What are you?

...I'm Batman.
So I picked up the new game Batman: Arkham Asylum this weekend on the recommendation of my good buddy Paul, and its incredible quality has consumed all of my free time since. This new Batman game is the everlovin' bees knees.

Take the best forensic science investigation parts of Condemned: Criminal Origins, the dark atmosphere and open Central Park-sandbox of the latest (otherwise 'meh'-quality) Alone in the Dark, add a sweet brawler combat system, and you've got Rocksteady's latest release, Batman: Arkham Asylum.
I assumed they would put in a quality combat system, and even a stealth-kill mechanic that's fun to use, but what I didn't expect was the cool 'detective mode' system where you can look around a room as Batman would, to pick out fingerprints and chemical vapors and other forensic evidence. It really adds the detective element to the game.


Without giving anything away, the premise of the game is that Joker has set up a super-trap for good ol' Bats, by luring him to Arkham island which he has secretly taken over, and letting all the crazies loose. The plot is an oldie but a goodie, and silently gliding around the island quietly choking-out assault rifle-armed joker thugs from behind just doesn't ever get old.

The voices are all done by the folks from the animated series, so yes we have Mark Hammil as the Joker, which is the most important voice of all because he's constantly mocking you over the loudspeakers. If any of you Jokers are on the fence about picking this game up, or haven't even heard its out, then I heartily recommend grabbing it. Its a Bat-smashing good time.

More Movie Reviews -- Hellboy and Chris C'tan!

Got some more horror movie reviews for ya folks. One in the theaters (Hellboy 2: Attack of the Puppets), and one fresh outta production and straight into Netflix Watch-it-Now (Undead or Alive).

Hellboy 2

Let's start with Hellboy, which I just came back from this fine Sunday morning (I like my horror in early morning matinee form). Don't worry, I won't post (m)any spoilertz.


So how is it? Well, its better than the first one, by far. I'm not really a Hellboy fan, I certainly don't collect the comics, and I'm not really into the cartoony/Men-in-Black way in which they present the Cthulhu mythos. I do like Ron Perlman punching giant muppets though, so that's what gets me to the theater for these movies (who am I kidding, I'd watch just about anything if it even remotely suggested the presence of Yog-Sothoth).

However, two things bothered me with the first Hellboy movie that made me almost not go see this one (which would've been unfortunate):

1) The regenerating Hellhound creature(s). So you're going to make me watch Hellboy fight a mutant dog. Fine, that's pretty cool, I can't wait to see what he fights next!
...again with the mutant dog. Oh wait, yet ANOTHER identical mutant dog. Then an hour into the movie: The exact same mutant dog! Wheeee! We don't even get a tentacled horror until the last five minutes, and it was only after seeing sixty more mutant dogs.

2) Secondly, the "Love story." For some reason Hollywood thinks a seven-foot 240 lb demon man stalking a 115 lb goth chick is "cute." Guess what, its not cute. Its creepy. Also: Boring. The love story BS in the first movie was so painful to watch (not "Attack of the Clones" painful, but painful) that I started to hate demon-spawned heroes, which really shows how bad it was.

Now, in Hellboy 2 there's some love story, but for Hellboy its the troubles of a couple arguing over living together and not the in-your-face "stalking chicks is cool and will totally work to win her over" as the last movie. However, they decide to go in a different direction with the love story-shoehorning in this one, and have fish-guy get a crush on a fairyland elf chick (oh stop whining, its hardly a spoiler, they'll choke you with it before the end of the movie anyway). I'm not sure how they'd explain that coupling though, I mean, how would they "do it?" Does he think he'll just release his gametes into the swimming pool and then she'll do the butterfly stroke or something? What's the attraction there for her? Its a stupid and forced love story. Moving on.

The good news is, the monster fights are excellent in this one. Lots of puppets. Instead of Nazi demon-summoning of the last movie, they went with dark Germanic fairytale-style monsters. Its like the Bureau of Paranormal Research decided to invade the Muppet show, Labyrinth and Fraggle rock all at the same time. Plenty of Gorgs everywhere for Hellboy to punch. Big monsters, little monsters, you name it. They really upped the ante with the monsters here and I appreciate their efforts. I especially enjoyed the "tooth fairies."

The movie was a little funnier than expected. While I don't like the government-coverup/Men-in-Black humor of the Hellboy genre (and there was a lot of it in this one), there is some stuff to chuckle at in this movie. Also the guy who plays the villain looks just like Tom Cruise. IMDB says his name is Luke Goss, but I'm pretty sure its really Tom Cruise. So if you want to see Tom Cruise do ninja backflips and get punched in the face, this is your movie.

Final analysis: Twelve-thousand regenerating mutant Hellhounds out of fifteen-thousand regenerating mutant Hellhounds. Easily worth a matinée ticket.


Undead or Alive

This movie just came out on Netflix's watch-it-now, and I actually highly recommend you watch it now!

Its a western zombie comedy (A "Zombedy") starring Chris Kattan and the guy from Desperate Housewives. Basic premise is this: Desperate Housewives guy is a hardened ex-army desperado, and Chris Kattan is his bumbling sidekick. Geronimo (the Indian warrior/druid) summons up a mystical zombie disease to kill all the white invaders. Geronimo's indian princess niece gets caught up with the duo as they battle the zombies.

This movie was stupid, as in stupid-funny. Chris Kattan plays the exact same character he plays in every SNL skit he's ever been in, and says a lot of funny stuff. There's plenty of old-west cliche's and silliness, especially with Kattan's character. You can tell that each actor knows how ridiculous the movie is and puts forth at least a little effort to make it even more ridiculous. But most importantly there's plenty of gore. Far more gore than you'd expect of a movie with SNL people in it (there's cameos by some of the other lower-ranking SNL people from the '90s as well -- mostly as zombies). I'm not sure how they ever convinced these actors to make this movie, but I'm glad they did. Its even got the kind of twist ending that are the reason I watch low-budget horror.

Final analysis: Seven Corpses out of Ten. For a free flick to watch on Netflix, its worth every penny. Highly recommended!

Scantabuviews: Shaky-cam Edition

I watch a shit-ton of bad horror movies. In order to make the world a better place I review them to better help you, the horror movie fanatic, to make good bad horror decisions.

So what did I watch this week? Let's begin!

Cloverfield

Yep, right out the bad horror gates is a really expensive horror movie with a high level of CGI directed as if it were a low-budget Indy film.


Basic premise: Extremely attractive group of successful twenty-somethings hang out together in New York at a big party. One guy is in charge of recording the party on a hand-held camcorder. Then a 40-story Godzilla monster appears and smashes everything in sight. Camcorder guy tapes it all Blair Witch-style.

Does it work? Sure. The actors ain't too bad, compared to what I'm used to with these kinds of movies, but then again they're getting paid an order of magnitude more money than those in the 'spring class project' horror movie realm, so they should be fair-to-good actors. Plus there is more than the one monster/creature in the movie so there's a lot of room for tension even when they're hiding from the big bad, though the protagonists do always seem to be within three square blocks of the Godzilla beast throughout the movie.

Its got the monster tension of the original Jurassic Park, which was a really fun movie to watch, though this one doesn't promise family-friendly deaths (Hey kids look! The T-rex ate the stuffy lawyer, Ha ha ha!). Most of the protagonists do stupid stuff that you'd never think you'd do in real life, but that's what bad horror is all about and why we watch it. Also, this movie also has nearly Transformers-level military battles, meaning that you've got army dudes wildly shooting bazookas every which way throughout the movie, which I wholeheartedly endorse.

Final analysis: Six Mothras and a Godzilla Junior out of Seven King Ghidorahs! Go watch it!

Diary of the Dead

George Romero is back from Land of the Dead with one-sixteenth the money! Hooray!

Basic Premise: This movie is about a group of college kids (*groan*) shooting a horror film for class (*yawn*) in a spooky forest. After spending far too much time in the forest arguing about their particular problems with eachother (I guess this is character exposition?), they hear about the zombie outbreak over the radio and decide to head back to campus to see whats going on.

The whole movie is again shot in Blair-Witch style, only in this one they really only have the budget for the one camcorder. All the iconic college character classes are present: the athlete, the film geek, the computer nerd, the southern gal, the tough Jesse Spanno gal, and the drunk english professor. And they all give a Sci-Fi channel original movie level performance, which is to say, very craptacular.

This movie movies really, really slow. When the zombies do show up they are in fact legit Night of the Living Dead zombies, but by that time you don't even really care, you just want the college kids to die. Especially the jackhole with the camera. And in order to deal with the problem of making the plot move forward in a medium that requires the camera to be involved with the action, they take the route of a lot of loud noises just off-screen and then exposition by the actors (usually covered in a new spray of blood) about "what just happened" and "what the camera guy just missed." There are some sweet old-school Savini-style zombie deaths, but they don't make up for the 70-year old college professor shooting zombies (off camera) with a compound bow and acting cool about it.

This movie makes me sad Romero was involved, though I'm glad he's still working at least. And its better than The Dead Hate the Living, if that means anything to you.

Final analysis: Rotten and falling apart. Avoid if you aren't a hard-core zombie movie fan! If are a hard-core zombie movie fan, then there's probably something in there for you about the fall of society and how the National Guard always end up being dicks in zombie movies.

Call of Juarez

My opinion about westerns, be they movie or video game, has changed dramatically in my old age. When I was a youngster I rolled my eyes every time my dad was watching a western, as with most things to me at that age, without a chance of a lightsaber battle I couldn't see the point of wasting your time with it.

Sometime between puberty and college graduation that all changed, and I now love renting and watching westerns. Be it Eastwood's cool shooting of a hanging rope from 400 yards, or John Wayne's knock-out haymaker, westerns have become awesome.

In the video game department the western genre is sorely underutilized. While six-shooter iconic image of the western automatically makes one think of first-person shooters, the western genre has taken a far back seat for fps's to the ubiquitous WW2 setting.

Call of Juarez is the latest western game to come out for the 360 since the excellence that was Gun. Since western genre games are few and far between, I decided to pick this one up and relive my love of blowing up stagecoaches filled with gunpowder and shooting banditos from horseback, because that's what I think of when I think of westerns.


The makers of Call of Juarez, on the other hand, think of forced stealth missions and gatling gun turrets.

In CoJ, you play two different characters, and switch between them after every level, like Mario and Luigi. Only instead of them being very similar in enjoyment like the plumber brothers, one of the characters is the refined essence of awesome and the other is the epitomy of "Why the hell am I playing this again?"

Lets start with the best first (even though you play him second). Reverend Ray. Reverend Ray is a Solomon Kane clone in the Western style. He's an ex-outlaw preacher who's fed up and has decided to take up the sword of God and smite down villainous foes. Not only does he get bullet-time capability (slow down power) that refreshes almost instantly, and is almost indestructible, he also gets a bible he can "wield." Now that may not seem like it would have much effect on your ability to shoot bad guys, and it doesn't affect game play at all, but it makes you feel 100x cooler than you would otherwise when shooting people in the face. See, the game lets you put different stuff in each hand, so you could have a six-shooter in one hand and a sawed-off in the other, with each gun controlled by the left and right triggers. Well, one item you can always switch to in your right hand is your trusty bible which you can read from while you shoot the crap out of "the enemies of the Lord." Everytime you pull the right trigger Reverend Ray will read some Old Testament Bible verse. Blowing the shit out of dudes with a gun in one hand while reciting the fall of Babylon out of the bible in your other really must be seen to be believed. Its awesome.


That brings us to Billy. Billy sucks. He's a half-mexican "nobody likes me" teenager who gets blamed for every little thing that goes wrong in town, and at the beginning gets blamed for his mom and stepdad's murders. I think the game was trying to teach me a lesson about racism or something, but instead it just taught me how to hate playing video games. Billy has rudimentary gun skills, almost no health, and only occasionally can find guns which are like crappy derringers and rusty six-shooters. The one thing he always has is a whip, with which he can grab branches and pull himself up. Go Billy! See, with Billy they decided to make a shitty platformer/stealth half of the game, where you spend forty minutes climbing up the sides of cliffs looking for whip-able branches, or spend an hour and a half creeping around from identical bush to identical bush in the back of a farmhouse to steal a horse. It sucks. It sucks bad. And the fact that he can only hide in a specific-looking bush makes the otherwise beautiful scenery an eyesore. Whenever you look out upon a beautiful prairie, and then see one of those goddamn bushes, you know a stupid-ass stealth mission is coming up. Plus if you get seen during the extremely boring stealth mission you automatically have to start all over!


Billy's worst enemy...

...the perceptive farmer!

Also, why does every first person shooter have stupid gun turret sections? They aren't fun, oh great game designers, they're freaking boring! While I was under the impression that the gatling gun was actually a very rare item in the Old West, in Call of Juarez there's a gatling gun just sitting around every few hundred yards, and if you see a gatling gun in front of your only path then no doubt a hundred Nazis/Aliens/Bandits are going to pour out of the nearby gate any second!

Also, the end of the game kind of sucks.

In the end, utilizing the scale of the Mayan quipus, a colorful rope tied into knots, the reviewers of the Technodojo give this game:

Knot, little knot, space, little knot

I would have given it knot, little knot, space, knot had it had less Billy and more Ray, but since it was only half a game that's how it goes. Only play if you are a true fan of westerns or psychotic preachers and can stomach repeating crappy sneak levels over and over.