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Midsommar – Review

Yeah I like it, the end haha.

Ok yeah not the end erm. I went into this kind of weird because I loved Hereditary but I know lots of people hate it for some reason I can’t fathom. That movie was fucking great, it was the exorcist for the modern era, I loved every minute of it.

I guess a lot of people were split about this movie too, so I didn’t rush out and see it because it kind of got mixed reviews and I’m not a huge fan of the wicker man the movie this is obviously homaging.

I mean I like the wickerman but I’m not like obsessed with it, it’s a cool movie but I didn’t burn pictures of Nicholas Cage when he was in the remake haha.

Midsommar is a very entertaining movie, visually it’s great, the lighting and camera work is fantastic, the acting is great, the music and diagetic sound is great. The atmosphere of the movie is first class. Throughout the whole film I was in a state of almost a trance but I was also on the edge of my seat.

The movie sort of held me in a state of perpetually chill but also a state of unease, it’s not a scary film, but it’s just a constant unsettling feeling under your skin and it’s great.

Maybe that’s why people didn’t like it, they went in expecting a standard horror movie like the conjuring or annabel or texas chainsaw massacre and instead they got something that just gets under your skin. It has it’s occasional shocking horrific moments but it mostly just simmers in your subconscious.

Even though I let the ending get ruined for me because like an idiot I watched the red letter media review before I watched it, I still enjoyed it. Although I did skip the rlm review for hereditary which was a good choice. I’d definitely recommend that, watch it after definitely.

There isn’t much of a story, it’s basically about a girl who loses her family in a horrible way and her boyfriend is trying to give her the boot but then this tragedy happens and he can’t. And he’s got a trip planned to this basically religious cult to do his thesis on it for his university anthropology class.

Then horrible shit happens obviously haha. It wouldn’t be a movie if they just sat around singing kumbiya haha.

It’s really just effective and well done. I found it thoroughly entertaining throughout. The only gripes I had were when I compare it to Wickerman which is a high bar to set. My only problems were narratively because in the wickerman it’s very clear why they’re doing what they’re, the purpose of the horrible shit that happens is clear. In Midsommar it’s more murky, it’s explained less and I guess that adds to the mystery because you basically know as much as the main characters do. And in wickerman the main character is a policeman investigating and here it’s just a bunch of teens doing drugs and being retarde.

Also the weird kid with the messed up face is all over the trailers and I don’t know if that was cut or something but that kid is almost not in the movie. The amount they show him in the trailers compared to his actual appearance in the movie is weird. Makes me think some of that stuff was cut. It’s just weird that kid didn’t feature much in the movie after going through all the effort of doing the effect in the first place and showing it off.

I don’t have much more to say about it, I liked it, I was engaged, I definitely think it deserves a watch and maybe a rewatch to pick up on things you might’ve missed. I dunno people seem to like it on rotten tomatoes, the audience and the critics, I have no idea where I got this idea it had a mixed reception haha.

I really like Ari Astor as a director, he’s one to keep a close eye on certainly, I’ll definitely be following his work as he goes forward. In my mind he makes movies that deserve the praise Jordan Peele gets haha. Jordan Peele that guy who makes hacky schlocky garbage but gets praised as if it’s high art because he’s blackish and his movies are about hating white people usually or something along those lines haha. Ari Astor actually makes thoughtful well crafted movies with amazing performances and I feel like he gets sort of looked over.

Just go check it out, Midsommar, it’s on amazon prime right now so if you have that you can watch it for free.

See you…

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Dr Sleep – Review

I went into this movie totally unbiased, I like the original shining, not a huge fan of Stephen King though, I think his writing is hacky, ok well that’s an understatement I think his face should be next to the definition of a hack writer. I don’t even really like most of the film adaptations of his work, I’m just aware of them but I can’t think of many that are very memorable other than as memes. Like Misery is an ok movie but I wouldn’t watch it more than once, same with Pet cemetery and silver bullet, they’re ok movies but they’re not something you keep coming back to. In a lot of ways once you’ve seen one King movie you’ve sort of seen them. And after some tepid reviews on youtube I thought this was movie was going to pass me by.

But that being said I have watched the shining quite a few times and I could see myself watching this again and again but it was just such a fun, cool movie. I really unironically enjoyed every minute of it. It was fun, interesting, heartfelt, sad at times, shocking at others but it constantly kept me engaged and interested and had some real ‘hell yes’ moments which were surprising. It succeeds not only in being a sequel to a great movie but also in being it’s own movie entirely. This is to the Shining what Aliens is to Alien. It’s not copying the previous movie, it evolved from it into something new and all together interesting in its own right and I really respect that.

So the movie is set after the shining and the main character is a grown up Danny Torrence played by Ewan Mcgregor. Danny is tormented by the spirits of the dead and the death of his own mother and thus driven to alcohol and substance abuse which seems like a logical response. But as fate would have it he gets a second chance and finds meaning and friendship working in hospice care helping the elderly come to terms with death and it’s both really sweet and heart rending. Me and my brother joked that this could also serve as a weird sequel to Sixth sense haha.

But at the same time this is happening you’re also following a gang of literal fucking vampires as they trek across america in camper vans like Near Dark recruiting and turning other people who shine and brutally torture and kill children to suck out their shine which they call ‘steam’. Basically how this idea has evolved in the sequel is that shine is like a literal substance and I know what you’re thinking, star wars and medicloreans and yeah I thought the same (that and it being Ewan Mcgregor again haha) but this goes in a much cooler direction with it. Because it turns out that people like Danny have existed for a long time and you can live a long time if you drain this power from others like you. So this group of basically psychic vampires seek out children to drain of their essence. The reason they target children is because the steam is pure and untainted and the first time they do it they sort of cut away but the next time you see them do it they literally slice this kid to pieces torturing him because pain and fear purifies the steam.

Now the first part of the movie just with Danny putting his life together could be a movie on it’s own, it’s sweet and interesting and sort of horrifying, it could’ve just been a nice supernatural drama oscar bait movie but you add this second layer with the psychic vampires and it almost becomes a bad ass Carpenter movie. It’s such a cool direction to take it in.

I really liked the villains because they seem almost like anime villains like the vampires in Near Dark but also really normal at the same time. They don’t seem or look like monsters, especially the main villain but she’s a fucking psycho who takes pleasure in cutting up kids basically. They’re all sort of believable and understandable, they see themselves almost as forces of nature, not as good or evil or monsters.

You have this great dichotomy between Danny’s story and the villains and you’re just waiting for them to collide. It makes me miss this type of film making, any other film maker would show you the villain once and then you wouldn’t see them again for an hour but in this you follow them almost as much as Danny which I love because you’re really getting to know all the vital characters.

The story is pretty simple in that Danny basically becomes psychic pen pals with this really powerful little girl during the eight years he’s putting his life back together. But during that time the little girl has come onto the radar of the vampires after she psychically witnesses one of their murders so now they want her because she has more steam than they’ve ever seen before. Because there’s a plot line basically where they haven’t been eating very well lately, the steam is drying up, they’ve been living on scraps so they’re sort of desperate for a big score.

The little girl called Abra reaches out to Danny to help her against the vampires so this is where the movie goes from interesting and fun to fucking awesome haha. It essentially becomes a really cool vampire movie with psychic powers and of all the ways this could’ve been done it happens in the best way possible. This could’ve been really silly like a stupid comic book movie, I wont spoil it but the confrontations with the actual vampires are really cool and grounded and awesome and hard hitting and clever. The end fight puts a nice capstone on the first movie without shitty sequel bait.

The movie very tastefully uses things from the original shining, it borrows from it and references in a way that is very respectful of the original. Sure they use new actors to play his mother and father and Dick Halorann but the performances are very subdued and they’ve picked actors that look a lot like them and they’re used sparingly.

Now a lot of people me included would be forgiven for saying “The shining doesn’t need a sequel” and you’d be totally right and there are lots of old movies that get sequels nobody asked for that serve just to squeeze money out of an old franchise manipulating people with nostalgia. This is probably 99% of the time but there is the 1% that is exception to the rule and this and maybe the Blade Runner sequel (which is hotly contested) are sequels that add to the original movie but are entirely their own movies and are good in their own right. Doctor Sleep is that in spades.

Like I could watch Doctor Sleep never having watched the shining and still enjoy it. You could show someone who’s never read King or watched a single one of his movie adaptations and they will enjoy this movie. The acting is great, the story and premise are fun, the action is surprisingly good, the effects are decent. Now I’m not gonna bullshit you and say the camera work and cinematography are on the level of Kubrick but they emulate him slightly and are competent. It’s not trying to copy the original, only call back to it for context.

In summary there’s no reason you shouldn’t see this movie, if you like supernatural thrillers, if you’re a King fan or just like the Shining or even if you like Near Dark or Scanners and weird fun movies like that. Hell if you just like Ewan McGregor go see this movie, I can’t think of a single bad thing to say about, I kinda wish it was a tv show just so we could have more of it, it’s such a cool premise. But as a movie it’s a perfect package, made by people who know how to make movies.
To a lot of people this will feel like an older movie because it follows a proper formula, film makers today try to subvert story telling conventions thinking they’re above them but they can’t see those conventions are there for a reason and without them movies just feel like a sloppy unsatisfying mess. You will come out of this movie satisfied you watched a real movie. This is without a doubt my movie of 2019, go see it.

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Hellboy (2019) review – Future cult classic

If you didn’t like this movie fuck you, that’s all I have to say, end of review.

Haha ok no, might’ve been a little hasty there.

Yeah so like every other sentient being on this planet I saw this movie and I was just like ‘why does this need to exist?’ And it seems that that feeling has permeated to the core of the entire movie watching world so deep that they’ve forgotten how to actually enjoy a fun movie. In fact they wouldn’t even know one if it slapped them upside the head with a giant’s dong.

I’m one of these complete plebs that hasn’t read nor has any desire to read the hellboy comics so I wasn’t particularly interested in the Ron Pearlman movies. I thought they were kind of ok, they were watchable, like if they came on tv while I was cooking or something I wouldn’t turn them off because I liked the practical effects or whatever. They were ok, pretty much anything with like occult nazis and I’m interested but I was never really blown away by the movies. They were just sort of middling monster movies that were castrated for children, where all the gore became gunge or something. Not having read the comics I can’t attest to what demographic they’re aimed at but I hardly think a comic about a demon spawn killing monsters is aimed at kids.

Which is kind of ironic because the biggest criticism I see about this movie is that it’s a cynical cash in on the franchise during the superhero craze dying down now. But it’s not even aimed at kids, it’s a hard swearing gorefest hard R rating so which ones are the cynical cash grabs again? The ones made pg-13 to sell mcdonalds toys or the ones where hellboy cleaves a giants head in two with a sword the size of a minibus?

I dunno, I feel like I’m taking crazy pills here, and if you swapped the original hellboy movies with this one in terms of the time period it would be Ron Pearlman getting his dick knocked in the dirt.

What I’m trying to say is like me everyone cynical prick (me included) and their grandmother was ready to hate this movie because super hero fatigue has set in hard and it’s here to stay and people were more ready to give the Pearlman movies a fair shake because at the time we were only getting the tip of the cape shit fuckening that was to occur soon after leaving us all feeling sore and deeply ashamed as a culture.

Because I’m sitting here watching this movie, ready to hate it every moment of it (and the beginning bit sort of sucked) but this funny thing starts to happen about the time where hellboy is fighting three giants straight out of trollhunter or attack on titan mano e mano; I start to have this funny feeling, this tingling sensation that some scientists have called ‘having fun’.

The movie is just fun as all fuck. It’s balls to wall action and gore and just bad ass. There are bits of this movie that just had me reeling, it was just so gorey and awesome looking I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. It blends practical and digital effects really nicely and I think the tone is really cool, where it’s kind of light hearted but then it’s as  violent and as gorey as a horror movie, so you get almost a black comedy vibe from it.

The movie is a good two hours long but there’s so much going on it doesn’t feel like a slog and even when you reach the halfway point so much has happened the first half could’ve been it’s own movie. In some respects the plot is a little rushed and not amazing but it has a solid structure where at the halfway mark he’s confronting the main villain and not having what he needs to defeat her he has to go back and measure himself.

The main cast are passable, I don’t know what accent Daniel Dae Kim was attempting the girl is kinda bleh, and it kinda wreaks of diversity woke squad where the only white man on the team is red. But David Harbour is great in this movie. The worst part of the original movies for me was the hammy acting from Pearlman. I like him, I think he has a cool voice and someone thought he’d be a cool hellboy but I think he was too old to play hellboy even then and now it would be ridiculous. You need someone old enough to be a tough cool Ron Pearlman character but also young enough to be a kind of a punk  kid sometimes. The bits where Pearlman is acting like a brat in the original movies is so forced and lame and his self loathing just felt silly, like he was doing a rainman impression. I think Harbour is a lot more realised as Hellboy, he brings a lot more consistency and personality to the role, I just felt like his interpretation was a more three dimensional character instead of just Ron Pearlman painted red. I felt like his struggle with his humanity was more potent and less shlocky.

I think the villains could’ve been better, I loved the changeling pigman he was awesome, when you first meet him it’s almost stomach churning the level of unbridled carnage he wreaks on people. You really feel like if you encountered this thing you would shit your pants. But Milla Jovovich as a villain was unremarkable, it was just Milla Jovovich being herself, she didn’t look particularly interesting, she was sort of too likeable as villain. But I guess the point of the story is that Hellboy is his own worst villain so it kind of makes sense that his villains aren’t as interesting as he is. Because the battle is between himself, either he gives in to his demon nature and conquers the earth or he beats his demonself and saves humanity from… himself.

Overall it’s just a solid fun, no nonsense, not giving a fuck movie I think will be a cult classic. And I don’t think it’s a cynical cash grab I think someone saw deadpool and logan and were like “Why don’t we do the hellboy movie we want to do where people say ‘fuck’ and get torn apart by a giant pigman in the most grotesque way possible?”

It’s a no holes barred action gorefest like that isn’t possible today, legitimately I’m not being objective. I’m holding this movie up against the sterile cynical mass produced comic book prepackaged action shlock we get today like every marvel or in some regards even the John Wick movies that don’t really take any risks, they just set up action set pieces and then string them together with a loose plot no one cares about.

What I’m trying to say is I don’t think this movie was phoned in, I can tell when someone doesn’t give a shit and I can’t look at a single frame of this movie and say that someone didn’t love this. Even things as simple as the sets and some of the shooting locations I just had to stop and say it looked good. This movie looks good, it’s fun, it’s action packed, it’s not neat, it’s not clean, you can’t take your mum or your girlfriend to it, you can’t have soylent drinking thin bearded will wheaton ass motherfuckers soy smiling while they tell you how bad ass it is when thor was playing fortnite. There isn’t some forced shitty joke mandated by their corporate office to be instituted every ten minutes, this movie isn’t made in a factory. I think we’ve been so programmed by these factory farm movies coming out of the comic book industry we don’t know how to watch a movie not made in that mould. This movie fucking breaks the mould and takes a demon sized dump on it. Actually fuck it, I think I might start reading the comics just to see which was a closer adaptation. That’s how you know you watched a good comic book movie, where you actually want to go read the comics it’s based on. You literally can’t do that with marvel because there are like a million different versions of every character. You can’t walk into to a comic book store and just ask to buy a spiderman comic without spending a couple thousand hours on wikipedia first to decide which fucking spiderman in which timezone in which dimension.

Don’t take my word for it, watch it and make up your own mind, and I guarantee even if you didn’t like it, you’ll have fun with it. I’m looking at this through the lens of the previous movies and the castrated garbage we’re force fed daily from the comic book empires, and it looks good.

 

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Vampyr review – it doesn’t suck??

Is that a pun? a vampire game that doesn’t suck?

Its the damdest thing, I’ve been wanting to try this game for awhile I was just waiting for it to go on sale for the right price and it’s been yoyoing in sales for some time but my friends kept telling me not to get it. But I was tempted when it went for like 85% off but it was still over a tenner so I let it go, only for it to go on gamepass a couple of days later and what seems like a match made in heaven, I still had a week left of the gamepass trial I had.

Erm this one kinda caught me off guard, I saw some trailers for it and I thought it looked ok and then I heard it was made by Dontnod and I was like “err no”.
For those that don’t know anything about dontnod they’re the people who make the award winning millenial simulators ‘life is tumblr’ and the trumps america simulator life is strange 2. They’re basically not even games, they’re just a bunch of really autistic french people trying to make social justice passion plays with kids with magical powers for reasons in an america seen through cnn. They’re really bad and cringy. So bad I watch play throughs just to laugh at them but the idea of spending money on them is ridiculous.

I actually played dontnods first game with gameplay, at least I think it was their first game, which was Remember Me. And it was really bad, I dunno, it was just bleh, the world the characters the hook of the game, just bleh, then they release Life is Strange, it wins loads of awards and probably makes no money and that was that.

Vampyr is made by focus home interactive and they were behind the really bad call of cthulhu game and they hold the license. But they did such a hack job the studio they were working with split off with them and focus home released this shitty fps walking sim that was basically dark corners of the earth but shit. So the people that split off from them went to make the sinking city which is not licensed but it looks really good. But for legal reasons might not be able to be lovecraftian haha. I dunno, but it looks good, it actually has gameplay, so that already makes it better by comparison.

So this game did not have the best foot forward to me, it even has the voice actor who plays the main character in call of cthulhu as the main character. So it’s a really bad impression I’m getting which makes it all the more astonishing that this is probably my  game of the year.

I absolutely adored it despite all my friends telling me it was boring or commie propaganda haha. I loved every minute of it and I’m going to tell you exactly why, that’s the point of reviews I guess.

There’s so much I love about it and it’s so unique, it’s hard to align my thoughts because initially I look at games and I try to categorise them. Like ‘oh this is an Assassins creed clone’ or this is a ‘gta clone’ etc. But there’s nothing to compare this to, it’s totally it’s own thing, part walking simulator part action rpg.

My best comparison would probably be a crossover between the witcher and bloodborne but good haha. Trolling aside, I loved the witcher but it’s just too long for replay-ability purposes and the choices you makes don’t feel impactful enough for me to want to redo them (also it took me forever to get all the witcher gear and I can’t be arsed to do all that again) and I don’t want to meet the person who wants to replay bloodborne.

Vampyr is the perfect length of a game and the choices you make and the builds you can design make for a hell of a lot of replay-ability. Kid you not, I started a whole new playthrough the second I completed it the first time, the only other game I did that with was probably mgs four or dead rising maybe. It’s ten out of ten for replay-ability. There’s so many choices and angles you can come at something and the builds are really fun to tinker with. The whole time you’re talking to people investigating and trying to be an apex predator vampire. You know you’re loving a game when you’re playing it and already planning for your next play through.

The storyline is honestly great, you play Johnathon Reid a newborn vampire/doctor who has to find out who turned him and find the cause of the epidemic of the spanish flu in london. Lots of twists and turns and it did subvert my expectations and also kind of blew my mind because the end boss is basically the end boss in my Cur books. I know, it’s weird that celtic mythology would make it’s way into this but it does and its awesome haha. The characters are fantastic, of course they are, they’re like central to the game. Half the game is about the characters, who you choose to kill and who you choose to spare and the consequences of that. And it all carries this sort of depression/uplifting feel of people surviving and making the best of it, the british stiff upper lip. Like you feel sorry for them and may want to put them out of their misery or you may want to help them.

Gameplay is split into two sections, you have your combat free roam exploration like bloodborne where the streets are filled with mindless ghouls and vampire hunters both want to take a chunk out of your butt and the focus is on exploring the dingey streets of London claimed by this horrible disease.

You have a witcher-esque combat system, which I heard people complain about but I liked it, really responsive, lots of synergy with the powers. You feel like a god when you get the right mix of powers and tactics, it’s great. That’s exactly how you want to feel in a game about a vampire.

But the combat is just one half of the game the other half is the sections where you’re in a ‘safe zone’ where people aren’t being prayed upon by ghouls and there aren’t vampire hunters roaming the streets. The parts where people are just trying to survive the epidemic and as a vampiric doctor it’s your duty to cure the sick and also eat some of them.

How the game works basically is you can eat certain people based on your level of mesmerism, so some people you can’t eat until later in the game where your power has grown a little. And the reason they do that is obviously just to stop you from breaking the game by just devouring everyone you meet instantly. But you can eat pretty much everyone in the game eventually. One of my defences of this game when my friends were calling it social justice bait and having really sjwy characters in it was to say well yeah there are sort of cringy characters but you can eat them. It’s like when rdr2 has the suffragette in it but you can feed her to crocodiles if you want. But in this game it’s even better because the game never intended you to feed the suffragette to a crocodile, there’s also a suffragette in vampyr but the game fully intends and prepares for you to kill her and it affects the game and your ending. It’s a really great mechanic that has such a great synergy with the world.

And honestly now that I mention rdr2 this game actually stays more consistent with it’s morality and politics with its period. In rdr2 your belief is never suspended in regard to what time you’re in, it’s very tongue in cheek and it’s drenched in modern morality and modern racial politics and social commentary. I never really felt like it was in the time it was portraying it was just a pastiche. Whereas vampyr is a near perfect period piece that handles it’s politics and morality with a bit of a progressive bent but it’s consistent and it makes you feel like you’re in that gas light era. It’s really great and even when your character spouts progressive opinions on race and gender you don’t cringe because you can just eat that person. So it creates a weird dynamic where everything Jonathan Reid says is subjective, is he saying that because he really believes that and he supports women/gay rights or is he just saying that because he wants to lower their guard for him to sink his teeth into them? He’s played very much as a blank slate and the voice actor is great. Because you can see it in like one line how he goes from soft-hearted doctor to cold blooded killer. It’s done so well in a game where you can murder someone’s child and come back and ask the parents how it makes them feel all while you and the game knows you did it. It’s eerie in a way because he knows he’s a monster and the face he wears and the things he says are just a mask. Lots of people look at that and see inconsistency, that he’s super progressive and non-violent and wants to help people but also wants to eat them. But honestly I see a person who see pragmatism in sacrifice to his hunger and also just can’t help it. He tries to be good but he knows he’s a monster. There’s even a part where you kill this guys wife and he finds out that it was you and he has to explain his hunger. So it’s as if you’re not even playing Jonathan you’re actually playing his hunger and it’s really meta because he has no control over who he eats. It makes for a great role playing experience in my opinion.

It’s such a unique game in that respect and it sort of turns you into a monster. Because I would find myself later in the game, more so in my second play through killing people not for the XP but just to see how his friends and family would react. Sometimes I’d kill people because they were evil and sometimes I’d kill people because they were good. It was a weird experience. The game sort of turns you into a kid with a magnifying glass over an anthill and lets you run wild. It’s so much fun, criminally so, it’s almost sadistic and just tickles me in the right way. I found myself having to justify killing someone and there’s not many games that make you consider that. Not just killing someone but asking yourelf why you did it.

Also it’s a little thing but another thing that makes this game so replayable is the save system, that is, it doesn’t have one. There is no save scumming in this game, you kill someone they’re dead until you start the game over, you make a decision, that’s set until you hit new game. So it adds this sense of finality and consequence. In rdr2 and witcher 3 you can load a different save in Vampyr that’s impossible, you made that decision now justify it, live with it. A little thing like that adds so much weight to your choices, it amazes me more games don’t do that. And in the second playthrough I was shocked by some of the changes to the cut scenes because some of them turned out completely differently depending on how many people I killed and who I killed, it really caught me off guard and I loved it.

Graphics are of course great, the game looks great, its atmospheric af haha. The only cons of this game I can think that jump out at me right off the bat are the fucking loading times. Oh goly gee those loading times are a fucking crime, specifically in a game where the difficulty can be punishing especially if you do a pacifist run. But that’s a minor gripe. Some weird racial choices for characters are the only weird sjwy elements and all the black people are voiced by the same dude haha. Like he doesn’t even try to do a different voice, it’s just the same guy wearing a different hat haha. I mean I don’t care but how many black journalists were living and working in London around the nineteen hundreds? Were there even any black people here at all at that time? England didn’t really do the whole slave thing compared to the U.S and when we did we put them in plantations in the Caribbean, they didn’t come to work in England as far as I know. The blacks here now are descendants of migrants who came over after world war two I think. But the french people that made this game, I guess they don’t know that haha.

So it’s really a minor gripe, it’s not really harped on, there are some indian people and that makes some sense, we’ve always had a close relationship with india. Some people were harping on the gay relationship in the game, like it was shoved in your face. Yeah I guess ‘shoved in your face’ translates to; a hidden cutscene where you have to wait and watch their heartbeats and follow them to a secluded location to spy on them. Really shoved it in my face there dontnod haha. It was so shoved in my face I had to look at a guide to get the cutscene on my second playthrough because I wanted to kill on of them to get his sword.

That’s another gameplay element, some characters have signature weapons that are more powerful versions of standard weapons, so you can plan your killing map based on what weapons you want to pilfer. Funny thing I actually got banned on facebook recently saying I was gonna kill the gay character because he has a cool sword haha. Thirty day ban for saying I want to kill a gay videogame character haha. Facebook is a joke.

Yeah so I loved it, the gameplay, the story, the characters, the world. The only things I would change is the ability to cut off that lame ass hipster beard he has haha. If you’re gonna copy witcher at least let us get a haircut but I guess barbers aren’t willing to work at night haha.

Oh yeah that’s how the game works btw. You fight and drink people for XP and then sleep to use the blood you gained and wake up the next night but during the day people can get sick and basically the consequences of what you did the night before take effect. And if you kill too many people a district can become unstable and overrun with ghouls killing everyone. So it’s a lot like a sim in a lot of ways. You really have to pick people off selectively and think about who you want to kill and who you want to spare. And you have to heal the people to keep the district healthy, another comparison to the witcher where you mix up potions to fight harder or whatever in this you make cures to help people.

Or you can just wipe everyone out and become a naughty vampire god haha. I also forgot to mention that the amount of XP you get depends on how much you know about them. Their blood gets more delicious depending on how many of their secrets you uncover, doesn’t make much sense but its really cool. Basically you have to talk to them and other people to probe them for secrets and then look around their house maybe or do a mission for them or follow them when their heartbeat raises, when they’re doing something shifty.

It’s a lot of fun, and yeah I cheated a lot looking at youtube for hints haha.

I loved this game, I might buy it when it comes off gamepass or goes on sale again. I really hope they do a sequel, I know it won a lot of awards, which it deserves. Weird thing, it’s the first game where I was playing it and listening to the music and thought ‘damn this music is good’ and yeah it won an award for it’s soundtrack. I think it made a fair bit of money too, so I hope it gets a sequel but in all honesty I’d much prefer a prequel where you play a vampire knight in the sixteen hundreds fighting the first outbreak, that would be awesome. Like the Witcher but more historically accurate but with vampires and werewolves. Or maybe they could make a spin off where you play a werewolf, that would be awesome, has anyone ever made a wereolf game not counting that morrowind expansion pack? The worst possible scenario would be just a bog standard sequel where you play Jonathan Reid again.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Jonathan Reid, the voice actor made the game, but I hate sequels where you trip over a rock and lose all the powers you gain in the first game. I hate that, it’s such lazy writing and it’s why I couldn’t get hyped for Deus Ex mankind divided, it’s just too contrived, you’re gonna tell me that Adam Jensen is such an amazing character he can’t be replaced by anyone else?

Just make a new character, Jonathan can still be in it, he could even be your maker, that would be awesome. Maybe set it in present day a hundred years later or even during world war 2, nazi vampires and werewolves, holy shit, there’s your fucking sequel haha. So those are my perfect sequels, a hundred years in the future or like four hundred years in the past or nazi werewolves haha.

Get cracking dontnod and focus home interactive, respectfully haha.

But in my opinion, this game is better than Red dead redemption 2 in almost every way. Sure it wont waste hundreds of hours of your time horse riding through empty plains and you can’t go fishing or play poker but the story and characters and gameplay are great and more importantly they serve the narrative. This game is a piece of art, it’s not just a collection of popular nonsense and pointless gimmicks. It’s totally it’s own thing and it’s great, go out and play it.

 

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Loverman Chapter 2 ‘The weeping song’

I got back the second to last part of Diana and I spoke to my editor after blowing my wad on the last round of editing and she says I should get it back soon, whatever that means haha. But yeah so that’s happening, that other thing is probably happening. Compared to how shitty I’ve felt for the last couple of months I feel pretty good, I’m really happy right now and honestly I don’t like it, I wish it would stop haha.

Maybe playing more red dead 2 will make me more miserable. Probably gonna do a review of that because everyone I know says it’s pretty underwhelming and honestly so far I can’t disagree. Like there’s nothing really about it that blows me away honestly. It kinda just feels like another red dead game, it’s not really that special. Definitely falls short so far comparing it to GTAV. I don’t mind the slow pace as long it’s building towards something and it’s immersive like Kingdom come deliverance. I loved the slow beginning of that game. Really need to do another playthrough of that game. I can’t remember the last time I was so immersed in a game.

Anyway, dying need to nap or do some proofreading or something.

Bye!

–

She kept up a dizzying pace through the old building, but I could hardly object to the brevity of the tour since it appeared to be just a series of long hallways looking all alike.

 

“This is the day room”

 

She opened a door that looked no different from any of the rooms we’d seen before. Despite that it had no viewing window and opened onto a large rectangular room with almost greenhouse windows on the walls and in portions of the ceiling.

 

“This is something like a solarium, they used to think the sunshine had medicinal effects, we use it as a common area, they have art supplies and games they can play.” She said directed me to deshevelled pile of soiled board game boxes and art supplies collected in a half closed closet. The room itself was empty but for a series of rounded tables made of a cheap chipboard wood with a few simple plastic chairs dotted around them and a few beanbag chairs. The carpet was a dull cream colour and the ceiling tiles were deeply sodden asbestos tiling with neon lights running in parralles across the ceiling.

 

I looked around the room as it stood empty, littered as it was with papers and crude paintings on the walls. The paintings depicting oddly shaped buildings. Or so it seemed, although obscurest in nature, following no known Euclidian geometry and copying no style I had ever seen before. Despite that they were quite skilfully reproduced as if from memory.

 

“Oh you noticed that”

 

She said spying my eye caught by the odd painting.

 

“We have a number of artists budding or otherwise that come here.”

 

“Oh really?”

 

“Are you a fan of the arts Mr Tilinghast.”

 

“Henry, please, to my friends.”

 

She seemed to scoff and then smile.

 

“I’ve eyes like anyone else” I said attempting something close to aloofness.

 

“The director seems to think artists are more susceptible to madness than ordinary men”

 

“Oh, why’s that?”

 

“It’s nothing he would publish for peer review, but he seems to think your mind has to be half gone already to be an artist in this economy.” She smiled and I stifled a laugh which cooled to a morbidity as I studied the sad truth in that statement.

 

I sighed in agreement and continued to study the room. It was bright which was odd due to the weather being as grey and dim as it was. The room seemed to glow with an eerie effulgence, it had to be something to do with the placing of the room and the windows harnessing the light.

 

“Please take your time to look at some of their work, the room is closed for today.”

 

I took her up on her offer and started to perouse some of the paintings, most of which were marked with the same signature. The scribbling did seem familiar but I couldn’t make out the name. The paintings seemed to correlate with the others, odd cyclopean structures, strangely shaped humanoid creatures. It seemed almost like the interpretation of a childs drawing done by a skilled hand.

 

“Closed?” I said idly not taking my eyes off an etching of a bust done in charcoal. The bust was some strange abstract creature that seemed to have the head of octopus and the body of some kind of reptile with wings with large clawed feet sitting prone on a pedestal.

 

“We had an incident the other day with one of our patients.”

 

“An incident” I aped thoughtlessly losing myself in the strange chimera like creature in the etching. Noticing then that were some very similar drawings done like but in what seemed like a childs hand, and still more in differing styles until it seemed to be something of a contest to draw the eldritch squatting thing.

 

I turned to her and saw she was motioning with her eyes at a patch on the floor. My eyes following her to see a portion of the cream carpet that had been removed in a large square with a box cutter a slight shadow of a brown stain on the exposed wooden boards below it.

 

“We’re having someone come in on Friday to replace it”.

 

“I see”.

 

“I’ll take you to see the director now if you’d like, he should be in his office.”

 

She led me down another hallway indistinguishable from the others we’d just traversed to a door with golden sign with the name Avery Fournier – Director Pink Bird Sanitarium embossed on it.

 

The door itself was a firm red oak with the top panelled cut out to make way for an ornate opaque glass screen. And as the light was shining I could seemingly make out two figures and could catch something of a conversation going on inside.

 

“He must be busy, should we come back later?” I asked.

 

“No he’s expecting you, he might just be recording something, if we enter quietly it shouldn’t be a problem”. She smiled and motioned towards the door holding her clipboard tightly to her chest and pushing her glasses up on her nose as if touching up a careful costume.

 

I clasped the door handle getting a slight jolt of something but not removing my hand. A sudden striking feeling of unease came over as if I was about to open a door to a party of people dancing over my own grave.

 

Opening the door as gingerly and as politely and inobtrusively as possible I entered with my head bowed like a monk seeking safe passage through some savage mongol land. But to my surprise I was greeted by a most affable and rotund looking old gentlemen sat smiling warmly above a great and bushy mustache.

 

The man instantly put me at ease with his effortlessly pleasant manner and way of speaking.

 

“Henry, is that you, take a seat old boy, you must have had quite a journey.” He addressed me queerly as if he were some old friend or an uncle rarely visited but gladly accepting of any such chance encounter.

 

Finding myself caught off guard by his amiable appearance at knowing me, I had but silent stammering in answer.

 

“You must be exhausted, where did you say you were coming from? Boston was it?”

 

“N-new Hampshire actually.” I said tracing my hands feverishly along the back of one of the high wingbacked chairs in front of the man’s small but neat desk.

 

Fournier’s office was little more than broom closet in size, a very humble room for a seemingly very humble and benign figure. But despite the size, the furnishing were old and eloguent, the smell of treated leather and hardwood was thick in such a tight space and nevertheless it gave way to an informal comfiness that was quite unbefitting an office of such stature.

 

“Would you like a toffee?” He asked standing to pass me a large glass bowl of individually wrapped toffees.

 

“Erm no- no thank you” I said smiling.

 

“Hmm” He smiled and sighed before putting the bowl down and unwrapping one for himself and fiendishly popping it into his mouth grazing his bushy white moustache. He smiled again and said “I must admit I’m quite partial to them” He narrowed his eyes and then at once as if he forgot something said “Oh of course, I’m forgetting myself, would you like one Zane?” He said lifting the bowl in the direction of the wingback chair to my right.

–

Check out the rest of the chapter on inkittttt The weeping song

 

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Loverman Chapter 1 ‘Paint a vulgar picture’

Ok truthfully just desperate for content at this point and not really feeling up to starting Diana two, I dunno, I just feel kind of drained creatively, might be something to do with my sleep patterns but I don’t feel super pumped about it. And I don’t wanna start anything unless I’m ready to start it. So I’m just back in the trenches finishing this off, which is one of the stories I started and sort of abandoned when I lost focus of where it was going.

I think I literally abandoned this story to write the first Diana so I’m kind of hoping for that to happen again, just to be writing this not really knowing where I’m going then boom get hit the lightning bolt again.

I didn’t abandon this because it was shit, I just kind of lost my place because this is a story I didn’t write out a really detailed plan for, now I write out these really detailed chapter breakdowns I almost never look at but they’re there in my brain. But for this it was sort of up in the air and I can’t really place, I’m not sure what I was doing with it so it’s harder to keep pace on it.

Just trying to keep my mind busy so I don’t go insane, kind of ironic considering the subject matter. I do love Lovecraft but I dunno it feels sort of hollow copying him or trying to make it into a marvel haha. I dunno, it just doesn’t get my blood pumping as much as Cur did, well I don’t anything could get my blood pumping as much as Cur did. Too soon for a sequel to that but I should start work on a plan for it at least, the plan for Diana two was finished ages ago, I just might want to go over it again.

In other news really enjoying the latest Parker book it sort of starts off as a normal Parker book and slowly escalated into an all out war bringing back some of the best characters from the series, even one from the fucking dead haha. I tried finding info on this but I could swear this one character died in a previous book this books references and I went back and sure enough, he’s dead as a doornail, I guess Westlake just forgot haha. Which is so weird because of how he seems so good and keeping all these characters alive in his universe. To miss bringing a guy back from the dead haha. Maybe it was a different Ed Mackey with the same wife haha. I dunno, I’ll give it a pass, he is a cool character.
Also so stupidly excited about this but I managed to track down and pirate all the conan, shadow and solomon kane pulps and I can’t wait to read them. So I’m gonna be knee deep in like 1920’s era pulp fiction for a while, should be really fun and inspiring. I can’t wait to get into it.

Anyhoo, hours a waining and I need to do some proof reading, wasted too much time already setting up the Loverman Inkitt page for you to mosey on over to.

See you…

–

On recollection of that singularly disgusting building my mind is hesitant to reconstruct the image of the hideous fuchea paint. Which cast over it like a layer of bubbled pink flesh hanging over a rancid rotting skeleton of a building. The colour of which I might imagine of those many chosen people who were exposed to a noteably vile a substance as cyanide gas intended as such for vermin. Their bodies bloated and pink, skin bubbling like that of a suckling pig slowly roasted over an open flame. The bones of the building that of an old English town house, transported brick by brick from such old haunts as Glastonbury. Home to such tails of wicked faeries that would disappear unlucky travellers who might have the poor fortune to rest upon a certain rock deemed sacred to the cruel ironic justice of the fae folk.

 

To this day I have seldom the choice to replay this ‘event’ over and over in my head. As it was this soggy new England morning in maine that I was to lose my grip on the mortal coil for better or worse.

 

It was a notably wet early morning that I was to set foot on the grounds of the Pink Bird mental asylum as it stood in the October of 1994 in the new England town of Presque isle maine.

 

Having graduated from a university of note some years before I was applying for a newly opened position at the facility. I’d hasten to add I had grown irritated at relaying which university I’d graduated from. As it seemed to invoke strange and morbid fascination from anyone that heard the name which is why I refuse to mention the accursedly wicked place even in these notes I scrawl now. Strange rumours dogged it of doctors coming from there possible forty years hence conducting strange research into the reanimation of dead flesh. I had no interest in such study for it was the mind that interested me. It became increasingly more irritating as people seemed to imbue me with vicarious curiosity at the history and rumours that abound said university of which I deem to remain nameless. It’s past neither in my time there nor in my present state interested me at all.

 

That being said I can’t help remarking on my present predicament and wandering if the accursed place had some hand in my misfortune.

 

I approached the building which I had remarked looked like a corpse prepared hastily for an open casket viewing. A make over having possibly taken place in the early seventies had not aged well and as it sat off the beaten track in the back country of new England.

 

The garden was slightly overgrown, the hedges seemed to crawl out and attempt to swallow the narrow path that led from the road. A large bare tree stood in the court before the building reaching up into the slate coloured sky of that misty morning. The colours of the hedges a mix of deep damp greens and autumnal oranges and browns forming a mash of living and dying rott. The smell of which was slightly sweet.

 

I approached the building in an old crysler my mother had left me passing a few years prior. The car was in fairly good condition but wide and maneuvered like that of an old tugg boat on choppy waters. As I wasn’t the most robust figure of a man I was prone to car sickness which made me slightly light headed as the car lurched around the tight oval curve of the main court around that old bare tree with it’s dark grey bark.

 

I parked as near the entrance as I felt was polite as there was no markings of any kind and only one other car parked in a similar fashion. But notably of more refined taste, a dark blue bently with tasteful chrome wheels.

 

I ascended a steep set of slightly damp stone steps to reach a large but ramshackle white wooden door as cracked and creased as the rest of the paint work on the old building. The whole thing looming over my head looked like a sore open wound crawling with unwanted plant life like dry boney fingers peeling at the cracks in the saturated fuschia paint.

 

Taken with some odd ceremony I knocked on the old door and was met with silence and then a dull echoing noise I attributed to the age of the building. But sounded oddly almost like a person sighing deeply or the sound of sawing wood.

 

After getting no response from my peculiar inclination to knock as if it was episode of downtown abbey and I was about to be greeted by some overly verbose woman in a bustiare. I shuddered at the thought and twisted the old rusty doorknob which released a coppery scent and then popped open with a shudder that ripped through the entire frame and an awful creaking scraping noise that went through me like the sound of grinding teeth.

 

“Oh I’m sorry” A young woman said as I almost fell on her through the door as it gave way faster than I thought it might. “I should have warned you about the door, I heard you knocking I was just…”

 

I was taken by her instantly, a beauty of note, her blonde hair tied into a tight but full bun secured in place with what looked like a chopstick. A set of small reading glasses perched on the tip of a short sharp nose below of which rested a set of full pursed lips painted with a muted dark pink lipstick which seemed to match the sparse spackling of light freckles on her cheeks.

 

Her lidded eyes were green and distinctive under neatly plucked eyebrows, perfect eyelashes beating like that of a butterflies wing. Her face a delicate pale canvas of faintly german irish features.

–

Read the rest of this chapter on inkitt. Paint a vulgar picture

0

Hereditary review

So again my pirate brother brought me another gem for movie night and I really didn’t think much of this movie when I saw it advertised because of the slew of garbage tier horror we’ve seen for a long time now. Like every James Wan movie ever and the blum house movies such as get out and quiet place. Total garbage movies that are hyped to hell and back to get the seals clapping make lots of money. But they’re shit, they never pass the fridge test because they’re hollow trashy movies about nothing ultimately.

There’s just been a wave of forgettable lame horror movies that pin out pointless sequels, mainly looking at the insidious franchise here. The first one was ok but the sequel was beyond ridiculous, pretending like that was there plan all along. Motherfucker you made a dumb horror movie and it made lots of money so you pulled some weird time travel tranny ghost story out of your ass, admit it. I daren’t even watch the others where the old lady is the main character and there’s a prequel, that’s a hard pass. The saw movies are ok I guess but they’re just gore porn, there’s no real artistry there and if you look at the latest movies, the acting and set design is indistinguishable from an actual porno.

Now Hereditary on the other hand is quite unironically a horror masterpiece. It’s basically a James Wan movie if it wasn’t just slocky over produced trash. It’s sort of a standard format horror movie turned on it’s head to be more like a drama. And one of the big criticism is that it’s not actually scary which is bullshit, what that actually means is that it has no jump scares in it, you heard me right, not one. But it has this sort of oppressive atmosphere throughout that is just insanely gripping. You just have no idea what’s going to happen next and the movie is so subtle it just can’t help but get under your skin.

The pacing is perfect, the length is perfect, believe me it needs every minute of that two hours, every pause, every silence is permeated with dread and it had me on the edge of my seat for two hours.

I don’t think I’ve ever been so just creeped out by a movie, so completely at the mercy of a piece of film. It has this constant theme of a doll house throughout because the main character is someone that makes dollhouses and it fits perfectly with the tone. Because the movie wants you to know that these people are not in control of their own destiny, they are dolls playing a part and you the audience too are powerless because you have no idea whats going on or who to trust.

It’s just such a powerful movie that knows how to use it’s power to great effect. It doesn’t beat you into submission with constant jump scares or gore. It hits you once really hard triggering your fear and sadness to an extreme degree and then it waits. And as the audience the fear builds waiting for the next gut punch.

I really don’t know what to say about but it’s just an excellent piece of film making. Everything about it is handled so perfectly. Very little really happens in the movie and it doesn’t really expand out from the house but it feels like a rollercoaster you can’t get off. The visuals are amazing, it’s haunting from beginning to end and there isn’t a single jump scare. Comparing it to quiet place, they never really leave the farm in that and it feels like there’s no journey but in Hereditary it’s an emotional/spiritual journey so them not leaving the house much isn’t really an issue. Whereas in quiet place we’re sort of lead to believe an emotional journey has taken place when really we’ve just been running around a corn field with a big monster chasing us around.

But it’s getting a lot of push back from the jump scare addicted audience as expected. I think why jump scares would ruin this movie is because jump scares are almost tension release valves. Something spooky is happening then something pops up and says ‘Boo’ then its over and you can laugh about it with your friends. But this movie never lets you go, it never releases that tension, it just keeps it going and pulling you deeper down. There’s no comic relief like Get out, there’s no relief at all. It’s a total onslaught on your senses and your psyche and it puts you right in Tony Collette’s shoes.

The performances were amazing, Tony Collette in this is spellbinding, I don’t think I’ve seen someone play crazy as well as her. You see that a lot in movies where someone is screaming ‘you have to believe me’ and they look crazy and you’re screaming at the tv ‘believe her!’ because you know they’re not crazy because you’re seeing what they see. But in this movie she was just so fucking crazy I didn’t want to believe her. And there are parts of the movie that are so horrifying you just wish they were a dream and the characters do too, it’s amazingly powerful. It manages to put right where they are all the time.

I don’t know how to describe it any other way than just this slow descent into horror and madness and misery that you just can’t look away from.

Some of the critiques are that it kind retreads old ground and I have a saying ‘I’ve seen it before and better’ and yeah everything in this movie I’ve seen before but not better. I don’t care if a movie borrows from something else or is in someway derivative if it’s good or it elevates what came before in someway which this definitely does.

If I had to compare it to something it’s basically The wickerman meets insidious or sinister, a really deep and dark horror movie sort of wearing the skin of a slocky jump scarefest. But even today looking back something like the wickerman doesn’t scare me (and in the case of the Nicolas Cage version makes me laugh) but this movie not only scared me it deeply unsettled me on many levels and stayed with me for awhile. Not only the trepidation but the themes.

Something you don’t get from a lot of horror films these days, not just scares but real deep sorrow. There are worse things than dying sometimes living is harder, you can watch Jason slash up a million co-eds but can you watch someone break down mentally and spiritually after the death of a child? This movie perfectly portrays living with loss and it adds to this melancholy and dread a little of what made Silent Hill 2 so powerful. Not just the horror but the sadness, the horror of being alone, the horror of being unloved. The horror in sadness. It’s coming at you from so many different directions overwhelming you with sadness and fear and loathing all at once.

I mean you see a horror movie like Get out and it’s basically a comedy. It has a comedy director and for the most part comedy actors trying to bring to life this laughable script about brain swapping. Then you have quiet place and we’re supposed to believe they’re sad about the kid dying but we’re never introduced to the kid and no one talks about it because they can’t so it’s never addressed. And you’re supposed to be sad when the dad dies /spoilers/ haha. But it just felt kinda cheap and unearned.

Neither of these hugely successful horror movies have the kind of emotional weight of Hereditary and thus can’t come close to the levels of horror (in every sense of the word) it can convey.

It’s what the horror genre has been missing for a long time, serious film making. Not just idiots trying to spin a buck and tell some goofy story about sound monsters or inter racial brain swaps. But genuine love and attention and talent.

This movie is a work of art if only for the visuals. But pair that with the acting and set design, story, pacing and it’s truly a horror classic and I seriously mean that. I think this movie should be up their with the Shining and the Thing as horror movie that just lives on and on and I hope it becomes a cult classic.

Go out and watch it, and then watch it again, I know I will.

DehX8IsWAAA3tIi.jpg

0

GS2 Chapter 19 ‘You can be the boss’

Hey there,

Not much to talk about, mostly been dayjobbing it and sinking deeper and deeper into general misery and misfortune, which is standard recently. I just can’t seem to catch a fucking break recently.

Although I watched like two thirds of deep blue sea 2 before me and my brother turned it off and decided an hour was enough time we were never getting back from what is essentially a really bad low budget copy of the first film. Part me almost wants there to be a documentary about this movie just to learn how it came about.
Did they win the rights to the name in a poker game, how did this pile of shit get made and why? I really just want to know how this went down and what drugs they were on when they thought this was a good idea.

I’m not saying the first movie was a masterpiece but it was competent with a good cast and decent writing and visuals and budget, this was like a daytime tv remake. So much so it doesn’t need a review because I wasn’t really paying it any attention after the first ten minutes. The acting was ridiculous porno tier, the story was basically the same as the first movie but dumber, the characters were cookie cutter, the sets looked like they were re purposed from a sci-fi movie. It looked like it was made for the scy-fy channel.

The plot is basically they’re experimenting on the sharks and then the sharks overhear them saying they’re gonna kill them all when the research is done and the go berserk, I know it’s fucking stupid. But what’s even stupider is how this is put across is by the shark like looking through a window like “hmm that’s what they think mwahaha”. So dumb. 
It just amazed me how bad it was and reminded me a lot of those movies like sharknado and sharktopus versus gatoroid or whatever and it was actually worse. Because those movies are fully self aware of how awful they are and they just have as much fun as they can with it.
They’re trash but they’re enjoyable trash, deep blue sea 2 is not self aware or funny at all, it’s just trash and I don’t know why it exists or why I even attempted just reviewing it. I’m just so curious as to how it exists. Mind boggling.

Anywhoo back on schedule with regular chapter posts and I’m amazed how long GS2 is, like why? Why is a zombie book so long? That’s just sad. I put so much effort into a book about zombie furfags haha. What is my life?

Ok well enough of that, gotta do some actual work, kinda shitty here because my boiler dyed so I’m just wallowing in my filth and trading in warframe which is more addictive than the actual game. Love life in the crapper as usual even worse than usual actually and I broke my toe because I was so angry that I couldn’t have a shower that I kicked the banister, genius.

But it’s not the first time I’ve had a broken toe, after years of martial arts my toes look like fucking twiglets they’ve been broken so many times haha.

Eh whatever just gonna spam and maybe do some proof reading, now that I think of it I should probably go over the pitch excerpt for Diana after Dark. I went over the other parts last week and really cleaned it up, I found so many mistakes I thought I might legitimately have undiagnosed down syndrome haha. 

It’s really a good thing nobody follows this blog otherwise I would get a tonne of hate mail haha.

See you…

–

“Turn around, slow”

“Who th-“ Murray was cut off by a shotgun barrel poked hard into the side of his head. “Ow!”

“We ask the questions, you do what you’re fucking told.” Roch said through her teeth. She was feeling it, her adrenaline pumping, blood boiling, she wanted to hurt someone.

“That’s right, girls rule, straight white men, die!” Juanita came around the side of the truck. Trying to not look out of breathe as she lugged the giant anti-tank rifle around. Trying to look comfortable resting it on her shoulder.

“Freeze cracker!” Kat screamed trying to sound like a cop pointing her mach ten at him with both hands clasped tightly around it.

Jaclyn had her laptop in her arm, pointing her gun forward but not really aiming at anything. Concentrating on making her face look as mean and serious as possible.

Roch pulled Murray down the steps of the Van and span him around hard against the side of the truck. “Ow” He said “What’s all this about?”

She hit in him in the back of the knee and got close to his face and whispered “We’re asking the questions asshole”.

He straightened up grimacing and said “So ask away”.

“Jacy do we need this piece of shit?” She shouted. Clammily fingering the short shotgun pressed tightly to the back of Murray’s sweaty neck.

“I just need to access his network so we can broadcast our signal piggybacking off theirs so..”

Roch smiled, her blood rushing in her ears. Murray closed his eyes and swallowed hard and said “Fuck me”.

“But we might need him for verification.” She perked up. “We have no idea how many security protocols they have, they could even have iris or voice recognition.”

Roch poked her head out of her bloodlust stupor, Murray squinted.

“I’m just saying. It’d be better if had him and didn’t need him than blew his brains out. Only to discover he’s the only one that can access the network.”

“Err yeah, that’s exactly right” Murray said.

“Shut up” Roch said giving him another little love tap with the shotgun.

“Just bring him inside and sit him down.” Jac said.

“Who died and made you the boss”.

“Just do it Roch” Jac sighed as she climbed the small set of stairs into the mobile hq. She took a deep inhale of breath as she entered. It was everything she hoped it would be although it smelled more like ass and doritos than she imagined. She sat down at Murray’s console moving his mountain dew bottles to make way for her laptop. She opened it up connecting it to the terminal and started to type in command prompts.

Roch lead Murray. A nasty look on her face as she pushed him up the steps. She sat him at another one of the screens in the van on a chair connected to the floor. The van evidently was intended for an entire team of people watching the cameras, budget cuts.

Juanita felt like a million dollars. She was starting to see herself as some kind comic book hero. Fighting some righteous daydream as she dragged her oversized gun into the truck. Parking herself in a seat next to Murray with the gun by her side. Panting and sweating profusely she said “Who’s this guy?”

“He’s their tech guy, monitors all the cameras” Jac said with her back turned typing at her laptop.

“How didn’t he see us coming?” She wheezed.

“He’s just one guy.” She shrugged looking over at the sad sack that was Murray. “There’s no way he could have known we had the kind of tech to ping his signal or the man power to take down his guard team.” She scrunched her face like she almost felt sorry for him. “Plus I’ve been patching into their drone traffic. There’s activity happening all over town, there’s not enough eyes on the ground to keep track of it all.”

“So what now?” Juanita huffed.

“Roch would you mind tying him up and then just guarding the door with Kat? We need someone to keep an eye out.” Jac said with an air of aloof superiority.

“Sure thing” Roch sneered and flounced out slamming the door behind her.

“What the hell your cracker as-“ Kat was cut off by a neat balled up fist tapping her on the nose and knocking her onto her ass. The french man picking and palming the mach ten out of her hand as she fell.

“I’m very sorry.” He said as he looked at her on the floor dazed.

As soon as Roch came out of the truck she was too pissed off to notice the smell of the crazy homeless guy. Which waiting for her at the side of the steps with his back flat against the truck wall.

“Hi” He said cherrily as he snaked a hand onto the barrel of the shotgun. Wrestling control of it away from her and tapping her on the nose with the top of the barrel. She folded like a cheap pic nick table at a heap at the bottom of the stairs.

The Frenchman gripped the mac ten in his hand looking over at Carpenter. Gauging distance and spread.

Carpenter clocked him looking and gave him a cheeky little wink as he cocked the shotgun. Liking his chances.

The Frenchman seethed and slackened his grip on the gun.

“After you, my friend” The Frenchman said.

“I don’t mind if I do.” He smirked.

–

Read the rest of the chapter here.

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A quiet place – Review

I wasn’t really planning to review this movie but then I saw all the insane buzz around it and my contrarian senses were tingling and I had to get it out. Honestly I didn’t hate it, it was just like ‘bleh’ it was a nothing burger of a movie for me. Tired re-used ideas done before, better and worse a hundred times and it really didn’t work for me. But fuck me if rotten tomatoes aren’t sucking the sweat from this movies balls.

It’s disturbing, and I don’t really get why. I understood why they were fanning get outs balls, it was the same reason black panther negative reviews were deleted, it was the race angle. But for this I have no idea why everyone has to like it, are deaf kids the new black guys?
I watched it with my brother who is an avid pirate arr and I just couldn’t get into it. The movie seems to never get going then it ends. I remarked to him that it was kind of like tremors meets it comes at night but not as fun or interesting as either. Actually this movie really makes me appreciate it comes at night more, despite the fact nothing actually comes at night the movie could have been half an hour longer at least. But it was suspenseful and interesting and did the end of world scenario in a fresh interesting way.

A way this movie doesn’t do. This movie is basically the road without the road, it’s stakeland without the land. It’s I am legend without the legend, can I stop this now?

I’m not going to get bogged down in the lazy/non-existent world building or sperg out about the many many plotholes and inconsistencies, if we did that we’d be here all day and all we’d have to show for it would be a headache.
The main problem I have with this movie is there’s no journey, there’s no attempt at a story or an arc or a goal. And it’s so easily done. The whole movie is centred around Blunt’s character having a baby so maybe there are complications and they need to find a doctor, or they hear a radio frequency about a settlement or something, anything but nothing like that happens. The movies plot could fit into an episode of tales from crypt, farmhouse attacked by sound monsters the end. Nothing happens the whole movie is just a circular mess of chasing around this farmhouse and pointless filler to get to the main beats of the bath scene and the *spoilers* dad’s death sequence *spoilers end*. And that whole scene is sad but it feels unearned and shoe horned in to a point that it makes the rest of the movie seem pointless.

The bath scene particularly I didn’t find tense at all because I knew she’d be fine, I knew none of the kids could die because they already made a big deal about killing one of their kids in the opening of the movie. So it’s completely without tension because I know none of these characters can die and there aren’t any other characters around them to act as monster fodder.

So there’s no story but movies like this can get by with no story as long as there’s a tense character drama like Cloverfield lane but there’s no character drama either because no one can talk. There are only four characters, beard shooshing dad, pregnant mom, deaf kid, none deaf kid. Emily Blunt and Krasinski are married in real life and they have a lot of chemistry during interviews but in this movie they’re playing a couple with little to no chemistry there’s no levity or romance. You’re supposed to believe these people care about eachother but their kids are running around a corn field with sound monsters that somehow took out the entire of america’s military and they’re like ‘they’ll be fine the script says so’.
The deaf kid is ok as long as it said in the script to do your best Dustin from stranger things pretending to be a fish impression, then she was spot on, the other kid is just a non-entity.

The main beats of the movie are painfully predictable, when the thing with the earpiece came up as a plot device for defeating the monsters my brother turned to me and said “Swing away” and he nailed it, it was just like that. It was a stupid Shamalamamadingdong premise, oh the sound monsters don’t like weird frequency noises, no one in the whole of america thought of using sound weapons on monsters that hunt by sound, wouldn’t it be awesome if we had something like sound cannons. Yeah that’d be great.
It was painfully dumb and I think honestly it’s just because I’ve seen too many movies I can just work out every beat of the movie and see the structure. This movie’s structure is mess, it’s a circle, they don’t go anywhere, no story is progressed, there’s no arc, we’re supposed to feel like they’ve been on some epic journey by the end when they’re on their front lawn.

By the end of the movie where the epic plot twist is that the monsters are powerless without their heads I turned to my brother and I said; “Emily Blunt is going to cock the shotgun and then the credits will roll” and would you guess that’s exactly what happened.

And we couldn’t believe it, that was the cheesiest and worst ending I could’ve imagined to this movie that was going for this serious grounded tone, it suddenly becomes aliens. I almost burst out laughing. It was so cheesey and unselfaware yet all the critics at rotten tomatoes are totally drinking the coolaid.
I mean is it as bad as Tom Hanks on like an actors guild video saying Get out is the greatest movie ever? Not really, it’s pretty bad but not that bad. I was talking about that to my brother and I said ‘Can you imagine if he was talking about It follows, people would laugh in his fucking face’ and It follows actually was a really clever horror movie with great atmosphere and genuine scares but no one would dare elevate it to the level of get out because it wasn’t directed by a half black guy and it wasn’t about racism, or whatever the fuck that movie was about.

I mean Quiet place isn’t bad, it’s just derivative and unoriginal and really unsatisfying, just watch the road or stakeland or war of the worlds, they’re the same movies but ten times better. People actually have arcs and they do stuff and go on a journey, there are characters and dialogue and goals and emotions not just people signing “I love you” at eachother. Fuck it ignore the critic group think behind this movie and just go watch Tremors, it’s like a quiet place if it was any fun.

See you…

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