I'm Frezno, and I write about whatever tickles my fancy. That usually involves such things as video games, science fiction, anime, horror, and anything/everything in between.
It's another one of those entries. Yes, time again for both you and I to throw up our hands and say, succinctly, "the fuck?". The fact that a movie like this got made doesn't surprise me. Lord knows there's a million low-budget shlocky so-bad-it's-good shark movies out there. The fact that this one achieved the notorioty that it did, getting five sequels? That baffles me. You're kidding if you think I'm touching another five of these, but let's look at that Wikipedia link and see how farfetched they get. We go from a B-movie disaster picture melding Twister with Jaws to... the end of the world? A time travel plot about battling other Sharknadoes throughout history and then undoing the franchise? What in the actual fuck went on with this series? I was there when this came out. I PVRed it on Space, I watched it, and well... I still don't know. I guess a shitload of people wanted this particularly brazen over-the-top nonsense, and I can't claim myself exempt because I've seen the fucker twice now. Let's try, somehow or another, to take this in some sort of direction. If I could do it to Godzilla 1998, I can make an attempt with Sharknado. God help us, this is our analysis.
A charitable reading of the film would suggest that this trades in subversion and dark comedy. You don't think so-and-so is going to die, but WHOOPS HAHA THEY TOTALLY BIT IT. A less charitable one would say it makes no goddamned sense and has tonal whiplash left and right. The opening certainly has jack and shit to do with anything that happens, beyond giving you more sharks killing people. John Heard, creepy old man character that he's playing, probably should have lived past the 1/3rd mark. Tara Reid's new boyfriend literally exists to be a jerk for two minutes and then die. The wildest, of course, is the poor bus driver. He makes it out of a tough situation only to die in a wild bit of black comedy. There's one swerve to this logic, which we'll get to in the hero shot of the movie, but let's talk about those goddamned sharknadoes. On paper, of course, it is absolutely fucking stupid. Indeed, the movie is more about sharks than the tornadoes which accompany them. I think only one person actually dies to the suction of the tornado, compared to a shitload who fall prey to shark attacks. You'd think someone just wanted to make a tornado movie and tried to make it THE COOLEST SHIT EVER by making the tornados full of fucking sharks, but it's the other way around: the tornadoes support the sharks. There's also the matter of literally blowing up the tornadoes to dissipate them with a rush of warm air, which... That can't possibly make any real scientific sense, can it? It's technobabble that almost makes sense. I guess.
The best goddamn bit of the movie is the ending, actually, and no I am not trying to make a clever joke about how the high point was when the credits roll. The honor goes to the moment when protagonist Fin leaps into the mouth of a shark with a revved chainsaw, and cuts his way out from the inside. That is the kind of absolutely dumb shit I expect from a movie that fuses sharks and tornadoes, and it's a pity we didn't really get too much more of it. Oh, the movie's dumb and gory but it never reaches anything near as gloriously stupid as that moment. Hell, he even cuts one of the supporting characters who got eaten earlier out of the shark! And she lives! Is it contrived? God yes. Is it one final reverse act of subversion? Oh lord yes. How about that? I managed to find a weird dark mirroring in Sharknado of all things. Okay. Fuck it. We are getting out while we still can. The day I find deeper ground to tread in a fucking movie about shark tornadoes is the day I just publish this post and lay down for the rest of the night. Oh look. That's right now. See you tomorrow.
Tonight on the Halloween marathon: a haunting. This game has haunted me for the past seven years, as I'm sure it's haunted millions of SNES players for the twenty-seven years it's been out. This is not, to be clear, because the game scarred me or made itself a white whale of impossible difficulty. I cleared this godforsaken thing only a few months after first seriously diddling with it. I have told this story on the blog before, but I don't mind repeating myself for the sake of an article. We'll keep it brief. In 2011, on my way to my favorite scenic getaway of Grand Bank, Newfoundland, we drove by an imposing mountain. Having listened to a podcast mentioning the game earlier in the trip, it was at this moment that I made up my mind. I was going to beat Super Ghouls n Ghosts. Six months later I returned to Grand Bank having done so, and did so again between a wedding's reception and its dance. Powerful stuff, but it was far from my first foray. The experience of clearing that game, plus a foolish wager I took to clear the NES adaptation of Tom Clancy's The Hunt For Red October, taught me how to tackle hard games. Battletoads? It fell. Contra? Beaten the original, no death. Dark Souls? I'm a flame master. Yes, even the rest of the Ghosts n Goblins series fell to my apparent skill. I just call it dumb tenacity and pattern recognition, but some of you like to praise me for this stuff so I revel in it a bit. Hard Game Beater, indeed. Well, I did it again. I sat back this afternoon in my basement and beat Super Ghouls n Ghosts. I didn't intend on it, as I felt I said all I needed to say about the series two years ago with the first game... but fuck it. Here we are again. This is Super Ghouls n Ghosts, and this is the fresh hell I put myself back into.
It's not quite as good as the arcade sequel to the first game, Ghouls n Ghosts... but it's fairly solid with lots of neat innovations. Ghouls n Ghosts let you fire in four directions, added more weapons, and let you upgrade your armor to charge up for cool magic attacks. Super Ghouls ditches the vertical shooting, but it's still got lots of fun and deep mechanics with its upgrades. Green armor will power up your weapon, and gold will allow you to charge up for a cool magic attack depending on what weapon you've got. Of course, getting hit once will knock off all the cool armor... and that's where the extra cruelty comes in. See, you find armor in hidden chests, and what's inside depends on what you opened last and what armor you have. It's easy enough to memorize how things will go when you don't get hit (Weapon, Bronze, Gold, Shield) but the real shit comes with the trapped chests. Magicians will turn you into a weak and defenseless form if you open one of these... and guess what the first chest you always get when you're in your underwear is? Yep, this game fucks you over twice. Take a hit, and you get a booby trap while opening a chest to, you know, power your way back up. If nothing else, this game loves kicking you when you're down. How about those weapons? I must admit, there's versatility with a lot of them. Sure, the knife is a reliable standby and fires fast and hits hard and will generally help you, but there's other perks to certain weapons. The bow, for instance, is a great beginner's weapon. It fires upward at an angle and its powered up version is a homing shot. It's GREAT for killing those pesky goddamned Red Arremers, but it's not perfect for every situation. The pathfinding on the shots isn't perfect and you may find it missing the mark or hovering about uselessly at times. My actual emergency go-to for Arremer killing was the axe. Unpowered up, it swings in a wide enough radius that I could get close and whap them mid-air. Intermediate Arremer fighting strats.
I want to stress that I like this game... I think. I say this because I am about to unleash holy hell upon its ending requirement. In Ghosts n Goblins tradition, you have to beat the game twice. That second time, you have to defeat the two forms of the last boss with a weapon called the Goddess Bracelet. You only get it by opening a treasure chest while fully powered up, so getting hit at any time in the final level while trying to collect it means you may as well die and try again. It's a bit of a melee weapon in that it shoots a projectile that does more damage at close range... but the two bosses you have to fight with it are all focused on breathing fire and shooting lasers. Getting hit and losing your armor means your range and power is diminished... and you're on a strict time limit. You either play risky and die in this state, or play cautious and run out of time because you're doing shit for damage. It's intensely frustrating, but just fair enough that you won't quit. There are enough money bags in the opening of the stage to grant you a continue on three lives' worth of collecting them. You'll never run out. You're stuck here, in this hell purgatory, until you best these sons of bitches. The true final boss is a joke. I killed him in one try. The assholes before him are the real final battle, in my opinion. I could go on about how the princess's bracelet is the ultimate power and all that, but I think we're done here. Super Ghouls n Ghosts is a game I like. I think. It's hard to tell. I enjoyed the parts that weren't the final gauntlet! I understand if you'd rather not fire this one up, but it's horrifying in its own way, hm? Either way, enjoy the spooky season. Next time we might get really, spectacularly dumb.
Hey, how about that? We finally got to some suggested material. I do love delving into the stuff I wouldn't otherwise, as I don't know what to expect. So it was when I loaded The Ritual up on Netflix. What did I get? Well, it's not the greatest movie ever, but it does what it sets out to do for better or worse. What is it trying to do? I dunno. Blair Witch meets The Thing is the vibe I get from it. Blair Witch because it's an hour or so of people being lost in the woods and losing their shit while spooky things happen all around them. The Thing because it's an all-male movie, and thus you get a horror movie about manly men, proper lads, dealing with spooks and ghosts. Or ancient bastard-spawns of Loki. Yeah, we'll get to that. Patrick Troughton's grandson is one of the lads! That's neat, I suppose. Well, let's see what we can dive into here. This movie's all about getting you when you least expect it, and the opening does that in spades. Just some guys going to the liquor store for some vodka, and oops there's a robbery going on and whoopsie one of the lads is dead. So now, in his memory, they're doing the thing they said they would do and hiking in Sweden. Some bad decisions later, we're all stuck in the woods with weird runes carved in the trees, animals hung up and gutted, spooky cabins with idols, spooky noises... Yeah, the whole lot. It's got an atmosphere to it and a bunch of weird shit, I'll give it that! The first hour of the movie is proper unsettling, with people getting sporadically picked off when you least expect it and nightmares plaguing the group... particularly our main guy, Luke, who froze in the liquor store while his pal Rob was killed. Predictably this leads to bitterness which comes out at the worst time, a lot of angry men, blah blah blah miss me with that shit. what's more interesting to me is Luke continuing to have surreal nightmares where the store and the woods blend together. Somewhere in here is a story about grief and guilt, but it's a little overshadowed by the spooky nature.
And then creepy cultists who turn the goddamn movie into torture porn. They sacrifice the one remaining guy that isn't Luke, and really needle it. They beat the shit out of him and torture him, then he sees his wife as he's tied up for sacrifice but PSYCH it's the monster. This thing must feed on fear and misery or something. What the hell is it? A Jotun, we're told. Some big spooky deer monster thing, we see in the end. It's implied it gave the creepy cultists eternal life? And there's a room full of spooky zombies upstairs in their cabin? What the hell is going on here? It's weird to complain when I love my ambiguity, but the movie's tiptoed just enough into the realm of explaining shit that I want it to follow up on it. It never does, though. Hell, why can't the deer thing leave the woods? Luke gets out and roars at it in a hilarious scene, but it doesn't chase him to gore him or anything. It feels almost wrong to be nitpicky like this, but the rest of the movie's tension is at its best when you don't know jack shit about what's going on. Throwing a bone in regards to explanation only calls attention to the rest of the plate, you know? I'll level with you. I'm fighting off a fever so I don't have anything else to really say about this one. I'd like to wrap it up. The Ritual is a very good hour long movie that happens to be 90 minutes long. The cultist stuff? Miss me with it. The spooky woods stuff? Okay, yeah. You got me. It's interesting, if nothing else. Maybe fire it up to see for yourself.
What? Yes, vampires go extra on their eyeshadow like that.
I'm here way too early. There exists, somewhere in the fertile ground of my mental idea garden, a plan to do a project talking about every story of Season 18 of classic Doctor Who. I don't know if anything will ever come from it, but this story's from it. Consider this either a teaser for what's to come, or the only goddamned part of it that ever gets written. Time will tell. So, a little background for this set of four Doctor Who episodes, because the background's kind of interesting and actually mirrors what ended up on screen. (Yeah, ain't gonna stop talking about mirrors in Doctor Who any time soon.) Originally written for the mid-70's, smack dab around the Hinchcliffe Horror era (which we've covered once or twice before in Halloween marathons past, I do believe), it got shelved because it was a "Doctor Who does vampires" story at a time when the BBC was doing a Serious Dramatic Adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula and didn't want Tom Baker taking the piss right alongside it. Or something. It remained on the back burner until 1980, when it was revived and retooled to fit an ongoing story arc. State Of Decay now was the middle chapter of the E-Space trilogy, so called because the Doctor and his Time Lady companion Romana were stuck in an alternate universe called Exo-Space and were trying to get back to their own reality. I really don't want to blow my wad for a potential Season 18 project, but I find the E-Space arc to be utterly fascinating. I'm kind of a sucker for other realities and all, so any story where the TARDIS slips sideways instead of back and forth makes me perk up. Why does this make the story mirror the background of its eventual filming? Because of the simple fact that it follows the old tropes of the Hinchcliffe Horror era; specifically, the touch of the main baddie being a menacing monster thought long dead but returned for one last grasp. The King Vampire of this story is the last of a race of super-vampires that the Time Lords had a great and massive war with (Hello, future!) who fled into E-Space and is now lost outside of normal time. So, too, is this story the last of its kind; the final grasp of the Hinchcliffe Horror era, warped out of time and space into the far reaches of 1980, when the program was on an eve of massive change. I love this crunchy stuff. How about the story itself? It's okay.
Let me set the scene for you here; it's been a hell of a day here, weather-wise. Gale force winds are blowing against the house and have been all day, and as I fired the DVD up the sun was setting. It was literally a dark and stormy night as I viewed State of Decay, and that just added to the atmosphere. The parts of it that are Gothic horror are dripping with it, particularly the main throne room of the three vampires. You've got a village full of peasants terrorized by them, and it all seems standard vampire stuff... but then you have the glimmers of space technology. The band of villagers who hide technology and try to learn from it to overthrow their Lords. The fact that the vampire's lair is actually a giant rocket ship, its fuel tanks used as blood storage for the Great Vampire which slumbers below the earth. It may be Gothic horror, but it's still Doctor Who, baby. What I really love is the one scene where the Doctor and Romana first meet two of the Lords, and just absolutely take the piss out of all of their statements that what they do is for the good of the peasants. (I'll just defer to the ever-wonderful Jack Graham for this bit.) That's peak Doctor Who for me, right there. I also really quite love the soundtrack, believe it or not. I used to be down on the whole synthy thing but this has grown on me. I particularly love the "twinkling" synth noises uses to represent bats. It's just so weird and uncanny that it actually makes things feel more alien in retrospect. It shouldn't work, but it does. What doesn't work? Adric, I suppose. I understand that he was tacked on. I understand he has a... reputation. I won't critique that, but I will say that he doesn't work here. He spends a lot of the story just wandering around, has a bit near the end where he pretends to be tempted by becoming a vampire, and then tries to betray them and fails. Doesn't accomplish much, but again... he wasn't supposed to be here.
Look, it works, okay? Maybe the Great Vampire effects could have been better, but I can't be a downer on a story with as metal of a fucking ending as "Doctor Who launches a rocketship into space to have it come down to earth and be used as a giant stake to kill a giant vampire". I mean, Jesus Christ. Is it my favorite E-Space story? Not really. I think I'd still give that one to the story following this, Warrior's Gate. It's all weird and dreamy and... neat. Sure, there's some sort of Dark Souls-y stuff going on with it but it's not really a spooky one. Not like this story, with vampires and blood and stakes and shit. I think I've done okay here. I've covered just enough for a Halloween marathon post, but left enough gonzo takes open that I won't be totally repeating myself if the Season 18 Project ever happens. Well done. Now. What the hell ELSE can I talk about...?
Well, that's a bit of a relief. It's refreshing to not have to do all sorts of mental gymnastics in the form of redemptive readings. We've got a properly good Godzilla movie here, and from Toho even so there's none of this "it doesn't count" stuff going on under the hood. I have the opposite sort of problem now. There's so much goddamn stuff going on under the hood of this movie that I don't even know where to begin. I guess at the beginning would help, we can be all linear. I like how all the Godzilla films I've sat down with so far always begin with boats at sea. Even the 1998 one, after its credits, begins at sea. Then we waste no real time. There's something in the water and bad things are about to go down. It's here where we get the movie's main focus, of sorts: the outside world in the opening minutes is represented almost entirely by found footage-style shots of people filming things. The rest of it? Government meetings. Shin Godzilla's main focus is on how the government reacts to this crisis... but let's take a step back here. Past Godzilla movies have cast the creature as sort of a harbinger of man's nuclear folly. This one has that element in it, deeper under the hood... but there's a more pressing influence in our opening. 2011's devastating tsunami which hit Japan hard. This is Godzilla as a force of nature, a pure natural disaster which just sweeps in out of nowhere and wrecks Japan while its government desperately tries to figure out what to do about it all. It works! You really do feel the human cost in this one, and the destruction isn't entirely all spectacle. Of course, the movie can have its cake and eat it too. The Godzilla that rampages through the city in the opening isn't fully formed. It's a goofy looking thing with googly eyes crawling through the streets. This is the Godzilla that's a natural disaster... but then it evolves. A newer Godzilla, pulsating red and stampeding through town with its roars. That's the Godzilla we know.
God, is the Japanese PM's reluctance to use force against Godzilla refreshing after coming from the American one. Oh, we've got Americans in this movie too, but not until later. For now, we have a movie where not a single shot is fired upon the big monster until almost the halfway point. You get these great wide shots of everything with tiny flares of cannon fire and one big Godzilla. Of course, it all does nothing... and then America gets involved. They do wound Godzilla, but then comes the big spectacle shot of the movie. Atomic breath. My god, the visual flare of this sequence. Could Godzilla always shoot radiation lasers out of its dorsal fins? I don't know, but one laser light show is enough to set a good chunk of Tokyo ablaze. Lest you think this movie's abandoned the science angle, it's covered as well. In tandem with the government stuff, this is all under the same umbrella. There's some implications that a bitter old scientist saw this giant monster coming, or even made it, after his wife died of radiation. Sixty years on and the ghosts of nuclear bombs past haunt this country. Dr. Maki's final note left on his abandoned boat says "Do as you like"... and that's a major running theme. The US does what it likes and orders more nukes to blast the dormant Godzilla. Yes, nukes. Clearly a rational idea in a Godzilla movie, but nobody's trope aware here. The science team's scrambling to figure out a solution, and they do as they like in going over the UN's heads and putting their plan to cool Godzilla down, like you would a reactor, into action.
The finale is brilliant. Military might alone won't stop Godzilla, nor will science alone. Operation Yashinori uses them both, delivering bombs and strategic demolitions to stall out Godzilla long enough to pump a shitload of coolant down the monster's throat. It's a tense finale that makes you wonder if any of this will work... but it does. Standing tall, forever frozen, Godzilla's shell remains as a landmark to the destruction. I mean, wow. This movie's real good, y'all. I'll level with you. I had money and couldn't wait until October to grab a copy of this, so I got it a few months back and gave it a watch. I liked it then, but sitting down with it again with a slightly more analytical mind? It may be the most affecting Godzilla movie since the original. It's a serious-minded film with a lot to say; much more that I didn't even touch upon. I'm barely scratching the surface here, but this is one that anyone who's a fan of the big stompy lizard should fire up and check out. I haven't got much more to say than that. Well, other than the fact that I'm thankful I can move on from Godzilla stuff for the next phase of this marathon. We've made it to the halfway point. Goddamn. What will we do next? I dunno. Let's find out, together.
Ooh, this one was quite nice. What's really fun about this brave new world of the Chibnall era is trying to pin down the themes and influences on the fly while watching. Woman Who Fell To Earth, for me, did give me some clear vibes as to where Chibnall's heart lay. I'll preface this, of course, by saying that the man has wholly original ideas and it all isn't just a rehash. We'll get to that fun, believe me. This is more of an anchor: some simple Doctor Who equivalent to use as a comparison. Woman Who Fell To Earth felt like a Tennant-era episode with a dash of Peter Davison in the Doctor's portrayal, which makes a lot of sense when you consider how Tennant was a Davison fan growing up. Here, with episode 2, we get something altogether stranger: an episode that feels like early Davison era, or early Hartnell. Early Davison did sort of draw on Hartnell, with one companion thrust into adventure against their will and an emphasis on exploring a mysterious new setting. This was no doubt due to the show being old enough that it started gaining nostalgia for itself, and you can go on a whole tangent about what that did to the show. Lord knows Chibnall, who was on TV at 16 decrying Terror Of The Vervoids for being a stock "monsters and corridors" plot, knew a lot about it as he lived through it. What's he got for us 30 years later? The Ghost Monument.
What a refreshingly gonzo opening this one has. Stuck in space, picked up by travellers at just the right time, and dropped onto some desolate sandy rock with three suns. Even the Doctor doesn't know what's going on or where this is. She does get her clever moment with helping the spaceship she's on land, admittedly roughly, but any landing you can walk away from, you know? It doesn't take long to get to what's going on here, sort of. Paris-Dakar Rally in space. That's a neat concept for an entire episode, but here it's just like one of... four or five the episode does. This is a wild mix. Still, we know where we're at and we have a goal. Get to the Ghost Monument, which is cleverly the TARDIS. Survive the hellscape of the planet Desolation. All while going through it, the Doctor is wondering what the hell is up... and so is the audience. I quite like this, this sense of discovering things along with the Doctor and her companions. Make no mistake, Desolation is a rough place. Three suns, flesh-eating microbes in the water, killer robots, weird... sheets that taunt you and suffocate you. Okay, so that's a bit odd, but hell. Let's be inventive. What I really love is the refreshing lack of anything to be stopped. Watching this through, I expected the reason for Desolation's desertion to be something to do with the space race, and for the Doctor to then be outraged and do something to non-violently tear the whole system down so no other planets got destroyed for such a petty purpose. That never happens. We do have our little moment of making sure the prize money is split between the two survivors, but the Doctor only raises the idea. She doesn't pressure Art Malik's character into accepting it. The episode thus just becomes 60 minutes of exploring a fucked-up alien planet and trying to survive all of the death traps. I really like that! The Doctor just got herself and her friends into a bad spot by mistake, and all they have to do is survive. Again, it's quite a refreshing change of pace for this show.
The companions all work quite well, of course. I take it with Grace's absence we're going to have some slow growth between Graham and Ryan. Again, don't quite like that. Sure, I like character development, but I don't like that we had to kill Grace for it. This is basically a fridging now; killing the interesting woman to spur the boys to talk about their feelings and focus on their pain. You can miss me with that, but we've got a hell of a journey to go so we'll see how it goes, I guess. I do quite enjoy Yas, though! There's some other things I'm not too fond of, like the Stenza being the reason Desolation is the way it is. I really don't want them to be a major recurring force in this series. Tim Shaw was a great sort of "joke" villain for the new Doctor's first adventure: someone menacing who she could still take the piss out of. Making his race an actual threat diminishes that somewhat... and then you've got this Timeless Child stuff that the sheets tell the Doctor about. For god's sakes, even Moffat knew when to quit with the arc phrase nonsense. Besides, any reveal about the Doctor is... ill-advised. Keep her past as a vague mysterious thing, for the love of God. I know it sounds like I'm complaining, but those few things are all that I really found wrong with The Ghost Monument. Oh, how the rest of it shines! I suppose I should mention the new TARDIS while I'm at it. Coral/crystal? Okay. I'm not in love with it but I'm sure it will grow on me. It looks a little dark and cramped on initial viewing, but time will tell on that front. Either way, I quite enjoyed this one, nitpicks aside! I don't like the Hartnell era all that much, but I must say that I enjoyed this sort of throwback to it... or the early Davison era, maybe. Chibnall would have been 12 years old when that aired. Just the right age for the oddities like Castrovalva and Four To Doomsday to really leave an impression on him. If that's where we're going to go, going forward? I'm all for it.
Next time: Rosa Parks? You're going to make a white person review an episode about Rosa Parks? Oh god.
Yeah. So this was a thing that existed! We are full on in a deep dive here. I remain confident that I'm one of the few people to ever talk about this semi-seriously, but I do remember seeing it on TV back in the day and liking it. So, I gave it a revisit and watched the first four episodes for the blog. I suppose this proves that, if nothing else, Godzilla 1998 had enough good will to get an animated series greenlit. What do we make of it, then? It's... interesting, to say the least. Entertaining on some base level. What strikes me as odd, though, is how much it follows from the movie. Yes, the series is a sequel but it basically picks up right then and there from Godzilla getting killed, only bothering to retell part of the final chase sequence... and abridge and change it slightly, but that's besides the point. If you hadn't seen the movie going into this, you'd be mighty confused. I mean, not even an animated Cliff Notes or anything. Point is, here's our new status quo: One of the Godzilla eggs hatches and imprints on Nick Tatopoulis, and thus becomes "good" and determined to protect him a
nd his pals. Together with some other characters from the movie and some new folks, they go around the world investigating other weird mutated monsters. Godzilla follows them around to protect Nick and ends up having fights with the big monsters while Nick and his team do science to try and figure out how to stop the big monsters and save the day. Holy hell. It's a kaiju movie mixed with a Saturday morning cartoon "monster of the week" mode of operation. This is actually genius.
It does, like the movie, almost work. The creature design is real inventive, from what I saw; in three episodes (not counting the opener which was the origin of the new Godzilla), we had giant squids, a big Cloverfield-looking fucker which fed on the giant squids and got pissed off when they died, a giant worm, and (my favorite) petrolum-consuming nanomachines which went haywire and formed a giant blob monster that grew the more petroleum it ate. There's some real inventiveness there, and I remember shit got even more bizarre from back in the day; eventually aliens got involved or something really silly like that. It's almost thrilling to throw on an episode and wonder what fucked-up monster Godzilla will fight today... and here's something wild! Godzilla has atomic breath! She just breathed fire a few times in the movie, but here the new Godzilla is breathing green-ass atomic breath. They actually got MORE faithful to the source material. Goddamn. I really am impressed here. Maybe easily so, but still. This didn't feel like a total waste of my time.
What doesn't work? Uhh, well... the way it handles the women? Particularly Audrey, the reporter from the movie. She went through a whole arc in the movie and now she's sort of just jealous that Nick is hanging around scientists all the time. The women in this show are constantly jealous towards each other and it really rubs me the wrong way. Then there's Nigel, the robot. He's this show's K9, I guess, in that he does scans and gives information... but he's also this show's Kenny McCormick. Yes, I said that. They have Godzilla or the monster of the week manage to trash the robot in every single episode. What in the hell? Some of the humor doesn't land, but it is a kid's show and I'm a grown adult so let's just say that a lot of it is swinging for someone half my height and leave it at that. I don't have much more to say. This was a fine way to spend 80 minutes. I'd binge more, but... well, you know. I've got an actual Godzilla movie I bought to talk about on the blog. No American stuff, this one's made in Japan, the real deal... and it's going to be very interesting. Who made this?
Ah Christ, the Evangelion guy? Oh, I'm really in for it now.
