Another 31 Days, Another 31 Screams: Day 13 (Godzilla 1998)

THIS IS MY BUILDING NOW

You're goddamned right we're doing this. It'll even be a redemptive reading, to the best attempt possible. It would be hyperbolic to claim that nobody in history has ever taken this movie seriously and critiqued it beyond gatekeeping it out of Godzilla canon or whatever, but it feels like that at times. Maybe it's my unique perspective of seeing this as a teen plus only having seen two or three of the serious Toho Godzilla pictures, but... well, on paper I hardly see a difference. A difference, that is, between a big dumb lizard sometimes referred to as Godzilla smashing the shit out of New York in a 90's summer blockbuster and a big Japanese lizard named Godzilla fighting three-headed dragons, King Kong, and mechanized versions of itself. Maybe I'm wrong and even the goofy goddamn Toho Godzilla movies have more nuance and heart than this American version has in one tooth. Feel free to call me on it, but that's just how I feel sitting here. Does Godzilla 1998 work? It's... complicated. That is to say, it generally works and I don't feel like I sat through the worst goddamn movie ever. At the same time, this movie has a lot of problems behind it. It ain't perfect, but you know what? I revel in that shit. I can make something of it for a post. Let's roll.


The most interesting thing, for me, is the setting. New York. Now, this is about the furthest thing from the more dramatic Godzilla films we've covered... all two of them. Still, trying to run our thoroughline reading of Godzilla leads to something strange and almost prescient. Recall that the original was made due to anxiety over the wound of Japan getting nuclear bombs dropped on it, and the fresh memory of that devastation. Godzilla 1984 was made at a tense moment in the Cold War, and the US/Soviet relations on display in that movie reflect that. So, too, does the Godzilla in '84 become a living metaphor for nuclear destruction. Apply that to the American Godzilla, though, and you don't find an analog... until you use the knowledge of the future. Yeah. Three years after this one is when we had a specific anxiety over buildings in New York getting blown up and trashed. This, of course, does absolutely nothing to improve the quality of the movie. It's just strange in hindsight. Okay, what is the movie actually doing then? It's being transformative. It's taking a bunch of elements from other blockbusters and throwing them into the Godzilla blender. You have not just Godzilla in here, but other big American blockbusters. The early parts of the movie make me think of Jaws, and there is even a recreation of one specific shot from Jaws where the camera zooms but keeps in on an actor in frame. I'm not savvy in film language, but they pull it. Even wilder is the final act of this movie, which straight up appears to kill Godzilla and then become a goddamn melange of Aliens and Jurassic Park, with giant eggs that hatch out baby Godzillas which then run around not at all unlike the velociraptors... and then Godzilla comes BACK and we get a car chase with her! Yes. Her. We've got a giant lizard that lays eggs and is pissed off that her young were killed. I don't care that the movie keeps referring to Godzilla with male pronouns after this reveal. American Godzilla is female. Look, I don't care how much of a blatant attempt at following a trend it is; any movie which is malleable enough to swap out a kaiju plot and say "WE'RE DOING ALIENS/JURASSIC PARK NOW, MOTHERFUCKERS" is doing something under the hood to make me pay attention.


So what doesn't work? Oh, everything else. The effects don't hold up all that well. The characters? Ehhh. They're going for the drama and all that, but it doesn't land. Odder still are the frequent attempts at being funny. Absolutely one funny bit landed with me, and that's Matthew Broderick tipping over things of basketballs and gumball machines to make the baby Godzillas slip and fall so he can get away. Mashing Aliens and Jurassic Park together is one thing. All of a sudden whapping you with a slapstick joke? Good god. Oh, and the military kills this Godzilla at the end. Absolutely off base with the Toho Godzilla, but let's be real; did you expect an American blockbuster that's practically military porn already to show the military as completely ineffective against the big monster? I didn't. Hell, the inciting incident that creates this Godzilla is specifically French nuclear testing. Not, you know, AMERICAN ONES. They bother to pin the blame on the French, rather than take any accountability for this stuff in their movie... but, again, did you expect them to? Oh, and why the hell are Siskel and Ebert in this? It's not really them, but there's Mayor Ebert and his assistant Gene and they look as close to the men as is possible. Well, I looked it up. Turns out Siskel and Ebert gave the previous movies made by these creative minds bad reviews. Wow. How goddamn petty can you get? Christ. Let's bail out of this one. I think I've done enough. It almost kind of sort of works, this one. If you try. Most people don't ever get past "THAT'S NOT THE REAL GODZILLA" so I think I've done what I can here.

Another 31 Days, Another 31 Screams: Day 12 (Bloodstained: Curse Of The Moon)

Ohh baby. If yesterday's post was complaining about a very good game (and it was, if we're being honest), this one is going to be nothing but gushing about an incredible game. Let's set the scene, just a bit. A Kickstarter got itself funded a while back, for a little game called Bloodstained: Ritual Of The Night. It's an upcoming retro revival of the "Metroidvania" style made popular by Koji Igarashi with his multiple entries in the series, and it's got the man himself behind it. So, you know, fans of that must be through the roof. Certainly I'd be interested in trying it when it comes out, but my loyalties lie with vintage 'Vania. That made what was to come all the more surprising. A stretch goal for the Bloodstained Kickstarter was an 8-bit styled prequel game, and that got met as well. The result was Bloodstained: Curse Of The Moon. (From here on, we'll just call it Bloodstained, as I doubt we'll be referencing the upcoming Ritual Of The Night any more.) My god, this game. It's in the running as one of the best I've played this year, and giving it a quick replay and change today only cemented that. The folks behind this get vintage Castlevania, but they've managed to go beyond. Replicating the atmosphere, aesthetic, and gameplay of an old Castlevania game would have been a feat of prowess. Bloodstained manages to go even farther. It draws upon advances and conveniences of games that have come since Castlevania 3's release, and applies them to a game that pays homage to it. The result is utterly incredible.


I think what I adore most about Bloodstained is its variety of choices. If you'll recall, Castlevania 3 had some of those as well, but in practice they amounted to "do you want the game to be hard, or do you want it to be REALLY hard?". Bloodstained  lets you tone things down, if you so choose. You've got a casual mode which gives you infinite lives and removes knockback, or a veteran mode which has lives and knockback. I went with Veteran, but it's nice that the option is there to not have your face rocked off. Lives are an interesting bugbear from the old days, but this game's real generous on that front too, if you let it. See, you can recruit characters in this one. Just like in Castlevania 3. Unlike that one, you get to take all of them with you. Also unlike that one, switching between them is instant as opposed to a five second teleport. It's the little things. Dying makes you lose the use of that character, but only losing all your characters takes a life away... and then they all come back. There's all sorts of shenanigans with the characters, though, as they draw from Castlevanias past. You have your whip user with a slide, and then you have characters which are Original Character Do Not Steal versions of Sypha and Alucard from 3. They're all good and useful, in their own way... but you could also kill them and gain super powers for your main hero! Or ignore them and try and beat the game with a basic jump and slash! The variety here is staggering, and I've not even gone into how it handles the stages. You don't choose which stage to go to this time, but the stages are massive with all sorts of branching paths and some hidden goodies. A lot of them you can only get with clever use of the other characters and their powers, so there's a reward for recruiting them. This works a lot better for me than choosing the stage because you never really get stuck on a hard path; it's either the intended path, or an easier shortcut. This game's just on point and I adore it.


Then you've got the extra modes, where you play as the other three characters in unison to beat the game again and earn a "better" ending, or a mode that unlocks the super powers for your main hero while also letting you use the others. I've played through this game a good five or six times and it's an absolute breeze. I keep putting down Castlevania 3 here, and I feel bad doing it... but my god. Here's a game which manages to take an absolute classic and improve on it in nearly every way. It's almost unfair to compare the two, given that Castlevania 3 doesn't have almost 30 years of game design and extra memory capacity to draw off of... but I can't help but do it anyway. I'll still go back to Castlevania 3, but Bloodstained has won me over. If I want to play a spooky platformer and get my ass kicked, I'll load up a Ghosts n Goblins game or Castlevania 3 or something. That's still my avenue of masochism, of course... but it's all about choice. If I want to play a spooky platformer and blast through it and have a relative challenge, choosing on the fly how tough I want to make it... I'll fire up Bloodstained. One wonders how the hell Ritual Of The Night will turn out now. Next year will tell, I suppose, and we could be writing it up if there's another one of these. In the meantime, I want to take on that Boss Rush... but first maybe I should check in on an old friend of the spooky marathons, hm? I bet you know this one. Big. Stompy. Yeah. That one.

Another 31 Days, Another 31 Screams: Day 11 (Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse)

Consistency, then. Moving from something that's a muddled mess to an actual classic. Will I find ways to complain? Oh, absolutely, given that it's me. I could get more annoyed with what this represented for Castlevania, if I wanted. It happens so many times with these long-running franchises: the second game is the weird experimental one and the third goes back to the first and polishes it up, and then everyone loves that, and then that weird experimental one gets derided as a black sheep once 30 more of the "traditional" style of said series gets made. Zelda. Mario. Final Fantasy. And, yes, Castlevania. I can keep that anger in check, though, because the weird experiment was basically the groundwork for 1997. You know, when Castlevania just ripped off Super Metroid and created another massive shift that caused them to make 30 more of those types of game at the expense of the traditional ones. In the end, exploratory platforming won out. Even with all that gonzo exorcism aside, Castlevania 3 is sort of a mesh of the two. I say "sort of" because it still doesn't end up working out quite like that. This is a very good game, but it's not perfect. That may be sacrilege to some, but it's true. I did enjoy my replay of it, but there are things that need to be addressed. This is more of a quick dive than a full review, so dip your feet into the spooky pool here. It's Castlevania 3, the third one.


In theory, this game is a mesh between the traditional action platforming of the first game and the winding branching paths of the second. Not only does the game have more stages, but you have different branching paths you can select along the way which end up dictating your route to Castlevania. On those paths you've got the other wild new addition to the game, the  new characters. You can choose between three; there's Grant, who has a piddly knife with no range (unless you play the Japanese version where he has an infinite supply of throwing daggers) and can climb walls. Sypha, the mage, has a weak staff for her main attack but the most powerful subweapons in the whole game. Then there's Alucard, who shoots fireballs and can transform into a bat. Sypha is my favorite character, incidentally, because I enjoy tearing through the bosses with her magic... but for the playthrough I did in preparation of writing this I went with Grant. I ended up barely using him, save for abusing his wall climbing power to take some clever shortcuts through certain stages. These really are great new innovations, of course, and they help freshen up the game. It looks and sounds amazing (again, even better in the Japanese version, but I wanted to be comfy in my basement today so I played my NES cart and made do) and I do admire the aesthetic. I'd definitely put it in my top 5 of "classic" (i.e, pre-Symphony Of The Night) Castlevanias, somewhere around the middle. As I said, though, it's very good but not perfect... and the biggest thing is the difficulty.


That sounds just a little ridiculous coming from an individual who willingly beat Battletoads multiple times, but let me explain. I'm not deriding the general difficulty of the game. The path I played is on a level of difficulty that I can respect. Okay, so the penultimate level is a real mountain to overcome but it's placed at just the right point for it to be that massive challenge. Additionally, the removal of a checkpoint before Dracula in the NES release and the bump up in damage for late game stages make things more of a hassle... but, I can endure. No, what sinks things for me is the Alucard path. This is, from what I can gather, the "hard" path of the game. You have more levels, and they're utterly fiendish in difficulty from the get-go. The final level of this path is ludicrous, with a massively long stage with multiple boss fights and autoscrolling segments. It goes a step beyond. Even masochist hard game beater me doesn't ever want to touch it again, and that just sort of spoils the fun of having a branching path game, doesn't it? You made one of your two paths so ridiculous fuck hard that I don't ever want to go near it again. In the end, that just restricts things right back down. Still, complain as I may... I don't hate Castlevania 3. I quite enjoy it, since I bothered to buy a physical cart and everything. I just wished I enjoyed the other half of it as much as I do the easier half. Of course, masterpiece as it may be... things can always be improved upon. That's our lead-in for tomorrow. You may know what's coming. It'll be fun. See you then.

Another 31 Days, Another 31 Screams: Day 10 (The Dark Tower)

What in the hell was that?

I shoots the shots that makes the people fall down.

I want to stress that I'm not coming to this out of dislike, or anger that it wasn't a rote following of the books. It's an adaptation and I get that... but I'm honestly sitting here in utter confusion at what I just put in front of me for 90 minutes. Really, I think that number is the best place to start. 90 minutes isn't enough time for the Tower. There was no real way they were going to get any of the grand scale, endless adventure, or wild prophecy that drew me in to the gunslinger's world in 2003. So they took another approach. They made it a movie about stopping the forces of darkness from bringing about the end of the world. They blended together elements from a bunch of the Dark Tower books (favoring the later ones) and made a 90-minute film of Dark Tower stew. Admirable. It doesn't work, though. Nerds like me who have devoured all the books will just sit there and wonder what in the name of God they've done to blend the story into this bizarre melange. Newcomers are going to be completely baffled as to what in the fuck is going on. Broad strokes are clear, sure, but the finer points will be lost. I will give the movie credit where it's due, though; for an adaptation of a book series with several references to other King novels, they at least change things up so the references are all visual Easter eggs. I caught a few fun ones on my watch. The exception is referring to psychic powers in kids as "shine", which is textual... but you know what, we'll let it slide. You don't need to know about the Overlook to get what is happening here. There's a mean old man in black who wants to blow up the lynchpin of reality, the Dark Tower, and let nightmares from outside the universe reign over ours. To do it, he harnesses kids with psychic powers to make them blast at the Dark Tower and try to blow it up. That's your plot, summarized. As to why he, or any of his cohorts want to do this... I don't know. Neither does the movie. The iconography of the Crimson King is there, but there's no explanation. He's a footnote. An Easter egg for us Tower junkies.


Really, the Man In Black is a bit of a letdown here. No ill will to Matthew McConaughey, of course... but this version of the character is lacking when compared to his book counterpart. I don't just mean in backstory or motivation or anything, I'm talking personality. The Man In Black was always an evil bastard, but he was an evil bastard with a sense of humor. McConaughey's lacks that humor and he just struts around in his suit, casting spells with a raspy voice and killing with but a thought. There's one exception which comes when we discover a character he's killed offscreen, and he's left a little "Hello there" message on the wall with a smiley face below it. THAT'S the Man In Black from the books! That's the one great moment of the original character as written shining through. Idris Elba as Roland is... well, he's Roland. I buy it, even with this gonzo adaptation. With the movie being such a cut-down epic, the standout scenes revert to his gunslinging prowess. Christ almighty, it's a Dark Tower movie, the thing that inspired me and set my imagination on fire... and the best parts are Idris Elba doing shooty shots? What the fuck happened here? Tom Taylor as Jake Chambers is... fine. The differences in character are prominent, of course, but this version does what he can. It's a well-acted production with a handful of great action beats, especially the penulimate shootout.


I really am at an utter loss here. I swear. The Dark Tower is just a passive thing out there that's in danger, and it gets saved by blowing up a bunch of bad people who wanted to blow it up. Even the idea of things from outside the universe could have been expanded on. The Crimson King, for instance. You could have had him out there in the Void as the nightmare thing wanting to get in. Instead it's just big snarly monsters. Is that what we've been reduced to? A grim and dour man in a black suit who wants to bring monsters into our world? Christ. The movie's drowning in King mythology, but none of it means anything. The number 19 is prominent, just like it was in the books... but there's no payoff to it. I know the reason for it in the books, and I didn't expect that to show up again... but I expected something! They've blended the mythic import of the books, but they haven't given it mythic import for the adaptation! In the end, this is a movie that doesn't have an audience, I feel. Dark Tower fans will be baffled or, worse, hate the hell out of it for being such a blended-together mess of Tower iconography. The average viewer will just get a half-hearted dark epic fantasy with muddled fleeting things that feel like references. I don't hate this movie. I'm just baffled by it. If I saw this in 2003, it wouldn't have set my imagination alight. I wonder if it did that for anyone in 2017...

Another 31 Days, Another 31 Screams: Day 9 (The Gunslinger)

Bang.

There's a huge pull of gravity with this one for me. I frankly can't believe I've finally made it to this point. Writing about the Tower. Shit. In many ways, this is the completion of the whole arc of 2003 for me. It started on a couch in April, in my home. It ended in September, 600 kilometres away, in a dorm room at Doyle House in Memorial University. There's a haunting here, and it's a personal one. I'm visiting my own ghosts. To review the arc of 2003, briefly: Sailor Moon made me want to be a writer. The Dead Zone finally got me interested in the works of Stephen King. The fusion of those two happened just a short distance away from that dorm room, at a Shopper's Drug Mart in Churchhill Square. That's where I saw a paperback copy of The Gunslinger. That's where I plunged headlong into the world of the Dark Tower. That's where I became a writer... and my god, is there some mirroring going on here. The version I had (and indeed, the version I re-read) was the Revised and Expanded Edition of The Gunslinger. I didn't even know what the original was, but this new version began with an essay by King. "On Being Nineteen, And A Few Other Things.". The short of it all is that King came up with the seeds of this massive epic, this seven-part series of books, when he was 19. I was 18 when I read this for the first time, and I'm much older now. Not nearly as old as King was when he wrote that essay, but I get it. His inspiration was simple enough; he'd read and loved Tolkien, but held off on making his own work of epic fantasy until he had a better setting. He found it by watching The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly. Lord Of The Rings, but a dark western set in an endless expanse of a mystery world. I think this is an aspect of King that helped me get into his stuff. For all I'd expected his books to be full of blood-drenched horrors and fanged nightmares ready to eat me... my first two forays into his canon were a tragedy about a man with psychic powers, and a weird post-apocalyptic western. Whatever was going on, I fell in love with this book right then and there.


To summarize The Dark Tower in a post like this would be impossible. You'd need a massive project, kind of like the Sailor Moon one, to even scratch the surface of what King did with these. We're going to try to ignore all of that. The Gunslinger is a very special book to me, and I'm doing my absolute best to cast myself back to being 18 in that dorm room and devouring it, letting it all sink in. Like The Dead Zone, it's a series of disjointed and self-contained vignettes as the gunslinger travels across the desert, recanting hardships or encountering new and mysterious folks. This makes sense because each of the parts were put out in magazines as separate short stories. It's an anecdotal form of storytelling, but one that makes things interesting and incomplete. We don't know a lot, and we drift back and forth between perspective. Time is wonky here in the desert, because the world has moved on. What the hell does that mean? Entropy? Something like that. I think what most drew me to this was the prophetic sense of it. Its vagueness hints and teases at things and mysteries to come, and this is only emboldened by King actively going back and changing things to both mesh with the later books, and foreshadow them. The mystery of the number 19, for one, is added into the proceedings. The fact that he only revised this book, and the 19 thing only comes in the final three, means that the number's important at first before it fades away, only to come back up again. Similar are the prophecies given by the succubus at the mid-point of the book. "Three is the number of your fate" is a phrase that gave me chills in 2003, and it lit a fire inside of me. I wanted more. Needed more. I dove headlong into the Dark Tower series, then and there, and a year later in that dorm room I brought home the last two books. I finished the saga.


This post ended up being more of a biography of myself than any review. The Gunslinger is a very good book and you should check it out. Hell, the whole Dark Tower series is a bit of a master stroke for King. I had my tinkerings and my own ideas, of course. I got to work on this whole writing thing myself. My early fiction was clunky. Hell, I think my current fiction is kind of clunky... but I just adore expressing the ideas and making up wild shit. Making an epic that spans generations. Telling a story. You all reading this will know me more for the nonfiction blogging, of course, but that comes about from hacking away at fiction words. I've drawn the beam that led me to where I am. Magical girls. Psychic powers. Gunslingers following across endless desert. There's only one thing left to do. I need to go back to the Tower. Not to the whole series, as that's a project I don't feel qualified for, even now. Look at how I've avoided talking about the book, for instance. No. I need to go deeper.


I need to watch the movie.

Another 31 Days, Another 31 Screams: Day 8 (The Dead Zone)

That fever for more cowbell is looking REALLY bad.

It's story time yet again. Time to go back to 2003, a year which would end up being a sort of lynchpin of inspiration for me. We have already discussed, in excessive detail, how watching old reruns of Sailor Moon made me want to be a writer. We have also discussed, less recently, about my sheer childhood terror of the works of Stephen King using the framework of his story of a nightmare clown from outside the universe. Here, at long last, is the intersection between the two. Sailor Moon made me want to be a writer. Becoming a Stephen King fan actually turned me into one, and The Dead Zone is where that started. This, I'll admit, is a bit of a reconstruction. In 2003 they made this into a TV series, and I happened to really like that show. This wasn't a story with supernatural terrors ready to eat your face. It had no fangs that scared me. It made me curious enough to pick up the book, and I went through it over the summer. Digging up the show would take too long and it's probably not aged well. As for reading the book, well, I'm covering a King book of somewhat more personal import to me for tomorrow's post. I'm a speed reader and all, but I can't read two novels that fast. Thus, we go to David Cronenberg's 1983 adaptation starring Christopher Walken. Fair enough! It has its changes, as an adaptation is want to do (and don't think the 2003 show didn't have a shitload of that going on), but the heart and soul of the novel is still there, and with a unique visual flair and atmosphere behind it.


A frigid tragedy. That's what Cronenberg's Dead Zone is. In a funny way, his film actually mirrors what drew me to the novel in the first place. We haven't covered any Cronenerg for these marathons because I haven't seen any besides this one, but from what I gather he trades in real fucked up body horror shit. There's not a glimpse of that in here. This tale is just a tragedy, of a man ripped away from a good life in a terrible accident, put in a coma for five years, and then burdened with the power of psychic premonition whenever he touches people or things with particular significance in their past or future. For all that people call Walken a giant Christmas ham, he really plays Johnny Smith great here. You feel for the poor guy. He deserved to be happy with his girlfriend, and now here he is, barely able to walk, left behind for five years,  and with all this psychic shit on top. Things only spiral further for him, but we'll get to that. The novel took place as a series of vignettes over a decade long span, and in many ways it's a book about Stephen King reflecting on the turbulence of the American 1970's. Cronenberg's film takes that structure and pares it down a bit, focusing on two or three of the major beats and giving each of them their own little section. You could almost edit this movie into a three-part miniseries... or at least it feels that way. More to the point, its outside shooting adds to the atmosphere. This movie is cold. There's snow all over the place in almost every scene, and it lingers. It gives me the same chilly vibes as Kubrick's take on The Shining, but as a dramatic tragedy with psychic powers instead of... well, whatever the holy hell the Kubrick take on The Shining is doing. They even shuffle plot points around to match with it; in the book Johnny tutors a high school kid and sees a vision of his graduating class dying in a fire at their grad party. In this movie, the kid is much younger and the vision of his death comes in the form of falling through thin ice during a hockey game. (Yes, Cronenberg is Canadian, why do you ask?) Point is, this is a movie that would fit just as well being watched in January during a blizzard as it does in a Halloween marathon. Oh, but there are horrors. A serial killer in the second act... and then Greg Stillson.


Oh Christ. Greg Stillson. A politician running for the US Senate, who a lot of people in the know don't trust, who has shady dealings behind the scenes and whom Johnny sees a vision of starting World War III due to his bluster and overconfidence? It's hard not to think of a certain elected official, and lest you think I'm reaching the author himself made a bunch of those comparisons a few years ago. What's wild is that, from what I remember, the book doesn't tell us what Johnny saw when he shook Stillson's hand until after it's all over and done with. "It", of course, being Johnny straight up trying to assassinate Stillson to prevent this terrible disaster... and getting shot and killed for it. Wild, huh, that this movie has been building us up to be sympathetic towards the tragedy of a would-be political assassin... but it does it, somehow. Johnny deserved better. Johnny saved the world, and nobody will really know it. Stillson survives the hit, but his reputation is tarnished and the day is saved. It's bittersweet, of course, as Johnny lays there in a town hall, dying of his gunshot wounds as his old flame holds his hand and confesses her love for him. That's the tragedy of it all, of course. Those two deserved better. It's quite the moving story, even if it has weird psychic powers... but that's the secret of King. He can tug at your heartstrings just as easily as he can scare the living fuck out of you... and he also has another secret. He can inspire you. He did it to me. The Dead Zone, while a great film, is just a gateway. Grab my hand and see the premonition of the future which awaits. The thing that, along with a magical girl show, made me the weird and wild writer I am today.


The Tower beckons.

Another 31 Days, Another 31 Screams: Day 7 (Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Phantom Blood)

I liked Roundabout before it was a meme.

Oh hell yeah. I've wanted to get at this one for a long time, and after a bit of time spent with a rewatch, I finally get my chance to talk about it. In my Doctor who first impressions post that I threw up... oh, like 3 hours or so ago now, I made mention of how that show's constant reinvention of itself is what's helped keep it going for 55 years. Jojo's Bizarre Adventure is... a little like that. It does eventually find a consistent formula of sorts, opting to use its creativity to come up with interesting superpowers for the various colorful characters to use. Still, it does shift drastically. One only needs to compare the newest anime season, Part 5, with what we're covering here today. One show's about a fashionable boy in late 90's Italy with the power to turn objects into living things, and reflect any damage done to those living things back at the attacker, while the other is set in Victorian England and has people using magic sun karate to try and punch that fashionable boy's dad in the face because he's a vampire. Even that is going a bit fast. Jojo's Bizarre Adventure is a hell of a thing to try and summarize, as anyone who hasn't seen it will probably think you're being outlandish and making it up. They're not, unless they are. Let's try and talk about this thing and pin it down, even as it shifts and changes before us. This is Part 1 of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, hereafter referred to as Phantom Blood.


In the end, it starts as a goddamned tragedy and needles you with misery over the first episode. Dio Brando, newly adopted brother to Jonathan Joestar, proceeds to systematically rob all joy from Jonathan's life and make things a living hell for him. It's hard to watch, but in the end that's what this story is about; Jonathan and Dio's relationship. Of course, by the end of episode 2 things just take a left swerve into gothic horror when goddamned vampires are introduced. There's a spooky heirloom in the Joestar house, a stone mask which puts spikes into your head if blood gets on it. Dio wants to use it to kill Jonathan so he tests it on a street thug and... surpirse! It's a magic mask which turns you into a fucking vampire! With all of Dio's schemes and machinations laid bare, the man rejects his humanity and dons it himself, becoming one of the undead. Jonathan, courageous to the end, tries to burn his own mansion down with Dio in it and nearly succeeds in the task. So, right away in 2012, I was really intrigued by all of this. Phantom Blood is tragedy tinged with Victorian-era gothic horror... and some more little black marks against it. Yeah, there's a bit of Victorian-era Chinese stereotype thrown about.  Is it as bad as, oh say, The Talons Of Weng-Chiang? I would say no because it's not the central focus of the plot. It's still an unfortunate black mark against the show, though... but at least no vitrolic brigade of Jojo defenders has harassed anyone I look up to as an influence because of it. So there's that. God, though. Even here, within the confines of one nine-episode arc of the show, the entire thing is shifting and changing. What starts as a tragedy between two brothers of House Joestar becomes a supernatural horror story where one of the brothers becomes a vampire and goes off to create his own army of the night, his first turn being, I shit you not, Jack the Ripper. We haven't even gotten to the halfway point which introduces the magic sun karate!


Okay then. The halfway point that introduces the magic sun karate. So. This came out in manga form in 1987, and one of the big things around at the time was Fist Of The North Star. If you've not checked that out, it has a man in a post-apocalyptic wasteland using magic pressure point karate to make people explode. Well, the immutable power of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure takes that and melds it with the gothic horror vampire story. Thus, we have Jonathan Joestar, a man in Victorian England whose brother becomes a vampire lord, thus forcing him to learn to use magic sun karate to make vampires explode. The power of the Ripple is a real interesting concept; controlling your breathing and using the power of your blood to channel the sun's energy into your fists and punch things really hard. Because it's sun energy, and vampires melt in sunlight, it makes vampires explode. See? We don't have to even mention anything like Stands for Jojo to be absolutely bonkers. Punching vampires with the power of the sun. Good lord. There is a bit of wheel-spinning for about 3 of the 9 episodes as Dio sends two knights he revived as vampires to kill Jonathan and his pals, but I suppose that comes from the serialized nature of the original work. No, the final battle with Dio and his eventual revenge are what really cement all of this. Phantom Blood ends the only way it could: as a tragedy between two brothers. Jonathan and Dio go down together (or so it seems), and it really was the only way things could have ended. Oh, things go on from here. There's another 16 episodes or so of vampire sun-punching action with Jonathan's grandson, a bunch of super-vampires, and an entirely different tone. Imagine Raiders Of The Lost Ark but with more vampires exploding and you've got the idea of what Battle Tendency is like. To summarize the rest of Jojo would be meandering and sound absolutely ridiculous. No, I'll leave it here with these nine episodes. Phantom Blood got me into this series, and its hook was this absolutely strange take on gothic vampire horror. No. I take that back. Not strange.


Bizarre. Ha ha ha. GET IT?