Review: Burning Dark

November 15, 2014 No Comments

Burning Dark by Adam Christopher

Back in the day, Captain Abraham Idaho Cleveland had led the Fleet into battle against an implacable machine intelligence capable of devouring entire worlds. But after saving a planet, and getting a bum robot knee in the process, he finds himself relegated to one of the most remote backwaters in Fleetspace to oversee the decommissioning of a semi-deserted space station well past its use-by date.
But all is not well aboard the U-Star Coast City. The station’s reclusive Commandant is nowhere to be seen, leaving Cleveland to deal with a hostile crew on his own. Persistent malfunctions plague the station’s systems while interference from a toxic purple star makes even ordinary communications problematic. Alien shadows and whispers seem to haunt the lonely corridors and airlocks, fraying the nerves of everyone aboard.

Isolated and friendless, Cleveland reaches out to the universe via an old-fashioned space radio, only to tune in to a strange, enigmatic signal: a woman’s voice that seems to echo across a thousand light-years of space. But is the transmission just a random bit of static from the past—or a warning of an undying menace beyond mortal comprehension?

This is the book that hates the reader. It hates you. For some reason, it starts in media res with some random woman freaking out about…something. You don’t know what. You don’t know why. The next chapter is about the protagonist in the midst of a space battle. That’s fine, though it doesn’t neglect to use some terminology you’re probably not familiar with. The chapter after that is a scene with five or six people all of whom are upset, none of whom you have ever been introduced to. They’re not described or differentiated in any way and they have nothing to do with the previous chapter. The dialogue has no tags. The dialogue has no tags.

And this is why I put this book down at least five times before bothering to slog through these first few pages. I hope the editor was fired for this crime. Only after reading the rest of the book did I realize what had been done to it. I can picture it now, some editor or suit guy reading the manuscript and going ”No! This is too slow! This is boring! It needs explosions!” and some other dude going ”Well, there’s a space battle like, at the end of the book but…” and the suit guy gets a glint in his eye: ”Perfect, cut that chapter out and put it in the very beginning.”

As it says in the blurb, the protagonist is the hero captain of a space battle. However, reaching the end of his career in early retirement, no one believes him. The beginning scene is his description of the famous battle. He tells the story to a bunch of assholes who doubt him. Only problem is that this scene takes place at the last third of the book, when we have actually met the aforementioned assholes and are familiar with them. When you reach the chapter, you literally have to go back to the beginning to re-read it, since it’s highly unlikely that you understood anything then, let alone remember.

Anyway, enough about my pet peeves and what makes me homicidal. On to the book.

I have a soft spot for sci-fi horror. One of my favorites movies is Pandorum, which, let’s face it, is not a very good movie. So I went in with a harkening for some scary sci-fi shenanigans. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t say this is a very scary book or that it even belongs in this sub genre. Except for some ghostly happenings that make up a very small part of the book, there’s not much here to warrant the horror label. To give you my own take on the plot, Cleveland is a fairly passive guy that straight up gets bullied by some tough guy space marines, while waiting out his retirement on a decommissioned station. Soon, strange things start to happen, beginning with a weird radio signal he receives that is essentially a leftover from early human space age. People start disappearing, spooky things happen and ghostly ghosts make a lot of people faint like they’re in a H. P. Lovecraft story.

There’s nothing particularly bad about the book, it’s just a bit of a kitchen-sink novel with a lot of different ideas mashed together. I’m not opposed to the approach, but the ideas are so radically different that it becomes jarring. Ancient Japanese myths mixed with alien wars and ghosts and a dead Russian cosmonaut. What connects all these things? Well, not very much, to be honest, outside of a vague conceptual link that’s revealed at the very end of the book.

I enjoyed some parts, including the Russian cosmonaut (based on a real world event, most likely a hoax by a couple of Italian radio operators) and the world building that Christopher did (of which we only see a small part). The protagonist is a bit of a wet towel, somewhat spineless and a bit of an idiot. It’s not that I like Mary Sue protagonists, but there’s something to be said for characters that drive the plot instead of responding to events. The space marine characters were far more interesting, although we don’t see a lot of them.

All in all, the book was a bit of a letdown. It feels rushed and sloppy, probably because of the different ideas it’s trying to shove together to make the plot work. Perhaps it would have worked better spread out over a couple more books, if the author filled in the gaps nicely. I’d read another Christopher book, but not this one. Never this one.

2 out of 5 Space Ghosts

Review: California

November 15, 2014 No Comments

California by Edan Lepucki

The world Cal and Frida have always known is gone, and they’ve left the crumbling city of Los Angeles far behind them. They now live in a shack in the wilderness, working side-by-side to make their days tolerable despite the isolation and hardships they face. Consumed by fear of the future and mourning for a past they can’t reclaim, they seek comfort and solace in one other. But the tentative existence they’ve built for themselves is thrown into doubt when Frida finds out she’s pregnant.

Terrified of the unknown but unsure of their ability to raise a child alone, Cal and Frida set out for the nearest settlement, a guarded and paranoid community with dark secrets. These people can offer them security, but Cal and Frida soon realize this community poses its own dangers. In this unfamiliar world, where everything and everyone can be perceived as a threat, the couple must quickly decide whom to trust.

A gripping and provocative debut novel by a stunning new talent, California imagines a frighteningly realistic near future, in which clashes between mankind’s dark nature and irrepressible resilience force us to question how far we will go to protect the ones we love.

In hindsight, the blurb makes me groan and touches upon most of my issues with this novel.

It’s hard to talk about this without making some kind of judgement on the author, so I’m not going to beat around the bush. The author of this book has either grown up in the whitest of white suburbia or is writing about a society she thinks exists in that suburbia. The amount of complaining and the horror in which these characters treat problems that are commonplace for a lot of people today is dumbfounding. This is not post apocalypse, this is ”I’m going camping” level problems. Oh no the water we shower with is cold! Oh no we don’t have electricity! Oh no we sleep in a queen sized bed! It’s utterly bizarre that the image of post apocalyptic society she managed to paint was ”Sometimes the water is cold.” I’m not suggesting that vast swathes of the American population live without hot water or electricity, but for anyone who’s been even a bit poor, these things should be familiar.

I’d wager that in a post apocalyptic society there’d be problems like not having water to drink (let alone shower) or food. Cold would probably kill you, depending on location. While horrible things happen (suicide, death, murder) in the book and things are definitely grim, the overall vibe I got from the protagonists is that they are hugely spoiled middle class kids. That might actually be on purpose, but since no one else shows up that’s any different, I don’t think so. You’d expect some kind of contrast between a survivalist who maybe knows how to hunt and skin animals and build a cabin and the couple who struggles to garden and lives in an abandoned shed.

The second biggest flaw in my opinion, was the plot. While there’s a lot of meat on it to distract (and some of it is fairly enjoyable), for anyone who has ever consumed any kind of post apocalyptic media, this might be the most generic plot there is. People go looking, find strange community of survivors who appear to be doing really well and welcome them in, but are also secretive. What is their big secret? Read to find out. I mean, up to the point where they decide to go looking, they seem to have a pretty good life, without any major problems. Food, shelter, safety. The reason they leave all that is basically because Frida is bored and wants some cool shit to happen, or something.

What elevates this novel from the bottom of the barrel is the writing. While a bit pretentious at points, once you get used to it, it serves its purpose very well and distracts from the bare bones plot by adding a myriad of subplots and characters. Switching the POV between the couple is a smart move, allowing us a better understanding of their choices and motivations. I personally found Frida to be really unlikable and was forever waiting for Cal or someone else to call her out, but alas, it never happens. I suppose it’s fairly realistic, but at the same time not really that enjoyable, which always seems to be the problem with realism.

I admit to being a bit perplex both by the plot and the universe in which it takes place in. It’s a sort of ”soft apocalypse” where society has slowly crumbled, but it sort of doesn’t make a lot of sense. On one hand you have private schooling and a very middle class existence and on the other, you have suicide bombers and packs of marauding bandits. I’m not sure how those fit together. I can’t talk about the plot without some major spoilers, but there are a few things there that make no sense either. If civilization is mostly gone, who the hell would care about politics? It’s such a strange thing to get hanged up on when society has completely collapsed.

The major plot twists keep me from delving too much into the plot, so I’ll cut this rambling mess short. I enjoyed part of this novel, but was very irritated by Frida and a couple of other characters. A lot of things stress suspension of disbelief for me so overall I must say I was left disappointed.

2 out of 5 Spoiled White Kids

Review: Bring Me Flesh, I’ll Bring Hell by Martin Rose

October 21, 2014 1 Comment

Vitus Adamson is falling apart. As a pre-deceased private investigator, he takes the prescription Atroxipine hourly to keep his undead body upright and functioning. Whenever he is injured, he seeks Niko, a bombshell mortician with bedroom eyes and a way with corpses, to piece him back together. Decomposition, however, is the least of his worries when two clients posing his most dangerous job yet appear at his door looking for their lost son.
Vitus is horrified to discover the photo of the couple’s missing son is a picture-perfect reproduction of his long dead son. This leads him to question the events of his tormented past; he must face the possibility that the wife and child he believed he murdered ten years ago in a zombie-fugue have somehow survived . . . or is it just wishful thinking designed to pull him into an elaborate trap?

I received this book in exchange for an honest review. I don’t actually care about the ethics of blogging or whatever, so this is the first and last time I’ll mention it.

Bring Me Flesh, I’ll Bring Hell is a genre-aware horror noir novel. There seem to be a few of those lately, which is something I’m pleased about. Now zombies aren’t really my thing, but I don’t think it’s quite fair to call Vitus a zombie. More of an undead private eye or a Hellboy kind of thing. Minus the brawls.

Vitus has spent a decade being dead and slowly falling apart, when a couple of clients shows up at his doorstep with a photo of their son, who has gone missing. Only the picture is actually a photo of Vitus’s son all grown up, even though he’s supposed to have died ten years ago in Vitus’s hands. At the time, Vitus was more of a traditional zombie and had fed on his wife and kid, before the people responsible for his condition came up with a drug that keeps him human (as much human as a decomposing corpse can be anyway). Now he takes a dose every few hours, lest he loses control again.

”We miss our son and would give anything to have him back, Mr. Adamson. Can You help us?”
”Anything at all, Mrs. Rogers?”
”Name your price, we’ll be happy to pay it.”
”Can you get blood out of everyday household items?”

Anyway, he takes the case if only because he needs to figure out what the hell is going on and if his son is actually alive. As per noir guidelines, this throws him down a rabbit hole of increasingly bizarre and complicated situations: A hooded figure following him around everywhere, trying to kill his clients; a femme fatale (almost literally, she’s a mortician) that heals his wounds and weird clients that keep ”rising” from the dead.

I’ll try not to spoil anything, as I believe discovery is half the pleasure in a novel like this. I found the book to be very well written, if a little ”purple” in places. However, any purple prose is satisfyingly gory, grim or funny. Nothing about sunsets and beautiful vistas, all about sinew, rotting flesh and fatalism. The plot is meaty and complicated, but not overly so. It really is a noir tale, which in my experience is rare to find, even when it says so right on the cover. Many an evening has been wasted reading The Maltese Falcon retreads.

The premise might seem ridiculous from the outside, but is handled deftly and doesn’t stress your suspension of disbelief too much, even when the really bizarre stuff happens. The last third of the book moves along on a brisk pace, with revelations just around every corner and it’s a pretty good ride if I may say so.

Check it out if you like: horror noir, grim humor or the Sandman Slim books.

Review: Young Ones

October 20, 2014 No Comments

Set in a near future when water has become the most precious and dwindling resource on the planet, one that dictates everything from the macro of political policy to the detailed micro of interpersonal family and romantic relationships. The land has withered into something wretched. The dust has settled on a lonely, barren planet. The hardened survivors of the loss of Earth’s precious resources scrape and struggle. Ernest Holm (Michael Shannon) lives on this harsh frontier with his children, Jerome (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and Mary (Elle Fanning). He defends his farm from bandits, works the supply routes, and hopes to rejuvenate the soil. But Mary’s boyfriend, Flem Lever (Nicholas Hoult), has grander designs. He wants Ernest’s land for himself, and will go to any length to get it.

From writer/director Jake Paltrow comes a futuristic western, told in three chapters, which inventively layers Greek tragedy over an ethereal narrative that’s steeped deeply in the values of the American West.

I enjoyed this a lot. I admit to being a little disappointed that the PR material for it gave me a completely different idea of what the movie would be (I guess I was expecting a new A Boy and his Dog or Mad Max, while this is more or less a sci-fi drama. Still, it’s a well made film and the director/screenwriter made some interesting choices that I appreciated it.

Ernest is a poor old farmer that owns land but not water. He has a job delivering supplies to the men working to bring water to the fields, but not his fields; the water is going to industrial farms further away. His attempts at convincing or bribing the boss to throw some water his way are unsuccessful. In the meantime, his daughter is dating this really douchy kid who needs to get smacked a lot. Ernest doesn’t trust me and refuses to help him with whatever scheme he’s trying to run.

All this comes to a head when Ernest’s donkey, which is instrumental for his work breaks a leg and has to be put down. He invests on a robotic donkey. When Ernest refuses to loan it to douchy guy, it gets stolen and used to smuggle contraband across the border. This is where shit goes bad and where I stop lest I spoil ya’ll.

There’s not a hint of melodrama as I would probably have expected in a movie about a down on his luck farmer trying to provide for his family (crippled wife and all). Things are mentioned (perhaps sometimes bluntly, like when Flem accuses Ernest of crippling his wife in some kind of accident he likely caused because of his drinking) and then never expanded on, but left to shimmer in the background. There’s no need for them to be brought up again later on when Ernest’s daughter is freaking out and screaming at him. I appreciate the economy.

I rarely review good movies, because reviewing the bad ones is much more amusing and let’s face it, lazy as hell. It fits my personality, so to speak. After watching this one and checking out some reviews online, I just felt that I had to give my 2 cents as well. In fact, let’s look at this review so that I can make fun of it.

Young Ones makes use of brilliant cinematography that is instantly wasted in the hands of a director who is without a shred of talent, an editor who must have been a butcher, mediocre sound editing, and a cast that is almost as misguided and inept as the screenplays author. A story that had true potential was crippled by a lack of character development, and the nonexistence of focus. The directors lack of skill is clearly seen in his failed attempt to (I may be paraphrasing) give the character of the machine, a robotic donkey, a sense of having a soul (not even a glimmer of this is seen in the film), and his somewhat unsuccessful try at implying that there is prosperity outside the boundary of where the characters live. The film is without any sort of outstanding performance by the cast, and lacks even a single character that the audience can empathize with. Personally I believe that this feature was a waste of a perfectly good cinematographer, and I wish I had spent my time at another premier.

— Cossette-mark

This is the only review they have posted on IMDB, and they joined roughly 2 months before they posted it. A bit suspicious, but whatever, I can’t imagine why someone would want to do such a hatchet job on it. Pretty much the whole thing is bullshit, but I’ll try and play along.

Young Ones makes use of brilliant cinematography that is instantly wasted in the hands of a director who is without a shred of talent, an editor who must have been a butcher, mediocre sound editing, and a cast that is almost as misguided and inept as the screenplays author.

That’s pretty bizarre. I think the director did a pretty good job, managing to avoid any unnecessary melodrama of the kind the reviewer seems to be after. The editing was adequate, it didn’t really stick out. The cast includes Eddie Fanning (she was pretty great in this) and Kodi Smit-McPhee who plays the son is an atypical actor and was also great for the role. Then we have Michael fucking Shannon, who is good in everything.

A story that had true potential was crippled by a lack of character development, and the nonexistence of focus.

I’m gonna go ahead and say that Young Ones is very obviously a bit of a fable, a kind of old time western, just updated and moved into the far future. I mean the story is classic: A farm that’s dying or dead, the pioneer father trying to take care of his family and the asshole who wants to fuck them all over and steal their land. Hell, it has a lot of overlap with The River (starring a young Mel Gibson), if you just switch out the flood for the drought and the rich banker guy who wants to sleep with Gibson’s wife with the kid in Young Ones who is sleeping with Shannon’s daughter.

The directors lack of skill is clearly seen in his failed attempt to (I may be paraphrasing) give the character of the machine, a robotic donkey, a sense of having a soul (not even a glimmer of this is seen in the film), and his somewhat unsuccessful try at implying that there is prosperity outside the boundary of where the characters live.

Why the fuck would a robot have a soul? It’s not even an A.I, it’s literally a donkey robot that walks around. Do you expect cars in films to have a ”sense of soul?” This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard and shows how far removed the reviewer is from the actual movie and what it set out to achieve.

The film is without any sort of outstanding performance by the cast, and lacks even a single character that the audience can empathize with.

Even the bit roles were interesting and had a little bit of depth, even if they were on screen for a few seconds.

Anyway, fuck you.

4 out of 5 robot donkeys

Bad Movies Double Feature: Buck Wild and In Fear

September 11, 2014 No Comments

Buck Wild

What happens when you make a horror comedy with actors that possess no comedic talent. Extremely awkward, rarely funny and too long by half.

”When their originally planned outing is cancelled, four friends go on a hunting trip in Texas. They include Craig, a straitlaced man; Jerry, a mysterious relative of Craig’s from New York; Tom, a nerd; and Lance, a hedonist. When they arrive, they discover that a chupacabra has bitten their guide Clyde, and, unknown to all, he has begun to slowly turn into a zombie.”

The synopsis doesn’t inform you how ~*wacky*~ the movie is. There’s a flaming gay redneck mafia dude that shows up at the beginning. At some point there’s conflict between the protagonists and him and one of them get paddled by the mafia boss’s cronies. This is the height of comedy this movie is trying to attain.

Between painful jokes about Craig’s unfaithful girlfriend, shitty sex scenes with the ”dumb slut” stereotype neighbor and the meandering plot, there’s very little of value here. You might enjoy it more if you’re into gore and zombie stuff, but I was just waiting for the whole thing to end.

1 out of 5 redneck zombies.

In Fear

This is a movie so boring, so bland, so incredibly shitty, that I feel as if I’ve already reviewed it in the past and I’m stuck in a kind of purgatory where I have to talk about this piece of shit forever. Harsh words, you might think, but I’m 100% serious, this is an offensively stupid movie, made even more agonizing by the fact that the director think he’s some kind of auteur making cinema. It seems to have worked as the movie has a 86% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is idiotic at best. Fuck you.

”Tom and Lucy have decided to go on their first trip as a couple, to a music festival and a secluded hotel. However they soon find themselves unable to actually locate the hotel and spend much of their time getting lost in a labyrinthine series of forest roads. As they continue to drive, their tensions rise as they realize that something or someone is deliberately toying with them and enjoying their torment. They pick up Max, a strange hitchhiker that may be connected to everything that is going on.”

Probably the couple with the least chemistry in the world, you’ll spend the first half hour trying to figure out if these two idiots have just hooked up for a weekend getaway or if they have actually met before. After a series of increasingly improbably events and choices, they get lost in some sort of maze made out of hedges. Why at no point does anyone say ”fuck it, I’m off-roading this bitch” is a question that will torment you as the minutes tick on by.

Realizing at some point there’s only so long you can go without having anything remotely interesting happen and also that your actors are just not good enough to prop the whole thing up, a weird guy they find on the road is added and that’s really where the terribleness of the movie ramps up into nonsense.

This is devoid of value.

0 out of 5 idiots in a car

Mr. Jones Review

September 9, 2014 No Comments

Mr. Jones

Hey look, it’s a horror movie I didn’t hate. I mean I didn’t like it especially much, but that’s rare enough on it’s own when your movie watching is the equivalent of a garbage disposal system.

The IMDB synopsis is pretty unhelpful, so I’ll get you up to speed myself. Probably massive spoilers follow because I have no filter.

A couple decides to move to the middle of nowhere because they have artistic aspirations. This eventually becomes an issue when they start arguing about how they left perfectly good jobs so the guy can make a stupid documentary or whatever. At the same time they find weird sculptures around their property and adjacent areas, eventually realizing they are the work for an artist that’s a bit of a underground sensation. Unfortunately he’s well known for the fact that everyone who buys his sculptures has terrible shit happen to them.

The movie is basically about solving the mystery of this artist and his creations, via the medium of found footage.

Mostly but the numbers for the first half, it turns into some serious what-the-fuck territory in the latter half. Don’t watch this while high or tired, it’s pretty nightmarish. The movie as adequate at most things, managing some creepy moments here and there by actually utilizing the whole handheld camera aesthetic. The couple is kinda irritating, but what horror movie couple isn’t. I wasn’t gnashing my teeth while watching it so it must not have been too bad.

The ending…well… I don’t know what to say about the ending. It wasn’t disappointing exactly, but it was so convoluted and messy that I’m not sure what the hell supposedly happened. It kinda tries to throw a twist at you but it’s all very confusing and open to interpretation. Feels like they tacked on some wtf-ness to make it more interesting, but I don’t think they landed it.

2 out of 5 creepy-ass branch sculptures (I’d say 2 and a half, but I don’t like decimals)

After (2012)

July 31, 2014 No Comments

Oh boy. I don’t even know. A cut rate Silent Hill clone that somehow manages to be completely boring and predictable. Hell, it even gives away its own twist in the first 20 minutes. Plot synopsis says ”When two bus crash survivors (Steven Strait, Karolina Wydra) awake to discover that they are the only people left in their small town, they must form an unlikely alliance in a race to unravel the truth behind their isolation. As strange events begin to unfold, they start to question whether the town they know so well is really what it seems.”
These two end up in their hometown who is suspiciously devoid of people, except for when they seem to travel back in time and there’s a bunch of people they can’t interact with. It takes them about half an hour to figure out what’s going on, because at no point do they think about reaching out and touching one of these phantom people. Imagine the frustration as they go ”Hello? Hello?” for the duration of each scene while everyone around them ignores then. Everything looking like a totally radical 70s sitcom doesn’t give it away either. Mystifying.

A situation that could have been creepy as hell becomes completely toothless at the hands of this director and actors. Ugh, I can’t even go on.

Just watch the trailer, it’s enough to give you a migraine.

0 out of 5 Silent Hills.

Insensibles

June 14, 2014 No Comments

Oh Insensibles. A movie I saw the trailer for ages ago and tried really hard to find, but failed at the time. I was into occult horror movies at the time. Alas, it was not meant to be. Until now.
Set in Catalonia, Painless weaves two stories: in one, starting during the Spanish Civil War and running through to the ’60s, an asylum attempts to rehabilitate children who feel no pain, by teaching them physical suffering. For some reason these kids habitually injure themselves and others and this is why they need to be locked up in solitary. Hm… In the second, in the present time, a brilliant neurosurgeon who needs a bone marrow transplant, discovers this dark past when he searches for his biological parents.

I finally got a chance to watch it the other night and was mostly disappointed. There wasn’t a lot of supernatural or occult elements in it and they never really did show up either. I’m not sure why it was such a big deal those kids couldn’t feel any pain. It’s a disease that is real and as far as I know, people who have it don’t light themselves on fire or eat their own flesh on purpose. They just have to be careful to not injure themselves and unwittingly die from blood loss or something. The plot mostly follows one of the kids, probably because he’s the most hardcore of all (dude cuts a nurse’s Achilles tendon for slapping him around).

One of the writers of Insensibles is behind Rec (not bad!) and Rec 3 (kinda bad), but I’m not sure who to place the blame on for the pacing of this flick. You could have easily cut out twenty minutes before Berkano (nurse slashing kid experiences a rebirth as a torturer) shows up.

I don’t want to say it was closer to Hellboy than say, Ninth Gate, but… it could easily have been a BPRD case, what with the Nazis and the super creepy torturer guy who can’t feel pain and lives in the ruble of an old prison. In that sense, it wasn’t bad. The Berkano dude was pretty creepy (he was also in Snowpiercer) and I really wish we had gotten to that point sooner and given him more screen time.

Spoilers after the break.

The point the movie largely fails for me is the ending. Such a cop-out. It doesn’t really resolve anything, and whatever meaningful implication they tried to point out by showing the protagonist’s baby isn’t enough to save it. So the non-pain feeling guy had a kid and that kid grew up to be a great surgeon but as far as I can see, he fails pain normally and his eyes are fine. So his kid will also…be a surgeon? I don’t know and really, who cares. Bit of a letdown for what could have been pretty interesting.

That aside, the movie had some solid directing and acting, though no real outstanding performances. I can’t stay mad it, but I probably wouldn’t watch it again.

2.5 out of 5 creepy bald fuckers

I Hate Anime: A Guide to Watching Horror Anime – Kore wa Zonbi Desu ka?

May 7, 2014 2 Comments

A new weekly feature for the blog!
I Hate Anime: A Guide to Watching Horror Anime is the result of my desperate attempts to watch horror animes while at the same time hating anime of any kind with a passion. You ask ”Why do you want to watch it if you don’t like it?”

I don’t have an answer for that. After you find yourself watching ”horror” TV shows from the early 90s because you’ve already seen everything else, watching some anime sounds like an okay proposition. Have you watched the Friday the 13th TV show? Anime should be a breeze.

Why I don’t usually enjoy anime

It’s probably just aesthetics. The animation style is usually lazy and puts me to sleep. More importantly, a lot of anime is creepy as fuck and I feel ashamed after watching it. I am aware there’s ”good” anime out there, I’m not debating that. I’m just talking about large swaths of it. Most of it. You know.

But hey, enough about me, let’s get started.

Is This a Zombie? (Kore wa Zonbi Desu ka?)

Ayumu Aikawa is a zombie resurrected by a necromancer named Eucliwood Hellscythe after being killed by a serial killer. As he tries to make the best of his undead life, he encounters a Masō-Shōjo (魔装少女^?, lit. Magical Garment Girl, a pun on “mahō shōjo”, meaning magical girl) named Haruna and inadvertently takes her magic powers, being forced to become a Masō-Shōjo (and thereby crossdress) in the process. With Eucliwood, Haruna, and a vampire ninja named Seraphim living with him, Ayumu helps battle demons known as Megalos while trying to figure out the mystery behind his own death.

Episode 1 synopsis, spoilers abound.

So uh…yeah. This kid is a zombie and can’t go out when the sun is up because he’ll dry out. He’s more of an undead guy than a zombie to be honest, since I don’t think he eats any flesh or brains and hasn’t rotted yet. But he can’t be killed, so I guess that makes him a revenant of some kind. For some reason he’s basically the help for a ”necromancer” that looks like a 7 year old girl in knight’s armor.

On his way home he ends up at a cemetery where a huge ass monster of some kind shows up. After being chomped on for a while, another underage girl shows up with a chainsaw and kills the monster. We see her panties a lot. It’s weird as fuck.

Apparently her dress gives her superpowers? Whatever. She tries to heal the zombie guy (who got chopped in half during the battle) but this makes her dress disappear (because, why not). She follows him home since she is now homeless and destitute. Then more things happened but I zoned out.

Later on he’s at his school when another monster shows up, this one a cool-looking lobster guy that sounds like Zoidberg. I’m not sure what these monsters have against him, but there you go.

The underage monster hunter ends up without clothes again, but somehow the zombie guy ends up in the dress and proceeds kicks the monsters ass. Everyone in school sees the aftermath and laughs at him, forever branded a pervert.

I chuckled a couple of times at the bizarre antics, but the passive protagonist was grating on me the whole time. This isn’t really a horror anime, it’s definitely a comedy with some ”monsters” thrown in. I doubt the storyline will be at all interesting, but I don’t care enough to find out anyway. Overall, a painless watch, mildly funny but still has all the weird anime tropes.

Weirdness Factor: Kinda weird. Girls look underage. The usual panty shots.

Will I watch another episode: Probably not. I laughed when the guy put the dress on like a deranged Power Ranger, but I didn’t really enjoy anything else.

Music: Utterly Forgettable.

Overall: 2 out of 5 Anime Chainsaws.

Help, These Movies Are Kinda Bad: Ladda Land, Tape 407 and Bunshinsaba.

January 25, 2014 No Comments

Ladda Land
Oh Ladda Land. A movie with a schizoid personality that never know what it wants to be. A comedy? A drama? A horror film? A thriller? Fuck knows. The movie deals with a pathetic guy and his utterly shitty family. His wife may or may not have been fucking her boss. His mother in law openly hates him and turns his own kids against him. His daughter treats him like shit and actually moves out of the fucking house at one point, with the blessings of her mother. Holy shit dude, just fucking go already. Pack a bag and get the fuck out, these people are literally shit.

They have no value. Just fucking run.

Anyway, some maid lady gets murdered (I don’t think we ever find out who did it) and appears to be haunting a bunch of houses in the neighborhood. There’s subplot about their neighbor who is abusing his son and his wife, one about the guy’s job being a scam and leaving him hanging, the wife’s boss who is implied is fucking her (I’m honestly not sure, he shows up at their house and later the husband notices the bed is unmade, so who knows) and a bunch of other stuff.

The actual horror thing is just an afterthough for most of the movie. The last part tries to ramp up the tension, but ultimately ends up being pretty dumb. Fuck it.

1 out of 5 closet ghosts.

Tape 407

Oh god. I can’t really recommend this movie. It has a bit of a twist so it gets points to that, but it’s the usual found footage shit in every other way. Especially in all the wrong ways, like people perpetually screaming at each other for no reason, repeating the same phrases again and again (”Listen to me! Okay? Listen. Listen to me! No, listen to me! Are you listening!”) in the name of ”realism.”

Look dude, you’re not making a documentary. You’re making a movie. That’s why you should try and avoid things that make me want to throw your DVD out my window like a Frisbee, even if you think they’re ”realistic.” Just make the yelling stop.

Anyway, the movie deals with the survivors of a plane crash that are stranded in the middle of nowhere and proceed to get munched on by creatures unknown. There’s two sisters, who serve as the protagonists, a tough air marshal, some photographer dude, whatever. Everything is by the book: The asshole guy that everyone hates, people getting eaten one by one, the dumb twist at the end.

I don’t really care enough about this movie to keep talking about it.

0 out of 5 airplane peanuts.

P.S. This movie is so shitty I can’t even find a decent poster of it online.

P.S.S One of the posters has this quote: ”A twist ending to leave you breathless” – Frightfest. Jesus Christ that quote should get someone jail time.

Bunshinsaba-poster-korean-chinatsu-miyoshi

Ouja Board / Bunshishaba

I’m gonna keep this short because I didn’t actually hate this movie, I just didn’t particularly enjoy it. Bunshishaba is a local legend, kind of a cheapo Bloody Mary thing. Three high school girls call upon her to exact revenge on their bullies. Their plan works exceptionally well as they immediately start dying. Unfortunately, the titular demon has possessed one of them and the dark secrets of the weird ass village they live in are about to be revealed.

IMDB says: ”Yu-jin and her blind mother move to a small village from Seoul. On her first day at the new school, Yu-jin gets picked on by her classmates. Along with other victims of hatred, Yu-jin puts a curse on the four girls tormenting them through a Ouija Board. On her second day at school, one of the spellbound bursts into flames and dies just as she sits down where Yu-jin used the board. The next day, another victim burns to death, and now the school is enclosed by horror.”

It’s nothing mind blowing but at the same time it didn’t make me want to kill myself, so it gets a pass. I can’t say I found anything scary about it, the usual girl with long black hair jumping out here and there, but the back story was interesting enough, if a bit derivative. I’d say it’s worth a look, but definitely middle of the road stuff.

2.5 out of 5 vengeful ghosts.