Castle Rock Companion - Children of the Corn part 2

The first part of the video can be viewed here.


Starting next week, Noel will be taking on the many sequels to the 1984 film.

Castle Rock Companion - Children of the Corn part 1

Since the video was getting a bit long, I decided to split it into a two part series.  In this one I talk about the story, the short film Disciples of the Crow, and the 1984 film.

I'll be back next week with part 2.

Castle Rock Cash In - Sometimes They Come Back For More

My review of the original film is here.
Noel's review of the first sequel can be found here.
And now, Noel's review of the second sequel. It's hard to believe they made it to three films for such a little known Stephen King story to begin with.

If you want to read or hear more from Noel, check his blog, his podcast, the Super Saturday Short Lived Showcase or The Monthly Midnight Movie Exchange.

Sifl & Olly

I apologize for the hiss that's present during the actual Sifl & Olly clips, but I recorded these directly from my VHS tape and iMovie does not have an equalizer option to try and fix it.
I also forgot to mention that you can also see more Sifl & Olly as part of Liam Lynch's old podcast Lynchland, but I recommend watching the original episodes first.

Castle Rock Cash In - Sometimes They Come Back Again

Just a reminder that if you missed my review comparing the first film to Stephen King's short story, it can be found here.

Take it away, Noel!


If you want to read or hear more from Noel, check his blog, his podcast, the Super Saturday Short Lived Showcase or The Monthly Midnight Movie Exchange.

Castle Rock Companion - Sometimes They Come Back

While Noel will be handling the two sequels alone, I'll post them here on the blog as well so you can keep up. Expect the first one to be up next week.

Also, don't forget to stay past the credits on this one for the requisite cat appearance. :)

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz vs The Wizard of Oz

I was a slightly odd kid (I think) in that I didn't really like The Wizard of Oz growing up.  They used to show it on TV once a year, and my grandmother would make it a point to call our house and let us know, because she wanted us to watch it.  I remember shrugging at why this seemed so important to her.  I think I was largely bothered by the falseness of the Wizard and the way Glinda could have just told Dorothy from the beginning how to get home.  Apparently I was a bit of a critic even as a child.

But somewhere in my adulthood, things changed.  Since the book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, was no longer under copyright, I found it for free online.  As a kid I had read at least one of the sequel books, assuming I didn't need to read the original since I had seen the movie.  I remember being confused by the characters that appeared and therefore never went further.  But as an adult, reading the story, I was delighted to find new material where I assumed I had already been before.  And not long after reading it, I went to watch the film again, and really, really enjoyed it.  Yes, it's pretty stupid that Glinda just doesn't tell her.  But the journey is still totally worth it regardless.

I think both versions are enjoyable in their own ways, and both versions have problems.  So I thought it might be fun to list what I like so much about both of them.

Things that make The Wonderful Wizard of Oz better than The Wizard of Oz
1. It's not just a dream, and Dorothy really does get to go to a magical world.
2. There's more to the plot than just "find the wizard then kill the witch."  I particularly love the other areas we get to see, such as the town made entirely of china.
3. All three of Dorothy's companions become rulers of a separate area of Oz.  Given that the gifts they are given by the Wizard are bogus, they deserve these better rewards.
4. The Wizard appears as something different to everyone, and we get great descriptions of what he appears as, and a good explanation of how he did it later.
5. The field mice and their queen.  I can understand why they didn't appear in the film given when it was made, but they're just so adorable.
6. The story of Gayelette and the Golden Cap, and the fact that the winged monkeys aren't inherently evil.
7. The Emerald City isn't emerald at all, but just looks that way when you wear the green glasses.  Though I guess that means the walls surrounding the city were higher than any of the buildings and had to have been painted green?  My point is there's a slight lapse in logic here, but given that the Wizard is a fake, I think this makes perfect sense.

Things that make The Wizard of Oz better than The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
1. While we're shown examples of the Scarecrow being smart, the Tin Man having sympathy, and the Cowardly Lion being brave long before they receive their gifts from the Wizard, it's not drilled into us repeatedly with all of them doing something than saying "I sure wish I had a ____." 
2. Ruby slippers are just plain prettier than silver shoes.
3. The songs.  How can you not love them?
4. "Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!"
5. "I'll get you, my pretty, and you're little dog too!"  Margaret Hamilton's performance in general is just fantastic.
6. The sequence with the witch's guards, and the characters stealing their uniforms.
7. Judy Garland.  Do I have to say anything else?
8. The change from sepia to color.  Even now when color films are the rule, this still looks fantastic.

As you might imagine, I'm pretty excited about Oz The Great and Powerful.  That one brief glimpse of the girl made of china in the trailer certainly suggests to me that they're pulling from the books as well as the movie for ideas.  It's not going to be perfect, but if nothing else it should be gorgeous to look at.  Oz is much like Alice in Wonderland for me, as it's a mythology in which I welcome all adaptations and versions, no matter how far off the rails. 

What's your favorite Oz book or film?

Silent Hill: Downpour and more

Today was supposed to contain a full review of Silent Hill: Downpour, but October has been an insanely busy month for me. Partially for personal reasons (I got a tooth pulled and it was a very painful recovery period) but also for fun, creative reasons (my very first acting role, the return of Strangers from the Internet, and a longer than usual Castle Rock Companion). So instead all I can give you are my initial impressions of the game. I thought I'd also include some thoughts on other Silent Hill related media to make this post more worth your while.

 

I was exceedingly nervous in the time leading up to the game's release for two reasons:  the first being that Konami themselves did not make this game and the second being that they mentioned breakable weapons.  After Origins, this was not a good sign.  But this was a different company and I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt.  Disappointment number one occurred when I loaded in the game to watch the opening titles.  Other Silent Hill games play genuinely creepy videos, usually a mash of various FMVs throughout the game that don't give you enough detail to spoil anything, but definitely set the mood.  They're usually set to a song sung by the gorgeously haunting voice of Mary Elizabeth McGlynn.  This game, by comparison, has a theme song by Korn.  But more than anything, the video was neither creepy or scary or haunting in any way.  It just looked like a generic action game where you fight creatures.

Actually playing it, I feel slightly better.  I do find it annoying that they decided to go for a little more realism when it comes to items.  You can only hold one thing in your hand at any given time.  That means if you hold your flashlight, you can't pick up a weapon unless you attach your flashlight to your belt first.  If you don't do that, you'll drop your flashlight.  Similarly, you can put one firearm into a holster, but once you arm yourself with it, you'll drop your melee weapon on the ground.  Certain melee weapons work better than others, but sometimes you'll need a certain type for puzzle solving, and so you'll have to go searching for that one type which means you'll have to abandon that good weapon you prefer for fighting.  It's just a little too much of a hassle, though I'll admit that so far on the easy difficulty I haven't had much trouble escaping enemies.
Also so far, and this may change as the game goes on, the enemies are not particularly scary.  The first enemy that you run into is a screamer, which is essentially a girl with long black hair and white skin who screams at you.  Her screams are disorienting, which provides the right amount of challenge, but I think we've all seen images from The Ring and The Grudge too often at this point to be scared of this creature at all.  Also, I've heard that the number of enemies you kill makes a difference in this game,  but so far avoiding killing them has been difficult for me.

The puzzles have been a bit frustrating, and solving them seems to be mostly about trial and error rather than clues.  Murphy, our "hero," will sometimes mumble something to try to give me a hint, but they've been a bit vague to the point that they don't always help me.  I've had to use walkthroughs already to get passed some of them.  I've also had to run through a sequence reminiscent of the haunted house in Silent Hill 3 and the nightmare world in Shattered Memories where it's basically just running through a maze and not getting caught by an evil red energy that's chasing me.  I'm really hoping that doesn't pop up again, but I have a feeling it will.

I've reached the point where you finally enter Silent Hill, and it becomes a bit of an open world game.  Personally, I'm not really a huge fan of those.  I prefer to be told where to go rather than forced to explore the town on my own.  But as I wandered a bit I ran into things that gave Murphy goals to complete.

None of these details have been frustrating enough to the point that I don't want to finish the game.  The tutorial level forced me to violently attack someone in a dream sequence, and I'm very much curious what that was about and what our main protagonist was in jail for.  He doesn't seem entirely like a nice guy, though I've been given multiple choices so far whether to help people or not, which I imagine will also make a difference in what ending I get.  They come down to "be nice or be a dick" so it's not exactly a huge moral choice, but I'm still curious what the result will be in the end regardless.

 

Just released this month is Silent Hill: Book of Memories for the Playstation Vita.  I don't have one so I can't play it, and honestly, I wouldn't want to.  I'm still trying really hard to wrap my head around the idea of a multiplayer Silent Hill, and I just don't get it.  You've occasionally been tasked to protect an NPC character in the games, but co-op play seems better suited for Resident Evil than Silent Hill.  Plus to keep to the "personal hell" themes of the series, you would have to essentially have a "I Know What You Did Last Summer" kind of plot to keep all these characters together at the same time.  Apparently despite their heavy promotion of this being a co-op game, it's actually just a solo adventure with the option to host sessions with other players.  The problem is that it's a dungeon crawler rather than a survival horror game.  I think it's safe to say that even if they do eventually adapt this for PS3, I won't be buying it.

And Beyond

It looks like Konami is trying to bring the series back home by asking Hideo Kojima to design the next game.  Considering the fantastic things he did with Psycho Mantis in the Metal Gear Solid series, I am very much excited about this idea.  Here's hoping it actually gets made.

There are now two Silent Hill films, but I'm afraid you're going to have to wait a bit to hear about those.  They will be the topic of the November Strangers from the Internet episode!

Japan got both an arcade game and a couple mobile phone games, but in America the only other way to get your Silent Hill fix is through the comics.  I have not read all of these, but from what I can tell they are a mixed bag.  I plan to dig into these pretty soon to get a feel for them, but the art is a big deterrent for me.  What they call "dream-like" I call "sloppy and hard to follow."

Three year anniversary

I like doing these anniversary posts because it gives me a chance to reflect on what I've done over the course of a year.  I think we all tend to chug right along and don't always realize how far we've come.

I've gotten more than 30k pageviews, which is pretty crazy when you think about it.  It's allowed me to talk to and become friends with people all around the world.  I dare say I wouldn't have most of  the friends I have right now if it wasn't for starting this blog, and for that reason alone I'm pretty happy.  I've also gotten to collaborate with some of them on various projects around the internet, and that's pretty awesome.

Since last year I did marathons for The Muppets, the Alien and Predator franchises, Batman, and of course I'm currently almost finished the Silent Hill marathon.  I started to script my videos, therefore hopefully making them increase in quality quite a bit.  I also started Castle Rock Companion, which should be going for quite a while.  Especially since Hollywood keeps announcing more and more Stephen King adaptations!

Beyond CRC, I have some other video review ideas in the works.  Not for series but one off episodes about various movies, shows, music, games, and books that I love.  There will probably be some more written reviews as well.  Not everything needs a visual element, after all.  I do not currently have any marathons planned, but that doesn't mean inspiration won't strike.  This current Silent Hill marathon erupted after I found myself in love with the first game and wanted to experience more.  Who knows what might hook me next year?

So thanks again to all of you who come here and read/watch/comment on my entries on a regular basis.  You make doing this a lot more fun than if I was just talking about these things all by myself!

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories

After finishing the first game and realizing we still had two months before the release of the Silent Hill HD Collection, I figured it would be safe to play the "re-imagining" of the first Silent Hill, subtitled Shattered Memories.  What re-imagining means is that while you are still a character named Harry Mason looking for his daughter Cheryl after getting in a car accident, the story itself is very different.  While there are still characters with the same names and you visit some similar locations, gone are the black magic rituals and mentions of summoning demons.  Instead you are actually in a psychiatrist's office and switch between answering questions for him and then reliving what happened to you after the car accident.

Apparently I was not the only fan of the series very frustrated with the combat difficulty of the last couple games.  This game was an attempt at a return to form, but unfortunately they swung it back way too far.  The only time you can "die" in this game is during the nightmare sequences, where skinless, faceless creatures chase you through a frozen world and you must run through a labyrinthine level to find the way out.  You have no weapons at all - the only things you will pick up during the game are keys to unlock doors and mementos that, as far as I can tell, bear nothing on the actual story itself.  In the nightmare sequences all you do is throw the wiimote and nunchuck in various directions to throw the creatures off you. These creatures were really scary and I felt really frantic the first time I ran into them.  But seeing as how these sequences increased in difficulty but not scariness through the rest of the game, I stopped being scared and mostly became frustrated.

When you're not in the nightmare sequence, there is no possible harm that can come to you.  You'll run into ghosts or some other paranormal energy, and your flashlight will flicker and you'll hear a bunch of static and feedback.  But once you realize there's absolutely no threat behind these things, just more story to be revealed, you stop being scared all together.

This game had so much potential to be a really frightening game.  You use your wiimote to control your flashlight, and you walk around places in the dark looking for clues.  Any horror movie fan knows the potential here, the idea of things lurking in the darkness where you can't see,  paranormal happenings all around you.  Just picture how frightening and thrilling this game could be!  Then sigh really loudly at how much this game is not that.  I screamed out loud the first time the creatures in the nightmare world jumped out at me.  Yet throughout the game I occasionally had to open up cabinets or pull back curtains to see what was behind them but I never found anything remotely scary behind any of them and had absolutely nothing jump out at me!  Why would you not include that?!

One thing I can praise it for is that it's one of the very few adult games made for the Wii.  There is cursing and a lot of very adult situations that happen within it.  It shows that there really is potential for motion controls and mature subject matter to go hand in hand.  They also take advantage of the speaker on the wiimote to work as your cellphone.  When you get a call in the game, you actually hold  the remote up to your ear to listen to the call. It helps to try to put you inside the game as much as possible.


Another neat thing about the game was the time with the psychiatrist.  You were asked some personal moral questions and asked to make some interesting decisions.  For instance, he tells you a story about a princess who is forced into an arranged marriage to a prince she doesn't love.  The prince knows she doesn't love him, but asks for her hand in marriage anyway.  The king knows she doesn't love him, but agrees to the marriage because it's the tradition.  On her wedding night she runs away from the prince, and enters a field despite a warning sign that there is a dangerous bull there.  The bull kills her.  Arrange the four characters in order of guiltiness for who is responsible for her death.  Not the easiest thing to answer, is it?

Those questions, along with some sequences where you go into first person view and can control what the character looks at, directly affect what ending you get.  Much like Bioshock, the same thing still happens, but the tone changes.  I managed to get a positive ending.  During the credits you also get an evaluation from the psychiatrist, a kind of personality profile.  I answered the questions throughout the sequences honestly from my own perspective, and I found the profile to be eerily accurate, with only a couple things off.

Unfortunately that profile was practically the only thing about the ending I did like.  The ending is a pretty common horror twist ending trope and a bit of a cheat at that.  Like a lot of cheat twist endings, I feel a little better about the story with enough time and distance to have perspective on it, but at the time I felt really betrayed.  It definitely left me with no desire to attempt a replay and get a different ending.

If you have a Wii and can find this game on the cheap, I recommend getting it.  While the not the best of the series, it's certainly the best since Konami handed game creation over to Western companies rather than producing these in house.  Just don't expect it to scare you too much.

I wonder if, with the release of the WiiU, they will maybe try to improve upon this formula.  I would gladly give another game in this series a try if they made the effort to increase the scares in it.  Though the two games they have released since this one are nothing like it.