So I decided that I'm going to be a little more dedicated to this blog this year, and I figure the best way to go about this is to start out with something that I wrote approximately six months ago. So without further ado, I give to you my review of no one's favorite Xbox game (no, not even for ironic reasons):

            These days, there’s a lot of emphasis on Indie games. Indie games allow for small groups of people to put their heart and soul into whatever they’re doing and create unique, beautiful experiences. Games like Limbo, Bastion and Dear Esther have proven to be the cream of the metaphorical crop. That being said—as anyone who’s ever listened to Jim Sterling’s most recent stuff will tell—being indie doesn’t automatically make you a clever hipster who fights convention. For every genre-defining Braid, there are half-a-dozen Day One: Garry’s Incidents, Earth: Year 2066, and bullshit flappy bird knockoff. Just as not all indie films are genuinely good, so are all indie games. I bring this up because I’ve recently been playing “Dead Lights,” a game which rips off several other games, with only shitty writing and shittier voice acting to show for it. Frankly, a more appropriate title would’ve been “Generic Mediocrity: the Game.”

            So here’s how I envision the creator of DeadLights going into his, or her—because suckiness knows no gender--“opus”: “well I just spent $100 on a copy of Microsoft game studios, but I have the imagination of a lobotomized monkey. How do I make my money back? Well, let’s see what’s popular on Xbox Live: Walking Dead, Limbo, and Shadow Complex. I know! I’ll combine the shooting and generic white dude—because god-forbid I create anything original for my first gaming outing—from Shadow Complex, the dark and dreary atmosphere, puzzle-platforming, and arbitrary inability to swim from Limbo, minus the German-Expressionist inspired surrealism, and setting from Walking dead, minus the racial/age/gender diversity. Oh and voice acting, because even though my writing is worse than the combined efforts of Stephanie Meyer and E.L. James, it’ll be way more legit if I have voice actors. I’m sure my friends down at the local community college would love a spare five bucks plus pizza. Professional voice actors are overrated, anyway. Alright now for the plot: To the online Plot Generator!”

            As you may have guessed, after having played through the majority of the game, I’m not exactly impressed. That being said: let me get this out of the way: yes, the aesthetics are pretty damned decent. And yes, the controls work just fine. That being said, those aesthetics and controls don’t exactly gel with the rest of the story.

            Here’s the thing about 2D plat-forming: it doesn’t exactly work with the whole “Zombie apocalypse” setting. 2D plat-forming is at it’s best when it’s slightly cartoony, either due to the limitations of the technology or plain old aesthetic choice. Limbo is dark as hell, yeah, but the whole thing has this very German expressionist feel, which already bordered the weird. Dead Lights on the other hand  is supposed to take place in the real world, and last time I checked, there’s no way in hell one underground hobo can create an entire labyrinth of traps that reset themselves. This isn’t fucking Indiana Jones here. I thought one of the aspects of the Zombie apocalypse were at least some vague pretentions to gritty realism. At the very least the puzzles in Limbo had a sort of disturbing edge to them. Any moment could involve using the corpses of fellow children to swim across a river or using the very spider that had been hunting you as just another box to climb over. The closest we get to that in Dead Light is tricking zombies into traps, and they’re not even your undead comrades.

            As for the story, well let’s play a little drinking game: I’m going to describe the plot and every cheesy videogame/zombie apocalypse cliché you come across, take a drink. If you’re not drunk one paragraph in, you clearly need play more videogames and/or watch more zombie movies. So the world has succumbed to the zombie—in this version called “shadows,” which only makes sense because everything is nice and contrasty—apocalypse has happened. You play as Randy, a survivor out to save his friends and family— and incidentally the latter group might as well have “bad shit happened to us” taped to their backs if only based on those arbitrary little trips down nostalgia lane we experience every other scene. Along the way, you’ll encounter a sewer level which is a good third of the game, run by the blandest crazy old man I’ve ever seen, as well as, naturally, a group of rogue humans who have decided that the zombie apocalypse is the perfect opportunity to act like complete psychos despite the need for man-kind to stick together, and a military which has gone bat-crap crazy “containing” the virus. Oh and you save two people in total, one of whom dies in the middle of piloting a helicopter, and the other is a young woman who almost gets raped but Randy saves her—in cut-scene no less, because god-forbid anything interesting happen gameplay wise.

            Don’t get me wrong. The aforementioned setup—as clichéd as it is—would be decent in the hands of some decent voice actors and decent writers. Even if it hasn’t been proven time and again that the zombie apocalypse can be an effective setting for everything from deep reflections on how far people are willing to go to survive (see 28 Days Later  and Walking Dead) to social satire (see Dawn of the Dead and the first two Dead Rising games), to paraphrase Movie Bob, “you can make a good story about anything.” That being said, it isn’t the set-up that kills this story, but, like most bad stories, the execution. As mentioned before the voice-acting is… mediocre at best. Randy is constantly making bland statements pointing out the obvious like he has some sort of disability that makes it necessary to say things in order to process them. If you’re going to pull that sort of crap, at least do it in a way that tells us a bit about the character as a whole (see the chronicles of Riddick games)—Batman in the Arkham games only got away with it because he’s Batman and you’d hardly expect him to be waxing philosophic while taking down thugs or solving environmental puzzles. The Rat—the aforementioned inventive sewer hobo—has to have the most boring voice for a guy whose supposed to be so eccentric and insane that his own son ran away from him. And then there’s the girl you rescue near the end. Seeing as how you rescue her, you’re forced to escort her. That’s right, the last half-hour of this puppy’s an escort mission, because the game hasn’t bothered taking any risks up to that point, so why should it bother giving us a climactic ending? If that wasn’t bad enough, she manages the impossible task of making the Ashley RE4 seem like Elizabeth from Bioshock Infinite by comparison. I swear, if I hear “Randy! Shadows!” Or “Randy! Soldiers!” one more time, I’m gonna gouge someone’s eyes out, preferably the developer’s.

            Despite the last thousand words or so, though, the game isn’t that bad. The plat-forming works and the aiming system works well with the setting. That being said, if you are going to buy a downloadable game, there are an endless supply of better ones to spend your hard-earned cash on, such as “Shadow Complex,” “Limbo” or one of the episodes of “Walking Dead.” Hell, Goat or Surgeon Simulator would be better uses of money than "Dead Light," or as I've come to refer to it, “Generic Mediocrity: the Game.” At least some genuine imagination went into those last two. 

Pontypool: Schlub Up or Die!

People—such as Movie Bob—like to say how the world of cinema has changed and that when viewing a movie poster, you literally had no idea what you were getting into outside of what the. Now, while there certainly isn’t that much that can be done for major motion pictures, I’d disagree with those sorts when it comes to slightly less known motion pictures. Instead of being clueless when going to the movies, viewers will be clueless when picking up a movie from redbox or when looking through suggestions on Netflix or some streaming service. All you have to go on are a little square with some awesome poster art and a little description at the bottom along with a couple of stars indicating total value, not unlike how those of the 80s and nineties had naught but the cover of a VHS and some vague description on the back, just as movie-goers of the 7

You gotta admit, that's a pretty
kickass poster

0s and 60s had a poster and possibly a preview they saw at another movie.

            I bring this up because this is very same mentality I went into “Pontypool” with. Going in, based solely on the poster, I’d be lying if I wasn’t expecting a schlocktacular zombiefest, but what I ended up with—while arguably containing zombies—was a little smarter than that, if not a little nonsensical at the same time.

            So Pontypool. Pontypool opens by introducing us to Grant Mazzy, the smooth DJ who was newly hired to be the voice of the local radio station in the titular town, Ontario, Sydney Brier, his producer, and Laurel-Ann Drummond, her Afghanistan vet assistant. As the day progresses, reports of something very wrong going on in town proper, beginning with a supposed riot at a dentist’s establishment to and ultimately climaxing in reports of “indescribable acts” by the towns people, including picking people up with their teeth and eating them.

If my description hasn’t made it all together clear, this is a very “Lumetian” picture. Chances are you haven’t heard of Sidney Lumet, but you may have heard of—as well as—seen some of the movies he’s made over the years, including both “12 Angry Men” and “Dog Day Afternoon,” films which give us one or two locations but due to things like camera angles, editing, or even the situation of the story, these locations stay dynamic enough to not completely bore the audience. Now, while he certainly wasn’t the first to think of this style of film making—indeed the style itself is arguably the great-great-great-grandchild of Greek style performances, and can still be seen in many a modern play—it is arguably his signature. Now Lumetian style can do a lot of different things for a film, however it is best at giving us the tension between a group of characters in an intensely personal setting. It also, if done well, allows the creators to skirt the classic “show, don’t tell” rule that is so integral to proper story telling. In 12 Angry Men, it allowed for us, the audience, to try and gain what we could from the descriptions given by the jurors. In “Dog Day Afternoon,” it helps to show the relationship between Sonny and the rest of the hostages.

In “Pontypool,” the three being trapped in the radio station really emphasizes the mystery of what’s going on. It’s hard not to be creeped out about what’s going on as reports cannibalism and god knows what else are coming from the poor schlub who liked to pretend he was on the traffic copter when he was just in his van. Meanwhile Mazzy is trying his best to be patient while Brier and Drummond try their best to get a feel for what’s going on. The effect is very Lovecraftian. You, along with the protagonists, aren’t entirely certain of what’s going on, but know full well that it’s bad and that no good can come of it. It’s a bit like a found footage movie, except without the pretentians to go along with it.

As I said earlier, there is a sort of Lovecraftian element to the fact that we're just hearing reports of what's going on as opposed to the team and the audience hearing for themselves. You could argue that this is sheer laziness on director Bruce Mcdonald's part, just as you could argue that leaving the horridness of the beasts up to the audience is laziness in Lovecraftian fiction. I'd argue that sometimes our limitations, and even our laziness, can lead to innovation. When Stan Lee was asked to to make a new superhero team, instead of thinking up some complex origin story, he just said they were mutants and wham, the X-men were born. Movies like Jaws, the first two Aliens movies and the Thing are all the better because of how little we see the titular creatures. What I'm getting at is that I'm giving McDonald a pass for not showing revealing the creatures until the end.

That being said, no movie’s perfect, and Pontypool is no different. The reveal of just what’s going on can range from completely a unique—if not convoluted—take on the zombie apocalypse genre, to completely and utterly convoluted. I’ll give you a hint: it defies even the most basic of understanding of how diseases are spread. My biggest problem is with the way the movie itself reveals just how the zombie apocalypse works. So the trio are all confused as to what’s going on and such and then all of a sudden, some German scientist comes along and just gives us a big old exposition dump about what’s going on. Not only that but the guy’s a caricature of every stupid b-movie scientist around. Now, while I don’t really have a problem with that sort of thing, it sticks out like a sore thumb in a film that’s been building up slow, uneasy tension. It’d be like if you were going through one of the “Grudge” movies and all of a sudden Freddy Krueger comes swaggering along making bad puns and whatnot.

Overall, Pontypool is not a “perfect movie.” But it’s got a genuinely interesting—if not convoluted—premise and some perfectly done execution. If you ever find yourself with some friends who just wanna have a decent time watching some movies, give this sucker a try. It’ll certainly b

Review: World War Z

If there’s one thing that World War Z does well that no other zombie movie does right, it’s that it manages to capture the shear scale and insanity of an initial zombie outbreak. It neither relies it’s main character waking up in medias res like in Walking dead or 28 Days Later—one of the few things I dislike about both—nor does it just leave it’s audience to assume that the world has been overrun like in most all zombie apocalypse movies before it save maybe 28 Weeks later. We hear the news reports of chaos breaking out all over the world and just like the trailer shows us, we see the chaos the initial outbreak causes. And we also see get to see the rest of the world go to hell in a hand-basket. I suppose this is one advantage to zombie being so damned popular is getting to see a movie where all we get to see all this. The sequences in Israel and the one on the plane have to be two of my favorite zombie scenes put to celluloid, if only because I knew exactly what song they were playing in the former.

That being said, this intensity kind of works against it. While the aforementioned in medias res approach to both Walking Dead and 28 Days are sort of a copout, they were necessary so that we the viewer get to see the harsh, unrelenting reality of living both with the threat of the undead but also that of the living pushed to the brink. World War Z loses this emotional punch beneath the crazy chase sequences and scientific accuracy.

While I’m at it, I’ll add a few last minute nit-picks: some of the sound effects sound a little too “trailery”, the various booms and bwa-wa-wa’s sounding a bit like something out of Inception. Not to mention the final sequence at the end feels a little lack-luster in comparison to the majority of the scenes before it, making it feel a bit anti-climactic.

TL;DR

While it lacks the emotional punch of either Walking Dead or 28 Days Later (the latter my favorite zombie movie to date) it makes up for it with it’s intensity and sheer scale. I say give it a look, if only for that one Israel scene.