Frezno's Games Of The 2020 Thing!

Oh hey. Actually writing about video games on this blog which started as a video game blog. That's weird. Anyway, as of this writing I have finished Symphogear. I'm fine. I'm just fine. We'll have to talk about that in 2021, though. For now, it's the end of the year roundup for a bunch of video games I played. I didn't play too many because I was busy obsessing over a certain magical punch girl utopic ideal, but I digress. Still, I found time for some pretty good video computer games. Let us talk about them, and start with...

BEST OPEN WORLD GAME OF 2020

Spider-Man (PS4)

I don't open world that much. In fact, I think my last dalliance with that was Breath Of The Wild. That game was very good when I played it, but the mists of time kind of made it like "well that was fine". Spider-Man on PS4 is sort of like that, but we're short on categories this year so you get bumped up, Parker. Be a happy man. Except not because it's Peter Parker so his life's shit. Not this game, though. It was a very engaging open world thing with a shitload to do, a pretty neat plot running through it, and just a whole bunch of swinging around. Really, you could do worse for Spider-Man games or open world ones. What else is there to say? I liked it.

BEST "BABY STEPS, I'M GETTING THERE" GAME OF 2020

Fire Emblem Echoes (3DS)

Hahahahaha for fuck's sakes. The astute among you may know that this game has now shown up on three GOTY lists in a row. The less than astute? Well, I just told you. It got on for 2018 because I impulse bought it and played about half of it, but had enough fun that I felt it had to go on the list. Then in 2019 I beat it on Casual mode, and finished another Fire Emblem game called The Sacred Stones. My baby steps in getting decent at these games. Well, somehow in January my beating of this game on Casual didn't sit right with me... so I fired it up on Classic. I finished it again. This is absolutely my favorite Fire Emblem, a unique flower of a game with "black sheep" mechanics that will never be seen in the series again... but I've talked about that before. I want to talk about the moment where, on a tough map with the risk of death present, I "got" Fire Emblem. I had a defensive wall, I knew who the AI would go for, I knew how to strategically bait out and peck at the enemy forces... I was a fucking tactician for a solid few moments there. Perhaps in 2021 I'll chase that high again. We'll find out, but for a brief shining moment there I really got it and loved it. 

BEST FIGHTIN' FROG GAME OF 2020

Battletoads 2020 (XB1)

Yep. They made another Battletoads. Then I got an Xbox One for my birthday, and it came with Game Pass free, and this was on it... How could I fucking not? What I got was... Well, it's a Battletoads game alright. That might strike terror in many, so I'll say this one's much fairer and nice about proceedings. It's 2020 and they're not scared to death of little Billy beating the fucker in a weekend at Blockbuster and thus tuning the game into an existential childhood nightmare out of that fear. That being said, it's still Battletoads. It aims for a new level of humor which is highly subjective and mileage will vary, but I got a chuckle or two out of it so I won't complain. The game itself definitely gets what made Battletoads good though; what starts as a quite functional beat-em-up increases in difficulty very fast. Before it can become a full bullshitty unfair beat-em-up, though, it shifts into any goddamned game genre it can. Button-tapping minigames, twin stick shooter, puzzle platformer... and yes, you got your high-speed homages to classic Battletoad stages like the Turbo Tunnel or the Rat Race. It's good, it's quick, and it's more Battletoads that was free so I'm quite pleased.

HARDEST GAME OF 2020

Samurai Shodown Neogeo Collection (Switch)

Son of a bitch. On a wild impulse (which I wrote all about) I ended up trying the original Samurai Shodown and struggling quite a great deal with its hateful, input-reading, frame-countering GIMME ANOTHER FUCKING QUARTER AI. Then SNK put a whole damn collection on the Switch and I deep dived. Okay, so that's seven games I put as the hardest game of 2020, but these fuckers deserve it. The first three I managed to barely squeak victory in after god knows how many quarters, but they get easier. Then there's Samurai Shodown V and its two variants (one of which is exclusive to this collection!) which I fell in love with. Mostly because it has an archer character, so the AI couldn't perfect block my attacks and instantly counter attack me because I was a ranged fighter. I loved this game enough to no-joke get one credit clears at the highest difficulty level, and while it was a real challenge to figure out, it was actually kind of satisfying. If the global hellstate calms down and I get a vaccination, I cannot wait to play this game with friends from away again and deal with human play as opposed to a perfect computer. Here's to you, SamSho.

BEST EXPLORATORY PLATFORMER OF 2020

Shantae And The Seven Sirens (Switch)

Okay, this is a weird one. I only played a few exploratory platformers this year, and I think this is the one I enjoyed the most. You'll see the others in the "And The Rest" category. Feel free to debate me on putting this one here, but I'm a big Shantae stan at this point who went gaga for Half-Genie Hero. In light of that, and despite this being good enough to get in the category... I was just a little let down by it in some ways? Previous games in this series have toyed with the exploratory platformer in different ways; the original is very much in the Simon's Quest mode, while Pirate's Curse and HGH are more a Demon's Crest style. Seven Sirens is straight-up an exploratory platformer a la Metroid or an Igavania. It's a bright, colorful, and fun one with lots of exploration and platforming and cute characters... but the goodies to be found leave a LOT to be desired. Pirate's Curse absolutely nailed powerups and made them open up new areas AND fun to use while exploring. HGH struggled with this a bit but the powers had their uses here and there. Seven Sirens just uses them as keys. The very last one you get is a triple jump which is nice, but everything else is strictly "and now with this powerup I can go HERE" and nothing else. It gets by with its charm, but I have to say I was just a bit let down by it. I have yet to revisit it to delve into doing it fast or other fun ending stuff like that, but it's still pretty good. Just... not as good as it could have been. With the current world map design but powers like Pirate's Curse, it would have been 100% lit. As it stands, it's less lit than that and that's a shame.

BEST "NEW OLD" GAME OF 2020

Bloodstained Curse Of The Moon 2 (Switch)

Oh fuck, now here we go. The original Curse Of The Moon was a welcome surprise, a loving spiritual successor to classic Castlevania that managed to improve upon its inspiration thanks to quality of life upgrades and just being really rad. Well, Curse Of The Moon 2 is more of that. Quite a lot more. A whole new suite of playable characters including a goddamned corgi in a goddamned steampunk mech suit. The same core of playable characters from the first game. Multiple routes through each stage, variable difficulty, and a climactic final mode that's just the goddamned coolest. It's not perfect and some of the bosses are way too busy and bullshit (looking at you, sarcophagus fuck in stage 6) but goddamn if there isn't a LOT of very good action platforming to dig into here. I'm very impressed with it and generally really pleased with it.

BEST GAME MADE BY PALS IN 2020

Silus (PC)

Hot damn! My pal Thom made an RPG and it's pretty goddamned good! Thom is very much an RPG superfan, and so a lot of knowledge and wisdom went into this game. Also a lot of heart, as the story moves along on a great little clip. I quite enjoyed Silus, and its battle system has a certain deepness to it, what with elemental weaknesses and buffing and debuffing and all that other stuff. This is the kind of game where managing that sort of thing feels really good, and by the end of the game it just felt really damn good to have gotten into a rhythm where you could nuke shit with your magic and buff up to deal with the tricky boss stuff. The story's also commendable and it really goes places and makes you feel for its sympathetic villains, and want to take down the motherfuckers at the heart of the conflict. It's also got a super gay magical academy girl as a party member. RACHEL BEST GIRL. I can say that, it's my list. Anyway if you like old RPGs from 25 years ago or so, you'd dig Silus. It's breezy, quick, fun, and a good pal made it. Good job, Thom.

GAME OF THE YEAR 2020

Final Fantasy VII Remake (PS4)

Yes, I know. I usually put some artsy weird thing that made me cry as the Game Of The Year. Putting a big remake of one of the most popular games ever seems a bit out of place for me, but all I can be is honest. Besides, bear with me 'cause this game delivers on the gonzo goods. Before that, though, it delivers on the very well made action RPG goods. God help me, it actually works well. There were a few hiccups here and there (LOOKING AT YOU, WALL MARKET ARENA BOSS) but I found the battle system neat as hell and really satisfying. This is a massive expansion of part of the original FF7, and the love and care put into it shows. What are just random side characters in the original are given so much more personality and charm now, and it makes the knowledge of what's to come all the wilder. If it were just that, a straight expansion of part of FF7, people would eat it up. Just that alone, though, wouldn't have been enough. No, they get really fucking clever with it. There are certain elements and things going on that will make one raise an eyebrow and wonder what the fuck. I'm not going to spoil them here, but suffice it to say that the end of this game was a wild ride. Here I was, having played for hours, it approaching midnight... and I decided to press on and beat the game that night. By now it had explained the stranger elements, and they are extremely meta. The final battle just goes for it in full, to the point that it feels more like the climax to a Dangan Ronpa game than a Final Fantasy one. I wish I could spoil it, but I've given enough away already and a spoiler section would only be a few lines long. Let's just leave it at that. A very very solid remake of a quite good and beloved RPG classic, that manages to actually Say Something that hit upon me in a resonant and crunchy way. That's what makes a Game Of The Year 'round these parts, and that's what the FF7 remake did. It earns it spot well, and I certainly hope the PS4 isn't retired by the time they get around to the next chapter of this story.

...AND THE REST

Here's the usual honorable mention sort of category. These games were all varying degrees of good, but they didn't get their own special categories made up. That can be due to many things. Maybe I already had that type of game filled up, or maybe I just couldn't make up a half-decent category. Either way, they're not left off the list. They're just down here. No disrespect, here are some brief thoughts on good games I did play this year.

Bloodstained Ritual Of The Night (Switch)

In contrast to the Curse Of The Moon games, Ritual Of The Night is very much in the Igavania exploratory platformer style. My copy was a gift and it was pretty nice to run through, but I admit that on a certain level I'm less impressed with it than I am with the Curse games. As I said, the Curse games feel like a natural evolution of classic Castlevania. Ritual, on the other hand, didn't give me that sense of surpassing and improving; it was very much "y'all remember Aria of Sorrow? Here is another game like that.". Aria of Sorrow is very good and Ritual Of The Night is very good by being like it, but on a certain level it didn't click with me like the Curse games. I am excited for the Classic mode they're adding to the thing though, so this may be worth a revisit.

The Legend Of Zelda (NES)

What in the hell is the original Zelda doing on this list? I have indeed played it before, but for whatever reason this year I did some challenge runs of it. I pulled off a 3-heart run, and then the swordless challenge. There's a surprising amount of depth and strategy to that game when you play it like that, and also some really damn annoying parts. Anything with Wizrobes or Darknuts is a nightmare, but I managed to pull these runs off and have a good time with the very first Zelda, so that was quite nice for me.

Mega Man Zero (GBA)

Ah yeah, the Zero and ZX collection dropped this year! I really only delved deep into the original Mega Man Zero, but that game's surprisingly crunchy and fun. It's a direct antecedent of my beloved Mega Man ZX, after all, and I went for a high-rank run. I managed to keep S rank up for a good while, until I just ran out of patience for it and beat the game while using stuff. My final rank was A, which is good enough, and maybe one day I'll go back and master that. Even so, what a damn good hard action game. I'm impressed, and would definitely enjoy that revisit.

Fatal Fury (Neo Geo)

I wrote about this game at length in my big fighting game post from May (I linked it up there during my talk about Samurai Shodown), so I won't repeat myself too much. It's a fascinating little fighter with design choices that would never be made in a post-Street Fighter 2 world, and it's something I'd love to try to 1CC if I ever got good enough at it. The final few fights are an absolute nightmare and would end 90% of my runs, but I like it enough to deem it worth trying. Andy Bogard's pretty rad.

51 Clubhouse Games (Switch)

I mean, I don't have much to say here. It's just a bunch of card and board games and stuff. You wouldn't think it'd be much, but it managed to be a nice pleasant time killer. Sure, you got classic card stuff like their own version of Uno, or Solitaire, but I found enjoyment in simple non-card games like the billiards or the golf as well. My only gripe is that the online is really bad for me, and that's partly due to my lacking Internet connection in the middle of nowhere... but also, it's a damn card game. Why's it got to lag to single FPS if I connect with someone else to play cards? Christ. Regardless, a sleeper little love for 2020.

Super Mario 64 (N64)

Oh hey, nothing much here, just another of the most important games ever made from 25 years or so ago. I actually attempted a 120-star run over the summer on the original console. This fucker's got teeth, and it eventually became too much for me. I tapped out at 111 stars on Tick Tock Clock, I just did not have the patience. Later in the year, when the 3D All-Stars collection dropped, I went back and did 70 star and picked all the stars I remembered liking. Played that way, it was nice because I could play all the good levels and forget all that bullshit that made me want to set my hair on fire. One day, maybe my patience will come back and I'll do it all. Boy, 2020 really is the year where I almost did full challenge runs, huh?

Super C (NES)

Speaking of challenge runs, here's one I actually finished in record time. I decided, for some ungodly reason, that I wanted a no death clear of Super C to match the one time I pulled the same off with the original Contra. It's something that took some work, and a little advice from Contra expert Polly to clear a particular roadblock with a clever consistent strat, but I kept at it and got my no-death clear. Contra's a rush. I'd have to be crazy to try the same for Contra 3, but you never know what kind of madness will overtake me in 2021.

Pokemon Shield Expansions (Switch)

Both halves of the new Pokemon DLC dropped this year and I blitzed through each of them in a weekend. New Pokemon added back in, a few brand-new Pokemon and regional forms whipped up, and just some more pleasant adventures in the Pokemon world. It's nice, you know? I got to play Pokedex hunter again, I made a whole new team of cool little critters, saw a lot of cute trainers, and did a bunch of co-op Dynamax battles. It's just plain fun to run through, and both expansions definitely were worth my time. One wonders what's next on the Pokemon horizon, but for now this was quite nice.

Momodora Reverie Under The Moonlight (XB1)

A game I dabbled with once on Steam years ago, and happened to find on that fancy new Xbox One Game Pass. I figured what the hell, and fired it up. This is an absolutely beautiful and graceful little exploratory platformer that doesn't overstay its welcome. It's short, sweet, but memorable. I really admire it, andit showed some teeth at times as well. It was unafraid to beat me down, but it was forgiving enough that I dusted myself off and went right back at it. Hell yeah. What a cute and fun little gem.

You Beat The Turbo Tunnel (PC)

In addition to giving me pro Super C advice, Polly also made a game this year! You Beat The Turbo Tunnel is a simple little thing which takes the infamous NES Turbo Tunnel and... well, makes it so you can beat it. It's a fun little chuckle of a game, but I also admire how it takes this infamous thing which was a locked gate for so long to so many and just smashes it to bits in the name of comedy. Little Billy is 35 YEARS OLD NOW, BLOCKBUSTER IS DEAD, AIN'T NO NEED FOR THE TURBO TUNNEL TO MAKE YOU WASTE YOUR TIME ON A RENTAL! Now you can beat the Turbo Tunnel, and it's all thanks to Polly. Thanks for that, Polly! =)

Helltaker (PC)

Horny Sokoban that can be beaten in 90 minutes. I know, because I fucking did it live. You can click that and witness my descent into madness, frustration, and even a little light bulb of relief as I actually honest to God figure out a solution or two on my goddamned own. Then swear again. It's also got cute devil girls in suits. Like I said. Horny Sokoban. Check it out sometime, it's free on Steam even. Or watch me lose my absolute shit at it. Your choice.

That'll do it for Game Of The Year stuff! I never quite know what to put at the end of these, so I'll just say thank you for being patient with me. It's been a tough year for us all, and I've mostly descended into magical girl nonsense like I usually do. That may change once I finish the final writeup... but, again, you gotta wait 'till 2021 for that. We all weathered this shit year together, so let's bundle up (at appropriate distance) and weather through the rest until some goddamned pinprick of hope shows up. Much love to you all, and we'll see you for 2021. Until then, loves. <3 

The Harmony Of Hope And The Dirge Of Despair: Part 4 (Senki Zesshou Symphogear AXZ) [4.5]

(Continued from 4.4)

Part 5: Discord Of Divinity

Here we are, then. The final part of the writeup, wherein we deal with the true antagonist of the season. I said it way back when we began talking about the season, but Adam Weishaupt is basically playing from the Dr. Ver playbook for his run on the show (the prick). Hell... I can't believe I'm about to say this, but he's not even as good at being an arch-manipulator as Dr. Ver was. His end goal is betraying the Bavarian Illuminati for his own selfish wants, yes, but there's no clever plotting here. Okay, blowing up the old Kazanari HQ is actually part of his plan in a way we'll see in a moment, but that move isn't one of an arch-plotter. It's getting rid of the problem with a very big boom. Dr. Ver would have gotten someone else to blow it up for him by convincing them it was a vital move. I need to stop giving Dr. Ver faint praise in comparison before I throw up now, Jesus Christ.

The Harmony Of Hope And The Dirge Of Despair: Part 4 (Senki Zesshou Symphogear AXZ) [4.4]

(Continued from 4.3)

Part 4: Percussion Of Perfection

We've been talking all around the Bavarian Illuminati, but we have yet to dive into the specific ideology which drives the trio in this series. Doing that will uncover a unique but interesting ideological conflict between them and the Symphogears, so let's poke at it. Our first glimpse of them was melting a bunch of Val Verdan military leaders into glowing light, which Saint Germain then absorbed and used to summon that big god dragon. We'll get to that, but they're also here to pick up a specific something or other... that something or other being an ancient Autoscorer named Tiki who's vital to their plans. Why not use her sooner? Well...

The Harmony Of Hope And The Dirge Of Despair: Part 4 (Senki Zesshou Symphogear AXZ) [4.3]

(Continued from 4.2)

Part 3: Precipitato Of Problematic

Well, that header's not ominous at all. To make matters worse... God. I really cannot believe I have to say this for the third time in the row. Deep breaths, everyone. We have to talk about Dr. Ver again. Yes, I know. That massive prick. He's dead, so thankfully we don't have too much to say... but let's think back to that moment where he died. No, not the part where it's dangerously close to giving the prick a heroic and noble death where he saved the world. In fact, never play that bit again. No, I mean the part where he left Maria a mysterious futuristic SD card with some cryptic dying words. A plot hook, in other words, for this season to tug on. As it turns out, what he had on that card was a formula for creating LiNKER. A parting gift so Maria, Kirika, and Shirabe can continue to battle the Noise. Unfortunately, Elfnein hasn't been able to crack the formula as of the start of the series. This gives us part of a little arc, and something we can really dig into for a start here... but I don't think it's going to end pretty. Let's begin.

The Harmony Of Hope And The Dirge Of Despair: Part 4 (Senki Zesshou Symphogear AXZ) [4.2]

(Continued from 4.1)

Part 2: Requiem Of Regret

Alright, there's going to be a lot of wild shit to play with later, especially considering the Bavarian Illuminati. I'm going to leave it on the back burner and instead focus on some other assorted resonant plots within Symphogear AXZ. Regret is a powerful thing that runs through some of these plotlines, both main and B plots, as we go through the story. It's very much an umbrella of sorts, but it will help consolidate everything together. Let's start with something I am hesitant to peck at. We get to start by talking about World War 2 and Japan's perspective on it! Which... okay, I'm lying, we're not going to go full tilt with that. I don't know. I'm a white person from the other side of the world, I have no idea about the complex feelings of Japan's thoughts on World War 2 and what happened there. What I can do is what I've always done. I can peek at what's here and make something of it involving the regret theme. Let's do that, then. It'll be kind of like looking at a Godzilla movie. I'm going on in without a guide this time, but I think I can handle it. Well, I hope I can.

The Harmony Of Hope And The Dirge Of Despair: Part 4 (Senki Zesshou Symphogear AXZ) [4.1]

(Happy holidays! This, as you'll soon come to see, took me a hell of a time to work on. Between NaNoWriMo and the inherent... prickly bits of the season in question, it took me a month or so just to bang out the words and get it done. I had to just sit on it for a while, let it simmer, and really ponder on what the show was trying to say. I hope the conclusions I came to aren't too disagreeable to you. If they are, well, maybe we can have reasonable discussion. You know, talking to understand one another. Like the cute punchy girl I've devoted a book to! As always, there are full spoilers ahead for this show. As always, thanks to the very special people who support me in these endeavors. As always... let's get into it.)

(Continued from 3.5)

Oh yeah. We're back for Part 4, y'all. In more ways than one, we've come full circle. I say that because of when I'm writing this, in the second week of November 2020. The mists of time have obscured when I started, but I can tell you for sure that as of mid-November 2019 I had finished the very first season of Symphogear. It's been an entire year, off and on, of thinking about this show. of watching it and talking about it with pals, of writing these massive love letters to it. The first season came out on Blu-Ray. It's on my shelf, no thanks to tricky fine print involving FedEx not delivering to rural PO Boxes. I started the journey a year ago, and by the time you read these words I'll be into the weeds of the final season, ending it. I'm probably going to cry when that happens, but we must focus on the season at hand rather than the season ahead.

31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 31 (Halloween III: Season Of The Witch)

Boo.

WOOOOOO! HAPPY HALLOWEEN! The night of terror, of danger, of children in masks asking for your candy! With equal parts fun size potato chips and mini Chips Ahoy, I did my part to live the little ghosts and goblins their treats. I saw one kid as a Mario with a like inflatable Yoshi around his torso. Adorable. Very few actual masks though. The spooky kind, not the safety kind, I mean. This is probably for the best since according to Halloween III a spooky mask will MELT YOUR FUCKING FACE INTO BUGS AND SNAKES. Maybe I didn't ease you into that one gracefully enough. We're finishing a journey that lasted two years on the blog. In 2018 I had to watch a Halloween movie, but this wasn't available digitally and the 2018 Halloween movie had like... just come out in theaters that I'm not near. I had to settle on Halloween 4, of all things. 2019 let me watch the previous year's Halloween film, and it was pretty good. For 2020, a year which went to hell in such a way that the sequel to the 2018 Halloween film has been delayed to next year? I finally bit the bullet and ordered a Blu-Ray of this sucker. Here, at long last to close out the spooky marathon... is Halloween III.

Oh, to live in a universe where this idea took off. Turning Halloween into an unpredictable genre-changing horror anthology with every entry. You can almost see how it would have worked. Horror at the core, but different flavors every time. Like Final Fantasy. What should have been the Final Fantasy VII of movies instead is the Zelda II of movies. That analogy is going to fly right over the head of anyone without intimate knowledge of old video games. I blame Halloween 2 for immediately following up on the Michael Myers stuff. Really I blame Halloween 2 for a lot. Maybe next year we'll tackle that sucker and take it down once and for all. Anyway, that left poor Halloween III going the anthology route without any ties to Michael Myers. Then Halloween lay dormant for half a decade, and they started right back up with Michael Myers slashing the teen girls and... we're still here. Oh, what could have been. The Final Fantasy VII analogy is still apt, though. Not in a "this is the greatest movie of all time" sense, but in tone and theme. VII departed from the fantasy trappings to go in a futurist techno-fantasy setting. That's Halloween III.

Hell, the opening even mixes the two. Scanlines over the credits forming the image of a pumpkin. Technology circa 1982 melded with horror. Whereas the last two Halloween movies were slashers, Halloween III meshes sci-fi with the occult to create a techno-thriller mystery. Instead of mask-wearing knife guys lurking in the dark, we have men in suits with incredible strength who can snap your skull in half or rip your head off with their bare hands. They're rather like Myers in that they never talk and are emotionles killers, but the effect is still jarring. The central mystery of the film is just what the hell is up with this Halloween mask factory in this creepy town. Shit clearly isn't right, as bums are getting their heads ripped off and a woman's face melts when she pokes a microchip with a hairpin. I can only imagine how Halloween III hits when you don't know what in the fuck it's leading to. If you're one of those people, for the love of god stop reading me and fire up the movie. Don't let me ruin it for you, I'd love to hear your reaction to going into this sucker blind. For the rest of you, now I'm going to blab about the antagonist's grand plan.

Technology and magic, melded together in a dark pagan ritual of vast proportions. Our boy Cochran runs the mask factory, and he's also some sort of paganist looking to serve the power of Samhain. According to him the planets are in alignment for another mass sacrifice, and so his grand scheme. He's stolen a piece of Stonehenge, put little chunks of it in microchips, affixed them to his masks, and then hyped the utter shit out of the masks via a marketing campaign. HEY KIDS, PUT ON YOUR MASKS AND WATCH THE TV AT 9 FOR A BIG GIVEAWAY! Cochran got his start in the business by making prank toys and other things, and this is the ultimate "trick" in trick or treat. Broadcasting a signal on TV at 9 on the dot that will activate the microchips in the mask and melt the head of any maskwearers watching, turning their heads into bugs and snakes and shit. We get to see this shit happen to some poor kid they test it on, who also happens to be the son of the best mask salesman in the country. Good job making me money, Buddy, here's your bonus! I TURNED YOUR SON'S HEAD INTO RATTLESNAKES! JOKE'S ON YOU! It's absolutely ghoulish, a gonzo mix of high-tech and pagan magic. Speaking of high-tech, those guys who rip people's heads off are super-advanced robots. A totally wild twist, but a welcome one in fitting with the movie's weird themes.

The climax starts in a wild way, with our hero tied up and forced to watch TV with his mask on... and what's on the TV before the commercial? It's Halloween. The original movie. It's fictional in this world, but it's so odd to hear the ominous score for Halloween as Laurie walks to a crime scene... in a totally different tense scene in another movie. Our hero gets out, scattering those death microchips everywhere and knocking out all the robots. This also creates an energy circle, not unlike a magic circle, all around a ring of computers. Literally the theme of the movie plopped right there in front of your eyes. The ending itself is an ambiguous bleak thing that doesn't let you know if the death broadcast which will melt the heads of every kid in America got through or not. I like the ambiguity. It's just vague enough to make you question, just intriguing enough to make you theorize. I slept on this movie a little when I first saw it, but I have to say it grew on me more rewatching it for this. It should have done better. Who knows what kind of gonzo genres and mashups Halloween could have gone in? Ah well. It did what it did, and it exists as its own historical curiosity. So, too, does this marathon. It's done. The long dark November is ahead, and more writing beckons. Not just NaNoWriMo, but Symphogear. I've got a lot of cooking ahead of me. You, though? You all have a good Halloween. Be seeing you when I see you. 

31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 30 (Kid Dracula)

And now, a little bit of lighthearted levity before the spooky day is upon us. Sometimes we need a little break, and replaying this thing was a good little break for me. I'll gladly talk about the game itself, but the circumstances around me getting it are memorable to me. It was not a Halloween purchase, but a Christmas gift. I don't recall the exact year offhand. Sometime in the mid to late 90's. Christmas break was coming and I made a little lending trade with a friend at school over the break. I lent them my Gameboy and some games, they lent me some Super Nintendo games. I remember Starfox was among them and I really liked playing that. My family dropped some hints that maybe I shouldn't have lent out my old Gameboy over the Christmas break, but I dismissed that. Come Christmas Day, here I am with fresh copies of this game as well as Operation C, the Game Boy Contra game. Don't I look like a fresh dumbass now, with two brand new games I can't play? I either waited for the New Year or got my Game Boy back with haste, but either way I played this game. I really loved it. Years later I lent it to another friend, and when I was leaving for college he asked if he could keep it because his little sister loved it. Sure, I said. What the hell. I got what I wanted out of it. In the end the joke was on me again, because it turns out that game was rare as shit and worth hundreds of dollars. I guess when it comes to Kid Dracula, I got varying degrees of trick and treat.

The tricks I've detailed, but the treat is the actual game. Maybe it's just childhood nostalgia and the old memories of how to play it popping back when I fired it up again, but it's a cute and breezy little action platformer experience. Funny enough the Famicom version this is a sequel/remake of is now easier to get one's hands on, having been included as a bonus in the Castlevania Anniversary Collection last year. Yes, this is technically a Castlevania game. A cute tongue-in-cheek parody of it, in which the titular Kid Dracula is supposed to be Alucard, I guess. The entire game is goofy and irreverent, with lots of stock horror monsters drawn in a goofy style. You got your zombies, your bats, your Frankenstein monsters, et cetera. As a child I just took it as a funny spooky game. Maybe it helped interest me in horror, who knows? Later you go to space and deal with aliens and obvious Xenomorph parodies. The one that always got me was the stage 2 boss, who is a burly masked man who attacks you with a hatchet and then a shotgun. I always just thought it was making fun of Jason, but now I'm fairly certain it's a dig at Splatterhouse, because that game has prominent shotgun use too. Splatterhouse also got a cutesy parody game in this style, but I've never played it. Next year, maybe.

As far as how it plays? I kind of love it. Knowing what I know, it was easy enough to rack up enough lives that I didn't have to worry. The bonus games you can play at the end of the levels help you in this regard, and I could easily get 10 lives on the balloon popping one. That's the best one, but after a certain point I didn't need the lives. A newcomer might, but if you do they're there. There's a lovely sense of progression as well with the powers you unlock after beating the stages, from a bat transformation to homing bullets to walking upside down. The stage hazards themselves are good and varied; everything from collapsing bridges to Gradius-style flame arcs to a tube in space level which is an autoscroller. It really is just a fun little game with just the right amount of challenge, and one I certainly loved at the time. Pity I gave it away, but what can you do? Ah well. That'll do for my little nostalgia trip with Kid Dracula. I highly suggest you give it a whirl before the spooky season ends. Speaking of, the night approaches. Ghosts. Goblins. Kids in masks knocking on the door asking for candy... and I hope they're wearing the safe kind of masks under the spooky kind of masks this year. Poor kids have been through a lot, like we all have. They deserve the fun sized potato chips we bought to give out to them. The kids will come a-knocking, as they have every year... but in between those knocks, for me? The final spooky movie of the season. The new beginning has reached its end. Oooooo. See you on All Hallow's Eve, y'all.

31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 29 (A Creepshow Animated Special)

Another unexpected choice, but one that turned out neat. We're winding down here in the marathon, and when I wind down I kind of just pick esoteric whatevers for the final few posts to get us to the finish line. To that end, I literally just load up Shudder to find an esoteric whatever to blast through for the evening when I found this. Fresh content, recently released! And it's even something I'm interested in. A brief primer, since it's been probably four years since we covered this series. Creepshow started as a 1982 horror anthology movie, a homage to the old EC horror comics of the 50's. George Romero directed, Stephen King wrote, and Tom Savini did special effects. A true meeting of horror minds paying homage to the tales of terror from their childhoods. It's a pretty good movie. More in this vein continued to be made. You have Creepshow 2, which is okay. Then there's the Tales From The Darkside movie as well as Creepshow 3. Both are unofficial sequels, though the former's spiritual and the latter is fanmade. Again, they're also pretty good. I legitimately do not remember if I covered Tales From The Darkside on here or not. Finally, there's a Creepshow TV series I haven't seen. I gather this animated special is them cobbling together a quick spooky something for the season. You get two spooky animated tales of terror, so let's start off with a Stephen King tale that only took 40-odd years to get an adaptation...

SURVIVOR TYPE

We've been here before, actually. Not the animated adaptation, which is new. I mean the actual story. I covered this back in 2017, and I remember writing it in an absolute hurried fever pitch before I had to go on vacation. I don't remember what I said about the story itself so let me just go and peek really quick. Oh. Not much. Jesus, I really was pressed for time, huh? Anyway this is the narrated story of a guy stranded on a desert island, resorting to eating seagulls and later amputating parts of his legs so he has food to survive. The short story itself is an effective slow descent into madness on the part of its narrator, the final entries only growing more and more incoherent. As an animated adaptation, this one really gets to show the absolute visceral horror of what our narrator has to do to survive. The killing of seagulls, the amputation of his own foot, it's all real gross shit to witness. Special props go to Keifer Sutherland as well. We saw him as a vampire a few days ago, but he definitely gives this guy character with his performance. It really sells the descent to hell when you can hear it. Come to think of it, both these stories only have two voice actors in them. Did they actually put this thing together in quarantine? If so, that's impressive. I hope they played safe and animated from home and stuff, but impressive nonetheless. The final line about ladyfingers is just as spooky here as it was in the story, so let's move on to something a little more modern and unknown with...

TWITTERING FROM THE CIRCUS OF THE DEAD

All the snide snipes at bloggers in this one make things a little too real. This is indeed a story for the age of social media and the kids on their telephones. It's also written by Joe Hill, and I've never read a Joe Hill thing before but I know him by reputation. Joe Hill, you see, is Stephen King's son who also went on to become a spooky writer. Helpfully, he also has a cameo in the original Creepshow as the kid in the framing device of the movie. It's neat to see him come back, and it's really neat to see the generations of Kings getting adapted for a Creepshow cartoon. Anyway, whereas Survivor Type was presented as a rambling narrated journal entry, this story plays with the times and is narrated as a livetweet thread by a bored teenage girl on family vacation. In typical rebellious teenage girl fashion she complains about her mom a lot and shares some funny stories, all while livetweeting the drive. They eventually end up at the titular Circus Of The Dead, and this all gets livetweeted as well. It's incredibly clear that this place is employing actual zombies and keeping people as captives, but our livetweeter and her family don't see it until it's too late. We get absolutely wild shit like a zombie shot out of a cannon and exploding, zombies lit on fire, zombies mauled by lions, lions eaten by zombies, and pretty soon all absolute hell breaks loose and our livetweeter is trapped and crying. We're not even sure if she's really tweeting this shit any more, but eventually they come for her too. Some canny ghoul then swipes her phone and tweets promotion for the circus, stating our livetweeter will be the next act, and that's that. It's an interesting tale, to be sure, and the zombie circus is a ghoulish bit of dark comedy. I also kind of like how the livetweeting makes this like found footage, in a way. Livestreamed footage? Oh fuck, there's a horror movie idea. Either way, let's bail from this scene. Two more days till Halloween. This was good, it's worth a watch if you've got Shudder, and I may check out the series in my off time. For now, though, I've got just a few more things to talk about...

31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 28 (Ghost Story)

Yeah okay, that's another weird one to try and explain. You know me, though. As long as I can squeeze three paragraphs out of it, I've got a post. Believe me, I've been rambling like a verbose idiot for 22 years. I got this shit on lockdown. So. Let us talk about Ghost Story. I admit to some fascination with the movie, considering I'd read the book first. I've only read the book once, however. Shall we talk about how I remember the book? It's by Peter Straub, an author I only found out about because of my own Stephen King kick. The pair collaborated for a novel called The Talisman, which is quite the evocative little book. But we are talking about Ghost Story instead, and Ghost Story was quite haunting. You know, a macabre tale of loss and grief and dark secrets and... yes, ghosts. I remembered the basic beats of the plot, just enough to keep me from being lost going into the movie. I thought the book was pretty neat, which is why I was intrigued by the movie. Was the movie as neat? Well.

I don't think so, but that doesn't mean it didn't still hit a particular mood. The mood it hits oddly makes me think of David Cronenberg's Dead Zone adaptation. That movie was set in winter, and the atmosphere combined with the subject matter and the score to create this very cold and haunting movie. That's the vibe that Ghost Story gives me. It's arguably the best part of it, but we'll poke some more. The actual scares are limited to OH GOD SHE'S GOT A FUCKING MONSTER FACE AAAAAH, but I gotta give them props. They are very good goopy monster faces. There's also the cast, primarily made up of film alumni at the twilight of their careers. Fred Astaire is in this. The dancer from the 40's, but he's a haunted old man regretting the dark secrets of his life. Same with all the other old guys who get together and tell scary stories, but then their sins come back to haunt them. Their sins being the ghost of a lady they killed back in the late 20's. A terrible and tragic accident we see full well at the end of the second act, when the survivors confess their tale to their dead friend's son. A flirty woman they were all sweet on got her head banged in a moment of anger from one of them, they thought she was dead and tried to hide her body by putting her in a car they pushed into a pond, but oops she was only knocked out and you drowned her. Her spirit haunts the sons of one of her killers, starting romantic relationships as some form of revenge. As she memorably says, she'll take them to places they never could have imagined and also drain the life from them.

So what doesn't work? I don't really know how to quantify it. It's a long movie at 110 minutes, and it feels like it needs to be shorter and longer. Longer because the opening bits had me, who had read the book but years ago, a little lost and confused. Shorter because the flashbacks do take up quite a bit of time. There's also a subplot with escaped asylum patients doing the will of the ghost woman that I legitimately do not understand the point of, because I don't remember what they were up to in the book. It's not even that it's an unfaithful adaptation. It hits all the beats. There is just some intangible quality about it that does not quite make it hit. Maybe it's the adaptation decay, maybe I'm just misremembering the quality of the book itself. Either way, this is just fine. Maybe worth a watch, but the best part about it is that cold atmosphere and that score. They're really good, especially here at the end of October. It snowed in parts of my home island this week, you know. The cold's a-coming. The dark oppressive months ahead. That's the real spooky stuff. Three days remain...

31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 27 (She Dies Tomorrow)

Okay, so since I don't know how much analysis I can wring out of something like this, I'm afraid I'm going to have to start by just getting honest and morbid. Alright, here goes. I'm an anxious person with mild hypochondriac tendencies who's not in great shape and was born with a heart defect. Thus, sometimes I kind of feel like shit and worry it's a cardiac episode. A little pain in the left arm and oh god no I'm going to fucking die this is it. I've even gone so far as to write shit like "Tell Facebook" on a notepad, convinced that I'm going to die in my sleep and worried that the people I care about online will never know what happened to me otherwise. I told you it was morbid, but I'm being honest. I mention this because the movie I just watched is about people dealing with the sudden existential horror of their own mortality, and the anxiety that comes with the bad part of their brain knowing for sure that this is it, it's the end of their life and there's nothing they can do about it. Let's poke on that for a bit and talk about She Dies Tomorrow.

I'm going to call this an existential horror movie. There's no grand explanation for why the events happen, no greater lore to draw on. Searching it on Youtube to rent it yielded an "ENDING EXPLAINED" video, and that's the wrong lens to use in analyzing this. It defies explanation. That isn't the point. The point is the unsettling nightmare of it all, the way the various characters react to it, and the metaphors at work here. It is a movie about the existential nightmare of mortality, and it lingers on this for the whole film. We're introduced to a girl named Amy, and she's clearly depressed and in a bad way. We see her listen to the same song over and over, drink wine, touch the floor, looking at cremation urns online. It's when her friend Jane comes over that the movie explains Amy's mood. Amy is convinced she is going to die tomorrow. Jane dismisses this as Amy being drunk and leaves, but here's the really spooky part about She Dies Tomorrow. It isn't just that the existential certainty of the dark recesses of your brain has you convinced that you'll die tomorrow. It's that this goddamned horror of mortality is contagious. Jane catches it, runs to her family in panic, and spreads the horror and certainty of incoming death to them. 

There's no big explanation for this, no lore dump, nothing. This is the movie. People convinced all of a sudden that they're going to die tomorrow, and how they deal with that. How, then, do they deal with it? Amy goes off on a memory tour, and we see flashbacks of her with a boyfriend. She wants to ride a dune buggy one day, and one night they get high as fuck and order pizza when her boyfriend answers the door, and the obvious intent of the scene is that the pizza man passed on the existential dread to him. Amy goes dune buggying in the present, returning to the house where she and her boyfriend were on vacation, and finding his body. It's not really clear how he died, but he did. Jane's brother and his wife console their daughter, who soon is weeping over not wanting to die... and again, you're left to fill in the lines here yourself, but it seems fairly obvious that they go to kill Jane as revenge for passing on the existential dread to them before they die. Brian and Tilly, two guests at the birthday party of the last pair we talked about, go and unplug Brian's father from life support and lament their relationship was pretty much doomed anyway. Jane gets to end the movie bleeding to death but swimming in a swimming pool as two other girls have the existential dread. The movie ends on Amy flipping between "It's okay" and "It's not okay". Which, mood.

That's She Dies Tomorrow. Uhhh. I don't know. There's something at play here, something about depression and anxiety and memento mori. Beyond that, it's a tone piece of existential dread and horror at our own mortality. It affected me for sure. I'm fairly certain I will live through tomorrow, though. Good lord, no, that's way too much of a downer to end this one on. Uhhh. Hm. Gotta think of a good way to end the thing now. Oh! Uhhh how about tomorrow we watch a ghost story? Yeah, that sounds like fun. Okay. That'll do it for this one. Sorry the tone's fucked, but what can you do?

31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 26 (The Lost Boys)

Man, RIP to a real one, huh? The late great Joel Schumacher directed this one, so I figured I'd pay my dues and watch it. Definitely a lot of mirroring with Fright Night, as it's an 80's vampire movie I've only seen once before, 20-odd years ago. Schumacher did a lot of movies that weren't his Batman duology, but the Batman ones will always stick with me. If I may, oh so briefly. I saw Batman Forever when I was 10 and without having seen the Tim Burton movies, which is the absolute perfect way for someone to experience Batman Forever. I still have an attachment to it. Batman and Robin is harder to love, but I can appreciate its turn to full goofy. I will always remember 1997 at the former Bayview Cinema in Grand Bank, seeing that movie on the big screen during my summer vacation. I don't remember how I felt on the movie since the Internet's freakouts over it have fucked with my memory, but I remember the experience. And now, to remember Joel Schumacher for something other than Bat credit cards, it's The Lost Boys.

The Richard Donner production credit and one cast member in particular gives this movie a certain feel later on, but the eerie and evocative mood it sets before all that comes in is a strange one. Santa Carla is a dark carnival of a town, night sky lit up by fairground attractions and roller coasters and flashing lights, but outside the bright lights is a darkness. Missing posters all over the place, people out of work and homeless. There's something bad here even before you get to the goddamned vampires. Once again, we're in a weird world where vampire fiction exists alongside the actual monsters lurking and preying on people in the night, but some people in Santa Carla seem to be in the know that this is happening and believe in it. It's not treated as a existential panic like Fright Night, but just an annoyance and a constant danger. Fuck, vampires are real. That fucking sucks, I'd better be careful at night at stuff. Our new kids in town are not careful and one of them falls in with the wrong crowd.

Ah yes, Keifer Sutherland's merry band of vampire boys. The title's a cute pun here. It's both referring to Peter Pan and his merry band of boys who never grow up, and also using "lost" as a synonym for the loss of innocence. 'Cause they're immortal creatures of the night who go out murdering folks to feed on their blood. Our boy Michael here has his own fall from innocence, and the obvious metaphor is a good boy falling in with the bad crowd. Except, again, the bad crowd in this case go out every night and murder people. That's a big yikes. The movie plays with the interesting concept of half-vampires; that is, you have some vampiric traits and weaknesses but can still walk in sunlight. Only actually making your first kill turns you fully, and that's the precipice Michael is on now. That leads us to his little brother, who gets in with a duo of vampire hunters. One of them's Corey Feldman. So you got your Richard Donner/Goonies connection right there, but that's only kind of what the movie is getting at. Kind of.

The last act of the movie goes balls to the wall, with Feldman and his vampire hunter pal going into the lair of the vampires (which is one hell of a set, gotta say) and staking Alex Winter before he can travel in time in a phone booth. Right, snark aside, this shit's fucked. They're sleeping like bats and the blood pours out and all kinds of other shit, but Keifer Sutherland swears revenge. Then the movie becomes a hybrid between Goonies, Monster Squad, and Home Alone. Bearing in mind the latter had yet to come out at the time, this is impressive. The vampires come, but they get totally fucked up. I swear, the climax of this movie is rad as shit. You got vampires melting in tubs of holy water while their blood spews out of every sink and water pipe in the house, and a vampire shot through the heart with an arrow into a stereo whose HEAD FUCKING EXPLODES FROM ELECTRIC SHOCK! HOLY FUCK! The final confrontation with the real head vampire is brief but he blows up better than a shmup boss, the grandpa gets a good line about how he can't stand the goddamned vampires in this town, and that's The Lost Boys. I really liked this one. Better than Fright Night, at least. What a rad little thing. Thanks, Joel. You really were a real one. 

31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 25 (Fright Night)

Last week of October! Woohoo! Just got a few more of these to power through and then the spooky night is upon us! Why, we even have a beloved 80's vampire movie to talk about tonight. Well, I think it's beloved. I dunno. I actually saw this one once, like over 20 years ago. I remembered the general plot beats, and going in again... yeah, I basically remembered all the big bits rightly. It's definitely interesting, to say the least. Funny that I encountered it back then, 20 years ago. I guess this would have been right when I was pushing my own horror boundaries. Post-Alien but pre-Stephen King, in my personal spooky chronology. It absolutely would have scared me shitless 30 years ago. In the present day? Fine, with some gnarly bits. Let's poke at it.

Parts of this feel like Dracula 1985. I don't know if there's a Dracula movie that came out in 1985, but this take on the vampire is very traditional with the rules and weaknesses and all. Has to be invited in, turns into bats and wolves, weak to holy stuff and garlic and stakes through the heart. All stock and standard, but let loose upon the NINETEEEN EIGHTIES! Well, specifically suburbia. Which I guess is 80's enough. The first 50 minutes of this sort of play on the aggravating "NOBODY BELIEVES I SAW A SUPERNATURAL THING" trope. Not as aggravating as it could have been, but you really feel poor Charley's desperation as he finds out his new neighbor's a vampire, tries to stop him and fails, and has nobody believe him even as this vampire is like HA HA HA CHARLEY I AM GOING TO FUCKING KILL YOU TONIGHT. It's spooky shit to have to deal with, but Charley tries to enlist an expert... and this is where we get the wonderful Roddy McDowell as Peter Vincent. The name's obviously meant to invoke Peter Cushing and Vincent Price, as he's a former movie star famous for playing vampire hunters who now hosts a late night horror movie show called Fright Night. 

Actually, let me poke at that for a bit, because this is fun to think about. The universe of this film is one in which someone like Peter Vincent can make a career out of playing vampire hunters in movies. It is also one where fucking vampires exist. When the vampire meets Vincent later for the "test" to try and keep Charley from fucking murdering a guy, he mentions he loves the man's work. It could be bullshitting, but like... Do you think the vampire resents this guy for making a career out of pretending to kill vampires? It's something wild to think about. Either way, 50 minutes into the movie, Peter Vincent finds out vampires fucking exist and damn near loses his shit. Like you would if you spent 20 years pretending to kill a pretend monster for a living only to find the fucking things really exist and want you dead. This leads us into the madcap second half where the vampire goes after Charley's friends. He straight up turns one, but Charley's girlfriend he goes after in a much more seductive way. It's an old horror movie trope where the female lead is a dead ringer for the monster's long-lost lover from 100 years ago or whatever, but I find it all a little weird in an age-gap sort of way. Not even in the fact that the vampire's hundreds of years old, but like... he looks like a dude in his 30s and he's puttin' the moves on this girl on the dance floor. Uh.

To say nothing of the scene where he has her back in his lair and turns her, which. Uhhhh. The last bits of this movie are some wild vampire fightin' action as Charley and Peter Vincent team up. There may be a little metacommentary here. Peter Vincent, earlier in the movie, gets fired from his TV host job because the ratings are down and all kids want to see these days are slasher villains in ski masks. That isn't the exact line, but he's lamenting the changing tastes of the Kids These Days, and the shift from gothic horror of the 60's and 70's to the slashers of the 80's. Except his unique skillset and knowledge come in here, in this situation, so he's relevant again. One wonders if they asked Peter Cushing himself to do this. That would have clicked that whole "old horror hero faces the return of the old monster in a new age" theme click. Anyway, the climax slaps. You got monster face Amy, a zombie dude melting on screen that's really gnarly, and the final defeat of the vampire with some gonzo effects. Yeah, that's Fright Night for you. It's neat. No goth David Tennant, but it's pretty neat. I wonder if there are any other 80's vampire movies I can peek at.

31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 24 (Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street)

I didn't really plan on doing this documentary this year. Really, it just popped out at me while browsing Shudder so I was like "the hell with it, that sounds interesting and I can probably squeeze a post out of it". It's horror adjacent, which is close enough for me. The horrors in this documentary are frighteningly real, though. A gay man who lived through the hellscape that was the AIDS crisis of the 80's, who lived through lord knows how much homophobia and trauma and loss. I can't fathom how it felt for the poor guy, but he got through it somehow. He even went and took part in this documentary to tell his story, get it out there, and get his closure. Right, we should probably talk about who the subject of this documentary is, huh?

This is the story of Mark Patton. He's done much in his life, but the thing most people know him for is playing the lead in Nightmare On Elm Street 2. Elm Street 2 is considered the odd sequel out for a lot of reasons. Yeah, you got Freddy coming back to life by hijacking a guy in the living world. You got him coming through to the real world and slashing up teens at a pool party, which gels really weird when you think of the other movies. The biggest thing people want to talk about, though, is the fact that this movie is filled to the brim with gay subtext. I talked about it two years ago for the blog and barely touched it. I didn't feel qualified and wanted to poke more at the alchemical themes of the movie, along with some other stuff. It has to be said, though. It's in there. It's in there and it's done harm and good. Harm in that the writer denied it was there for years, implying that Patton himself added something to the character on the page and made him gay just like he was. That bus-throwing left Patton with obvious resentment to the writer over the years, and as he admits he used the writer as a focal point for the resentment he had from this movie. It's hard to blame the guy. The hateful comments they flash on screen regarding the movie's reception turn my fucking stomach to look at. 

Yet, there's also good to come from it. It inspired and uplifted so many LGBT horror fans, and they get to share what the movie means to them in this documentary. They get to share that, if only so briefly, with Patton himself. For Patton, this grand tour of the horror convention circuit is an act of healing. Between the reception to the movie and the AIDS crisis, Patton withdrew himself from the public eye. He lost partners, he fought HIV himself, and he powered ever onward, making a life for himself. That one defining fact about his life remains, though, and so Patton wants to get his closure from it all. He wants to find the good after 30 years of harm, and so he's off on tour to meet his fans. He's off to share his story with this documentary, and let the world know Mark Patton's story beyond "he was the gay guy from that really gay Elm Street movie". I know it now, and he's a pretty cool guy who weathered through more hurt and heartache than I ever have. He gets to meet his fans, he gets to reunite with cast and crew from his one big movie. He even gets to speak with the writer after 30 years, share his pain over what the writer had said in denying the subtext and shifting the blame all those years ago, and get an apology. An act of healing and moving on if there ever was one. That's really all I've got to say on this. I quite enjoyed the documentary, and I'm glad Patton got to share his story and get his closure. Elm Street 2's not a favorite Elm Street, but it's interesting enough to be up there for me. As for Mark Patton? I hope he's doing good down there in Mexico with his husband and his cute little dog. Guy's earned it.

31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 23 (Still More Angry Video Game Nerd Halloween Episodes)

At this point, this is a tradition in our little marathons. Me taking an off day to just talk about a couple of shortform comedy gaming videos with a loose horror theme. So here for you, once again, are brief capsule form thoughts on three more Angry Video Game Nerd videos. Eventually we'll run out of these since I do three a year and he only makes one spooky themed video a year, possibly two if we're really good. Even so, we can raid the backlog for a bit yet. That's exactly what I did, actually. All three of these videos are over a decade old, and in fact we're starting with the very first that James Rolfe ever did. That's right, strap in, it's...

You know, I've always been at odds with this video. I had this game growing up. I got it at a flea market in the 90's on the cheap with no preconcieved notions about Castlevania or anything like that. I also eventually was gifted a Nintendo hint book with a chapter on this game. Those two facts definitely skew my opinion of the game. I think it's fine. Pretty enjoyable, even, in the here and now when we can know all the shit. That does poke at an interesting observation I want to make with this video, though. This is the one, though. This kickstarted the whole thing. Not just AVGN, but people hating on this odd little game I liked as a child. The same thing happened with Zelda 2, but Zelda 2 is arguably a better game, and even this video has Rolfe admit it's pretty good. You've got all the standard complaints that have become infamous. The long day to night transfer, the cryptic clues, the need to grind for hearts. Among those are some oddly personal ones like there being few bosses. There are ROM hacks out there to "fix" all that if you truly care. What I find most interesting are the infamous crystal kneeling complaints. They're the sort of stuff that got me stuck as a kid too, but I just had fun roaming around the world in it. Rolfe is right in saying they're cryptic, but said complaint has been seen by millions of people. Those millions now know the solution, even if they agree it's cryptic. The popularity of the video could be argued to have eliminated the cryptic nature of the game. It's wild to think on, but don't think on it too hard. We'll move on.

This one, on the other hand, I remember renting for a while there back in the day. It certainly wasn't the greatest and I never beat it, but I don't seem to have missed much. I said it before when I talked about all the movies on here once before. I have no brand loyalty to Ghostbusters. They're decent movies to me, not tentpole 80's classics (and one reboot like nobody but me seemed to like) so Rolfe's disappointment at the bungling here doesn't hit me as hard. There are definitely some good highlights in this video, though. Even if I know the car vacuum prank call is rigged so it's just one of Rolfe's friends on the line, it's still amusing to think on. It becomes this slow descent into angry nerd madness with all the balls in the air to keep track of while playing. Then we've got that stairwell climb, which... Jesus, that's brutal on your thumb if you have no turbo. I don't think I've ever seen a non-cheated play of it, but I would like to in order to know how in the fuck such a thing is even possible. There's a strange feel to it, especially when that ending screen hits with its wild typos. It's a decent episode, and so we move to the last of the three.

This game has an interesting sort of issue thanks to being reviewed by AVGN. It shares the same fate as Silver Surfer, though on a far lesser scale. A B-list game that, all of a sudden after the AVGN video, everyone has played and deemed one of the hardest games on the NES. I haven't actually tackled it myself (though I bought the cart once) but looking at a longplay it just looks like a really tedious slog based on the bad part of Blaster Master. Unremarkable, but not infamous. Yet Rolfe seemed to think so in part, as he chose to tackle it. There are certain prickly points of the game design he gets to needle, like the gun downgrades and there being no technical continue function. The latter I know is because they didn't have time to program it in after the fact, or just plain forgot. Some oopsie along those lines. I have played about as much as Rolfe has, and I can't say it's the greatest but I don't hate it, either. I've certainly played harder and I've definitely played worse. Even so, it's an enjoyable episode and must have taken a hell of a time to shoot with all the retakes of him as Addams Family characters to put on the screen at once. The Genesis Addams game he looks at seems okay enough as well. That'll put a bow on AVGN for another year. Next time, I dunno.

31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 22 (Happy Death Day)

I just keep dovetailing into these, don't I? We went from retro-styled 80's horror to retro-styled 80's found footage to found footage trying to find a unique gimmick. The unique gimmick part is what we've dovetailed into here. This movie's unique gimmick, its premise, its main selling point? It's really easy to just say it. Let us get it out there. It's like Groundhog Day but as a horror murder mystery. I will add that I have never gotten around to seeing Groundhog Day. I bet it's a very good Bill Murray comedy beloved for good reasons. Never got around to seeing it. It happens. No need for pitchforks. Besides, that pitch opens so many wild doors. We'll see the results of them... how about nowish?

Meet Teresa, college sorority girl. To quote another massive tale, bluh bluh huge bitch. She's not a very nice person, as we discover over these opening moments. Total mean girl. Making out with her married professor behind closed doors. The kind of girl you wouldn't blink twice at if you saw her get stabbed to death in a slasher movie. Oops, look at what happened. The babyface mask of the killer here is Ghostface-parallel, but still evocative and creepy. It's a good design and I like it. Shame Teresa got stabbed to death-- OH WELL WOULD YOU LOOK AT THAT? THE DAY'S STARTED ALL OVER! I'll just reveal it right now. There's no in-movie explanation for the time loop that Teresa's caught in. I gather from talking to a pal that A) Groundhog Day didn't explain it either and B) the sequel to this movie goes in-depth on the explanation of it. I don't know if I want an explanation. I had my own gonzo theories as I watched that would have been radical if they were it. The serial killer discovered in the third act could have time loop powers, gathering energy by killing his chosen victim over and over again for nefarious purposes. The professor could have been engaging in an elaborate quantum physics experiment. Even Teresa's dad could be in on this shit, doing something to his ungrateful daughter to revive his dead wife. 

It was fun to theorize as I watched, but the movie wasn't concerned with that. It was concerned with the mystery and the character arc. The mystery we've already explained; who the hell keeps killing Teresa and why? Well, I haven't explained it, but you know already that the time loop part gets no explanation. There's payoff to the killer, but first we gotta get the character arc stuff. This nightmarish hell loop actually makes Teresa self-reflective, and think about the better person she could be if she ever manages to break free from her karmic curse of revival. It's not infinite, though, as there is residual damage in each repitition from all the violent murder. Bit of a race against time, there. I'm pretty sure this is the same story as Groundhog Day. A mean jerk gets caught in a time loop and, over the repitition, learns how to be not such a big mean jerk. I really like the Teresa that blossoms over the movie. She doesn't lose her snarky bitchiness, for lack of a better term, but she does grow empathy for others. In what she thinks is her last loop she's very upbeat and nice to everyone around her, lets all her regrets out, and genuinely tries to be a better person. Then she goes to kill the serial killer fuck who locked her in this loop, she does it, and...

Whoops. Back again. Yeah no, turns out it was her roommate the whole time, who resented her for being a terrible person and sleeping with the professor. Girl even poisoned Teresa's birthday cupcake, and Teresa finally eating it in that last loop is what clued her into the motive. She finally fends off her attacker, and gets to live another day. A new day, even! This breaks the time loop somehow or another, and I'm fine with that. It's symbolic. This was a neat little movie! Such a simple little pitch, tweaking the formula of a popular movie into a different genre. Yet it works! It really works, and it isn't even too gory or violent. I can live with that. Maybe one day I'll poke at the sequel. It might even be soon. Until then, this can sit as a nice little experience, no matter what the bullshit explanation for the time loop may be. 

31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 21 (Found Footage 3D)

I sort of stumbled into this one on accident, but you know what? I was on Shudder and needed something for tonight and this popped out. Pun unintended. I did not actually watch Found Footage 3D in 3D because I don't have a fancy television or glasses or whatever the fuck. It really doesn't impact the experience. At no point beyond the movie introducing 3D cameras did I peg that anything was an obvious 3D gimmick. I can pinpoint moments in hindsight, mind, but I wasn't thinking of it at the time. I was invested. Right then. I have only a little experience with this genre, but you can tell that people are constantly trying to innovate and mash it up with other stuff to make their found footage movie stand out. Cloverfield mixes it with a Godzilla picture, WNUF Halloween Special mixes it with a shitty 80's VHS recording, et cetera. From the title, you'd think Found Footage 3D is mixing found footage with the 3D movie fad of the 2010s. It technically is, on a literal technical level since it is that. Using just that as your hook and filming some cliche cabin in the woods nonsense would be gimmicky bullshit. Thankfully, Found Footage 3D agrees with you. 

No, what it's actually doing is mixing the "self-aware of horror tropes in a horror movie" style of movies like Scream or Cabin In The Woods with the found footage genre. The found footage artifice is a behind the scenes documentary of the making of a shitty found footage movie IN THREE DEE. The filmmakers in charge of Spectre Of Death, the in-universe movie, are right there with you saying shit like the opening titles are cliche, or that the movie needs a big innovative dumb hook like Sharknado had. The people making this found footage movie know the pitfalls and the tropes of the genre, and alternate between emulating them and trying to avoid them. Director Derek is an absolute narcissist of a creator who comes up with the dumbest shit imaginable and lazily tries to justify it by saying shit like "well how would the audience know that?" and calling us dumb motherfuckers for eating this shit up. We're meant to dislike him, and boy howdy do I. He's an antagonistic selfish filmmaker prone to angry outbursts against his cast and crew, and he can't come up with an ending without making himself look good. He tries to make himself sole survivor of the movie, but nobody's having it. Found footage rules, man. Everybody dies. The negativity on set only swells as actual creepy shit starts to happen. Kids, you're not just making a found footage movie. You're in one.

There's a wonderful scene wherein Derek is trying to write the ending, and the producer helpfully critiques that he's explaining way too much about the monster. They have a big waffle about explanation vs ambiguity in these movies, and Derek's eventually only swayed on the side of ambiguity because it means he can explain more shit in the sequel and get 15 bucks a head 'cause it's 3D. The movie itself, however, gets to have its cake and eat it too. It explains the themes and motivations of Spectre Of Death plain as day to you. It's up to you, dear viewer, to think critically and apply those themes and motivations to Found Footage 3D. The artifice of this being a found footage movie about making a different found footage movie means it gets to explain the inner one and leave the outer shell vague when the shit hits the fan. This even gets signposted early on, when the film crew put up some old guys on a bench to do the stereotypical horror movie thing where they ask for directions and the guys say "oooh, stay away, that place is baaaaad". When they then cut from making the movie and mention in conversation where they really are going, the old guys actually tell them to stay away unironically because it's a bad place. A real found footage movie happening inside a fake one. Or, to put it another way, the fake one poking out of its box and influencing the real one.

Yes, what you've got here is a good old-fashioned case of metafiction. Spectre Of Death is all about the crumbling marriage of characters Derek and Amy, played by the director and his ex-wife. Specifically it's about how the negative emotion of their breakup creates a supernatural demon that terrorizes them before ultimately killing them both, but not before helpfully leaving the expensive 3D camera behind for someone to find and show to the audience later. As a found footage movie plot, it's utter stock bullshit. The interesting thing is how you can read it. Shudder's synopsis of the movie seems to agree with this reading, but the movie never explains it in lengthy exposition like Derek would want. Throughout the movie we see the negative tensions on set, and the real raw angry emotion between the ex-lovers as they try to make the film. Pair that with filming in an actual cabin in the woods where murder happened, and bang. The fictional negative energy demon from Spectre Of Death is now haunting the cast and crew of Found Footage 3D. Things escalate worse and worse, and that leads us to our final act with the terrified documentarian running from a murder ghost in the woods while holding his camera.

Earlier in the movie, the producer mentions that a good found footage movie has to answer two questions. One, why is the cameraman filming? Two, to paraphrase: Why the fuck is the cameraman STILL filming when nightmare ghosts or goblins are trying to kill them? Spectre Of Death answers the first quickly, but never gets to answer the second because Found Footage 3D goes ass up with ghosts and murder. Found Footage 3D answered the first question with the making-of documentary. Its answer to the second question is that the goddamned phantom or spectre or whatever the fuck can only be seen via a camera, and thus documentarian Mark has to use it to see if the damn thing is trying to murder him as he tries to get away. It's a unique answer, only playing on the metafictional artifice. Of course the ghost wants to be filmed. It's broken free of one movie and wants to be in another. The end scene, with Amy and Mark in a wrecked van, even plays to this. Amy, possessed, asks for the camera to be on her. That's the ghost, that's her fictional negative energy made manifest wanting its final close-up. Her last line is all about the first rule of found footage movies, she goes monster in 3D, cut to credits. Found Footage 3D is definitely interesting, to say the least. It's got this shimmer of metafiction behind it, and the nesting of one found footage movie within the other lets it poke at the common tropes of bad ones in really interesting ways that I haven't seen before. It really didn't need the 3D, but if that got it greenlit, so be it. I enjoyed it for what it was.