Make no mistake, MAD MAX: FURY ROAD is fucking great. As a raw, unfiltered, pure car-chase centric action film it ranks among the best ever made. As George Miller's three-decades in waiting return to form, it's the absolutely breathtaking final form of the Ozploitation road movie... And yet, somehow, it's a little strange that I'm left with no conclusion other than "it might have been slightly better if Mad Max wasn't even in it".

That's not to trash on the film. I love it. But there's so many niggling little questions I have that I'd rather talk about the stuff that bugs me than talk about the good stuff. Because, frankly, if I were to do that I'd just be doing this, anyway:


At this point there's not much to be said about George Miller's original Mel Gibson trilogy that hasn't already been said. The 1979 original Mad Max is a likable enough slice of pre-apocalyptic mayhem in which Mel Gibson takes on a roving biker gang that gets too close to their anarchistic ways, and loses everything in the process. The final scene in the original is as nasty as it's ever been, and the entire scene involving the ultimate tragedy that befalls him is positively gut-wrenching to watch, knowing it's already over and being forced to watch a man see that everything's been taken from him. Produced for $350,000 with actual Hells Angels performing the stunts (and being paid with beer!), the film was such a massive success that it was the single largest budget-to-box-office ratio until being dethroned about 25 years later by The Blair Witch Project.



The franchise pièce de résistance, however, is the 1981 sequel Mad Max 2 - released in the US as The Road Warrior, probably just so Warner could spite AIP by not having to acknowledge their copyrights in North America. While the first film had already been inspired by 1970s post-apocalyptic films like A Boy and his Dog and The Omega Man, the sequel to a movie about law and order breaking down took cold war paranoia to its logical conclusion, giving Max a life wandering through a grim, wild world in which a man could get run down for a shotgun shell or a tank of "guzzoline".  Few other action films have been as influential, despite this film itself being largely a nod to Spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s, coming full circle as Indians and Mexicans are transformed into rag-wearing maniacs and muscle-bound and deformed BDSM punks. The film is bigger, louder, and meaner than its predecessor, and does a fine job standing on its own two feet as a unique story with only hints of who "Max" really is. And it works beautifully as a result.

The franchise was such a phenomenon that international distributor for the sequel, Warner Brothers, decide to up the scale and produce a Hollywood style third picture shortly after The Road Warrior. Unfortunately, Miller's long time friend and producer - Byron Kennedy - died during pre-production, which pushed the schedule back signifigantly, to the point where Miller himself only shot the film's big action sequences, leaving the B-unit to fill in the dramatic beats on their own. The final result is Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, a film that's simultaneously bigger and emptier than The Road Warrior in every way. The first 30 minutes are a visual treat - Max wandering into an oasis city lit only in high contrast nightmares, getting in a fight in a gladiatorial blood sport, and refusing to finish off his enemy... and then, without warning, we see him tied to a horse with an oversized papier-mâché Mardi Gras head and he's saved by a bunch of naked kids out in the desert, who he then decides to protect when he realizes how out of their depths against the remnants of the modern world they are. Apparently this was originally written as a riff on Lord of the Flies, and it shows; I wouldn't fault anyone for falling in love with the post-nuke absurdity of Tina Turner in a hunred-pound chainmail cocktail dress and a foot-tall blonde wig, but I just feel nothing for it after the 30 minute mark... then again, I haven't tried to re-watch it in a decade and a half. Maybe a refresher is in order.



It's worth noting that while George Miller's actual franchise has laid inert for many years, it was also responsible for dozens of imitators, knock-offs and even films that took only the elements they liked and layered everything else on from there (see my own beloved Fist of the North Star). It's also the series that launched Mel Gibson's career, giving an almost accidental movie star fame and fortune, giving him free reign until he made the greatest snuff film of all time, said some shit about the Jews, and now merely shows up as smarmy cameos in Robert Rodriguez parodies and movies involving puppets and mental illness. I know the whole world has had fun shitting all over Gibson - myself included - but no matter how shitty he was to his ex-wife or how much he's basically just /pol/ incarnate, I can never hate what he did in these three films. Hell, even with everything else in Thunderdome going goddamn haywire around him, he's still just... Max.

And that's where - despite the overwhelmingly positive reaction that Fury Road has (rightly) been given, being the second highest rated action film of all time on Rotten Tomatoes, second only to... Oh come on, you have to be kidding! - I think a lot of the film's few naysayers are getting their nostalgic panties in a twist on principle more than anything. For better or worse, the hero we're introduced to at the opening of Fury Road calls himself Max, a cop, hell he even drops the term "Road Warrior" to draw all the connections humanly possible... and yet, the character Tom Hardy plays isn't Mel Gibson's Max Rockatansky. He can't be. Not if continuity matters, at least.

While it's true that George Miller has played fast and loose with continuity in this franchise, he made damn sure that Gibson wore a contact lens with a dilated pupil in both the last third of Road Warrior and all of Thunderdome to remind viewers of how hard he ate shit when his Interceptor was finally totaled. Gibson's urge to be a man of action may have left it less obvious at times, but the Mad Max of the 1980s sequels walks with a limp. He's also gone gray in the temples despite Gibson himself only being about 25 years old when they shot Road Warrior. Hardy is actually 37 - over a decade older than Gibson ever was when playing the character - but he's such an overpowering presence he looks younger than Gibson's gimped, wandering shell of a man. Probably the most confusing angle here is that the opening of Fury Road shows Max driving his Interceptor, which as I've just pointed out, got totaled in The Road Warrior... but he loses it in the opening here, so it can't be a prequel, either!

Tom Hardy shares the jacket, gun and leg brace of Rockatansky, but his own tragic tale - shown to be long after the fall of civilization, and involving an 8 years old or so girl who calls him "Papa" and an old black man who claims he 'let him die' - speak to a tale of sadness that in no way lines up with the original Mad Max, or even the bloody misfortunes that follow in The Road Warrior. In effect, Tom Hardy is playing an entirely new character - a funnier, more smarmy one at that... who happens to have a five-second rapid-fire montage of footage from the original three movies.



In short, Tom Hardy is Mad Max... if only in a non-literal, mythological reinterpretation sort of way. He's got the iconic gear, the silent demeanor, the Man With No Name vibe behind all of his decisions... but he isn't quite Mel Gibson's character. This is best explained as being a pseudo-sequel, the same way that Superman Returns is clearly supposed to take place after Richard Donner's two Superman films but doesn't ever quite line up in a way that really makes sense. The more regularly assumed comparison is James Bond who's played by a new actor every decade or so, but in both cases these "sequels" are being made by an entirely new staff, with only the broadest connections being maintained for marketing purposes. George Miller is the only guy to ever make a Mad Max movie, so if he says that Tom Hardy's Max is the same Max, I can still look at him cock-eyed and call him a liar... but, he's right by default. It's his character, and as much as I love trying to twist the wires of continuity until everything clicks into place, this is one of those cases where it just isn't going to work.

George Miller's fucking with you, people old enough to have remembered when any of the original films came out. If you can accept that Mad Max is a concept - a mythological character to be interpreted however the era needs him, not unlike a superhero who's origin changes every decade or two - then you can probably just shrug off whatever baggage Gibson's presence brings to the table. What's far more galling, though, is the fact that... well, I know you can argue that this was true of all the prior films, this is by far the Mad Max film with the least input by the guy named "Max".

See, Max plays the narrator in the opening, and as the audience we're introduced to the War Dogs and their oasis-town of The Citadel through his own blinkered and at times terrified point of view. From there, the film slowly drifts away from Max himself, exploring the culture - the topography, the religion, the cultish mentality crossed with technological deception that keeps the omnipotent Immortan Joe (Hugh Keyas-Byrne) in control of a starving, deformed and miserable village who, in turn, provide willing young men to join the fanatical, kamikaze-Viking culture that keeps everyone from being raided by their enemies, one blessing of fresh water at a time. It's in this truly impressive location that we first meet one of Joe's lieutenants - Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) - who's taking the massive and heavily armed "War Rig" on a supply run... but once she leaves and Immortan Joe's harem has disappeared, they realize they've been betrayed, as Furiosa has actually taken his Five Wives and is headed for parts unknown. They launch an assault on Furiosa, and one of the sickly mutants - War Dog Nux (Nicholas Hoult) - brings Max along for his ride to glory... as his literal blood-bag. Nuclear radiation has been hell on these kids, so they transfuse healthy blood to keep themselves from dropping dead in the dirt.



Saying much beyond this would be a bit pointless; I've already given away the "twist" which anyone who's going to watch it will figure out 20 minutes in, and the rest of the whole bloody movie is a massive car chase to try and take them back. I'm not exaggerating when I say that; there are breaks to change scenery and confirm newly arisen questions, but the two hour film is primarily focused on the roughly 24 hour period in which Immortan Joe loses "his" women, and launches an attack to return them, with Max caught in the middle of it all as a confused, exhausted, and generally pissed off bystander. Furiosa actually does almost all of the lifting in terms of the plot, with Max content to follow her into the gaping jaws of probable death only because turning around to face Immortan Joe's army is certain death, so he likes his chances with the iron-handed warrior just a little more. There's no greater good, no just cause, just survival in its most raw and uncomfortable terms.

And what a glorious day it is for a chase; with Miller himself having promised "90% practical" car chases, explosions and fight scenes, the result is a clearly blocked orgy of cars flipping over in the dirt, getting lit on fire, smashing through cliffs and crushing steel and chrome like it's nobody's business. I can't stress enough how amazingly straight forward and clearly blocked the carnage is, and while you could argue that other films have better moments of finely-plotted engine smashing, you'd be hard pressed to ever challenge the sheer volume on display here. The dedication to practical effects mean only a handful of sequences look fake, because - carefully erased safety harnesses and potential background details aside - they aren't fake. The film simply beats the shit out of its vehicles in a nine year old's wildest sandbox fantasy come to life, with the most obvious instance of its dedication to badassery being the Doof Wagon, a towering Frankenstein of amplifiers and drum kits stapled to an engine with the centerpiece being a guy on an elastic with a flaming guitar, strumming sick licks as Immortan's company charges into battle. It's so gloriously absurd it's fucking beautiful.



And then it spends the next 2 hours tearing those fantasy cars down to their skeletons and setting them on fire. In a way it's actually a contradiction of prior films - scarcity of things like fuel, ammunition and water made wasteland survival rely more on stripped down dune buggies and even traveling on foot - but the name of the game for Immortan Joe's society is extravagance and opulence. It's less a contradiction to prior films than an inversion - a trio cults so obsessed with appearance as omnipotent warlords of boundless wealth, they toss aside live bullets and tanks of gas like it means nothing. It changes the dynamic, sure, but anyone who thinks the basic reality of The Road Warrior being as "small" as it could be was anything but the limitations of resources is kidding themselves. If The Road Warrior was the gritty, dingy, unwashed reality of the nuclear apocalypse, this is the overblown metal concert interpretation of the same universe; a pageant of blood and twisted metal cranked up to 11. I can sympathize with those who wanted a smaller, dingier take, but I refuse to complain with what we actually have before us. Particularly not in light of how the last Hollywood Mad Max production went.
So where's the problem, then? If an action movie has all the action, who gives a shit about anything else? This is the mindset that's led to the film having a "98% Fresh" ranking, after all, and I won't deny that it gets the job done and then some. And yet.. well, there's that whole thing about the title, namely "Mad Max: Fury Road". This is absolutely Furiosa's show, and while Max has a few cool moments to himself, he's hardly the typical hero. He isn't a smarmy anti-hero, or even begrudging ally; he's just kinda' there from start to finish. He has even less dialogue than I'm willing to bet he has in any of the prior films, and while Hardy's body language and presence fill in the gaps his mostly mute performance leave behind, he's ultimately such a small cog of the larger machine that it's... odd, that Furiosa herself has more or less the same characterization.

Sure, Furiosa is doing what she does as a means of redemption - paying her dues for whatever sins have put her in good graces with a violent sociopath who proclaims that his unborn children are his "property" - but... that's about it. We learn a little bit about her origins, we see how she reacts to the situation she dives headlong into, and that's it. Her character is defined by her actions - a rare feat in an action film, I admit - but that's really all she has! By the end of the film we actually know more about Furiosa than we do Max, and that isn't saying a lot. It's well handled, I thought, and I applaud Miller for trying to find a way to naturally establish growing trust without making it feel forced or stupid, but it's almost entirely through handing each other weapons. Yes, that's an awesome way to do character development... but, there's the whole problem. They develop into the same fucking character, at least if we're going to view this from a pseudo-mythological point of view, which is the only lens Miller's left me to work with.

While Max and Furiosa's personalities do differ to a notable degree, their role in the actual story don't. The original film had Max playing off his family and friends on the force, giving him a pretty wide net to cast in terms of dramatic range. In The Road Warrior, Max spent much of the film next to a bumbling prisoner-slash-sidekick - a man who was clever but not tough, and could help the tough but not clever Max out of a jam when his well of macho grit finally ran dry. Thunderdome is an abomination, but it was the equivalent of dropping a homeless veteran into an orphanage that's about to be bulldozed by wasteland kitsch Tina Turner. Contrast produces reaction and drives compelling characters to say - and do - compelling things. Unto themselves, both Furiosa and Max are badass loners that could carry a movie like this without a problem... but now they have to carry each other, making the Five Wives even more useless from a characterization standpoint, to the point where they may as well be exposition-spouting macguffin's for the first hour of the film (though, thankfully, they eventually get their time to shine). The reactions all make sense, and that's more than I can say for the overwhelming majority of action films in which a man and a woman have to talk to each other like grown-ups, but they don't amount to a whole lot in the end.

That said, I can't praise the film enough for not even entertaining the thought of a bullshit romance between them; it's clear that neither Max nor Furiosa have time for that shit, and had the film tried to imply that the two were even thinking about porking, it would have become a farce in no time. God, how I wish more films had the balls to reach a solid conclusion and not end with a kiss. Pacific Rim stumbled here in the 11th hour, but at least the lead's quizzical "So, uh... do we fuck now? I'm not sure what the right response here is..." look was closer than I expected. Not that Fury Road didn't find two characters to make cheesy goo-goo eyes at each other. Eh, it's cute enough I'll allow it.

That's not to say that Furiosa isn't textured or nuanced or whatever - again, every aspect of this film's universe was plotted and constructed with a distinct reason, with the subtle implication that Furiosa's mechanical hand may be a literal "Mechanic's Hand", unfettered by the scalding heat of an engine for emergency repair in the middle of a war - but in the end, there's only one character we can tell more about than her:

Immortan Joe. The bad guy. Miller's own White Darth Vader has, by far, the most clear and understandable character motivations; as brutal and destructive as the War Boys society may be, he wants his legacy to live on in a world where nuclear fallout have caused his own genetics to betray him. It doesn't justify sexual slavery by any stretch, obviously, but at least his obsession with his Five Wives is driven by the need to carry on his legacy, rather than simple, violent sexual gratification, as was the case with The Humongous' men. He's afraid of his own frailty, of being unable to pass his legacy down to a generation of strong, healthy men who might keep his society operational when he inevitably dies. The guy's a maniac, obviously, but he's not quite a cardboard cartoon villain.

And that's before we even get into the fact that the actor playing him - Hugh Keyas-Byrne - was the same guy who played Toecutter in the original Mad Max! There's nothing specific to connect the two, mind you - if anything, Bruce Spence appearing as two completely separate characters in The Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome suggests that Miller doesn't care about a massive over-arcing continuity... which, again, explains why Max has both a new origin story and flashbacks from previous films. But the implication that Toecutter did survive smacking face-first into an 18-wheeler at full speed, only to survive on into the new world in a portable iron lung - and for his obsession with healthy children to be an extension of  - survival after facing death in the eye at the hands of Max himself is... interesting. Probably not even intentional, but a fascinating possibility in a film that refuses to draw any objective clarity.

And yet, there's a few other things about the whole film that feel "off", for lack of a better way to sum it up properly. Little things, all of them, but just big enough that it got me thinking all the same. Max opens the film with narration, but doesn't close it, having effectively handed the whole film off to Furiosa by the second act anyway. There's a scene that's so drawn out and sappy I'd be shocked if they hadn't shot an alternate take where they die. The film's action set pieces are all phenomenal, but there's very little in the way of actual gore and virtually no nudity; much like Terminator 2 or The Man with the Iron Fists, the whole thing feels like it was gunning for a PG-13, missed the mark by about an inch and then just shrugged and didn't bother to try again. Heck, the one scene of Max being a badass on his own terms - without Furiosa or the Wives involved - is resolved completely off-screen; a great way to show his character's reaction to certain doom, perhaps, but a sort of frustrating cock-tease to anyone who expected the film to have a one-on-one brawl between Max and a wasteland scavenger. This isn't even on par with complaints I've seen for the Nolan Batman movies, since ultimately Bruce Wayne is, undeniably, the focus of all three films; this would be more like if Kick-Ass spent the first half hour with the title character, realized that Nick Cage and Chloe Grace-Mortez were far more interesting, and then spent the rest of the flick from Hit Girl's perspective until the end credits rolled.

I'd have been okay with that, even, but structurally, it just doesn't make much sense, and with the year and a half this thing spent in post-production I wouldn't be surprised if nervous Warner executives and test audiences coaxed the film into a slightly new direction. I won't state anything until the dust settles, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if the year and a half this movie spent in post-production jettisoned a lot of little things and added some other little things that shifted the film into something Warner felt a little more comfortable with. The results are still fine - not every studio executive suggesting a new direction is a Blade Runner level abomination, after all - but I'll be very, very curious to see if any deleted footage winds up on the Blu-ray come the end of the year.

One of the most interesting suggestions I've seen is that Fury Road is a great action movie, but a poor Mad Max movie. I'm of the mind that Fury Road is ten times a better Mad Max movie than Beyond Thunderdome, but all the same I can't dismiss the notion out of hand. How attached you are to Mel Gibson's character will directly impact how much you find yourself liking this film, and while I'd have been perfectly fine with Max having been dropped entirely to give Furiosa more room as a character, leaving them to work in tandem at essentially the same simplified role in a streamlined story perhaps made both of them a bit less defined as a result. It's ultimately not a deal breaker, but it's the sort of thing that creeps up on me more as time goes on as feeling not quite right. Not bad, or poor, just... weird. I love Fury Road, but it feels weird sometimes, that's all.

And then... Well, there's this whole discussion...


For the two or three people on planet Earth who may be blissfully unaware, there's been no shortage of articles praising Fury Road for being a "Feminist Action Movie". As far as I can tell there were 25+ articles effectively rebuking a single self-described MRA for saying he refused to pay for the film... which kinda' shows you how manufactured and hollow these reactions to identity politics tends to be. But as I've said before, I am fascinated by the notion of critical theory, even if most people who try to apply it are just dipshits pushing their own fetishes on everything, so I was morbidly curious to see how this film stacked up as a supposed feminist-subversion of macho action movies.

Mind you, we have to do this in a moment in time when "feminist critique in media" boils down to hundreds of irate fans spamming Twitter and Live Journal because HBO's Game of Thrones - a show literally made or rape, murder, head crushing, incest, torture and sexual mutilation - had the audacity to show a main character getting raped. Off-screen. By a villain. For a show that ends its first episode with a brother-sister couple fucking and then pushing a child out of a window hoping to kill him, it's positively tasteful. There's a very odd undercurrent of those wanting progressive media to actually desire a sanitized, safe version of art that couldn't possibly offend anyone, regardless of the context or meaning behind it; the flip-side of the same coin conservatives have used for decades to hide sex and violence from children. So the question for me wasn't "Is Mad Max a feminist film?" - because hey, that means nothing without a little more context. The question was "Is Mad Max a cowardly, neutered attempt to pander to sheltered social media feminists?" - because man, that could really suck.

It's pretty much impossible to talk about this aspect without explicitly SPOILINGcertain plot twists that extend well beyond the first reel, so I'll let you know when it's safe to come back... let's mark the naughty paragraphs in red, just to avoid any unfortunate accidents, shall we?

The "new-media" surrounding the film has been trumpeting this as a "subversive feminist statement" for a while, and while I appreciate that some people are excited by that fact, I find it gloriously ironic that the audience most eager to lap up surface-level acknowledgments of a group of freed sex slaves standing against a literal social-patriarchy with the phrase "We are not things!" are the very same audience who will likely leave the theater with a case of the vapors over how the film doesn't hesitate to kill pregnant women, show the villains cheer on that her unborn child was male, and pull back the curtains on the fertile hope of the Vuvalini society as being little more than a violent band of old women who live in a dust pit in the middle of nowhere, clinging to the basic concept of fertility like sad spinsters who will never have another child. Anyone who expected this film to present heroic women as infallible nurturers are going to be disappointed, and anyone who argues that "Trigger Warnings" should be mandatory for scenes of violence against women are going to be pissed to the very core at how little plot armor the film affords anyone, male or otherwise.

This is a burning-rubber and adrenaline fueled action film through and through, with perhaps a single moment of smarmy moralizing so trumped-up and symbolic that you'd probably have a better chance arguing that Friday the 13th franchise is a morally conservative propaganda film, since most of the victims of Jason Vorhees' blade are either smoking pot or having sex. (Except for Part 2, in which he kills the boy in a wheelchair. I love Part 2.) Mind you, the person giving that moralizing - while holding a "War Boy" by the throat and telling him how the world having ended is his fault by proxy - is also proven to be largely sheltered and ignorant of the world around her, so while she's technically right, we're hardly supposed to see her blind anger as nuanced wisdom. The film also makes the wise choice to side-step any misandry, suggesting that the War Boys are just as much victims as the Wives themselves are; human flesh promised to a cult leader, with death being the only form of advancement for a lower-class who just accepts that their lives are limited and worth nothing save for the blood that they draw.

The core theme of the film is, as if anyone had to worry about it, not some ironic-misandry drivel like #killallmen*, but a somewhat more simple one: Those With Absolute Power Are Corrupted And Blind To Their Own Wickedness. It's not a stretch to say that if we were to go back to stone age tribalism, many societies would quickly devolve into something similar to The Citadel. Anyone who'd argue otherwise would have to be so woefully unversed in history that they probably think Genghis Khan is a Mortal Kombat villain.

* If #killallwomen would be seen a horrible, sexist concept - and let's face it, it would be - why is #killallmen different? Because men are expected to take it on the chin, thus further establishing that men and women are inherently "different"? Irony, is that you? I'm not offended by it or anything that pussified, I just can't help but laugh at how backwards it all feels when I see it. And keep drinking "male tears", by the way. It means "semen" in Spanish, you goddamn idiots.

There's also the odd fact that Furiosa didn't bother to try and save the thicker, dark skinned "Milkmaid" slaves. They weren't planning to go back for them, so... yeah. Feminism is only for healthy and privileged young women, you saw it yourself. If anyone wants to talk about how progressive and smart and super into women's rights this movie is, remind them that the only women the story felt were worth saving were the young, naive and pretty women who hadn't yet had babies. It actually doesn't undermine the point of the story, don't get me wrong - I like to imagine that Furiosa herself had something to do with capturing or bartering for these girls, and thus they're "her" responsibility in a way the older slaves aren't - but it's a fun, shallow diversion to drop on someone not prepared for it.

The film is deeply feminist at a conceptual level, you'd have to be blind not to see that. But it's a violent, take-no-prisoners approach adhering more to the macho action-fantasy that's far more in line with other already popular and acclaimed "feminist action films" like Kill Bill and Aliens or even (dare I say it?) the rape-revenge films of yore like I Spit on Your Grave and Ms. 45. It doesn't drag its women through the muck like those films did, but the realization that salvation can only be found in violence, is one and the same. One of my favorite scenes in the whole film is when one of Joe's wives sighs at the realization that the Many Mothers aren't the peaceful midwives they'd hoped for. The film sees the victimized sex slaves dropping their Victoria's Secret bandage lingerie in favor of picking up guns and marching to war against a massive wave of stronger and better equipped men, simply establishing that violence, courage and vengeance aren't an inherently masculine value in the world of Fury Road.

You want to change the world? You need to pick up a gun. George Miller knows it, and if this film can show young women that action - not sympathy - are what'll change the lingering reality of sex slavery and victim abuse, shit, I'm all for it. 


So why was there so much buzz about how feminism relates to Fury Road? Why did the click-bait prone new-media concoct an entire bullshit story about an army of MRA-sympathizing cavemen refusing to see their favoritest, manliest franchise ever over so much estrogen getting in their high-octane? What possible angle is there to push, even?

Well, it's mostly because Eve Ensler, best known as the writer of The Vagina Monologues, was brought on set to work with the actors playing Immortan Joe's harem. Not just because she's a feminist of note, but specifically because she's worked with victims of sexual abuse for decades and George Miller wanted believable reactions to how different personalities in an abusive but symbiotic relationship would react to suddenly being both free and alone. That's basically it. I've even tried to see some people spin Ensler off as a rape-apologist due to the above mentioned play featuring The Little Coochie Snorcher That Could, but as this story was itself based on the testimony of one of the 200 women interviewed in the process of making the work, it's less Ensler herself advocating for underage lesbian rape and more her being willing to present an anonymous girl's life as she saw it. If you're looking for a feminist who actually molests children, you're probably thinking of Lena Dunham... but, thankfully, that's wholly irrelevant to anything I've said here. (I'd never deny that Roman Polanski is an incredibly fucking talented director, so it'd be hypocritical of me to shit on an artist for poor personal choices, anyway.)

And why wouldn't Warner Brothers push that fact in the current market? Eve Ensler, writer of the single most provocative and iconic pieces of feminist theater in the 1990s, had a hand in Mad Max! We're going through a curious time where the markets for "nerdy" things - comics, video games, and yes, sci-fi/action movies - have sold about as well as they're going to within the demographics that already like them, and seeing how much money young women are willing to spend on stuff like The Hunger Games, Twilight and Doctor Who has the Hollywood machine drooling at the thought of catering to BOTH demographics at the same time. This is why we're getting a Wonder Woman movie, even though they can't find a director who seems particularly interested in it. This is why The Mary Sue writes grumbling articles about there being no Black Widow merchandise, despite the fact that The Avengers primary audience always has been - and will always be - adolescent boys who care far less about "the girl" because they don't have pubes yet... and, frankly, she's not nearly as interesting as the robot, the green dude, or the alien who shoots lightning. This is why we're getting an all female reboot of Ghost Busters. Because they know men nostalgic for their 80s childhood will see anything with the red-lined logo, leaving that sweet, sweet female market to entice. Somehow.



What's funny is that I - and I'm willing to wager pretty much any reasonable human being alive - have no real argument against notion that an all girl action movie could be incredible. It's all a question of casting, direction and sincerity, a combination the all but expected sausage parties fuck up all the time. Hell, one of the greatest "Hard R" action films of the last decade - the almost completely ignored Punisher: War Zone, suggesting that the third time really is the charm for Frank Castle - was directed by a woman! Why the fuck do more people not mention Lexi Alexander when they talk about women in film? Scratch that, acutally - why the fuck is Lexi Alexander not making more ass-kicking action movies?!

But what really fascinates me is less the unsubtle pandering nature of it all - "pandering" itself isn't bad, lest the entire notion of gratifying entertainment ceases to exist - but the broader knowledge that it's not going to fucking work, no matter how hard they push the discussion. Different demographics want different things, which occasionally overlap into both categories, of course - but just because you put the things those demographics want in your products doesn't mean said demographic will start caring about it. Let's say men like transforming robot sidekicks - it's probably not a 100% ratio, but I'm willing to bet that's a thing people with Y chromosomes dig. You could put transforming robot sidekicks into trashy romance novels as a way to encourage a wider male reader base, but odds are the overwhelming majority of readers are still going to be female. Similarly you can put badass women in your movie, even make the core concept of the film about liberating slightly less badass women... and the majority of the people who are going to show up to see a Mad Max movie are still going to be people who would have shown up to see a Mad Max movie if zero women had been in it to begin with. Not because Mad Max fans are uncultured heathens who instinctively hate anything with a vagina, but because they're here for the spectacle of the bombed-out remains of society slaughtering each other in a wanton orgy of explosions, not the possibility of gender politics in a hyperbolic apocalyptic fantasy setting. The fact that we can have both is just gravy, really. Meaty, chunky feminist gravy. There's a sentence I have to find a way to use more often...

To put that idea into perspective, Fury Road has a 98% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. It's literally the highest rated action movie ever made, because fuck you Rotten Tomatoes, Fritz Lang's Metropolis is an action movie the same way 2001: A Space Odyssey is a goddamn hermaphrodite scat-porno. Literally the greatest action film of all time. So how much sweet, sweet dosh did it make catering to both masculine action junkies and the Mary Sue demographic? We're a week in as I write this, and it's currently sitting at... $63 Million domestic, with international sales bumping that up to $128 Million. The production budget was an estimated $150 Million, and that never includes advertising and promotion, of which this film is getting a metric ton's worth. It was actually beaten at the box office by Pitch Perfect 2, a film that cost an estimated nothing. So clearly you can milk young women for a massive profit. You just have to make it into a movie about singing and being comfortable with your fat and sassy self, instead of freeing slaves after World War 3.

Not that anyone expected this to pull in numbers like Age of Ultron, but goddamn it, this is why we can't have nice things...

There's undeniably a feminist bend to the film, but it's wholly justified by the narrative that drives it, and doesn't try to preach much to an audience that just wants to watch cars smash up real good. Much like the undertones of Norse mythology and the idea of separate societies working together, each with their own visibly unique culture, greetings and fascinations - it's simply a part of the fabric that makes up the whole experience. It's not even a "big idea" filtered into the film as an after thought; it's part of the core, and a means to propel the story forward. It's not as on the nose as any of Neil Blomkamp's films have been, at the very least... then again, I've had punches in the face that were more subtle than a Neil Blomkamp flick, so that's not entirely a fair comparison.

I actually feel kinda' guilty writing that much about the flick, because... goddamn, there shouldn't have to be that many asterisks and questions and clarifications for a film that, when you boil it down to the bone, is basically 2 straight hours of gloriously executed desert-burning carnage. The film isn't as bloody or laser-efficient as The Road Warrior was before it, but times have changed since 1982, and George Miller has adapted with it. Budgets, expectations, even audience sophistication in some specific respects have all evolved, and having seen plenty of decent directors try to repeat their glory days unchanged, I find it refreshing to see Miller use his legacy as a backbone to try something a little different. It's by far the biggest and most gloriously crafted Mad Max film, and is by a wide margin the best action film in recent memory. I'd have to watch them both again before making any insane claims like it being "better" than The Road Warrior, but the fact that I'm suggesting that's even on the table should tell you everything you need to know.

Fury Road is good. Damn good. Just a little weird around the edges.

UK genre label 88 films has, up until now, mostly been a sort of "Bizarro" equivalent to US labels like Full Moon and Troma Films - releasing high quality encodes and bonus feature packed special editions of the same movies that the US branches crapped out in whatever quality they could manage. They're limited by the same materials as their US equivalents, but whoever is handling the materials clearly has a better grasp on it, and the results are a notable improvement for about the same price. They've moved on to doing a wider range of American cult movies - slasher flicks, in particular - and while I'm not the biggest fan of every title they've announced, I like these guys on principle. Plus, they're selling the original Toxic Avenger, Castle Freak and The Last Horror Film at cheaper prices than their North American equivalents; if you need a better excuse to support a region-free UK label, you may need to re-think your trashy movie priorities.

Their most recent announcement in particular is an interesting one: THEY WANT TO REMASTER ZOMBI HOLOCAUST. They're asking for 7,500 pounds ($11,786) to craft a new 2K scan from the camera negative, and if you pledge 20 pounds (or $39.28 with all shipping fees) you get a copy of the finished BD, complete with an exclusive slipcover for backers. They're up to a bit over one-third of their stated goal, and have admitted that if they fail, they'll default to using the same crumby Media Blasters produced master I bitched incessantly about when it was released a couple years ago. No, it wasn't an upscale as I'd initially guessed, but man was it crap all the same...

I'm trying to get people to see this not because I think Zombi Holocaust is a particularly good movie - frankly, this is all anyone should waste their time with more than once:



DOCTOR BUTCHER M. D - MEDICAL DEVIATE!Can we please, please get a chewed-up grindhouse transfer as a bonus?That was by far the best aspect on the BD release of JUST BEFORE DAWN...
There's about three minutes worth of really great one-liners and gore show pieces, but it's such a lazy and shallow imitation of substantially more worthwhile Italian genre fodder that you're really better off just having a double feature with Lucio Fulci's Zombi 2 and Umberto Lenzi's Eaten Alive for a much better experience. Still, watching B-movies cannibalize their own trends is a fascinating little historical foot-note unto itself, and it's nice to see any studio willing to give it the white glove treatment, top shelf content or not.

I know 88 Films has done some great work, though I'm disappointed to admit I've yet to purchase any of them myself. This reminder - and the great prices on their own website - are tipping me into trying a few of their catalog entries, and you can bet I'll be grabbing that sweet exclusive slipcase for a movie I've always thought was pretty "meh". To be honest, I hope this does so amazingly well that they'll consider doing a similar project for BURIAL GROUNDS. I don't doubt the OCN for that is a bloody mess, but for a dull turd like this to get a new 2K scan and for a shambling, accidental masterpiece like that to remain in its current state would be utterly unforgivable. In a karmic sort of way, I mean.

Not sure what's up with Burial Grounds, but if you want to prove that there's a market for trashy good Italian exploitation, give them money. If you want to get properly mastered garbage cult movies, you have to prove there's money to be made in properly mastering them in the first place. Arrow Video has done some cool stuff using similar means - Happiness of the Katakuris and the Walerian Borowczyk films in particular - but those are the rare hybrid of B-movie schtick and high-brow symbolic transcendence that will always get curious support, if nothing else. Zombi Holocaust is another beast entirely... sort of a big slobbery Boxer to a batshit crazy Chinese Crested. If that makes any sense.



Buy this, too. Yes, I hate recommending Shout Factory titles unseen myself. But fucking hell, is that CRUEL JAWS? On Blu-ray?! How did-- when the fuck-- REALLY?!*

Goddamn it Cliff, I'm buying this even if it's a train wreck, even knowing that their upcoming "Special Edition" release of DOG SOLDIERS is a fucking upscale. So just skip that pile of ass and get this instead... and hope it's not a pile of ass.

Honestly, I wish I had one label left I trusted. Well, besides Arrow Video. I'm not sure what to make of 88 Films just yet, but I've certainly got my eye on 'em. We'll see, ladies and gents. We'll see.

* UPDATE: Ha! Apparently Shout Factory just now realized that CRUEL JAWS is chock full of footage "borrowed" from a certain Steven Spielberg franchise, and have pulled the plug on the release for fear of this release getting legally hate-fucked into oblivion. For those unaware, it's this very issue that's prevented the film from ever getting a legit DVD release up to this point outside of a few European releases from labels that had less than zero fucks to give, and it's long been figured that the film would either have to be dramatically re-cut, or someone would have to crap out a limited edition in the hopes that Universal would simply ignore it.

Thanks to hansolo for pointing out that Shout Factory finally did their research... after taking pre-orders. EXTERMINATORS IN THE YEAR 3000 is still coming out, for those who are more excited by middling post-nuke adventure movies than hilarious shark flicks. This is pretty far down on my list of post-nuke flicks I'd love to see in HD, but with the loss of CRUEL JAWS, I'll simply bide my time and see what reviews say about this now single-feature.

So, the good news is that Anchor Bay put out the original SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT on Blu-ray for its 30th anniversary, complete with a new commentary track.

The bad news? It looks like garbage day. Based on the smattering of caps that have surfaced, with the most relevant sampling being found HERE, I have zero problem writing this off as an upscale of a Digibeta made in 2003. I've jumped the gun once or twice, I know, but this is such a fucking joke I'm only sad that there's no punchline.

The saddest part? This isn't even the first time Anchor Bay has shat out an upscale. With all due respect to Alyssa Milano's breasts, I just never cared enough about the 1995 Embrace of the Vampire to look into the BD release, but as you can see, it's unwatchable 486i dreck upsampled to 1080p mediocrity.

Anchor Bay, at least whoever's in charge of their catalog titles, can go fuck themselves with a plastic baby Jesus. If you don't have an HD master and 35mm film materials still exist, you don't do an upscaled SD release. It's not that hard to grasp, is it?

Apologies, friends, for having fallen silent over the last month or so: I've been very sick, work has been hell, my work-after-work has been no less daunting, I've been very angry about things I have no control over, and lacked internet for several days. I hurt, I'm exhausted, and I'm pissed off...

So let's talk about Sam Kieth for a little while. Sam Kieth always cheers me up!


"It's wet. Dark and wet. It's the kinda weather than penetrates - makes your skin feel itchy and oily. Dirty kind of, but real too... and that's good.

It's time for Cheers. Sam and Diane, Norm Peterson, the Coach - and then, after he died, Woody. I don't have a TV now, but that's okay. The shows in my mind are almost always better..."

- The opening narration of The Maxx. From memory, not quoting the book. And yes, I could go on.

I don't talk a lot about comics on the Kentai Blog. Not that I don't like comics - I do, have since I was a kid, and along with toys, video games, horror movies, heavy metal, sweets and chronic masturbation, never really "grew out" of it. I visit a semi-local comic shop almost every week, and there's a folder set up for whatever new crap Mrs. Kentai and I have incoming. I'm utterly fascinated by the concept of interlocking continuities written by different creators and drawn by different artists over the course of decades, and I've happily watched Bob Chipman's regular "Comics Are Weird!" episodes of The Big Picture* in lieu of my long-since expired childhood subscription to Wizard Magazine, just to remind myself how balls-out silly some of the comic storylines from the 60s and 70s really were. Comics are a fascinating, limitless artform that bridge the gap between graphic arts and narrative storytelling in a way no other medium has, and frankly, has no hope of doing in quite the same way. Comics can be fucking incredible, and the fact that they've somehow become the defacto source material for Summer Blockbuster franchises is both brilliant and confusing to me.

And yet, I don't consider myself a "comic guy". Not because I don't like comics, but because my focus tends to be a fairly narrow slice of what "comics" are in the first place. Most of the stuff I bring home are from specific artists and writers I've been recommended, or who did something so absurd that it caught my eye; crazy high-concept explorers like Ted McKeever and Rick Veitch, smarmy satirists like Mike Vosberg and Batton Lash, renegade-nihilist authors like Garth Ennis and Alan Moore are the sort of people that most grab me, and as such, that's what I buy, almost exclusively. I'm certainly open to suggestion - hell, just the other day I had a conversation with a friend about the Death in the Family arc that DC has pushed The Joker through... but even then, the only reason I paid it any mind was because I finally realized the art for the whole storyline was crafted by Greg Capullo, who's the sole reason I've got about 50 Spawn issues bought through the 90s when that was the only "regular" series I consistently picked up.

In other words, I'm the equivalent of someone who "likes movies", but only watches movies made by Terrence Malick, Rob Zombie, Tsukamoto Shinya and William Friedkin - a talented and laudible, but ultimately very limited sampling of voices that are a small, curious force in the industry at large. (That's not to say I don't do that with movies to a large degree, as well... but that's neither here nor there for now.) I like the comics that I like, and while they're certainly not the most outre or obscure work out there, I don't think my personal opinion or experience is "good enough" to recommend or compare it to more noteworthy or understood voices in that industry. Much like with visual novels, Indonesian exploitation movies or the works of Mike Oldfield, I know they're awesome, I just don't know enough to have a particularly noteworthy opinion on it.


That said, Sam Kieth and Bill Mesner-Loebes'THE MAXX is fucking incredible stuff. For those who only know Image Comics now as the eclectic publisher of stuff like Fables or Saga, I can actually remember when the company formed about 20 years ago, essentially as a reactionary mass-migration of Marvel artists who felt they weren't given the creative freedom they earned. For all the shit I give comics at the time for being inherently goofy (and only sometime self-aware of it), understand that I have nothing but sympathy for the artists behind them; they're kept to a tight leash by big publishers with air-tight contracts, paid slave wages per page, and  effectively anything they've created becomes the de-facto property of their boss, regardless of how much of themselves they put into it. I won't defend the silly schlock that most of Image's creators put out, but I'll acknowledge that they had every right to splinter away from Marvel for having given them a number of successful runs without getting any of the artistic flexibility or commercial success they should have seen for having done so.

Image became a massive success as the industry was going through a particularly weird time; the crash of the market in the 1990s is well documented unto itself, but the short version was kids were less interested in spending allowance on comics than they used to be, and adults were lured back into the marketplace by two factors; a newly found sense of self-importance brought about by "adult" storylines helping grown-ups who had 'matured' out of the medium, as well as rampant news stories about how nostalgic fanboys were spending a literal fortune on rare comics from their youth, which led normal people to assume that if they picked up issue number one of some new, sure to be a hit character, they'd have a fortune on their hands in a year or two.

This led to an industry trying to cater to both sides at once - an inflated focus on sex and violence coupled with an obsession with introducing new and killing off old characters, hoping that one of those big shocking twists would finally pay off... short version is, it didn't. Because comic shops had become a fairly common installation - many of them actually surviving off of sales of trading card games, video game rentals, science fiction memorabilia and what have you -  they printed hundreds of thousands of copies of everything, and when it became obvious that nobody was ever going to be nostalgic for Wetwork, the market basically cannibalized itself. Marvel and DC, still the undisputed industry titans, hit such hard times that they were eventually sold off to Disney and Warner Brothers, respectively, to stave off outright closure. Needless to say, that's had a pretty profound impact on how "comic heroes" are seen now, versus twenty years ago. But that's not the focus for today, and I'm sure if you use the power of Google you can find a far more comprehensive version of what happened. I'd say that MovieBob did a good job, but that would imply that I wanted you to watch anything MovieBob's made, and... yeah, like I said, just use Google.


Anyway, Image Comics was the ideal sort of company to fill this void. Todd McFarlane, Erik Larsen, Rob Liefield and several others simply upped and left the crappy contracts Marvel had put them under, offering creators the rights to their own characters and a dramatically improved percentage of the proceeds; McFarlane's Spawn became the poster-child of 90s mainstream comics in general, literally being a superhero who lived in the alleys of New York with the homeless, his face disfigured and rotten on account of him literally being a demon from Hell. That wasn't the exception for a "superhero" genre entry circa 1995 - that was the ideal.


They spun a successful media empire from Spawn alone, which left the creators to effectively do whatever the hell they wanted to. Erik Larsen focused on the savagely biting and delightfully tasteless parody The Savage Dragon, Todd McFarlane made enough money with his popular HBO animated series and trend-setting action figure line to buy award winning baseballs like it was going out of style, Mark Silvestri's cult-hit Witchblade rose above its seemingly exploitative exterior to gain legitimate critical appeal... and Rob Liefield sucked harder than ever before. Fun fact, but Silvestri was so convinced that Liefield was a con-man who'd sink the Image Comics shop that he requested that he keep his rights separate from Image, but use them as a publisher. The rest thought he was being paranoid, but told him to do what made him happy, which formed Top Cow Entertainment (because, talented or not, Silverstri's not above a good tit joke). The bizarre turn of events was that Liefield was so convinced that he could convince Spielberg to make a movie off of his characters that he did end up costing the company a fortune by simply not drawing comics


Most notable to this discussion was a proposed miniseries called "Darker Image", which was published very early on in Image's lifespan in late 1993. Sam Kieth, Rob Liefeld and Jim Lee were each given 8 pages to introduce a new character of their choosing. The plan - supposedly - was for Darker Image to run 4 issues giving all three creators a chance to tell a complete 32 page story, thus theoretically inciting readers who may have only been interested in one story to consider the other two, and thus cross-promoting their own characters in a blatantly incestuous feedback loop. For whatever reason, issue 2 never materialized, and The Maxx became the only one of the three featured heroes to get his own regular comic series. Having read both Liefeld's "Bloodwulf" and Lee's "Deathblow", trust me, we didn't miss much by these two being lost to the sands of time.

It'd be unfair to not mention MTV's "Oddities" cartoon series from 1995, which in turn elevated The Maxx from a cultish comic icon to having a substantially more mainstream profile... even if "Mainstream" meant "Cartoons for stoned twenty-somethings on at 2 AM after a Cribs marathon". Keep in mind, this was long before [adult swim] turned that notion into a nightly programming block, and everyone figured South Park was going to end in a season or two. Regardless, Sam Kieth evidently spent two days a week in Los Angeles overseeing the production, which likely explains why it's so faithful to the source material, and why things like voice casting and soundtrack choices fit so perfectly. A number of cameos from fellow Image heroes, including The Savage Dragon and Pitt, had to be re-written over licensing concerns (some were accomplished more smoothly than others), and the abrupt end around issue 11 - with its own little epilogue that goes in a completely different direction from what the comic would follow - left far more questions than answers.


It's worth noting that, as fantastic as the TV show is, some of the more complex layouts - such as when the cursed Jungle Queen and Mr. Gone have their competing monologues as Julie escaps using an Is tooth - establish how impossible it was to properly and accurately transplant every word of the source material into a new medium. Honestly, until I got the issue 2 and could read the disparate conversations as written, I could never fully follow Mr. Gone's dialogue here, and as that's explaining the premise in ways that'll only become clear later on with more info, that's... kind of a big problem... but, what works far outweighs what doesn't, and to this day the only thing that drives me crazy is that the spot-on mix of nihilist snark and and petulant frustration coming out of Mr. Gone's mouth is left anonymous. Guess whatever voice actor on staff wasn't interested in being known as "the pot-bellied, mean spirited serial rapist in that cartoon about the big purple hobo". My, how things have changed. I bet nowadays they'd want to cram Jackie Earle Hayley in there. Anyway, as good as the TV show is, if you like it, you should absolutely read it.

For over a decade, the only option for the animated series was a two-hour VHS tape that spliced the 11 episodes into a single two-hour movie, trimming some content for time and swapping out some songs they didn't have the rights to for home video - most notably, "I Want to Marry A Lighthouse Keeper" from A Clockwork Orange had to be substituted for a cheeky sound-alike. Otherwise, they actually did a surprisingly decent job of making the whole serialized tale feel like a single, solid feature, even with the unfortunately abrupt ending. These days Amazon.com is selling the entire, unedited TV series on a two-disc DVD-R set in generally better quality than I expected, but the soundtrack is still edited, and a pair of dual-layered DVDs might have helped avoid some massive macroblocking during a few of the fast paced sequences. Understand that pre-DVD music licenses were never given a second thought, so as frustrating as the soundtrack substitutions are, it's something we're largely just going to have to live with, or bootleg our way around forever.

By the time the industry had eaten its own kidneys to survive, Image Comics inadvertantly found a new direction when horror author Robert Kirkman literally tricked his editor into publishing yet another George Romero inspired zombie story... you probably never heard of it, unless you're literally everyone on planet fucking Earth. That shift towards more genuinely serious (but still "genre" influenced) and intentionally transgressive storytelling has been their bread and butter for the last decade or so, and couldn't be any further removed from the equal parts wonderful and horrible wasteland that was the 1990s comic scene... a scene that The Maxx would somehow both rise above and sink to the very depths of, all at the same time.



The Maxx was a curious beast on a lot of levels, specifically because it was created explicitly as a work of satire. The 1980s ushered in the age of "Gritty" superheroism thanks to the one-two punch of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore's Watchmen, which set the stage for Spawn and similarly po-faced and dead serious "Xtreme" anti-heroes who fought cyborg gorillas to somehow seem like a legitimately great idea. The Maxx, however, was sort of the self-aware antithesis of everything this era had going for it; a hulking brute in purple spandex with deformed "claws" for hands who doles out violence as justice, he was too terrified to take off his own mask and look at his own face for fear of what he might find underneath. He mumbled dramatic Rorshach-esque narration to himself, not realizing his enemies could hear every word. His only friend in the world was Julie, his freelance social worker, whom he was convinced he protected in her own dreams where she was the Frazetta-esque Leopard Queen and he was finally what he convinced himself he was; a hero. Through it all they were attacked and mocked by the wicked sorcerer Mr. Gone, who attacked using the "isz" - cannibalistic phallic nightmares, whom need only put on human clothes before the outside world ignores them completely. One entire issue was drawn in the style of a Saturday Morning Cartoon complete with blatant Dr. Seuss writing, while another was dedicated to a depressed teenage girl considering committing murder on her treacherous boyfriend, only to realize that licking her wounds beside Maxx in the filth of the city was marginally more appealing. Early issues had a propensity toward cross-overs featuring Pitt and Savage Dragon - similarly bonkers and experimental works Image was pimping at the time - though the uniquely... depressing quality of the hero himself meant his cross-overs into other universes were typically brief and meant more as a joke than anything.

The Maxx wasn't a superhero: He was a pointed, frustrated dismissal against the notion of superheroes. That's nothing particularly new or even unique - as I've likely mentioned, I adore The Brat Pack and generally like The Boys, both of which are brutal, violent, fatalistic rejections that humanity could ever be inherently good, but... The Maxx is a bit more low-key in its commentary, suggesting that even people who do want to be good to those around them often lack the basic tools to help themselves. To perhaps best sum up what made it so endearing, Wizard Magazine gave away an "Issue 1/2" promo, which - rather than just being the first chapter trimmed down for length - was an original story about two adolescent boys, telling each other stories about how they figure "The Maxx" is either a tormented loner who fights for justice over a burning sense of guilt for having been on the wrong side of the law for so long, or a gadget toting wise cracking super detective with a snappy sidekick and a costumed nemesis he thwarts every month. A massive homeless man tells the boys that the reality is far less glamorous than either; "The Maxx", as he calls himself, was just a nobody who got lucky, and was "changed" by an experience he couldn't explain, and now lives on the streets, unable to use his brute strength to prevent crimes and unable to hold down a job or have any 'real' friends. He's too afraid to take off his own mask and see who he really is anymore - just a crazy, scared jerk, slowly losing his grip on reality, and unable to make anyone around him feel better off. The Maxx was closer to veterans who lost a part of their mind in a trench in some god-forsaken shithole and never got the help they needed to get their shit back together than any sort of tormented arbiter of justice. The kids shrug off the bum's story as too depressing. The story ends with the "bum" revealing his massive, powerful claws to scare off a crackhead who decides the boys would make an easy target, and without wanting to shatter the kids' illusion of what a "hero" really is, he's a nobody their mother wants them far away from moments later.


It's sad, it's funny and it's so dense with self-loathing and bitter irony that it's hard to take it as anything but creator Sam Kieth reveling in how absurd he finds the very notion of "superhoeroes" existing in the real world. Kieth, mind you, was popular for his work on X-Men before he jumped ship to Image, so he's had plenty of time to mull these concepts over and pull them apart, stripping the core concept down to its bones and asking why even those were necessary over time. The book wasn't all jokes, which is why it's such an insidious, captivating little trip down the rabbit hole. Perhaps the most notable proof being the presence of Mr. Gone, a cryptic wizard of powers not quite properly explained who's capable of traversing both the dream worlds that may or may not be "real", and of manipulating the world we all live in, his crime is literally that of serial rape; he has no master plan to dominate the world, no evil  monster to summon. He's just a bastard who hurts other people to amuse himself.

He begins as a cloak-wearing nemesis, gets decapitated... and then shit gets weird once we realize that "Mr. Gone" is actually the physical personification of a depressed teenaged girl's emotions towards her estranged father. And by the way, his decapitated head keeps on taunting them, because if Mr. Gone is literally the phantom of emotional and sexual abuse (he is), ignoring it doesn't magically make it disappear. It becomes clear about 8 issues in, once the guest-spots stop, that Sam Kieth is using The Maxx more as a way to explore a psycho-analysis of his own personal manias and fears, using the book's story as a sort of shock therapy for some deeply seated and uncomfortable explorations into the purely emotional damage caused by poor familial relationships, sexual abuse, isolation and self-hatred. Maxx isn't a hero because he doesn't save anyone; he's as emotionally damaged as everyone else around him, and the fact that he could, theoretically, destroy Mr. Gone ultimately means nothing, since - as wicked and horror inducing as he might be - he's also the only son of a bitch who knows what the hell is going on around them.

How much of this is Kieth's own life versus him exploring bigger, grimmer concepts that he figures would be universal to an audience who doesn't know him... I'm not entirely sure. Truth be told we get glimpses of how he distorts and plays with his own reality in the somewhat recently published The Worlds of Sam Kieth artbook, but his actual past is still something of a mystery, save for the fact that he evidently married a woman twice his age when he was 15, and largely refuses to talk about his life before his 20s. I don't want to press a man I've never met for details on what traumas and fears shaped him... I'm only curious, because I can't think of any other piece of art - graphic storytelling or otherwise - which was so wholly obsessed with the concept of emotional pain as a driving force for life itself. Not to say that the books come off as particularly preachy or self-aggrandizing; Kieth and his co-writer Bill Mesner-Loebes have enough of a sense of humor and a sense of self-awareness that even the darkest and most poignant bits of storytelling seem to be aware of how ridiculous they are, and only ask that the viewer take the material at face value, not necessarily take them completely seriously. This is, after all, a universe in which you can learn to slip into other people's subconscious dreams.



Several years into the book's publication they explored The Origins of Mr. Gone, quite literally spelling that out on the cover like you'd expect on a silver age superhero book; the story is one of childhood abuse, self-loathing, denial and, eventually, an attempt at redemption to those he hurt. One of those pages involves a woman he raped showing up to his house, screaming and slapping him for hours on end, the two stopping for sandwiches... and and then she continues to abuse him  until she decides to go home. When she stops showing up, he feels worse, because now he's alone yet again. It's completely fucked up, and Mr. Gone himself knows it, but is disappointed when she works it out of her system, as it means he's once more alone without even the satisfaction of paying whatever due penance he can offer. The Maxx may have started as a commentary om the increasingly grim and self-important wave of adolescent heroism as grotesque power fantasy overtaking the comics industry from the area in which it was written, but realistically, The Maxx is more creator Sam Kieth using his talents as a visual storyteller to try and avoid paying for anti-depressants; every character within that universe is emotionally damaged or unhinged, be it via depression, schizophrenia, multiple personality disorder or violently rejection sexual orientation, and it's telling that once Kieth grew tired of the cast he turned to one-shot stories that played out like extended versions of the Gimp scene from Pulp Fiction crossed with an episode of Dr. Phil by way of A Clockwork Orange. The "Final Issue" is a frustrating mess, but having crafted two very disparateworlds, he basically acknowledged that he had told all the stories about David, Julie, Mr. Gone and Sarah he could muster, so while the ending is the most infuriatingly anti-climactic downer ever made until Takashi Miike's Koroshiya-1, it seems... almost appropriate. To quote Mr. Gone, "And so our story ends, Doc... Not with a bang, or even a whimper, but with a THWACK."

Infuriatingly enough, it's been all but impossible to catch up on everything Kieth published after The Maxx ended in 1998. Before credit cards were a thing my younger self had any meaningful access to, my access to comics were limited to a shop that closed around 2000, which left me unable to get his evidently even more obtuse and psychologically-driven work since, including Four Women, My Inner Bimbo, Ojo and Zero Girl... which, of course, are now out of print, difficult to find, and going for prices I just don't feel compelled to pay for them. I did finally find my Scratch! comics, which are an oddity unto themselves;it looks like Sam Kieth pitched an original miniseries about a werewolf, and DC's answer was "Sounds, uh... sounds like we could do that. If, y'know, maybe there were more Batman involved?"


Anyway, the reason I bring all of this up is because after several years of the trade-back collections being impossible to come by, IDW is reprinting The Maxx - well, not simply reprinting, but releasing a sort of 'Remastered' edition known as THE MAXX: MAXXIMIZED. I didn't know much about it when I saw the title, I just knew I needed it, and asked the local shop I haunt about once a week to grab any and all of the hardcover printings they could get - well, all of them under the "human priced" category, at least. There's an incredible looking 'Artists Edition' of issues 1-6 in a massively oversized printing in all of Sam Kieth's raw, unfinished, scribbled glory... but that's $125, and was sold out long before I knew it existed. The first 8 chapters in the "normal" hardcovers, which are in color and have all the dialogue in place, will set you back less than $50. This series has been out of print for years in any format for years now, so if you've never had a chance to read it - or if you're like me and have a combination of missing back issues and OCD about having all copies in the same goddamn format - it seems like a damned fine place to start. IDW's glossy, oversized hardcovers are a damn fine way to wallow in this beautifully crazy stuff anyway.

Sam Kieth gave an interview or two before the Maxximized version started releasing, and for a while was implying that he might be adding new pages to fix continuity issues and settle some questions he felt were never adequately answered in its original run. According to the introduction in the first hardcover, there isn't any "additional" material... so either we're getting new pages later, or Kieth eventually changed his mind. The Maxx was never particularly cohesive, so while I wouldn't mind that anticlimactic train-wreck of a final issue being re-worked slightly, it's not going to suddenly change the overall tone and scope in a massive way. Unlike The Brat Pack, this doesn't *NEED* a new ending... it just needs to be wallowed in for what it was, and what it will always be; an imperfect, deeply personal, and undeniably beautiful experiment in self-loathing and sympathy for the devil.


As for the "remastered" part... basically, they've re-scanned the original inked pages and re-colored them from the ground up. Sam Kieth defends some of these changes based on the fact that the work was rushed, and that between being involved in the TV show and constantly being behind in his deadlines to start with, a great deal of the things that have bothered him were in no way Steve Oliff's fault - they were simply choices he didn't express well enough in notes to avoid. Kieth has also admitted that he requested the Outback scenes to be desaturated and given a distinct motif, which includes a distorted, oil-paint like texture over the backgrounds, giving everything a diffuse, slightly off kilter look, despite the key art floating on top of it appearing largely unchanged. At a glance, everything looked close enough to the original, but there's been a consistent shift away from the vibrant, neon color Steve Oliff blessed the original Image printings with, replaced by a far less psychadellic and faded hues by Ronda Pattinson. Nothing looks "off" at first, but comparing the original books side by side reveal some very curious changes:

Julie's clothes are never the same color between the two, light sources have been re-done completely to occasionally more dramatic effect, and the background hues in otherwise blank panels focused more on character interaction are often completely different. Hell, Tommy - the boy sent off to get Cokes 'n burgers 'n stuff - has gone from a blonde to a ginger, and his once orange Letterman Jacket is now white! Does it matter? Not really. I wouldn't be surprised if when Kieth doodled the scene out he thought it'd be fun to make Tommy look a bit like the recently deceased Archie, a lovable throwback goof who returns to find everything he thinks he knows about the world torn to pieces five minutes later, but Oliff's work skewed the pallet just far away enough that the gag was more or less lost. Whether or not the gag mattered, particularly since it apparently wasn't clear to Oliff in the first place, is debatable. Another good example is when Julie opens the fridge at the start of issue 2 and finds a grinning Is looking back at her; the original version had a fridge stuffed with flourescent food products. The new version has toned the color of her milk cartons and snack-sausages down, so that the only vibrant color we see are the gnarly red gums of the monster itself. Again, not a change I'd argue the page needed, but it was clearly done to draw focus where focus was due, and from an artistic point of view that makes perfect sense.

I can't, however, decide how I feel about the shaft of light when Maxx is trapped in a dumpster and being gnawed by Isz having been ditched in favor of, I suppose, a more realistic - but far less dramatic - even light source. Some minor details from the original colorist are simply no longer present. Issue 2 features narration which, in the original Image printing, was made to look like it was scrawled on lined, three-ring binder paper as we'd expect form a student. The hole punches are still there, but the lined paper is not; whether this was removed because kids these days do that shit on an iPad or because Ronda Pattinson and Sam Kieth simply forgot it was supposed to be there, I can't say. Curiously enough, the striped pattern on the dummy's shirt is also absent, which is a shame considering how much fun Oliff had distorting the fabric around Gone's clenched fist. Another, more subtle loss in the same issue is the splash page of Julie pressing the Is tooth against Mr. Gone's throat - the original by Oliff features a single drop of crimson blood leaking around the tooth. Rhonda Pattinson's does not, implying that the skin hasn't yet been broken.

It's not all bad, mind you. Speed lines that were originally lost in the Image printing have been restored to Maxx and Gone's initial scuffle, and Julie's smirk when she tells Gone she can see through him like glass appears to have been either re-drawn slightly, or restored to show the pursed lower lip once just hinted at. I won't deny that the digital shading given to light sources and subtle gradations added to the evening skies bring a certain level of subtle realism the original, starkly cikired images lacked, and while the colors on display are a bit less obnoxiously vibrant, they're never so far from Oliff's original design that anything looks... off. Just "different". Saying one is objectively better than the other would be unfair; they're certainly not the same, and some reading are inevitably going to prefer the originals, but neither is substantially more detailed or consistent, and nothing is so gallingly different that the book has magically transformed - which isn't something I can say for that "Special Edition" of (for example) The Killing Joke, which transformed the Suspiria-esque color pallet into something positively dreary and mundane, or even that nightmarish "painted" bullshit that was done to The Incal so many years ago. It's a remaster that comes with its own kinks and tweaks, and while I'm glad I still have the originals to compare, nothing I've seen yet has been off-putting to the point that I'd not recommend the gorgeous hardcover printings IDW is putting out.

So, there you have it. You finally have a chance to give Sam Kieth money again, and the results aren't too shabby. That's all I can really ask for.

What I'm seeing is not only this medium, but those who have supported it being called out. Told they're no good, that they're violent,

Before we go any further, I want to tell you guys a little story. This is something that's been discussed off and on in the last year and a half, but it's a more or less perfect little summary of why those who follow the bizarre cross-section of pandering and loathing that is Games Journalism have suspected something was horribly off for some time. It's the story of someone who lost his job for trying to warn people of a case of literal, blatant charity fraud, and it's something the entirety of the gaming journalism sphere did nothing to try and fix:

Alistar Pinsof, a former Destructoid writer, who was suspended - and later fired - in May of 2013 for publishing an article revealing that an IndieGogo campaign setup by developer Chloe Sagal, crowdfunding a game project called "Homesick", had a larger than usual project goal because she claimed a piece of metal lodged in her body after a car accident was poisoning her, and she needed surgery to remove it to survive. Tragic, isn't it? Well, the truth was that the money was actually intended for sexual reassignment surgery - a fact she had not shared with the gaming public, information Pinsof learned after becoming friends after the story ran, and was horrified to learn he'd been involved in publishing what, by all counts, was - by every legal definition - a charity scam. It didn't matter in the long term because IndieGogo took the project down anyway - legally speaking, they aren't allowed to be a charity, regardless of what sort of operation you're having, honestly disclosed or not.

Sagal actually tried to commit suicide on a live Twitch stream around this time, and once Pinsof knew the whole story he felt conflicted, asked his fellow staff members what he should do... the majority told him to publish the story, because it was, ultimately, the honest thing to do, and so - having penned it before he knew the extent of Sagal's depression - the article ended up going live while she was recovering in the hospital. Having outed Sagal as both a con artist and a transwoman while in the hospital over a suicide attempt, the backlash for this was swift and brutal from both LGBT sympathizers and fellow game developers alike. To try and clarify the stance on this, Pinsoft attended a Gamers Against Bigotry panel to explain that what he did was a matter of honesty to the public, not an attempt to shame Sagal for her personal life - that it was sincerely a matter of ethics with horribly unfortunate timing, not any sort of political or personal judgment towards a person he, up to that point, had considered a friend.

Regardless of his original intent or the validity of the information published, Destructoid owner Yanier "Niero" Gonzales turned to the GameJournoPros mailing list for advice on how to deal with this sticky situation. Among the people asked for input was Samantha Allen, herself a transwoman, an admitted misandrist who worked in game criticism, and is now infamous for writing an open letter to the game industry that more or less set the template for the now infamous "Gamers are Dead" article push published August 28th... so, you can probably guess where the conversation went from there. In the end this group of competing journalists agreed that he should be fired, and that none of them would take him after this - effectively blacklisting him from the over hald-dozen websites involved in the GJP. The details are all HERE, complete with the GJP eMails, should you be so curious. Some of the related commentary therein suggests this may be the reason Jim Sterling, snarky and self-professed consumer advocate who now works for The Escapist, left Destructoid in the first place; when asked if he'd consider suing, Pinsof confirmed that the website was on the verge of bankrupcy and simply wanted to distance himself from the whole affair.

So that's your "Game Journalists" at work, ladies and gentlemen. Do any actual investigative reporting, or whistle blowing on something as flatly illegal as charity fraud, and expect to be blacklisted by the entire industry as a result, since you're hurting the feelings of others in the process. Addendums over the whole situation were published by much of the gaming journalists scene after this, and in the end, Sagal set up a Go Fund Me project and got her surgery, which is - I suppose - the happy ending the story asked for. Can't say the same for Pinsoft, who's not worked in gaming journalism for the last year and a half, for having the poor sense to tell the truth in an industry fueled by outrage, cronyism and appealing to a mindset that protects certain industry types not because of what they've done, but because of who they are.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is obvious and unfortunate corruption in hobbyist media. This reaches far beyond the norms we saw in 2007 when Jeff Gertzman was fired from GameSpot for his unimpressed review of Kane and Lynch, or the memetic image of Geoff Keyleigh posing as a snackfood shilling "Dorito Pope" for exclusive coverage of Halo 4 in 2012. That shit's ridiculous too, but it's not the same thing. This sort of thing, this punishment of honesty and protection of people they know to be lying and committing criminal acts, is what the term "#gamergate" was started to discuss and expose to the larger public eye. This is the sort of thing the people who read websites like Destructoid, Kotaku, Polygon, Rock Paper Shotgun, The Escapist, EuroGamer, GameSpot, Joystiq and so many more should be aware of. Video Games, unlike most hobbies with an enthusiast press that are built up around them, are fast approaching being a $100 Million industry, with a culture dedicated to pre-purchasing products on good faith alone. They control the hype new titles generate, and their review scores directly impact which developers get their bonuses after the publishers. Their faults, their biases and their echo-chamber approach to coverage of a vast and unique industry directly impact both the businesses they represent, and the customers who keep them afloat. No, it's clearly not on par with Scotland or ebola or anything absurd like that, but as games continue to be one of the cornerstones of popular culture, it does matter - and it matters to a lot more people than it did a decade ago, on both sides of the business.


For those of you who have been keeping an eye on Gamer Gate - the consumer revolt against corruption in gaming journalistm circles - you can skip the following green text, if you so desire. For anyone who hasn't followed the last two months of ridiculous bullshit - or keep hearing about how it's some crazy hate fueled campaign to run women out of the industry - I'd suggest you read it. It's not the most complete or detailed timeline, I know, but A People's History of Gamer Gate exists for those who so desire every nook and cranny of this insane saga, and #GamerGate in 60 Seconds is always available for those with the ADHD.

To recap: Back in early August, an independent game developer Zoe Quinn - who's become so irrelevant to the larger discussion, most of the people forced to reference her now call her "Literally Who", just to fuck with Google analytics - was revealed to be having a sexual relationship with Nathan Grayson, a writer for Kotaku, either at or in close proximity to the same time he wrote a couple articles that feature her prominently through a tell-all blog post "The Zoe Post" her then boyfriend Eron Gjoni made, detailing how she was an emotionally abusive compulsive liar who continued to betray his trust for months on end.

Nobody at this point was sure how deep the connection between Literally Who and Kotaku went, and questions followed. Rather than offer up a generic statement about how integrity is important and they realize one of their writers may have fucked up... they censored all discussion of it. When YouTube bloggers pointed out the blatant scumminess and merely wanted answers on how this conflict of interests was never so much as mentioned, Quinn used false DMCA claims to remove discussion. When YouTube's largest LetsPlayer, Michael "TotalBiscuit" Bain caught wind of the illegal take-down and called it for the bullshit that it was, his entire reddit discussion was deleted. Discussion of this was dubbed #Quinnspiracy, or - on 4chan particularly, #BurgersandFries, referencing the fact that Quinn's ex knew of "Five Guys" she cheated on him with. Because of course 4chan would turn it into a snarky joke.



Around the same time, Quinn begins to be hacked, doxxed and harassed by an anonymous third party - the validity of which is still up for debate, make no mistake there - but LW's friends, including Phil Fish and indirect support from Anita Sarkeesian, lightning rods for justified hate if the gaming community ever had them, supported her and everyone harping on her personal life as "misogynists". At this time, the organization known as The Fine Young Capitalists took center stage, pointing out that he was doxxed and DDoSed by Quinn and her friends, costing him a $10,000 towards a feminist charity intended to put female game creators in touch with game producers. To this day, The Fine Young Capitalists hasn't been mentioned once by any of the "major" gaming news sites, not even after it was funded to the tune of $70,000 - with by far the largest donation body being members of 4chan, despite having been so gloriously dubbed the "Cathedral of Misogyny".

It was also uncovered around this time that Kotaku's own Patricia Hernandez had not only written positive press for her landlord, Anna Athropy, but had written multiple pieces for Christine Love's Hate Trilogy of visual novels - a person she had been in a romantic relationships with, but never felt the need to clarify this to the reader. It was also discovered that Ben Kuchera, who was also writing press about Quinn, had also been funding her work through monthly Patreon donations and didn't feel that was worthy of disclosure. This led to the broader discovery of a large number of journalists funding independent developers they themselves were being paid to report on, which has led more to further questions than any simple answers as to what the ethical line between friendship, sponsor and subject should be in this particular business... questions that still, largely, haven't been answered to the public.

Of all people, Adam Baldwin popped his head up to point out that demanding basic journalistic integrity wasn't anything but misogynistic about asking for basic ethical disclosures. He suggested the name #gamergate, to distance itself from Quinn, who - again - is little more than a footnote at this point. Around this same time, Anita Sarkeesian - infamous pop culture critic, and effectively regressive to the 90s "video games cause violence in teenagers!" bullshit, particularly in terms of her psuedo-scientific bullshit methodology - had her life threatened over twitter. Despite this lone psychopath not having used the Gamer Gate or Quinnspiracy tags, it was "good enough" for those who thought the consumer revolt was skeevy to write the whole group off as having created it.



The end of August should have finished it off for good, I know; the lack of any particularly notable new games left gamers with little else to talk about in the meantime, and it became clear that the gaming press had no incentive to apologize for their lack of transparency or behind-the-scenes collusion with who should have been their competitors... and then, something amazing happened. The entire gaming press published a dozen articles over a single weekend saying one thing: "Gamers" were an outdated concept that we had to move beyond. Gamers are dead. Gamers are over. The future doesn't have to be the hateful, misogynistic, and toxic community we have today. Kotaku, GamaSutra, Rock Paper Shotgun and so many more turned on their own audience, calling them sexist pigs and hate mongering racists in the most passive-aggressive language possible, suggesting that the culture they chose to be a part of - the same culture that these writers sold to them for ad dollars - was inherently toxic, and that they should be ashamed for being part of it, reject it, and create something new and more welcoming for an audience that clearly wasn't them.

What's far more troubling are the unanswered questions dredged up in the middle of the shit storm. YouTuber CameraLady and her assistant ShortFatOtaku unearthed a damning paper-trail connecting Phil Fish and his IndieFund game funding board to having potentially preferential treatment in the Indie Gaming Festival (IGF), which - if true - would be a blatant case of racketeering. Milo Yiannopolous, a reporter for the Breitbart UK website, initially focused on the "feminists killing games" aspect of the story to support his own agendas, but quickly kept digging and found the existence of the GameJournoPros mailing list, proving that representatives from most of the major gaming press were in collusion to cover and ignore certain subjects, even leading to suggestions that certain contributors may have been fired as a direct result of the GJP discussion board.

While many of the sites that support gaming enthusiasts ran with the story of how #gamergate was an organization dedicated to running feminist voices and even female developers out of the business, none of the blatant examples of Gamer Gate supporters being harassed, doxxed, insulted or threatened were even acknowledged, much less the admission that these sites themselves were the intended target of the revolt's ire. Hell, Christina H. Sommers, who put out a video supporting gamers as being no more misogynistic or antisocial than any other entertainment themed subculture, recently lost her husband. Upon hearing this, Gamer Gate members donated money to send her flowers and signed a card over her loss. Those monsters.



Perhaps the most cataclysmic thing to have happened in all of this was the loss of 4chan. The site is still there, don't get me wrong, but once it was confirmed that Chris "M00t" Poole had no interest in allowing the organization of Gamer Gate discussion on his site and began letting mods whip out the ban hammer, there was a mass exodus from /v/ to 8chan.co, which fully supports the anonymous freedom 4chan was once founded on. Amusingly enough, MSNBC caught wind of this and ran a hilarious, nonsensical story about how 8chan was "too extreme" for 4chan. Keep in mind that it took /b/ years to get their own Fox News story with an exploding van; while I know the majority of normalfags will never know the pleasure of shitposting on bait and getting those sweet dubs, I doubt the mainstream press has any idea quite how hard they're making 4chan irrelevant, and how them having called 8chan "more extreme" is going to elevate it into the boogeyman they wrongly assume it is. It's glorious, if you ask me.

Detractors have come in all shapes and sizes, with celebrities ranging from Seth Rogan, Patton Oswald and Tim Schafer all decrying #gamergate as a solely misogynistic movement - heck, we've been compared to ISIS so many times in the last 8 weeks we've added "Reese's Law" t o the Rules of the Internet. Most recently, Gawker Media - who, let us not forget, owns Kotaku as well as Jezebel and Deadspin, the latter of which have run anti-GG articles despite neither site having anything to do with gaming - has allowed their writers to openly encourage bullying of "Nerds" to quell the revolt - during October, which happens to be National Bullying Prevention Month. Anita Sarkeesian's latest death threat - an anonymous eMail threatening Utah State University's feminist population - has hit the front page of the New York Times, with many writing this off as definitive proof that #gamergate is the hate campaign - if not an actual, organized hate group - that its detractors have been calling it for weeks. Few have picked up that Something Awful goons are taking credit for making the front page, with the only other notable story being Ebola... so either goons caused the virus' spread, or they sent an anonymous death threat to a noteworthy YouTube professional, take your fucking pick.

Things are only getting more heated; those who stand against GamerGate are publicly acknowledging the harassment from their own side, Gamer Gate supporters - long written off as right wing fantatics by proponent critics within the industry - are now cringing that Fox News writers seem to acknowledge they exist and might be on GG's side, and various news providers - CNN, CBS, Huffington Post, the BBC and more - are all hosting dialogues about the "online harassment campaign" that is Gamer Gate, with some shows willing to acknowledge the actual origins of the name and what it's supposed to stand for, and others riding the Hate Train all the way to the bank.

In other words, it's the bullshit fluff pieces about violent video games all over again - except "violence" has been replaced with the word "misogyny", and since nobody's actually shot up a school in the last few months they're using anonymous trolling as 'proof'. The same as it ever was, if not somehow dumber...

 As they say, This Ride Never Ends, so let's cap the current events there and go into details in just a few minutes... I've got plenty to say on the subject, but if this is, somehow, your first introduction, you've already got a metric ton of clusterfuck to digest.

Exactly what Gamer Gate supporters want varies from person to person - that, uh, that's, kind of the nature of an amorphous, leaderless consumer revolt. The majority of us - and yes, I say "us" because I am one of those assholes discussing it on forums, sending letters, and donating money when it seems appropriate, which makes me one of the unruly horde, so to speak - seem to think these few basic ideas are a good start, though:

* News, Reviews, Promotional and Editorial Content should be clearly marked as such. Promotional material paid for by the producer is fine, but everything about the arrangement needs to be disclosed in plain sight. This is (ironically) more problematic for "traditional" internet criticism than it is on YouTube, which has legally must disclose what is, and is not, a paid advertisement versus independent criticism.

* Review content should never be slanted either in favor for, or against, the publisher or developer. The grotesque system in which developers only get bonuses for specific Metacritic scores - and are only allowed to release reviews in very close proximity to the release date of the product itself - has made this a murky area to begin with. With those in mind, a reviewer should be honest about the content itself, and not punished if said opinions don't match what the publisher was expecting.

* Any connections - financial, personal, romantic or otherwise - which may directly influence a writer's impartiality of a subject should either be recused to another columnist, or a statement should be made in the piece stating the nature of said connections. This includes prior or current relationships, living with a person you're covering, and funding the subject in question indirectly (such as through Patreon support).

* No columnist or reviewer should be accepting gifts or incentives from the subject in question. (In my eyes, review copies of software and hardware are not gifts - they're the tools to do their job.) Anything else should be avoided, and scenarios where journalists are only given preview footage or playable demos at the end of an all expenses paid trip - which is not particularly uncommon in this industry - should be avoided if possible, and clearly marked as such if and when they occur.

* "Exclusive" rights to publish reviews before competitors should be avoided. If review embargoes are to continue (as I imagine they are), every critic's voice should be given the same prominence, and no single critic should be allowed to draw the initial narrative for others to follow, consciously or not.

* Personal biases are to some degree inevitable, but relevant subjects should not be avoided or ignored because of them.

Case in point on the last bit: Ignoring one game developer's harassment to respect privacy whilst covering the explicit details of another has led to stories in which multiple women being harassed and threatened are covered in the gaming media, despite threats and harassment being no less frequent towards men in the industry itself. Cards Against Humanity creator Max Temkin's rape allegations, Stardock CEO Brad Wardell's (entirely false) sexual harassment charges, and IndieStalk founder Josh Mattingly's (actual) blatant sexual harassment were all front page affairs for the gaming press - Kotaku, RPS, The Escapist, you name it. So, clearly the dirty laundry of game developers and journalists is something the public should know about, yes?


Zoe Quinn's alleged harassment by the-forum-we-shall-not-name was similarly newsworthy; the fact that she broke international DMCA laws to illegally censor details of her sex life - which included both her boss and a writer who covered her for Kotaku, the details of which indirectly led to a charity literally being blacklisted by the gaming media - was not considered newsworthy, because they felt that slutshaming a woman who broke the law to cover her personal indiscretions was in poor taste. Noticing a double standard? Good. That means you have a pulse.

It's bullshit like this that's led to the outside appearance of the games industry and community itself being misogynistic, which is simply not the case when one factors in the larger picture and speaks to anyone with a presence in either game reviews or development. Misanthropic? Possibly. Hostile? Eh, no more or less than online discussions about politics or sports, but kinda'. But to argue that it's targeted at women specifically - which is the only argument AGAINST Gamer Gate I've ever seen in the wild - seems misguided, if nothing else.

After those seemingly obvious points, sure, it gets a little fuzzy. Plenty of people more fed up with this than I am don't want to see anything related to Social Justice - which, being the only real argument against the consumer revolt, is now seen as the primary antagonist, when in fact it's more a side effect of everything related to the journalism's other shortcomings - and while I do agree that talk of "progressive" social issues unrelated to most mainstream games has taken up a disproportionate percentage of the hobbyist press' focus in the last few years, not considering it at all is taking the request to avoid personal bias way too far. Really, that's just silly - you can be a full blown radical feminist who thinks every game should star a woman, just to undermine the patriarchal system that's been making games for decades for all I care - I don't know that I'll agree with you on that, but I don't see why you can't be paid to say it anyway, so long as it's marked as your own personal opinion, and not seamlessly blended in with the advanced coverage of - as a real world example - how The Puppeteer on the PS3 is sexist because the creator based the story on his own childhood, and stuck to the familiar in creating the lead character. Others think reviewers should be forced to buy review copies just like we normal schlubs - I can sort of see the argument for that in a naive way, but I know reviewers aren't paid shit to begin with - and in some industries, those promo copies are the only "payment" you get to start with, so I'm sympathetic to them being handed screener copies or advance codes. To summarize a point Total Biscuit once made, to an average person a video game is a gift - to a reviewer who has to play them to earn his paycheck, it's just paperwork. There's also the big, ugly question of review embargoes, basically not allowing a review to get published until a very specific date - this is kind of a mess, not allowing critics to do their job until a game is already on the market, but with so many games released today withholding content unless you pre-order, or even withholding content unless you pre-order from a specific retailer and in a specific timeframe, those reviews not being out as early as possible leave prospective buyers in kind of a shitty spot.


But that bullet point list up there? Basic, clear, obvious ways to avoid even the hint of what you say being a conflict of interests? That stuff is so basic it's it boggles my mind that they aren't already in place. That's the stuff every single person who says the phrase "Gamer Gate" - and doesn't follow it up with a string of nasty insults - wants to see happen. That's what the tag was formed to discuss, specifically designed to pull as far away from the he-said she-said Zoe Quinn situation as possible. Lot of good that did it, but hey. That was the goal. Here we are, over eight weeks later, and stigma of "Muh Soggy Knees" clings tightly to the name with a handful of massively visible examples of threats and harassment cropping up, which has led to a no less massive - or mean spirited - backlash against its supporters who seemingly assume everyone involved in Gamer Gate is sending death threats and planning a shooting spree.

Now mainstream news outlets are discussing it, the brakes on the discussion over what Gamer Gate is, and why it matters, aren't just locked - they've been melted open. Called a "culture war" between gamers and those who want Social Justice - a battle line originally drawn not by the gamers themselves, mind you, but by the "StopGamerGate" regulars who won't put down their third-wave feminism buzzwords and do any research into what the people who gathered behind the tag actually wanted out of it - this has become a titanic clusterfuck so hilarious that not only has nerd culture turned on itself, but that certain assholes with a massive number of followers are openly comparing any supporters to KKK and ISIS, while others are openly condoning the bullying, harassment, and outright violence towards gamers - some of it not even Gamer Gate supporters (or "Gators", as we're sometimes called - I can't be upset, that's too cute!), just "Nerds" in general... in other words, the people who want to see Gamer Gate fail have gradually gone from being convinced of their own moral superiority, to blatantly just being Ogre from Revenge of the Nerds. I wish I were kidding, but the fact that Mercedes goddamn Benz pulled their ads from Gawker in less than 24 hours over "jokes" about this proves that not everyone thinks it's funny.

What does Gamer Gate want? To be heard. To be respected and treated like adults by the sites they support by their very patronage. To deal with a press that's honest, fair, and has the gamers interests in mind - not the interests of the publishers, and not a singular hive-mind colluded between competitors behind closed doors. We ask that serious allegations - like threats, alleged misdeeds and harassment - be corroborated before reported as fact, and that when something isn't explicitly clear, that the "games journalists" do some goddamn research to clarify it. (Case in Point: The fact that EuroGamer has to organize a massive, PR filled shitfest of an interview just to confirm that Rise of the Tomb Raider won't be an Xbox exclusive permanently is ridiculous, but at least they finally got the answer they were looking for.) We want an ecosystem of websites that talk about our hobby, the good and the bad - and if you can do that without being blatantly condescending to us in the process, well, that'd be a nice touch.

And on the other side, what does the Anti-Gamer Gate side say we are? Misogynists. Antisocial, pale, chubby, spiteful virgins so sick of women talking about our playthings that we're actively trying to harm them.They think repeating this ad infinitum will somehow make it come true. They think a handful of bastards willing to write long form threats - threats that are never even tagged as being written by Gamer Gate supporters - somehow encapsulate a group which has proven to have several thousands active members at any time, minimum. They think brow beating and shaming gamers will make them slink back to their toys and leave the websites that were designed from the ground up to cater to them will leave a better, smarter, more positive creation in their wake... but to get to that positively, they have to crush us first. To prove that gamers are subhuman scum, and that we must all be such immature, callous, harassment-prone douchebags that we deserve the barbs that we get flung at us, regardless of what any individual one of us may have actually said or done.

Let me tell you something about gamers... actually, allow me to clarify that word, first - when I say "gamers", I don't mean the assholes who bought a Wii as their first ever  console, or have dumped 2 hours in the last month into Angry Birds: Star Wars while taking their daily dump on an iPhone as the entirety of their time playing games. Yes, those people are, technically, "gamers" - in the same way that anyone who owns a car is a "driver". When people say the word "Gamer" they're typically talking about a gaming enthusiast. To put this another way, every asshole on the planet - well, besides me, but that's not important - every asshole on the planet knows how to drive a car. They're "Drivers". Not "Gearheads". A gearhead a someone who gets under the hood to up the torque, who supports specific models out of a deep seated dedication, who spends their weekends restoring their vintage ride to perfection, and can tell you exactly what year the Firebirds got ugly. Gearheards are car enthusiasts, not merely car owners. The gamers who play phone games and little else simply aren't the audience for Rock Paper Shotgun, GamaSutra, IGN and Giant Bomb - or any other digital entertainment themed website that's openly told "Gamers" they are no longer welcome. They're "Casual Gamers", and while I don't intend that distinction as an insult (Pac Man is comfy as fuck, simpler than a lot of "casual" games made today, and I dare anyone to tell me otherwise) when you want to start playing the dick-waving game of who actually supports the game industry outside of assholes playing on their mobile phones, it's absolutely an important distinction. Casual Gamers play different games from Core Gamers, and Casual Gamers *ARE NOT* being targeted by the Game Journalist circles. Simple as that. Do you know what a Main is, or what OP is short for? If so, you're the target demographic of those sites. If not, eh, I guess there's always NeoGAF...


I'll tell you why, too. The most popular game in the world via total players is - and I friggin'hate admitting this - Candy Crush Saga. But the only thing you'll see mentioned about it on the websites that ran the "Gamers are Over" articles are what massive copyright trolls the game's publisher is, because - and here's the god honest truth - the people reading those sites hate those games. Not because they're bad games (plenty of them are - that's irrelevant), but because it means every Soccer Mom with an iPad can now call herself a "gamer", which leads to the inevitable, pointless volley of rhetorical questions, boiling down to PC-sounding drivel like "Why doesn't Assassins Creed: How The Fuck Is This Franchise Still Going Annually find ways to appeal to 40 year old upper-middle class latina housewives?"

For the same reason R-rated action movies starring 70 year old ex-bodybuilders, comic books about masked avengers, and green colored energy drinks that taste like shame don't try to target anyone but a young male audience: This mythical new paradigm of adult women gamers aren't overwhelming audience playing AssCreed, they've never been the audience playing AssCreed, and the oft-repeated ESA numbers confirming that HALF OF GAMERS ARE WOMEN NOW and MORE ADULT WOMEN THAN TEENAGE BOYS PLAY GAMES factoids don't change the fact that the games they're actually playing simply aren't AssCreed - or anything even vaguely resembling AssCreed. They aren't playing the same games that people who have been calling themselves "Gamers" for more than the last five years are playing. Asking why women don't play Battlefield is like asking why men don't wear pantyhose; there's nothing really preventing them from doing it, the majority of them simply don't want to.


And no, don't even think I'm trying to say that means "kek girls don't play games", or that any girl who owns a DS is a "fake geek girl" or whatever the fuck it is people try to spin on anyone who dares to point out that demographics are a thing in video games. Just like they are in movies, and television, and books and LITERALLY EVERYTHING RELEASED, EVER. The ESA is the group reminding us that half of gamers are women... and yet, even by their own numbers, less than a quarter of them are playing Max Payne 3, while two-thirds of them are playing Just Dance. Asking why women don't play Killzone or State of Decay is fundamentally equivalent to asking why more men don't watch Divergent or The Fault in Our Stars. They just don't care. With this in mind, the regular cloying discussion of how to make games "more inclusive" and "appeal to new audiences" just... doesn't really make sense. Women interested in the violent power fantasy scenarios that define the vast majority of the AAA market seem to be willing to ignore the shallow writing and occasional flash of boob for whatever else they find appealing in there, and as you can see, damn near half the people playing Kinect Zumba have balls. Probably well manicured balls that smell vaguely of vanilla and gym shorts, sure, but balls none the less.

My point is that having a penis doesn't make you magically like certain things - not even vaginas - so why would someone having a Tab V make them not like competitive or skill based digital entertainment? Girls play video games, and they always have. Anyone who argues to the contrary and isn't wearing a hockey helmet is a person you can stop talking to, immediately. But that doesn't mean that the majority of video games that sell to that Core Gamer audience changing dramatically would increase sales. And I say this as a guy who thought that Battlefield introducing female character models in BF4 was a good thing. Honestly, why wouldn't it be? Hell, even I have a friend who served in Iraq, and her having ovaries didn't medically get in the way of pulling a trigger, as far as either of us aware. Not to mention all those Carpet Bagging jokes pretty much wrote themselves...



No, what it means is that the girls who are already interested in Dark Souls and Battlefield and Guilty Gear have always been interested in them, and that dramatically changing the game design to encourage a new audience would push everyone who's already interested further away. People who like certain games like them for a reason; people who complain that certain games don't appeal to them were never going to play those games anyway. By far, the most popular game with people who would typically identify themselves as gamers is Grand Theft Auto on consoles, and Starcraft on PCs. "Gaming" means a lot of things to a lot of people, but "Gaming Press" only focuses on the 'Core Gamer' demographic, which doesn't give two shits about Flappy Birds - at least not enough to bother reading reviews and discussing the artistic merits thereof. See, the audience reading those sites are the same audience who want to know if the Xbox One will play Dragon Age 3 at 1080p or 900p. The same audience who will choose which retailer to order Hyrule Warriors from for their favorite franchise outfit DLC bonus, and then simultaneously bitch the whole time that Nintendo is falling to the same Ubisoft styled bullshit retailer exclusives*. The kind of people who will suggest you don't buy a broken port of a PS2 game, because why the hell should you when a used PS2 costs $50, even if Sony doesn't get a dime out of the deal? If this discussion is on a site not directly affiliated with publishers they'll tell you to emulate it, but that's... neither here nor there, I guess.

* The correct answer is "Twilight Princess Zelda", with Ocarina of Time Zelda being a fair substitution. At that point it's mostly a question of Blondes over Brunettes. If, for any reason, you chose Skyward Sword, you'd better be into dudes, because that game features the most shit-tier Zelda this side of a CDi.

Core Gamers are a unique breed - hobbyists who care just enough about the fun they have to trust other people to tell them if a game is an improvement on the last entry, to deduce if one platform is better at playing the game than another, to understand why certain games are better than other, seemingly similar games - but are also typically willing to engage in those sites. To disagree with other gamers over what a given game's strength was, or recommend similar titles that fill whatever specific niche they're looking for. If gamers weren't willing to engage each other - even if, more often than not, the extent of that interaction is basically "git gud, scrub" - there wouldn't be a gaming culture to begin with, and having spent so much time and energy on "core" games, the thought of wasting breath discussing whether or not a mobile game is worth your time is... kind of like walking into a room full of cinephiles into Ozu and Godard, and asking them which episode of The Simpsons is their favorite. They might have an answer, but that's not why they're together chatting about art films n the first place. The audience for those websites are almost exclusively core gamers, and I don't give a shit what you've read - the overwhelming majority of core gamers in the Western world today are men in their 20s through 40s, and amusingly enough, that's the same demographic who's working 9 to 5 and playing games in what little spare time they have left. Telling them they're bad people? On the sites they came to because the "mainstream" press doesn't give two shits if Dark Souls 2 has fast travel - or indeed, know what "Dark Souls" or "Fast Travel" even are? To prove that there are core gamers who fall outside of this white boys club the tag #notyourshield was used by women, people of color, LBGT and disabled people to show that the arguments that the gaming community itself was toxic, oppressive or somehow dangerous was a smoke screen, at best. Christina H. Sommers even posted a video explaining how gamers - while passionate and opinionated - are no more or less reasonable than any other group of fans that have built up their own community, and that anyone hand waiving them off as misogynists based on the actions of a handful of bad eggs would be to undermine any subculture.

Writing gamers off as woman hating sociopaths was a fool's mission, and they should have known better. Gamers still play games they like a decade after release, building emulators to upscale them to modern standards. Gamers grind away at MMO's until they get a Level 90 character, and then buy a new character so they can repeat the process over again. Gamers "git gud". Telling them they'll never win and then unveiling an even bigger challenge is what makes us dump quarters into arcade games. What makes us replay games on Expert once we've already seen every nook and cranny. The challenge is what makes us like games. The people who back down once they realize it's a lost cause and will take for-goddamn-ever? Those are the fucking casuals, man.

(Hey, don't give me that look - I'll finish Dark Souls eventually. Sucks when you can't co-op and your wife actually wants to play these silly things just as much as you do.)


Gamers don't die, friends - they just respawn. That's branding 101 shit, right there. The people that Gamer Gate were originally pissed off already knew this, but after Samantha Allen's infamous "Open Letter" prophecized we'd give up once the new shiny title came out a few weeks later, they dug their heels in anyway, fuguring that if we put up with day-one and on-disc DLC, annual expansion packs for sports games sold as original products and technology that flat out didn't fucking work right, we'd just swallow this bait, too. They made their choice, and we're already seeing changes; Operation Disrespectful Nod, a letter writing campaign targeting advertisers, have already stripped GamaSutra down from 4 advertisers to 1, which includes Intel, the single biggest CPU producer in the world. If Intel is listening, and Intel knows that "gamers" aren't dead - just pissed off - that's a huge win for those who were pissed off at being insulted and shamed for being associated-by-default with a handful of social degenerates in a business that's worth over $70 Billion. I'd miss EuroGamer's Digital Foundry comparisons and The Escapist makes me laugh on a regular basis, but at this point, the entirety of the old guard has become so toxic, so hateful of their own consumers that I'm willing to watch it all burn.


Really, let's think about that for a second; in the next decade, video games as an industry will be worth more than movies. The PS4 has sold over 10 million consoles worldwide, and yet it has about two compelling exclusive titles at this point - maybe four if you live in Japan. You're hard pressed to find someone alive today under the age of 65 who isn't a "Gamer", if only casually. Now, let's say the entire movie review press said "Cinephiles are over. You all supported those fascist Christopher Nolan Batman movies, so clearly you're all NAZI supporting fascists!" - how would the world have reacted? They would have laughed it off as the nonsensical verbal garbage that it is.

But somehow, that's not what happened here. Because the targets are "Gamers" - a medium that's been vilified since the mid 1990s by assholes like Jack Thompson, who saw it as a potential to milk a young and largely misunderstood market for an easy pay day, and is still largely written off as "Murder Simulators" and "Electronic Children's Toys", and have struggled to find critical acceptance ever since - games have forever been painted with the broad brush of being no more than adolescent power fantasy and grotesque escapism for social miscreants. This is hardly the first time that's happened, mind you., In the 80s before that, it was tabletop games like Dungeous and Dragons turning the youth to Satanism. In the 60s, it was the power of Rock 'n' Roll making kids smoke dope and have premarital sex. In the 50s, it was comic books making kids into serial killers and homosexuals. It's all part of the same bullshit cycle of moral panic.
The trouble is that this particular moral panic comes from a very different source than Jack Thompson and Hillary Clinton, who have lost all power to censor violence in the medium thanks to a Supreme Court ruling that it would be violating free speech: The opposition stirring the pot this time is far less blatant about their aims. They claim that they want games to be "inclusive", to tone down "inherent sexism", to "explore innovative ideas". At face value, nobody but a self-admitting asshole would say any of that is a bad thing. I like plenty of games in which you play as female characters, and typically choose them when offered**. I don't give a shit what race my character is, and thought the subtle use of potentially-racial tension in the Telltale produced Walking Dead game was an interesting use of it as both a mechanic and a storytelling concept. I'm not a socially regressive monster who demands murderous white men as leads at all times; I thought the new Tomb Raider was pretty damned great, and the only brown tinged military shooter I've given a shit about in the last decade was Spec Ops: The Line, simply because it was basically Apocalypse Now: Afghanistan Edition. I think I'm open-minded, and willing to try new things if they look fun.

** You have no idea how much it hurts me to know that Ruto, my personal fishwaifu, is slow, clunky garbage in Hyrule Warriors. Not quite as bad as Zant, I admit (WHY THE FUCK DID THEY PROGRAM TRIPPING IN A WARRIORS GAME?!?!), but not half as good as Darunia, who's already just a crappy Ganondorf. If you want to wreck that game, just stick with Shiek, Zelda, Ganondorf and Link. Big shock there, I tell you...



Now, you know what doesn't look fun? Dear Esther. The Path. Gone Home. Depression Quest.  And it's not even because those are lacking in mechanics, because I thought Journey was alright. Sadly, these are the sort of games that the people who are shaming games for being sexist and uninviting to alternative audiences, rolling their eyes at them being all flash and no substance, are holding these trite and dull experiments up as what games "could be" in the glorious future that Gamer Gate is fighting against merely to keep their status qou of annual sequels to murder simulators. Fuck that self-serving stupidity. Pushing agenda and personal experience through entertainment is fine - I'm saying this as a fan of the Blue is the Warmest Color comic and the Wandering Son anime. I see nothing wrong with anything, even pressing the ill-defined concept of Social Justice against the expected Caucasian hetero-normative standard in Western media, being the driving force behind a work of art... I just ask that the work of art has to be interesting to start with. This is why I never liked Brokeback Mountain - it's entirely because Ang Lee is a boring director, not because the story he had to tell was any less valid or interesting than the typical heterosexual romance explored in other Hollywood films.

I'm not sayng people with no taste can't continue to support boring crap if they actually like it, but I don't want a future of shitty walkway simulators to be held up as the critical norm when far more interesting games are released and then pooh-poohed for not being completely politically correct. I want Bayonetta 2 not just because it's hilariously over the top softporn-as-empowerment, but because it's a fucking Platinum designed action game that plays like a twitchy dream. I want Super Smash Bros. not because it satisfied my core lust for patriarchal control, but because it means I can use fucking Mega Man to punch Ganondorf in the balls. (And, for the record, I'm not such a fanboy that I'm not FUCKING PISSED at the dull, simple, badly paced level design, and baby's first mechanics that Inafune's Mighty No. 9 is showing. Fucking hell, Inafune, how did those Shovel Knight assholes so thoroughly destroy you at your own literal game! *Ahem*) I don't want a sequel to Metal Gear Solid 4 because MGS4 was particularly good - I want MGSV because it allows players to explore a villain's point of view, their gradual and immense fall from grace between being a man who fights using standard war procedure for world peace to being a sociopath who trains child soldiers and abuses nuclear weapons to accomplish his ultimate goal. Those are the games I want, as someone who's been playing games since before he could read - fun, unique, interesting games that sometimes explore ideas I've never seen before, and others merely polish the concepts we already know are good.

It's with this in mind that I find everyone standing against Gamer Gate - frustration towards a group who's only requested transparency and honesty from the industry that claims to be looking out for them, and turns around to shame them for daring to question their authority or motives - has no choice but to turn back to the origins of it all and claim misogyny. The fact that they have a wealth of people willing to threaten them, doxx them and generally shit on their every move only throws fuel on the opposition's fire to claim that we're all basement dwelling pasty neck-bearded manchildren who are one lost game away from picking up an AK-47 and shooting up a school auditorium full of feminists... which, incidentally, is exactly what some creepshow did to victim extraordinaire, Anita Sarkeesian. I'm not afraid to show a pile of shit when one of "our own" squats on the lawn, so here, take a peek:



Notice something, though? He doesn't mention "games" - not even once. "Gamer Gate" is nowhere to be found, despite an obsession with a fairly obscure spree shooter named Marc Lepine, and a massive hate-boner for "Feminism". Assuming this isn't just a troll milking an already present controversy for lulz (Protip: most of these "threats" are just that), this is the rantings of an unbalanced sociopath who'd just as likely draw a gun on a feminist who didn't like porn, or cartoons, or advertisements. "Gaming" hasn't entered the threat once. And yet, this is, somehow, the true face of "Gamer Gate". You know what else is worth considering? The Something Awful forum was snickering about making the front page of The New York Times over "drama" they manufactured the other day. You know what was on the front page of the NYT?  Yeah, you can already see where this is going. There's also been rumblings that the GNAA - that is to say, the Gay Nigger Association of America - has been False Flagging Gamer Gate for a few weeks now, but is planning to abandon it since it hasn't gotten the results it was hoping for. Evidently the Billy Waggoner Crew - no exaggeration, professional twitter trolls - are in the mix as well.

For those somehow even less hip than myself, a "False Flag" is when you pose as a second party and then troll a third party, hoping for as much drama and internet fireworks as possible. The fact that Twitter is ridiculously easy to create multiple accounts ('burners') means that one person could easily be posing as multiple assholes on both sides, either arguing with one awful thing or fake-arguing another and hoping to get the original side to look foolish. A duplicate account under another identity is known as a 'sock puppet', but the danger of false flagging and falling for sock puppets runs both ways. The second largest tag in this whole affair has been #notyourshield, in which female gamers, gamers of color, and gamers who fall under the LGBT rainbow have posted photos of themselves to prove that yes, there are minority audiences who like video games exactly as they are. A handful of idiots created sock-puppets to bolster the numbers... but, with over 150,000 tweets in the last 30 days alone, you can bet your ass that plenty of them are, in fact, women, minorities and non-heterosexuals who see that Gamer Gate has a point.

It's also worth noting that the some of the most notable Gamer Gate supporters and signal boosters - Total Biscuit, Milo Yiannopolous, Brad Wardell, to name a few - are no strangers to death and rape threats themselves. The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory have more or less confirmed that anyone with a notable profile on The Internet is going to get random death threats from time to time, and it's been suggested through studies that men are actually more likely to be harassed anonymously than women... but, this shit gets complicated. Men get more hate targeted at them specifically, while women tend to get less frequent, but more generalized hate just because they're women. Apples and oranges. It's also worth noting that gay and bisexual people tend to get three times the harassment of their heterosexual peers in any given context, while transgender individuals get... well, you get the point. As I've said, this isn't specifically a "nerd culture" thing so much as it is an "internet culture" thing, and you're hard-pressed to find  anyone who's safe from blanket harassment.

With that said, perhaps the difference is that being a woman in nerd culture on the internet is still just enough of a novelty that a handful of them - like Sarkeesian, and Quinn, and most recently Brianna Wu - that their word is taken as more important than others in the same positions without the disadvantage of being women in a man's world.

Let's talk about Wu for a second, though. Brianna Wu - developer of the largely ignored Revolution 60 - is a nasty, heartless troll who literally used a photo from the Autism Speaks powerpoint of a kid with massive cognitive faculty problems and then made an "Advice Animal" meme pointing out how autistic Gamer Gate supporters are. When Camera Lady - notable supporter and internet detective who has legitimate, crippling autism - pointed out that was hypocritical behavior of someone who was standing against Gamer Gate because they were supposed to be a harassment campaign, replied "Leave me alone gross fucking aspie". When she was called on her general shittiness, she wrote it off as her 'account having been compromised'. Really, Wu? Your account was hacked for a total of 5 minutes before you had a media shit-storm and you've never ONCE mentioned it until someone called you out for being a shitty person? Get fucked, you hypocritical scumbag.


Oh, and for those curious, I've seen a handful of people defend Wu's use of "aspie", since it is a commonly used shorthand for Aspergers Syndrome. Here's the thing; Jew isn't a dirty word. Or Black. Or Oriental, really, since it's just pointing out timezones. But go ahead, try calling someone a "Gross Fucking Jew" and see if anyone isn't pretty sure you're a nasty anti-semite bag of wet racist garbage. You can be a racist prick, I don't really care. Just have the good sense not to pull the "I stand for socially progressive ideals and equality for everyone!" card with the same fucking hand.

Why does Brianna Wu matter? She's the one pushing for mainstream media over her anonymous death threat. She was humiliated in a KingOfPol stream in which Hotwheels told her "It's not all about you, Brianna.", and then cancelled on Milo Yiannopolous' pre-recorded radio show once MSNBC returned her called. This is a person who insults autistic people, and then plays the victim card once she gets some bile back. No, she didn't deserve it, but he only reason anyone gives a shit is because it plays right back into that "Misogynerds threatened Anita Sarkeesian, gamers hate women!" train of thought that's been the game media's go-to clickbait for over two years now. If Total Biscuit or Randy Pitchford or anyone who wasn't a poor, defenseless woman in a male dominated nerd industry posted a death threat as fact, people would laugh it off as him deserving it for being a gross fat nerd who makes money on YouTube anyway.


[Not sure where else to put this: Before I forget - literally anyone who points to Shadow of Mordor to say 'See? SEE? Gamer Gators don't CARE about ethics, otherwise twitter would be flooded with people complaining about this bullshit! IT'S ALL ABOUT WOMEN WITH YOU PEOPLE!!' can shove it right up their own piss-holes. Twitter only ignored the skeevy promotional-deals-or-no-review-copies bullshit because, for once, the gaming press simply talked about what a skeevy, underhanded bullshit that WB Interactive was pulling - after TotalBiscuit broke the news, of course, because I doubt any other reviewer would have the stones to get a copy and then not follow through without it already being public knowledge. Gamer Gate supporters didn't complain about ethical journalism on that one because the journalists actually did their fucking job, and hooray for that! The fact that it wasn't a Twitterstorm doesn't mean that Gamer Gate didn't send WB and the PR company they partnered with on this title how gross the whole thing was a massive stack of letters saying, effectively, 'This isn't cool. You pulling this shit does more damage to a game's reputation than letting honest reviewers give honest, open criticisms about it.']

Curiously enough, YouTube personality Boogie2988 - perhaps the first victim of blanket harassment by the not-yet-named Green Tea Party, simply saying "Trust no one - not even me!" several weeks ago when questions of mass censorship and collusion had not yet been answered in any meaningful capacity - has said that the promotional contracts he's signed in the last week have been far less draconian than those before, proving that the publishers "get it", if only once they've already stepped in it. You know what else Boogie's had recently? Death threats. Several of them. As in several this week. But since he's a fat, straight, white dude who's more interested in talking about the mechanics of Smash Bros. than about how sexist Samus' Zero Suit is, you can basically rest assured that nobody in the gaming press is going to mention it.

That's the whole problem in a nutshell, really: Not that mere fact that a "Social Justice" bias exists in this cottage industry, but that it takes precedent over the bigger picture, and got us to the point where gamers themselves are willing to believe that all those "other gamers" are clearly just a pack of blood thirtsy vagina hating lunatics. Zoe Quinn is caught screwing a writer who's been giving her positive press, which in turn uncovers the fact that she and her PR agent worked together to silence an independent feminist charity, yet the entire gaming press ignores this clearly shocking and, dare I say it, socially conscious story - because the woman's private life is her own business, even if it cost The Fine Young Capitalists upwards of $10,000 and blacklisted the charity in the gaming media proper. Remember folks, a year before all of that, Brad Wardell - a game developer with over a two decades of experience in the undustry - was accused of sexual harassment, a case in which the accuser had to publicly apologize for fabricating such heinous stories - but the fact that he was cleared of all charges was never covered as "news". They simply slapped an addendum on the original piece, citing him as a rape happy monster - a story that was so heinous it not only led to him getting death threats, but threats that people would rape his wife and sodomize his son.


You've not seen that information published until the last week, because nobody cares when a man is threatened on the internet - certainly not in gaming journalism circles, at any rate. And, no, I don't think pointing out the gross hypocricy in all of this is in any way standing against the progressive ideals that these sites clearly hold dear in the first place. I'm not a misogynist - I'm a misanthrope, if anything. While I don't consider myself any sort of politicized feminist, I'm certainly not anti-feminist in the sense: I think reproductive rights should be a given, I think what little evidence to support the notion of a wage gap is disgusting, I think that America treats pregnant women's work leave like a joke, and I for the life of me can't understand how any monster can be so offended by the sight of a titty that they'd request a nursing mother to recuse themselves from sight. Heck, I even agree that popular culture is kind of focused on a "male as default", which is just... silly, when you get down to it. Boys are easier to market to, I get that, but breakout oddities like My Little Pony suggest that the barriers of girls being comfortable playing with boy toys - but not the inverse - might finally be wearing down over time, and I fail to see the problem with that. I'm simply against bias in any one direction so thick it starts obscuring the truth, and allowing one side to be harassed without so much as a nod in their general direction while the other side is martyred, focused on as needing protection and special treatment. That's not feminism, which is the goal of usurping the status quo of women being treated as inferiors: The goal of any feminist is for women to be equal then men and have control of their own lives. Being treated better than men in any given situation is Benevolent Sexism, and is no better than when men are given preferential treatment - which, I guess, in context would be Malevolent Sexism? Wait, 'MalevolentSex'... damn, wish I'd thought of that years ago for my Steam user name.

So let's talk about that harassment - that vile, evil stuff that makes Gamer Gate look like such a bad idea in the first place. May I remind you, this isn't a Hate Group: We don't meet at the Town Hall in hoods or build bombs in Steve's basement. It's merely consumer revolt united under a single hashtag - no leader, no base of operation, no single manifesto, and thus is by default more or less incapable of policing individual and typically anonumous members to begin with... but  more importantly, most of the actual threats that crop up in this discussion aren't making them in the name of Gamer Gate to begin with.

That asshole who threatened Sarkeesian before the USU threat, sending her photos of her photoshoopped face covered in blood and bruises? He's either just a diluted madman, or - far more likely, statistically speaking - just a troll who sees that he can cause a disturbance in the community on both sides by literally handing Feminist Frequency free publicity. There's also the remote chance that it's an inside job meant to stir up sympathy, or even - as has been suggested to a separate threat - a particularly unscrupulous journalist literally creating click-bait bullshit to drive his ad views through the roof, but without proof, you run the risk of sounding like a goddamn maniac.

Curiously, one of the people who have been sending threats to Sarkeesian has been potentially identified as a Brazilian game journalist who's website makes money off of nerd related clusterfuckery. Who pinned his IP down? A Gamer Gate member. Because we'd rather hang the psychos out to try so we can get back to focusing on the actual problem, which is the gaming press treating us like shit - not women, not feminists, and certainly not the waste of protoplasm that is Jack Thompson 2.0 in a pair of hoop earrings.

 See that? You sww that this is? Internet Detective working to uncover the person responisble for harassing Anita Sarkeesian. Go ahead, tell us again how this is an organized Hate Group when we're the ones doing the legwork to stop the harassment of people we don't even like. It just makes you all sound crazy. Further adding to the hilarious severity of this situation, Men's Rights Activist side A Voice For Men is offering a $3,000 bounty on whoever finds the psychotic asshole who sent the threats that got the USU discussion shut down. We've basically hit the event horizon of Internet Crazy when Men's Rights people are willing to pay out of pocket to publicly shame someone who threatens Feminists.

That's not the only good thing to come directly out of Gamer Gate, either. We've already talked about The Fine Young Capitalists, but they've also raised over $5,000 for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, and most recently have been signal boosting the Extra Life cancer research charity, which all in all has made over 1.8 million dollars. When Eron Gjoni - Zoe Quinn's ex-boyfriend who inadvertantly blew the larger hypocricy of the gaming industry open - was dragged into court over the Zoe Post blog being an attempt to have her harmed - if not killed! - by the "vicious" gaming public, legal help was offered, pro bono, by supporters. When some creep tried to doxx Quinn yet again, 8chan called out for help, and the board was spammed with a constant flood of image macros for 5 hours straight to prevent the information from being on the site for more than a few seconds, until the moderators returned and could ban the IPs from where said sensitive information was coming from. When Anita Sarkeesian was being sent death threats by some anonymous piece of shit, he was tracked down by multiple Gamer Gate supporters, and all relevant information has been forwarded to the local police in the hopes that this creep can be brought to justice. But perhaps my favorite was when Gawker reporter Sam Biddle talked about how we should "Bring Back Bullying" and suggested we all "Smash a Nerd!", Michael Cernovich - a self-professed "law and fitness nerd" - immediately put $10,000 in escrow to donate to charity, if Biddle would box him for three rounds to donate to an anti-bullying charity. I SWEAR, NOT MAKING A WORD OF THIS UP.


So tell me, everyone who says Gamer Gate is a mysoginist cult worth destroying and should all kill themselves in the deep, dark recesses of their mothers' collective basements... what the hell have you guys done to help others in this, exactly, except yelling at a bunch of self-professed nerds?

Oh hey, a cute observation: After China published an article on this nonsense, pointing out what a nasty little hypocrite Zoe Quinn was, they called her a "Geen Tea Bitch", which is a Chinese slang for a whore who tries to look good on the outside - unsullied and pure, as green tea, is the idea. With this charming new vernacular in mind, 8chan's /gg/ board decided that "Green Tea Party" was a cute enough name for the opposition. I rather like it. Calling them "Anti's" sounds like the worst family reunion ever, and calling them "Social Justice Warriors" makes them sound like a positive influence out of context. So, if you ever hear me bitching about Green Tea Parties, either I went to the worst tea ceremony ever, or I'm sifting through a thousand tweets, trying to separate the interesting news from the assholes. I rather like 'Green Tea Party'. It's also, if inadvertently, a jab against the baseless and, to be honest, somewhat confusing argument that most Gamer Gate supporters are simply right wing anarchists (the overwhelming majority seem to be somewhere on the Leftist-Libretarian end of the political spectrum when given basic tests).

That out of the way, I want to share something with you guys. Something that made me laugh so goddamn hard I nearly fell out of my chair. The other day, the Green Tea Party started the tag #StopGamerGate2014. Why 2014? I'unno, probably because they saw #Kony2012 and thought that did great... even though, y'know, Joseph Kony is still out there in Africa, training child soldiers, and fighting against an enemy that also uses child soldiers. The tweet trended for 24 hours, getting a massive number of interest from both San Francisco - where Anita Sarkeesian, the Silver String Media group, and Zoe Quinn's associates are all located - and from... Indonesia. That's kinda' weird, right? Didn't realize Southeast Asia was so into gaming, much less the related harassment suffered almost entirely by American women. Well, the most obvious explanation for this oddity is because these tweets were being made by bots, or independently operated programs that automatically re-tweet any number of things they're told to watch for.

Another thing that irks me - every now and again I see someone pop up and say "I agree with what Gamer Gate stands for, but the tag is too associated with negativity. It's toxic. You need to switch names for anyone to take you seriously." As I've pointed out, Gamer Gate was the switched name - pulling away from Zoe Quinn, only continuing to talk about her because Quinn herself had the nasty habit of never shutting the fuck up, and yet the group - who's stated goal was to expose and correct corruption in the hobbyist industry - was labeled misogynistic terrorists anyway. To clarify, according to the detractors of this revolt, being associated with a certain tag means the tag itself is toxic.

So after that, this happened.



Your eyes aren't deceiving you, friends: A bot hired by the Green Tea Party, to re-tweet "#stopgamergate2014, was one of the very same bots hired by the ISIS terrorist organization. In the same fucking tweet, no less. Let that sink in, and then let me all-caps this shit just to amuse myself:
You hear that, everybody? Gamer Gate is not only too extreme for 4chan, it's too extremefor ISIS! WE'RE SO XTREME WE ONLY NEED ONE 'E'! ...I'm joking, of course, but this really is the sort of shallow, moral-panic drivel people are using to say that "Gamer Gate" = "Misogynists". It's simply not true. I despite Anita Sarkeesian, I really do, but that doesn't make me a woman hating beta - it just means I don't think poorly researched, emotionally manipulative and internally inconsistent criticism is worth giving attention to, much less be held up to the gold standard it is, quite blindly, by nerd culture around it being so afraid of being seen as social neanderthals as their pockets of cultish fascination becomes mainstream entertainment that they accept broken and misguided criticism as-is, warts and all, and don't have the balls to offer a second opinion on it either.

But if there's one thing I needed to remind myself where I stand, it's Alex Lifshitz' speech given at the Critical Proximity convention in April of 2014. Alex is credited as the associate producer for Disney-Pixar Kinect Adventures. THIS is the speech he gave, and this is a partial transcript of what the people who are against Gamer Gate actually think of the people who play the products they attach their names to:


This is the stream of bile that specifically starts around 5:30, but you get the idea. The only thing I'm willing to give him is that South Park's satire is brilliant. Well, that, and the Caroline Petit thing. Y'know what? Caroline Petit got far more than her fair share of bullshit for her review of GTAV, and yes, seeing the spiteful, unnecessary bile people flung her way - insulting every aspect of her they could find - pissed me off. I can fully understand why a transwoman would be more sensitive to gender issues than many people, but to be frank, she knew exactly what she was getting into with the Grand Theft Auto series. But being a transperson is bound to get you an inordinate amount of harassment, hate and bile. No, that isn't right. No, that isn't cool.

But it's not a gaming specific problem, either. Find me one transgendered person who hasn't been harassed, mocked, threatened and generally made to feel like shit just for existing, and I'll prove you're just quoting last week's episode of South Park. Petit has my sympathies for the bullshit she was given over a review for a game that, by the time it was published, nobody had ever played... but let's not pretend she didn't know exactly what sort of trap she was walking into. While this is playing to the other side of the fence and nobody's proud of admitting it, people have literally gotten death threats for changing the weapon balance in Call of goddamn Duty. Petit's gender identity was the lowest hanging fruit that anyone who wanted to hurt her could throw back, and that's exactly what they did. If she were Italian, they'd have called her a dumb wop. If she were Arabian, they'd have called her a Sand Nigger. She was a transwoman, and that's the insult they went with. It was gross, it was unnecessary, but it's not some uniquely grotesque aspect of gaming culture to insult someone in the easiest method to get a rise out of them. That's more "Trolling 101". Again, Greater Internet Fuckwad theory in action. If you think anyone, anywhere, hasn't gotten death threats on the internet for voicing an opinion the psycho at the other end disagreed with, you're a fucking moron. I've had numerous PMs insulting my weight, my job, my appearance and my sexual preferences from someone who literally knew one thing about me: That I disagreed with him on how good a particular Blu-ray transfer looked. Nobody's defending Caroline Petit's trolls. But nobody should be surprised by them, either - nor should they be more upset just because Petit was a transwoman. Remember when critics that gave The Dark Knight Rises less than optimal scores were harassed by anonymous assholes? Same sort of sociopaths. So unless you want to argue that Movie Culture or Nerd Culture as a whole has an issue with harassment, it's just more of the same old shit.

But y'know what else? Fuck this Lifshitz clown. Fuck him and the pretentious thesaurus this speech came from. "Mice that roar" and "Dishonest sacks of hot garbage that should be broken on racks"? But somehow we're the crazy people. Alright, sure, let's not question that or anything...

On the other hand, the industry is far and away more on our side than they're willing to admit in public with all the bad press kicking about. Case in point: Here's a fucking Senior Microsoft Executive showing anonymous support on 8chan.



Truth be told, I wish the Green Tea Party luck - I really do. Every time they try to pin threats on us with no real connection, every time they cite a doxxing we know is fake, every time they get 8chan mentioned on the news, it only adds fuel to the fire. Gamer Gate wants to see the ivory towers of a niche industry they've supported crumble under the weight of their own hypocrisy, and with Nintendo already having gotten rid of standard press releases in favor of spreading the word through Nintendo Direct streams and YouTube uploads, the sites in question that are starving for clicks don't need to exist. Frankly, the fastest way to get rid of this tag would be to pussy up and write a refined ethics code, and stick to it...

...which The Escapist did! HUZZAH! ETHICS, HONESTY, THE PRESS MAKING GOOD! Well, that was the idea, at least. The fact is they're already backing down over some of the content they published under the banner of "strong principles" usurping content. To summarize, they've published a total of 23 developer interviews on the whole saga - male and female, positive and negative, trying to get a wide variety of takes on what this is all about, and why it matters to people in the first place. It sounded great at first - an honest, open, unfiltered take on what people who actually create games think about the whole situation - but shit started getting weird, and since publishing the full spread, two of them have been removed over a dedication to stand against harassment. One of the developers - the head of Rouge Star Games - has all but admitted to being a troll, so that wasn't a big shock, and he wasn't too upset about the whole thing. The bigger concern is over the removal of the latter, which has the following quote - hand to god, this is what it says:

While we cannot speak to the legitimacy of such of complaints, due to our strong policy prohibiting harassment and abuse we thought it best to simply remove the interviews.

For fuck's sake, guys! Literally the only website of the old guard that's been priding itself on new and improved ethical standards pulled content critical of their industry because someone might have harassed someone? Might being the key word there - the concept of proof is optional. Because, Hell, what journalist ever asked for that! The net result? While I'm not one to defend Rougestar Games on this one, James "Grimachu" Desborough's name being associated with "potential harassment", the extend of which was him literally poking his head into an IRC chat to learn what the fuss was all about, asking to be directed to a stream discussing it, and saying "bye". That's fucking it. Sadly, with his name displayed prominently on the article as a "possible harasser", he's been the target of a harassment campaign so brutal that his wife had to assure the public that she was sitting by him the whole time to be sure he didn't do anything to harm himself.

Let's question that a little further. A developer gets called a "harasser" without proof, gets a torrent of hate delivered to his door as a result,  and The Escapist doesn't offer so much as an apology.Anita Sarkeesian, YouTube Critic - not even an actual fucking game developer! - gets harassed by anonymous dipshits, and it's fucking news. Because of course all gamers are toxic, but they'll only pay attention when it's a Damsel in Distress and makes a better biline. You can set your fuckin' watch to the fact that Desborough getting shat on by someone who doesn't like gamers won't be covered by anyone in the old guard of gaming journalism, simply because there's no pre-existing narrative for "Gamer Gate Detractors Are Sociopathic Trolls". It's be a contradiction, if anything, and then suddenly every site that posted one of those dozen "Gamers are Over" articles - or even simply shut their damned mouths over the whole thing - would need to admit that they were full of shit the whole time, or at best only telling half the story. Admitting something like that would require things like basic journalistic integrity, so, y'know... here we are, back where we started.

Ain't that just some shit? I wonder why those three lines of literally nothing even came up in the first pla--


Oh. Well. This is... interesting. Greg Tito, lead editor of the escapist, is being told by Alex Lifshitz - that "gamers are sacks of hot garbage" douchenozzle - that "this is not the hill to die on". Call me paranoid, but when the opposition's methods involve censorship and obscuring facts, they're probably not the good guys, no matter how hard they shout that you hate anything with a vagina.

What do we know about Alex Lifchitz? Not too much, curiously enough. Bit of a black horse in this whole affair. We know that the "biggest" title he was involved in was as an intern on one of the Call of Duty games, which means this is the sort of asshole who'd run donuts to Michael Bay on the set of Transformers 20 and then talk, at length, about how Hollywood is doomed and moviegoers should all be chemically castrated. We also know his father runs some corporation valued at hundreds of millions of dollars, so he has the resources to do whatever he pleases in his spare time. Why he's the guy making an editor for a Defy Media publication quake in his damned boots, I haven't a clue. I'd say that questioning what ties this jackass has to the industry in the first place would be tin foil worthy, but after the GameJournoPros list, the IGF having direct financial ties to Polytron and Silver String Media having proven to guide certain games towards the public spotlight in critical circles, I'm not sure what's crazy and what's not anymore.

Then again, much as The Escapist remains one of the damned few places outside of 8chan allowing open and uncensored discussion, that doesn't absolve them of any bullshit they themselves perpetuated. After all, we can't forget that The Ecapist still employs MovieBob. I wonder what he's been--


...wow. Really, Bob? This from the guy who called Megan Fox a blow-up doll? Who pointed out that Bayonetta's character design was an intentional inversion of the typical design aesthetic for female Japanese sex symbols, and a literal case of a designer Mari Shimazaki's female power fantasy? The man who argued in favor of Metroid: Other M's oddly submissive and cloying version of Samus Aran not being weirdly sexist because [game mechanics] > [storytelling], and the former is somehow an excusable cause to ignore the latter? Boy, it must be easy to buy a higher horse these days...

Again, The Escapist was important because the editorial staff itself was taking a Switzerland stance on the site proper, and they remain the only worthwhile place (barring sifting through 8chan) that's keeping tabs on the whole mess via the forums. It basically means that the Black List and White List are as important as ever. The more you ignore the former and the more you support the latter, the faster Gamer Gate has nothing to complain about, and the faster we can all go back to ignoring this retardation and waiting for The Phantom Pain to come the fuck out already.

The appearance of Something Awful, the GNAA and other literal troll groups all begs further questions, of course: Were one of them the same anonymous third party who hacked The Fine Young Capitalists, proclaiming themselves to be "The Head Mod of /V/"? Did they also doxx Brianna Wu on 8chan's lesser known /b/ board knowing she has ties to people working at MSNBC, just to see how far they could propel it? Were they hired by some third party to cause a big stink and elevate someone's career in the process? Nobody really knows. But if it turns out to be true, it confirms what I've suspected for weeks now - that 90% of the people flinging death threats don't really give a shit about either side of this debate, they just think watching gamers and the people who hate them flip out is hilarious... I'm sad to say it, but they probably have a point. Brianna Wu is such a nasty bitch that she creates new supporters just by being terrible in front of those who haven't picked a side yet. The masterstoke of all this, however, is they're stirring the pot days before Brianna Wu is set to go on CNN and CBS. I'd be more upset if she weren't so damned good at choking on her own feet, and accidentally converting more neutral parties to the Gate who don't understand why one woman they've never heard of getting anonymous threats somehow constitutes a Hate Group.

Honestly, I'm lost here: What the fuck did gamers ever actually do? All this talk of a sexist, exclusionary, toxic community didn't crop up until Anita Sarkeesian appeared on the scene in 2012. Now the gaming industry is so quick to lash out at anything it perceives as being exclusionary that we had endless debates about whether or not Assassins Creed Unity would have a playable female lead, despite literally every game in the franchise being the story of one character. We have an industry where tweets, even full blown editorials dedicated to the Far Cry 4 cover art being racist, despite both characters on it being Himalayan natives. (If anything, the image was supposed to be classicist - but, that's neither here nor there...) I've seen the God of War series swap out "offensive" trophy name making a tasteless 'Bros before Hoes' joke, despite it being a franchise in which you literally tear the eyes out of your enemies and then enter Quicktime Event mini-games to fuck multiple women. I've seen corrections about the Tomodachi Life controversy still be wrong, insisting that the Japanese version of the game allowed gay couplings (it doesn't), and insisting that adding a same-sex option to the game's code, a game which was already being localized on the cheap as an act of curious desperation, would be simple (it wouldn't). I must have read a dozen pieces pimping Remember Me up to be the second coming of Christina, an empowered heroine in a unique game environment that no publisher felt comfortable releasing because it had a cooties-infested gurl as the lead! Oh, wait... the truth is nobody wanted to release it because, despite a few really clever ideas, the game itself kind of sucks.

Yes, the majority of the gaming media reports tiny tidbits - new character nobody but Sakurai likes confirmed for Smash Bros., inevitable DLC pass for Arkham Knight detailed, Tomb Raider Rises exclusive to Xbox for, uh... a little while maybe - so the "majority" of news reported is just that, news. But such a large chunk of the editorial commentary is targeted at making people like me feel bad because I liked Manhunt - not because the game was actually the deplorable murder simulator Jack Thompson always warned us about, but because it didn't have a strong female lead or any positive depictions of Afro-Americans. It becomes exhausting. You want to complain about something that gamers actually give two shits about? Make a stink about how Hyrule Warriors lets you pre-order $20 worth of DLC a month before it's actually available on the main menu. Having had to punch in a code to get Ganondorf's skins and pre-ordered one of three specific costumes, I'm already wishing I could ignore the awesome allure of paying $8 to unlock Epona... as a friggin' weapon. (Yeah. Kinda' like Hyrule Warriors. Not entirely relevant, but fuck it, someone should know.)

The funny thing is, there's an instant kill switch on this: All Gamer Gate asked for was for their hobbyist press to stop gargling bullshit in front of them, so if every site simply acknowledged they may have made some mistakes, and here's a shiny new ethics policy to make for any misgivings we may have had in the past... hey. Gamer Gate has no corruption to fight. Report on Desborough's harassment, talk about the creepy think-tank bullshit going on behind the scenes at DiGRA, then let your intern write a piece on how he thinks the character designs of Mortal Kombat 40 are sexist wank fantasy and how Tim Schafer says we're all intellectual babboons - boom, all sides covered, nothing to hide, and nobody has any room to complain. There'd still be back room bullshit aplenty, we all know that, but even being paid lip service would be enough to give a large chunk of this revolt no platform left to stand on: The very second game joruanlists acknowledge there were issues with the way things have been for years in the second that Gamer Gate supporters have finally had their voices acknowledged, and then all of this mess can be put out behind us. It's just, so... simple.

Too bad that's not the road they've taken. As of Friday the 17th, Polygon, Giant Bomb, EuroGamer, GameSpot, and Game Politics have all published "Letters From The Editor" in various forms, all saying more or less the same thing: Corruption hasn't ever been isn't the issue, harassment is, and that's all Gamer Gate has cared about. To their credit, GameSpot acknowledge that only a small but very vocal minority of people are engaging in anything that's actually harassment, but the other four... hell, the last of them goes as far to defend the GameJournoPros list, despite the creator of it having compared it to the JournoList - which, if you've never heard of, is not seen as a positive thing by either side of the political spectrum. If we don't have a dozen articles all published by Sunday, I'll almost be disappointed. Get caught with your hand in the cookie jar? Double down, folks! It's the only way to get those nasty Gamers to go away - I mean, it worked so well six weeks ago...

It just doesn't end, either. Rolling Stone just ran an interview with Anita Sarkeesian, calling her "the most important critic in video games". Guess they never saw that presentation she game in 2010 where she says she wasn't a big fan of video games, or realize that the first video she ever did on the subject was her spouting off so many blatantly untrue "facts" about Bayonetta she may as well have been describing another game. The Southern Poverty Law Center has classified Gamer Gate an actual hate group along with the KKK and Black Panthers. CBS and CNN are on tap for next week, with some of the regulars threatening "big things" coming our way... and that's where it's all going to get a little crazy, isn't it.

Mainstream coverage is ultimately going to be the game changer, and I'm not convinced how thoroughly people on either side are conscious of it yet. As much as the vast majority of gamers - Core and Casual alike - are blissfully ignorant of this comparatively epic Nerd Scuffle... but the publishers? They're paying very close attention. You want to see an end to this one way or another? Just wait until 2K, EA, Ubisoft and Square-Enix see news reports about how video games are now directly linked to misogyny, harassment and domestic terrorism. This is an industry that's worth bank, sonny, and the moment that major publishers think that Gamer Gate being thrown about on CNN is going to cut into their Black Friday sales, that's the moment we'll see a massive PR push back against the narrative that gamers are basement dwelling autistic woman haters. Don't forget, Microsoft single handedly took games out of the basement and into the mainstream with the massive marketing push behind the Xbox line, bleeding money for years until it finally stuck. I wonder how they feel about all this...

While there was less direct feedback in the days before internet, I can pretty much guarantee you Sega, Nintendo and Phillips didn't like it 15 years ago when they were accused of sewing the seeds of violence in America's youth. They played the game, struck back at those damning accusations with the founding of the ESRB... and, once they could claim that a little "M" on the box confirmed that Doom wasn't appropriate for Little Jimmy, everything went back to normal. I can see Microsoft arranging charity events to donate to anti-bullying campaigns, and Sony starting a college fund for young women interested in game design and programming. Hell, Nintendo doesn't even need to do anything to convince its target demographic that it's just a box that people are supposed to have fun on - it just needs to remind people that the Wii U isn't a separate accessory for the damned system they bought seven years ago!


If anything is going to lead to a full blown nuclear strike for or against Gamer Gate, it's going to be the guys holding the purse strings. To that end, Chris Mancil, the public relations guy from EA, has already come out in support of Gamer Gate's frustrations towards a media circus that seems to have drifted away from its audience. Now, to put that into perspective, EA has pulled such ridiculous anti-consumer shenanigans that it was voted the worst company in America twice in a row in public polls -  and yet, even those assholes know not to piss off their money when it's suddenly made personal. Gamers are suckers for downloadable content and deluxe limited editions, we already know that... but we're don't take kindly to being spat on. For all the nasty, petty, dumb shit EA has done over the years - hell, Spore's DRM bullshit alone has had them on my personal shitlist for about half a decade now - even they're nervous that this consumer revolt could turn against them. What happens if Microsoft feels the pressure of Misogynerd Gamers giving their flagship console line a bad name? What happens if Ubisoft decides to try another whack at a viral campaign like they did with the Frag Dolls, but this time turns it against the spite-filled ideologues who are calling their bread and butter sexist trash?

And that's why this isn't just going to fade away. Video games have found massive commercial success in the last decade, but they've never been socially accepted as anything but a curious time-waster or an excuse to be nostalgic - go ahead, show me a single 25 year old who doesn't own a retro Mario shirt. Games themselves, however, are still seen as the inferior consumer product film criticism legend Roger Ebert said could never be high art, and they're still living in the shadow of Jack Thompson pounding the drum of Doom having created school shooters and Grand Theft Auto sitting on the verge of an outright ban for inaccessible code leading to an unfinished, shitty softcore porn mini-game at the very start of the last console generation. Gamers aren't second class citizens because they can be anyone - a privileged snotty WASP given a 3DS for his birthday, or a poor boy in the ghetto who's sole anti-drug is the latest annual release of Madden - but the hobby itself is seen as third rate garbage, even by the critics who are supposed to be pulling for them. Gamers who see this hypocrisy have nowhere to collectively call their own now, and they'll simply do what they used to do; buy games that might be good, play them, fuck around on /v/ for new titles to play, and try to focus on the fun part of gaming instead of the tedious bullshit that surrounds them.

You want brutal honesty on this whole affair? Ask yourself what sort of people are so hung up on video games being insulted that they're willing to write letters and parse twitter feeds and screencap fucking everything, just to prove a point they have no direct involvement with. Gamer Gate may not be mysoginistic... but it might just be a case of, to borrow the turn of phrase from the opposing side, Weaponized Autism. You're talking about an audience that beats Dark Souls, the masochistic console equivalent to masturbating with a cheese grater, more than once! How the fuck do even try you nuke that?

I'm not talking completely out of my ass on this one, either. As someone who was diagnosed as being on the spectrum a decade and a half ago myself, I can promise you that you're better off herding cats than trying to convince a hardcore fan he should change how he "feels" about something that means a lot to them. I know video games are stupid. I also know I've seen Jack Thompson's reign of terror before, twice, and it pissed me off then as much as this bullcrap is pissing me off now. Maybe I'm over reacting, who knows... doesn't matter. Because I am a Gamer. I'm sick of the way the press that's supposed to represent me has treated me and my own. And in this instance, I can't lose. The game industry will pull out of the sites associated with it long before Gamers will stop beating their drum. We've been trained to keep fighting infinitely, to literally play the same rounds over and over on harder difficulties to get better scores, or even unlockable costumes. The best part? The Gamer Gate DLC is all free, and with no sequel in sight there's no reason for the community to abandon it for the next entry. Gamer Gate wants to see the game industry reformed, and barring that, it'll just keep grinding until there's nothing left but a server crash.

Gamers will still be Gamers, buying new titles and complaining about how they suck anyway... but the gaming press? That's the only group here that should be afraid. Keep pushing back, and we'll strike at the vital point: Not the traffic, nor the columnists, but their advertisers, whilst poisoning the outside world to their value in the first place.  That'll be the final straw, and Black Friday is looming, even now. If the gaming media pushes this "Gamers are Violent Misogynist Scum" narrative any harder, it won't be long before the game publishers themselves don't want to be associated with them anymore. They'll be happy to let YouTubers and Twitter Feeds handle the news if they see the rest of the industry as a liability. If the gaming sites that have shat on our collective good will change, we win. If they don't, I've got two words for 'em:

GAME OVER.

Really, Viz? You're going to make me do this, huh? Alright then. I've had a go at Media Blasters, I've called FUNimation on their bullshit, I can't tell you how many times I've had to publicly shame Arrow Video on old shenanigans, so if you want in on the "fun", that's your problem.


To be honest, I wanted to be polite about this. I wanted to post those atrotious SD upscaled screengrabs from Viz'SAILOR MOON Blu-ray once it came out, sigh really loudly and post a facepalm picture, say "Welp, ain't that some shit... wubba-lubba dub-dub!" and be done with it. I'm a busy guy, they've got money to make, the disclaimer would be enough for everyone to be somewhat satisfied, people could judge for themselves... this should have been easy. Frustrating, depressing and ugly, but easy, none the less.

Don't get me wrong, those promo shots and video clips Viz has been been pimping since about Anime Expo were always a bloody mess - a clusterfuck or questionable decisions and limited resources, I know, but fans of this franchise have been so starved for a complete, proper presentation that I don't even blame a single one of them for knowingly buying a shitty release, because I've done it myself many, many times over the years. 'It is what it is', I told myself. No sense dragging Viz through the mud for a release even they, and everyone else already knew, is a shit-show by nature... heck, I'm honestly a little disappointed to admit I was late to this particular party, not realizing how bad things were going to be until a couple weeks after everyone else had seen the proof.

I certainly had my reasons for being out of the loop. But we'll get to that later...



I figured that, much like The Great Humongous, I'd stop all the violence and just walk away... and then you had to lie through your teeth to our collective face. Why, Viz? It's not bad enough that you have to put shit on our tongues, but you had to look us in the eye and tell us it's delicious Belgian chocolate, too? No, man. That's where I draw the fucking line. You don't literally feed the consumer half-true information about the quality of your product, and more specifically, misrepresent the quality of competing products and expect me to hold my tongue. You don't lie to the internet and expect anyone to forget, much less forgive. That's an amateur move, and what's worse, y'all fucking knew it when you made it.

I'm not writing this because the new Sailor Moon Blu-ray/DVD release sucks. It does, but that's not the part I'm mad about. I'm mad because they suck, and Viz is willing to throw Toei under the bus to say it's not their fault their own in-house upscale is a miserable pile of ass. Not happening, folks. Not on this blog, at any rate.

The lie I'm talking about specifically is THIS POST on the Neon Alley blog earlier in the week, which includes several comparisons between the Viz Blu-ray, and the Japanese DVD. These DVDs are region locked, feature no English language options, and were until very recently the only legitimate way to purchase the entire series for playback on NTSC systems. Don't get me wrong, I love image comparisons - they're a great way to learn how to identify video anomalies, and help consumers who have an eye for said differences. In short, an honest, accurate A/B comparison is the best way for consumers to make an informed decision.

The problem here is that Viz did not use accurate screenshots. They went out of their way to make the R2 DVD screenshots look worse than the actual discs in an effort to make their absolutely abhorrent HD "Remaster" look better by comparison. They also claim early comparisons were from the "Japanese DVD Release" itself, rather than the "DVD Master" as later samples were called. It's bullshotting at its finest either way, but I want to establish how utterly full of it Viz is being before we get into how they're being dishonest.

If you're a visual kinda' Sailor Soldier, here's pretty much all you need to know about what a filthy, back-stabbing lie Viz is pushing to make their set not look like a steaming pile of poorly upscaled shite:


Worse yet, if this Anime News Network ANNCast Interview with Charlene Ingram and Julie McDonald is any indication, they're digging their heels in for the long haul, with zero plans to fix the discs themselves, or change authoringhouses for future titles. In other words, I hope you like all of Viz' future upscales looking like frame-blended and saturation-boosted butthole, because that's all I'm ever going to expect from them going forward.

 For further examples of just how ridiculous the funky frame-blending issues are...


No, I won't be dissecting the whole discs for a 10-page autopsy: The above examples should be enough to prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that these are a train-wreck far beyond my already meager expectations. This wasn't hard, Viz: When you were offered SD materials, you should have done a DVD release, gauged customer interest in a Blu-ray and then double dipped a year or two down the line. Now customers are stuck with artifacts that are worse than the import editions, and for a release claiming to be a High Definition definitive remaster, that's unacceptable. In fact, it's bullshit.

And for the record, the DVD version is a 16:9 frame pillarboxed to 4:3, meaning about 25% of the frame is simply wasted space. Yes, most HDTV monitors at this point are 16:9, but that means resolution is limited more than it has to be. Yes, this is stupid. Yes, this was the wrong decision to make from a production standpoint. But it's so, so far down on the list of "shit wrong with Viz' release of Sailor Moon" that I'm not going to even give it the time of day.

Viz Media is lying to you. That's all there is to it. Straight from McDonald's mouth: "All I can tell you is that what you're seeing in terms of blended frames is not part of the post-production process."This is untrue; it's simply the result of an IVTC algorithm not being tweaked to handle unexpected 3:2 cadence changes, and yes, you bet your ass if I had been handed those gorgeous ProRes captures from Digibeta I could have been able to spit out a proper 23.976fps master without any consistent issues. Animation is one of the most problematic types of material you can work with, and it's become abundantly clear that Subatomic Digital - likely through inexperience more than a lack of sincere effort - have come up dramatically short.

The only possible reason this could be the result of the digital masters present to Viz is if Toei did something horribly wrong to produce them. Unfortunately, for that theory to hold any water, we'd have to assume any other international licensor was given the same shoddy materials to work with, since Toei has no reason to play favorites with anyone else. There have been numerous reports confirming that the progressive PAL DVDs released by Kaze Dynamic of Italy* are not only pulled from the same sources as Viz Media's 1080p abortion here, but that they managed to properly IVTC the source video and pitch it to 25fps without any issue. In other words, Kaze Dynamic did what Subatomic Digital didn't: Treat the footage properly, restore the original 23.976fps framerate without any frame blending, and leave the perfectly normal analogue film grain exactly as they should have.

"We're like, video passion on steroids here! That's how addicted we are to getting the best possible imagery..."she continues on the ANNCast."I don't think there's a lot of ground we can cover by pointing to this or that image and saying, this is the right image, that's the right image... I can tell you without a doubt that myself and ten videophiles sit with me, 20 hours a day, working on this material know, and are providing Charlene and our Neon Alley folks with the images that we have access to."

Allow me to express my feelings in the only medium I find appropriate, under the circumstances:


Now, let me explain why I'm so incredibly pissed off by this answer, and why I was willing to try and ignore this sideshow since, franly, I don't have the time for it: This week, I finalized the M2V and AC3 files for a particular DVD release that'll hit shelves sometime next year after, quite literally, months of work I did over weekends and in the wee hours of the night after finishing my regular 40 hours a week doing what I do to make a living. I won't mention the title - odds are you all know what it is anyway, but I at least have to pretend Kentai is an anonymous parody of a shared autistic videophile sarcasm rather than a real human being with video processing credits well into the thousands now - but suffice to say it's a substantially less iconic piece of animation than Sailor Moon will ever hope to be. Honestly, if this title had been a dump of the not-so-great import DVD with no added work, the small fanbase for the sort of niche title we're talking about would have sighed, shrugged, and ponied up $20 just to show their support on principle. It's that kind of show... the kind that gets a release out of a combination of nostalgia from a small set of hardcore fans, and a morbidly curious subset looking for explosions of insanity they've somehow missed from yester-year who figure it's a fair price to peek their head into the freak tent.

The release took forever, but it's not exactly "pretty". Massively improved, absolutely, but those materials were a goddamn joke: I worked from the only surviving analog masters - certainly not fresh 2002 Digibetas that look like a perfect representation of the 16mm film they were shot on, but crumby analog tapes closer to VHS that DVD. We're talking NTSC masters so old they'd be legally allowed to drink! I spent an entire season fixing that two and a half hours or so worth of footage; color grading literally each and every shot for accurate flesh tones and exposure issues, manually removing scratches using matte plates to prevent eyeballs and drops of blood from distorting or disappearing, fixing major film and video damage that I found unacceptable, repairing analogue opticals with digital replacements when I had no other choice to avoid funky seams popping up as a result, experimenting for two weeks on DVNR algorithms that minimized the issues inherent to those god-awful sources without molesting any of the "real" detail underneath... this DVD is my fucking magnum opus. The sanity I've lost is something I can never get back, and honestly, the only praise I expect to see are one or two forum posts saying something along the lines of "Oh hey, that's finally out? Well, it looks better than my old VHS. Too bad there's no Blu-ray though."

My blood, sweat and tears are infused into that remaster, and yet I doubt it'll sell more than 2,000 copies before the license expires. For fuck's sake, I haven't even discussed payment yet because (and please, don't tell my boss this!) that's not why I do it, or at least that's not my primary motivation for doing it... I did it because it was the right thing to do. Because ultimately popular culture is our culture, in all of its kitschy, grotesque and embarrassing glory. Sailor Moon in particular holds a very special place in the hearts of girls who grew up on it - a show about empowerment that was still feminine, wrapped up in a charming bubblegum aesthetic and with a cast of defined, lovable characters? That's the kind of shit people eat up forever. This is a title that fans have been frustrated to only have abridged, incomplete, and heinous quality options for... and this is how their patience and love has been repaid. A botched pseudo-HD master and a bunch of carefully worded corporate deflections that all boil down to, we tried super hard, you guys! Honest!

"As a videophile yourself", Zac Bertschy asks, "Do you look at this and say: Okay, this is as good as this show can look?"

"You know, my feeling about it is I'm really happy with what we did to it, based on what we had to work with. I'm thrilled with it... these issues don't trouble because I don't think they make the product in any way less - I know the love and care we put into it. So am I happy with it? I am happy with it... I'm completely over the moon with it, if you must know!"

Zac later asks: "So fans who pre-ordered this set and get their copy in the mail. They aren't happy with the video quality. What do you suggest that they do?"

Charlene has an answer on that front: "Of course we take all feedback very seriously, but that's... It's up to everyone to decide what they want to do with what they bought. Given - to echo Julie's point - given what we had to work with, that's how it was able to turn out with everyone working on it, so, we just don't have any news on that at this time."

In other words, if you think this release is a slap in the face... you can eat a dick. In fact, you can eat a whole bag of soggy lukewarm dicks if you're still hungry. They're sticking with their partners, they're not changing the process, and we can expect similar results going forward. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Before I can go any further, I need to quote the following piece from the Neon Alley blog that raises further questions:

The original footage for Sailor Moon, being from way back in 1992, is also older than many fans who adore the series now. In 2009, Japan released the seasons on DVD using the best materials available, Unfortunately, the original film from 1992 just does not exist. In making our Blu-ray releases, we used the same masters used to create the those beautiful releases, but make them work for the modern Blu-ray format.


Waaaaaitasecond... let me re-emphasise the part that caight my eye, just to be clear:

"In 2009, Japan released the seasons on DVD using the best materials available, Unfortunately, the original film from 1992 just does not exist."

First of all, the SD Telecine work was done in 2002 - a minor correction, I know, but the fact that a 12 year old DVD kicked your shoddy upscale's ass is still worth pointing out for a total understanding of how hard this ball was dropped. More importantly though, why the fuck does the original film "not exist" for this series, exactly? Toei had no trouble pulling the camera negatives for Dragon Ball Z out to do their fascinating (if not entirely successful) Dragon Ball Kai experiment a couple years back. In 2009, the entire 152 episode Fist of the North Star TV series had a new HD master created from the original film negatives, creating an even higher quality DVD release that the previous 2004 edition. Toei has pulled 35mm negatives out of cold storage for feature films including the Saint Seiya and Galaxy Express and Sherlock Hound movies... and yet somehow, Sailor Moon - easily Toei Animation's most iconic and internationally beloved magical girl franchise, not to mention one of their top earning franchises of the 1990s - "doesn't exist"? Unless you can point me to some dramatic explanation for this one, I'm calling bullshit.

To put this into perspective, that company I worked with? They had a contract with a major Japanese animation distributor. They asked for an HD master, and were told one didn't exist. They asked if they could get a film print, and were told if they were willing to pay they'd make a new Interpositive. So yes, technically it's possible that whatever actual 16mm elements were scanned in 2002 have gone lost. But to imply that Sailor Moon is the one vintage Toei Animation show that simply DOES NOT HAVE FILM ELEMENTS? No fucking chance do I buy that. I mean, if this were some no-budget obscure OVA produced by a nobody in 198X for the faint hope of breaking even? Sadly, you might have something. But Toei somehow lost all of their film masters for Sailor Moon? Really? Come on, guys - this isn't Genocyber, Dream Hunter Rem, Roots Search or some other obscure mess I'd believe has been lost to the sands of time. Honestly, this would be like saying that Warner Brothers can't find the camera negative for The Shining. Because, reasons, don't worry about it.

I could criticize this stupidity for hours on end, but... honestly, I'd rather not. My office is in the process of moving, I really need to get some sleep at some point, and I'd rather just call this shit and move on with my life. Viz, you fucked up. Hard. You're on the shit list, and don't expect me to assume the best from you while you continue to squat down and let releases like this congeal out of your company's backside.

For those curious how this horrendous level of bullshit was accomplished, here's a list of exactly what's wrong with the Viz comparison: 


The R2 DVD screenshots are presented in their 'native' 1.5:1 aspect ratio. DVD stores MPEG-2 video at a resolution of 720:480 at 29.97fps. That 720:480 file is then given a "flag" which tells the DVD decoder to play the file as either squished to 4:3 (ie: SDTV "square") or stretched to 16:9 (ie: HDTV "wide").

In short, nobody would ever, ever watch a DVD with a fat, distorted 2:1 aspect ratio as is being displayed in Viz' own comparison. Yes, technically the DVDs do store their data that way, but that's now how it actually looks when played back on literally any piece of software designed to play DVDs.

Also note that there's some pretty severe aliasing



The R2 DVD screenshots show interlacing. This is a trickier one to discuss because, yes, most anime DVDs are interlaced - that is, the 24fps film frames were converted to irregular patterns of 29.97fps video that show "combing" during motion. Interlacing is normal on NTSC signals, and isn't technically a 'flaw', just a normal part of the broadcast process.

When you watch an interlaced DVD on an interlaced TV, the set itself is refreshing in half-frame intervals, so everything looks normal. When you watch an interlaced DVD on a progressive monitor (like an HDTV), either the display or the DVD player is deinterlacing the signal first. Sometimes deinterlacing looks like crap and introduces jagged, aliased edges and blended frames; other times the deinterlacer is "smart" enough that it can reconstruct the original film frames and look like a proper, progressive image. It really depends on your hardware, and the content itself: Anime, due to its typically low framerates, is infamously difficult to convert from interlaced frames back to the original film frames due to limited motion wigging the algorithms out.

Is it difficult to remove interlacing on cartoons without leaving interlacing behind, or creating blended frames? Immensely. But it can be done. I know this because I manually tweak Inverse Telecine scripts every fucking week at the office. It's difficult to get the right mix and sometimes occasional frames are bound to get fucked, but as you can see at THIS COMPARISON, it's not impossible to convert the 480i broadcast signal on the DVDs back to 480p film frames... hell, knowing Toei's general lab work, I doubt this was even what I'd consider a "difficult" job.


There's really no proper excuse for this one. The chroma channel has been boosted on their "DVD" screenshots to the point where reds have become oversaturated and detail has gone missing completely - detail that is present on their Blu-ray release. The most obvious offender is the far shot of Usagi's house, in which subtle gradations of red and orange smear into a big neon blob on the "Master" shot, but look fairly natural and less... day-glo, on the Blu-ray sample.

Explain that to me, miss McDonald: How the heck do you show color information in a final encode that does not even exist on the master? Do you understand that this is why old film prints often have a nasty yellow push to them - because the pigment itself has simply ceased to exist? You've worked in the industry for over 25 years, so I'm sure you do. How do you show color information that's been boosted out of existance?

You fucking don't, is the obvious answer. Those screenshots - by malicious editing, or by simple colorspace ignorance - are missing color info that exists on the ProRes and Digibeta masters, because if it didn't, it wouldn't be on the fucking Blu-ray. FUCKING HELL.


...I could go on, but honestly, fuck it. It's 1 AM and I'm packing up HDCAM decks in the morning. Viz has confirmed that future releases will be no different, I'm sure a number of Sailor Moon fans will compromise with this turd of a release, five years later someone else will find some 16mm prints and do a proper HD telecine, double dips will be planned... world keeps spinning. I'd make a Dragon Ball Z comparison, but remembering how fucking good those "Level" sets were - and how we'll never see more of them - is still a wound too fresh to talk much more about without sinking straight into despair.
 
And uh, for the record, I couldn't be any prouder of Zac Bertschy for the way he handled this interview. He was left with the uncomfortable spot of being forced to ask - if not in so many words - why Viz was lying to their customers. He was honest, he was direct, and yet he continued to be polite and corteous while trying to drag the answers out that customers needed to know. Mind you, Justin Sevakis could have called them on this bullshit ten times harder, but... well, I guess that'd be too much like giving ANN a rocket launcher in a knife fight, while Viz had one leg tied to the other.

This is exactly the sort of thing I wish I saw in other circles I could, quite easily, draw numerous current parallels to. Yeah, I don't exactly "get" why Zac still writes about anime for a living when it's become clear he doesn't care for the medium's output 9 times out of 10, but I can't fault him for being absolutely spot-on in speaking for the customer when they've been given a raw deal. I only wish I saw honest, probing questioning from the video games media when they sell us broken, unfinished games brimming with DLC and app-purchase enhancements at full price.

UPDATE 1: Just to establish what an unmitigated shit-show this release is, here's a FAN-MADE COMPARISON between the actual Viz Blu-ray, and a fan-made "HD Upscale" using the already compressed, already chroma-subsampled, and (if I'm not mistaken) already-interlaced R2 DVD.

More stuff on the horizon. Been too busy and crazy to form coherent writings the last couple weeks, and things aren't going to get better until Thanksgiving. Worst case scenario, this explosion of mental diarrhea is all you'll get for a while... hopefully someone finds some worth in it.

November is a shitty time to be a gamer, friends. It's that time of the year that publishers can smell blood in the water, knowing those on the fence about picking up a new console have a nice Holiday shaped chance to Trojan Horse their way into new homes, and as such, absolutely everything that could come out tends to between the first and second week of November. Just enough time for those who want it to have their copies on release date, and just enough time for every store to double-down and fill its shelves with fresh display copies for the shopping rush that'll crush a minimum of five Best Buy or Wal-Mart workers every year.

Basically, everything gets dropped all at once into the market in the hopes that they'll be "the" killer app for the year. Nobody wants to be the number two selling title for this all-important period, so we're seeing a huge push for tentpole franchises - Ubisoft with Assassins Creed, EA with Dragon Age, Microsoft with Halo, and Nintendo with Smash Brothers, all in the same goddamn two week stretch! It's crazy, but that's just the way things get every year in this market, for better or worse.

Black Friday is a bitch... but there's nothing quite like the smell of rioting shoppers at 4:30 in the morning waiting in line for 45 minutes just to score some shitty sweater at 15% cheaper than it will be two weeks later. If there's any better way to waste your life reveling in the excess of capitalism, baby, I don't know what it is.

Unfortunately, punching coffee-fueled mothers shopping for Little Jimmy in the face to get a copy of these games might be the more entertaining option than actually buying any of 'em. Every now and again, I remember how appallingly fucked up the video game industry is, and this last week has given us plenty to consider for the broader picture, whether you're into the games on display yourself or not.

It's safe to say I'm a pretty massive fan of Yasuomi UMETSU's 1998 two-part OVA, released as A KITE/カイト in Japan, and as the slightly simplified "KITE" everywhere else. The miniature movie, a blood soaked and action packed tragedy across three acts, plays as any hardcore exploitation fan's wet dream come true; a grueling, stylish, morally bankrupt, and - depending on which country you watch it in - blatantly pornographic mash-up Luc Besson's Leon: The Professional and La Femme Nikita, Bo Arbe Vibenius'Thriller: They Call Her One Eye, with action set pieces that would make even John Woo at his prime seethe with white-hot jealousy. It's a pulpy explosion of sex, revenge, brutality and jazzy sorrow, and draws a curious line right between when anime - as a medium - would break out into its own uniquely niche little market culture; Umetsu's plan was to always make the show a sexually charged and super violent action extravaganza, but at the time, TV shows for kids were still the norm, which led his producer to suggest re-writing it into an explicit porno title to secure funding, since - at least 15 years ago - adult videos always sold numbers to cover a modest production cost. He'd repeat this process in the no less fantastic MEZZO FORTE, though that would eventually get a "mainstream" TV sequel, which - while not terrible - remains the lowest point, artistically speaking, for this very unique and talented director.

While I maintain my belief that the graphic rape scenes present in the original, uncut version are integral to Sawa's definition and even growth as a character - hell, I'd argue one of the most heartbreaking scenes, emotionally speaking, is watching Oburi's bloody face shift from fury to acceptance, showing just how little control over their own destiny these emotionally manipulated teenaged assassins really feel they have... but, hey, for some reason a lot of people can't seem to see past the "cartoon kiddy porn" aspect of the uncut version. I don't agree with their assessment, but I both understand where it's coming from and can't find it in me to hold it against them. So it's safe to say that while I staunchly disagree with it, I wouldn't hold it against anyone who decided to stick with the "R-rated" mainstream version. Not only do you not feel like some sort of alien pedophile when you're watching it, but even the director says it's the version he likes best.

It's with this in mind that I was already hesitant to get excited about Media Blasters' announcement that they would be releasing KITE on Blu-ray... in the less-explicit "International Version", of course. But when this was delayed numerous times due to production delays - evidently going as far as getting their hands on the original Japanese camera negatives - I maintained curiosity, if not excitement. At worst, I thought, perhaps I could use the base to create my own uncut BD using upscaled footage of the "explicit" scenes and call it a day.

Then it was announced that the Hulu and Crunchy Roll airings were from the "Remastered" source material... and that things weren't pretty. Comparisons to their massively compromised Legend of the Overfiend Blu-ray were raised, with multiple scenes sourced from upscaled analogue SD video sources due to the film prints used being incomplete. I've yet to watch the digital stream version myself - figured I'd wait for the BD and be done with it - but I thought, if nothing else, they couldn't have done a dramatically worse job than they did with Urotsukidoji. Yes, those upscaled bits are obvious and janky and disappointing - especially when you factor in that I know for a fact uncut 35mm prints* existed in the 90s, and it follows that they probably still do - but the limitations of the film source were so bad, and the upscaling was at least somewhat competent, so how much worse could this get?

I'm not willing to take back my benefit of the doubt. The following SCREENSHOT GALLERY is worth a thousand words, and at first, the results seem breathtaking; unlike prior Media Blasters releases, this looks clean and sharp enough that I'm willing to take their word that this is a new scan of the original film negative; natural grain, bold color, phenomenal resolution... honestly, the 35mm material looked better than I could have asked for. For a brief moment, every ounce of me wanted to toss on some pans, march to my local Best Buy and yell at a clerk until they could find a copy for me. It's that good.

And then you keep scrolling, and then you get to the episode 2 footage, and then... and then...


To be fair, Media Blasters claims that the negative was "incomplete". Maybe this is true. Maybe there really is no proper 35mm source for large chunks of the second OVA, and that means we're stuck with analogue telecine materials made in 1998. If so, man, does that suck. There's intermittend frame blending throughout the original tape masters, which means it's impossible to get a clean 23.98fps IVTC going: At best, you can deinterlace and then use "restore" tools that'll duplicate non-ghosted frames to get a cleaner version of the shot going at the cost of frames it can't de-blend. Kind of a no-win situation there. Analogue noise, dot-crawl, line shimmering and other issues have always plagued the 1998 master of Kite, to the point where I would argue that there was nothing anyone could have done to make the SD materials "work" on Blu-ray. Honestly, for all the shenanigans that Sailor Moon has been going through, those Toei SD masters were as perfect as an SD master could get; Kite is far from the worst I've ever seen, but I'd need to dig back into the mid-1980s to find something legitimately comparable.

So, the footage is upscaled and the masters look like shit. This release was going to be a train-wreck no matter what happened. Unfortunate, but almost predictable. What I couldn't have guessed was just how HORRIBLY Media Blasters would go about upscaling the SD material, to the point where after I screamed at my monitor I went to my shelf, dug out the "Kite Uncut" Media Blasters DVD, and decided I could probably upscale this fucking thing better myself.

The results are as follows. Actual MB Blu-ray on the top, my own upscale on the bottom:
























What I want you to keep in mind is that the filter chain I've used here is EXTREMELY basic. I didn't color correct anything, there was no film-judder or scratch repair filters here, I used a super-fast DVNR algorithm I'd never trust on something I expected people to pay for that may be smearing away otherwise maintainable temporal detail, and even I used a basic de-blending script to cut down on the worst of fuzzed-over, ghosted frames as best I could. This is also being made from an actual production DVD which, to be perfectly frank, has some fairly piss-poor compression; examples such as the subway car exploding and Sawa falling with the flailing bodyguard are going to look substantially worse for me due to the MPEG compression artifacts gumming up the DVD, none of which should be on whatever gnarly analogue Betacam master the original materials were actually stored on. Don't forget, Media Blasters' compression was so grungy that they did a "remastered" DVD for the edited version of Kite back in 2009. It's literally the same exact source tape as their 1998 DVD - it was simply compressed far better than it was the first time 'round.

And yet, despite all of those limiting factors, somehow even the "Kite Uncut" DVD from 2004 looks dramatically better when properly upscaled to 1080p during SD sourced sections. The shot of Akai sneering after he's curb-stomped Oburi in particular have a shocking level of aliasing and lost-detail in the background painting, which is depressing considering how little "detail" there was on this title for the DVD release. I've yet to subject myself to the Crunchy Roll stream, but consensus so far is that the first episode's worth of material is complete or damned close to it, while somewhere in the ball park of 4-5 minutes of the second are sourced from poorly upscaled SD tape. Evidently, there are sections where it cuts back to SD material for just a few frames and then cuts back to the new film scan. Exactly why several minutes of the original negative for episode 2 were unusable, I'd love to know; call me crazy, but had they included a behind-the-scenes featurette showing what state the OCN was in, I'd probably have bought the disc just to understand why the fuck a 15 year old negative is in such bad shape. I know Green Bunny and ARMS probably didn't keep great tabs on the negatives for what was, from a marketing point of view at least, some crazy niche-porno film that'll only appeal to sex and violence obsessed degenerates, but without a compelling explanation, it's hard to make any real judgment calls on how much of this grotesque upscaling is a legitimate means to and end, and how much of it was Media Blasters' unwillingness to fix whatever materials they were offered.

Without a compelling pile of evidence either way, I'm left feeling like this is most comparable to the RUROUNI KENSHIN: TRUST AND BETRAYAL/るろうに剣心―明治剣客浪漫譚―追憶編 Aniplex Blu-ray import. The difference, though, is that certain scenes of the Tsuioku-Hen OVA have always looked funky due to 30fps video generated effects, so nobody who was particularly familiar with the series was surprised to see a handful of scenes look like absolute shit. Came hand in hand with the production, even if, deep down in my blackest of hearts, I kind of wish Sony had just paid to re-animate those scenes from scratch for the otherwise stunning HD master. With Kite, those crappy shots are gonna stick out like sore thumbs, being not only terrible for SD upscales in general, but not being weird effects shots where we could forgive production gaffes; this is simply a release where the negative was lost, and they resorted to the only thing they had left. Truth be told, I wouldn't be surprised if the upscaled footage was originally created as a guide to re-assemble the raw film scan, and when they realized there were no more prints to be had they used their upscaled reference to fill in the gaps. Yes, the film lab should be ashamed of coming up with results that terrible, but from their point of view, I can understand them just not giving a fuck anymore; when you've completely run out of film, what's the point in even finishing up your HD master?

It's a shame this had to go the way that it did, too. Because goddamn, the 35mm sourced scenes look incredible.




Contrary to what many of you may have assumed over the years, I don't really hate John Sirabella, or his company Media Blasters. If anything, that'd be giving them far too much credit. I'm often annoyed that they're in the business of licensing fantastic content, but always had trouble delivering a quality release, due to a combination of a lack of proper quality control and a nasty habit of promising more than they could deliver. Sometimes those flaws are minor irritants that could have easily been avoided had someone more familiar with the material been keeping tabs on it, while others are such unmitigated train wrecks I truly can't understand how they ever came to get a wide release in the first place. Whether this is the former or the latter, I'm still struggling to decide; unlike the Overfiend fiasco, where we have every reason to believe "complete" 35mm prints of the theatrical version still exist in varying elements, this may be the only print available. I honestly don't know. If you have a Hulu Plus or Crunchy Roll membership, I'd recommend watching the SD stream first, just to get an idea of how jarring it'll be; "understanding extenuating circumstances" and "tolerating the results" aren't necessarily the same thing.

Media Blasters has always been a frustrating operation to consumers with standards about quality control, and this release might be their most frustrating release in years. I've supported them dozens, if not hundreds of times with individual purchases over the last 15 years, and God knows I'll probably keep doing it when they don't screw up. I'm not buying this one, though. I just can't bring myself to do it, knowing that not only are chunks of it upscaled, but they've been upscaled about as badly as humanly possible, short of leaving them at 1080i. Sure the thought of getting about 40-45 minutes of  KITE in glorious OCN-sourced HD is an attractive one, but the fact that my ten year old and not-too-good to start with DVD looks better for the other 5 minutes is already a deal breaker; the fact that it's the shorter, less-explicit version was already a tough pill to swallow, but with this they've coated it in super glue and hot sauce. A shame, too... for as awful as those upscaled shots are, they're at least the minority of the runtime.

For anyone who still wants a copy, Best Buy stores are stocking it seemingly at random, and pre-orders are up at Rakuten. Media Blasters distribution can be called spotty, even at their best, so if you want one I'd suggest looking now before it quietly slips out of print and into over-priced obscurity. Not saying you should, but if you're going to, at least do it for cheap.

I'm still here, friends. Just because I'm "busy" and have a "life" doesn't mean you can ever fully escape my rambling stupidity!

A couple recent releases from the UK based cult film distributor 88 Films have finally come out, and it's compelled me to say a few words about the releases themselves, the label distributing them, and  the context they've established in surprisingly clear terms. The how behind it is a little more complex than usual, so let's break it all down...

THE REMASTER CAMPAIGN

As most of you likely know, I contributed to an Indie Go Go campaign wherein 88 Films wanted crowd-fund a restoration of ZOMBIE HOLOCAUST from the original camera negative. As most of you who know me are aware, I don't actually like Zombie Holocaust much - but up until that point, the best release we'd gotten was the Media Blasters Blu-ray, which was rife with grotesque scratch repair artifacts, muddled color grading that made the film look like it was shot completely in the dark, and  super-funky CRT scanner noise masking legitimate detail, courtesy of the somewhat infamous Roman film lab LVR Video and Post. They've been responsible for most of the HD transfers released by Blue Underground and Arrow Video before the latter's dramatic turn-around in 2013, and the former... basically vanishing for a year and a half, presumably while Bill Lustig looked at the market conditions and decided to take a hiatus from trying to squeeze blood from a stone.

I've written a lot about how poorly LVR has handled the vast catalogue of Italian exploitation and thriller films of the 70s and 80s, and how Media Blasters managed to make them even worse, if only out of incompetence rather than malice. All in all it's felt kinda' shitty to be a fan of Italian trash film on Blu-ray, since not only did Arrow Video and Blue Underground mostly pull back once their cache of A-tier Fulci and Argento titles had been finished, but most of the titles we got looked like crap anyway. 88 Films drawing a line in the sand and promising a second-chance for the titles that Media Blasters/Shriek Show had treated less than well was an encouraging first step, and as 88 Films' releases of Full Moon and Troma films are regularly superior to their North American equivalents, I felt satisfied that I could trust them with my $35 for a restored copy of Zombie Holocaust.

Later on, the campaign was updated to include a new stretch goal to restore BURIAL GROUND in the same manner - and that's a garbage film I actually do quite like. Needless to say I did what had to be done, and put in a second pledge.

THE ITALIAN COLLECTION

It's thus with incredibly mixed feelings that I decided, despite loving the film to its cheap, stupid core, that I decided not to pre-order ANTHROPOPHAGOUS: THE BEAST for the seemingly fair price of £19.99. It's worth pointing out that this title was not part of the remaster initiative, which is why I was hesitant to throw a little more than $31 down before I knew what I was getting into. While short on directly-related bonus features the 88 Films release does include 42nd Street Memories, a feature-length documentary about the beloved "grindhouse" run of 1970s exploitation double-features, and pre-orders are set to include a slipcase and postcards, which is a decent enough bonus. And anyone who pre-ordered straight from the 88 Films website - the only store currently offering it - got the above slipcase, replicating the old UK "Video Nasty" cover about as closely as humanly possible.

Sadly, all of that means little to me when the final product looks... well... like THIS. Basically, it looks like every other low-quality CRT scan that LVR has applied noise reduction to in order to get OCD twats, like myself, to shut up about all that ugly scanner noise. Sadly, this isn't at all unexpected, as their earlier release of Antonio Bido's THE BLOODSTAINED SHADOW was also a LESS THAN STELLAR. The latter didn't receive any obvious degraining, and if I had to guess I'd lean towards that being due to D'amaot's penchant for shooting on 16mm, which naturally lends itself to a grainier image than a scan of a 35mm stock. That means there's some basic limitations to how good the negative for this D'amato flick will ever look, sure, but for all the bizarre and often easy-to-fix at a production level problems, the Media Blasters BD release of Beyond the Darkness had, at least scanner noise and DNR weren't among them!



Doubtless some of you are thinking, wait a second, if the dated CRT scanner is producing excess noise, shouldn't noise-removal be a good thing? Arguably it can be an improvement, though of course you'll risk sludgy smearing and temporal warping, which I find to be more distracting in motion than even heavy noise (though, admittedly, a "smooth" transfer tends to look better in still frames). The problem is that "removing" the noise generated during a film scan doesn't bring back the detail that was obscured, nor does it produce a consistent, stable image underneath. It's basically swapping analogue static video for digital video vaseline, and I'm a firm believer that farming the film scan to a different lab with better equipment will allow you to avoid both ends of this unfortunate spectrum,

In short, 88 Films - bless their low budget and schlock loving hearts - already know that these masters are crap, and they're dumping them on us regardless. They even talk about how the masters "LOOK GREAT!" on the Face Place, but if you're looking to official social media for an HD transfer's objective worth, you're doing it wrong anyway.

Part of me feels hurt by this; I've never been a big fan of the "It's Okay When We Do It!" mentality, and by specifically raising the bar set by Media Blasters' rather crumby treatment of those two Spaghetti Gut-Munchers, seeing them pump out the exact same crap of their own accord at the very same time is... well, it just shakes whatever confidence I had in them, to be honest. I'm not angry anymore - hell, I'm not even surprised when I see a new Italian cult film in HD and immediately wince at the coarse grid of CRT grit floating on top of a fuzzy, washed-out image. I'm just sad at this point. I and people like me fought for better, and a handful of people in this industry dug their heels in and refused to compromise... so why is this, years later, still somehow the norm?

THE SAD REALITY

The reality, of course, is that they don't bother, because, well... nobody cares. Even if you look at the successful Indie Go Go campaign, less than 300 people actually contributed to make this new master happen, and quite a few of them paid dramatically more than the $31.25 or so asking price on principle. Less than 300 people cared enough to throw money at 88 Films to do two new transfers of iconic splatter trash-films, and I can tell you from personal experience that both I, and a friend of mine, contributed to this project solely on principle, not because we actually liked the film!

Certainly there are plenty more who were waiting to see the results with the intent to grab it for about half that price from Amazon UK - and those cheeky fuckers still get the "limited" slipcover, for what it's worth - but if you can't even convince 300 people to pay MSRP to guarantee a dramatically improved release, that's proof that Blu-ray is only continuing to contract to the point of irrelevancy, even to one of the most dedicated audiences out there; genre fanatics who own multiple copies of the same film because they're never satisfied that the presentation is "perfect enough"... than again, most hardcore horror fans were probably satisfied with a DVD copy or two in their own language and a half-dozen VHS and LD copies cluttering up their closets. I don't want to say that horror in by its very nature a nostalgia driven market, but... well, perhaps that's another discussion entirely. I wouldn't be surprised if many of the niche labels are gone or just empty husks about two years from now, with obvious exceptions being Shout Factory, Arrow Video, Vinegar Syndrome and studios that own their own content like Troma and Full Moon - though if they'll continue doing BD releases at all with the gradual take-over of streaming in 5 years is anyone's guess these days.

Just as importantly, having worked with a handful of licensors over the last decade, I know how... well, frankly, how shitty some of these outfits can be to work with. You want to license a title for Blu-ray from an Italian film studio? Great! It's entirely possible that they've already made HD masters. Why did they do that? Because they knew the title you wanted was popular and they wanted to have a master on hand. But what if you don't like the film lab, or you thought the work was poor? Well, it's entirely possible that this film lab has a 20+ year history with the guy who runs the film lab, and you'd not only be taking business away from the guy who's storing their negatives, but you're basically pissing on a professional friendship that goes back to a time when the Italian film industry actually made both of them money.

Remember when people flipped out about Fright Night and Enemy Mine being limited to 3,000 copies each? Say what you will about 25 year old horror and science fiction films, but those were mainstream Hollywood titles with surprisingly high scalper-potential. Zombie Holocaust is a real cult film, and it can't even get 300 fucking pre-orders! Those 275 copies just don't pay the goddamn bills, and honestly, while I'm frustrated by the lack of quality coming out of 88 Films, I'm slowly coming to terms with the fact that based on the numbers we ourselves can see, the future of Italian cult films are middling-quality LVR CRT scans, or nothing at all. When I believed the market cared even the slightest bit, I dug my heels in and demanded better... now that we can see how few in number we are, all I can do is pray we get more transfers like the start of Blue Underground's run and less like the newer, digitally processed stuff that only added as many problems as they tried to fix.

Besides. 88 Films assured us all that there are worse film labs in Italy. The thought sends shivers down my spine... and makes me wonder who was responsible for the abomination that was the MB master for Burial Ground, a title I (incorrectly) attributed to them when it first came out. The number of labs left standing in Rome - good and bad alike - shrink with every passing year, and I have to wonder if LVR isn't the bottom of the barrel, good gravy, who is?

ZOMBIE HOLOCAUST

While I'm still waiting for the fuzzy-helmed clowns at Royal Fail to get me my goddamn package, screenshots of the 88 Films restoration of Zombie Holocaust are, at least, ENCOURAGING. Keep in mind that like Lucio Fulci'City of the Living Dead, this was for some inexplicable reason shot on Techniscope two-perf at a hard-matted 1.85 ratio, which means the OCN is effectively a 35mm camera using a 16mm frame's worth of resolution. Sounds pointless, I know, but if it's good enough for Lucio goddamn Fulci, I guess it's good enough for Mario Girolami, too.

Without a copy on hand to poke at, I'm surprised to hear people talking about plenty of scratches and instances of dirt that were untouched, despite Pinewood Studios having reportedly done the restoration work. Whether this is just a little "sparkle" around the edges or a full-blown Grindhouse Experience, I don't yet know, but truth be told I'd much rather have a raw, filthy and damaged presentation than one that's been so digitally manipulated it looks like the prior MEDIA BLASTERS RELEASE. Of course there's nothing preventing it from being scanned properly and having damage removed on a case-by-case basis, but such is the fate of cheap Italian splatter films, I guess...

I may do a longer write-up on Zombie Holocaust at some point, but honestly, my utter lack of enthusiasm for the flick itself leaves that sounding more like a chore than anything. Don't get me wrong, I "get" the love the film has for mashing up three disparate genres at once - undead zombies, mad scientists, and blood thirsty jungle savages - but everything about the film just feels a bit more dull than it ought to. Aside from Donald O'Brien giving a sweaty, over-the-top performance the flick doesn't deserve and one incredible gag in which Ian McCulloch basically liquefies a zombie's head with a boat motor, there's just nothing to recommend here beyond the conceptual novelty. If  you really want to experience Zombie Holocaust, watch Deodato's Last Cannibal World back-to-back with Fulci's Zombi 2. Your sense of taste will thank you later.

It's been said that a single line of dialogue disappeared during the restoration. Pity, that, but I don't expect it to be fixed, and if that's the only thing truly wrong with  the presentation, I'll live. That said, this is  why I wish labels like this would hire actual fans to QC  their work; true, everyone can make mistakes - I myself didn't catch the fucked up opening credits for Re-Animator on the German restoration, for example - but if you're willing to give two or three known fine-tooth-comb types advance copies for the chance to throw your hands up in the air and shout "Oh YEAH? Well ZombieFan92 didn't spot anything wrong, so it MUST be a minor issue!" would probably go a long way in satisfying some of those complaints, if only on a conceptual level.

Hardly something worth bitching about now, I know, but I'm always disappointed that the re-cut American version "Doctor Butcher M.D. - Medical Deviate" has never gotten a new modern transfer, Unlike a lot of US edits that simply removed footage or swapped the order of scenes around, Doctor Butcher is TRULY ITS OWN THING, and at this point I'd almost be satisfied with somebody hiding the entire VHS rip on a Blu-ray just to see what the heck it was.

BURIAL GROUND

Where things get a little more confusing is the situation with Andrea Bianchi's BURIAL GROUND/La Notti del Terrore. Unlike Zombie Holocaust I actually do like this cinematic turd, and I was furious with what a mess Media Blasters' prior attempt to restore the film for Blu-ray turned out to be.

88 Films initially said that they had located the film's original negative and interpositive, as well as a 35mm release print. They did a telecine on the print, though I... don't know why, unless they planned to release a beat-up "Grindhouse Print" on the disc as a bonus. I'd be thrilled, sure, but actual release prints are always multiple generations away from the negative and tend to be in the worst shape of any available elements, so starting from there for a high quality, archival copy was probably a bad idea to start with.

88 Films had their lab made a test scan of the IP, but were quickly left found wanting. They then tried a new scan of the negative... but realized why the Media Blasters BD was such a mess. The entire film was stored on 16mm A/B rolls with undercuts, meaning that the shots were never really edited on 16mm, but blown up to 35mm for editing purposes. Going back to the original negatives reveales plenty of extended footage never meant to be in the film at all, as well as frames marked out with a big scratched-in "X" signifying they didn't need the cut after that point. In short, restoring from the OCN would include re-editing the entire film from scratch! It's certainly doable - hell, I've done it myself from SD materials for certain content - but it's time consuming and expensive, for a project they likely had hoped would be a done-deal.

While Facebook-sized 1600:900 JPGs aren't quite the most ideal 1:1 source one could hope for, they're better than nothing. With that in mind, here's an idea of what 88 Films has to work with:




None of them are "pretty", aesthetically speaking, but at the very least this vindicates my prior theory that the massive amounts of chroma noise on the MB Blu-ray was the result of a telecine device either not being designed for, or properly set up for, 16mm OCN content. The world of telecine and scanner hardware is vast, infinite to an outsider like myself, but at the same time it's not so impossible that I can't spot bullshit when I see it. I'd keep harping on Media Blasters utter lack of care and foresight into their own catalog, but with them not even having held an announcement panel at Anime Expo this year, I'd feel a bit like putting the spurs to a horse that's been rotting for weeks now.

I'm also shocked how poor the IP looks - they're struck straight from the negative, so in theory they have all the positive traits of being a "Generation 1" source without any of the irregularities of the OCN - keep in mind that quite often optical effects like fades or day-for-night shots are applied to the IP itself, rather than the OCN, so scanning straight from the negative may not actually yield the same results as a vintage print of those instructions weren't followed to the letter. Having watched stellar DVD transfers where people are turning on lanterns and trying to get to sleep in the middle of the day, I can assure you it happens more often than it should. If I had to guess, I wouldn't be surprised if the Interpositive was a 35mm blow-up, which alone can lead to problems with focus and clarity. It's the reason that the HD transfers for films like Lustig's Maniac and Bill Hinzman's Flesh Eater looked far wonkier than I expected on their HD debut, and while it's unfortunate to imagine this being as good as those films will ever look, without a proper 16mm negative to source a new transfer from, that's all she wrote.

So what'll become of Burial Ground? At this point, only 88 Films knows for sure, and it's possible they themselves aren't sure anymore. I can confirm that they've reached out to people who know this film like the back of their hand to be sure the bizarre example of hundreds of individual frames missing from the Media Blasters BD won't be repeated, but they did this information before they realized what a mess the original negative was. I know, personally, what I'd like to see them do... but I don't know what impact that would have on their budget, and if they're willing to take a loss on this title to do the "right thing" and hope their next release actually turns a profit to compensate.

This is pretty much why I haven't said a lot about cult-films on Blu-ray in the last year. Between this and Toei Animation being willing to re-upscale one of their major flagship titles of the 90s, it's clear that we lost. The video market only cares as much as they can squeeze a potential remake out of it, or profit off of the lead's recent death, or if they can buy out an entire film catalog for pennies on the dollar to the original owners don't have to have someone on payroll to piece out the "good" titles one by one to a mere three or four potential licensors. The future is looking grim, friends... but, it was nice watching it all burn to nothing with you.

Ah well. Gotta' get dressed and check out a 35mm print of BURIAL GROUND and NIGHTMARE CITY at The Egyptian. Just because I can't have a pristine HD copy doesn't mean I can't watch a filthy, faded, butchered print in the dark with total strangers!

We've talked about the 1985 version of VAMPIRE HUNTER D enough over the years, so let's just get down to business.


Sentai Filmworks' Blu-ray marks  the first ever HD release of my beloved horror-western, and while details are sparse Sentai promises, and I quote, "this Special Edition has been Digitall Remastered in High Definition from the original materials". If I had to guess I'd assume we're looking at an above-average quality telecine of a vaulted interpositive with some fairly mild digital manipulation, but you know what they say about assuming things; in any case, the materials on display are quite comparable to the Italian PAL DVD release by Yamato Video dating back nearly a decade, and as that's been our "reference" transfer ever since, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Heck, they might even be the same exact 35mm print, as both the Yamato Video and the Sentai Blu-ray start off with a Toho Film Company logo - this is absent from most other prints used for video transfers as the film was originally produced by Epic / Sony Music Entertainment, who released on DVD in Japan circa 2001 to cash-in on the Yoshiaki KAWAJIRI directed psuedosequel Vampire Hunter D: Boodlust, and seemingly sold it to Toho at some point in the next decade and a half or so. This may seem bizarre - and trust me, I know at least one licensor besides Sentai was trying to court this title only to be stopped by one issue or another (we'll get to the most likely one shortly) - but keep in mind the mere fact that Japanese "Production Committees" are a fairly recent phenomena only underscores how little thought went into keeping these assets organized for international release.

First, the good: Before getting into the niggles brief, Vampire Hunter D never has, and likely never will, look any better on home video. I have a feeling that the late director Toyoo ASHIDA would be proud if he could have seen the final form of his labors. Framed properly - if just a bit tighter than most prior releases - at 1.33:1, this new HD master presents the film looking largely consistent with the Italian and Japanese home video versions, though with improved resolution, less print damage, and a wealth of color fidelity never seen in any prior release - not even the matted OVA Films DVD from Germany compares in terms of detail and overall image quality. If you have one of the superior PAL DVD releases, this is still a massive improvement in every way, but if like so many fans you've only seen the American and Japanese DVDs, this may as well be a revelation. The Urban Vision DVD in particular was a noisy black hole of nothing for long stretches in Count Lee's castle and moonlit duels, and finally getting to see what the shit is going on when D gets thrown to the catacombs is reason enough to celebrate.

Color grading is always going to be tricky for this one, due largely to the low-contrast nature of the film itself. I assume because they knew the target market would be rental VHS, the film features several scenes - including the lengthy opening - in which the backdrop is effectively a large, sweeping monochrome plate with partially animated characters peeking out of the shadows. Before you assume I'm just being pretentious, and Christ know I could be when waxing poetic about Ashida, the same clever monochrome minimalism would be improved by Yoshiaki KAWAJIRI's Wicked City a few years later, and the color pallet - mostly stark gray, black and blue - was confirmed by the director himself to be tailored specifically to the known weaknesses of VHS and Laserdisc. Scenes set in daylight were always a bit drab and cold looking on video, and having seen the comparably pumped-up German transfer, I can see why some would find it more appealing that way. But the majority of the film happens at night, and over-exposing those lengthy battle scenes just reveal a large swath of shadows and nothing, which leaves me to believe that the slightly dim color grade shown here is "accurate", even if it makes the film look a bit dull compared to the vibrant excess of similar 80s OVAs.

That said, Vampire Hunter D has always been a little rough around the edges, and this new transfer - glorious as it may be - hasn't changed the fact that the limited budget has always left it looking a bit like a sow's ear. Judder, flicker, staining and animation errors - always a part of the film since the day it was shot - are relatively frequent, as are odd and occasionally twitchy animation errors that fans of newer, all digital titles may be unhappy with. While I have little doubt all of these issues could have been massaged with heavy digital manipulation, I have no complaints; it looks like a low-budget video from 1985 given a modern HD transfer, and goddamn, that's all I've ever wanted. At the very least there are no cue-marks at reel changes, obvious vertical scratches, photochemical staining or similar marks of a print left in anything but proper storage. It's as cheap and raw as it's ever been, but in the best way possible. I don't doubt that a proper pin-registered and stabilized scan of the original 35mm negative may have yielded more stable results, I'm more than pleased with the overall retention of the film's inert limitations.

Sadly, the scene of Count Lee's face being crushed by his own castle - represented by wet paint between 2 animation cels being pulled apart in the camera - is not present. To this day I'm not sure why the Japanese home video master minted in 1985 has this sequence slipped in, but it's a fun, bizarre oddity I'm begrudgingly willing to live without.


The less stellar news, however, is that the transfer looks to have been digitally processed to some degree. Having seen abominations released by Disney and Q-TEC I'm not going to bitch and moan too hard about this one, but there's an odd level of... let's call it textural inconsistency? Oranges, yellows and greens have a fine layer of soft, relatively natural looking grain, while blues and grays have a very broad, almost defocused layer of noise, and red... well, red is basically fucking grainless. Film stocks play an important role in each color having a certain texture, I know, but a total lack of visible celluloid structure on D's cloak? Bullshit. That's some grain management going on, and there's nothing anyone could say to convince me otherwise.

That said, it's at least an attempt at grain management, not removal. In hindsight, the inconsistent but largely still semi-present grain structure isn't too different from the DVNR applied to the "Miyazaki Collection" release of Nausicaa. keeping in mind that, as a full frame 1.33:1 transfer, Vampire Hunter D would actually have about 30% more resolution (and thus less grain) than a 1.85:1 transfer from the same stock. I'd say the level of grain is comparable to other marginally processed 1.33:1 transfers like Ninja Scroll or Rurouni Kenshin Tsuioku-Hen/Samurai X: Trust and Betrayal, but as both of those transfers had notably less in the way of flickering, splices, film judder and other production mishaps, the 'grainless' look just sort of blends into the otherwise polished presentation. D's rough edges and occasionally ugly, flat key frames make the smoother, less textured appearance stand out just a bit more by comparison: Vampire Hunter D has always been a rough looking film in its own charming way, and removing the texture, while hardly a deal breaker, doesn't really help its aesthetic in any way, either.

I don't use numbers to summarize complex opinions - it, sadly, undermines actual reading and critical thought. In summation the transfer is above average but not exceptional, unto itself, but an essential and much needed upgrade for a film with a long and rather dour history up until this point, especially in North America.


First off, this is perhaps the most pleasant surprise: The Japanese track is, by far, the best audio presentation the film has ever had. Not only that, but I suspect it's the first ever genuine presentation of the Japanese Dolby stereo mix promised on the original Japanese advertisements, but - for one reason or another - were always presented as weak and muddy sounding track. I don't have the R2 Japan DVD handy, but as far as I could tell the track was dual-mono with an above-average level of flutter and other analogue distortions, rather than a genuine stereo track. For the example that convinced me I wasn't crazy, listen to D enter the front door from the left side of the sound-stage at 00:54:22. It's not the most dynamic stereo track in the history of animation, but it's by far the best sounding presentation of this particular film I've found... and trust me, I've looked.

Just to confirm I'm not insane, another easy to spot example is during the end credits of TM Network's "Your Song" - at 01:18:06, the music skips back and fourth between the left and right ear before settling back in the center for the Engrish line 'Why do you go forward, why do I go backward?' a few seconds later. If, like me, you're just enough of a possibly gay 80s pop fan to have actually listened to TM Network recreationally, you'll know this is exactly how the song is "supposed" to sound.

Why has every other release? If I had to guess it's because stereo audio wasn't quite common in theaters until the late-1980s in the United States, with Japan trailing somewhat behind until the advent of cheaper digital decoders in the late 90s. It's common place for Japanese films made before the DVD era to have a finished mono mix placed on the master prints themselves as optical tracks. Optical audio, sadly, is a bit trash from an archival standpoint with limited fidelity by nature, with original magnetic tape being the preferred materials where available. The German and Italian DVD transfers both credit their Japanese mix as "original mono", so it's not much of a stretch to assume that they sourced their Japanese audio from the sound-on-film present on whatever archival print was used for their respective transfers. Even the original North American Laserdisc specifies "Stereo English" and "Mono Japanese", for what it's worth.

Newly translated English subtitles are included, and at a glance appear to be a marked improvement over Urban Vision's generally serviceable translation from 2000. I've only spot-checked a few scenes, but so far, it's A-OK. Wonder how close it got to that custom track I prepped shortly after the first novel got translated...

The German DVD went out of its way to include a new 5.1 remix, but being sourced from the same crumby mono materials as everything else, it was more of a mono track that echoes slightly louder in the right side from time to time and has a wildly out-of-whack LFE mix that makes even standard dialogue thump like a friggin' DMX album. I applaud them for trying, I guess, but with them only able to echo the mono mix there's actually more directionality in the proper stereo mix on this new Blu-ray.


It's a rare day indeed when a 30 year old Japanese dub has higher fidelity than a brand new English localization, but what is this Blu-ray if not a short trip to crazy town? Sadly, the Streamline dub is nowhere to be found, and in its place is a newly produced dub courtesy of Sentai Filmworks. I can't say for sure, but I wouldn't be shocked if the exclusion of the Streamline dub was, itself, at the request of Toho; having tried to deal with the paranoid legal branches of film licensors, I can say without hesitation you'd be shocked at what you'll be told you can't include, no matter how little sense it makes.

To put all of this into perspective, Streamline Pictures was sold off to Orion Home Entertainment. Orion Pictures was bought out by MGM. Streamline Pictures themselves only owned temporary distribution rights to the Japanese films they purchased; the dubs produced by them are considered ancillary works, and in more or less any court case would go back to whomever owns the international rights to the film. I know for a fact that archival film and audio materials for the various Streamline titles were auctioned off from closed film lots after MGM's bankruptcy in 2010, meaning that at this point, about all MGM really owns are the logos for Streamline Pictures...

Unfortunately, when you try to explain this to a Japanese corporation they see "MGM owns the company that dubbed the film", and they don't want to even risk MGM noticing them. This is a crying shame, but as Toho has had more or less the same reaction to the AIP produced Godzilla dubs - to say nothing of the Roger Corman produced "Godzilla 1985" - and is the reason why the "classic" dubs have more or less disappeared from the market from the 1990s onward.  This doesn't explain why the bonus features have gone missing, of course, but I'd assume that Epic/Sony Records didn't bother to keep close tabs on this before being folded into CBS/Sony Music Entertainment in the late 80s.

Amusingly enough, the premix materials they based this on were made in mono, with all of those exciting directional cues I've never heard before on the English track becoming a dull and central thump that turns the TM Network song into an indistinct, echoing mess; this explains why the music is so low and muddy compared to the Japanese track, too. The quality of the English voices themselves are fine, but I... will refrain from commenting on the dub much beyond that. I finally understand how old school Kaiju fans felt about having "new" dubs of their childhood shat out by Toho, and while I agree that both are ultimately rather silly, and arguing that one is ultimately inferior to the other feels a bit like spitting in the wind... it's also somehow very, very unpleasant to sit through the new dub. If you want an opinion on the Sentai dub, ask someone without 20 years of familiarity and nostalgia with the Streamline version, 'cause my bitch ass is biased as it's going to get. What I can tell you is the Texan accents are laid on thick, Rei sounds like a poor man's Ralph Fiennes wearing David Bowie as a suit, Larmica's voice is shrill and cringe-inducing to a Japanese-emulating perfection, and Witchie's laugh is even more out of sync with her animation than I'd imagined possible. If you guys can sit through this thing in its entirety, you're stronger than I am.

To be fair, the translation of the Streamline localization was always a heinous mess, but at least everyone involved had the good sense to play it as a somewhat hammy Hammer Films inspired melodrama; the new dub appears to try and emulate the Japanese voices to an almost painful fault, lacking any of the nuance and humor in the Streamline translation, which seemingly realized you can only take a boomerang chucking mutant David Bowie running himself through to mortally wound a combination of Marvel's Blade and The Man With No Name so seriously before it all starts to fall apart. The original Japanese version has its own sense of humor, muted as it may be by comparison. Say what you will about Carl Macek's lack of respect for the original Japanese language; at least the man produced dubs that felt natural for the material it was given. And hey, the new Sentai dub actually uses the word "Dhampir", so that's more than the 'official' Bloodlust English dub managed.


Sentai's new Blu-ray comes on a BD-25, with the main feature clocking in at 14.5 gigs with an average bitrate of just under 20,000 kb/s. Both audio tracks are presented as DTS-HD Master Audio stereo at 24-bit sample rates. Due to the use of mild DVNR I honestly doubt cranking the video bitrate would have made a worth-while difference; you can make out some mild blocking during high-motion shots, but with much of the grain having already been smoothed over to a soft dither, the compression artifacts are more or less negligible. The whole thing is packaged in a standard semi-transparent blue case with familiar Amano YOSHITAKA key art, and a somewhat updated version of the original Japanese logo.

Also of note, the entire Japanese credits sequence has been left intact, with English credits added at the end. Kudos to Sentai for that being their standard operating procedure for features, minor as it may seem. The Streamline version included English credits over the final scene of D riding off into the sunset, which was always so long and oddly silent that I'm surprised the Japanese version didn't do the same; then again I'm suspicious that the original script called for a 60 minute film and the production was later requested to stretch itself out to a feature length, which would explain the lengthy, silent scenes of D riding to, and from his mission.in an otherwise quite aggressively paced film after the intentionally methodical opening.

Aside from Sentai propaganda, the sole bonus feature present is an HD presentation of the original Japanese trailer. It's worth watching just to see numerous alternate cuts that were changed for the final film, and the hissing soundtrack and odd blue cast to the whole thing are a cheeky reminder as to how much better the film looks to any prior incarnation. Sadly, the 10 minute making-of from the Japanese laserdisc - which was included on the Urban Vision DVD - is nowhere to be found. This is a surprisingly decent piece for what's basically just an EPK, interviewing the original actors (and editing inappropriate footage to the conversation), and letting the director give his philosophy on how to approach what was, at the time, an entirely new format.

I hardly expected it, but the only other noteworthy bonus feature is the fascinating Jonathan Clements commentary track from the Manga UK DVD. Pity none of those made the leap, but everything else on the Urban Vision DVD was propoganda for the upcoming Bloodlust film, so the "special edition" status of the 2000 DVD was a bit more of an exaggeration than I'm sure they'd like to let on in retrospect.


While it took a damn long time to get here, I think I'm finally satisfied enough with a Japanese language presentation of VAMPIRE HUNTER D that I can move on with my life. The lack of the Streamline dub and Making-Of featurette from the Japanese Laserdisc is a frustration pair of omissions, but what can you do?

Fans of the film shouldn't think twice; pay the damn $25 and move on with your life. It's probably never going to get better than this.


Because Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain comes out in 15 minutes. If I ever post again, expect it to be long after I've completed the game... and "completed" can mean a lot of things in this context, even before you get to rankings. Yes, I know just a little too much, and yet not enough to spoil the fun. Maybe I'll revisit this in a month or two, we'll see just how upset I am over the revelation that Punished Snake kills Dumbledore.

For what it's worth, I've seen the caps of VAMPIRE HUNTER D: BLOOSLUST and I'm convinced this - much like GHOST IN THE SHELL and THE END OF EVANGELION - is very much a victim of its own original production methods. Soft, weak contrast and grainy as shit? Sounds like a 90 minute AVID to 35mm-out project to me! Justin Sevakis has noted that he actually tried to done down some of the washed-out and grubby look, which means the only way this film would look dramatically better is if someone gave it a proper shot-by-shot color grading, which it's clear the Japanese side wasn't willing to do. To be frank, I can hardly blame Discotek for not hiring some crazy asshole to fix a disc that was already knee-capped by not being allowed to include the Japanese audio. This fucking movie will never catch a break.

WELL... THAT WAS BULLSHIT.

Warning: I must be off my meds again. This shit's gonna' get real angry, rambly and up its own ass in the vaguely-analytical side of narrative. We might talk about the "game" part another day, once I've cleansed myself of anger and sorrow, but... well, Phantom Pain has a lot to answer for in the story department, and that oddly enough has an adverse effect on the gameplay itself as a result. Like I said, we may revisit this if I end up actually caring enough to come back to it.



Despite two and a half years of hype from that jaw-dropping "Red Band" E3 trailer, METAL GEAR SOLID V: THE PHANTOM PAIN fails to deliver on the heavy promises that series creator, director, and 28 year franchise auteur Hideo KOJIMA had promised as far back as 2010. Despite rave reviews and sales topping 3 million copies sold in the first week, long term fans of the franchise have been pretty vocal with their frustrations and disappointments, not the least of which has seen websites like Eurogamer and Polygon publish soft-addenda articles, standing by their "9.9/10""Game Of All Time""It's Literally Better Than Sex On The Third Realm Of Consciousness" scores, while simultaneously acknowledging that something is seriously wrong. The argument that Hideo Kojima himself hasn't been given the time or NDA release to explain what "really" happened is as solid an argument as you're going to get at this point, but with Kojima having stood by this as his final game and his magnum opus for the last year, it's... well, it's fascinating to see where it all went wrong, but that doesn't actually make the game I paid $60 - plus $20 and change for the prologue, METAL GEAR SOLID V: GROUND ZEROES - any more complete or satisfying.

I'm honestly not mad anymore about it. I was for about a weekend. At this point, I'm just disappointed on two levels - one, that Kojima could have fallen so hard in a mere decade between METAL GEAR SOLID 3: SNAKE EATER and this abomination, and on the other, that whatever might have been salvaged from the flaming wreck of what's clearly a compromised and bashed-together narrative might have been "okay" were it not for the public-yet-mysterious breakup that happened behind the scenes between Kojima and the game's publisher, Konami. Japanese business culture suggests we'll never actually know what went down behind the scenes, but based on what little we can piece together of our own accord, it probabl goes something like this;

Kojima, who had served as Vice President of their console game division for the last 5 years, has been effectively obsessing over Metal Gear Solid V as his big going away blast. Konami in those last 5 years have been pulling away from console game production to focus on mobile development, casino games and non-video game investments like health clubs. After tallying up the money spent since the production on the Fox Engine started in 2010, Konami's top brass pushed Kojima to release the game in whatever state it was in; not wanting to compromise the entirety of it, they split the game into a "Prologue" and a "Full Game" to meet the launch of the PS4 and show off the power of the Fox Engine. Whatever was going on behind the scenes was only making Konami worry even more, which prompted Kojima to make a stand and refuse to compromise by setting a date on a project that wasn't even close to being ready. CEO Satoshi SAKAMOTO clearly wasn't amused, at which point Kojima was basically fired from his position as VP, but was kept on contract for another year to finish the sprawling project for a release date Konami themselves set - after all, if this is the state it's in now, one can guess that had Kojima and his team bailed outright, the retail release could be dramatically worse. Kojima Productions has already been disbanded, and Kojima will leave the company at the end of 2015, with this... "game" being the last project he'll work on under the banner of the ol' UUDDLRLRBAS.

Yeah, this is mostly guesswork and reading between the lines. But until either side is willing to make more than vague assurances that "Kojima is still supporting Phantom Pain, we'll see you next METAL GEAR!", that's about all we can really do.

It's not a bad game, mind you. My 150-and-counting hours with it should attest to that without issue. The general world design, stealth mechanics, gunplay and seemingly endless ways to trick, misdirect, confuse, fuck with, and straight up murder a billion Soviet and Central African PF soldiers is truly a joy to play with, and while I won't lie and pretend the game has endless variety or a lack of filler - any game this big is going to get a bit repetitive if you're digging your heels in for 100% - the fact that the game keeps track of your playstyle and then shifts the AI strategies and equipment to compensate, effectively modifying the difficulty to match you, speaks to the brilliant core of one of the finest game design crews in the industry today. As a living, breathing, beautiful piece of interactive technology, MGSV:TPP is second to none, and it's basically locked in a three-way tie by default with FALLOUT 4 and THE WITCHER 3: WILD HUNT as inevitable "Game Of The Year" status, though as all three of these games have dramatically different aesthetics, mechanics, concepts and goals, picking any of them will ultimately come down to the gamer's own personal preferences anyway.

That said... wow, Phantom Pain is a mess. I started writing a long-form piece, but find doing so mostly irrelevant, since George "Super Bunnyhop" Weidman covers about 90% of my biggest concerns in the following 35 minute(!) academically minded review... it should go without saying that, not only does the video itself, but the rest of this post is going to spoil not only all of the secrets that Metal Gear Solid V holds, but by extension the ending to pretty much all Metal Gear games in the seemingly endless and sprawling franchise that built up to it. It's impossible to even try to discuss what went wrong without just diving into the gory details, and so I'm going to roll up my sleeves, stick both hands deep in there, and hope the guilt from what I find doesn't drive me to madness...



METAL GEAR SOLID V:DISSOCIATIVE DISORDER
While I do think Weidman's points are almost entirely valid, I'll confess there's a few things that bugged me either more, or less, than they did him - but that's to be expected from a franchise that finds appeal and love  for a hundred different reasons at once. Case in point, while I adore the polished and seemingly bottomless gameplay -  and was more than willing to keep going after 150 hours, until the code decided I could eat a back of dicks for daring to test of a fucking internet rumor was true - somehow the game still feels... well, not only incomplete, but wholly lacking in obvious thematic and narrative structure. Such basic and simple beats in storytelling that I'm, quite frankly, shocked that Hideo Kojima was capable of missing them. Meticulous, overwrought melodrama propelled by reactions the players are naturally drawn to take part in is kind of Kojima's "thing" so the problems on display seem to be two fold; not only is a big chunk of the narrative simply not present, but the remains of what wasn't jettisoned were hastily re-arranged in a rough, skeletal manner that gives the vague appearance of closure without actually closing anything.

While Weidman does a damn fine job explaining the biggest leaps of faith in Kojima's final chapter in what's easily the medium's most important and unique attempt at serialized story telling - drawing as much from American superhero comic continuities as it does American-pop action cinema, Japanese science fiction absurdity and random scientific texts digested, understood, and then promptly disregarded for maximum dramatic effect  - there's a few things he didn't touch on that have left me with no choice but to consider their odd and, in some cases, galling absences that I'm sure are largely being overlooked less because they aren't an issue, and more because... well, when the publisher sells you the first act separately and then cuts half of the third act completely, it's easy for the smaller things to fall through the cracks, I guess.

I can't stress this enough, but MASSIVE SPOILERS FOLLOW. Not only will this ruin any surprise the game might have had, but odds are it won't make much sense unless you've already played it - and most (if not all) of the games in the series before it, anyway.

I feel like I shouldn't have to explain that, but y'know. If you wanted to be surprised by any Metal Gear game, don't read any more. Also, if you haven't played the actual games, odds are none of this will make sense anyway. "Explain Metal Gear" is such an impossible feat it's a meme unto itself. Hell, I've played through METAL GEAR SOLID 4: GUNS OF THE PATRIOTS and even I'm not convinced I have a clue what's going on.



One of the more intriguing things that the trailers hinted at - well, one of those intriguing things that are actually in the finished game, anyway - is the reappearance of Paz Ortega Andrade, aka Pacifica Oceana, a double agent who infiltrated Militaires Sans Frontieres at the start of the "Peace Walker Incident" in 1974, and eventually took control of Metal Gear Zeke with the intent to bring it to her true master, Major Zero. In meta context it's clear that Paz was an excuse for Kojima to include a cute blond "teenage" girl on Mother Base without it feeling as inappropriate as it should have - let's face it, METAL GEAR SOLID: PEACE WALKER was, despite decent gameplay, largely waifu bait PSP bullshit, there's no other excuse for Cécile Cosima Caminades to exist - but, narrative wise, it was about right; Big Boss wouldn't trust a Soviet scientist, but if he came bearing a literal symbol of war-torn atrocity to distract him, why would Boss suspect the cute kid who just wants to sunbathe and play with the base kitten of being the real mole? (Not that she was the "real" mole, but... well, Miller's complicated relationship with Cipher is irrelevant for the time being.)

While a number of small oddities always cast the canon status of Ground Zeroes into doubt - Chico freaking out and not recognizing Snake for no real reason, captive MSF agents being shown Skull Face's horrifying visage but not being able to remember it, Miller playing dumb about knowing that Paz was a Cipher infiltrator, the bizarre lack of Big Boss' typical banter or affinity for cardboard box loving - a pet theory of mine was that the Camp Omega mission was real in some capacity, but that the mission we saw was "wrong" in some fundamental way; maybe the whole thing was a propaganda film produced by Cipher. Or maybe this was Chico's incomplete, PTSD-worsened recollection of the events. Or even in the context of Phantom Pain, perhaps this is the hypno-therapy "memory" of Venom Snake, itself both incomplete and based on second-hand testimony of how the events went down by the limited survivors of MSF. Any of these explanations would have been enough to explain why Paz - despite having had two bombs inserted into her body, with organs removed to make room(!) - could have "died" during the events of Ground Zeroes, but come back in The Phantom Pain, looking essentially the same but still bearing the large "V" shaped scar.

"V", as we later learn, was a code name given to Big Boss' body double, a plan that wasn't even put into motion until after the events of Ground Zeroes took place. In other words, the shape of the scar itself was a meta-textual hint that Ground Zeroes wasn't what we thought it was. Simply put, there's too many unexplained coincidences for Ground Zeroes to be anything BUT a fantasy... or, more accurately, a nightmare.

Phantom Pain warms us up to the idea that Ground Zeroes went down differently than we (the player - ie; Venom Snake) remember it, and send us on a quest to find not only the surviving MSF soldiers who haven't completely lost their minds, but return with photos of happier times, each photo giving us a pleasant visit with Paz... who's stuck in a temporal loop of recessive memory and amnesia, waiting for Peace Day, which will clearly never come. Once you collect all 10 photos, the final photo is waiting outside of Paz' room... and once you give it to her, she tears herself apart in a bizarre moment of body horror, with Venom Snake waking up on an unfinished platform, grasping at a ghostly butterfly that was never really there. Comparisons made to Silent Hill are perfectly valid here, and more importantly, even the final tape Paz "gives" you establishes that she's gone, and nothing you can do will bring him back.





In a sense, this might be the one instance of Venom Snake getting some legitimate character development that isn't him silently reacting to Miller and Ocelot railroading him on a quest for revenge he seems oddly distant to; Venom Snake was an MSF medic before Mother Base was razed by XOF, and the guilt he felt for failing to save Paz haunted him, even with his memories having mostly been erased through a combination of brain damage and hypnosis. It's the only time in the finished game that Venom Snake is shown to react to anything resembling guilt or the effects of PTSD, and while it's heavy handed... it works. You feel awful realizing that Paz is just a phantom of Peace Walker's distant memory, and seeing the one cute, good natured thing on Mother Base turn out to be a lie only justifies the distant, cold tone that flows through characters like Miller and Emmerich.

So where does the paradox kick in? The biggest issue is that Ocelot and Miller INTRODUCE Paz to Snake. Ocelot has been known to experiment with hypnotherapy to trick himself from revealing his true goal in MGS4, and it's implied in "Episode 46" (we'll get back to that later) that he's doing the same here. Could Ocelot have planted those seeds in his subconscious, knowing that Venom would react? Maybe. I guess. I mean that's a stretch, even for Metal Gear, but this is the guy who hypnotized himself to believe he was possessed by the soul of Big Boss' dead clone by grafting an arm onto his body, so sure, fuck it, whatever. The issue is that Miller is a patsy in all of this - he was never brain washed, and if Paz were really alive, he'd demand answers.

This leaves us with two possibilities, neither of which make a lot of sense:

1) Miller and Ocelot were never in the non-existent room with Snake. The whole thing was a hallucination on the part of a man suffering from memory loss, PTSD and mental conditioning. This is the most likely answer, I admit... but it opens up a whole new can of worms, which we'll get into momentarily.

2) Paz was real, and this was all meant to tie back into content removed during production that would allow you to bring her memories back full circle, at which point Paz would join your Mother Base crew. It isn't as good a fit, thematically speaking, but it's what I'm willing to wager was the original plan. Otherwise why bother having Ocelot or Miller there in the first place? Let Venom figure it out on his own terms.

If we assume "1", that leaves us with the notion of an unreliable narrator... and holy shit, does that open up the flood gates in regards to Quiet.



So holding aside all of the carefully crafted controversy bullshit surrounding Quiet... ah, who am I kidding. I'm being an analytical crazy person, may as well talk about some vidya tiddies while I'm at it. Truth be told, I like Quiet, and not just because she is to boners what MSG is to Chinese food; not necessary and it makes you feel a little upset at yourself when you get it, but it's still always always a welcome addition. I actually find she's the only original character in the game to have a decent story arc or a satisfying sense of character, which in a franchise mostly remembered for its iconic bosses and supporting characters... kind of sums up what a failure Phantom Pain was as a narrative experience, if not a sandbox game.

Quiet is a badass, the blatant sexualization only becomes borderline parody if you choose to spend time with her and get your Buddy Level up to 100% (meaning you're the creep, you rascal you!), and while I admit the camera zooming in on her bazongas which are bare because of nanomachines parasites and crisped up lungs is over the top - even by Kojima's standards - it's about the only time this fucking mess remembers that it's a Metal Gear game, and it's supposed to be doing cuh-rayzee and eye-roll inducing bullshit. Was it clumsy and awkward? Yeah, more often than not. But if the rest of the game is going to take itself so fucking po-faced, fuck it, I'll let this be awkward.

Let the sort of people who are legit mad over this shit get triggered into a coma. Maybe they'll finally stop bitching about George Kamitani being good at drawing sexy girls, moaning that nobody bought a mediocre game with a largely wasted memory-rewind function, and stop blindly donating to Kickstarter charlatans who are literally giving speeches at the UN about how arguing with subjective criticism is not only harassment, but that legal measures should be taken to stop them, while quoting 15 year old reports that call Pokemon "Satanic" and argue that violent action games turns young boys into "killing zombies". I fucking wish I was joking about any of this.

Anyway. The bigger issue here isn't the fact that Quiet can't speak, or doesn't wear pants: It's actually a small detail that took me a while to put my finger on. During Chapter 45, Quiet speaks English to save Big Boss - releasing the English Parasite and rendering her a danger to Mother Base and the entire English speaking world as a result - and then she wanders into the desert, never to be seen in the game again. Much like Aerith in Final Fantasy VII or Magus in Chrono Trigger, once she's gone, she's fucking gone. Considering this is end-of-game stuff, it means that clearing out the remaining Side-Ops without your sniper backup is going to be a bitch, so you'll feel the sting through gameplay as much as you will cut scenes. Much like the whole Paz "twist", it's actually a nice touch and is one of the few successful times the game communicates the loss that Venom - and, by proxy, the player - must feel despite having rebuilt Mother Base from scratch.

But what was that small detail? The simple fact that once Quiet leaves, the photo of her in the ACC (Air Command Center - or "Pequod") disappears. Keep in mind that every other photo, including those of Huey Emmerich - a literal traitor who's responsible for the deaths of countless Outer Heaven soldiers in two separate bases - remain where they were. That's odd, isn't it? That Boss would take down the photos of his best sniper and even potential love interest, but would keep the scumbag who knowingly rebuilt a nuclear death machine so a bunch of crazy kids could steal it, and mutated a parasite on Mother Base with the intent to sell it back to your enemies, forcing you to kill your own men - and then tries to make you feel bad about it? What kind of sick, self-hating sociopath would keep photos of THAT dingle berry and ditch the pictures of the sexy lady who could kill an entire platoon in 10 seconds flat?

The logical explanation is so simple, it's literally all over her face:



Butterflies in Metal Gear lore were tied specifically to the Peace Walker incident. For those who don't remember, Peace Walker was a story in which Big Boss - a man who was given that title for killing The Boss, and rejected it for the guilt and shame he felt having had to pull the trigger on his own mentor - and the excuse he uses for being in South America is that he's looking for something; a blue morpho butterfly. This all ties back to MGS3: Snake Eater, when - after losing his eyes to Volgin's torture - Naked Snake tries to "catch" a butterfly, realizing that losing his eye has permanently fucked his depth perception. Even his eye was a minor loss.

Tying this all together, the last photo you get for the Paz storyline is... wait for it... the elusive blue morpho. See a pattern emerging?

When Quiet is angry and ready to get her blood on, the skin on her face changes tone, and a butterfly "appears" on her face, like adorable war paint. The only way to prevent Chapter 45 from appearing in your Missions List - and thus, Quiet from leaving Mother Base - is to customize your PF's emblem using the butterfly as your centerpiece. All of Quiet's weapons are named after butterflies. You get the point, I'm sure. Quiet has replaced The Boss as that elusive force that drives Snake to his inevitable fate, and if Paz and The Boss are anything to go by, butterflies are something you can't catch...  far more than the Skulls, they are truly "those who don't exist".

So what the fuck is up with the scene where Miller is torturing Quiet, much to Ocelot's chagrin? This is such a clear, important moment that I'd say it's impossible for it to be non-canon... but the Paz Paradox complicates this, doesn't it? Either Venom is an unreliable narrator and everything he witnesses is open to debate as being "real", or what we see is what we get, and both Miller and Ocelot were capable of seeing Paz's phantom, too. In short, the Paz Paradox makes Quiet's very existence a potential figment of Venom Snake's retrofitted memory, and if she really WAS a fantasy, that actually explains the leering camera and the fact that despite not appearing to be an ethnic Navajo, she's able to speak it fluently with Code Talker; these logical leaps are literally made for you, the player, not for the literal, contextual narrative.

I hate to play that pretentious game in a narrative as clearly compromised as this - but obvious problems with the game aside, it's not an entirely unfair question. Metal Gear Solid 2 was literally a game *ABOUT* the pointlessness of sequels, and spent its entire final act  breaking the fourth wall asking the player if wasting their life away playing simulations and letting your "real" life pass you by until you have nothing else to show the world you existed. Metal Gear Solid V seems to be a direct inversion to this confrontational and somewhat pointed commentary - the game lets you quite literally make yourself in Big Boss' image, with the legend telling you in the game's final cut scene that you are as much responsible for his legacy as he is - but the fact that the game even has that obvious, tangible layer of memetic commentary means we can't rule the use of well-established symbols from the series out as trying to tell us something bigger.

In short, either Paz was supposed to be real or Quiet wasn't. Nothing in the game contradicts this notion, and until Kojima's NDA's break and he's allowed to tell us what the fuck happened behind the scenes between Konami and Kojima Productions, I'm unwilling to consider this oddity anything but intentional.



Now before going further, we have to talk about the "cut" content and the messy implications that it leaves us with.

Rumor and speculation is still largely what we have to go on, but one thing is clear; a decent chunk of the footage shown off in the various pre-release trailers released by Konami starting in 2013 are simply not present in the game. Off the top of my head:

* Venom Snake wanders through a burned out village full of child soldiers, and later is shown falling to his knees and crying out in anguish. The village with charred corpses is in the game, but it's not actually a set piece.

* A scene at Masa Village in the trailer shows a fully grown soldier training the child soldiers how to use automatic weapons. Again, this is present in theory, but much like the "burned village" its presence is hardly worth noting in actuality.

* Boss covered in blood and standing in front of a wall of fire, his face slowly growing sad, is one of the most iconic shots in the "Nuclear" trailer. It's also nowhere in the finished game.

* Several POW's are shown being mocked, waterboarded, and executed at Camp Omega, an area that you were supposed to return to in Phantom Pain if you owned the prologue. Never happened.

There's also various "alternate" takes of Big Boss in the chopper from Ground Zeroes, as well as two extended versions of the "Hallway Walk" from the Diamond Dogs quarantine platform (including some amazing body-horror animation). With no more Camp Omega missions to speak of now, it's hard to say if this was hinting at something bigger or if they just re-framed/tweaked the final footage. I'm trying to give Kojima the benefit of the doubt here - I know "cut" content often finds its way into marketing materials since it's all edited and finalized long after they've sold it - but the overall lack of anything even resembling the tone on display here is what confounds me so much.



This is also ignoring a veritable TON of "missing" dialogue tracks still hidden in the game data, such as Code Talker and Huey Emmerich singing birthday songs and additional dialogue from Skull Face implying that you could have potentially fucked with him during the now infamously awkward jeep ride, and even some straight up goofy bullshit like The Suth screaming "Yer' FIARD!!" and "CONSECUTIVE! C! Q! C!!!" Whether the implementation was cut as a conscious decision or due to a lack of time and resources, or they're just hanging out for some hilarity in MGO3 is really anyone's guess, but it's bizarre to see what should have been absolutely basic things, like menu sounds, somehow dropped for no concrete reason...

While I have little doubt that "Chapter 1: Revenge" was mostly finished - it has an actual arc, a journey unto itself, a couple of twists and turns along the way - it's still kind of a nasty mess. Those 30 Episodes (plus the hour-long "prologue" - which I loved, by the way, even if it ran just a little too long) have quite a bit of filler content and some big leaps in logic, but overall they feel like a complete, cohesive, if slightly underwhelming piece of entertainment. Phantom Pain Chapter 1 is still weak as far as stories go, ranking somewhere between "smarter than Peace Walker but not as substantial as Guns of the Patriots" - both of which are on the lower end of the Metal Gear writing cycle, as I'm sure we'd all agree -  but it's self-contained enough that if this is what I'd gotten, no more and no less... I'd sigh, shrug, and think, fuck it, at least I had fun right?

The problem is that after the credits roll we get a preview for "Chapter 2: Race". This is where the game doubles down on feeling rushed and broken and becomes a literal work-in-progress; the "19" missions presented in Chapter 2 are actually 6 new story missions, a dozen "Hard Mode" repeats of missions from Chapter 1, and a 'remix' of the prologue, which is as much an interactive cut-scene as it is anything else. It feels like a sampling of unfinished demo tracks rather than a full album, and while both Huey and Quiet get something resembling closure and resolution to their individual stories, Eli, The Third Child, Metal Gear Sahelanthropus, Code Talker and The Boss (in the form of the reconstructed Peace Walker AI Pod) simply do not. Zero and Strangelove appear in the form of audio tapes, but their loss is such an insult that I... honestly wish they hadn't been, to a large degree.

Exactly how much of the game was jettisoned during production is still up in the air, but the literal final boss battle - Eli piloting Metal Gear Sahelanthropus in the English Parasite infected island dubbed "Kingdom of the Flies" - was the narrative finale the game was begging for. The actual battle with Sahelanthropus in Afghanistan is pretty fucking underwhelming, and letting Eli fight his "Father" - while forcing Diamond Dogs to drop napalm on, and I can't stress this enough, an island full of live children - was exactly the big, dramatic gut punch that this whole storyline had been building up to. It was the next, logical extension after "Shining Lights" - arguably the one truly good thing about Chapter 2 - in which, having already had no choice but to put down his own men, Venom Snake has to extend that same nihilistic realism to the very people he tried to save from a life that was much like his own.

THE PHANTOM FINALE

You can argue how much content and what context is missing, but make no mistake; the fact that the "Premium Edition" of the game comes with an 18 minute(!) summation of the "Phantom Chapter" is proof that Kojima wanted us all to see how the game was supposed to end, knowing this is all bullshit...



THE PHANTOM CHAPTER:KINGDOM OF THE FLIES
Imagine, for a moment, if RETURN OF THE JEDI featured the first half of the film exactly as-is, up until the explanation that HOLY SHIT YOU GUYS, THERE'S A DEATH STAR 2: SITH BOOGOLO... but then we never get to see it. Nor do we ever get to Endor. No speeder bikes, no Ewok religious idols, no Lando Calrissen  and Wedge Antilles bromancing up until the big ass cathartic explosion - literally none of that happens. Instead we just abruptly cut to Luke Skywalker on the Star Destroyer without ever getting back to the sub Rebel Alliance has a fucking Death Star to blow to smithereens. That total lack of closure, of anything resembling a grand finale is the only way I can begin to describe how this game ends, and any excuse to shrug all of this off as intentional - as giving the player a "Phantom Pain" by not fulfilling their basic desires for cohesive storytelling - is just wrapping themselves in needless layers of pretension and hopes of hidden meanings to excuse a fundamental failure to deliver a finished product.

To continue the torturous analogy, maybe a couple scenes get swapped around in the middle, so we still see Yoda die, we still get clarification that Leia is Luke's sister - you know, clarity for a few of the less important subplots - but instead of the catharsis the film actually ends on between Luke Skywalker surpassing his father and the Rebel Alliance working together to destroy the ultimate death machine, it just cuts from Palpatine taunting Luke to that whole "I am a jedi, like my father before me!" line with no final Vader duel... and then, hey, rolls credits. No redemption for Darth Vader, no thrilling escape as the Death Star implodes, no getting shitfaced and making poor decisions with mongoloid teddy bears; nothing. It reaches the thematic conclusion of heroism, but the narrative just... stops. There is no actual resolution at all. That's what The Phantom Pain does. It's fucking INFURIATING, and while you can talk for hours about all of the ideas that didn't make it into Metal Gear games going back to the first MGS, all of those games were at least organized to minimize these losses. MGS2 ends on a giant "WTF?!", sure, but even that was a carefully weighted risk that tied up the actual meta-narrative as much as was necessary. MGSV? Shit is as unfinished as it gets. It's like a movie just missing the final reel with the credits awkwardly pasted back in. It's fucking sad.

Not trailer related, I know, but it's also worth noting that the endless cut scenes showing off Battle Gear were intended to culminate in him being Phantom Pain's equivalent to Metal Gear Zeke - a customizable and upgradeable mech that, unlike Zeke, you were meant to take out into the field. All the time hyping this four-legged floating abomination turns out to be a tiny logo to send on "Dispatch Missions", which you can't even watch unfold via cutout figures like in Peace Walker. I honestly can't think of a more underwhelming waste for a literal flying tank. Kojima swears this was cut "because it made the game too easy", but considering the Chicken Hat and "A Rank or Lower" items still exist, I'm calling bullshit. It was cut because it didn't work yet, and they figured jettisoning the fun so they could try and cobble what little of Chapter 2 was in a usable state seemed like the lesser of two evils when the Konami Crunch left them with no more wiggle room to delay the game another month, let alone the year it likely would have taken them.
So what is that end credits freeze-frame in this already painful analogy? It's "Episode 46", The Truth: The Man Who Sold The World. A twist that's only a surprise if you're not a tinfoil hat wearing asshole who looked up interpretations about every seemingly relevant David Bowie song a year before the game came out. (Spoiler: The song is about doppelgangers. Flamboyant, pansexual doppelgangers...)

So let's get this out of the way: I don't mind the big twist about Venom Snake being Khan a body double cooked up by Zero as a way for the "original" Big Boss to slip through the world, undetected. It actually explains how Frank Jaeger could be imprisoned by "Big Boss" in Outer Heaven and still be on Big Boss' side in Zanzibar Land three years later. It also explains how Big Boss could be the leader of Fox Hound during Operation Intrude N313 while simultaneously running Outer Heaven without anyone being the wiser. It raises further questions, of course, but it's just clever enough that it fixes the continuity between the 1987 Metal Gear and the 1990 sequel, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, so it's... better than the twist we got at the end of Peace Walker, at the very least, and it was seemingly tailored to make Big Boss' endless speech at the end of Metal Gear Sold 4: Guns of the Patriots leave not only an ironic, bitter aftertaste, but makes his insinuation that "sometimes people can be used to play certain roles" all the more insidious.

What I DON'T like is how pointless and jarring the presentation all is. It's clear that the "big twist" was in the cards since Ground Zeroes has Kiefer Sutherland also playing the medic, who's face was very, very carefully hidden from view. This is all fine. The only issue I have is that, it just... appears. Out of nowhere. Done all the "Important" Side Ops? Cool, congrats, here's the true, super-secret ending for no fucking reason. PTSD and hallucinations were once promised to be a big part of the game, and are even a key component in the prologue, but they barely appear in practice otherwise. Could this have, I dunno, been tied to a bigger story mission that cuts back and fourth between a repeat of the fucking hour long prologue? The fact that this happens at "Chapter 46" - and isn't even treated as a 'Final Mission' is telling of how randomly this was pushed back into the unfinished Chapter 2 mold with little regard for how it all fit together with the rest of the game. Kojima admits there is no end by the very checklist you select missions from... I can't tell if that's incredibly honest or douchey. Maybe it's both.

But my biggest question is... well, why? Why now? What brought on Venom to remember that "Vic Boss" is really just Ishmael? The game has no narrative, or even thematic explanation; they've simply run out of game for you to play otherwise and already took Quiet away without really warning you about it, so fuck it, here kid. Have your big, shocking twist ending 4chan figured out a year prior. You've earned it... somehow, maybe, I guess...

Not to use Tumblr's favorite word in vain or anything, but couldn't this all be triggered at Mother Base by someone - maybe even Ocelot, the lovable rascal - playing "The Man Who Sold the World"? It literally opens the game, and stimuli - such as music, smells and sensations - are known factors in triggering things like flashbacks in PTSD patients, which the Paz Paradox suggests Venom likely is.

Shit, if there was no narrative explanation anyway, couldn't it have been worked into the mechanics? Maybe you got the tape after all of the other missions and then just listening to it on the iDroid actually triggers a cut scene? Could we do literally anything to make me feel like I'm part of the experience instead of just watching it unfold in the background while I wait for it to be ready for more actual gameplay? Imagine if the game opens with the Midge Ure cover and "The Truth" is only revealed if you hear the Bowie original... oh, what could have been...

Making this insanely important epilogue fit back into the broader game structure would have helped my good will by a bunch, and the fact that once you finish it, the game just kinda' shrugs and dumps a dozen unexplained, effectively impossible-to-be-real tapes in your lap. It's not all about Miller making a fast food resturaunt at Mother Base, either (which, by the way, is the best fucking thing ABOUT the game): It's stuff about Zero, Skull Face and Paz, long, rambling monologues hastily explaining all the deep seated lore away like it realized it had a bunch of scenes to show but just started reading the full script verbatim as a radio play and hoped that'd be "good enough" to satisfy... anyone. It just smacks of this all having been shuffled back into the game at the 11th hour hoping to salvage something resembling closure.

It doesn't work. The last reel is gone in this movie, and they've simply cut the build-up to it, hoping we wouldn't notice.



Another thing that's been irking me for a while is the fact that the Diamond Dogs logo, which hasn't changed since the initial Yoji Shinkawa art for Big Boss, feature none other than a Rhodesian Ridgeback. Data mining suggest that the brief appearance these pups make in Ground Zeroes - barking at Skull Face as he walks to Chico's cell - would have been a part of a larger gameplay mechanic, but like so many things it was removed before the game could be finished. Guard dogs were a feature in both Metal Gear on the MSX and MGS3: Snake Eater, so not having them in MGSV - particularly when they could have changed the whole dynamic of bringing DD, or in how enemies can track you during an alert status - is really a shame. There's even a QTE for tossing off wolves, so it doesn't seem like including them would have been that much more work... but I'm getting away from my point, which was narrative rather than mechanical.

Why is the Rhodesian Ridgeback important? Because Kojima stated, when the game had just been confirmed to be Metal Gear Gear Solid V, that race, culture and language - all as separate concepts - would be the driving theme behind The Phantom Pain, specifically quoting "Race and Revenge" as the game's two core themes. The last third of the game are under the banner "Chapter 2: Race", but "race" itself - skin color, the one thing that embracing a new culture can't change until a few generations of breeding happen - never actually factors in to anything.

Rhodesia is now Zimbabwe, a country to the north of South Africa, but one that up until 1980 had a very similar British founded "White Government" that, despite only making up about 3% of the country's population, treated the native black citizens as a second class, enforcing apartheid laws that literally prevented blacks from entering "White Areas". The country was embroiled in some pretty nasty combat through the 70s and 80s, culminating in Zimbabwe declaring independence from their previous government that had ruled since the 1930s. Meanwhile, South Africa maintained their forced racial segregation and generally shitty treatment of black citizens until 1994, presumably due to South Africa having a nearly 9% white populace, plus a similar number of what the official government calls "coloured" - which, basically, implies that they're not anglo-white, but aren't necessarily african-native in origin, either. (How much things have actually improved in South Africa since, I can't say, and is getting off track anyhow. Learning about South Africa from Die Antwoord is about as useful as learning about Japan through Tsukamoto Shinya: Awesome, yes, but not especially useful.)

Plus, Sahelanthropus has a skull painted on its big, ugly head. The fucking obvious "final battle" after Skull Face escapes with Sahelanthropus would be chasing him down to an armored fortress on the South African border with the defeated Sahelanthropus' mechanical head as the keep's centerpiece. Throw a couple more skulls up and the "founding" of Outer Heaven comes full circle. But that's not the issue... well, it is ultimately, but it's not why I think it got mangled and re-written so heavily during production, at the very least.

I think a certain word is really blame. Ironic, considering the context of it all...

YOU WILL BE ASHAMED

OF YOUR WORDS AND DEEDS

Back when this was still "PROJECT OGRE" in 2010, Hideo Kojima promised us that his next game would deal with "taboo subjects", going as far as to say that if he messed up the way he handled them, he may have to leave the industry permanently. When he unveiled Quiet in 2013 and met nothing but scoffing and charges of sexism in the English language gaming press, he assured us that Quiet was the anthisesis of uncovered female heroines, and that when we knew the secrets behind her exposure, we would "be ashamed of our words and deeds". The Quiet thing was pretty goofy, no matter how you slice it - but that quote was alongside numerous promises that race was still a key component, and that the game would challenge its audience in new and thought provoking ways. Ironically, METAL GEAR SOLID V: GROUND ZEROES - despite having numerous burning questions that will seemingly never be answered - did a good job of doing exactly what he promised. Phantom Pain, well... I feel the game was courting something dangerous. Something profound. Something that very few games have ever touched on, and when they do it's usually a clunky, over-wrought version of it, like Spec Ops: The Line or The Last of Us. Something that makes YOU, the player, feel not only guilty, but justified in something some that, all things considered, makes you kind of a shitty person.

For what it's worth, I personally don't know shit beyond the absolute basics about apartheid Africa. Heck, most of why I know about it came directly from me being fascinated by Neil Blombkamp's sci-fi treatment of the concept in District 9. This isn't all meant to be getting into the political implications I'm largely unfamiliar with, merely point out that - much like the Jewish Holocaust - there's a lot of fertile ground for using it in a fictional context to draw attention and parallels to current events.

Ground Zeroes had the stones to use a fictional "black site" to openly show how brutal and unjustified the real-life events at Camp X-ray in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq from the last decade have been, and while admittedly fictionalizing these events with the convoluted plot of a story of a cloned super soldier who fights nuclear bomb launching robots is probably not the most "mature" way to handle it, at least there was a legitimate attempt to focus on torture and giving the military limitless power over "non-combatants".

Phantom Pain stands on the edge of apartheid down to its very core, and refuses to directly acknowledge any part of racism in Africa despite that supposedly being the whole fucking theme of the game. If you're paying attention, you'll note that every victim of Skull Face's experiments in Angola-Zaire is black, poor, skinny and absolutely miserable. Skull Face himself seems to show no direct distaste for human ethnicity - merely their nationality, the fact that they're so willing to conqueror and manipulate those around them on unfair terms. Skull Face doesn't give a shit about blacks... but I'm willing to bet a lot of those predominantly white PF groups do, or at least the people hiring them. I wouldn't be shocked if one of the earlier focuses in the story was on Skull Face being backed by someone - likely someone not even in the game, at this point - who was willing to fund XOF's research on the premise that he develop Kikongo Parasites, and similar parasites that would specifically wipe out local tribal groups that they held responsible for the violence through Rhodesia and surrounding areas. Skull Face isn't racist, but with even Ocelot calling these parasites "Ethnic Cleansers" - and the obvious parallels between Code Talker's childhood to ongoing ethnic homogenization - it feels like a game that's never had trouble courting controversy is trying so hard to say it without saying it that it's painful.

So let me say it, Kojima: At one point your English script had some white asshole say something like "But who cares if we kill all the niggers?" This freaked someone high up in the chain at Konami the fuck out - perhaps not without reason, considering how absurdly PC the American and general English language media has become over the last several years - and this subplot got scrapped. Nothing else even begins to make sense, and considering everything *ELSE* we know got cut, suddenly removing a bunch of cut scenes from the early missions in Africa starts to hold a more intriguing implication. For one thing, this is a shame, since - while I'm of the personal opinion that hating anyone for their ethnicity, gender and religious or political beliefs over their behavior and personality is fucking stupid - tribalism and distrust of the "other" is very much a part of human nature, and an evolutionary necessity at that. People who grow up around what they see as their own kind are inherently suspicious, wary, fearful or angry as what they as something wholly separate, be those lines around race, language, class, even sex or political affiliation.

Sports are seen as a catharsis for so many people because it lets one group's "tean" go to battle with the other's, which - in centuries prior - would likely have just been an outright skirmish. Kojima clearly wanted to touch on some dark subject matter in this project, but after Ground Zeroes - by far the darkest chapter in Metal Gear history - he seemed content to cut any and all controversial elements that weren't Quiet's massive bewbs, leaving a game that feels like it's just on the edge of striking a nerve... and then never does. For fuck's sake, even The Last of Us felt more like a taboo breaker than this.

But there's a second reason this drives me crazy, and that's the fact that Rhodesia is - again - just north of South Africa. Why is South Africa important? Because that's where Outer Heaven is located! The logical conclusion here would have been Venom Snake invading a massive XOF stronghold on the Zimbabwe/South African border, conquering the shit out of it, and replacing one of their flags or something with the Diamond Dogs emblem. That's all it would have taken to make it clear that Phantom Pain really had come full circle with the founding of Outer Heaven, particularly with the novel version of MGS4 - which is more of a "rewrite" than a typical novelization, keep in mind - implying that Big Boss returned to Groznyj Grad in the late 80s to found Zanzibar Land in the ruins of Volgin's old stomping grounds. This would have legitimately brought the founding of Big Boss' empire full circle, but instead the game seemingly forgets its own continuity and just says, fuck it, Diamond Dogs in the Seychelles = Outer Heaven in South Africa eventually. 'Cause why the hell not.

HERE'S TO YOU,

CHICO AND BOSS

It's interesting that we didn't hear about Jim Piddock - the English voice of Major "Cipher" Zero - turning down the role until December of 2014. They had seemingly finished with Kiefer Sutherland, Robert Atkin Downes and the rest of the "main" English cast in 2013, yet the character who supposedly set up the entire "V" plan wasn't even contacted until the game would have, theoretically, been wrapping up production? Similarly the first implication that Strangelove - who winds up killed off screen, and in the final game only exists as a voice recording monologue in Chapter 2 - was a tweet from the Japanese actress, Yumi KIKUCHI, in July of 2014.

In and of itself, this isn't such a big deal; Chapter 2 may be a bloody mess, but with Skull Face having been virtually a tape-only presence in Ground Zeroes, it's hard to say if this was always by design or out of desperation once larger sections of the game had to be abandoned. In any case, the whole Strangelove subplot is just... bizarre. Huey was a lovable goofball in Peace Walker - effectively just Otacon in a wheelchair, when you get down to it - so while Phantom Pain's promise to show men becoming demons was ultimately fulfilled... it was by the one character who had every reason to not be a bastard. Ground Zeroes presented Huey as a twitchy liar who sold MSF out to Skull Face, but with a throw-away like about Strangelove having "left" not long before the XOF invasion, it seemed like they were setting it all up that Huey traded Big Boss' army for Strangelove's life. A crime of passion where the needs of one were seen as justifying the loss of many. In more focused and sensible hands, Huey's betrayal of Outer Heaven would have been tragic, romantic, even...

And in Phantom Pain he freaks out when she takes Hal away as he becomes Gendou IKARI 2.0, locks her away in The Boss' AI pod, and lets her starve to death like a dog. They discover her corpse which slumps out of the pod in a cassette tape. What the actual fuck, Kojima?! There's no way this was as it was written, and the more I think about it, the more I question if Huey's "betrayal" was scrapped and re-written entirely in the 11th hour. The whole thing just feels "off", and it's such a disappointing end to one of the more interesting Peace Walker characters I can't help but wonder if this was all ultimately done - if only in part - just to spite Konami's chance to use her in later games.

 Even holding aside how shitty a treatment this subplot is to both characters, it's also a total squandering of the fact that - beyond all rational expectations - THE BOSS LIVES! ...well, her AI pod - which, as Peace Walker established, isn't quite the same as the real thing - is still there, still remembers "Jack", and no matter how you slice it, could have been a valuable asset to the Diamond Dogs. They use her as a witness, and then just kinda'... forget she exists. If you wander around the RD platform she simply sits there, repeating bits and pieces of her final moments forever... locked in a living, infinite hell. Thanks, Venom! To be fair he does talk to the pod exactly once in the hidden "Final Ending" that's still locked behind the FOB stupidity that sounds like more fun than it actually is - but that's such a pointless after thought it actually makes Venom's character even more confusing than if they'd left it out entirely.

Hey, does anyone else remember how Kojima went to Normandy as part of the game's "location scouting"? Wouldn't that have been amazing, to see The Boss kicking ass with the Cobra Unit on D-Day through mind-jacking into the fucking AI pod? Wouldn't that have given us an actual justification to bring "The Boss" back - to see her legend, her gospel, renewed through the tragedy of seeing The Joy being an absolute fucking beast on the battle field, killing nazi's with The Sorrow and a big ol' Ocelot filled belly? Goddamn the thought of that game existing makes my dick hard... and instead she plays a bit part on a shitty episode of Law and Order.

Fuck. This. Game. But in the end, the biggest disappointment for me is, of all things, Chico. Hilarious, right? We were like a a budget extension away from VR Missions with the mother fucking Cobra Unit, and THIS is the final straw...

Don't get me wrong, nobody actually liked that annoying little shit - Ground Zeroes seemed designed solely to torture and humiliate the little bastard, and with the fact that he had a headphone jack embedded in his chest (which he could evidently listen to...?) was never explained in any way, shape or form still drives me nuts, since there's a LOT of weird and frankly interesting looking experiments going on at Camp Omega which all amount to fuck-all in the end. His Achilles tendons were destroyed, but with Phantom Pain's very title having an obsession with loss and irreconcilable damage to the self, what better character to explore this notion with did this franchise have but Chico? He never had a childhood that was free of the battlefield, and being forced to beat and even rape the girl he loved, and then still being coaxed into betraying MSF to spare them both further humiliation, puts him in the "damaged beyond fucking repair" category.

If the goal of Phantom Pain was to explore PTSD in any sort of meaningful way, to show the harrowing and miserable lives that veterans and even non-combatants have to suffer for the unbroken chain of perpetual violence. Forget Skull Face, ignore Miller, if there was ever a fucking case study for Metal Gear being an anti-war story, the 14 year old boy who was tortured, crippled, forced to engage in sexual assault to save both of them further violence and in the end sold his comrades out anyway was THE story to run with. Yes, I know a small, crippled, 20-something year old brown boy impersonating a 50ish Big Boss would have been a bit of a stretch, but goddamn, even that would have been a more fitting and interesting twist than "Big Boss is just some random brainwashed medic. Too bad those crazy kids Big Boss tried to save died or some shit".

For a year and change now I've been reminding self-important arseholes who are ready to write off Ground Zeroes as sadistic, misogynistic trash to wait until the actual fucking story was finished before pointing and making Invasion of the Body Snatcher noises as the "Women in Refrigerators" page on TVTropes. Metal Gear had a habit of not really killing characters, and considering this was the fourth mainline game to star the final boss who was killed in the original game, I had no doubt that even if Paz was gone, Chico's guilt and self-loathing would ultimately be a driving force behind Phantom Pain's raison d'être... and in the end, it's not even treated background noise. More time is spent trying to explain what the Boss' AI pod is, despite that having already gotten closure in Peace Walker.

It's really depressing when I pick this all apart and realize that despite Peace Walker being, by far, the weakest prior story for a mainline Metal Gear after the original, even that seems to understand what themes and character arcs and developments are. Peace Walker may have been Metal Gear Lite, but Phantom Pain is a bunch of sticky notes randomly shuffled together into a convoluted skeleton with no meat to speak of.

WITH QUIET DIGNITY

That's the real fuck'n rub here for me. Because at the end of the day, exactly one character in this game had a character arc, had personality, was likable through and through... and it was the one character Kojima just made to troll the whole goddamn world with.



Quiet's story is a tragedy presented as a farce: She gets barbecued by "Ishmael" in the opening, has parasites injected into her skin to replace her lungs and digestive track, survives getting her brains blown out by "Ahab" but assumes he's the former, follows him to Mother Base ready to release vengeance through her voice... and in the end, she sacrifices herself to save Venom, not only releasing the curse of the English Parasite forcing her to wander the desert alone, lest she infect the world, but is never able to come to terms with her feelings for the man who convinced her to become a gun. Not for honor, but for love. It's poetic... in a brain-dead kind of way.

It's annoying that so much focus has been put on her awesome baps because at the end of the day, she's the only character in here I wanted to spend time with. She assists you in the field, she's treated like dirt by your supposed friends, she betrays her commanding officer because she starts falling for Big Boss, same as the rest of us. Other than the whole "silent" gimmick, she fits right into the series, and the whole "dur hur paruhsites make no sense 'cause THE END" shit needs to stop. Like, now. You guys know the old man still had lungs, right? Working, not-charred like jerky lungs? That's why he fucking snores. The fact that Naked Snake gets the ability to use sunlight when wearing The End's camo snuggy doesn't suggest that Quiet could wear the same, rather it suggests that The End's clothing - rather than his entire body - was filled with the chlorophyllic parasites. And that just opens up a whole bunch of new potential retcons, doesn't it? But nah, let's all be snarky and joke about a hundred year old man in nylons instead instead of actually paying attention to the pseudo-science.

These guys also realize that Quiet's roughly as dressed as Big Boss in Naked Camo, right? And that wearing this gives you ZERO tactical advantage over putting on a shirt, right? But nah, there's no way this optional outfit is Metal Gear sneaking in a little dash of manservice, gotta be part of that adolescent male power fantasy...



What's funny is that Quiet wouldn't have been so out of place in any other Metal Gear game. Metal Gear 2 had a Soviet spy who was also a figure skater who didn't realize that she was dating Frank goddamn Jaeger, because "Frank Hunter" was such a clever fucking alias. Metal Gear Solid 2 had The Fortune, a forlorn girl in a one-piece bathing suit and combat boots who couldn't get shot to end her life, and I mean that oddly literally. Metal Gear Solid 4 had the Beauty and Beast unit, and they...


Yeah. If a line was ever crossed into "...well, this is fucked up", it was the Beauty and Beast Corps. They moan seductively as you tranq them, they crawl and straddle you if you whip out the camera, and every single one of them is about as naked as you can get with a second skin of latex. They all have horrifying, tragic backstories, and the fact that they react to extreme trauma by wanting to grind on what appears to be a 70 year old Snake is... unsettling. It's not the sexuality itself, which is just silly, it's the direct connection to trauma, torture and violence that makes it so off-putting.

But that's kind of the whole point, isn't it? That you can choose to be an asshole and act like it's a Playboy shoot is entirely up to you. When I played through the boss battles I fought them for real using deadly weapons, and frankly, the battle with Laughing Octopus (above) is such a weird John Carpenter-esque nightmare that if you're getting off to this, you're probably a bad person with fetishes that make people regret looking underneath your bed.

Not that I'm not a bad person myself, or think that being a "bad person" is anything to take too seriously when we're talking the realms of fantasy. I have literally argued with people over the definition of "rape porn" because they think movies or books or what have you with graphic depictions rape - regardless of presentation and goal of the work in question - is instantly 'porn' or a celebration of sexual assault. As a dedicated connoisseur of rape porn I find that notion offensive! There's a wide range between the rape comedies of the Hong Kong CAT III period and the brutality of my favorite Chinese Cartoon Girls which are, in no uncertain terms, made exclusively to beat off to. If you want to use the words "rape porn" and don't know what Legend of the Overfiend, Raped by an Angel or Thriller: A Cruel Picture are, you really have no business talking about a varied subject you clearly know nothing about, much less projecting your personal turn-offs on a work you'd otherwise have no interest in. And there's the rub, I think. Art - or entertainment, media, whatever you think movies and games and such are - are allowed to offend and make viewers uncomfortable, if that's the story and the tone the creator wants to make.

I guess if your argument is "overt and non-story centered sexualization is stupid", I can't completely argue against it. I happen to think light-hearted, eye-rolling fanservice can be fun. Sometimes it's so bad it's just cringe-worthy. Quiet straddles the line (giggidy), but when it all comes to a head (goo) it's just... dumb. It's not offensive. It's not even creepy. It's just stupid, and considering the one line from the game everyone remembers is a guy named Skull Face screaming "WHOOOOO?!" at the top of his lungs, meh, at that point I can't get too worked up over it. Metal Gear is a franchise about how ugly bipedal robots that launch nuclear weapons are the height of technological warfare and a human clone with advanced aging has to stop an AI cluster's plot to control the trigger of every major manufacturer's weapon through the use of nanomachines, who fights a different old man who only brainwashed himself to think he was possessed by the spirit of a different dead clone to try and stop a machine that's taken down by an 8 year old girl who stole the plot from Independence Day, and also there's a cyborg ninja with robo-high heels who fights a hairy chested bisexual vampire with hyperspeed boots and a 90 minute cut scene in which two old men who barely know each other dump anghsty philosophy on each other in a graveyard I SWEAR I HAVE MADE NONE OF THIS SHIT UP.

In other words, "stupid" is nothing new to Metal Gear. Either you're used to it, or you already went back to Mobile Suit Gundam and/or Splinter Cell.

If your argument is "KOJIMA IS BETTER THAN THIS!" and "PREVIOUS GAMES WEREN'T THIS DISGUSTING!" and "THINK OF THE CHILDREN WOMEN WHO FACE ENOUGH PUSH BACK FROM THOSE EVIL MISOGYNISTS GAMERS", well...







...you clearly haven't been paying attention for the last decade or two. Inappropriate and questionable sexual tension is part of the charm at this point, and to Kojima's credit, he's about half as liable to undress and objectify men as he is women. Bitch all you want, games media and pals, but Kojima himself stated that Raiden was specifically designed to appeal to a female audience that wasn't fold of Solid Snake, and if you decide that Big Boss is more into ruffling around Kaz' banana hammock than Paz' frilly things, hey, that's all up to you.

Is Quiet stupid, particularly the way she shoves her ass into the camera for no real reason? Of course. She is. Is she reduced to a sex object by the camera? Every chance it gets. And does that undermine her character? Nah. Not unless being crammed up Snake's ass has made him a sex-fantasy object, too. For a game where words are in short supply - both thematic and literally - Quiet's actions are almost universally stunning, If you're arguing that a character's looks are ultimately the deciding factor in how seriously you take them, you're being honest and I can respect that, but unless you constantly bitch about how non-functional the average Final Fantasy or Dynasty Warriors costume is, I also think you're just being a touch ridiculous about it.

Hell, a friend of mine - who's no prude - grumbled about the "dancing in the rain" scene. I reminded him that he adores Berserk, and the only real difference is that in Berserk the two of them didn't actually want to stuff each other's gully holes, which makes the whole scene even dumber in a sense. Not that you shouldn't love Berserk, but for fuck's sake, will I be happy when I never have to hear about Quiet's tiddies again. I'd much rather hear how she was the despised yet sweet natured badass the Diamond Dogs deserved, not the martyred matron they seemingly all needed.

Besides, the fact that the one time anything remotely sexual happens to her is A) an act of violence, and B) ends with her absolutely DESTROYING that little fucker's junk says all you need to know about Kojima's view of the world; ain't no crime rubber necking, but keep those hands where she can see them, boys. If that's too much for you to handle, fuck it, I really don't know what to tell you.

Metal Gear is fucking dumb and yet over-explains every part of its dumbness. That's why people like it. If this is news to you, I'unno what to say, dude.

IDENTITY CRISIS:
WHAT IF I'M A LIE?

If the plot were a mess but the characters themselves were engaging, this may have saved to some degree. Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is a flaming trainwreck of an overall narrative, trying like mad to explain away the intentionally broken meta-narrative of METAL GEAR SOLID 2: SONS OF LIBERTY, but at least its dedication to giving all the characters their moment in the sun makes it feel... alive, by comparison. Even when MGS4 sucks, it's at least dedicated to fleshing out and walling in the rich and well-rounded characters the series had been building up to that point. By the end of it all, I find "Liquid Ocelot" just as likable and even sincere in his dedication to The Boss' will as Solid Snake is to defeating The Patriots; two sides of the same coin, violently barreling towards the same goal, despite never fully realizing it. It's sad, it's brilliant, and it's just dumb enough that I can keep rolling with it... even when we get to shit like this.


...yeah, MGS4 is pretty retarded. But somehow it's still more likable than Phantom Pain. And a big part of that is because by and large, nobody in this game has any real personality.

You remember Revolver Ocelot? The guy who convinced himself he was Liquid Snake and grafted the dead fucker's arm onto his body and then hypnotized himself into believing it was true? The guy who was shown to be an absolute nut even as a kid, twirling pistols like an old Western hero and dedicating hours of the day to creating increasingly convoluted hand gestures and mewling like a cat? Yeah. Ocelot was a fucking madman, and when he became the default antagonist of MGS2 and MGS4, he owned it. Ocelot is a back-stabbing sociopath who'd sacrifice everything to let Big Boss' interpretation of The Boss' Will come to fruition, but he was always a spastic crazy person getting there.

So who the fuck is the southern drawl cowboy played by Nolan goddamn North? 'Cause he sure as shit isn't Ocelot. He's a dull textbook of in-world information spouting off 2 minute chunks of backstory at the drop of a hat - his presence in the Paz introductions being the scene that clinched it for me; Ocelot is not the same character he's been in every other incarnation. It's not "a new take", it's "some other asshole they named Ocelot". Phantom Pain is trying so goddamn hard to emulate a po-faced Tom Clancy narrative that Ocelot simply doesn't fit within its fabric, so he's been modulated into a generic... nothing.

Benedict "Kazuhira" Miller comes off only slightly better; Robert Atkin-Downes plays his role as the bitter, vengeance driven general straight to the hilt, and I absolutely respect every ounce he poured into a role that steals every scene he appears in. Unfortunately, Generic Ocelot and you-know-who kneecap virtually every attempt Miller has at finally succumbing to the darkness that consumes him; Ocelot tortures as a necessary evil, but he's so blase about the whole thing you'd think he was simply doing it to shut Miller up. Miller, meanwhile, gets veto'd at every step of the way, being denied not only satisfaction against Skull Face, but Huey as well.

I mean, yeah, Huey winds up getting cuckolded to death by his own son. Still doesn't make up for the bullshit "punishment" he got. Miller should have cut his legs off and kept them as a trophy. Literally anything would have been better than that.

And that all filters back to the biggest void in the game: Venom Snake. I understand it, memetically speaking; Phantom Pain posits the realization that Big Boss' legend wouldn't exist without gamers being desperate and hungry for more, to see how the lovably autistic Naked Snake fell from grace as the greatest hero of all time to become the blood thirsty madman of the Outer Heaven Uprising. By making "us" Big Boss, Kojima finally rejects the fourth-wall breaking rejection of war games as anything but a waste of time in MGS2 and lets us have our power fantasy. We become Big Boss, the feared mercenary who gave birth to the War Economy. Feared by the general public, loathed by the "real" puppet masters, and beloved by those who's lives begin and end on the blood stained battle field, Phantom Pain is the ultimate realization of Peace Walker's knowing commentary of Big Boss'"downfall" being the logical conclusion of his journey towards what he always saw as The Boss' will; the monster who's sole purpose is to perpetuate violence and retaliation as a means to an end, giving every group who feels wronged or that they deserve more than they have the manpower to take lives... not for life, not for honor, but for you. Big Boss' descent into violence and villainy is your own military simulator. Always has been, and it was at the endgame of Peace Walker - when Mother Base's theme changed from the yellow of peace to the red of combat - that Kojima made everything as clear as he possibly could. Hell, the final speech in Peace Walker - the first time Big Boss says "Outer Heaven"* - has far more nuance and understanding of the morally ambiguous position that Big Boss and Mother Base hold than the entirety of the Phantom Pain.

* Yeah, yeah, he mentions "Outer Heaven" in passing METAL GEAR SOLID: PORTABLE OPS, despite presumably using Gene's money to fund The Patriots, which is why he has to start from zero (hehe... I miss laughter...) after leaving Cipher. Actually wait, is Portable Ops even canon at this point? Screw it, can I just ignore how dumb that Null stuff is and then pretend Portable Ops is The Phantom Pain?

So what "missing link" does Phantom Pain ultimately cover? It can't do much, because Kiefer Sutherland's silent, stoic take on Big Boss is almost completely devoid of personality, other than always being merciful and just and fucking perfect at every step. Huey betrays us a second time and forces you, the player, to murder your own troops... your judgment is to put him on a life raft with food and water and let him figure it out. You're hired to kill child soldiers by a warlord who wants them silenced; you take the injured kids back to Mother Base and open a fucking day care. The player can "Go Nuclear" by building nuclear warheads and even  growing a massive oni horn if he kills people and animals on a regular basis, but so fucking what? I hate to go full anon, but let's face it:

Big Boss Did Nothing Wrong. And that's bullshit. "Kaz, I'm already a demon." What? NO. No Venom, you're NOT! Even if we consider everything you did in Portable Ops and Peace Walker to be morally questionable (and it so is), what has he done? What honest thing has Venom Snake done to show the sort of self-loathing he shows when he rescues Kaz? Every line Venom gets seems to come out of nowhere - and that's when it comes out at all...

I don't want to get into the failings of Chapter 1 because, as weak as it was, I can live with it. It's only when you introduce the avalanche of unfinished, poorly executed and nonsensical clusterfuck of Chapter 2 that it all goes wrong, but the jeep ride with Skull Face sums up the impotence and misfires of MGSV almost perfectly. You create a bookend moment with the Ground Zeroes opening while Skull Face gives his evil villainous monologue, Big Boss sitting in silence and fidgeting like a hobo on the bus, and then once the villain has said his piece and you expect a quip, a threat, a question - for the hero to say literally fucking anything - instead, we get... well, just fucking look at it...




Such a list for theme songs...
We get 2 minutes of awkward silence while Donna Burke's amazing theme song echoes softly in the distance, like an impotent firework farting musical brilliance along the ground where no one can see them. It's painful. If one moment in The Phantom Pain can sum up why the strong, silent approach was a horrible idea, and how low Hideo Kojima has fallen as an interactive storyteller, this sequence speaks louder than words ever could. And I LIKED the fucking ladder scene in Snake Eater! At least that served as an act break, and was a reprive of a theme that we already liked, not as stretching for time minutes before the final battle and blowing the Donna Burke load all over the sheets before you ever got your boxers off.

If there was a single moment where my minor doubts and frustrations turned to blackened, seething fury, Chapter 30 was it. A pity, too. Skull Face may have been a goddamn Saturday morning cartoon villain in the end, but White George Takei was more fun than anything around him. Had THIS cornball in a ten gallon hat had been the final boss of Peace Walker, maybe that game would have been the finale I always wanted and never realized.

DID YOU LIKE IT?

The saddest part in all of this is I'm starting to piece together what a desperate, angry act of bridge-burning Chapter 2 really becomes. Zero's put into a coma by the late 70s thanks to Skull Face's parasites. Paz, Chico and Strangelove are dead. Huey is a filthy traitor. The Boss is reduced to a broken record. Miller is a crippled, bitter husk. Ocelot is boring. Skull Face is killed in the least satisfying manner possible by an annoying little shit. Quiet's gone. Volgin's lust for revenge extinguished... Eli and Baby Mantis are MIA, but the Collector's Edition spoils what'll inevitably happen next, and anything that isn't properly explained in the game itself (ie: EVERYTHING) is either given an over-long audio cassette, or is brushed off as unimportant.

I'm not even going to dignify the fact that "Parasites" are the new "Nanomachines" and that, much like Midichlorians, they've retconned them back into things that were well presented enough that nobody who knows how to have fun even questioned it. Oh, that guy shoots hornets? Oh. Okay, sure. Moving on. Fucking parasites, man...

All of this was pieced together on the fly, but there's a single theme running through it all:


You really want a game starring a bitter, unlikable Miller? How about that back-stabber, Huey? You could do a "Real Big Boss" game if you wanted to, fulfill all those hopes and dreams of seeing a loli-Sniper Wolf and a young Decoy Octopus, I guess, but who really gives a shit after Quiet effectively replaced her in all but name?  Venom Snake is a blank slate, but we know what he does from here; there's only so many more convoluted shenanigans Konami can cram him into, and the plot is so convoluted and full of retcons and contradictions that the far simpler answer would just be to hit the reset button. Arguably that's long overdue anyway, but Kojima spent so much time carpet bombing his own continuity that I can't help but think some of those little details - Strangelove and Chico dead, Huey being a scumbag, Code Talker being fucking useless, Quiet running off and being infested with deadly parasites besides - that a bit part of it was Kojima giving his employers as little opportunity to continue into METAL GEAR SOLID 666: OUTER HEAVEN RISING as was humanly possible.

That won't stop them, of course. Metal Gear Solid 6 will exist, and odds are it'll suck. But after the heartbreak of watching The Phantom Pain unfold and implode on itself form 60 to 0 in about 6 chapters flat, I don't know that it could be any more crushing. Phantom Pain had the potential to show the darker side of a man fans considered a hero, to really dig deep and wallow in the pain and misery that Big Boss' bloody revolution ultimately boiled down to. Ground Zeroes seemed ready and willing to walk down that path, but something - compromise, cowardice, maybe a little of both - ultimately keep this from being anything it needed to be to have a lasting impact.

Did I like it, Kojima? No, I fear I did not. I never thought I'd look at Peace Walker and think, man, the series probably should have quit while it was ahead, but that's where I'm at with this. It's a sad, wasted potential that only makes the rest of the Metal Gear universe worse by extension, and has for the first time in about a decade left me so furious that I want to write a fucking outline for the obvious conclusion that the teasers and promotional footage promised us, rather than the lies and misdirections we've been fed this whole time. I have no doubt that were Konami still in the business of actually focusing on console games this would have been less... broken, but the damage is already done, and there's no behind the scenes drama that can convince me that massive problems with the narrative are directly at the behest of Hideo Kojima itself.





It's 1:30 in the morning. I have to get up for work in 5 hours. I've re-written parts of this more times than I can count, and if I don't hit "post" now I'll probably revise it another dozen times and add another five sub-sections referencing other reviews that hit points I've only touched on. I'm sure this write-up is as big a mess as the game it's brutalizing, but this is less a "review" and more a "purging", for my own sake. To put this all into perspective, I'm playing the Mad Max game to forget The Phantom Pain exists, even though the gameplay of the latter is infinitely more appealing than the former.

I don't understand what's happened. I just know this is almost as crushing and disgusting a feeling as The Phantom Menace was about 16 years ago. It's not that bad, no, but it's as big a wasted potential, with the Outer Heaven Uprising being the one last piece of the puzzle worth exploring only for this game to reference it for literally about 30 seconds in a fucking reflection of a mirror. Again, I kinda' like the ruse, but... how is THAT the focus of the game. with zero actual build-up?!

Realistically, in terms of "how mad am I", it's Prometheus levels. There's some admirable qualities and I could probably appreciate it if I wasn't already a fanboy, but I'm too close for this to be anything but rage fuel. But if these aren't made for fanboys, who the fuck are they for? Who else would put up with this bullshit, much less actually enjoy it?!


Well... at least we can still mod the game, I guess. Here's hoping some bitter ex-Konami employee leaks the ever loving fuck out of the Fox Engine so someone can produce better closure than Kojima Productions was allowed to, in whatever form that takes.

Long live the man who sold the world... and may the memory of his phantom fade into obscurity.

While I don't think I'd ever peg A LIZARD IN A WOMAN'S SKIN/Una Lucertola con la Pelle di Donna as my favorite Lucio Fulci film, I would hold it up as one of his more interesting and polished films before he descended into the sticky pop-madness he'd become so famous for largely in hindsight; despite being yet another "animal" themed whodunnit in the wake of Dario Argento's Bird with the Crystal Plumage, the soundtrack, location, and even the way it's shot are all an interesting contrast to the more familiar spaghetti-thrillers of the period. It's a little nastier, a little more dreamlike than many of the period Italian murder-mysteries I've seen - which, admittedly, is but a taste of a veritable banquet. I can probably name between 15 and 20 giallo I've actually seen, but Italy was cranking these films out to the tune of over two-dozen a year at the height of their popularity in the early 70s, and with the concept so firmly entrenched into the country's cinematic landscape we're still seeing throwbacks like the short Yellow from 2012, and the feature-length The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears as recently as 2013.

Regardless of where it may sit in the pantheon of its contemporaries,  A Lizard in a Woman's Skin remains a comforting reminder that Fulci was more than capable of simultaneously logical and increasingly dreamlike films, in which the substance was just as high a priority as the style; the film's combination of schizophrenia and psychedelic drugs not only give Fulci an excuse to go for broke, but it allows him to use the uncertain state of the heroine's mind to let those increasingly surreal and dangerous images build with the audience experiencing, first hand, that her heroine's own sense of self and reality are falling apart before her eyes. It never gets close to the heights of violent and nonsensical insanity that would cement the director's fame in the next decade's "Trilogy of Death" - three films I absolutely adore, but admit are accidental masterpieces, the result of an angry, petulant artist throwing whatever dumb idea he could come up with at the screen and not particularly caring what stuck - but this was absolutely a precursor to the mounting visual representation of fear and dread that Fulci would gradually allow to consume his films whole.

It also serves as a fascinating counterpoint to Fulci's follow-up, Don't Torture a Duckling/Non si Sevizia un Paperino. A Lizard in a Woman's Skin is, at its core, an examination of morally upstanding blue-bloods in the lap of luxury being threatened by the hedonistic ways of the hippie, while Duckling is about small town simple folk needing to face the realization that they themselves are more than capable of causing their own destruction. Florida Bolkan stars in both, playing mirror opposite characters in films that stylistically couldn't be any less alike, and the contrast between the two makes both films somewhat better as a result. I won't get into why Duckling has a lot to say - to even hint at the central theme of the story would be to betray its ending to anyone who hasn't already seen it - but suffice to say I'm excited knowing that a BETTER THAN EXPECTED Blu-ray release of this is already out in Austria... too bad the only current release is an absurdly over-priced "Leatherbook" collector's edition that was priced at over $100.

Speaking of overpriced European imports, a combination of unexpected bills and a bad sense of timing, I completely missed my window to get the French Limited Edition via label Le Chat Qui Fume, so for the time being we'll just have to take Michael MacKenzie's word* on the European presentation being decent, but flawed in a number of ways. He does a good job of summing up the surprisingly complex myriad of DVD releases - I think the only one I've kept around is the Optimum UK release, which is both the best looking and most complete SD release we'll likely ever see - and while minor differences have already cropped up, it seems the bulk of the Optimum DVD, Mondo Macabro BD, and French BD are all sourced from the same HD transfer crafted by Studio Canal.

Mondo Macabro has gotten into the habit of doing a "Limited Edition" of 999 copies through their own Big Cartel store front for pre-order, to be replaced by a wide release once that's sold out. A LIZARD IN A WOMAN'S SKIN was no different, and while the disc contents will be identical between the two, the now sold-out LE gives you two reversible alternate covers to choose from, an opaque red plastic case and an 8 page booklet featuring an essay by Troy Howarth, author of Splintered Visions: Lucio Fulci and his Films. Each copy is individually numbered, too. It's a nice incentive to buy straight from the source, but as the Amazon price is about $10 cheaper and contains unique artwork not found in the Limited Edition in any capacity, I won't fault anyone for waiting it out for the wide release version. Especially not if they're waiting for reviews, as I was tempted to do but didn't, because God knows I hate having money.


If for some reason this is your first visit to my little corner of Internet Hell, I'm not really into "reviews" in the traditional sense. If you want someone to tell you the transfer is "very good 8/10" and go into how much fun the bonus features are... that's not really what I do. I do somewhat more in-depth analytic musings of the transfers, effectively looking for problems, because Blu-ray is (good lord) a decade old. I shouldn't need to be the guy who points out when IRE levels are fucked up or when to junk a 15 year old film scanner, but hey, somebody's gotta' be hated by all the labels he loves so that they might learn...

Mondo Macabro have opted for a BD-25 at an average bitrate of about 22,992 kb/s (ie: 23 mb/s). I mention this largely as a footnote, though - I'm sure nobody would complain about a higher bitrate, but as we've seen for years now when it comes to raw bandwidth on H264, "bigger" doesn't instantly mean "better", and there's really nothing to complain about in terms of banding, macroblocking or any other common compression woes. Don't get me wrong, I'm a firm believer in keeping bitrates high as more of a safety-net than anything, but this is a perfectly acceptable transfer as-is, and from the looks of things, it's better than the

To be fair, I found exactly one scene with visible compression artifacts but the combination of being dark, having several optical effects, and those macroblocks being in the darkest areas that most reasonably-close-to-calibrated displays will crush out entirely leaves them so minor I won't even point out where they are. Leave a comment with the timecode I'm talking about and I'll owe you a cookie or something.

Both the original English and Italian audio options are available as 16-bit PCM mono tracks - calling either a "dub" would be a bit of a misnomer, so the option to watch either-or is nice - with a third audio commentary as a 192kb Dolby Stereo mix. Clear, white English subtitles are available for both the Italian dub (which are often quite different from the English track) and a secondary track to subtitle a scene that was seemingly new dubbed into English at 00:26:35 - anyone with more than a passing familiarity with gialli will likely know what they're getting into. Another scene at 00:31:18 is in Italian and NOT subtitled - though the dialogue is clearly inconsequential, and curiously, the music and effects present here are completely different from the Optimum DVD version of the scene.

The English track sounds surprisingly good, with only a low level hiss during silent sequences; the Italian track isn't bad, but it's clearly been filtered to compensate for unwanted analog noise, leaving the track sounding slightly thin and metallic by comparison.

From a technical presentation, there's really nothing to complain about... but what about from an archival standpoint? Mondo Macabro is the first to present the "complete" version of this film in HD, but at what cost does that preservation bring to a high-fidelity presentation?

David "lyris" MacKenzie has done the mastering for this title, and he's not been shy on the Blu-ray.com forums that over a minute's worth of uspcaled footage had to be used to present the most complete version of the film available. We've seen this a handful of times in cult HD releases, most notably the various European iterations of Dario Argento's Four Flies on Gray Velvet - a process that was done so poorly in the Shameless UK that a German label Koch Media later did an entirely new scan of the scenes they could, and re-upscaled the scenes they couldn't from scratch. I'm very happy to report that the Mondo Macabro presentation - compromised as it may occasionally be - has much more in common with the latter than it does the former.

The Mondo Macabro transfer runs 01:43:57 in total, and makes a proud claim on the package to be the longest version of the film available. The fact that this is being used as a selling point when the French Blu-ray is known to be missing footage, however, isn't exactly a comforting direction for this conversation to start from. It's entirely possible, I suppose, that I've missed some additional sequences, but the following 3 scenes upscaled from what appears to be a PAL Digibeta source:


All in all,that's about 68 seconds of footage, and roughly in line with David's prior warning of what to expect. It likely goes without saying that several scenes typically cut from prior prints - such as the scene of Strindberg putting her fingers under her skirt before it cuts to the aformentioned shot of Sorrel cracking nuts - are retained in their entirety, in HD, where applicable.

It's unfortunate, but this all ties back to the observations that Michael made about the French Blu-ray being incomplete, which leaves me with no other option but to assume that there simply is no HD version of this footage available. An oddity, to be sure, but having heard second-hand accounts from film labs that would cut a few seconds here or there because of an audio issue or a bad splice they didn't want to freeze-frame around, it's not exactly shocking either.

Do I wish Mondo Macabro would have found another solution - presumably paid to do a new HD telecine for these 68 seconds? You bet your ass I do! Particularly since the SD footage was clearly culled so recently there's little reason to assume that the 35mm element itself isn't still within reach. But it's entirely possible the licensor doesn't want them to disturb the film materials again, and it's even more likely that the cost involved to do so would far outweigh any potential additional sales this particular title would generate in the first place. Lucio Fulci's best known for movies like Zombi 2 and The Beyond - by comparison his gialli are mostly a footnote to careers like Bava and Argento, films that are generally liked by aficionados but have never been a huge commercial success, to the point where Bill Lustig all but guaranteed he'd never bother purchasing the rights to Don't Torture a Duckling in HD. The only reason that fans are so willing to buy this particular film on DVD multiple times is because each release has been such a fascinating clusterfuck in the first place, and I'd wager that most fans who put up with murky, VHS-quality copies to see something even resembling an "uncut" version before will put up with this compromise without much complaint.

It's frustrating, sure, but compared to having the footage simply missing, jump cuts and? It's a compromise I can live with. At the very least it's clear every effort was made to keep the footage looking as close to the HD master as possible, and kud to all involved for doing a job so good, even I don' thave much in the way of suggesting ways to improve it:






I don't have any real insider information here, honestly - I'm simply going to guess that the source used here is the same decent-enough PAL Digibeta the Optimum UK DVD was made from, likely with some additional color correction and filtering to make it match as closely as it's ever going to. Ultimately it's disappointing, but the difference in quality is subtle enough that I suspect a lot of less obsessive fans won't even notice. To put this another way, if "grain structure", "edge ringing" and "chroma subsampling" aren't things you tend to worry too much about, odds are you'll be more than satisfied with the whole transfer.

And it's a shame I've spent so much time talking about this 68 seconds, because most of the other hundred-plus minutes look pretty damn good! Insofar as a low-budget Italian thriller shot on location from the early 70s will ever look, of course. The print used could well be the OCN for all I know, it's certainly in fine shape with nothing to bitch about in terms of scratches, flicker, staining and so on, and while I have no doubt an intensely expensive and carefully corrected 4K master could theoretically yield superior results, I rarely found myself wondering what could be, and instead being surprisingly content with what is now.


One slight annoyance is the presence of some funky chroma scaling issues. Notice the solid white gap between Leo Genn's shoulder and the red curtain behind him, or the almost electric outline of the flower in his lapel;  reds in particular have a slightly diffuse, blotchy look I initially thought was the result of DVNR processing, but the more I see, the more I think the conversion from 4:4:4 color to 4:2:2 went slightly awry and introduced some ugly sharpening artifacts that make the otherwise subdued color information look a bit wonky around the edges. It's a very minor problem, mind - more an academic curiosity than something I'd actually ever get my panties in a twist over.

There is a lengthy oddity though - from about 01:05:37 to 01:08:20, starting with a shot of a cardboard cutout of Strindberg's body on her bed and ending just before Bolkan walks out of her father's office in black, the image quality takes a pretty notable hit; heavier grain, more frequent scratches, density flicker and an odd loss in color fidelity that makes the faces in the crime scene look somewhat sickly and jaundiced. It's pretty clear that for one reason or another the negative was simply unavailable for this footage, and a lower quality dupe element had to be used in its place. Considering how rough the film has looked in the past on DVD, I can't bitch too hard - the slightly funky color timing in the first half of this elemental substitution looked much the same on the Optimum DVD, so I can only assume this has far more to do with physical film limitations than any sudden loss in technical competence.

Also worth noting; there's an odd jump cut at 01:08:20 just after the line "If something doesn't happen, I..." The Optimum DVD is identical, and if there is an extra scene that's supposed to follow here, I've not seen it on any of the various English or Italian language prints floating around. I can only guess this was a last-minute editorial decision that was never properly smoothed over circa 1971.

There's a number of smaller scenes that look similarly rough - for example, a close-up of the reflection in Bolkan's eye at 00:47:29, as well as numerous shots in the following scene of Bolkan speaking at the jail - but looking them over a second time I can only suspect that these scenes involving difficult-to-film reflection effects were simply optically printed to the negative, making the color oddities and grain a natural part of their creation. Whether or not dated optical effects "should" be manipulated with cautious grain removal to make them match the rest of the film is very much a personal call; personally, I'd rather they not bother and let the rough edges show than try to sand them off and potentially do more damage.

Now I'm just nit-picking, but at around 00:08:29 there's a bit of an odd instance of blended frames during the split-screen shot of the swinging party at Strindberg's flat set against Bolkan's more understated dinner... the nature of opticals make such things hard to judge, but could this be a stray deinterlacing artifact? It's not uncommon for European Telecine work to be finished at 1080i 25fps, but not knowing the history of these materials like the back of my hand I can only guess.


Another annoying niggle I'll be damned to not mention; the English credits appear to be over-matted to about 1.95, which have actually cut the original copyright information in half. Yes, I've seen actual prints projected in much the same way. Yes, I rolled my eyes and growled under my breath there, too.

The bonus features are quite impressive, culling the best material from essentially every previous release and including a host of new material, too. The only obvious missing piece is the inclusion of the old US print called SCHIZOID for American audiences, which was notable for some bizarre optically printed "dream wave" censorship, along with having . I'd never recommend anyone watch the English cut over the complete composite version offered here - I merely recommend it as a fascinating curiosity, the same way that I'd recommend anyone with a sincere interest in the Lone Wolf and Cub series try watching SHOGUN ASSASSINS, if only once.

At the end of the day, I'm slightly frustrated, but mostly satisfied. Mondo Macabro has been pretty honest about what we're getting, they've done the best they can with a title that's had a long and difficult history on home video, and with this never having been a big hit in Germany I can't see this having a repeat of Four Flies on Gray Velvet; the release is what it is, and knowing what it is, I can say it's absolutely worth the price. It eclipses every prior DVD release in every way possible, and a compromise between an incomplete and a consistently high-quality presentation was made in what I can only describe as the best option available. It's not quite perfect, but the odds of this film getting a better release in the forseeable future look slim, to put it kindly.

If you want to support Mondo Macabro's fine work, pick it up through their BIG CARTEL. My copy is in the 700s, but as far as I can tell they still have a handful available, proving how every single sale really does count for niche titles like this. I don't get any referral money so don't click it on my account, I just think this release is as good as expected, and think anyone interested in it should buy straight from the source. If you're cheap, I get it - Amazon is taking pre-orders for 02/09, which is a fair breath between the initial LE and the wide release. Screw Amazon, Diabolik DVD is notably cheaper even if you have Prime.

And yes, friends... It's good to be back.

* Foot Note: A pity that him moving on to do QC work for Arrow Video will ultimately nullify his spot as one of the handful of reviewers I trust out there; he was a hard man to please, and his penchant for finding quantization problems on discs I'd call "perfect" are admirable, if not potential signs of the OCD.

Still, I can't blame anyone for not wanting to (directly or otherwise) trash talk their own competition, and it's a big part of why - even after all of these years - I still post under the pseudonym "Kentai"... frankly, whatever input I can offer seems less and less useful as labels have become either self-sufficient every step of the way, or willing to release whatever crap they're handed the competition won't touch, with very little in-between. At this point I'm mostly writing this out just to appease my morbid curiosity. And totally not to justify the $28 I've spent on a movie I've bought on DVD at least three times.

For those who might not pay as close attention to these sorts of things as I used to, a quick heads-up; Don and Jerry over at Synapse Films are now taking pre-orders for their Limited Edition of Dario Argento's violent, clever and strikingly shot 1982 giallo, TENEBRAE. The release date is "officially" the 23rd of this month, but seeing as how they're literally waiting for the manufactured copies to arrive, it may get to you even sooner. (And since I rarely have a reason to pimp his stuff, kudos to Synapse for giving the coveted cover work to Silver Ferox Design!)

If you kept up with the Demons releases from a year or two back, you know the drill; it's $46 shipped, you get a nice steelbook with a DVD and a Blu-ray (plus a remastered CD this time), and most importantly, dozens of man-hours have been put into taking the best elements available and fixing what - in this case - both Arrow Video and Wild Side did not. It seems the now-infamous scratch removal artifacts that plagued the European BD releases have been repaired(!), and Don May himself has given the entire master a shot-by-shot color grade. Mercifully this is a film that's never had the intense controversy surrounding its home video presentation it as, say, Suspiria or The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, but it's got such a unique and difficult to handle "look" by design that the varience of all prior releases have only raised further questions. I have little doubt that however the

The new release also boasts some interesting bonus features, including a seamless branching option to see the now-virtually unseen English language insert shots from "Unsane", along with the feature length Yellow Fever: The Rise and Fall of the Giallo documentary, plus a handful of other goodies that are a bit less over the top. Good stuff overall. I was a bit disappointed the entire "Unsane" print wasn't included as a bonus, but Synapse has since explained that the American 35mm prints were uncut (MPAA trims aside), while the 90 minute VHS release was seemingly just butchered to use a cheaper T-90 cassette. At that point, fuck it, just make it complete and move on.

Again, if you remember the Demons releases, this also likely means that a substantially discounted but bare-bones Blu-ray is sure to follow in a half-year's time despite Synapse "having no current plans". I can't fault Synapse for wanting to play both sides of the market here, and seeing as how they've yet to sell out of either Demons tin, they probably made the right choice giving those as many sales as humanly possible. This is very likely to be the best 1080p presentation this 34 year old thriller's going to get, so if - like myself - you want to be done buying and comparing releases of this fucking movie once and for all, consider the price more a peace of mind tax than anything.

To be honest, it's not my favorite Argento flick. It's good - damn good, at times - but it had the nasty habit of being made after both Profondo Rosso and  Suspiria, but before Argento would lose his mind in an experimental way as he would in Phenomena and Opera, only to lose his absolute shit in the years that follow, but... let's not get into all that. Not now, at any rate. In the end Tenebrae is one of those films you can show "normal" people to explain why you like Italian thrillers and this one is expensive and well produced enough that they can see the appeal without having to forgive the usual shortcomings of the cheaply-made and fetishized entries that make up the bulk of any genre's outings. It is what Princess Mononoke is to Japanese Animation, or what Jackie Chan is to Hong Kong movies in general; it's actually pretty damn good, but it's such entry-level stuff that's been over-analyzed to the point of parody that actually talking about it now seems pointless. Yes, the crane shot remains as jaw-dropping as ever, and yes, Argento casting doubt on his own motives as an artist is a clever touch, and yes, parts of the soundtrack are amazing... anything else to add?

No? We're good? Cool, let's just buy it and move on for a couple years.

With a certain Dario Argento superfan no longer offering commentary on non-Arrow Video transfers, you can bet your ass I'll probably say something once this sucker comes in, if only on principle. Odds are it'll be a lot of good things with Synapse's track record, but hey, we'll just have to wait and see!

No release date or pre-order yet, but supposedly Synapse is authoring Phenomena as you read this. That's the Argento film most desperately in need of careful repair work (aside from Suspiria, which Synapse is also working on), so while I expect the Synapse Tenebrae Limited Edition to be quite good, I don't think it'll be too full of surprised either.

Phenomena? I'm sure we'll have plenty to talk about once Labyrinth's darker cousin comes out to play. Code Red is also working on a new 2K scan for Opera, go figure. But screw that, one fourty dollar domestic Argento Blu-ray at a time, please!

Alright, let's cut the bullshit; there's nothing more to say about Dario Argento's celebrated 1982 post-modern thriller TENEBRAE that hasn't been said a hundred times by people far smarter than myself. Let's skip to why anyone's interested in me talking about this flick.

I could go on for a thousand or two words, trying to explain the subtle difference between the European "Wild Side" master and the new Synapse corrected version... but why not just sum up the difference in a pair of screenshots?





...and now for the thousand or two words. Damn, I never make this easy on myself, do I?

For those unaware of the full sitiation, the following screenshot is the worst instance of automatic digital scratch repair (DSR) artifacts to be found on the various instances of fast-motion through the film, with this particular gaffe - around 00:37:38 on the Synapse disc - being, by far, the absolute worst offender, but as the booklet proudly gives timecodes for, there's plenty of other, less galling instances throughout that have been manually repaired, effectively by using the clone-brush in Photoshop and averaging out the data manually, as opposed to letting Skynet flip its shit at the slightest bit of confusion.

For those who may not be aware, scratch repair filters basically try to calculate drastic, high-contrast shifts in color over a small area of the frame, and when they identify a high contrast "blip" they assume it's either a stain, dirt or similar, and fill it in with an 'average' of the frame before and after. This removes thousands of instances of small nics and stains and scratches, normally without any major, obvious consequence aside from a slight softening of the image... but it also has the potential to fuck shit up when it can't tell the difference between a hand savaging an envelope and a large emulsion stain. These sorts of artifacts are actually not that uncommon in industry-standard HD masters, but most of the worst are "fixed" - either by creating a garbage matte from the unprocessed source, or simply shoopin' dat woop' - before the consumers ever see anything quite that nasty.

Unfortunately, anyone expecting a perfect presentation absolutely free of DSR artifacts might be setting their hopes a bit too high; the problems are baked in, and often very subtle, resulting in small details distorting or smearing straight out of existence. While it's difficult to find a way to do this that doesn't feel like it's shitting all over the label releasing the title, this could well be an educational moment for many of you, so let me direct your attention to some minor details that struck me as fairly standard examples of DSR artifacts:


In this shot, the bobbing, spiral phone cord is getting marked out as a scratch and has a random chunk smudged into oblivion, a little below the countertop to her right. As you can see, the scratch repair filter is actually trying to fill the cord in with the pattern of the drapes behind her, which is pretty normal behavior when an object like a cable is bobbing around in front of a static background.


This shot is substantially less obvious, but pay attention to the glasses; despite Anthony Francoise being shown to wear tortise-shell specs, the frames have basically become transparent jelly in the handful of frames in which they move along in his hand, only to return to their normal color once he stops moving. His hand is a smeared mess, too - and while it's true that motion blur is always a factor, the fact that his fingers have formed a sort of deformed flipper is a pretty common issue when DSR is set way too high, as it clearly was during the original telecine.


And here's another, perhaps more "obvious" example if we pay attention to Dario Nicolodi's fingertips; the averaging has left a ghostlike impression in the background where her hand only lingered for a single frame, but kept the fleshy color from the frames where the overall "average" was consistently the same color. The artifact is subtle, particularly since her arm is moving the whole shot, but if you've been dealing with this shit as long as I have, becomes somewhat unmistakable.

I want to stress that this isn't meant to rain all over Synapse's parade. The artifacts were baked in at the source level, and while I'd rather have a certain level of scuffs and stains over digital artifacts, the fact is most highly-praised and celebrated HD transfers have some level of minor digital wonkiness due to automated processing that most people - myself included, depending on how severe it is - simply shrug off as normal motion blur or peculiarities of the original camera and film stock.While I admit, a fresh scan from an archival 35mm element would have been preferable to patching over the digital problems that already exist, the presentation is still much improved over the prior version, which was already a HUMONGOUS STEP UP from the virtually unwatchable 2011 Arrow release, which - once and for all - proved that my bitching and moaning about all those weird, noisy transfers coming out of Rome weren't just me expecting too much from limited film elements. Depressingly enough, the far superior French release is actually older than that awful initial Arrow Video master, but since Wild Side was mostly re-releasing Argento movies to DVD at the time I didn't know about it until several months later. Still, having long insisted that something was seriously wrong with the HD masters coming out of Rome, it was nice to finally be validated... even if it took Arrow and LVR shitting out that wet-sandpaper textured 1080p abortion to convince the world that, y'know, maybe I had at least half a clue what I was talking about.

Ah, memories...

Going between that initial gnarly LVR master and the imperfect-but-pretty-damn-good Wild Side transfer, you can likely understand how easy it was to forgive the fairly minor sharpening artifacts that appear as edge-ringing on the 2010 HD master; yes it's there, and it's a shame, but it's such a minor point of contention compared to the initial Arrow HD master I honestly couldn't be arsed to give a fuck then, and several years later I feel as apathetic towards its presence now as I did the first time I laid eyes on it. The only way to downplay the sharpening is to try to blur edges away using spatial interpolation, and while you can get away with that on a crumby looking LD transfer of relatively simple content - say, 16mm sourced animation? - it would likely be a disaster on a source like this. Like the scratch repair gaffes they're just in it for the long haul, and similarly their presence is a minor point or two off of the whole, rather than anything to be especially grouchy over.

I briefly considered doing a full A/B comparison between the 2010 Wild Side Video release from France - which was, after all, the original presentation of the HD master all 3 versions are based on - but knowing that the Arrow Remastered transfer is essentially the exact same thing with a lower (and I assume, correct) gamma... there's not much sense in taking the time. The CAPS-A-HOLIC COMPARISON between the two tells you everything you need to know, namely that the Synapse transfer has warmer mid-tones resulting in brighter, more realistic skin tones, but the highs lean more towards a cool blue that leaves what were once white, clipped highlights looking slightly minty fresh. Generally daylit scenes look totally natural on the Synapse grade, though as you can see, interiors are a bit of a gamble, depending on how dramatic the original lighting was.

It's clear that effort and consideration has been put into adjusting the overall tone of the Synapse release, but the fact is it looks better in some ways and worse in others. Both seem more or less consistent with the vast majority of restored home video presentations and with Argento's demand for an over-exposed film in which the titular "Shadows" are an ironic absentee, and with each having its ups' and downs' I'm not confident to say the grading is conclusively "better" than the other. If I had a gun to my head I'd say I prefer the fuller reds of the US release, but it's literally a case of personal aesthetic preference, not mathematical or even historical accuracy.


Perhaps the most interesting part of this disc is that, despite being based on the Wild Side transfer, it does also include the alternate "English Inserts" - and it does this via Seamless Branching, which is a feature we rarely see on Blu-ray discs. See, while the film was shot almost entirely in English to start with, various close-ups of the Tenebrae novel itself, the notes the killer leaves for Peter, and even the meticulous book-keeping the killer does of his victims were shot in close-ups in both English and Italian. It's similar to the alternate takes Kubrick did for the "All Work And No Play..." pages in The Shining, I suppose, but with Tenebrae taking place primarily in Rome, it does raise some questions as to why the killer would have English language newspapers in the first place...

The French and UK transfers only present the Italian credits, presumably since the transfer was pulled entirely from the Italian OCN. The Synapse release actually used an archival 35mm print to transfer the English titles and text inserts from, and the quality - perhaps largely due to 35mm opticals always looking a bit ropey anyway - match the rest of the film pretty much seamlessly. Perhaps the most interesting example is at 00:51:55, when Laura Wendel starts reading the newspaper clippings about the murders; the image is only slightly soft and with a bit more debris than the main feature.

While the inclusion of the English inserts are certainly a cool little bonus - and one I don't think have seen a home video release since the Israeli VHS release some 30 years ago, at that! - I'm not gonna' lie. I'd have been way more into seeing the "English" version as its own transfer, warts and all. As far as I know the English "UNSANE" prints still had Italian credits and were mostly complete, sans a few trims to the overt violence to satisfy the MPAA. Oddly, the American prints were cut by another 10 minutes - not by the film distributors, but by Fox Hills Video, who decided that trimming the film would let them get away with releasing a T-30 tape in "EP" mode.

That said, Synapse loses a point for not including the Kim Wilde song Take Me Tonight as the default end theme on the English version. Yes, I've listened to the Argento commentary - yes, I know he hated it. But if you can look me in the eye and tell me that Kim Wilde doing the theme song wouldn't have made this film so amazingly 1982 it hurts... I just don't know that we can get along at that point.

With that in mind, sure, I can forgive Synapse for skipping on the American VHS edition entirely, but... to have an archival 35mm print, do telecine work, and then not transfer the entire print? Synapse could have called this "The Grindhouse Presentation", done literally no work at all, and idiots like me would have been thrilled. Shockingly enough, we are getting the Americanized version of "Creepers" in their next hefty-priced Argento themed steelbook, so I wonder what the deciding factor here was? Cost for a new telecine rather than just having select reels scanned? Bandwidth concerns? What's the deal with not giving fans who have been wallowing in thrilling resotrations the chance to now let them wallow in the scratchy, poorly-graded reality of yester-year? Especially with a film with an intentional a look as Tenebrae, I'd love to know how a "real" vintage 35mm print holds up to the 20 years or so of creator-approved restored prints held up back in the day.



I find myself torn on how to feel about this one. On the one hand I won't deny that the Synapse BD is hands down the best visual representation of the film, with the most interesting special features, a newly remastered CD soundtrack, and a shiny limited edition Steelbook. The presentation is absolutely top-notch, and as sicj the $50 or so asking price isn't outrageous - certainly not compared to some of the more insanely expensive giallo BDs out there... but is it worth the hefty asking price when the Arrow Remastered edition - "Region B" lock aside - can be had for about a third what this'll set you back? Money is no object, and blah-blah-blah... but fuck me, even I can tell when I'm making a bad decision. And that's where I find myself hitting a brick wall on actually recommending this release to all but the absolute die-hard fans.

While I certainly cringed at the price tag attached to the one-two assault that was Demons and (especially for) Demons 2, I felt they were absolutely worth every penny. The UK transfers for those two films were abysmal, and with the Japanese release being nearly as expensive as Synapse's offering - and with only a slight improvement to Arrow's grubby presentation - the Synapse release was an absolute no-brainer. For fans of that glorious thrill ride and its lesser sequel, the upgrade was effectively mandatory. And I have no doubt that once Phenomena is up for grabs, the Synapse presentation will again be like night and day between the current HD offerings on the market.

Here, however, the differences - however appreciated they are - are all fairly minor, even on a side-by-side comparison. That one shot of Peter's hand is a hell of a lot better... but I can't in good conscience say that fix is worth the price of two typical Synapse BDs, much less three from many of their competitors. Pity this'll be by far the low-point with the definitive edition of Phenomena and their 4K remaster of Suspiria being next in the line-up, but they can't all be worth the premium, I guess...

If the Yellow Fever documentary interest you, if you don't already own the Simonetti soundtrack, the price tag is absolutely worth it. If not, I'm tempted to say stick with the prior Arrow Remastered release - or, if you just want the best looking presentation and can't swallow the cost, just wait 6 months for Synapse to inevitably change their tune from there being "no plans" for a non-limited edition to there being an Amazon pre-order for less than $15.

Regardless of what I have to say about the following Blu-ray release, if you care about any of these films, take a look at the campaign and consider contributing. I plan to myself, and if you legitimately want to see more vintage Italian exploitation films released on Blu-ray, you probably should too.

The day has come, friends - I've finally gotten my copy of the 88 Films Blu-ray of Andrea Bianchi's BURIAL GROUND/La Notti Del Terrore - a month late due to a forwarding address apparently having been expired, but hey, who's counting!

For those who don't know, 88 Films secured the rights during, and offered a restoration as a bonus stretch goal to their Zombie Holocaust remaster campaign through Indie Go Go. They were quiet on the subject for a little while, and the reasons behind it became clear when they decided to release a random sampling of A/B/C comparisons of "tests" they were doing with the available materials. You can see them HERE ON FACEBOOK, if that's your jam; the short version was they were left four options, each a little more pleasant than the last.


* Media Blasters' effectively useless HDCAM master, which is such a mess I've written extensively on it - to summarize, massive chroma noise from a poor scan, frames missing at literally every single cut resulting in a notably shorter runtime, and outtakes have randomly been inserted back into the film incorrectly - and that's on top of it having been delayed for nearly a year! (In short, this was the Eurohorror release so shockingly bad that Media Blasters never even bothered to do another one.)


* The only known surviving English language 35mm "Grindhouse Print" which - while more or less complete - looks just as blown out, faded and filthy as you'd expect. We'll talk about that later, rest assured...


* A 16mm Internegative - presumably the same film source that all DVD masters in the last 20 years have been made from, which is badly out of focus.


* The original 16mm camera negative, which - while the very best material available -  evidently required a ton of work to restore every individual cut of the original film to its proper place.

Now, I have a theory, as imperfect as it all is; Media Blasters' transfer claimed to be from the "Original Negative", as does 88 Films' remaster. 88 Films even went as far as to provide some context for the fact that the negative they were offered involved "Undercuts" - in other words, the original 16mm A/B rolls where the editor marked the end of the shot by marking the first frame he didn't want with a big "X" scratched into the print itself... but, before we get into the nitty gritty of the transfers themselves, I can say (with one dubious exception) that every single frame is here.

Which means that either the Media Blasters transfer was made from some other film source entirely - maybe a 16mm reversal-negative with warped splices? - or else they really did go back to the same negatives, and were so shockingly sloppy re-creating the finished negative that they managed to lose frames completely at random because whatever film lab did the work was literally just that amazingly terrible.

None of it really adds up either way, and I've reached out to 88 Films for clarification, but they're taking their time in getting back to me. Without wanting to throw either party under the bus, I'll leave the details and explanations given by their respective parties as they are for now, and will happily update this if anyone's willing to come to light with more details.

So! Confusion and potential behind the scenes drama aside - how is the presentation?


Much like the uncut version of Just Before Dawn that Code Red released a few years ago, this is a gloriously nasty source print that's been given absolutely minimal preservation efforts; for this transfer each and every scratch, scuff, stain, pop and blob of dirt has been retained in its untouched form.

How does one even qualify a transfer like this, I wonder? While I've seen some truly impressive transfers derived from 35mm release prints, this has gone out of its way to not correct any color grading mishaps, to not process out any of the tinny hiss - to call it "raw" would be an understatement, and considering what a cheap little slice of exploitation this particular title is, I would imagine that anyone who legitimately has an affinity for it - particularly anyone who was lucky enough to own an original VHS copy before the various DVD releases, or even see an equally-grotesque 35mm transfer at a revival showing (both of which I myself am guilty of) - won't feel their black, shriveled hearts grow three sizes just spending a few minutes wallowing in this unfiltered stretch of nostalgia.










From a technical standpoint... I really have no complaints. The 15.76 Mb/s bitrate is adequate enough to keep the fuzzy grain structure from looking like AVC soup, and the very rough-and-tumble nature of the whole makes the usual expected problems sort of blend into the constant grimy insanity of the content itself.

The Grindhouse Version ain't pretty. It's exactly as it should be. It's kind of ironic that despite being an ass-ugly source print, there's really no technical complaint to be had.


Here's where it gets a little more complex... but, the good news is that I can emphatically say that the title has never, and may never, look better than it does right now. Whatever quibbles and misgivings I have for the transfer as a whole are absolutely drowned out by the fact that, in the pantheon of low-budget and schlocky Italian horror films to have been brought to Blu-ray, this is far from the worst. It's not perfect, which is a shame, but what can I say? If the $35 I paid as part of the Indie GoGo campaign led to this, I'll live with it.

First of all, the restored version - one oddity I'll explain later aside - appears to be complete. The Media Blasters' release before it lost frames at each individual cut, an issue that is mysteriously not an issue on this virtually-complete presentation. This alone is worthy of praise, considering another Italian zombie trash classic - Hell of the Living Dead - has suffered the same fate in High Definition as the previous Burial Ground master before it.

There's little in the way of notable debris, scratches or damage in general to complain about - there's minor scuffs and dust that hasn't been completely scrubbed away, though it's never to the point of distraction. The original 1.66 framing of the Super-16 negative is preserved in full. The English titles have been sourced from what look like 35mm archival elements, and while I would have liked to see the Italian titles, even just as an extra, I have no complaint over "Burial Ground" being the on-screen title rather than "La Notti Del Terrore".

What 88 Films promises is a 2K scan of the "Original Italian 16mm Negative" has a slightly muted, drab look when compared to other releases I'm familiar with - no contrast boosting here, that's for damn sure! - but daylight scenes have a fairly natural, golden hue and the juicy gore on display is a healthy crimson, with the poorly lit fleshtones tending towards a natural - if slightly sickly - hue. Black levels are quite solid, and overall the restores presentation's clarity and definition is dramatically better than the fuzzy, uneven blobs of high-contrast film grain hovering on top of the Grindhouse Transfer.

The English audio has been transferred in its original mono at 24-bits, as has the original Italian audio. They both sound fairly clear without any obvious hiss, flutter or other analog distortions, though it's obvious the English track has been given a pass of digital noise reduction, while the Italian track is more prone to clearer highs and slightly more distinct separation between music and dialogue - though it tends to hiss and crackle a bit more as a result. The slightly more "raw" Italian track sounds slightly more appealing, and I don't think any of these actors spoke a word of English on set anyway - but neither is really a disappointment.


What needs to be discussed is... well, the general texture of the transfer. Make no mistake, the Media Blasters master was a horrendous abortion of constant, distracting chroma noise that in no way represented the original film elements - 16mm or otherwise. For that reason alone, this release wins hands down - I had intended to do a full 1:1 comparison with that eyesore, but at some point I must have had a stroke of pure sanity and seem to have either sold it, given it away or burned it in a toilet fire.

But is what we have here actually good? I tend to think it's ultimately on the upper-end of the transfers Blue Underground and Arrow Video were releasing early on, before it became en-vogue for them to the scans themselves from scratch; there's noise floating on top of a soft and somewhat smudgy image, a minor-to-moderate level of DVNR that comes and goes (but is especially heavy during the opening zombie attack), and it has that unfortunate, tell-tale artifact of fast-moving objects like swinging weapons having sharp, defined grain while the rest of the image looks somewhat smoothed over.

Perhaps the best comparison I can make is the 2K remaster of Lucio Fulci's Zombie 2... that is, the LVR/Blue Underground remaster, not the superior Arrow Video transfer sold as Zombie Flesh Eaters. If you were fine with that, you'll probably love this. If, like me, you found the Blue Underground release of that lacking... well, you're not exactly in for a treat.













To get a clearer idea of what I'm talking about, open both the "Grindhouse" and "Restored" sceenshots 7 and 11 in different tabs. Notice how "off" the grain looks on moving faces? And notice how despite the numerous other problems on the Grindhouse version, the grain looks... y'know, normal?

[Kentai Films Protip: When you have an especially noisy scan, don't use temporal DVNR! The result always warps during fast motion, and with old CRT scanners the issue is less the presence of noise itself, and more that it seems to exist outside of the underying celluloid image. A far better method is to gently apply a spherical blur until the noise loses its "sharp" look and blends back into the film image proper. No, it's not replacement for a scan with better quality optics, but helps you avoid... whatever it is we should call what we're looking at today. No chroma smearing, no irregular grain patterns - just subtle a softness no one would ever suspect without a direct comparison.]

Do keep in mind that - while I stand by by BU Zombie comparison on all technical merits - the budget and artistic intent behind this film is... well, it was minimal, to put it bluntly. Comparing Lucio Fulci's camerawork, light staging, editing and artistic direction to Andrea Bianchi is like comparing Baz Luhrmann to Christopher Nolan. The 16mm negative stock, terrible on-set lighting, and frantically moving whip-pans all lean me toward wanting to forgive 88 Films' clearly well-intentioned transfer, but... I've got to be honest here. It's just not that good. It pains me saying that, too, but it's just not very good at all.

My opinion was a lot more positive the day the disc arrived, when I could wallow and revel in a stable, watchable HD transfer of archival materials, but the more time I spent looking over different scenes with different intensities of grain management and faded, sickly color that leaves skin an odd, almost gray mass of nothing, the less enthused I became with it. It's never anywhere near as miserable as the 2011 Blu-ray, and it's still a substantial step-up from any SD presentation, but one need only compare the two transfers present on this very disc to know that something just isn't right on what should, in every way imaginable, be the superior presentation.

Had this come out through Shout Factory or NSM Records, pretty much anywhere else that didn't have the fanfare surrounding the restoration itself? I'd just shrug, say "Well, it's better than a bunch of other shitty Euro Horror discs on the market." As someone who paid to see both this and Zombi Holocaust restored... I'm honestly not sure how I feel. Disappointed, maybe, but even that's giving these flaws a little more attention than they probably deserve. I'd bet money this was carried out on the same Cintel hardware LVR has had chugging along for a decade, and it's unfortunate that no matter how hard the staff of any lab might try, they can't magically make garbage hardware they spent a quarter-million dollars on magically "good" - instead they listen to complaints, and adjust their internall processes accordingly, even if the ultimate end result is "add noise reduction so clients don't complain about video noise". It's panning water, not plugging the leak, but that's the situation we tend to find ourselves in...

But high personal standards aside, let's face it - Burial Ground getting a mulligan at all was a goddamn miracle, and if this is as good as it's gonna' get... well, I don't have to praise it to the heavens, but I can say that I've seen, and own, far worse. I'm happy I have this release. I don't mind that I paid $35 to fund it. I just hope this isn't seen as the high watermark when 88 Films themselves have released better looking transfers from other licencors, as they've proven they're capable of much more when their HD tape masters start from a better place than this.



As far as original "Expert Commentary" goes we get a feature length commentary by John Martin, and a 27 minute video interview with Mikel Coven*. I've not watched either, and to be honest, I don't know if I will any time soon - not that I doubt they're amusing and chock full of interesting information, I just don't have the energy to watch another 2 hours' worth of Italian schlock bonus features right now.

Ported from the Media Blasters release are the films' trailer under the title NIGHTS OF TERROR - not only is it poorly upscaled, but it appears to be a PAL-to-NTSC conversion, deinterlaced, and upscaled to 1080i 29.97. Brilliant.

There's also 10 minutes or so of Deleted Scenes presented as-discovered, without sound, which run the gamut of being amusing to erotic to kind of dull, as is often the case. Frustratingly, the Media Blasters incorrectly re-inserted a few of these outtakes at around 00:25:41 on the 88 Films Restored Version. Footage that was supposed to be included in the film proper is still included in the Deleted Scenes reel, but the outtakes that are presented as part of the feature on the Media Blasters Blu-ray - including some additional exploding lightbulbs and a longer scene of two lovers flirting and kissing by the fountain - are nowhere to be found. A minor loss, but a slightly frustrating one all the same.

While the initial print-run comes with an "O-Sleeve" style slipcase, all releases also come with a booklet featuring new writing by Calum Waddell (who also moderates the commentary). Finally, the package includes a collectible postcard featuring the original Italian poster art, as well as a two-sided cover with both classic American and Italian designs. All of this has a sort of bleeding, super-saturated look to it, but there was clearly some effort put into the design, and as a fan of the oft-insane posters for vintage trash films the attention to providing multiple options is deeply appreciated.

*Fun Fact: The interview is interspersed with what looks like the super-noisy footage from the Media Blasters BD.


This is an interesting case. In short, the version on display per the Negative Restoration appears to be the exact same version released on every DVD going back to the Japan Shock release:

At around 00:42:45, James slams the shutters closed after tossing the lifeless body of the maid to the zombies below. In the Restored transfer, he begins to turn towards the camera, and there's a jump-cut to the bloody hands of zombies picking at the corpse below. The music has a jump cut as well, though with the weird, grinding soundtrack over this film it's a little more difficult to tell than normal.


If you go to roughly a minute earlier on the Grindhouse print (due to the truncated title sequence), you'll find that this shot actually runs about 6~7 seconds longer; James leans his head against the shutter, clearly horrified by what he's just done, before it smash-cuts back to a close-up of entrails being clawed at:


This specific oddity confuses me. If this was pulled from the original camera negative, the footage would still be there as it was on the Media Blasters HD master - though I suppose it's not unthinkable that the English language 16mm IP that was used for the audio was missing this short sequence, and the raw footage was trimmed to match - rather than the Italian audio being used to fill in the gap, which would have been preferable? One could easily argue that MB never touched the negative - they did, after all, claim to be "working from the negative" on Buio Omega, only to later reveal what they meant was they had a new IP made from said negative - but the fact that Media Blasters unearthed about 10 minutes of never-before-seen footage implies they had some poor sap digging through the archives for the earliest-generation material available.

And yet, the same old footage known to be MIA from the 16mm IP is - once again - trimmed from the 88 Films transfer. Is this master really from the original camera negative, or perhaps a 16mm back-up negative used in place of the unusable OCN the licensors are now treating as one if the same? If not, what the hell did Media Blasters use for their 2011 masters? Don't misunderstand the tin-foil, I want to trust everyone involved here, but as the similar confusion over exactly what materials were used between both Blue Underground and Arrow Video's competing 2K restorations of Zombi 2 have established, either one side is lying... or both are being lied to.

If 88 Films wants to clarify any of this, I'd love to know and will happily update the write-up. I'm not angry, as the scene was (to be fair) a largely inessential reaction shot and it's included on the disc in one form or another. I'm just... confused. And I don't like being confused.


If you own any prior DVD copy and want a notable HD upgrade? Yes. If you own the Media Blasters HD transfer and want a proper, effectively-complete version of the film? Absolutely. If you like having raw, un-restored 35mm "Grindhouse" transfers to ogle in High Definition, as I occasionally do? Hell Yes! If you just want a cheaply made movie looking fantastic on principle? I'd recommend you move on.

All that said, I still plan on contributing a wad of cash to the current Italian Collection Restoration Project. I'm not blown away buy the results here, but I'd still rather see Aenigma and Buio Omega brought up to this standard than to languish in the inferior presentations we currently have at our disposal. It's all a matter of degrees at this point, and even at its worst, Burial Ground commits the cardinal sin of being no-better than average.

I guess if that's the best future I can hope for, I'm fine with it. We live in a time where Michal Mann approved Blu-ray transfers have SD inserts, because at this point sales on physical media are so weak and "old" B-movies do so poorly that nobody fucking cares - not even guys like me. If you need further proof, take a look at the Indiegogo Campaign and realize that despite over 20,000 pounds having been raised, that's still less than 500 backers in total.

Five years ago, when I was adamant that we could - that we should do better, there was still reason to have hope. These days, if a release isn't appalling... that's pretty much yer' lot going forward. If "Average For An Italian Exploitation Film" quality is all we have a chance for, I'd rather take it than not at this point.

Just do me a favor and keep including those chewed-up Grindhouse Prints, won't you? If I can't have a proper looking "perfect" restoration at least let me torture my monitor and headphones with the ugliest, most organic presentation possible as an alternative!

DISCLAIMER: Remember friends, ALWAYS make sure you're signed into the right Google account when combining previous identities into a shiny new one.

As deeply frustrated as I've been at the glacial pace director Hideaki ANNO has taken with the "Renewal of Evangelion" project, I'm not without sympathy; good films take time to create, and love them or loathe them, the new Evangelion films have some of the most spectacular traditional animation the world has to offer. With three out of four films having been released in 2007, 2009 and 2012 - in Japan, anyway - it seemed reasonable that he would spend the next three to four years finishing off the reboot of what's easily his most beloved and viable franchise. In other words, we're due for the final chapter, and at long last Neon Genesis Evangelion can be put to rest alongside Aim for the Top! Gunbuster as "Complete". Which, incidentally, is still more than we can say for the Evangelion manga.


Things are never quite that simple, though, are they? After a commercial and critical success was found in Gareth Edwards' Legendary Pictures' produced 2014 Godzilla film - a serious, heavy film that seemed to be made to wash away the perceived sins of the self-aware 1998 Roland Emmerich film of the same name - Toho Studios admitted their biggest star ever was coming out of retirement for a 2016 release. What wasn't revealed until several months later was that none other than Hideaki ANNO had teamed up with Shinji HIGUCHI - best known as the director of practical effects for the trilogy of 90s Gamera films, but most recently the director of the live action Attack on Titan films - to direct a full on reboot of the Gojira monster, with Anno himself in full control of the film.

The "International" title given to the project was Godzilla Resurgence, but in typical weeb fashion, literally no-one called it anything but "Shin Godzilla", until FUNimation Films announced they were using the original Japanese title as-is. It's worth noting that the title itself, シン・ゴジラ, is written in simplified, phonetic katakana; this isn't because the film is aimed at children, but because the meaning of "Shin" in the context of a title could mean a lot of things: New, True, and Holy all use the same phonetic reading Anno chose, and the fact that it isn't directly clarified appears to be completely intentional.

Yes, I'm still salty that we're probably not going to see Evangelion 4.444: We Do [Not] Know When To Quit until at least 2018 as a result. But to say my curiosity on the new monster movie  we were getting was piqued would be an understatement...


It's no secret that Anno has always been a fan of kaiju films, or even that Evangelion's core development process revolved around trying to equate the fanciful, physically impossible nature of giant monsters into a somewhat more scientifically grounded existence, and it could be easily argued that the EVA units themselves are some of the most iconic giant monsters in Japan's long and colorful history of animation. The film is in many ways a thematic successor to the action sequences he brought to life in Evangelion over 20 years ago, and it's only fair to acknowledge that one thing likely lead directly back to the other.

It's also worth noting - without delving too far into spoiler territory, of course - that Anno's film isn't "just" another monster mash. While the Toho films are now rightly regarded as silly camp catering to a young audience with over-the-top costumes and silly practical effects, it's worth remembering that the original 1954 film, directed by Ishiro HONDA, is about as serious and grim as a 1950's B-movie about a nuclear dinosaur was ever going to get. Godzilla was such a popular character he became something of a superhero through the 60s - to the point where even the somewhat dour, mostly monochrome Hollywood reboot gave him a grotesque, dangerous insect nemesis, just to cast him as the "good guy" to the audience.

The original film was substantially more nihilistic, suggesting the appearance of Gojira itself was the direct result of the continued testing of the hydrogen bomb in Japanese waters, and the combination of his blistered skin, atomic breath and destructive presence that turns Tokyo into a literal sea of fire all give the original film an obvious, allegorical bend to the monster being a not-too-subtle reference to the atomic bombings that forever altered Japan's culture, politics and identity.

I bring all of this up because unlike every other single Toho produced Godzilla film... this is a total reboot of the concept. This is the first time Godzilla has been seen by the world, effectively allowing Anno to reinstate Godzilla as the force of nihilistic destruction he was initially envisioned as. And if you think Anno's obsession with literal, biblical apocalypses isn't going to factor into his presentation of Godzilla, you might want to stick with Gareth Edwards and his reptilian bear.

Not being a press critic, I was happy to go to a limited theatrical screening of Shin Godzilla on opening night... but how does the film hold up? As always, I'll warn you when MAJOR SPOILERS are coming, though between the combination of familiar framework and very unexpected execution, I'd argue that the less you know going in, the better.

For those who's only live action point of reference is Anno's live action Cutie Honey movie, you can relax; Shin Godzilla has some of the same inappropriate and self-aware humor that defined what was essentially a parody of the Go Nagai character, but Shin Godzilla ultimately has far too much reverence and understanding of what makes a Godzilla movie tick to not get it mostly right. That said, the almost purely political nature of the story places it closer to something like Doctor Strangelove than Pacific Rim, which I can see either confusing or annoying plenty of viewers who just wanted to see a Japanese dude in a rubber suit stomping all over Tokyo for some kitschy fun. Anno's film is a lot of positive things, but taking cues from both the original 1954 Ishiro HONDA film and his own literally apocalyptic fascinations, he crafts a narrative that's more about compromising for the inevitable rather than preventing it, told from the point of view of exasperated and confused people who can't afford to be idealistic. But I suppose anyone who knows what Evangelion or Gunbuster is and expected a "normal" kaiju movie is just being silly.


It's not a monster movie so much as a disaster movie with a political lens, with the rampaging titan of the title being the disaster itself - Godzilla becomes a none too subtle allegory for Anno's - and indeed, a large subset of Japan's - frustration with their own governmental role, showing politicians moving from room to room during a live emergency strictly on protocol,  and assuring the people everything's going to be okay and their top scientists - who in reality made an off handed thought - that there's no way the unidentified creature can come up on land... only for one of his aide's to come up and whisper in his ear that yeah, he's already on land. The images of flooded streets and ruined buildings are a none too subtle reminder of the Tohoku 3/11 tsunami a little over five years ago, and as if to quell any doubt that Anno's taking a jab at the real-world politics criticized savagely for taking too long to do anything helpful, he even has the Prime Minister don a rescue worker uniform while staying perfectly safe in his office and giving press conferences. The real tragedy is that while the film acknowledges that Japan's current bureaucracy is too bloated and complex to efficiently deal with an emergency situation, it still tries to treat those elected officials as people who are simply out of their depth, rather than full on Kubrickian parodies of political agendas.

One thing that works surprisingly well about the film is that - unlike its' 2014 cousin, in which we're robbed of Breaking Bad far too early to spend most of the film with Kick-Ass - there is no hero here. No self insert for the audience to feel like they're part of the action. The film ultimately focuses slightly-more on Hiroki HASEGAWA, the Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary - a particularly fancy way to say "note taker for the clusterfuck", really - who's not quite old enough for his obvious intelligence to get respected, or his solution-oriented mindset to cut through the red tape surrounding him on all sides. Yutaka TAKENOUCHI plays the Prime Minister's Aide, ultimately being the filter from the politics to the audience as much as to our DCC Secretary; he knows it's a ridiculous and infuriating song and dance to get the many to lean in one direction, but he also knows the weight of the bureaucracy will crush itself with a little law and order, leaving him to whisper in the old man's ear about what's what, and ultimately - arguably - wields the ultimate power in most situations.



Scientists, soldiers and politicians all share the ultimate course of the battlefield, and it becomes clear the reak schism is not between those who want lure him away versus destroy him outright, but between the young upstarts who just want to find a solution and the elders of the previous generation who are so used to dragging their feet and protecting their positions of limited power, they can't adapt when a real emergency creeps up behind them. How much of any of this will be interesting may well be tired to how little the average non-Japanese viewer knows about Japanese politics - of which, admittedly, my interest is mild at best. Anno's script has been accused of being right leaning, and while that's not entirely untrue, Japan has been a fascinating case study for some time: "Post-War never ends" one character laments, disgusted at Japan's lack of military autonomy in the case of their absolute worst-case scenario, their reliance on other nations for capital and the fact that a handful of young, innovate people will be holding up the cowardly old fogies, potentially for the rest of their lives; It ain't subtle, but it seems reasonable, and the characters are all just aware of their position enough to give it a little levity to keep it from feeling too dire.

Let's not kid ourselves, there's some obvious nationalism going on, to say nothing of the pot-shots taken at Korea, Russia and the States - with the American presence being filled in largely by the lovely Satomi ISHIHARA, who plays Kayaco Anne Peterson, the Japanese Special Envoy to the President of the United States. There's been some rumblings for the film being "right wing", but I don't really see it; if anything the old guard explains that without being open to globalization and allegiances with old enemies in times of crisis, we're all apt to crush ourselves under a lack of capital and resources. Pride in your homeland isn't worth much if it's reduced to a smoking crater. Even the holy rhetoric enacted by Emperor Hideko TOJO is criticized outright, which is the sort of thing you wouldn't expect from blatant pro-military traditionalist propaganda; if anything, I suspect that most American critics who are also aware of Japan's place in the political landscape simply lean left themselves, and are surprised when the film throws ideas from both sides of the aisle in a desperate attempt not to placate any one audience, but to face facts: Japanese Bureaucracy doesn't always work, and nobody has a simple way fix it completely.

Back to Peterson, her role is somewhat more interesting than I expected - a native born American in personality and ambition, but Japanese in both ancestry and culture - which leaves her conflicted as shit starts to edge toward the fan and leaves her torn between the love of her grandmother's country, and her own political gain. I figured I'd hate her the moment I saw her, but in the end she's kind of endearing... unfortunately, her obviously phonetic Engrish is terrible. I mean it's understandable, which is better than some Japanese actors I've watched spew nonsense syllable salad, but an American, who lives in America, in politics? Are you kidding me?

Yeah, I know. It's a nitpick nobody but native English speakers (who are hardly the target audience) are going to be annoyed by, but... it's still pretty bad.


It'd also be unfair to talk about a Hideaki Anno film without mentioning the presentation; the film's cast is constantly moving, being expanded and shuffled from place to place as new details come to light, which means that subtitles are almost always on-screen in Japanese, giving the viewer some new nugget of context. Camerawork get more frenetic as plans come together, or the audience is only allowed to peek out from dense legal text explaining why the plan won't get approved in the first place; for a film in which the majority of the run time are guys in suits grumbling back and fourth over how absurd their suggestions are due to walls of red tape and a lack of resources on hand, the presentation is about as dynamic and engaging as it was ever going to get. It's not as memorable looking as Cutie Honey, sadly, but I try to picture the monster of this film being "2.5D" as Honey herself was and... then I just don't know how to feel anymore.

The soundtrack, composed largely by Shiro SAGISU, is also as eclectic and beautiful as you'd expect, with the operatic original tracks - including "Persecution of the Masses" and "Who Will Know", tracks that can only be described as operatic. It goes another direction, too, which we'll get into shortly, but all of the original pieces - even those fans of Anno will be intimately familiar with - are fantastic. Anno knows how to use a full surround stage to great effect, and if for no other reason, I'd say see this in a theater just to hear how amazing things are when things start to go downhill for humanity.

In short, Shin Godzilla offers fans a very polished and absolutely unexpected reboot of one of cinema's most iconic antiheroes. I don't think everyone will love it, nor perhaps should they, but Anno seems to have crafted an intense and one-of-a-kind film that's best described as a political thriller with a grotesque sense of humor over its' walking disaster. Yes, it's a dialogue heavy movie less about characters than about ever changing conflict, but considering how much everyone and their mother hated the "dumb action" focused Roland Emmerich movie, this may well be the ideal alternative. It's a fine film, and one that's going to be hotly debated and derided by long time fans of the iconic monster - and not without reason.

To be fair a lot of people hated Emmerich for screwing with Godzilla himself, and hey, about that...


Anno has been making kaiju movies in the form of giant robot anime since the 1980s, so I had little doubt he'd figure out how to make this work. What I DIDN'T expect was for Godzilla, the iconic King of the Monsters, to make his first full appearance as the "Monster A Form" - a bloated muppet impression of a moray eel with stubby legs and pulsating and bleeding gills, dragging his googly-eyed face along the city streets like a literal fish out of water who's had about two drinks too many. 

Dubbed "Kamata-kun" - evidently a pun I don't follow on the legendary Yamata no Orochi, an eight-headed serpent referenced later in the film (subtitled as "Hydra" by the official English translation) - it's infuriatingly stupid watching that gore-spewing amphibious turkey terrorize the populace... and I fucking loved it! Plenty of people won't, and while I know the decision was done to be divisive, I just can't comprehend why we expected any different. It's such an inversion of expectations, such a dick move to pull on such an iconic design that it was built solely to incite fury and confusion, and as far as trolling the audience goes, it may well have set the gold standard. The fact that this absurd fever dream of an introduction is set to the powerful operatic score only enhances how gloriously stupid it all is.

Of course, Shin Godzilla doesn't stay this way for long; after realizing that upward mobility and forearms are required for traversing the world of man, he simply reaches a point where his entire body starts to ripple and instantly mutates into a newer, larger, more mobile form. I'm actually a bit disappointed how brief the Tyrannosaurus shape is on screen for, but the mere sight of him changing the shape and even mass of his body at will is such an unexpected and bizarre sight, I'm fine with the execution overall. There's also something to be said about Godzilla transforming from an awkward sea creature, to a literal dinosaur, to a humanoid monster that uses nuclear firepower as its' final and most horrifying form. I won't lie, I'd have been thrilled to see a few additional "in-between" forms just to satisfy my transforming monster lust, but what we have is a largely logical blueprint... and besides, the subtle shift we get in the third act - to say nothing of the surprise waiting for us in the final shot of the film - suggest other directors less concerned with proving their concept a lot of  room to play with going forward.





Whatever misgivings fans may have had for the goofy looking first form, or the fleeting images of the second I'm almost surprised were given action figures, the majority of the film features the almost zombified "Shin Godzilla" we've seen in posters and trailers, and I find myself with decidedly mixed feelings about the whole thing. On the one hand, the design is imposing, unsettling - a literal and gruesome monster the likes of which Lovecraft would wake up in the middle of the night screaming over, and then try to figure out how to make it the product of the Jews later on. On the one hand, watching Shin Gojira, God Incarnate, emerge on land for the first time is exactly what fans who weren't impressed by the Legendary Pictures' Hollywood-style reboot were waiting over a decade for. It's pure, unfiltered fanservice, and it's exactly what fans who know the difference between the Showa, Heisei and Millennium films wanted...

And yet, after Kamata-kun's clumsy, casually blood-spewing and laughter-inducing drunken rampage, watching his march like a wind-up toy across towards Tokyo just feels too... sterile. His tiny unblinking eyes, shockingly stiff body language, and complete lack of vocalizations make him look like a massive robot rather than the clever evolving beast we were introduced to prior (and will see again later). Mansai NOMURA provided the CGI motion capture, but here it looks like it's simply a statue being wheeled along a track, only his tail allowed to show the slightest amount of character, despite Nomura giving the beast a certain consistent level of curious personality and grouchy determination in every other scene the film has to offer. 



Further adding to this sensation of rickety awkwardness is the literal recycling of - at times - 50+ year old mono recordings of Akira IFUKUBE tracks from the Showa era films. They certainly hit the right notes for nostalgic Showa era fans, but they also feel so afraid to go off-model from such a transparent, literal return to form it manages to have even less personality than the original 1954 monster. Rumor has it that Anno was intending to remaster the tracks in stereo for the film, but "difficulties" prevented it, and in the end they simply went with the decades old mono mixes as-is. For a guy who gets new compositions of public-domain classical music for his cartoon about kids shitting themselves with existential fear in robot cockpits, this just seems lazy.

And then it dawned on me: The time before this, we saw Godzilla fully evolve from a wiggling eel into a tyrannosaurus-piranha hybrid, and then he... just, sauntered off. And then when we see him again, he's taken on the "classic" Godzilla form, with no real indication that he had a distinct need to evolve any further, despite his constant exploration of his body in every other scene in the film being the result of him experiencing a threat or hardship, and using his biology to find a solution to it. In that case, why show an interim form at all if the only reason to do so is to prove that he can evolve in real-time? Wouldn't something more drastic - or even some gradual steps in between the "Final Form" on his way to the center of Tokyo - make far more sense from both a pacing and storytelling standpoint?





For those totally lost, the original Neon Genesis Evangelion TV series - which started as a fairly "normal", if overly dramatic and "realistic" take on classic mecha shows like Mazinger Z and Space Runway Ideon - became a social phenomenon when it took an almost Twin Peaks-esque turn in the second half, becoming a fusion of existentialist self-flagellation, overlapping religious iconography, and extreme violence.  The hints of these elements are there in plain sight the whole time, they just ramp up from "Oh, that was unusual" to "NO SERIOUSLY, WHAT THE HELL IS EVEN GOING ON?!" via a sort of frog-in-boiling-water nature. Once the weird hits you, it's far too late to save yourself, and you'll find yourself reading up on the Seraphic Tree and Arthur Schopenhauer just to have a baseline understanding of what's going on. Mercifully, Shin Godzilla never goes that far... but I'm bringing all of that up for a reason.

See, the TV series was simply too big to ignore, and the blatantly offensive content - such as giant monsters literally eating each others' hearts, staining the entire countryside in blood while teenagers screamed and begged for them to stop - became such a big deal that while broadcasters had previously let Gainax deliver the finished video masters just hours before broadcast, they now required a 24 hour window to preview everything. Anyone who knows anything about anime production knows that this shit is always polished and fixed at the last possible second - seriously, go watch Shiro Bako for an idea of what animation production actually looks like, and keep in mind that the lack of technology to quickly fix fuck-ups in the 90s made this even harder - that when push came to shove, Evangelion became a clusterfuck of limited animation, off-screen dramatic, events and - in the final two episodes - one of the most surreal and desperate visions of the apocalypse ever crafted.

The finale was so controversial, yet the series so popular, ultimately a Director's Cut of the final 6 episodes was released on home video, ending with an entire theatrical movie - The End of Evangelion - effectively remaking those controversial final episodes from scratch and splicing them back into the "Complete Version" as episodic experiences alongside the, arguably, more cerebral minimalist finale... but, that's another story.



The above sequence with the tiny man in the giant hand? It's actually a minute long freeze-frame as Ode to Joy fades to nothing. In short, when his hands are tied, you can generally tell by the obvious level of pure spite on-screen. And, of course, it's also entirely possible Anno is just an aging pretentious hack and I'm giving him far too much credit... but if it that entire was the result of a little bit of both, I wouldn't be too shocked.

It's also worth noting that the effects crew themselves talked about a "Tadpole" creature that seemingly matches the description of the completely unseen figure lurking beneath the water the whole first act. I could forgive the loss of a "Form Zero" for the sake of getting to the good stuff - by which I totally mean Kamata-kun! - but the literal non-entity of a Tadpole 'Zilla, and the momentary glimpse of a T-Rex Zilla are such oddities that they can't help but give me pause.

With the above in mind, I'm now truly honestly curious if there was an entire reel's worth or so of content jettisoned during production with the "Monster B Form", as having his armored shell before he's been attacked by human weapons doesn't actually make a lot of sense in the context they went out of their way to build about his powerset... but, I guess we'll probably never know. Toho is incredibly protective of their most famous star, and Anno isn't known for talking shit after a project finishes, so the fleeting presence of the red, birdlike monstrosity that goes literally nowhere before scurrying off-screen feels like a last-minute change somewhere along the project, with the trailer-friendly zombified march of the final form likely being more in line with what Toho was expecting of the project the whole time.





Now, that having been said, every complaint here is nullified, instantly, by the time Godzilla gets to central Tokyo. Watching this monolithic beast suddenly lose its' stoic cool after being nearly a statue for so long has a certain inherent shock to it, and what follows is the most amazing instance of city destruction porn I may have ever witnessed. It's breathtaking, technicolor beauty and satisfyingly massive scale is the stuff that you could make love to, and the fact that it begins with Godzilla, breaking his own fucking face, just to make his trademark atomic breath physically possible is exactly why I was fascinated at the thought of Anno picking up the reigns in the first place. The obvious body horror, physicality of the chemical changes, and final otherwordly beauty are the sort of creative images that nobody else on the planet delivers quite like Anno, and Higuchi brought them to life in a way nobody else could have realized.

After this jaw-dropping scene, however, the film shifts gears back to the offices of the Prime Minister and quickly finds itself back in the hands of the floundering politicians; brave, clever, and desperate to find a solution before the rest of the world finds one for them... yeah, that stuff's still pretty good. But it didn't make me nearly as erect as watching Anno's vision of Tokyo turned into a sea of a flames.

Aside from the real-world military hardware (which is pretty damn satisfying to watch!), it's never photo realistic or cutting edge as far as the effects go, and anyone who expects that from a Japanese Godzilla film is so amazingly far off the mark I'm not entirely sure why they're watching this to begin with. Gareth Edwards - for all of his tedious second act filler trying to convince us its' human drama - has already crafted the ultimate, "realistic" Godzilla, and I'm surprised how intrigued I am by Legendary's similar upcoming treatment of Kong: Skull Island. For Anno and Toho to even try to top that would have been a fool's errand, so instead we get bug-eyed turkeys smashing their face into shit. I'm fine with this, and I think once the obvious reality of what the movie was always going to be sets in, most of the people grumpy about it now will come to the same conclusion eventually.

And as for the final, unsettling shot of the film... hoo, boy. I can't wait for what's an obvious visual metaphor of Godzilla trying to achieve his final, perfect form to be misinterpreted for the next 10 years! Though damn it all, I AM curious if the sequels will pick it up from there and go batshit crazy with what it implies...

ANNO'S ATTENTION TO MADNESS

(IN CONCLUSION...)

That said, for all the things that frustrated me about the above mentioned monster-porn build up, there was a handful of shots - curious, high up, almost introspective shots of the monster - one of which shows it rearing, which is features in many of the film's trailers. It's clear to me this particular shot was the giant mechanical puppet - it was too big to be a "suit" in any traditional sense of the word, and is closer to the stunt-suit used for various shots in the original 1954 film. Those shots bothered, not because "they're not CGI and you can tell" (even though you can), but because... well, Shin Godzilla's face was an entirely different shape than the CGI model. It was longer, had larger eyes - I suppose it was a bit more crocidillian whereas the "normal" CG model was more humanoid. Something about this bothered me, and it took a conversation with the better half to pin down where the issue was...


With all the attention to detail in the figures and so on, why are the proportions of his head a different shape in the actual movie? How would they not catch that?

> Wait. The original Godzilla had two different suits, didn't it?

Well sure. The prototype was turned into the fire breathing head, and it had a longer snout and bigger eyes and...!!!

> What's your problem.

OH MY GOD!! ANNO REPLICATED THE INCONSISTENT CHARACTER DESIGN...

> Yeah. That's what I said.

競女!!!!!!!!

...I mean, it could be a coincidence that Hideaki "Evangelion" Anno - known for layers of subtle foreshadowing, obscure external references, and generally being a mischevious bastard - accidentally replicated the same mistakes as the film he's effectively remaking... but if that's a coincidence, it proves Anno's a hundred times better at this shit than anyone's giving him credit for. Even if it's completely by accident.

Whether Shin Godzilla's greatness - and curious flaws - is the result of cautious, intentional craftsmanship or accidental genius are ultimately irrelevant. It did the impossible and justified both Legendary and Toho producing fully independent and tonally opposite Godzilla, for different (if oft overlapping) audiences, and there's something gloriously fun about that. If you can see this in an American theater before October 18th, I'd recommend it... the sheer scale of the massive, explosive elements are worth seeing on the biggest screen possible, even if you'll also be able to tell exactly when Anno cribbed some shitty YouTube stock footage.

No clue, friends. But that aside, we've got some good news!

For those who may not be aware, Italian label Nightmare Factory is releasing several editions of their all new 4K restoration of DAWN OF THE DEAD. Yes, this release is reported to be Region B locked, and yes, rumor has it that the "restored" transfers will all have forced Italian subtitles - but I'll just have to find out when my copy arrives, won't I?

What you need to know is this: The 4K restoration is the first new transfer minted for Romero's 1978 classic since the Rubenstein Company started their 3D conversion back in 2008, which has so far only been shown in a handful of theatrical screenings. For better or worse, the new Italian handled restoration is based on the 118 minute European cut - "Dario Argento Presents Zombie", if you know the film's convoluted and multinational history - but with Rubenstein having funneled a fortune into a 3D version literally nobody asked for, and reportedly holding the home video rights hostage until he's able to make his money back on a fat license fee, this is probably the only viable alternative we're going to see. If you're a Dawn of the Dead fan and you're craving a state-of-the-art 4K release... this is pretty much the only game in town for the foreseeable future.

For those who aren't exactly fluent in Italiano - and that includes myself - here's what the 4-disc edition contains in a nutshell:

• - Restored HD version (2016 4K master) of the 118 minute European cut of the film
• - HD version (2013 master) of the 127 minute American Theatrical cut of the film
• - HD version (2013 master) of the 133 minute Extended Workprint
• - Bonus BD with 2.5 hours of new content plus vintage trailers
• - 5 postcards designed by fans of the film
• - Booklet

I won't get too in-depth on the bonus features here since... well, it's a safe bet that 90% of them will be in Italian with no English subtitles. The 18 minute interview with Tom Savini will likely be in English, as may the 8 minute introduction by Nicolas Winding Refen (who seems to have gotten the ball rolling in this 4K Remaster project) but I'll be shocked if anything featuring Dario Argento, Claudio Simonetti and so on features any English dialog or subtitles of note. That said, if you already own any of the exhaustive, absurdly special-features packed DVD or Blu-ray releases from the last 12 years and you still need more, I... don't know what you're expecting to find... I'unno, maybe that 8 minute restoration featurette will show some cool Before/After footage?

The 6-disc edition contains all of the above, but adds two very enticing extra discs into the mix:
You should also know that there's reportedly a fairly major issue with the 4K Restored Blu-ray which I can only describe as "I-frame pulsing". Basically, every I-frame (once a second or so) is much sharper, and noisier, than the B-frames and P-frames that follow, which have something of a softer, more diffuse look. It's not even that the softness is the problem - it's the inconsistency in the middle of a scene to suddenly "pulse" a sharper frame after and to be followed by a string of more neutral, blurred frames. If you're an autistic crazy person who knows what GOP structure is, you'll instantly know (and probably hate) what you're gonna' see in this set... but, it's impossible to know how bad these things are via stills, so I'll just have to report back when I see it myself in motion.

For those so inclined to import - and can deal with the combination of region lock frustrations and possible forced subtitle shenanigans that always crop up on titles like this - the 4-Disc HD Edition can be had for about $36, and when I pulled the trigger on the 6-Disc 4K Edition it was for just over $50 - and that's with standard shipping included! I'm not getting a dime should you follow those links, I just want the world to know that this exists, and that while there's already talk of some compression annoyances, it's still going to blow the similarly themed Japanese box set out of the water - and that damn thing still sells for about $120!

There's also a 2-disc DVD for those who just straight up hate quality. I have little doubt a non-limited edition of the European remaster will be released next year for a lower price - likely without the American and Extended cuts, of course - but for the sheer volume of content you're actually getting in this particular package, it'd be a little crazy to hold out for something better.

Sadly, no. But having weighed this one out for weeks, I'd rather take the time to explain why I won't be doing it - and why nobody but those with way too much money to burn should bother, either.

This is primarily because I haven't personally made the jump to "4K"/UHD, and while I've been horrendously tempted to pick up an Xbox One S just to review the 4K disc at 1080p... that would be rather pointless on a lot of levels. As such, I'll be doing a write-up on the BDs, which - considering how many things are wrong with all the HD versions of this film - should still be plenty fascinating to dig through on its' own, anyway.

This is a good time to rant about the current state of UHD, though: To be blunt, the display hardware - while absolutely mouth watering on its' own - simply isn't ready for anyone who actually understands what these displays are (and aren't!) capable of doing. I've been tempted to spend a small fortune on an overpriced OLED and lord it over all of my friends as they huddle around their sad, pathetic, peasant-LED's for warmth... but try as I might, I just can't convince myself it's worth it. Not yet, anyway.

Consider the following a primer of sorts for anyone who's about to take the plunge on a new display. My advice is "wait" - but if you're still dead set on being that guy, I completely understand. At least know what the hell you're getting into.


Thankfully, "4K Resolution" itself is pretty straight forward* - double the pixels in width, and height, meaning 3840:2160 UHD has exactly four times the resolution of 1920:1080 HD. The standard also allows for up to 59.94fps, meaning that James Cameron's fantasy of people wanting high refresh rates outside of video games and pornography could be a thing... if, y'know, anyone wants to actually produce content that isn't garbage dramas shot interlaced. (Or Hobbits. I guess.)

* Other than the fact that "4K" is referencing horizontal resolution while "1080p" was referencing horizontal, which literally makes fuck-all sense. Also, 4K spec is 4096 wide, the same way that 2K is 2048 wide, meaning that not only is "4K UHD" not by definition 4K resolution, but that "2K" should be "2K HD" - unfortunately people assume that 2K is inherently better than HD as a result, when pointing out "2K SCAN" vs "HD TELECINE" has more to do with how the image was captured and restored, rather than the actual resolution thereof. Because fuck TV marketing.

UHD-BD has some interesting quirks as a format; not only are discs available in single-layer 50 GB, dual-layer 66 GB and triple-decker 100 GB, but each of those discs has its' own maximum bandwidth limit - 82 Mb/s, 108 Mb/s, and 128 Mb/s respectively! Audio has largely been Dolby Atmos encoded, which is basically a 5.1 mix with metadata to "shift" the individual sounds around a grid of tiny satellite speakers; It's actually pretty cool tech, but completely impractical outside of an actual movie theater with a massive array of speakers installed to cover a wide area. Video - the part that interests me the most, I admit - is now handled by 10-bit HEVC, which - having done some preliminary test encodes myself - I can confirm it holds an almost shocking level of efficiency improvements over Blu-ray's most common codec, AVC, and suspect that in most cases, 100 GB is more than enough for an excellent, reference-quality end-user transfer.

Yes, of course, word is that there are already a handful of UHD-BD's with visible compression issues, and I'm sure that bitrate starved Netflix and Hulu streams will always be disappointing when it comes to grain structure - but if you didn't expect that, you didn't pay much attention to the launch of DVD, Blu-ray, or Netflix HD, did you? There are still some minor disappointments in the spec sheets - video is still subsampled to 4:2:0, and for another there's still "Limited" and "Full" color spaces to confuse and annoy everyone who can instantly tell the difference between PC and TV levels - but honestly, chroma bumped up to a full 1920:1080 is probably enough to satisfy even my crazy self.

But by far, the most promising part of this whole process is the introduction of HDR - or High Dynamic Range. In super-simplistic terms, it means two things; expanded color space, and higher peak luminances (whites). The actual colorspace for Rec. 2020 expands red notably to include those glowing, fire-engine-light reds that Rec. 709 HDTV colorspace simply was never designed to acknowledge, to say nothing of the other-worldly greens that... ironically, nobody's ever seen before in a movie. Seriously, the technology to produce them on a digital screen didn't even until recently exist, so unless you insisted on the most amazingly fabulous bright-ass neon green pride float to ever burst info flames in NoHo live, you've probably never seen colors quite like what 2020 is capable of producing once you hit those outer reaches of the gamut.


It's worth noting that for these colors to even exist as a spectrum of light the human eye can see, there has to be a lot of light being pushed out by the display - considerably more light than we've ever had on consumer or even public exhibition screens until quite recently.

So... where's the problem? Kentai's down for 10-bit color, and this Deep Color stuff is pretty rad, right? Mo' Reds, Mo' Greens, and screens so bright you'll go blind - what's not to love?! Well... there's a couple things really chaffing my HDR boner, and if you've looked into it as long as I have you'll feel thoroughly cuckolded by the mistress of Rec. 2020 yourself.

To put this another way; have you ever looked at a movie and went, man, this scene is visually stunning - but if only there were deeper, more vivid greens? Well... I mean, maybe you have.  But to Rec. 709's credit, it's basically covered the overwhelming majority of the blue spectrum humans are capable of seeing, and while red can certainly be improved, the only major gains we get are in the side of the color spectrum that we associate with... golf courses. Dramatic lighting tends to be white, blue or red, and while higher color fidelity will lead to greater visual contrast in some titles and subtle improvements on things like color banding for pretty much everything, this is very much a subtle refinement in 95% of real-world uses.

Arguably, though, Rec. 2020 is a bit less important than DCI-P3, which was a color space specifically made to capture every possible color range of 35mm film. Well, more relevant as far as movies are concerned, anyway - I'm thinking of the obnoxiously saturated colors in games like the DOOM reboot and salivating at what might be with a new HDR profile...

Many titles in the initial batch of UHD-BDs - The Martian, Mad Max: Fury Road, and so on - were all, seemingly at least, re-graded from scratch specifically to show off how vibrant and pretty and magical this new format was. Stuff released by Sony... wasn't. Pineapple Express was hardly the sort of title I expected from the first wave, but a decent one to show that even with all the expanded color in the world, a movie shot with a drab, overcast visual style is always going to be a drab, overcast movie. I imagine the world will be surprised to see that the inevitable UHD-BD release of Caddyshack doesn't glow like the primary heavy hues of an X-rated Ralph Bakshi cartoon, but these are things that people will slowly figure out on their own.

They were all HDR enhanced transfers, make no mistake, and there's a difference in just how vibrant those titles can get in terms of red and green and particularly highlights on the bright end of the grayscale, but the difference is subtle refinements and increased fidelity in things like traffic lights and grass lawns - not show stopping crazy neon explosions. I have little doubt that young and enterprising film makers will make full use of these new expanded colors over time, but for now, this is basically just additional chroma headroom for your favorite movies; nice to have, sure, but the odds of you noticing a huge difference, even during an A/B comparison, aren't that bloody likely.

Even if we assume that P3 is more important than 2020, there isn't yet a consumer level device capable of displaying that entire range of color yet anyway. Even when properly calibrated and setup, there will be a point of roll-off where the brightest green simply stops short of the full range of signal. The main reason for this is - assuming the hardware all down the chain is capable of accepting the full signal to begin with - to generate a wider color gamut, you need to produce a brighter peak white to carry the wavelength the color exists in.

TV manufacturers love to talk about wide color and High Dynamic Range and all the amazing stuff their new models can do that the competition can't - yet they're always oddly hesitant to talk about the actual cd/m2 rating -or number of "Nits" produced - because they know even the high-end OLED and LCD screens out there fall damn short of the recommendations by a wide margin. Simply put, if you're watching an SDR screen calibrated to the industry standard of 100 Nits, the brightest, deepest blue is only going to be 7 Nits and be pretty fucking dull - but if you're watching on a high quality OLED screen with a maximum output of 800 Nits, you suddenly have 56 different stops of blue to play with before maxing out. So it's not just the brightest, peak blue - it's all the subtle gradations between the light baby blue of the sky of early morning, and the deep hues of midnight that'll have a new level of depth to them.

For the time being, any OLED TV labeled HDR has to have a maximum output of 800 Nits, while any LCD with the label has to output 1,200 Nits - but even that's only on miniscule highlights, where a full screen of white is notably dimmer for both. The reason they have different scales is because OLED can actually turn individual pixels off, giving it greater perceived contrast than LCD, even with a lower light output. That said, both technology are fudging this stuff - OLED have the Automatic Brightness Limiters the same as Plasma, which means that while a small reflection can have a crazy high light output, a full fade-to-white will be substantially lower, and you can watch the whole screen dim as large, bright colored objects come into frame. LCD uses local-area based dimming, which... well, kinda' sucks, but in a completely different way.

In both cases, however, they all pale to a reference Dolby grading monitor that outputs a terrifying 4,000 Nits! We're likely not going to see that for home use until we come up with some crazy new technology to power it, sadly, but mentioning the word "Dolby" brings up the other big stinker in this new tech:

Without delving into I-could-be-compromising-NDA's-here territory, I don't mind saying that my day job consists of a lot of transcoding-server-based wizardry that'd come off as mundane and even disappointing to most readers - developing templates to convert one kind of file into another, automating broadcast friendly audio normalization to different international specs, dumb stuff like that. But the 4K content rollout happening right now has left me to be the front line in telling clients who want to get their feet wet what we can and can't give them, and holy hell, has it been equal parts enlightening and infuriating to follow.

The short version is that because each TV has different color and light capabilities, they've developed what they call "PQ" - or Perceptual Quantization - to make sure every display is capable of displaying the movie as closely as possible to what the graded master was intended to be shown at. In other words, the source media is always encoded as Rec. 2020, but a metadata setting tells the TV what levels it was graded at - so if the movie was graded on a 3,000 cd/m2 (or "3,000 Nits") monitor and your TV can only handle 1,200 Nits, it'll actually shrink the color gamut/dynamic range by 60% so that you keep as much of the color as possible without resorting to clipping and blowing things out of proportion. This includes values for absolute red, green and blue data as well, which means the chroma and luma of the signal are scaled to the appropriate points separately - which means if your TV can't handle the maximum brightness but it can handle the maximum red, it's not going to compromise one for the other.

It's actually a really, really cool idea, and having seen demos of it in action, I can say that PQ is a damn fine thing. Now, my understanding of HDR is that even if the color never falls outside of Rec. 709 (or P3), the contrast between black and white is effectively infinite, and only limited by the display itself. This, admittedly, makes the lack of HDR enhancement on the DotD 4K release something of a missed opportunity, but considering both how niche this title is nearly 40 years later, and how experimental the hardware is, I can almost forgive seasoned professionals not familiar with HDR for not bothering to dive into the new format incorrectly, and instead focusing on delivering the best quality SDR presentation they know how to... particularly when you factor in that, even with current HDR content, the average brightness between an HDR and SDR output is typically comparable - it's just got a lot more dynamic range, which lets you not clip highlights and crush shadows while still staying within the realistic 500~1,000 cd/m2 light output of the average consumer TV.

The bigger problem is that there's different kinds of HDR Metadata. The two most common right now are HDR10, and Dolby Vision - the former has fixed coordinates, meaning the whole movie has a max output for each color from start to finish, while the latter is a dynamic solution, meaning each scene can be tweaked individually to compensate for low lighting - say, making sure a camp fire is displayed properly alongside the following scene taking place on an overcast afternoon. Adjusting PQ on a shot-per-shot is great, particularly when it comes to downscaling HDR content back to SDR - something you could easily do via algorithmic automation on a Dolby Vision master since it would scale everything right down to the Rec. 709 limit, but would require plenty of hand-holding on an HDR10 source to avoid crushed shadow detail and clipped highlights.

So what's the industry standard? There... really isn't one - and certainly not a permanent one. Oh sure, the Society of Motion Picture abd Television Engineers (SMPTE) put their stamp of approval on HDR10, but Netflix is 100% behind Dolby Vision, which requires hardware on the display that knows how to handle the dynamic metadata outside of apps. Samsung knows that Dolby Vision's dynamic properties are here to stay, so they're currently working on an open-source dynamic equivalent to Dolby's equivalent,.. but whether it'll require all new hardware or be shunned due to partnerships with Dolby is anyone's guess. (There's also rumor that HDR10 Metadata is limited to 1,000 Nits, but having seen it for myself I can tell you that's certainly not true. It is limited to 10-bit, however, while Dolby Vision is up to 12-bit.)

That's before we even talk about Hybrid Log Gamma, a really clever method to make HDR content backward-compatible with SDR hardware without any Metadata at all - it just outputs a fixed (pair of) gamma curves, and trusts that the device it's being fed to is calibrated somewhere in the ballpark of "correct". The downside is that it features no PQ, which means all levels have to be fixed on a static 1,000 Nit scale. That doesn't sound terrible at first, since most displays on the market are only hitting about 800~1,100 Nits anyway, but as it's only being used for what could charitably be called experimental broadcasts in Europe for the time being it's all kind of a moot point... for now.

Odds are there would be more support for it if the only thing that used it wasn't VP9, but word is H265 will be implementing HLG profiles for 2017, so buckle up kids - this shit's just getting started.

Even with all the exciting changes in perceptual contrast and color gamut... there's also the limitation of the resolution itself. Namely the fact that most Hollywood movies finished over the last 15 years or so are limited to 2K resolution.

Let me clarify that for a second: Despite professionals slowly but surely moving towards digital photography as a more cost-effective and (arguably) flexible atlernative to celluloid, movies are still - by and large, at least - shot on 35mm film. These days, 35mm is typically scanned in at 4K and then edited on a digital image sequence called a DI - or "Digital Intermediate". Despite confusing naming conventions surrounding it, 2K 1.78 is exactly the same resolution as 1080p HD - 1920:1080 - and since virtually all 2K sources will ultimately be seen on Blu-ray or HD streaming anyway, the difference between 2K and HD is really negligible, at best.

The only reason it's been sononymous with "Better Than HD" for some time is because of the difference between an HD Telecine - that is a real-time transfer of 35mm to HD video - and a 2K scan to uncompressed DPX image files, which are then graded and assembled on a 2K DI. In short, the "scan" part of the "2K Scan" is the important distinction - not the resolution itself.

Things get more complicated when you talk about a modern movie - something like, say, The Martian. While more or less every shot of Matt Damon was shot on 35mm film, it was then scanned into a digital file, and placed on a DI for digital effects matting, and even for grading and general clean-up on shots filmed entirely on-set. Those scans may well have been scanned at 4K, but the DI itself - which gets differing resolutions from different cameras, post houses and so on - is at 2K. Even if the 2K DI was kept (which may or may not be the case), all of the color grading and effects compositing was done at 2K resolution, meaning the ultimate digital file that represents the final output of the movie is limited to 2K.

"But wait!" I hear some of you thinking. "Isn't THE MARTAIN already out on UHD-BD?" It sure is! But the dirty little secret is that Fox didn't actually re-create the entire movie in 4K. They simply went back to that same 2K DI source and upscaled it by 4X to produce a faux-UHD master. To be fair, upscaling HD to UHD is a much less butt-ugly process than upscaling SD to HD... but it still isn't "really" 4K. And that's what about half of the supposedly "4K" UHD titles kicking around in the market right now are. Crazy, right?

Dead. Fuck'n. Serious.

But it's hard to blame them in some cases, I admit. MAD MAX: FURY ROAD - another early "4K" home video release - was shot entirely on Arri Alexa cameras at 2.8K resolution (2880:1620), and then scaled down to a 2K DI. So even if the 4K transfer was re-rendered from scratch, the resolution shot on location was never full 4K resolution to start with.

It's understandable that all-digital movies would be limited to 2K, but why the limitation on 35mm sourced films? The short answer is "3D". Unless a movie was actually shot using 3D cameras, you're basically having people manually trace and rotoscope individual objects in post to add depth, and that means you need multiple layers of the same footage. And since this is a process done effectively at the last minute, and is also the way most Hollywood blockbusters make guaranteed extra money at the box office, it's seen as a necessary evil... even by directors like Guillermo del Toro and Zack Snyder, who are about as open in their disgust for the process as they're allowed to be before the producers give them a talking-to about shitting on the profit margins.

So why not just use 4K DI's? The short answer is that it's just not feasible to do it for all projects on the sort of turn-around time expected of a feature film - and it will have a sizable impact on budget, even if it's a fraction of the overall cost. It comes down to raw resources, and if you're a Hollywood producer who's trying to maximize profits, and the tech guy in the office says that 2K work is a lot cheaper than 4K work, odds are that's the first thing that's getting axed. This is why despite Sony scanning everything at 4K to get the most out of the raw scan possible, we get full 4K restorations of Taxi Driver but a title like Fright Night is scaled down to 2K for further clean-up and grading - the higher resolution scanning is baked into the cost of having the hardware to do it, but taking the time and bandwidth to continue working in 4K adds up pretty quick. As an example, a feature length 2K master of a 90 minute film will take up about 1.5 TB of disk space alone! A 4K DI has four times the resolution, and yes, will take up four times that space, to say nothing of the added strain on whatever network is forced to decode that much raw bullshit at any given time.

For better or worse, I spend every day dealing with network latency, side-eyeing mismatched source content and queueing up transcodes for both production and delivery purposes on a server that was effectively built to handle HD material in real-time. Think of it this way: Even when all you're doing is jamming cuts of meat down a conveyor belt into a meat grinder, suddenly cramming four times as much meat into the same sized pipes is gonna' cause all sorts of panic you, and the rest of your team, simply aren't ready for. You've got three seasons of SD content? Beautiful, spread the cheeks on that thing and go to town. You've got THREE 4K source files?! We're basically fucked the rest of the day, and anything not-4K-related that you expect to get out the door by 5 is going to require a very special request.

Even if your goal is simply to take the finished master and convert it to 3D, keep in mind that conversion is effectively rotoscoping, and multiple people are going to be working on the same title at the same time, and the bandwidth required to hit the same 6TB file from multiple workstations is ridiculous. It can be done - native 4K DI's for titles ranging from The Smurfs 2 to Elysium are proof enough - but if 3D is part of the picture, it's barely worth the expense, and allows you to farm work out to multiple, less insanely equipped sub-studios. There is, technically, "4K 3D IMAX" in select theaters... which are always, without exception, upscaled from the 2K 3D masters even if a 4K master for the "Flat" version exists.

The process of rendering a full length movie is often simply too data-intensive (ie: "too expensive") to justify doing at resolutions beyond 2K. The market for higher-quality 3D is already negligible, and quite frankly, the overwhelming majority of consumers are so clueless they wouldn't know the difference between 720p and 2K - forget HD and UHD. Hollywood caters to the lowest denominator with the biggest payout... which happens to be 2K 3D. The saddest part of this reality is that while I'm not thrilled at the idea of purchasing a 2K DI sourced movie in "upscaled 4K", the added benefits to H265 compression, PQ contrast and HDR color are enough to get me to at least consider buying the more expensive version, even if I don't have a fucking display that'd know what to do with any of it yet. The fact that virtually all UHD-BDs released so far include a "Restored in 4K" Blu-ray copy only makes that jump a little easier to swallow.

In short, 2K DI was easy to convert to 3D, which means nobody wants to invest in 4K DI. Weak.


Anything finished on 35mm can be re-scanned at 4K. Otherwise I'd be warning you about Dawn of the Dead rather than throwing fitty bones at it. But realistically, the leap between 2K resolution and 4K resolution is probably going to be quite a bit more subtle in most cases. Most sane people don't sit within 6 feet of a 55" TV, and the real-world gains in resolution are going to be pretty subtle. If anything, the most obvious improvements will come from the variable block-sizes and 10-bit refinement of H265 as a codec... but neither of those things actually needed higher resolution to begin with. Much like "2K" vs "HD", the difference has more to do with the mastering process than the actual output resolution. 4K is better, make no mistake, but it's also not why most 4K masters are a dramatic improvement on dated HD scans on its' own. That's why the "Remastered in 4K" versions of Ghostbusters and Sam Raimi's Spider-Man looked so much better than the prior Blu-ray releases, even at 1080p resolution.

Don't get me wrong, you should buy 4K restorations of classic films if you have the money to taste. But the market is going to be even smaller than Blu-ray has already become, and I have a feeling the titles we see are going to be titles that the guys running the labels know will sell, and titles they happen to love personally. Dawn of the Dead is something of an outlier, and I fully expect the majority of 4K movies to be trash nobody would ever actually want to watch outside of penance.


I may talk about the PS4 Pro in another post. Short version is it isn't really 4K, just clever upscaling and some supersampling for any schmucks buying this for playback at 1080p (complete with frame-drops not featured on the base hardware!), but for $400, it's "close enough" to UHD resolution.
Holding aside the Metadata and Display Gamut nonsense, one of the few times where that crazy expanded colorspace really would be an amazing boon would be video games. Digital creations aren't limited by 35mm exposure, in-camera sensors or available local lighting, and the thought of the boiling reds and alien greens in something like, say, the 2016 DOOM reboot with enhanced grayscale and color fidelity could be absolutely brilliant if done properly - and a handful of PS4 and Xbox One games already have full HDR support, even on the older-model consoles, though of course as displaying HDR samples on SDR monitors is pretty much impossible there aren't many useful A/B comparisons floating around yet...

The issue, however, is how HDTV's handle those signals. Most displays process incoming footage in different ways - upscaling, deinterlacing, color correction and so on - and in the case of movies, it... doesn't really matter. In virtually all cases movies are shot, edited and shown at 23.98fps and play at a locked framerate from start to finish. No problems there. Anyone who plays games - well, anyone who plays shooters, rhythm games, anything where instantly reacting to game stimuli is required - will know that reflexes are important... but also rendered completely fucking moot if your display has any major input lag.

Back in the days of NTSC CRT, there was no delay to speak of - the input was virtually instantaneous to the analog connection - but HDTV's and now, UHD displays, require time to properly process whatever signal they're being fed. Most game consoles and anyone gaming on PC that isn't using a specialty designed high framerate monitor is locked to 60fps (well, 59.94Hz if you wanna get technical) which means there's exactly 16.66ms between each frame. Theoretically. Slowdown and frame-pacing are a thing, but let's ignore that for the time being and just say that a great TV will give you one frame of delay, while an average TV will give you about two frames worth. And, yes, video game mechanics themselves are slower now than they were a decade ago to account for this phenomenon, if you can believe it.

Yes, you do. And all of that is irrelevant when discussing delay, because it's based on actual milliseconds going into the display. Desktop style monitors typically have ~15ms delay these days, even on cheap garbage monitors, but you're never gonna' get that sweet, sweet HDR profile for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided on a 1440p screen that runs 144hz, now are ya?

And yes, I've recently upgraded to a GTX 1080. Feels good to play 2160p, even if it's currently being scaled down a 1080p. What is aliasing, again?

When you buy a TV and you know you're going to play games on it, you probably set it to "Game" or even "PC" input. Why? Because that disables plenty of the internal processing and lets you get data in as fast as humanly possible. ~33ms is typically as good as a large display is going to get, and is fairly playable at anything that isn't a competitive shooter or fighting game - but anything after that is going to introduce an obvious delay that could be annoying at best, and unplayable at worst. The only monitors with better response times tend to be smaller desktop monitors that forego a lot of the basic conveniences of "TVs" - nothing wrong with that, but if you're sitting 2 feet away, you probably don't want a 55" UHD monitor to start with. (Well, I do. But I also want a three foot erection that breathes fire, so grain of salt there.)

With all that in mind, let's remember that UHD with HDR is not only feeding four times the resolution and an expanded gamut over the same connection as an HD master, but it's also got to equate the HDR metadata so the image is displayed properly. In other words, HDR was designed to be used for movies more than games, and the hardware implementation reflected that... at the expense of games being actually playable. While plenty of TVs have had firmware updates to speed up response times, plenty of sets still have over 60ms of response time - or about  a 4 frame delay - while Sony's current Bravia line - the one marketed as the "Perfect Match" for the PS4 Pro, no less! - has over 100ms of lag on UHD with HDR enabled. In other words, it's fucking unplayable.

To be fair, a lot of current models have had firmware updates that dramatically cut down on input lag once proper diagnostics by third parties. For the love of Pete, always check Rtings.com, though I assume the first generation or two of HDR sets (which'll probably be really cheap if you can find them kicking around) are never going to be updated, largely because people who do play games don't dive in when it's crazy expensive and can burn-in like a mother. Ask anyone

Even so, the fact that this wasn't even a consideration is shocking to me. Truly, if there's one thing I want out of a $1,500~5,000 TV, it's for my natural shitty skill at vidya to be exponentially amplified by a full tenth of a second. I need to respawn in every room six times on Ultra Violence anyway, so the last thing I need is to have the game trailing behind my obvious lack of skill.


Light output needs to improve before the colorspace is ever going to reach P3 levels (with "100% Rec. 2020" being science goddamn fiction for the foreseeable future), and unfortunately edge-lit LEDs - the cheap, lightweight garbage people love to waste money on - aren't capable of that to begin with. Despite being incredibly pretty, OLED isn't as bright as a full on baclit LED (yet). As the tech improves and the price comes down, it'll start to be feasible to have both full-P3 and at least 1,200 Nits - which, from any sane perspective, should have always been the bare minimum for "HDR". Instead it's being used as a gimmick to separate the cheap 4K sets from the expensive 4K sets, which is fucking deplorable.

There's nothing wrong with a 4K SDR monitor, and I've considered getting one myself - but the HDR monitors that are available right now are so bare minimum, it kinda' makes me want to have no part of this shitshow until the 2017 models have locked horns long enough to get at least a 100% P3/1,200 Nit standard. Maybe by then the HDR Metadata will have been figured out, too - though I wouldn't get my hopes up on Streaming and Disc having a single, unified standard, much as that would make
every consumer's life a lot easier.

Unless you get a crazy good deal on something really, really good, I say save your money for another year. The tech has to mature, and it's only going to get cheaper anyway, and unlike Blu-ray and the PS3 a decade ago, the Xbox One S just... isn't an appealing enough console to justify getting as a cheap media player with games. Not for someone with no love for Halo and Gears of War, at least.

As for the Dawn of the Dead box, we'll have to talk about that another day.

Midnight Factory's 6-disc Blu-ray/UHD-HD collection for DAWN OF THE DEAD is an extremely frustrating package, all in all. On the one hand it's simply the best presentation of the film that's ever existed... on the other, it's a huge mess in its' own right, and if you're waiting for clarification on if it's worth the asking price, it really does depend on what you've expected out of it.


As has been stated elsewhere, the presentation of the George A. Romero approved "Theatrical Cut" and the "Extended Cut" are a 1:1 match with the audio and video files found on the substantially more expensive Japanese box set released by Happinet in 2013. The M2TS files are literally the same here - copy pasta, all the way down. Both transfers are pulled from the same 35mm elements, with the Extended Cut being the 'source' and trimmed down to match the length and audio mix of the Theatrical Cut. The only new additions to these discs are Italian forced-subtitles, and a Region "B" lock.

Mind you, the entire 6-disc Midnight Factory box set under scrutiny here costs about the same price as just the Extended Edition Japanese Blu-ray, so if you're clever enough with a BD-ROM to bypass the forced subtitles it may well be worth it to go for all the way. On the other hand, if you only want the Extended Cut and could care about the European Cut, that release doesn't have forced Italian subtitles. So invest accordingly.


Not something I usually talk much about, but for a $50~ import with a half-dozen discs, I guess I may as well...


Despite this being a hefty 6-disc set, the whole collection is contained in a single, somewhat opaque blue case the same height and depth, but double the width, of a standard BD keepcase. The case has two flaps - one for each side of the case - each holding 2 discs, with one disc in the front and rear of the case proper for a total of 6. To call it "complex" would be an understatement, though I assume the 4-disc edition comes missing a flap, and is likely less of a pain in the ass to deal with.

The Italian language booklet (seemingly containing a new essay, and interviews with Dario Argento and George Romero) covers the 4K UHD, and the Post Cards - kept in a small, sealed plastic bag, just the way I like it - flop somewhere around in the middle, which means you'll be attacked by them every time you open the case. It's kind of a shit-show to be honest, and none of this is helped by the fact that the case itself is chunky and only likes to close when it seems to want to close when it feels like it. Not gonna' lie, I've had worse, but this may be the most cumbersome piece of "Deluxe" packaging since that equally ridiculous fat-case for Dust Devil on DVD nearly a decade ago.

The only real upside is the fact that - much like Arrow Video's old "Special Edition" Slipcases! - the case has a total of 4 poster art pieces you can swap around as you like - the iconic American, Italian, Spanish and Pre-Release posters are all given a full panel. The art itself is decent quality, amazing historical stuff, and... kind of pointless, considering you don't have a window to show any of it off from. Goddamn, Midnight Factory, get your shit together on this thing!  Instead it's wrapped in a thin, glossy cardboard slip the International Post loves to ding up as much as humanly possible - but it's that weird Refen themed art, so, fuck it, I can't convince myself to be as upset as I was at the less-serious damage on my copy of the Anchor Bay Ultimate Edition.

If you're a packaging fetishist and you're more patient than I am, I say wait until the inevitable German port of the same content in a Mediabook, or 3D Steelbook, or a Leather Bound Zombie Skin Edition - pretty much anything would be less excruciating to deal with than this goddamn thing. I don't ask for much from a box set, just functionality, and somehow this has come up just short enough to annoy the crap out of me.

But we all know I'm ripping these to my hard drive to fuss with them anyway - and may have gotten so sick of waiting I grabbed a Nautical Freelance Copy to start this review. Moot point, but hey, full disclosures and all that...



As expected, while the bonus features with Tom Savini and Nicolas Winding Refen feature English audio and Italian subtitles, the rest of the interviews with Dario Argento, Claudio Simonetti, the LVR restoration crew, and the archival interviews with Alfredo Cuomo and Claudio Argento are in Italian with no translation. If you're surprised by this, you probably haven't imported many Italian DVDs.

Archival interviews and trailers are all SD PAL, and as such will likely not play on most North American displays. Not much to see here unless you speak Italiano, which - considering the countless hours of bonus material already available in English - is really no skin off my nose. I was hoping the Restoration featurette would show some cool before/after samples, but unless you really want to see a graded vs ungraded shot, that's as good as it's going to get.

The Open Matte transfer is arguably the HD highlight of this collection, and is - for all intents and purposes - identical to the 1.85:1 transfer aside from having all that sweet, sweet headroom. It's a little bizarre knowing that the 1.85:1 area on the center-right of the scan has been cleaned of dirt and scratches while the rest of the transfer hasn't, but as the 35mm Master Positive has been kept in relatively good shape over the last nearly-40-years, there isn't a whole lot to complain about that can't be equally leveled at the "Final" 1.85:1 master.




Before we talk about the new master - the good, the bad, and everything in between - it's worth noting why this was such a big deal. This is hardly the first time Dawn of the Dead has been given a new, high-resolution transfer, but it's never quite gotten the attention and care it so desperately asked for...

In 2004, Anchor Bay restored the American Theatrical cut of the film to what was - at the time, certainly - one of the most impressive presentations of a 70s horror film outside of the big studio wheelhouse. Scenes were corrected on a shot-by-shot basis to get consistent, rock-solid black levels and somewhat neutral skin tones, despite highlights often having a too warm (and sometimes blatantly brown) cast. Sadly, as this was still the era of DVD where heavy film grain led to terrible, clumpy compression, heavy DVNR that led to blatant ghosting and edge-filtering to prevent the whole film from looking "soft" as a result led to an unnatural, digitally processed look that's hard to look past. Going forward, this will be known as the "Divimax Master".

Perhaps only adding to the confusion were reports that the Arrow Video Blu-ray - which also included the two "Alternate" cuts on PAL DVD - was regularly cited as being 'higher quality' than the Anchor Bay transfer. This is certainly a matter of taste, but the biggest difference between the two was that Anchor Bay later applied an additional pass of scratch-removal tools, which did their job (somewhat) but also caused the usual high-frequency detail loss that comes with the territory. The master itself is exactly the same otherwise, and sadly, most of the damage was done during the initial creation of the master over a decade ago.

The Extended Edition of Dawn of the Dead was first released on Blu-ray by Happinet Japan in 2013. I suspect the Happinet transfer is actually the restoration that served as the foundation for Dawn of the Dead 3D, a conversion project that was first announced as in production all the way back in 2007! That would, at the very least, explain why the new transfer is so distractedly bright... hmm... either way, this will be the "Extended Master" when comparisons are unavoidable.

The Happinet release also included a "New Master" for the shorter American Theatrical cut - in reality it was the same exact scan as the Extended master re-cut to the soundtrack of the George A. Romero approved 1979 Theatrical Cut, since the former was effectively just an unpolished, longer cut of the latter anyway. As such I'll refer to the 2013 Theatrical Master and the 2013 Extended Remaster as if they were one and the same, because... well, they are.

Since we're being slightly pedantic anyway, I'll point out that while Elite erroneously released the 'Extended' version on Laserdisc in the 90s as the "Director's Cut", Romero has since clarified that he willingly trimmed the extra 7 minutes or so of footage and that he considered the 127 minute "Theatrical Cut" his personal prefered version of the film. Romero seemingly had no direct involvement in the creation of the 118 minute "ZOMBIE" cut released in most of Europe.

Presumably Alfredo Cuomo and Claudio Argento hold the master positive that makes up "ZOMBIE", the Dario Argento approved 118 minute version that serves as the leaner, meaner, less satyrical answer to Romero's more pensive and playful take on the zombie apocalypse. I like Zombie just fine - I'm not convinced it's the "best" version of the film, no, but I'm also convinced that each version has their own strengths, and Zombie is no different - though for better or worse, the elements appear to be no better or worse than the 35mm CRI that's seemingly served as the basis for every new home video transfer of the film dating back to the mid-90s.

Foot Note: Anchor Bay possibly created a new 35mm print in the late 90s, but the inclusion of "extra" scenes on their initial video releases - which were later removed for the 25th Anniversary Edition DVD - suggest they either have been cleaning that old girl up for decades, or perhaps struck a low-contrast print from the same vintage CRI. The connecting thread is the moire whorl patterns that aren't present on the ZOMBIE elements, and thus can't be on the camera negative. Take a look at Danny's Dawn of the Dead Collector's Blog for some fascinating info on this seemingly rock-solid theory. 


First the good news: The promise of an all new, high quality 4K scan of the "Zombie" Master Positive print have been delivered exactly as promised - by which I mean it's not an upscale or anything like that. The Japanese "4K Remaster" of The Crow has proven that this isn't always the case on overpriced imports.

It's clear that efforts have been made to maintain the overall integrity of the element at a scan level, from the correctly centered 1.85:1 aspect ratio to the carefully regulated highlights and a level of consistency between shots for things like fluorescent lighting and time of day that no print of Dawn of the Dead prior has ever seen. In many ways it may indeed the best, most natural looking version of the film ever released... but that doesn't mean it's a particularly attractive presentation on its' own. Romero's principle of substance over style means the original lighting and focus on the film was never particularly great to start with, and anyone expecting Dawn of the Dead to be a crisp, glowing film for the 21st century is probably not someone particularly familiar with the film to begin with. It's always been an underexposed, inconsistent, grimy looking little movie and while there's a few problems with the presentation, it's clear the overall project did everything it could to preserve the occasionally underwhelming world George Romero and DP Michael Gornick created.

When I first looked over the 4K European Remastered 1.85 disc, my heart sank a little. Shadows were an indistinct gray, flesh tones had a dull, washed-out look compared to every prior print worth mentioning, and while the appearance of visible on-set lighting was no longer a big, hot colored blob of light, I found myself struggling to call what we have an "improvement" - from any raw, aesthetic standpoints, at least. I suspected that there was an incorrect gamut conversion at first: Outside of the optical titles none of the unexposed areas of the print are ever "black", and while the new 4K sourced BD looks perfectly serviceable during well lit exteriors, the vast majority of the while film looks very... pale, to put it kindly.

It wasn't until I looked the whole thing over with a histogram that it started to make sense - even if I find myself frustrated with the result. While the Extended HD Master released in 2013 seemingly favored midtones over highlights or shadow details - getting a consistently vibrant, natural looking color pallet at the cost of virtually every lamp and light fixture being blown out into a glowing vortex. In short, the Extended HD Master pushed the exposure to increase contrast, and with it find some sensible looking midtones at the cost of making very bright scenes way too bright, and very dark scenes a little on the thin side. There was a little clipping on things like the mall lighting in the 2004 Divimax transfer as well, but nothing outside the margins of error (or good taste).

By comparison, the new 4K transfer seems to have preserved the highlights perfectly, with the brightest scenes consistently topping out at IRE 100, just as they should, with the muddled midtones and weak black levels the natural result of leaving things as they are. The result - while technically sound and perfectly respectful to the source material... still strikes me as very underwhelming, from any aesthetic point of view at least. The cool cats at CAPS-A-HOLIC have made many of the things I'd otherwise write completely irrelevant (huzzah!), but all the same, their comparisons can be a bit limited and may not always tell the full story, as might be the case here, so I've included a bunch of purty pictures for your personal pleasure.

I've tried to get a wide variety of examples so that anyone on the fence about taking the plunge can make the right call.






















But so what if Kentai thinks the movie doesn't "look" attractive - low contrast is good, right? It brings out more detail than a high contrast transfer which will only crush shadows and boost highlights! This is actually all a good thing and he's just being grumpy because it doesn't look the way he wants it to... honestly, I was worried that was the case for about a week, but something just didn't feel right, and I think I've finally put my finger on it. See, going lower-contrast will usually yield more shadow detail, that hasn't been the case here. The shadows on the 4K Remaster are oddly vague and murky, and actually have even less information hiding in the shadows than either of the competing HD masters. I was expecting a hundred shades of gray, but there's no shades to speak of - just the same damn off-gray!

To give you a quick, simple example of how completely different all three masters are - and to give an excuse to use the scene where Tom Savini calls Ken Foree "Chocolate Man" - here's a quick frame-match between all 3 major Blu-ray releases. Obviously, how close to calibrated your monitor is will have a huge impact, but you can at least see the big issue for yourselves.




As you can see, both the Divimax and Extended masters show what I'm assuming to be a round smoke detector and a sprinkler to the right of the grate... but the European 4K remaster has only the vaguest hint of the former, and no visible instance of the latter at all! The shadows are simply a murky haze of nothing, and seeing the "actual" black 1.85 matte bars against it only makes the weaknesses around shadow detail within the new transfer that much easier to spot.

That said, the blue cast on the European transfer is one of those "intentional" changes that works - another example is the dark blue shot of the mall exterior, which plays off previous shots of the dark night sky, playing their arrival up as the true "Dawn" in the film's title. It's not in the original, but it's a clever enough touch I'll happily take it. It's little things like this that show me that far too much time and effort was put into this new transfer for the issue to simply be that the people working with the master didn't know what they were doing: Even if it's only in a small way, the work making Dawn of the Dead consistent from shot to shot and scene to scene elevates the film into a more cohesive, structured whole than it ever has been, and it's given me a newfound respect for how much care and effort can go into work I still may not, ultimately, be all that happy with.

Only adding further fuel to my personal speculation fire is the Open-matte transfer, shows countless instances of small black debris on the print registering as "true black", while completely unexposed areas of the original film are the same milky gray color as the finished 1.85:1 transfer. I can't say anyone treating only optically printed debris as "true black" (because no light passes through them) is wrong, since that's what a 35mm print looks like on projection, too... and yet, even in that context, these seem to vary between "looks pretty normal" to "what the heck am I even looking at"?












Some of these instances - such as Peter and Roger emerging from the doorway - look... fairly okay, I guess? The screen is an almost consistent fade to optical-black (ie: "this is as dark as the prior element is getting on this print"), and I can believe that's how the scan is 'supposed' to look... but then again, the shot of Roger fighting a zombie in the truck cab is just gnarly and washed out, far as I'm concerned. Compare it to a similar (not frame accurate) example from the Divimax HD master - or even the Extended HD master! - and despair at how flat and sad it all looks:






So... Is the grading just poor, or is there more at play than meets the eye?

In the end, I can only guess that the different 35mm elements themselves are the limiting factor here, and the new color grade only reveals those weaknesses. After all, the prior HD master was struck from the same 35mm elements and the results were VERY SIMILAR as far as contrast and shadow detail goes - but when you factor in how piss-poor so many other elements of the previous masters were, it was easy enough to chalk those up to the mastering process rather than the elements themselves. If that's the case - if the black levels on the low contrast 35mm IP elements simply don't exist - I can't blindly call the transfer poor. Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar, and as disappointing as the black levels are here, I feel that far too much care has been spent elsewhere for this to have been anything but a known compromise.

I will say - if my hunch is anywhere close to correct - that I would have handled it a bit differently... but that's the beauty of being an arm-chair critic, isn't it?


If this were the only issue I'd do my best to look past it, but the compression is frustrating as well. The good news is that the artifacts aren't as blatantly ugly could be, but they're better described as an issue of consistency, rather than overall quality. The phrase "I-Frame Pulsing" has been used to describe the issue, and it's not a bad one because it does sum up the issue... but in terminology that means bugger all to anyone who's never actually encoded video before. So forgive me for giving a primer on this, but it's actually relevant to understanding where things may well have gone wrong.

Most of the video compression algorithms we use to this day - MPEG-1, MPEG-2, AVC, and now HEVC - are based around the notion that a sequence of frames have commonality that can be exploited and replicated between frames with minimal changes. These smaller segments compressed together are called Group Of Pictures - or a "GOP". While I sure didn't vote for them to be the defacto standard to Make Video Quality Great Again, the way their trickle-down compression works goes something like this:

I-Frames have the least level of compression, and are thus easiest to decode. They're also the largest frames in the GOP as a result. I-frame only videos are typically used for broadcasting and editing purposes for these very reasons, but have to have a dramatically higher bitrate to match quality with "Long GOP" compression as a result.

P-Frames reference the previous frames in the GOP, sequentially, until the next I-Frame is hit. These are smaller, but are slower to decode since they're ultimately referencing previous macroblocks. They're handy enough, and easier to read for certain applications without playback funkiness (ie: Media Servers), but if you're going down this road you may as well go all the way in.

B-Frames are even smaller at similar quality levels, but they work by pulling blocks from the frames both ahead and behind, making them an absolute beast to play back on weaker hardware, and more or less impossible to get to function outside of standard forward playback without hitches.

A typical MPEG-2 GOP may look something like "IBBBPBBBPBBB", at which point another I-Frame gets punched in and the pattern repeats. AVC is a bit more flexible in that it can have GOP sizes from 1 to 250 frames without playback taking a hit, but smaller GOP sizes lead to higher quality, and as a way to avoid decoding issues Blu-ray specifically demands a 24-frame max GOP for standard progressive content.

Still with me after all that nerd shit? Cool! So, what happens when your bitrate is adequate and your I-Frames look great, but your B-Frames and P-Frames aren't encoded to the same standard - either because you did a one-pass encode that doesn't properly allocate the bits where they need to go, or because your multipass algorithms are straight up crap? It means that some frames are nice and crisp and sharp and look like your high quality master, and then the next several frames - while perhaps not terrible - are substantially softer, more diffused, and uneven looking compared to the I-Frames. In other words, the good frames "pulse" in and out, while the bulk of the transfer is the fuzzier, blotchier B/P-Frames that aren't anywhere near to the same standard.

In properly encoded two-pass content, the difference in overall clarity between an I-Frame and a B/P-Frame should be undetectable, but that sure as shit isn't the case here. Here's a pair of frames from the same seconds which perfectly illustrates the problem:





You see the huge gap in the quality of the grain structure? This, my friends, is what poor temporal compression looks like; not single instances of compression creeping up on a specific frame, but regular intervals of the source video being preserved and then smoothed over or turning blotchy, and then the crisp, accurate texture is back again before you can even blink. It's an abstract kind of Hell, to be sure, but as someone who's job requires assessing visual quality on a wide range of source materials, this is the kind of shit I just can't unsee. It's possible the more sane among you will see the artifact, shrug, and then move on with your day... but if so, you're not one to care what I have to say about compression to begin with, are ya'?

The above screenshots are from the "Restoration" themed featurette, and are slightly worse than the main feature - but as what we're talking about is a temporal effect, and thus impossible to show properly in stills, I'm using a more-obvious-than-normal instance to give you the idea of what to look for in the main transfers. Sadly, both the 4K Remastered 1.85 OAR and the 4K Remastered 1.33 Open-Matte transfer have this issue - don't have the hardware to watch the 4K UHD disc yet, so no comment on that one.

The encoding - fascinating as the reason behind it might be - just isn't particuarly good. I've seen far worse on releases that were highly reviewed, so I imagine this'll annoy those who are already prone to snort and shake their heads at the quality of "grain structure", and that most others will be perfectly happy that they see any grain at all - much less plenty of it on brightly lit footage. The transfer may be far from ideal, but compared to the smeared, waxy texture of the 2004 Divimax HD master, it's still a pretty dramatic step forward for a film that's never been able to catch a break on Blu-ray.

THE DISCS ARE TRUE 24FPS,

NOT THE USUAL 23.98FPS

ENGLISH AUDIO

Both the 1.85:1 and Open-Matte presentations feature an English 5.1 remix and the original mono mix encoded as lossless DTS-HD Master Audio. Sadly, they also feature forced subtitles... assuming you aren't using an HTPC and some AACS cracking software. Hint-hint.

The English 5.1 remix - which sounds more or less identical to the Dolby True HD 5.1 mix on the Japanese BD - is about as goofy as you'd expect; sound effects are too loud as dialog is too quiet, foley echoes and trails when it clearly shouldn't, and the concept of directionality is optional, at best. The high end cuts out suddenly, and there's some odd humming in certain scenes with a lot of ambient noises which, I can only guess, is a residual artifact of the hiss removal DNR. It manages to be simultaneously bass heavy and tinny, and the fact that I had to turn my player volume all the way up to comfortably hear the dialog is nothing short of terrifying.

In short, like every 5.1 English remix of Dawn of the Dead, it sucks... and you've either made peace with it, or you'll go with the original mix. As you'd imagine, I went with the latter.

The original mono track sounds... dated, like it was pulled from a finished 35mm optical track (and likely was!), but under the circumstances I've no real complaints with the overall fidelity or volume of the mix. Unlike the Japanese release, the mono track seems to remain consistently in sync with the image and is presented as lossless. Like the visual presentation, it's not stunning, but once you know what you're getting into there's not much to complain about either.

The saddest part? Listen to the restored Italian 5.1 track for all of 15 seconds. It's fucking amazing - clear, nuanced, pans like it should, the whole nine. Listening to the English 5.1 track leaves me wondering why anyone bothers to waste time remixing 70s low-budget movies, but listening to the Italian track - in short, morbidly curious bursts - makes me wonder what could be if Rubenstein ever goes digging in the vaults and Dawn of the Dead is given the proper remix it deserves.

IS IT WORTH BUYING?

This is far from the only BD release of the 4K Remastered European version of Dawn of the Dead we're going to see over the next few years, and the combination of region locking, forced subtitles, middling compression and a shoddy limited edition package all make this an incredibly rough purchase to recommend to anyone who isn't a huge fan of the European cut to begin with. The transfer is underwhelming, the audio competent, the bonus features are mostly useless if you don't speak Italian, and even the limited edition box is a swing and a miss. I feel bad saying that, knowing how much work and dedication clearly went into the preservation of one of the most unique horror films of the 70s... but the finished disc just ain't that good.

Unless you absolutely need the 4K UHD-BD and the Open-Matte transfer, I'd say hold off for now and see what the rest of the world starts doing with the same materials. It can always be worse, sure - but at least it might be more English friendly or region free in the process!

Happy Holidays, friends.

See you all in the new year!