pretty early on and it helped me guess a few of the late-game twists. It's got plenty of time to build to its setpieces, and maybe it's too leisurely in spots but it works. On the outside, then, we have a health spa where rich people come to relieve themselves of the stresses of the world. Inside? It's all a front for a bunch of immortals. The head doctor, his staff, and a very special patient all get to harness the water of life and use it to live forever, all while they slowly poison the people who are here to be healed and drain the life force from them, leaving withered husks who are then fed to the eel creatures which are poisoning them to purify the water of life for the priveleged. These people are the 1%, hoarding immortality and murdering countless old people in the process all so they get to live longer. All while lying through their teeth about it to the bitter end. They know goddamned well what they're doing, and they keep doing it. That's mostly the staff. Dr. Volmer, the one in charge... well, he's up to way more.


It's actually quite disturbing, Volmer's grand plan. See, 200 years before all of this, a baron lived in the castle setting of the film. He got burned at the stake along with his sister, because he wanted to marry his sister. Which, yuck, but their child survived and is actually the special patient at his spa, Hannah. And he like... wants her. That's what all this murder and lifeforce draining is for; not just to keep them alive, but so he can keep their bloodline alive. You know. I can't even type it out in full, it's just that goddamned gross. I'm used to bullshit power structures sacrificing innocents so those in control can do it all to save one person close to them, because I play Japanese RPGs, but this is a level of fucked up beyond that. What does Lockhart do when he finds out? He lights the shit on fire. Lockhart's 150 minutes of hell have turned him anticap, and he ends the movie riding off with Hannah on her bike instead of going back with his bosses. As he says, he's feeling much better. So really, when you think about it, capitalism was the "wellness" of the movie. Systems put in place to benefit some at the expense of others, be it becoming rich or living forever. Lockhart's cured at the end. What a wild movie. Shame about the gross shit in it.

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 20 (A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors)

Ah yes. Back at this shit again. I don't know if I've detailed how much Freddy Kreuger as a concept scared me as a child, but he did. Not the main source of childhood horror movie trauma, but definitely up there. A lot of that was just in the sheer idea of "if you go to sleep, something you cannot possibly avoid doing, a monster will fucking kill you". Oddly enough, revisiting the opening of this movie had me tense and shitless for a completely different reason. That being the wrist slash scene near the beginning. Artery injury's a phobia of mine, and anything with slit wrists or throats has me noping the fuck out. (I don't think I actually witnessed a single kill in the original Friday The 13th because of this, but we're about 15 years too early to cross Jason over with this.) Still, you know, dread happened and I managed to avert my gaze like the phobic dork I am. The rest of the movie should be okay. We're on the third Nightmare movie, and one I haven't experienced since college when I marathoned these things in a bid to conquer fear or whatever. I thought it was fine back then, but I think I've consumed fan consensus to believe that this is the one the most people like? Not really me. Still, this rewatch has given me quite a thematic thoroughline to talk about... even if the other parts of the movie don't work. So, let's talk about that a bit.


Whereas the first two movies were set in suburbia (the same house of suburbia, in fact) and dealt with all the haunting of that, Elm Street 3 (let's just call it Dream Warriors from now on, huh?) takes place in the halls of a psychiatric ward with a ragtag group of troubled teens. Freddy's back and toying with them in their dreams, but Nancy Thompson from the first film is back as well and is now a psychiatrist herself, here to help them out. This setting, and the tropes of supernatural horror in general, reflect each other in a strange and honestly sobering way. (Oh and if you want mirror imagery, there's lots.) The teens are refusing to sleep, due to the quite sensible reality that a goddamned dream ghost with knives for hands is trying to murder them. As part of the conflict and danger to them, their doctors think it's all just delusions and a healthy bit of sleep is all they need to get right-- GEE HEY WHY ARE ALL OUR KIDS DYING IN HORRIFIC AND ABNORMAL SUICIDES ALL OF A SUDDEN??? It's the typical horror movie cliche of the adults in power not believing a word these kids say when they express fears of being murdered by a supernatural monster, and those adults taking the absolutely wrong actions in trying to protect them. Set in a psychiatric ward, though, this all suddenly takes a morbid turn. It feels like a metaphor for the sorry state of mental health treatment in general, and how it's a fucking joke. The people who are in need of help, who are practically begging for help from those in power to help them, are not getting it. Those with the power to help are instead having academic debate about delusions and REM sleep and completely dismissing all of their concerns, and the people in need of that help are fucking dying. Indeed, this becomes all but textual when Kristen, the girl from the beginning, is set to be sent to solitary and sedated so she'll quiet down, at the behest of the one doctor who doesn't believe them. In hysteria, and basically pleading for her life because she knows Freddy Krueger will dismember her in her dreams, she screams "YOU STUPID BITCH, YOU'RE KILLING US!". God. I didn't expect this movie to be saying something so strong.


Unfortunately the rest of it doesn't quite work. There's a very weird undercurrent of science vs. religion going on in the background, where the other doctor who slowly comes to believe Nancy has his faith in science questioned as he's powerless to stop the kids in his care from these bizarre suicides... and then he keeps seeing a nun who tells him to have faith and use it to beat the abomination killing his kids. That ends up being what kills Freddy in the end, throwing a bunch of holy water on his bones and compelling the shit out of him in the name of Christ. There's also Freddy's "origin" story, wherein a sister of the faith locked in a ward for criminally insane inmates is sexually assaulted by them and gives birth to Freddy. Which, where in the fuck do I begin with that? Sure, it mirrors the theme of mental health treatment being inadequate, but Jesus. There's also the whole "Dream Warrior" idea, where the kids learn to weaponize the power of their good dreams to do cool shit like backflips or super strength or shooting lightning bolts as a wizard. It sounds like a great idea, and it would be a beautiful resonant duality of them beating their nightmares and traumas with positivity if it actually affected Freddy in any way. Every Dream Warrior confrontation has him shrugging it off like the unstoppable slasher icon he is and then just fucking killing them anyway. It's a pessimistic waste of a great idea. I think that's all I've got on Dream Warriors. It's better than I thought it would be, but it doesn't quite come together on all fronts to be the perfect dreamlike horror movie it could be. Oh, what could have been.

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 19 (The Immortal Hulk)

This was, if nothing else, an interesting read for the spooky season. From page one it states "There are two people in every mirror" and if you know me by now, you know that's enough to get my attention. Really, applying the notions of duality and dark mirroring to the Incredible Hulk sounds kind of obvious when you put it on paper like that, but over the 24 issues of The Immortal Hulk so much more happens than just that. I don't know how long I'll talk about those things for, but we can get a post out of it so... let's start from the beginning. This ain't a happy fun punching Marvel comic book, it's all dark and visceral and introspective and shit. Its opening moments have a gas station holdup gone wrong, with three dead... including one Bruce Banner. Once night falls, the gang who put the robber up to it find a green monster ready to enact vengeance like some unhinged Batman. (Okay, maybe not that different from how Batman would have done it, actually.) The portrait painted of the undying Bruce Banner and his other selves, the green thing on the other side of the mirror, is that of a wanderer seeking atonement for past sins. That's the vibe the early issues give, and #3 is a lovely little Rashomon-style affair of different people being interviewed about a Hulk sighting, with different art styles for every vignette. Still, there's a whiff of something here. Something more... and soon enough, it rears its head.

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 18 (A Voice From The Dark)

Well, that turned out to be a bit of a surprise. It even gives me something to work with for post length. Speaking of that, I feel like I need to give context for what A Voice From The Dark is, and the specifics of why it is a thing. Not because I assume the backstory is something unfamiliar (I'm sure like 90% of you know all about what I'm going to mention), but because it is important to understanding the actual thematic resonance of the story. Yes. It has one. Incredible. So. There's a website for a particular old-school style of Internet review show called Channel Awesome. Until about... last year or so, it had a hell of a lot of people on it and a huge community of different and varied critics covering their own niches, all rallied around the main draw of the site; Doug "Nostalgia Critic" Walker. There are two things you need to know about all of this. The first is that, over the first few years of the website's history, Doug Walker brought all of his pals together to film anniversary specials. Like, The Avengers of Internet reviewers. These started as 20 minute crossover "brawls" with a lot of pretend fighting and memes, and then grew into actual feature-length movies and a four-hour miniseries before culminating. You should also know that I hate these things. They have their audience, but I am on the fringe of that audience and yet all it is to me is hammy bullshit, obnoxious memery, and a shitload of pretend fighting. The second thing you need to know about all of this is that, last year or so, a mass exodus occured from Channel Awesome after several allegations came to light; some unprofessional annoyances, others massive accusations. It is far beyond my wheelhouse to detail them at length; suffice it to say there are grievances, I believe them, and just about everyone abandoned ship en masse. Then, born out of some nostalgia on the part of these creators over the good parts of those old anniversary films, a bunch of them got together to create another crossover miniseries, this one as an audio drama instead of a filmed thing. That's A Voice From The Dark, and it's got Lovecraftian undertones and is set in a haunted house, so that's why it's here. What does it have, though?

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 17 (When I Arrived At The Castle)

You've got red on you.

This will probably be a much shorter post than usual, I'm afraid. There's a few reasons for that. One, the subject matter is a pretty short affair, all things considered. Nothing wrong with brevity, of course, but that leads me to issue two. I'm not much of a comic critic. I can talk about how pretty the art is, and I shall, but any specific visual drawing techniques at play beyond the immediate obvious elude me. Listen, my field is the written word and not the painted picture. With all that in mind, what have we got here? Well, it's an evocative and moody little piece of fiction, if nothing else. I looked at the cover and expected some sort of dark lesbian gothic horror fantasy. I got... some of that. Other things I got I didn't expect, but are good because it means I get to write about them. So, let's see what When I Arrived At The Castle has going for it.


Its use of color is on point! Black, white, red. That's what you get, and that's all you need. Really, let's do our best to point out the use of red as it's the only non-monochrome color used to illustrate the piece. As an accentuator, it works for narration first off. As you flip through and our protagonist catgirl ventures deeper into the castle at the behest of what must be a vampire girl countess, red splatters all over. The carpet, the portraits, the rain outside. All signifying the bloody nature of this place. It all has a certain surreality to it, and later on, as we see our catgirl taking a bath (Incidentally, there are nipples in this book, so heads up on that) the water is inky black. A knock comes to the door, gentle white at first before a blood red cacophany. We get even more surreal imagery with a fantastic "jumpscare" in page-turner form involving the vampire, and then on we go. Beneath her elegant facade we see the shades of red where some terrible true form lurks. Then come the doors, and we never actually see what is behind them, we only hear of the fates of those who have come before in two-page spread narration (with a red background, of course). As we go on, more and more red stains our catgirl.


Then, a confrontation. Our Countess is a lamia, inviting our catgirl to kill her... and we get true visceral. Red everywhere, a terrible thing finally bursting forth from the elegant countess, sinking its fangs in... and then no red. A moment of calm, a simple dream of sinking... and, eventually, the thing. The human features in white, the monstrous blood red, halfway out of the dark. True animalistic nature takes over with evocative narration, a dance of visceral red playing out in a white void. Both of them are monsters now, wrestling and tussling and biting. We dance and dance until we have a red cat, a thing with its prey in its mouth... and fade to black. That's When I Arrived At The Castle. It's a surreal piece of work with a lot of clever uses of color and allegory that I barely scratched the surface of... but these are hardly deep dives. It's pretty neat! Lots of spooky imagery, and not at all what I was expecting. Nice stuff. On to something else that's odd and wild in a lot of ways, then.