Just a fair warning to everybody who likes these elegant little fluff games about smacking wolves in the taint with enchanted staffs and collecting scattered woodland ingredients to Alchemy up pies. Mrs. Kentai really loved the last game in the series, so I was ready to pull the trigger on this one to keep the good times a' flowin... but two unexpected things kept me from sealing the deal.

NIS America is no longer the US distributor due, as I understand it, to Tecmo-Koei having purchased GUST outright back in Japan. Lost in the shuffle were both the extravagant artbook Limited Edition, and the original Japanese voice track. The former was a great incentive, but at the end of the day I can live without it. The latter, however, is the line for me; even if you're more forgiving of this omission on principle than I am, the fact that what we're getting is being described as a "Partial English Dub" smacks of penny-pinching, the major side effects of which could have easily been avoided by doing quite literally what they've done for every single other iteration in this franchise and include the original language track.

Plenty of games are only available dubbed into English and other anglicized languages made from that. I've grown accustomed and expectant of it for franchises like Final Fantasy and Metal Gear. But you know what they didn't do? Dub the "big" cut scenes and then remove dialog from the rest of the game.

Apparently Tecmo Koei is already talking about restoring the Japanese audio for the next game in the franchise. Maybe we'll see this as free DLC or something down the line? These games are closer to visual novels than most "big" AAA titles, and as such programming mouth flaps is a non issue (at least if the last game was any indicator).

I'll be damned; after about a year of utterly ridiculous bullshit, Feminist Youtube video creator Anita Sarkeesian will finally launch the first episode of her already controversial "Tropes vs. Women in Video Games" video this Thursday. This is about 9 months after she announced that she had started the project with donations from a Kickstarter project, and can finally put to rest the endless snickered implications that she took the money and ran. Which would be, y'know, retarded since this appears to literally be her job.

But perhaps a little history is in order to understand why we're talking about her in the first place: Despite the fact that her videos consist of her talking into the camera while clips occasionally play behind her, she needed a larger budget for this project than usual - presumably to buy a truck full of games as research material, well, fair enough - and setup a Kickstarter with a goal of $6,000. To, in simplified terms, talk about how video games are inherently sexist on YouTube. So far so good, right?

Well, once 4chan's /v/ Board caught wind of the whole thing, a mess of ugly, trollish behavior followed, including massive levels of anti-semitic and death/rape threats on her YouTube account, home made flash games where you could literally bloody up her photo, and even blatant, pornographic shenanigans on Wikipedia article. In short, someone dared to talk seriously about a young medium with a largely teenaged male demographic as its primary market and how it mightnot be a great representation of women in the process (*gasp!*), and that very same demographic decided to prove her point to the hilt by being a bunch of loud, immature and misogynistic assfucks.

Sarkeesian wasn't exactly quiet about the incident, however, and as news spread through every corner of the video gaming community it led to a shockingly positive backlash against her detractors; not only did she surpass $6,000 - she walked away with a grand total of over $158,000!


Now, for someone who claims to be speaking out as an expert on women's issues and fighting against the injustices of the world, it's a little suspect that she hasn't announced any of that "extra" donated money being given to, I dunno, shelters for abused women or fighting child rape in Africa or any number of more positive uses than potentially invoking a perfect 10 on irony for being harassed (among other things) about her Jewish decent and keeping a small fortune she only earned from the exposure that said harassment actually got her... but, I digress. Mostly.

At the end of the day, it's her cash, and she can do whatever the hell she wants with it. In a way it's admirable to blow every penny on every single game system and potentially interesting title available, though if "research" was the whole point, I'm not sure why emulating or even watching video walk-throughs of long out of print games was good enough. But hey, having seen people write shit off wrongly because they didn't bother to actually ever see it - and I myself have been guilty of this more often than I'd like to admit - I can't blame anyone for doing their homework before they attempt to present what they have to say as a well informed and meticulous opinion based on first hand experience.

Is elf cheese stinky? Probably. But I'm not going to be the asshole who says that without having at least tasted it. On a related note, if anyone knows where I can purchase snacks made from the breast milk of beautiful, fictional women, let me know. Don't look at me like that; we've established this is for research, damn it!



There's so much more to all of this than Sarkeesian herself, though. 2012 was a fascinating year in the broader geek culture when it came to looking into the mirror and asking if the nerdy stuff we've all grown so fond of - video games, comic books, movies and the like - did adhere to bizarre double standards in a likely unconscious effort to sexualize and/or subjugate female characters in genres and mediums traditionally designed as adolescent male fantasy. The most obvious example was the Street Fighter X Tekken Internet Reality Show "Cross Assault" - yeah, that was actually a thing for some damn reason - which quickly devolved into one of the team captains, Aris Bakhtanians (wearing the scruffy beard and Robert Baratheon beer gut), being increasingly squicky towards his own team-mate Miranda Pakozdi, threatening to smell her and watch her in the bathroom, among other "charming" antics that would be funny if this were an episode of Beavis & Butthead and it were still 1996.

For her part, Pakozdi resisted the charm of starting a Reality TV feud, and merely ended her final match in an obvious forfeit, literally refusing to play the game and watching her character get pummeled in silence. Keep in mind these are people who basically play Street Fighter for a living, where losing in any official capacity is simply not an option for their future in the... I refuse to call it a "sport", but you know what I mean. It'd be like a professional pole vaulter merely walking under it and raising his middle finger to the judges the whole way; it certainly makes a statement, but it's still not good for their reputation or their averages.

That all would have been bad enough, but the fact that Aris Bakhtainas went on to give a ludicrous statement about how, and I swear I'm not exaggerating any part of this, "sexual harassment and racism is a part of fighting game culture", was the icing on the douchebag cake. He's essentially justifying the constant stream of words like cunt, rape, nigger and faggot used purely as low class insults on Xbox Live as the song of his people. And I gotta tell you, speaking as someone who took it upon himself subtitle tentacle rape porn in his spare time, that sort of mentality is just gross.

Look, I'm not saying you can't say these things in any context - I call my cat a motherfucker on a daily basis, despite the fact that he has never, as far as I know, had coital relations with his mom -  but I'm saying that you say them among actual friends, not to complete strangers when you're hoping to win a cash prize for throwing Hadoukens, and certainly not to people you consider team mates. In short, the fact that anyone would suggest that losing the phrase "rape that bitch!" while playing BlazBlue would somehow destroy the culture of playing BlazBlue was an eye-opening thought. He's clearly just a bloated sack of dumbfuck, but the thought that he might not be alone was a humbling one to anyone who picks up a controller to unwind.



Things didn't get much more cheery from there. E3 happened just a few short months later, and the initial teaser for Hitman Absolution. I personally thought the whole thing was dumb more than it was sexist, but in the wake of the Sarkeesian fallout, plenty of people saw women in BDSM Nunspoiltation costumes and sky high heels getting punched in the face by a conservatively dressed player analog, and saw it as little more than exploitive, sex-drenched posturing to sell a game in which you shoot people. Which, you know, it is... I just fail to see it as a problem when the whole point of these games has always been debauched blood-soaked fantasies. The fact that you literally spend the whole game murdering people is fine, so long as the women aren't dressed inexplicably sexier than the male antagonists? Before we get too lost in the minutia here, let us also remember this is a game where you can murder people dressed up as the giant chicken from Family Guy. At that point, the D'amato Latex Nun Squad being involved seems like the least ridiculous thing about it.

At that point, though, a lot of talk pointed towards "Hitman Absolution itself isn't the problem." Well, thank fuck for that. Rather, many concerned people asked if this sort of blatant sexualization targeted towards females should be the norm in video games, and by extension, nerd culture as a whole. This was a fair enough moment for introspection, I guess, but to this day I don't see anything "wrong" with the trailer full of sexy nuns getting the shit pounded out of them by a mute man in an Armani suit. But again, part-time tentacle porn translator, not a trained expert on the double-standard of sexism in the 21st century.

As is so often the case I see it as stupid, and maybe even tasteless, but as is so often the case my reaction to charges of sexism don't quite ring true. Is it ridiculous that the all female goon squad clearly bought their uniforms in the same aisle as the ball gags and Astroglide? Well sure. But it's little more than a parody-infused extension that ladies "formal wear" is a sleevless, low cut dress and painful heels while men get to walk around wearing an especially comfortable suit. What we see in fantasy is often, to one degree or another, a reflection of the reality we already live in, and while I won't deny the notion that women are expected to be "sexy" in ways men are not, that same idea creeping in our pop-culture is largely a hyper-realized version of what we already know and see every day.

For me, though, the whole thing got out of hand when everyone started flipping out over the Tomb Raider reboot trailer, which was very clearly hemming closer to The Gray than it was Indiana Jones. The modus opperandi was clearly to knock Lara Croft down a peg and present her as a young, inexperienced adventurer who has to earn her place as a survivalist expert; it's a grim, gritty interpretation of a franchise that had always been about two pies in the face away from being a joke, and honestly, I thought it looked much more interesting for it... it's too bad the already sore anus of the gaming community let loose the hounds over about 10 seconds of footage implying that Lara has to fight back against some dangerous, desperate men that might want to put the rape-boots to her and her friend. Because they're the fucking bad guys.



It's a terrifying concept, I admit. But how is this any more offensive than her fighting against a wolf trying to rip her face off, exactly? Aren't both instances the whole POINT of this game, to present Croft with all manner of dangerous, horrifying situations and overcome them with you playing the heroine? Well, according to the game's executive producer, Ron Rosenberg,  he thinks the player wants to protect Lara, not be Lara. Being a firm believer in the power of moe, I actually don't much disagree with him on this point, and while moe in general is looked down upon in the context of a Western pro-feminist discussion, that doesn't mean that the natural reaction isn't there in a large number of consumers.

Of course, just to be safe, the studio head Darrel Gallagher decided to undercut the whole argument, basically saying that any attempted rape in a mainstream video game doesn't really exist... even though it, you know, clearly does in the promo video they'd already shown us (if just implicitly). A number of critics and commentators basically snorted in disgust, and said that rape and violent sexuality has no place in video games. Personally, I disagree with this assessment; I won't deny that it's overwhelmingly an uncomfortable subject in any medium, and unlike novels and film it doesn't have a century or more to back up that it's a "responsible" or "valid" enough medium to tackle complex, hairy subjects with tact, but suggesting that there's no room for 'X' in any medium will stagnate any growth that medium might have to begin with, and quickly any possibility that a video game could have something worth-while to say about these subjects is dashed in a self-fulfilling prophecy.

That's not to say that rape won't be handled poorly in video games, just like it is in every other story telling medium on the planet. Just to say that it can't handle it well is unfair to a medium that, intrinsically, has a different set of tools to immerse and communicate with the player than other forms of entertainment do. Oh, and speaking of which!



And, yes, we do have countless rape simulators available from Japan, but the market for those has mostly dropped out in favor of games in which you build your ideal girlfriend, and then stick things inside of her when you're done. Due to a number of factors - government classification pressures, changing tastes, and an increase in the level of interactivity these sorts of games offered - they simply don't top the charts anymore. They still exist, sure, but saying that films like The Brown Bunny, 9 Songs and Baise Moi exist doesn't instantly mean that unsimulated hardcore has become a commonplace in "mainstream" dramatic cinema. That said, the general shift of virtual pornography in Japan is a huge matter unto itself that'd take up a lot more time than I've got to dedicate to it here, so, maybe later...

I won't defend the massive glut of virtual rape simulators in the context of Modern Feminism in Popular Culture, I'll only point out that Japan is different. Here, geeks get their collective panties in a wad over Firefly and The Walking Dead, pseudo-intellectual fantasy adventure that strikes a fun balance between wacky action and character development, allowing the American to consume something inherently silly without feeling they're engaging in something outright stupid. In Japan, it's often enough something like Strike Witches, a show about teenage girls who use a combination of science and magic to fight aliens in WWII in their underwear. Because this is just how Japan rolls. It's like trying to convince Germany that David Hasselhoff isn't cool, or that India really needs to can it with the cinematic musical numbers: It's just not going to happen. It's an innate cultural thing that we'll never understand because we're not really a part of it. All we can do is accept it, and try to deal with it on its own terms, whatever that might entail.



I'm not saying Japan isn't sexist - far from it! It's probably the most sexist first world nation out there, and on levels far more important than cartoon driven geek subculture. I'm just saying that bring upset at Japan's take on gender roles and presentation probably isn't going to matter if those discussions aren't happening in Japanese. That puts incidents like Sheva Alomar's somewhat infamous (for racial as well as sexual overtones) Tribal Bikini, and the utter mockery of Samus Aran's legacy of heroism in Metroid: Another M outside the reach of our general influence. Not to say you can't have a discussion about these things, but that Japan will start to give a shit when Japan itself gives a shit, not when Americans are offended that they're a decade or two behind America's concept of gender equality.

I mention this because, to this day, a large number of video games are made both by, and for the Japanese market, and they continue to produce gonzo bizarro stuff focused on cute girls like Disgaea, Neptunia, Atelier, and a variety of other absurd and, sometimes, perhaps inherently sexist/sexualized games. And as the Western market for these games tend to only make up a small number of tales to begin with, they couldn't give a fuck if we, as a culture, don't like it. They move a few thousand units on a game that didn't have a huge production budget to begin with, they crunch the numbers, and if all went well we still get Atelier Ayesha the next year. World keeps on spinning.

This all got me thinking... do we even have recognizable, admirable, iconic heroines in the video game sector? I'm honestly not certain. The majority of video game protagonists are written, intentionally, to be blank slates that the player can project themselves onto. Perhaps the best example of this is Commander Shephard of the Mass Effect trilogy, an avatar so malleable that the player can literally pick a different gender without effecting anything central to the game's core plot. Another great example are the covers of the Call of Duty: Black Ops games, which present little more than a generically rugged masculine shadow with no explicitly obvious features, but plenty of artillery. He is whatever the player wants him to be, nothing more, and nothing less.

So what of our game heroines - honestly, who are they? The closest thing we have to an iconic, modern day heroine the player controls that immediately jumps to mind is the aforementioned Lara Croft, but trying to done down the glitz and sexiness for a darker, more realistic take has only backfired. Samus Aran is similarly a beloved and respected heroine held over from the dawn of the 8-bit era, but her status as a strong, independent character not ruled by the whims of a man she barely knows was wiped away in Another M. Princess Peach is another potential contender, but she's always played second fiddle to the squat plumber who rescues her, and after this many years I'm not convinced that she's not meeting Bowser on some clandestine annual BDSM meet that poor Mario has never been informed of. What else do we really have that wasn't a one-hit wonder? I'm looking for bankable game heroines here, the kind that weren't dropped after one title - so goodbye Mirror's Edge, Heavenly Sword and Bayonetta, relevant or not. Well, there is Bloodrayne who holds the honor of being the first non-real woman to appear nude in the pages of Playboy magazine... so yeah, there's that.



Getting away from digitally rendered mamaries and back to Anita Sarkeesian... honestly, I'm still a little fussed as to why she's gotten so goddamn much attention to begin with. I've watched the majority of her work posted to YouTube, and find that while some of it is legitimately interesting (particularly the shift in advertising Lego products that occured in the 1980s). But of far more importance to me are the rather harsh and seemingly reasonable CRITICISM OF HER WORK - not the unfiltered 4chan trolling, mind you, but an honest to God catalog of what she tends to do, and why it harms her credibility as a critic. Granted, I'm hardly an academic myself - let's just say my combined experiences with higher learning were a joke without a particularly satisfying punch line - but I'd like to think I can spot bullshit when I see it. And Sarkeesian having posted exactly one video about a video game character, only to pull it without a word some time later - presumably when she realized that Bayonetta was, as a concept, a parody of the adolescent sexualization those unfamiliar with the actual game all thought she was merely yet another part of - speaks to a lack of confidence in her own views. Which is odd, since that's literally all the Women Vs Tropes videos are.

The most troubling issue is the fact that she doesn't actually discuss anything; her supposed "conversations with pop culture" are monologues almost entirely focused on her, rarely cutting away to the material itself in question or allowing any other commentators to expand or even question the viewpoints she presents as undeniable fact. As the above criticism explains better than I plan to here, she appears to be - intentionally or not - a master of manipulating feedback, allowing the sloping-browed hate speech to flow when it garners outrage, but she tends to not show any posts that have a more well thought out argument over whatever her subject du jour might be. Feminism isn't science, it's a philosophy - or rather, a number of differing philosophies with the unified goal of wanting to see women treated equally to men. As a somewhat easy example, there are "Sex-Positive" feminists who believe that pornography, BDSM and gender identity can be positive and self-affirming actives for women to engage in. Meanwhile, Sarkeesian posts a video complaining that The Pirate Bay has porn advertisements. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and assume she's not one of those...

With some of the passing mentions I've made above, I don't doubt that there are some very nuanced, important questions that we should be asking about the presentation of women in pop culture... I'm just not convinced that Sarkeesian is the one to make that conversation happen, at least not in a way that isn't tailored specifically to what she decides it should be. I'd love to be wrong come Friday, but my guess is we're going to get a lot of angry soap boxing and half-truths to make a point, and the fact that she's pulling all the way back to the second Zelda game on the NES suggests that this research is going to cover a time when games were much simpler than they are now. That's not to say that The Legend of Zelda doesn't continue an eternal cycle of a young hero saving a princess in danger, but for crying out loud, those games didn't even have actual characters until the SNES iteration. There's a whole lot that can be said about Zelda's role in Ocarina of Time... and I'll be honest, how she reacts to that will tell me a lot about how I'll probably feel about her summary of this exploration as a whole. But I have no idea what she'll cover, or when - I wasn't a backer, just another schlub who was positively gobsmacked by how 4chan trolls turned a YouTube academic into a bona-fide threat to the normalcy of video gamer subculture being a rowdy boys club with no sissy girly cootie shit to get in the way.



In a way, though, it doesn't matter what any of us think; by having been so thoroughly and publicly brutalized by the anonymous masses of gaming culture itself, seemingly concerned that a feminist commentator was going to look at their hobby of choice*, she's already become something of a martyred saint. Will her upcoming video series have some valid points? Probably... but that doesn't even matter anymore. The moment she was treated like an internet punching bag and earned the Paypal based sympathy of strangers was the moment she went from being an obscure pop-culture commentator - one of thousands, easily - to having every eye in the world of video games on her. We're all her captive audience now, and whether she's right or wrong, she's still going to be seen as a trail blazer for presenting research on a digital medium in the digital age, focusing on aspects that have largely been ignored to this point (in no small part because gaming is still both a young and constantly evolving medium - more so than any other form of storytelling I can think of, at any rate).

It strikes me as vaguely reminiscent of how C. J. Clover's academic study the American horror film, Men Women & Chainsaws, was one of the first books to seriously tackle the notion of gender roles in modern horror films with a feminist slant - and yes, before anyone asks, I read every damn page of it. I certainly don't AGREE with Clover on all of her points, and find some of her readings into my all time favorite films as a bit shallow - even at times downright crazy... but she gets props for having taken the time, done the research, and publicly tried to take it all seriously and look at what has always been a boys' club with a different view point. When we settle on how we see the world, we stop trying to understand and merely accept that some things are, not that things might be what we see in them. Culture can be studied and popular culture is absolutely worthy of anthropological value, but we need to approach these subjects from more than the angle of the fanboy if we hope to get anything substantial out of it. Again, I think large passages of MW&C are a big plate of misguided bull, but I won't fault Clover for having done the research and come to a totally different point of view on it all than I did. Hell, she's the one who literally wrote the book on Leatherface's sexuality, and I respect the hell out of that - it's just my personal enthusiasm to disagree with her about it from time to time.

In summary, Anita Sarkeesian has become so much larger than herself by way of her despicable story having eclipsed any of the work she might actually produce, and it's earned her a 15 Minutes she never would have gotten without /v/ waving their collective taints at her. At the end of the day, I'm damnably curious to see what she'll do with it.

Alright, that's enough outta me on all of this crap. In short, I'm all for more interesting and nuanced female characters in video games... though to be honest I'd argue that the majority of male characters have most of the same problems, just in different, less female-offending ways. Avatars of macho-murder like Marcus Phoenix and Kratos aren't exactly subtle portrayals of complex masculine entities either, and the fact that both male and female characters tend to be targeted towards adolescent male fantasy doesn't bother me enough to be upset about it. But maybe if any of you give two fucks what I think on the matter I'll talk more about it in the future.

*Truth be told, "fear" is rarely the motivation behind 4chan trollings. Sure does make for a snappier headline than 'Anonymous Shits on Obscure Academic 4 Teh Lulz' though, doesn't it?

Just a quick reminder to anyone who might have missed out the first time; March 8th, 4PM Eastern, Twilight Time/Screen Archives Entertainment will be doing two things:

1) Re-listing CHRISTINE as a standard $29.99 title and limited to one per customer, based on order cancellations from the initial sell-out. though I can't imagine there will be more than a handful of copies available. Odds are this window will be less 7 hours, more 7 minutes.

2) Offering 100 copies of Christine, signed by star Kieth Gordon. You have to order $100 or more worth of any Twilight Time titles and then put in a note like "I'd like a signed copy of CHRISTINE. Y' bastards." And if you're one of the first 100, you get it. Not sure if you can back out if you don't get it, though...

Aaaaaand I'm done talking about this movie until I have a chance to open my copy and actually, like... look at it.

WvTiVG: Damsel in Distress (Part 1)
The first episode of Women vs Tropes in Video Games is... well, it's certainly better than her previous projects. It talks about the history of the trope in question, details the vast number of titles that adhere to it, and even bothers to fact check the source material, which is substantially more than can be said for HER FIRST ATTEMPT* at critiquing sexism in a video game.

At best, I'd say it's inoffensive, impersonal, and has all the charm and passion of a high-school oral report. All this controversy, public outcry and calls of shenanigans, you'd either expect something expansive and mind blowing or maybe just a total train wreck. In the end, all you get a single person speaking in carefully measured tones, explaining (at goddamn l-e-n-g-t-h) about the origins of the Damsels in Distress trope, and even what raison d'etre means, assuming her audience is too stupid to know a rather common phrase from one of the few languages English regularly pinches quips from.

In other words, it's basically the same all all of her other videos, just longer and more accurate. And if you'd like to see what's, effectively, an alternate take on this whole subject in relation to the Super Mario Bros. universe in particular, here's an older, more concise, self-aware, and clearly fandom-driven exploration from everyone's favorite MovieBob**:



The information presented in Women vs Tropes in Video Games 1.1 is - with a few things I'll contest in a moment - accurate enough, and a wide variety of examples are cited to show how firmly entrenched the trend is, but beyond pointing out that Damsels in Distress exist in video games (and have been for a long time), she doesn't have much else to say about it, other than suggesting that maybe these more popular DiD's should get adventures of their own - and apparently hand-held side games aren't good enough for those purposes. She also suggests that popular culture can reinforce stereotypes and attitudes on a subtle but damaging level, which is a fairly common argument to be sure, but also skirts dangerously close to the nonsensical arguments that video games lead to mass shootings or that pornography leads to sexual abuse. Granted, that's perhaps the whole underlying point of this series, so while I strongly disagree with her on the broad strokes, I'm still holding out hope that she'll have more interesting research suggesting she's on to something (aside from the anecdotal evidence of 4chan's casual backlash, of course).

Granted, there's every possibility that this is because this is Part 1 of the subject, laying ground work, while Part 2 will have some more in-depth content... but still, after almost a year of controversy and a small fortune to have fallen into the project's lap, I expect... well, something bigger. Interviews with game critics? An attempt to get some of the designers responsible for these titles a chance to say what they did, and why they did it? I'm all for random assholes on the internet having their say - heck, it'd be hypocritical for me not to -  but I don't need $6,000 to look into a camera and do it, and if I were given $150,000 on top of that I'd try to have *SOMETHING* more to show for it. Ah, well... c'est a vie. Which is French for "who gives a fuck", and I never had to tell you that because I know you're all adults and capable of using the google.

To her credit, Sarkeesian has a handful of interesting ideas to cover here, such as how Donkey Kong started out as a licensed Popeye the Sailor game, and how Starfox Adventure was originally a completely unrelated original property, "Dinosaur Planet", and the ever popular sammich' munching furry icon Krystal was originally one of two protagonist in the game rather than a mere macguffin to be freed at the end. She doesn't, however, point out (at least not explicitly) that Krystal's brother Sabre was planned to have at least equal play time, leaving Krystal as a co-protagonist rather than the protagonist, and that a large part of the game would have been completed with a masculine avatar anyway. A minor distinction, perhaps, but one worth making if your whole argument is that said character's role was being "minimized" to begin with.

She also asks why Princess Peach is not a playable character in the "NEW!" Super Mario Bros. franchise entries, despite the Wii versions supporting up to 4 simultaneous players - two of which are Toads. Personally, I think that's a damn good question; what's the point of having two interchangeable toads? Mario and Luigi are basically a pallet swap, always were, but there's no reason you need to have the entire supporting cast be as bland as possible. Peach doesn't have to have different abilities; that was a hold over from Doki Doki Panic!/Super Mario Bros. 2 International, and with the whole point of this being one giant nostalgia trip fueled expansion pack to the Super Mario Bros. name, why not toss in one more throwback and let Peach do her thing? I don't think anyone actually playing these games requires Bowser to kidnap her as a plot device, mostly because playing platform-adventure games is the reward; the story is basically a non-issue.

She gets one otherwise interesting detail flat out wrong, claiming that Zelda has never once been the star of her own adventure. If we're only looking at games develop and released by Nintendo, this is true, but this also suggests that she doesn't even know these "games" exist:


Look, it's obvious that we all wish the Zelda CD-i Trilogy didn't happen, and even Nintendo itself has disavowed all knowledge in their fancy pants hardcover Legend of Zelda: Hyrule Historia compendium, but ignoring those infamous, meme-spewing atrocities against interactive video entertainment existed - especially when you've gone out of your way to acknowledge that you're talking about both core games and spinoffs in your research - kind of makes you look like you're either clueless, or manipulating the facts to suit your own argument. I'll let Anita's many vocal defenders decide which.

While we're on the subject of everybody's favorite non-shrooming Nintendo Princess, I also took some issue with the notion that... okay, so I'm going to spoil the living shit out of Ocarina of Time here, but it's been over 15 years since that particular chapter of the franchise came out - and over a year if we include the 3DS re-release, even - so eat a dick if you're going to get upset over this. She briefly mentions that when Sheik reveals himself to be Princess Zelda in disguise, reverting back to a typical feminine form, she's captured by Ganondorf literally three minutes later.

This sounds like a fair argument if you want to apply the DiD trope to Ocarina of Time and all, but this is ignoring two very important factors: One, that Sheik is physically a separate entity from Zelda, a more muscular, less curvy and darker-skinned person that is, by all appearances, a member of the Sheikah race while Zelda herself is a Hylian. In other words, the only reason Ganondorf didn't capture Zelda while she was hiding as Sheik was because he had no reason to assume that Zelda was a larger male of a completely different race, not to mention the fact that she'd been hiding in plain sight as a double agent for Ganondorf for the better part of seven years. It'd be like the villain trying to capture Marilyn Monroe when, without his knowledge, she'd been magically turned into Yul Brynner. You can use this convenient plot twist to make a case against progressive feminism, there's also a lot of narrative weight behind it that Sarkeesian ignores, painting the game as perhaps less clever than it deserves. Suspension of disbelief, and all that jazz.


Another minor issue I take is the suggestion that they're pumping retro games out on modern consoles as a "fast cash grab", leaving the DiD Trope intact without any thought to how future generations will interpret it. Sarkeesian herself acknowledges that these sales are being driven by nostalgia, and nostalgic fans are already familiar with the fact that, for example, Princess Peach is typically a captive to be rescued. Now, while I can understand the idea behind "improved" HD remakes (and some are done exceptionally well) I don't want the actual game to be affected. I'd rather be offered a cheap download of a classic 8-bit game totally unmolested than have it be modified for modern sensibilities, and I've felt this way since... hell, the Ninja Gaiden Trilogy release on the SNES? Marketing material that might have aged poorly to adults edited to suit the current cultural landscape of today's children is... well, frankly, it's kind of fucking stupid. She's either suggesting that these games should be lost to the ages and made unavailable in any meaningful capacity, or that they should be censored to meet a more modern point of view - one which, as far as I'm aware, isn't that dramatically different from when those games were introduced in the first place.

She didn't win any bonus points for getting her knickers in a twist over the iconic Double Dragon opening gut-punch, and she saved her one real moment of snarky deadpan silence for a clip from Dragon's Lair (ie: one of the most imaginative, beautifully realized, and intentionally braindead video games ever made). But this is kind of her shtick, so whatever.

At the end of the day there's one thing that really sticks in my craw, and that's the disabled comments (and video ratings, which I'm less concerned with). Disabled, fucking, comments. On the one hand I get not wanting to sift through the inevitable shit-storm of trolls who didn't nip this in the bud the first time, but on the other hand it, intentionally or not, confirms what I've always feared about Anita Sarkeesian: Her interest in "discussing" these matters begins and ends with her telling you what's what. There is no conversation, no feedback, no raison d'etre apart from her stepping up on a YouTube soapbox and assuming everyone in ear shot agrees with every word of it. How is that useful to improving and expanding any culture? She's an academic for crying out loud; she understands things like "debate" and "discussion". Without providing an avenue for anyone to try and ask her for clarification, or engage in anything resembling civil disagreement, she's basically locked herself in the role of being a teacher reading from a manuscript that's not changing any time soon.

As I've said, I have no problem with the study of gender roles in popular culture, and I think categorizing, exploring, and perhaps even updating it could be a good idea. Unfortunately, Sarkeesian doesn't want any of us to talk to her about what we think; she's happy to throw her ideas out into the wild and then ignore what anyone might have to say as a rebuke.

I was hardly expecting the first episode to be an hour long interview with Shigeru Miyamoto ending in a brutal Feminazis United decapitation. I just expected something, given all the controversy that came before it. If you have anything to say about it, I can't speak for Anita Sarkeesian, but my comments are always open. I'm curious what you guys think, considering how big a deal this thing somehow became.

UPDATE: Apparently the Feminist Frequency site has an option for comments. And yet, there are none after six days. Curious, that...

* For the record, Bayonetta is not a single mother, and the game sold less than 1.5 million copies in 4 months, not 3 million. Her opinion that the game is a worthless waste of time and money is her own, but the above are facts, and would have been apparent had the actually bothered to spend 5 minutes looking up either of these things. With that in mind, I'm damned willing to bet she never actually played it, which seems... disingenous, at best.

** I really like MovieBob. He's got a certain admirable, unapolagetic quality about his love and over-thinking for nonsense, but also approaches material like movies, comic books and video games with a level of humble, realistic detachment, acknowledging that they are pretty gooddamn silly, whilst pointing out that this doesn't mean we can't still love themfor what they are, rather than what they aren't.

So, first the good news: both France and Germany are releasing Sam Raimi's horror-fantasy mash-up cult classic ARMY OF DARKNESS on Blu-ray in exhaustive Special Editions, which are all set to include a grand total of three cuts of the film: The familiar 81 minute R-rated "US Theatrical" version, the 89 minute "International Theatrical" version few English speakers have ever seen, and the 97 minute "Director's Cut". Ginchy, right? We can finally marvel at Bruce Cambpell at his Campbelliest in 1080p, free of the studio mandated cuts that saddled the American cut of the film!

What could possibly go-- actually, I'm not even gonna finish that sentence. At least half of you know exactly where this is going, but, let's talk about it anyway...

The good news is that, at the very least the 81 minute "US Cut" will be pulled in its entirety from the same HD master Universal has released on Blu-ray in various territories, while the 89 minute "International Cut" will be provided by an HD master compiled by MGM for various European and Asian territories. So what of the 10 minutes worth of footage featured only in the Director's Cut? If early reviews can be trusted, I've got three words for you, friends:



"But what about the MGM Hong Kong DVD?!" I hear some of you ask. "That looked great! It had to be from an HD master!" And supposedly it was... partially. According to a hastily translated account ripped from - if I'm not mistaken - the FOLLOWING REVIEW, this is what they had to say on the matter (with some basic grammar fixes by yours truly):

"MGM had an HD-Master for the Euro Version. They used it for the release in Germany and for the Hong-Kong DC, both on DVD. For the additional scenes in the HK DVD, MGM had only an SD-Master, which they edited into the Euro Version. So the Director's Cut on DVD in Hong Kong is a mix of the Euro Version HD Master, and additional scenes in SD."

That's coming from somebody who's actually seen the disc, but... honestly, I have trouble buying it. The fact is, the "DC Exclusive" footage looks great for a standard definition release, and it all just looks so damn good, I have trouble believing that MGM haphazardly spliced an interlaced SD master into a pristine HDCAM source to accomplish it. More importantly, the DC includes fresh scans - HD or not - from a 35mm source from start to finish. Clearly MGM has access to a complete and usable film source - why not request that single reel of footage be re-transferred? Could this be a joint venture between Filmedia and Koch and both of them decided, "Psh, fuck that DC, man - it's just not worth the money"? Hell, Koch transferred less than a minute for their release of 4 Flies on Gray Velvet, something just doesn't add up here.

Maybe I'm completely wrong, but the difference in quality between the International Cut and the Director's Cut is simply a non-issue; I have trouble even spotting when it switches from familiar footage to extended gags, and considering I broke a dozen blood vessels in each eye watching the color timing snap unexpectedly on that totally uncut German release of Ebola Syndrome where everything suddenly turns a jaundiced yellow hue whenever extended blood is about to flow, I'd like to think I'd notice something. Of course, it's not impossible that MGM created an SD master of the DC from start to finish, and this new HD master was Frankensteined between that and a pre-existing "International" HD master... there's just too many variables here to put my finger on, at least before the damned thing is officially available to the public.

The Filmedia French release (Evil Dead 3 : L'armée des Ténèbres) packs all 3 cuts on a single disc, presumably via seamless branching, with a retail of 25 Euros. Germany has an upcoming release via Koch Media (Die Armee der Finsternis), which will be available in both a Director's Cut only single disc for 15 Euros, or a top-popping 6 disc 2 Blu-ray/4 DVD combo in a Media Book for 45 Euros. That hefty price increase comes with the now rarely seen US TV Cut (basically a sanitized presentation of the International Version) and ports Director's Cut commentary, while both include various behind-the-scenes footage, interviews, and a host of deleted scenes that every fan of the film has probably seen at one point or another. My guess is that Koch and Filmedia will be using the same HD master, but as nobody's yet seen the German release, it'd be premature to state that as fact.

I'm on the fence over which of these releases to grab, but it won't be too much longer before I get one of them shipped to my door. We'll take a more in-depth look soon enough. In the meantime, I'll try to share some thoughts on a very special purchase I made earlier in the week... we'll see how horribly distracted I get, though.

THE PROTOMEN: THE WILL OF ONE(The Protomen: Act I)  

Jeff Lieberman's largely unavailable 1988 horror-satire about the dangers of (what now seemed inevitable) pop-cultural brainwashing, REMOTE CONTROL, is now available on DVD and Blu-ray HERE direct from the film maker. They're both restored from a new 2K master, each copy is hand-signed and numbered by writer/director Lieberman, they've pressed a thousang copies per format, and there's a limit of 2 copies per customer - in other words, it's basically Twilight Time plus Albert Pyun, but without the scalping and SD masters, respectively. Interesting.

There's a lot of crap coming out right now that I want to get my hands on first, but I hope this'll be around for another few weeks so I can put in an order... never even heard of this damn flick, to be honest.



In other, perhaps even more bizarre news, the Los Angeles based Dark Delicacies bookstore sold a handful of copies of William Malone's 1985 creature feature THE TITAN FIND, better known as CREATURE in much of the world. It's not one bit unfair to call this an Alien knock-off, but at least by all counts it's one of the better knock-offs of the period, and stars Wendy Schall and Klaus Kinski. Malone tracked down the uncut master positive and created a new 2K master from it, and was in the midsts of releasing it himself on DVD... but after a handful of copies were sold at Dark Delicacies, a signing was canceled and the store - perhaps inadvertently - that Malone had signed a deal with a distributor who was interested in a wide DVD and Blu-ray release. All eyes are currently on Synapse Films waiting for the other boot to drop, though as of this moment no official word on who exactly now owns distribution rights has been made... odds are almost overwhelmingly in Synapse's favor here, though.

I think I saw the final reel or so of this on the Sci-Fi channel years ago around two in the morning, right before they'd give up and play Infomercials 'till dawn. I'd love to revisit this, just to see if it's half as good as I remembered it (or if it's even the same damn thing).


For the record, I've been to Dark Delicacies a few times. Cool little place that does autograph signings every week, and I was lucky enough to get Bill Mosley to put his signature on something for me not too long ago because of it. I've bought a handful of posters from them too, and the prices were better than I typically see on eBay. Good people there. Hopefully they'll hold another event in the near future and have Malone sign some damn Blu-rays instead.

Whilst I totally understand why Quentin Tarantino is an inherently divisive figure - let's face it, Aspergers Syndrome and cocaine are a pretty polarizing combination - the fact that he's willing to run The New Beverly Theater as a non-profit museum of vintage and modern titles alike, exclusively on 35mm*, is one of those things that the man deserves a lot of credit for.

The sold out Tuesday night show, their monthly Grindhouse Double Feature no less, happens to be Lamberto Bava's DEMONS and Sam Raimi's THE EVIL DEAD. The latter has been such a popular mainstay for so long it'd be disingenuous to suggest that it doesn't get shown as a "midnight movie" on a pretty regular basis, but I've never seen it on 35mm, so it's still new to me.

DEMONS, on the other hand, is a rare treat to say the least! I'll be paying close attention to the "look" tonight, as I did with both Suspiria and The Burning when I saw them on 35mm in the last year or two. I've actually never seen a 16mm blow-up on the big screen before either, so The Evil Dead will be an interesting experience... boy I hope that's a vintage print, not one of those "All New!" 35mm Answer Prints that totally defeat the purpose of watching a beat-up print from the time of release.

For the record: Techniscope doesn't look as bad as you probably think it does. At least not if 1990: The Bronx Warriors was any indication. Holy hell, seeing that on 35mm was a treat.

* They will play video sources, but only on very, very special occasions. The non-convention premier of the NIGHTBREED workprint was a great example... and holy crap did it look poor on a 30 foot screen.

The 35mm Ascot Films print of DEMONS on display at the New Beverly (provided by the Alamo Draft House) was a thoroughly pleasant surprise; framed at the 1.66 OAR, uncut, and featuring a surprisingly decent sounding mono track, the film included English opening and closing titles, plus Italian credits just before the epilogue starts playing. The print's garish, nightmare inspired pallet looked as vivid as anyone could have asked for with nary a trace of fading, and while minor damage was common, major analog tears were non-existent. It was (according to management) provided by the Alamo Draft House, and overall was in fine shape.

But how did the film "look", in an aesthetic sense? For one thing, the absolutely electric blue hues and deep blood red of the theater interiors were gloriously vibrant, bordering on the surreal and recalling equally glorious moments of Dario Argento's post-giallo centric career before he went all... well, y'know. And while the very nature of a 35mm release print leads to expanded contrast I was a little surprised to see just how bright and under-exposed the shadow details of the dimly lit theater really were, with the scenes "behind the screen" in particular having a visible red tinge over everything, even when you'd expect it to fade all the way to black. By and large, the 1986 US print looked like a more vivid and filthy presentation of Arrow Video's HD master; the one day-for-night shot panning down the Metropol exterior was not chemically tinted on the US prints (or at least not obviously so), and while I maintain that the Arrow Video transfer has boosted gamma and weak black levels from a purely calibration minded standpoint...  well, at least I can't say that it's inconsistent with an actual 35mm print.

I will say, however, that the Ascot Films release didn't have that slightly green push of the Arrow Video release on the relatively neutral scenes; the shadows in the opening shot of the subway pulling into the tunnel were pitch black, not midnight blue with a slightly brown twist. Keep in mind the US version has a completely different title sequence, so comparisons might not be totally fair, but it stuck out none the less. Also, keep in mind that the very concept of a 35mm print includes shining light through an opaque medium, which kind of prevents "black" from existing in any real sense; even the best of prints have elevated black levels compared to a properly mastered Blu-ray, which can go just as dark as you like it in the RGB 16-235/IRE 0-100 scales. Apples and Oranges.



THE EVIL DEAD, however, was a mess of a different color entirely. Whilst I've had little but high praise for the 2011 Blu-ray, which in turn was created from a 2K restoration of the original 16mm camera negative, the 35mm print I saw last night was actually based on that very same director approved digital master. Don't get me wrong, I totally understand the conceptual appeal of seeing a restored 35mm presentation of any film that's justifiably called a classic - and Sam Raimi's 30 year old drive-in splatter shtick is certainly that, even if he thinks we're all idiots for saying it - it's not what I expected when I was going to a "Grindhouse Double Feature" (though, ironically enough, the restored print was provided by the folks at Grindhouse Releasing).

Have you ever seen DVNR on a 16mm movie shot in the late 70s underneath actual 35mm film grain? Now I have. There's only a handful of shots that looked really, truly bizarre, but they were there, just as they were on the Blu-ray. Also surprising was the general lack of grain on... shit, pretty much everything. The Evil Dead on Blu-ray was so grainy and finely textured you'd be forgiven for thinking Sam Raimi developed a way to shoot on sand paper instead of celluloid, but the 35mm presentation looked "soft", and never especially heavy on the grain, not even on the optically printed shots (such as the split-screen stop motion effects during the final reel). What the hell's going on here? Did printing the 2K master to 35mm include a blurring pass to produce a less garishly grainy print? Or is the Blu-ray just swimming in digitally generated video noise? I honestly don't have a firm theory. It's even possible that the 35mm print was intentionally defocused to downplay the grain, but not having ever seen a proper 16mm blow-up print - and not really knowing the protocol for playing them to begin with - I don't really know.

What we know for sure is that the 2011 2K restoration for The Evil Dead was approved of by Rob Tapert and Sam Raimi, and that the vast majority of it was pulled from the original 16mm camera negative. Occasional dupe prints were used to fill in gaps, and while opticals were subtly improved - removing matte lines on the moon, color correcting lighting oddities, digitally removing producer Rob Tapert from the background of one shot, and reversing one of the film's most infamous gore shots so as to not break obvious visual continuity - the 2K remaster is, in the broadest of strokes at least, very much respectful to the film's low-budget roots. The audio mix was a little jacked in my eyes, clipping in spots and having a level of dead silence you'll never hear on a theatrical print's optical mono track, but the restored audio comes part and parcel with the restored visuals, and I don't know if the exaggerations I was hearing were the result of the New Beverly's sound system or the print itself. Much like the visuals, the "newness" of it all didn't appeal to me, though from a technical standpoint

Seeing Grindhouse's 35mm print actually revealed even more image compared to the 1.33:1 BD transfer, regularly showing a bit of gunk stuck at the top of the camera gate or the rounded corners of the aperture plate, though the framing is similar enough that unless you're really, really into wiping your ass with the concept of "Image Safe" framing, you'd never really notice to begin with.

DEMONS was a hell of an experience, and a fascinating point of reference for any home release. EVIL DEAD was... fun to see in a theater full of people who love it. And if I had any reason to celebrate, the surprise presence of  35mm trailers for THE GRUESOME TWOSOME, TWITCH OF THE DEATH NERVE (Bay of Blood) and CORRUPTION probably made up for it.

...have I mentioned that I'm stoked that the Fede Alvarez remake of Sam Raimi's first featyre is coming out next week? I'm sure I have. But seriously. Stoked.

Can't...Stop...Watching...MGS5...Trailer
Yes. There's a plane eating whale made of flying fire and a Pokemon Pegacorn in the first trailer. No, I don't know if Kokima's just fucking with us at this point. And yes, Big Boss clearly has a horn sticking out of his head in the last shot. Because why wouldn't he?

Why? because Hideo KOJIMA is an unstoppable force, and he's made so much money in this industry that he can literally do whatever the fuck he thinks is cool, even if it's batshit crazy and makes no sense to anyone, ever. Let's face it, at this point the only guy making games in Japan who even might be crazier than him is Suda 51 - I stress "might" though, since they're crazy in totally opposite directions. It'd be like comparing David Lynch to Alejandro Jodorowsky; you probably could, but what on earth would you get out of it?

Street Fighter II is one of those rare video game franchises that needs no introduction; it's been so synonymous with its genre of arcade fighters that it was basically the defacto template every other developer used to make their own fighting games, unless they were specifically trying to knock off Mortal Kombat instead. It generated nearly $200 million in arcade cabinet sales in Japan alone, and introduced the phrase "Shoryuken!" to countries that still weren't sure how to say 'sushi'. It remains as critically successful now as it did in its heyday, and introduced the concept of directional special attacks, P2 Colors, and internalized combo systems to the masses. It was also one of the very first games to prove you could literally re-sell the same exact game just by throwing in a couple new boss characters, so... thanks for opening that Pandora's Box, Capcom. It spun out into what might well be countless revisions, ports, cross overs and sequels running up to this very day. Seriously, if you can ACTUALLY READ this bullshit without stopping half way through to put a shotgun against your own gag reflex in a combination of dementia and a sadness for the lack of progress the human race has made in 20 years, get yourself a cookie. You've earned it.


Perhaps just to fuck with future pop-culture historians, 1994 actually saw the release of two separate theatrical experiences meant to cash in on the game's overwhelming popularity: the ill-fated Van Damme atrocity simply titled STREET FIGHTER, and the Japanese produced STREET FIGHTER II: THE ANIMATED MOVIE/ストリートファイター II MOVIE. Both were technically adaptations of the Capcom video game franchise, and both dealt with the same overall storyline and characters. You'd never know this by actually watching the films, though; the Hollywood adaptation plays everything like a stone-faced serious remake of any second-tier 80s cartoon franchise, giving us numerous characters with the same names but often totally different roles and appearances, with a few of them having been literally reverse-engineered by the script to "transform" them into their familiar game appearances through little more than happenstance, with absolutely none of the high-flying fantasy elements or convoluted backstories that made the game so damn fun to begin with. Raul Julia gives it his all as a super-powered parody of a cartoon villain with all the subtlety of Slidely Whiplash reading for a guest spot as Dr. Claw, but it wasn't nearly enough; the end result was still the kind of extended "fuck you" that video game movies were well known for since their very inception with Super Mario Bros., and at this point the two best examples we have remain Mortal Kombat and Silent Hill suggesting that we still haven't quite figured out how to deal with that.

That said, we did get at least one perfect Street Fighter live action experience... too bad it was a part of the Hong Kong produced City Hunter movie, and as such most people probably forget that the damn thing even exists! Wong Jing was actually courting the rights for a Hong Kong film, but having learned that Universal/Columbia has already picked up the rights, he decided to Wong Jing it up anyway and made the mind shattering ultimate raised middle finger in Hong Kong cinematic history, Future Cops... which is, for better or worse, a story for another day.


Anyway, back in Japan the traditionally animated 2D movie came out roughly as the Van Damme atrocity was stinking up American multiplexes, and while I wouldn't call it a ground-breaking step forward in the history of animation, at least it's fair to say that it doesn't particularly suck. Characters are consistently drawn in a high quality style reminiscent of the original arcade designs, the literal animation itself of showing two characters trading blows is unusually high quality stuff, due in no small part to them having been coreographed by actual MMA fighters Kazuyoshi ISHII and Andy Hug. While there isn't a constant barrage of Hadouken's flying around like some latter day Dragon Ball Z episode, there's just enough fanservice to the game's wild and supernatural special attacks that the final results are... well, honestly, they're about the best movie you were probably ever going to get out of Street Fighter II.

Capcom's 1-on-1 arcade brawler itself isn't exactly War and Peace to start with, and Gisaburou SUGII's direction coupled with the general finesse of Group TAC's production simply made a boundlessly fun, technically polished popcorn movie that was thoroughly unashamed of being a well crafted popcorn movie. According to the production credits, it was all co-written by Kenichi IMAI, but he only worked on this and Suugi's own Street Fighter II V series, which makes me think Sugii grabbed an old drinking buddy to bounce ideas off of as a last-minute measure against things getting too weird. It took its source material as seriously as it could. It's all rather goofy when you get right down to it, but so is Street Fighter to begin with. The problem with every live action adaptation the material has had (to say nothing of the American produced cartoon series!) is that it was a wholly different kind of silly. In other words, it's not the kind that actually worked with any of the silliness that made the games work in the first place.

The Animated Movie had a particularly convoluted release in the US back in 1995, where it was given both "PG-13" and "Unrated" releases, with the former being a heavily censored release and the latter... well, the violence and f-bombs were all left intact, but Chun Li in the shower was still trimmed to the point of redundancy. This English dubbed version was released on every major video format up until the mid 00's, pan-scanned just to rub salt into the wound. The English dub was a unique affair as it replaced the entire soundtrack with Korn, Alice in Chains, KMFDM and other mainstays of vintage MTV in a bid to catch a hipper, cooler audience than... background instrumental tracks, I, guess? Twenty years on, it's almost adorable how hard Manga Entertainment was going out of their way to convince the average British 12 year old how amazingly badass that Street Fighter Cartoon really was. And it is pretty awesome, if you take it for what it is and willfully ignore everything it isn't - like emotionally possessing even the weakest grasp of things like physics and common sense. If you can watch Ong Bak 2 or and walk away with a grin on your stupid face, this film is working on that same basic level - it's just removing itself that much further from reality.


For those wondering where the hell this Region B Blu-ray came from, Kazé is actually a French label that, in recent months, has made a gradual shift to including English audio and subtitle options on their releases for export to the UK (where your options are, basically, "Manga Entertainment" and "Import From Anywhere Else"). I guess it makes sense; projected sales in English speaking Europe have never been especially great for anime, and if Kaze can sell more units while simultaneously bleeding what they may logically see as competition dry, all's the better for them. When you put the disc in, it asks if you want to start the menus in French or English, the latter of which ignores the French audio and subtitles on the disc - and, incidentally, switches up which trailers play after the piracy warnings.

Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie has had a pretty grungy track record on home video. The earliest iteration was the letterboxed LD master minted in 1994, which the vast majority of subsequent "uncut" releases have been based off ever since, in one form or another. (The English dubbed masters were mostly PAL sourced and cropped to 4:3, so let's pretend those just didn't exist.) Australian anime specialist Madman released a "Remastered" version of the film on 16:9 anamorphic PAL DVD, but as OTHERS HAVE ALREADY POINTED OUT, they were still using the same letterboxed NTSC masters - they just did a substantially better job of cleaning them up first. In effect, the bar for this one is so low that the Blu-ray can't help but impress: Manga Video re-released the film on DVD in North America back in 2006 using a DVD-10 (ie: a "flipper DVD), presenting the "Unrated" dub from a PAL conversion source on one side - complete with the Chun Li shower scene partially restored (and in the wrong spot, no less. Classic Manga Entertainment!), and the original, unedited Japanese version with English subtitles on the other. The latter looked about as good as a non-anamorphic analog NTSC master from the mid 90s was going to get, and the former... well, it was still pretty shit, but that surprised no one. Underwhelming as that surely sounds, that's been the best release this poor flick has had up until now.

Kaze presents STREET FIGHTER II: THE [ANIMATED] MOVIE in 1080p High Definition in its complete, unedited form at just shy of 100 minutes, with Japanese credits running over the finale, framed at its original 1.85:1 theatrical aspect ratio. Having seen this on an uncut VCD* back in the day, and having been fascinated by the evolving ugly DVD releases that followed, I can say this much; Street Fighter II never looked half this good on home video, and I doubt it looked appreciably better on 35mm prints, at that. If you do own this on DVD, you should probably just toss it in the garbage now: While the new Blu-ray might not be absolutely perfect, it's easily eclipsed every previous home video transfer in every way possible, and fans who have put up with crumby looking releases up until now should be very satisfied with the results. Resolution and outline clarity are quite good indeed, print damage is minimal and regulated to minor black and white dust spots, and there's just enough telecine judder during optical effects to remind observant viewers that this was clearly produced before digital editing was in its prime. The image is pleasant in most ways, and anyone who remembers just how damn ugly this film has been on DVD up until now should be satisfied.

That said, the transfer is... kind of a mixed bag, wavering between the extremes of clean simplicity and analog limitations. Brightly lit scenes have the plasticine sheen of a transfer that's been hit with a fairly thick slathering of DVNR, while darker scenes are awash in a harsh noise I can only assume is the result of an old-school CRT scanner. Sometimes you'll have dark blue and browns swimming in noise and brighter greens and peach skin tones utterly devoid of digital noise in the same shot; once you start noticing it, good luck un-seeing it. Final Boss M. Bison's crisp, blood-red uniform has not a speckle of video noise on it, yet his hunter green cape and charcoal gray hat looks like it's made out of undulating sand paper; if anyone reading can come up with a sensible explanation for this disparity that doesn't involve digital noise removal, as always, I'm all ears.

That said, the print is perfectly stable and quite clean, outlines are almost always crisp and defined, and the color timing - while a bit darker than one might expect - remains both faithful to previous releases, and looks like a largely accurate representation of Capcom's iconic original character designs. It looks good, more often than not; much like the Aniplex releases of the Rurouni Kenshin OVA Blu-rays or the Japanese box set for titles like Card Captor Sakura and Space Adventure Cobra, the DVNR has been applied with a substantial amount of care and finesse. I wouldn't say it looks like 35mm, but it's hardly a disaster... it's just so damned inconsistent about it I can't help but wonder how nice it could have looked had we gotten a higher quality 35mm scan and little to no digital tinkering after the fact.

I have little doubt most people will be perfectly content with the video quality, so as long as nobody starts shouting about it being a 10 out of 10 or Five Stars whatever the hell they say when they think things couldn't get any better, I'll just casually shake my head at these Damn Kids and their DVNR Buttons and get back to posting some delicious screenshots:










The AVC encode hovering at 21 Mb/s average is... adequate, a few scenes that drop off to not-quite-black aside (see cap 9 for a painfully perfect example of what I'm talking about). There's actually some pretty garish macroblocking here and there, but the combination of harsh, dancing digital noise and unusually fast-moving animation means that the glaring artifacts you'll see in a random still frame is substantially less obvious on actual playback. If you wanted to be a dick about it you'd surely find a number of macroblocks kicking around Ryu's iconic Hadouken launch right before the opening credits, but that scene is so over the top with its flashing lights and flickering colors that I'd be hard pressed to assume that cranking the bitrate substantially higher would have netted a particularly worth-while improvement.

So, here we are again in the middle. It's neither the gritty perfection attained by Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and The Last Unicorn, nor the digitally scrubbed horrors of Galaxy Express and The Aristocats - it's just a totally middle of the road, adequate HD transfer for a film that, let's face it, probably wasn't ever going to get a lot money thrown at it anyway.

All three audio tracks (Japanese, English, French) are presented as 2.0 LPCM. The JP track is 24-bit while FR/EN are both 16-bit. Whatever. The Japanese mix has some subtle analog hiss over the 'silent' Capcom logo as well as high-end distortions whenever the action picks up, and to be honest I wouldn't be shocked if the sound were pulled from the optical stereo track present on whatever 35mm elements this transfer was pulled from. The English track is substantially louder, crisper and free of any obvious analog distortions when compared to the Japanese audio, but exactly how you'll respond to the "Export" soundtrack (to say nothing of the dated English dub itself!) will determine how much clarity you're willing to settle for pretty damned quick. To be fair, while neither sound incredible, both sound as good as you'd reasonably expect them to; Japanese audio for feature films in general doesn't sound particularly great until you get into the last decade or so, and even then low budgets often prevent all but your top-tier event pictures from having a big, fat, bombastic 5.1 mix.

And, yes, I know, Manga Ent. and Madman have both presented these mixes in 5.1 surround, but if you've ever actually heard any Manga produced 5.1 mixes, you'll know you're not missing out on anything a bog-standard audio reciever with Dolby ProLogic II couldn't easily deliver. Never having subjected myself to the English dub before I couldn't tell you if there are any pitch issues to speak of, but having been produced by Animaze in the USA I can't imagine it would be an issue to start with. Both English Subtitles and English Slates are included, and the film is broken up into 10 chapters.

I don't think any extras were produced for the Animated Movie itself, so while I certainly wouldn't have complained about the inclusion of some original trailers or even a retrospective on the games of some kind, I'm not going to pick any fights over the film being presented without them. This release is already available in (and thus shipping from) France, with the UK release of the same exact disc set to drop May 13th, with a current Amazon UK pre-order price of just under $30. Recommended for those with an affinity for over the top 90s anime; it's aged better than it has any right to, but it was never top shelf material. With Japan dominating the "Region A" market with an iron fist, I can't imagine any theoretical English friendly local release will sell for less (or come with more material) than the Kaze release.

I was shocked when the first Red-Band Teaser for the Fede Alvarez' written/directed reboot of Sam Raimi's splatter classic [THE] EVIL DEAD showed so much promise. I'm just as shocked to report that, having seen the actual film, it delivered everything I could have realistically asked for. Anyone on the fence is urged to go see it, now; it's the very best kind of cinematic junk food, and it delivers everything that fans of the original film could have asked for. (Note that I didn't say "The Original Trilogy." We'll talk about that in a minute.)

Without plowing head-first into spoiler territory - which I'll clearly mark in just a minute, so no worries if you're seeing it in the next day or two, just come back later - I can safely say that there's plenty here for fans of Raimi's iconic trilogy to gleefully chew on, but a working knowledge of the original isn't actually necessary to understand anything important. Granted, it's hard for someone my age so thoroughly saturated in genre movie malaise to imagine a world in which someone hasn't seen The Evil Dead '81, but... hey, it takes all kinds.

There's been a handful of critics who have complained that the film can't settle on whether or not it's a gritty Platinum Dunes inspired "hip" remake or a throwback to a goofier, sleazier time. I personally think that the movie intentionally defies this categorization by the sheer fact that it's both; it's a slick, polished, relatively expensive take on what was really just an endlessly lovable and stylish B-movie, but once the supernatural elements hit their stride, the film never throws the throttle back to keep those grim, modern sensibilities in check; it simply lets the fantastic elements evolve and consume everything around them, until the entire film is literally drowning in blood in a manner that's neither quite comedic nor horrific, just mad to its very core.

This is, let us remember, a remake* Sam Raimi's 1981 film, not the brilliant parody sequels that followed and, in the pop-cultural memory, perhaps replaced and even re-tooled the original in retrospect. The Evil Dead '81 had a sense of humor, surem but that was Sam Raimi just being Sam Raimi; most of the moments that come off as funny are moments that everyone involved groans over today, knowing they were all just inexperienced kids just trying to make a scary movie but having neither the experience nor the monetary support to make everything stick. Granted, when Raimi and everyone else involved realized how audiences reacted to the "funny" moments, they decided to just go that direction. I can't claim that Raimi invented the Splatstick film, but with the exception of Peter Jackson, it's fair to say he damn well perfected it, and in proving that he had more talents up his sleeve than the modest Evil Dead '81 alone could provide, launched his career from that of an independent nobody to a genuine Hollywood bigwig. The problem is this has left people with the impression that The Evil Dead '81 was a horror comedy. It wasn't - Evil Dead II was. Army of Darkness (or "Midieval Dead", as it was originally called) was a comedy in Horror Movie Clothing, which is perfectly fine,  but has only further blurred the line as to just how seriously everyone was supposed to take the original film.

*Calling this a "remake" might be... how should I put this. Slightly disingenuous. See the SPOILER TAGGED material for more details.

With this in mind, anyone expecting Fede Alvarez' modern reboot to flip a switch at the one hour mark and fall apart into a parody probably isn't viewing the film as a mounting series of increasingly gross and physically impossible set pieces; they're viewing it through the prism of a decades-long subculture that became so self aware that it spawned Evil Dead: The Musical, and on some level, perhaps we were all waiting for the film to degenerate into that as what would, at first glance, appear to be its only logical conclusion: A Horror-Comedy. But it isn't; it's just slowly unwravelling until the boundaries between "horror" and "absurdity" have ceased to exist. There is a natural, gradual shift from the intensely cold, serious first act and the growing sense of shock and revulsion that the film continues reaching for in its bag of grotesque carnival tricks. The trailer makes the film look terrifying and like an intentionally patched together ghost film full of slow burn jump scares, but in reality, it's closer in tone to the ghost train ride of the original Raimi trilogy than all that. It just takes a little while to show its true colors, is all; by the time it's decided to be spooky, it's already tearing people's faces off and then feeding it to someone else. (Well, not literally. Not in that particular order, anyway.)

The other thing I'll tell you before getting into the nitty gritty is that, oh hell yes, it's just as nasty as you probably think it is. Yes, it's a fun, over the top kind of nasty, but when boiling water, hypodermic syringes and crowbars are all on the table, the flick finds new and exciting ways to make you squirm like a little bitch. Despite the dour, spooky makeup, the "Deadites" (still not a word outside of Army of Darkness, goddamn it...) are still just gigglingly sadistic children, using anything and everything that crosses their paths to make a bloody impact. It's how they use it that'll raise eyebrows, though. Make no mistake, this isn't on par with Nekromantik or Human Centipede 2 [Full Sequence], but the fact that an R-rated film distributed by a major corporation like Sony/Tri-Star got this much in-your-face gore on screen is still a shock, even in the 21st century. Comparisons to Alexandre Aja's The Hills Have Eyes and Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead are absolutely warranted, and that's a very good thing.

So, let's get into the nitty gritty of what both did, and didn't quite work... as said, everything will be marked as spoilers, so if you're not wanting to have your fun spoiled just avoid the RED TEXT. We good?

Hauling someone there for a hardcore heroin detox - and then having her be the first person to be stalked by Naturon Demonto's fury - was a brilliant twist. Not only does it give everyone around her a reason not to freak out, but it also means that everyone staying locked down in an isolated cabin with no communication with the outside world in the middle of nowhere, actively ignoring the person who was just raped by a fucking tree MAKES PERFECT SENSE. (Also, that's gotta be the single least sexy tentacle rape in film history. Trust me on this guys; I'm a goddamn expert.)

The only real weak link, at least that I can remember feeling that way at the time, was "Grampa" being killed suddenly and without any real fanfare felt like kind of a waste. Yes, it's a shocking and unsettling turn of events that doesn't clue anyone in to the fact that Mia might not be herself anymore, but still, no horrific violence? Even the kitten that got hilariously/horribly stabbed to death in Drag Me To Hell got more attention! I had wondered if he'd avoid the possessed Mia, or maybe get injured and become a Deadite Dog himself - wouldn't that have been fun?! But, no, dog gets its fucking head caved in off screen. Eh, kudos for killing the pet at all, I guess? (Wow, that... sounded worse than I'd thought it would.)


That general quality extends to the rest of the script, which is filled with characters who generally don't do anything especially stupid; the "rules" of the Deadites are never made explicitly clear to begin with (it's something the book itself might be trying to hide, for all we know), which make the one questionable moment of someone willing to let a Deadite free once they've "regressed" to human form seem like at least a compassionate reaction. Besides, this is one of the corner stone scenes of the original Evil Dead - bitching about it in a film designed to literally carry on its legacy would be like bitching about a Friday the 13th remake using a POV camera. There's a few moments of questionable reactions sure, such as Eric's almost manic fascination with The Book of the Dead itself, but there's never any especially lulzy, or head slappingly dumb reactions to bitch about. (You know what I'm talking about. Prometheus springs to mind: "HEY LIL' FELLAH!")

The first reel has some of the expected, oddly exposition-heavy dialog flying around just to get the viewer up to speed, but overall the screenplay itself was surprisingly solid, and seems far more aware of things like logic and character consistency than Raimi's own film of the same name. We even learn quite a bit of unusual, unpleasant backstory about two of our protagonists, and that all has a pretty heavy resonance on what follows - a satisfying turn of events from a genre where splatter is the highlight, not character growth.

But is the script a little too clever for its own good by peppering the development through the tragedy itself? I'm a little torn on the fact that there's little to no setup in the film for the actual characters. We learn enough about David and Mia to sympathize and pity them, and Eric does enough hemming and hawing that we get where he's coming from in his bittersweet reunion with what was clearly once his close friend, and even gets to redeem himself for what looks like . Overall it gives us some tasty bits of character development to chew on, and learn primarily through the characters interactions with each other as the horrors unfold around them, but by the end of the film we don't know anyone in any meaningful way... then again, this is a fucking Evil Dead movie. It's not like we're going to see more than one of them in the sequel again.

Unfortunately, Olivia's sole development is that she's a competent nurse with a slightly pissy disposition. It's not much, but it's just enough that her actions and reactions seem consistent enough to recognize her as a person of some kind. As for Natalie... well, she's there to get fucked up with power tools. She literally has no defining personality traits other than "the blonde one" - she doesn't scream, she doesn't fight, she just watches shit explode around her and does what people tell her to do. She's not even interesting enough to become a sort of Damsel in Distress, she's just bland window dressing. Don't know if this a weakness from newcomer Elizabeth Blackmore of if she was simply too underwritten for talent to matter, but I literally forgot she was in the movie for long stretches until something bogus happened to her.

That said, holy shit, Elizabeth's impromptu take on "A Farewell to Arms" was really something. Let's talk about that practical gore, shall we? PHENOMENAL. Yes, I'll admit it, CG could potentially have increased the total squick factor (not to mention the consistency) during the eye-jabbing bit especially, but the fact that everything looks so hyper-real, the direct result of doing everything in a manner that just doesn't exist anymore, was like pure goddamn catnip for a rubbery gore-hound like myself. I'm certain the "falling drop of blood" (you know the one) and the buzzing flies in the basement were added in post, but considering what a bitch having done them any other way would have been - they'd have been optically printed if this were 1981, let's face it - I'm cool with them, even if the former looked a bit cheesy. By the by, I can't wait to see the "Making Of" materials on the upcoming Blu-ray; how on earth did they get that one long shot of Mia hacking up that spiny, blood soaked hairball?! Either it's some kind of magical collapsible material, or Jane Levy has a throat that'd put Linda Lovelace to shame!

Speaking of Jane Levy (in a, y'know, not-throat-fucking sort of way...), she gets serious credit for both pulling off abject spit-spraying hands-shaking terror in a way even seasoned veterans often shy away from. Before "He" has her, there's a moment of undilluted fear and dread that just fills that actress, and she spits it on the screen as nothing but raw, unfiltered honesty. Loving it. Mind you, her inevitable turn as a cheesy ass-kicker is slightly less impressive, but far from bad - just, not as shockingly great as when she was one step away from slitting her own throat to escape whatever else might happen to her. I wanted to give her the crown for playing the raspy, sneering Deadite... until I remembered that "Abomination Mia" is credited to Randal Wilson. I'm hoping she was just the body double for the final reel and not the centerpiece to the film's churlish bellowing menace, but until I get some clarification on who played what, I just can't make that call. Everyone else is competent, professional and not overly showy, but I'm afraid Levy steals the entire show leaving everyone else looking a bit uninspired by comparison.

And hey, let's face it, when you're put up against The Chin himself, you can only ever be so cheesily awesome before you're just bordering on trying to be Ash Williams, both a locing parody and, somehow, the perfect embodiment of the one-liner spewing, firepower toting, stupidly macho 80s action hero. Thankfully the film knows better than to go down that road, and Ash just... doesn't exist in this story. There's winking moments, familiar actions from different characters that recall his spirit and his role, but at the end of it all Mia does not equal Ash With A Vagina. You see that, The Thing 2011? That's how you create a new heroine, rather than gender-swap the one your franchise already had.


And yet, the film is missing one core element of the original film; actual terror. There's a handful of jump scares, certainly, and one of the most unsettling moments in the film is purely an effect that was accomplished through sound editing, but... well, there's simply no tension in the film. Raimi's film may have had some ham-fisted moments of unintentional humor, but scenes like watching Linda's eyes flicker as Ash digs her grave, and the long, slow shots of "That Thing" in the woods eyeing potential new victims before bowling them over had a certain overbearing sense of Lovecraft inspired dread. If the cloying, soft-focus softcore porn of horror is the tension and the build up, then Fede Alvarez' stripped down splatter film is gonzo pornography, cutting to the body horror and supernatural spooks early on and never once looking back to question if the audience was on their seats uncertain of what would happen next. We know what's going to happen next; some motherfucker is about to get FUCKED. UP. The only question is how, not if.

Upon leaving, Mrs. Kentai was rather non-plussed about the whole thing. I asked her what she was less than impressed by, and she said, without even thinking about it, that the film simply wasn't scary, which left her looking through her fingers at an hour of increasingly absurd violence. She acknowledged it was all well done and kind of fun in its own right, but it just didn't burrow to the nightmare inducing part of the brain the same way as Raimi's original was designed to. Mind you, this all appears to be by design, but... if the promise of the film's poster was "The Most Terrifying Film You Will Ever Experience", it was a failure. Even those fucking Paranormal Activity flicks pack more actual dread and terror in their 90 minutes of falling pots and attractive ladies sleep-standing for hours on end! "The Most Fun You Have Ever Had Dry Heaving Into Your Popcorn"? Sure, that's a bingo. Whether or not this distinction will harm the film's longevity or appeal, I can't say; I had a blast in the theater, listening to the entire audience around me squirm and gasp and cheer in unison, but I'm still just a little bummed that I'm not looking over my shoulder as I crawl into bed tonight.

On reflection, a big part of my not being upset by the lack of actual 'horror' in what's being marketed as a horror film is that is we've already seen what contemporary remakes of The Evil Dead would have been in both "serious" and "deconstruction"  modes. They were called Antichrist and The Cabin in the Woods respectively, and anyone who feels let down by the lack of balls-out terror or underlying tongue in cheek attitude in this film should be reminded that these two great films covered a lot of ground that Fede Alvarez couldn't, not without being looked at as playing to old-hat tropes already dissected by the masters, anyway.

Speaking of "okay but weird" feelings, what was up with Natalie up and dying after all no apparent head trauma? Was there a consistency with Deadite Death I just didn't catch? Her body was never "cleansed" and her head was never destroyed and she was never burned (a point of consistency to every other Deadite in the film... I think?), I guess it just reached a point where "He" gave up on them? That would made sense, I suppose; Olivia's head was crushed, rendering her base senses useless, and while Natalie still could have bitten someone (hell, Mia bit her!), not having any hands makes her a less than ideal host, that's for sure. This was one of the only things that really bugged me walking out of the theater; then again, these Deadites don't seem to possess severed body parts, so I guess being an animated head might not apply in this reboot the way it did in Raimi's trilogy. Speaking of Deadite consistency, the lot of them never "flying" was probably for the best, but I liked the visual cue of Mia simply scooting along the water's surface as an analog. It's still charmingly retro-spooky, easy to pull off without shitty CGI, and looks unlike anything I've ever seen in film - well, outside of anime, at the very least.

For the record, it's just a little underwhelming to try and put a face on "Him", by the way, even if it was just in passing. (Notice the old Jewish spelling for 'Satan' scribbled on the page where we see "Him".) Evil Dead II went out of its way to show Naturom Demonto's ultimate "form" to be an amorphous Shoggoth that used the faces and voices of those it consumed as interchangeable masks, but I guess the fact that the film ultimately used a ghastly mirror-image of Mia's own self as the creature stalking her in the woods was smarter than anything else they could have done. Actually, I really like the idea that The Book simply shows you what it'll turn you into as a matter of course; that gave Ash plenty of reason to run in the previous trilogy, and gives a plausible explanation as to why he never tried to describe it to anyone else.

Fanservice is abundant, but more subtle than I figured it'd be. Ash's old car is still there, rotting under a tree, we see the necklace (which was... broken earlier, wasn't it?) forming a familiar face, and while the results are completely different this time around, kudos for trying to burn The Book anyway. Hearing Sheryl's voice fill the cabin just before Mia lost all semblance of herself is the kind of manipulative bullshit that sends a shiver up my fanboy spine, but with everything else in place, it's forming a common theme; this has all happened before.

So... is this a remake? Kinda. It's clearly taking place in the same 'universe' as the Sam Raimi trilogy, and Fede Alvarez has made the charming argument that maybe The Book of the Dead makes these things happen in a self-repeating cycle of black magic influence. Yeah, sure, at the end of the day it's a cheap way for the fans to have their sequel cake and eat a remake, too, but it's at least a clever way to look at it, no? With this in mind, is the version of Naturom Demonto in the '13 film a sort of Version 2.0, crafted by the Candarian Demons themselves to lure new souls into their gaping maws? We did see a number of "fake" Necronomicons in Army of Darkness - so hey, who's to say that there was only one Naturom Demonto, or that its texts couldn't be re-created in some way? They're already talking about a sequel to the '13 revamp - plus a fucking sequel to Army of Darkness, plus some sort of wild "Evil Dead vs Army of Darkness" finale to cap off both franchises - which has officially bent the very concept of continuity over the fence and sodomized it until it was a gaping bloody void.

Y'know what's NOT in the film? Mia singing "Not another peep...", or David cutting anything up with a chainsaw and spraying blood on a lamp, both of which were featured prominently in the film's earlier trailers. Were there some major changes late in the game, or are these just goodies we'll see restored for the inevitable Unrated Director's Cut? Only time will tell, I'm afraid.

Let's just throw this one out there and be done with it: Best. Chainsaw. Violence. EVER. That was an award I never thought I'd have to take away from Tobe Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2, but goddamn, if that wasn't some cheer-worthy gross out greatness, and the biggest high the story as presented could have ended on without going full bore bullshit in the last 10 minutes by remaking the end to Ash's story.

You stayed to the end of the credits, right? If you didn't... well, you're either an asshole or your bladder was ready to blow, but either way you missed the single biggest theatrical fanboy tease since Iron Man. Have fun with that knowledge, tiny bladdered assholes! All kidding aside, that was pretty friggin' awesome (even if it means nothing to a fresh audience), and it leaves me with little doubt that Raimi was confident enough in the finished film to leave the door open for... well, you know where this whole ridiculous franchise is going by now. And as a long time fan, I couldn't be happier for it.

EVIL DEAD '13 probably isn't going to be a trend setter, and while Fede Alvarez has proven himself to be a competent, polished film maker who knows what his audience wants, I don't think we've uncovered the next Sam Raimi here. But it doesn't matter; the film is a gruesome good time for old fans and newcomers alike, and if it doesn't make its meager $17 Million budget back in the first weekend, I swear I'm going to die a little inside. It's not horribly complex, but it has pretty goddamn massive cajones and delights in testing its audiences' limits, even at the cost of literally everything else. With one major stylish choice aside, it's everything that a remake of The Evil Dead probably should have been, and I can't ask for any more than that. Fede Alvarez has done a fine job dusting off the title for an engrossing splatter film, and Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell's involvement has made sure it stayed true to the fans that have been fawning over their almost accidental masterstroke. This might not be an accidental classic, but it's pretty goddamn fun anyway. Highly recommended to people who love movies that hate human flesh.

EDIT: Updated for a few very relevant sections I spaced before publishing (damn my enthusiasm!).
          You'll be surprised how much you forget to clarify at 2 in the morning.

Can't say I've ever played the FARCRY games up until now. Not that I was unaware of their existence, and the more I saw of the most recent third installment - and heard of war stories from my work pal about how he basically fire-bombed a pirate hovel which then ran out only to be eaten by tigers - but it sounded like a fun thing I should pick up once it's hit that magical $30 price point. Sorry, game industry, but unless you're stuffing it in a lunch box covered in bobbies or happen to be about a 30 year old cartoon franchise I adore, odds are I can wait until you've reached the 50% off mark... which these days is usually 6 months or less, anyway.

My familiarity with this franchise jumped up a billion points, however, when a friend of mine said I needed to check out the soundtrack to the game's upcoming downloadable single-player spinoff, BLOOD DRAGON. The chintzy looking OFFICIAL WEBSITE (check out that store!) opened on April 1st, leaving most of the vaguely interested internet to shrug it off as an oddly elaborate April Fools Day prank... but a few days later official government age ratings, trophy lists, and XBOX LIVE dashboard images popped up as well, suggesting one of two things: Either this was the single most elaborate April Fools announcement ever, or it might be an actual thing.

Far as everyone can tell this is set to drop on May first on multiple gaming platforms, there's a couple of enticing SCREEN SHOTS, and if you aren't worried this nonsense can stick the landing, they even cast Michael Biehn. That's right, Michael Biehn in a role that's neither Aliens nor Terminator related - whooda' thought! Far as everyone can tell the game has some charming 8-bit cut scenes, and the actual aesthetic of the actual FPS gameplay appears to be somewhere between Radioactive Dreams and and 2019: After the Fall of New York in terms of garish post-nuke chic soaked in enough neon to choke a mall tour, giving no quarter to the brown and bland look that's infected the overwhelming majority of "gritty" first person games for about the last decade. It's hard to say at this point if the game will be a playful revival of legitimate cheesy 80s greatness, or just play this all as a bit of an out and out parody - that fine like that separated Jason Eisener's Hobo with a Shotgun from Astron 6's Father's Day - but in either case they have my undivided attention.

But what really sold me on this silly thing was the soundtrack, which you can OFFICIALLY SAMPLE at the band's Sound Cloud page. The best part? The band (Composer? Robot? Monkey with a silver ear?) is named "Power Glove". If you can hear Warzone and not immediately feel like the world is a better place for it, you and I are on totally different wavelengths. I don't think I've ever been prepared to throw dollar bills at my monitor based solely on the goddamn soundtrack, but if there's ever been a time, this is it.

I love the future.

Oh wow, cool! What is that, a sequel to VANQUISH? That game was cool as shit! Oh man, I can't wait to play--




...holy crap, this was going to be the Frank Miller styled grim 'n' gritty reboot to Mother Fucking MEGA MAN X .  They produced a number of test renders and gameplay demos back in 2010 with Armature Studios (a studio largely composed of developers who worked on the Metroid Prime series), but Capcom pulled the plug before it ever went public, which is normal for Capcom. For some reason they hate using their ticket to print free money by putting anything with Mega Man on the box that isn't A) a cute retro rehash of the 25 year old games that introduced him, or B) a bad joke using the American box art. And yes, Kenji INAFUNE was totally on board with giving adults who had grown up on his most famous creation a darker, more contemporary take on the franchise - it's not that surprising, when you factor in that he created Zero because he had grown bored of the little blue dude that had been in all the previous games, and only made Zero the supporting character because Capcom wasn't convinced franchise loyals would take to an entirely new hero.

The Mega Man FPS - which was code named "Maverick Hunter" -  was at least aesthetically distinct from the usual parade of military shooters that we've seen from the last decade. It also had a narrative trick up its sleeve that, had I gotten over the initial shock or Mega Man having somehow become a first person murder simulator, I would have eaten up with a goddamn spoon: The first game centers around X finding himself living in a brutal dystopian society only he can save, and the second game would have shown X becoming infuriated and disenfranchised with the world around him, seeking ultimate strength and intelligence in a bid to destroy everything that stood in his way. The final chapter of the trilogy would have been played from Zero's perspective, forcing X's mentor to turn on his own fellow machine for the sake of mankind.



Would the games have been any good, though? Nobody can really say; the development never got far enough along for anyone to make a proper judgment either way. Darker reboots of Capcom's Devil May Cry was highly regarded by critics (though it sold less than any previous iteration of Dante's adventures), and Square-Enix's Tomb Raider was both a top tier seller and a critical darling, though reboots of Hudson's Bomber Man and Capcom's own Bionic Commando were commercial failures with, at best, mixed reviews. So maybe it would have been awesome, and maybe it would have been just as terrible as the phrase "Grim 'N' Gritty FPS Mega Man X Reboot" sounded the moment it popped into my head. Like I said, Capcom hates releasing anything Mega Man related for reasons I don't really understand (perhaps it's just to spite Inafune these days), so this sits next to Nintendo's proposed Sony designed SNES CD-ROM add on, and Alejandro Jororowsky's proposed film adaptation of Dune in that nebulous part of my brain I can't help but be totally fascinated by what might have been...

And yeah, I'd probably be way more angry at the mere thought of this whole thing having potentially existed right now if the last official appearance of Mega Man in a Capcom game hadn't been this atrocity:


Yes, that's actually the in-game prologue for Street Fighter X Tekken. Inafune was apparently cool with this, too, but Inafune also turned his face into a weapon of Mass Destruction in the Hypderdimension Neptunia franchise, so... Kudos on making Roll hot. Too bad about literally everything else.

And, yes, X and Zero are set to appear in PROJECT X ZONE. I can't decide if an officially licensed Mugen PSP game throwing a handful of Mega's in a giant melting pot of Capcom, Sega and Namco heavy hitters is an improvement to the above atrocity or not... but hey, at least now you can stab Ryu in the dick with the cast of Valkyria Chronicles!

While Ubisoft inexplicably insists that FAR CRY 3: BLOOD DRAGON is an official "Expansion" of their Triple-A Desert Island Tiger Fueled Sandbox styled adventure franchise, the facts are finally in: It is indeed a stand alone download-only game built on the groundwork of the original Far Cry 3, those who have already gotten a chance to play through the entire game (due to a hilarious - and now, quite closed - XBLA release glitch!) says it takes a brisk 8 hours or so to do everything, and will be available for purchase on both XBLA/PSN platforms on April 31st for a mere $14.99. As a point of reference, the last time I played an 8 hour game I loved was Lollipip Chainsaw, and as I dropped sixty bones for the privilege, this seems like a bargain.

As an added treat for those of you with a boner for shooting things on computers that weren't pre-made by Sony or Microsoft, Steam already has the PC version up for pre-order, and is including a full download of the Power Glove OST I've been violently masturbating to for about a week as a free bonus! Needless to say, I whipped out my Visa like it was the last circle jerk before The Big One. If anyone reading this has Steam installed and has even the remotest interest in what you see up there, I suggest you do the same before the OST deal drops off in two weeks.


This has forced me to ruminate, if only (semi-)briefly, on how I feel about "download only" copies of games in general. You surely remember that I hesitated to pull the trigger on Fist of the North Star: Ken's Rage 2 for a wide variety of reasons when the game was released in February, and while I'm a little sad that it's been a couple months and I still don't have the game... well, I still think my hesitation was somewhat justified. The game was too large (space wise), too substantial, and simply too expensive to be justified as a download-only PS3 title for the full $60 MSRP. I get that video games are a luxury item, and that a full fledged AAA title - of which the Hokuto Musou sequel is, arguably, at least an AA "expansion pack and then some" affair - costs $60 because of the development costs and all that. If I had bought the damn game on a disc for $60, I wouldn't have batted an eye, so who does making this one a download-only title bother me on such an oddly personal level?



I understand well enough that offering the game on a disc versus as a download is offering literally the same content - the data's identical between both formats. You're paying for the same game, so obviously the price should be similar, and that's fine. But cutting out the physical media production, skipping the wholesale discount given to Game Stop and the like, means the publisher is pocketing more money to start with, and in turn is removing the option to ever lend or even, Gods forbid, resell my personal copy has been removed - and it's also hogging up additional space on my less than bottomless PS3 HDD, which only gets more pathetic for Xbox 360 users who (as far as I know, at least) have to buy an MS Branded drive should theirs reach critical mass, and are forced to snap open their system with a goddamn hammer if they want to replace it on the newer models. In short, Download versions cost the same as the Disc versions, but come at no real advantage to myself, other than dodging about $5 in taxes and not having to wait in like at Best Buy for like five minutes. Were they a bit more competitively priced - say, $50 instead of $60, or they cost the same but included the first wave of DLC, or anything like that - I'd probably be more okay with the whole idea, even if I'd avoid it personally.

That's not to say I don't buy download-only games. Blood Dragon is a great bargain, and I'd pay $15 for that on the PS3, if that seemed like the better option. I have no problem with the whole "Virtual Console" concept, where you're paying $10 for a game that's been out of print for 15 years, merely saving the headache of ordering a copy off of eBay only to find it so scuffed up it won't boot to begin with. I'm also going to pick up the Black Rock Shooter PSP game for $20, because A) the price is less than the going MSRP for a typical packaged PSP game - which essentially, doesn't exist anymore, and B) it's a kooky Action-RPG based loosely on a memetic NicoNico Douga music video. This was never going to get a wide US release because it wasn't made to appeal to Western sensibilities to begin with.

Had this been a $30 packaged release, I'd be fine with it, but a $20 download is perfectly acceptable with all of that in mind. I'd have loved to see the utterly insane Premium Edition released in the states, but sadly, I still live on Earth where I still have a substantially better chance of walking outside and randomly being attacked by Olivia Wylde who, for reasons therapists would later go on to describe as the "Kentai Syndrome", threatens to slit her own throat with a hacksaw unless she's allowed to repeatedly suck Spaghetti-O's out of my anus. Seriously, every word of that had a way better chance than anyone in North America packing the White Rock Shooter in a premium translated release, despite the fact that those insanely cool/ridiculously overpriced toys are literally the only reason most of those games exist to begin with!


Hell, I'm still not convinced I shouldn't have picked up Hokuto Musou 2 for $60 as a sign of good faith... and then I realized that a $60 download game has over $50 worth of DLC. I was so shocked I had to itemize that shit: $23 on costumes, $18 on unlockable characters, $8 on bonus maps, $3 pack of "upgrade"scrolls, and $3 on a pallet-swap of the "Pre-Order Bonus" DLC costume. If playing the entire experience front to pack cost a hundred bucks, the least you can do is give me a fucking disc to give away should I get bored with it. And, yes, part of the rub here is that Sony is kind of a dick about what does and doesn't qualify as something "worth" releasing on disc, but it still sucks. 360 owners can, I admit, purchase a physical copy, but just wait until we see how true the rumors of the Xbox Durango turn out... that'll be the end of physical copies even mattering for game consoles. (But we'll talk about that if, and when, we have to.)

So, what about downloading PC games that are, by and large, identical to their console equivalents? Well, I feel slightly differently about that, too, mostly because Steam has been a fantastically intuitive service that runs sales that make any semblance of having a valid complaint instantly moot. The fact that I have a 3TB HDD - and smaller drives to spare! - is an added incentive to not give a fuck is my copy is physical or just a few bytes of data on my Steam profile. But there's a fundamental difference between playing on a console and playing on a PC: When you buy PC game discs these days, they're more often than not essentially a glorified Steam installer anyway; simply put, I've been more willing to support download only games on a PC platform more than I have the PS3 because it makes a heck of a lot more sense when the actual disc is irrelevant to playback anyway. If you want to play whatever, fuck it, Bioshock Infinite on the PS3, you can play the game from the disc with only a bare minimal installation to make the auto-saves work properly; if you want to play it on the PC you're going to install the whole fucking game anyway, making the disc little more than a glorified serial number caddy. The formats are inherently different enough that I can accept it as the norm on one and not the other, even if - broadly speaking - it's the same experience for the same price.


I'm clearly thinking about games too goddamn much these days. Not sure why. Anyway, go throw dollar bills at Ubisoft like some sort of 80s satire fueled stripper. I feel good knowing I have, and seeing people on forums who beat the game when it was accidentally released in the wild say they're still willing to buy a copy solely on principle warms the cockles of my black, shriveled heart.

A brief, frustrating update in reference to my prior moderately-positive review of STREET FIGHTER II: THE ANIMATED MOVIE: The English dub appears to be the heavily censored PG-13 version which removes all of the swearing entirely. This is opposed to the only slightly-censored "Unrated" version, or the completely "Uncut" version.

[UPDATE:] The Manga Entertainment R1 DVD includes the "Uncut" version on the stereo track, and the "Unrated" version on the 5.1 mix. The only difference between the two - as far as I know, and I am so not the guy to ask about the English version of this particular film - are two lines involving the word 'fuck'.

The PG-13 audio evidently removes all swearing, and hasn't been seen by anyone since the late 90s, which  with massive edits for violence and nudity on top of all the sailor talk. This also means the Kaze Blu-ray is the first time the "Unedited Version" has ever had the PG-13 dub included on it, which is... interesting, to say the least. For those masochistically curious what non-language differences there are between the PG-13 and Unrated prints of this film can check out exhaustive comparisons HERE.

If I'm not mistaken I could probably sync the 'Uncut' dub to the new Kaze Blu-ray, but the Manga release - as you can see HERE - has several relatively minor cuts to the original unedited Japanese prints, which this Blu-ray is based on. This makes syncing it slightly more complicated than usual, but I'd be lying if I said I hadn't fixed so much worse... of course, that was done with the promise of a paycheck on the other end, not because I'm interested in spiting the language track I had no interest in until someone mentioned it was fucked up.

The Madman AU DVD is uncut as well, and synced to a Japanese print... but it's also been sped up to progressive PAL, which means the pitch could be all sorts of wonky when I shift it back. Now that I know the Manga track is uncut, I'm wondering if the best course of action would be to watch both cuts of the dub, figure out what's missing and replace specific lines of dialog... but then, of course, the question becomes just how seamless those audio edits would be.

Geez, who thought the Manga UK dub for Street Fighter would ever be this complicated?

[END NEW TRANSMITION.]

Thanks to Kriztoffer Swank and Sky_Captain for clarifying this infuriating issue for all fans of the English dub. I'm not one of 'em, but I sympathize with your rage all the same.

I feel like Rob Zombie's gotten a lot of shit over the years he hasn't particularly deserved... though I guess that's true of literally everyone who did anything after The Internet existed. Don't get me wrong, each year that passes is a year I like House of 1000 Corpses just a little bit less, and I won't say that Halloween 2 wasn't a film rife with both structural and idealogical problems, at least it took a stand against a slasher movie sequel literally being the first film with a number tagged onto the end of it. I'm a firm believer that anything less than praise levied against The Devil's Rejects is little more than bitter heresy, and while I totally understand why some people can't stand the grim, trashy reboot of the archetypal bogeyman, I stand by my affirmation that Rob Zombie's take was dramatically more interesting than John Carpenter's. Perfect? No. A fuck of a lot better than literally any of the other sequels to Carpenter's original Halloween had been (barring, perhaps, Season of the Witch)? You bet your ass, boys and girls.

While I wasn't thrilled hearing that Zombie's new film was being produced by the same folks who were responsible for the Paranormal Activity franchise - my opinions of which can be summed up very well with "Well, that sure was clever. The first time." - the promise of him being offered Final Cut was appealing enough, as was Zombie's own description during preproduction that it would be a film akin to if Ken Russell had directed The Shining instead of Stanley Kubrick. Psychedelic isolated clips and a jaw-dropping gonzo bizarro trailer made the rounds, all of them showcasing Sheri Moon Zombie - Rob's muse, and seemingly his detractor's personified ire - trapped in a supernatural struggle between the world we know and the dark existence of a witch's coven, seeking vengeance for their brutal punishment in the 17th century. Having thought Rob got the shit end of the Internet's opinion stick, and having spent most of my life living in New England - and, being fascinated by horror from a young age, having always been enchanted by the gruesome history of Salem - this was a film set to hit every chord on my list...


And yet I walked out confused, wondering what might have been. I wouldn't say I dislike the film - it isn't terrible, not by any worthwhile measure - it just isn't what it could have been, or perhaps even should have been to justify its very unique and potentially genre-shattering position as a serious horror film sprung from the very real tragedies that befell the accused women of a little town in the Americas. Was this movie for real? Was it an experiment in terror, boiling the elements of the masters down into their most simplified parts as a study of why we're afraid, or the groundwork of a master inspired by his childhood throwing everything at the wall and watching very little of it stick? The answer is inevitably somewhere in the middle, and while it's clear Zombie was pulling from masters like Kubrick, Argento, Polanski and Russell... the final film is more akin to the dreamlike, sometimes wholly disjointed works of Jean Rollin, Lucio Fulci and Karim Hussain. Initially, I'd have compared the films to David Cronenberg or Michael Soavi, but no, both of these men have a grouding of emotional, structural and theological symbolism to tie everything into, at least, a single cohesive whole, if only sometimes in a meta-textual way; Rob Zombie's latest film doesn't seem to be interested in anything grander or deeper, just... well, weirder. It accomplishes that and then some, and I'd be lying if I said the film wasn't quite a bit of fun just to look at all the over the top set pieces lurking in the shadows, even if it doesn't add up to much. It's just not the epic send-off to the supernatural that I still believe is burning away inside of Zombie's brain, and is a frustrating reminder that even talented artists can only accomplish so much when under relatively major time and money constraints.

But what makes this mish-mash of surrealism all the more frustrating is how good the first forty minutes or so of the film are. There's moments of pure, distilled WTF to be sure, but they're balanced by a level of restraint and subtlety that I hadn't been aware Zombie possessed that honestly doesn't break until the final act. Absolutely none of the rampant nudity in the film is there to be sexy (apart from, maybe, the opening titles), and while the brutal punishment of the Salem Witches is presented in the most sadistic manner possible, there's virtually no other acts of murder or blood-letting on screen that aren't trippy cut-aways to what may or may not be a violent realizations of a shattering subconscious.  The mounting, grinding soundtrack and the shifting landscapes of the dull tones of reality clashing with the super-saturated world of Satan's wrath envelop every second, becoming so intertwined that, yes, I'd argue the style is the film's ultimate substance, in the same way that Suspiria and Eraserhead operate entirely on fuzzy dream logic, but become burned into your memory through the sheer hand of the director assaulting you with the raw, unhinged experience of it all.

Sherri Moon Zombie is, as ever, adequate. Look let's be honest; she's gorgeous, she's willing to go to damned ugly places to please her man's need to be a demigod of exploitation film making, and Rob is comfortable asking her to be sexually assaulted in the face by a Satanic blood-belching priest. What the hell else do you guys even want? Can you think of anyone else who'd even agree to be in this mess, much less knock it out of the park if they did? Christ. This really shouldn't warrant special attention - Sherri's merely "okay", not especially noteworthy one way or the other - but I swear, if that ever gets brought up as a complaint against a Rob Zombie movie by default, whoever says it is getting punched right in the dick. Dead goddamn dick-center. Internet, we're officially done with this particular bitching, and we should have been done with it 8 goddamn years ago when she proved herself to be an adequate character actor to begin with.

The three ladies who play Sherri's scheming landlords - all genre veterans, as is typical of a Zombie casting call -  are all fantastic in their own right, and many of the comparatively minor roles are filled with talented Zombie regulars (blink and you'll miss Sid Haig and Michael Berryman!), but hands down it's Meg Foster as the wicked Satanic matron who steals the show. She was utterly terrifying. Seriously, if you only see the first three reels of this movie, she is what the rest of your nightmares will be made of; pure, unadulterated malice. And this is coming from the hot chick in Masters of the Universe - Jesus Christ, how could we have seen that coming?! The film even makes fantastic use of her as a sort of barometer as to how far down the rabbit hole we've gone, slowly wearing down the walls of reality by combining Foster's horrific turn with Sherri's more worldly existence, until the boundary is finally broken, the last seal laid bare, and then... and then...


...and then Satan shows up looking a bucket of KFC haphazzardly glued back together and wearing an El Santo gimp mask. The whole scene is set to glowing, soft-focus, romantic photography and totally un-ironic, sweeping classical music. And then... I can't even tell you what happens next because you won't believe me 'till you see it for yourself anyway. Mrs. Kentai couldn't take another second of it, and just busted out laughing. I couldn't pick my jaw up out of my own lap long enough to make a sound. I'm not spoiling this because it's in the trailer, and it's the Weirdest. Fucking. Thing. I have EVER SEEN in a movie theater... and, sadly, I don't mean that in a good way.

Seriously, Mr. Zombie. Rob. Whatever, I'm asking as a fan here, and as someone with a penchant for loving the hell nonsensical weirdness - what the fuck just happened to your amazing atmospheric horror movie? As director, Zombie walks a fine line for the first four reels, gradually teasing us with what look to be intentionally artificial stage-show quality neon nightmares are juxtaposed on a lifeless, almost uninhabited and monotone vision of Salem, and brings them both crashing into a violent mix that gels neither as a work of pure, apocalyptic terror nor even as B-movie excess as it did, more or less, in House of 1000 Corpses - that film certainly wasn't a masterpiece, but it's still amusing enough watching Bill Mosley turn Rainn Wilson into a bloody arts and crafts project. There's a subplot about Sherri being a recovering junkie, building to the idea that maybe it's all in her head - hey, just like Jack Torrence in The Shining! - but most of that looks like it was left on the cutting room floor, and only pops up when the narrative left them no choice but to bring it to the forefront. A lot of stuff does that, now that I think of it, but that's the most blatant obvious of a loose thread, just waiting for the viewer to start tugging away.

Much like the final confrontation in Argento's Inferno, the film tries to gamble with its big ideas and loses credibility for it, trying to build to a Book of Revelations and ending on a minimalist stage play. I'm not giving Zombie the pretentious benefit of the doubt on this one either, because interviews have all sort of confirmed that the film we saw wasn't the film he wrote; in other words, I "get it", I just don't think it works... and that makes me incredibly sad, because I feel like he was on the verge of something amazing. Not since Prometheus have I walked out of a theater feeling like a masterpiece was side-stepped this hard, but the reasons why both of these films fail are so vastly different, it's not a very fair comparison. Without actually spoiling anything (else?), the final 10 minutes in particular really left me holding my head and wondering if I was just hallucinating. Rob Zombie has ushered in an apocalypse, and it turns into a low-budget music video complete with garish After Effects wipes and Sherri grinding on a Black Metal guitarist for no discernible reason - you know, the sort of goofy, nonsensical bullshit I'm already on the fence with coming from truly independent films made by fucking nobody in Eastern Europe for 1/10th the budget this one had.

It tries to bring it all back just before the end, but it manages to somehow infect both narrative threads so hopped up on its own indulgence that the finale of the Salem Witches is rendered borderline parody, and the final moments in Sherri's story are so over the top that... well, at that point, all I could do was laugh. Because it was so absurd it was funny as hell. It's clear that Rob Zombie was trying his damnedest to become Stanley Kubrick and Roman Polanski, but in the end he crashed and burned somewhere between Jean Rollin and Alejandro Jorodowsky. It's not goofy enough to be a rollicking B-movie to be jabbed at by drunken friends, but it's just not good enough to be anything more than the sum of its fragmented, uneven parts that can't decide if it's a legitimate retro masterpiece of Satanic horror, or a stumbling remake of yet another generic East Asian ghost movie. It's just... a mess. A fascinating, unintelligible mess that's so off the wall I can't help but recommend everyone in ear shot see it for themselves, just to experience it. I can call Zombie a lot of things right now, but "unoriginal", "risk averting", and "giving the slightest of fucks about what a typical audience wants" wouldn't be in the top five hundred.

I can't say a word of this without acknowledging that, why yes, I've followed Rob Zombie's usual press tour of brief, professional interviews. I know that despite having been given Final Cut on the project, the $1.5 million dollar budget and month long shooting schedule simply weren't enough to do whatever he had written. The scene used for the film's poster - the one that proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this film no longer knows what the fuck it's trying to be anymore - was one they had to improvise that day because the original concept was simply never going to be made. I can't fault Zombie's creativity, his aesthetic, or even his heart; all of them were in the right place when he made this film. He just bit off so much more than he could chew, and I have a feeling this is going to sit next to similarly bizarre, transgressive, and frustrating messes like... honestly, I can't even think of a proper comparison. Kazuaki Kiriya's CASSHERN or David Lynch's DUNE both come to mind, gorgeously realized and thematically rich epics that just unwravel before your very eyes, spawning a giant mess that's impossible to fully respect, but too gloriously decadent and bizarre to hate. I'd recommend anyone interested in this film see it - it isn't a swing and a miss scenario so much as it is the ball whizzing right past the batter and decapitating the pitcher. It's literally just that off. And if nothing else, I'm confident it'll be the single strangest, most difficult to describe film I see all year. If that isn't a compliment when I'm looking forward to the next Astron 6 feature, I don't even know what could be.

Rob Zombie has announced that his next film will be a historical drama about the 1974 Philadelphia Flyers team now known as "The Broad Street Bullies". (For those as hopelessly clueless about "Sports Stuff" as myself, just picture The Bad News Bears, but everyone has more whiskey than plasma in their blood and play 'sports' mostly as a legally justified Fight Club. Christ, that does sound kind of fun, doesn't it?) I was honestly sad at the knowledge that Rob Zombie is finished with making horror films for the forseeable future, but having seen him go for the gold and stop half way... maybe it's for the best. I still believe that Rob Zombie is a largely overlooked talent, and if nothing else, this will convince the rest of the world that his talent isn't directly tied to how many throat stabbings a film has. This, however, won't convince anyone but the biggest fans of gonzo insanity that he's got anything else to offer that The Devil's Rejects didn't already cover.

Recommended, but only for those who already know they're walking into a trap. Here's hoping the Blu-ray includes 3 hours of deleted scenes, and a 3 hour epic might at least restore something resembling thematic cohesion to this glorious pile of flaming wreckage. For what it's worth, the original screenplay has been published as an old-school "Novelization", and having heard confirmation that it was based on the last script Zombie made before actual production began, I might sit down with that over the next week and try to piece together what in the name of fuck happened between then and now.

And also, how weird is it that the AMC 16 was doing the semi-fancy Los Angeles premier with Rob and the female leads all doing a Q-and-A? Much as the film wasn't what I had hoped it would be, that whole experience was just lovely, and being able to sit just a few rows behind Michael Berryman and Ken Foree was pretty goddamn nifty. And for the record, however fun and crazy you think Patricia Quinn is, you're wrong. Dead wrong. That sweet ol' biddy is insane.

Warning: The following post is made in a fit of exhausted and fury/coffee fueled frustration. I TRIED not to spoil anything major and make the slightest bit of sense, but I'm not awake enough to tell anymore. Take from this what you will!

...so, yeah, my evening's kind of a huge, wet, smelly cunt. Downloading FAR CRY 3: BLOOD DRAGON for the second time tonight, whilst Mrs. Kentai is on her second hour of playing motherfucking SIMCITY 2013, which was also purchased this very day. Irony? I could give it to you wholesale right now.

The biggest slap in the dick is the fact that Steam and "Uplay" - yes, a DRM scheme you run from Steam, as if goddamn Xzbit himself is now working for Ubisoft to put DRM in yer DRM - both claim I've played the fucker for about 45 minutes when, in reality, I maybe got a whopping 5 minutes in before the game crashed, and promptly refused to start again after a reboot.

Guess I have the excuse I've needed to go all Scorched Earth on this mother fucker, including a new MoBo, 3TB HDD and clean Windows 7 64-bit install. "Real Life" keeps rearing its ugly head and convincing me it's something that can wait until next weekend, but if I can't get my FC3:BD on, real life can go mother fuck itself.


In lighter news, I bought a DVD! No, really, an NTSC DVD of a film that just came out for purchase. Why on Earth would I do that, particularly when it's a title I already have a Blu-ray copy of!? Well friends, we'll have a lot to talk about next time... and, actually, the flick is basically a perfect match with Blood Dragon. Separated at birth, you could say.

Alright, let's see what happens... your move, Uplay.

I'm just going to throw this out here as a point of reference; KIDS ON THE SLOPE/坂道のアポロン didn't sound the least bit interesting to me at the moment when it came out. Reviews are overwhelmingly positive, and having been directed by Shinichiro WATANABE and featuring Yoko KANNO's jazz as a key selling point, odds are it's a masterpiece... it just came out at a time when a light drama about teens in the 60s singing in Engrish wasn't something that sounded fun to watch. At all. Being in a bad place emotionally makes me crave Human Centipede 2 and Bad Lieutenant, not Forrest Gump and The Majestic, so that has far more to do with how I was feeling than the show itself. Isn't subjective opinion an ass like that?

In short, I'm sure it's fantastic, but there's a time for I Stand Alone and there's a time for Ted. For me personally one year ago, the notion of the director of Cowboy Bebop making a coming of age show about kids singing in broken Engrish was just not what I needed, and so I've quietly decided to wait for Sentai Filmworks to do their thing and release the show on Blu-ray... and then, Sentai fucked up. Which they do a lot when I'm not paying much attention - more on that in a minute or two.

In the case of Kids on the Slope, episode 11 is MONO LT ONLY on the JP track. This is not the typical "2CH MONO" method, where the stereo track has been mixed down into a single mono track and repeated in both channels - you have half the stereo mix on the Left track, while the Right track is dead silent. It just isn't there. The other 11 episodes appear to be fine, making this oddity all the more frustrating.

If this were a one time flub I... well, I'd still argue that whoever does Sentai Filmworks/Maiden Japan's authoring should potentially be drawn and quartered for something as obvious as not having a complete, functioning stereo track, but I'd inevitably shrug it off and remind myself that every genre friendly studio - FUNimation, Media Blasters, Discotek, Magnolia, Shout Factory, Dark Sky, you name it - have made honest mistakes at one point or another, and while major issues should be recalled and fixed, a single, minor fuck-up here and there is going to happen, and with sales in the toilet, they have even less incentive to replace them than they did a few years ago. I accept that, and can try to ignore it, so long as it's just that: An isolated mistake, not a constant string of poor quality control.



In short, I'd be more forgiving if TOKYO MAGNITUDE 8.0/東京マグニチュード8.0 didn't have the exact same problem on Episode 8.




And episode 12 of THE WORLD GOD ONLY KNOWS/神のみぞ知るセカイ. Yes, seriously. Three titles and counting.



And as for HORIZON IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE/境界線上のホライゾン, the problem is no less awful, it's just even more shocking that it even happened. The second half of episode 7 was only pre-rendered before encoding, meaning it shifts down to 360p, sub-DVD resolution. On the mother fucking 1080p Blu-ray. Have a PEEK if you don't believe me for some reason.

And for the record, no, none of these problems are on the standard definition DVD releases. They were solely authoring glitches on the BD end, and Sentai has consistently offered short, professional eMails basically saying "It is what it is, and it isn't getting fixed."

This is all ignoring the general shittiness of their 1080i products, which are slowly taking over the label's output. PENGUIN DRUM, BODACIOUS SPACE PIRATES, TOKYO MAGNITUDE 8.0, DREAM EATER MERRY, and KAMISAMA DOLLS are all 1080i60 encodes Stateside despite their JP equivalents being 1080p24. They're crappy 1080i encodes, too, with moderate to severe artifacting on consistent motion, which even Blu-ray.com's REVIEWS are incapable of avoiding (despite the fact that the reviewer gave the disc a 4 out of 5 for video quality). FATE/STAY NIGHT and CANAAN are both 1080i releases, though at least that's true in Japan as well; I can't really fault Sentai Filmworks for using what already exists, but I can certainly give them shit for using inferior 1080i broadcast materials when 1080p home video materials do exist. When this happens, you buy the JP Blu-rays and re-encode 1080p transfers in-house. If the contracts say you can only use the material you were handed and you're a stickler for details, then you only sign contracts that demand 1080p materials.  It's pretty goddamn straight forward.

There's also that mostly forgotten and never once screen-capped FIST OF THE NORTH STAR: LEGEND OF THE DARK KINGS set which is supposedly 1080p on disc 1 and 1080i on disc 2, and almost surely an SD upscale to boot; I bought the subtitled DVD set for a song, and thinking the show is pretty crap to start with I'm in no hurry to re-buy an expensive release for the sole purpose of seeing just how bad it really is. I may have to cover that hot wet mess eventually, if for no other reason that it's clear nobody else is ever going to.

There's also the PERSONA 4: THE ANIMATION Blu-ray, which is dub-only despite the DVD being a proper bilingual release. Obviously this is a licensor limitation - not a "glitch" in the traditional sense, but at that point, is a Blu-ray even worth releasing? They certainly skipped BD rights on my beloved QWASER OF STIGMATA, so it's not as if HD materials are a flat requirement... part of me is incredibly bitter that the greatest piece of fanservice-satire-overload in the history of the medium is only available on DVD, but then again, if this is how they treat their premium content perhaps it was all for the best? Is it better to shrug off a release entirely than have it and be forced to bitch about it for hours on end? Oh yeah, no BD for MARIA+HOLIC ALIVE was a kick in the dick, too, particularly when we all learned that the first season was rendered in HD as well and would have given Sentai Filmworks the perfect excuse to re-release the first half of the series on BD, too.




Keep in mind that the last two Sentai titles I bought - GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES and NINJA SCROLL - were perfectly fine, free of both authoring glitches or notable audio/video quality differences when compared to the super expensive Japanese imports. HIGHSCHOOL OF THE DEAD, one of their earliest releases, is a great release and I'm happy to have it on my shelf. Word is their just-released PATLABOR: EARLY DAYS OVA collection is similarly fine (though not owning a copy yet, I can't say one way or the other). And it's perhaps that inconsistency that's the most damning aspect of all; I simply refuse to pre-order anything from the splintered remnants of who I still think of as AD Vision, and going out of my way to support a company that so consistently shits the bed on their home video release as hard as these guys do isn't something I can convince myself is worth spending money on - not unless I know it's not a clusterfuck going in.

Shitty 1080i encodes already has me hesitant on both Bodacious Space Pirates and Penguin Drum, but the shows themselves are supposed to be so goddamn good I'm probably going to crack next time I see them on sale. Kids on the Slope and Tokyo Magnitude 8.0? No thanks, Sentai. Y'all can keep your shitty MONO LEFT tracks. Managing to create audio fuck-ups worse than Media Blasters wallowed in nearly 10 years ago is a clear violation of that line.

I don't want anyone reading this to flatly refuse to buy Sentai Filmworks/Maiden Japan titles, because when they don't fuck up their discs are just good as anything FUNimation puts out... I just want them to keep their eyes peeled on reviews, and know if they're supporting a major fuck-up or not before you throw $50 at a company that may or may not have earned it. Alternately, everything these guys are releasing on their streaming service THE ANIME NETWORK, and at least if the stream is fucked up you only paid $6.95 for a month of unlimited access. Just fit in 13 episodes a week and you'll have seen over $200 worth of problematic Blu-ray content for less than the cost of a Carl's Jr meal!

Full disclosure: I don't own Scream Factory's new Special Edition Blu-ray release of PHANTASM II. I've actually never seen the sequels to Phantasm, which I'd always hoped would fix itself by way of nice context-fueled special editions, but Scream Factory discs are rare in local shops and I'm slowly gravitating away from ordering everything now that 90% of what I want is readily available close by. In other words, this is something I've been eyeing for a while, but have yet to pull the trigger on.

With that in mind, I really can't comment on the disc proper, and as such you should take anything I have to say as the word of a casual observer looking at other people's examples. I can't say if the disc is a train wreck because I don't own it, and I want everyone who reads the following paragraphs to keep that fact in mind.

That said, CAPS-A-HOLIC has done a 1:1 comparison with the Anchor Bay UK DVD, and... I refuse to stamp this as a you-know-what without owning the disc myself to examine it in detail, but suffice to say, these comparisons are incredibly damning. If anything, the UK DVD caps appear to have more detail on close ups and less in the way of clipped highlights... and I have a theory as to why. Again, theory - don't own the disc, didn't make the comparison. Just calling this as I see it.

So, let's say you have a decent PAL Digibeta source. You can upscale it to 1080p using a smart-sharpening filter that warps edges to be slightly crisper, but you'll still have to crop off the edges to avoid vertical blanking info and any other distortions associated with SD video. Then, you can process the "HD" master using scratch repair filters on the upsampled master, which produces MORE SUBTLE ARTIFACTS than if you were to simply run an SD scratch repair filter. That said, it'll still SMOOTH OVER THE GRAIN SLIGHTLY, leaving slightly less detail than if you'd left well enough alone. You can tweak colors and contrast to your liking, though if you don't keep tabs on the levels you could end up with CLIPPED WHITES and COLOR CASTS that look... unnatural, is a nice way of putting it.

Not that this is an upscale of a PAL SD master. There's just... nothing about these comparisons especially suggesting that it's not. THIS SHOT is the absolute best I can come up with, and if that's as good as it gets and it is from a dated HD source, we may have another Re-Animator or Versus level master on our hands, a D5 tape so unimpressive that it's improvement over NTSC is marginal, at best.

Make of that whatever you like, I'm kind of done. Just pointing out these obvious weaknesses and letting everyone else make up their own minds.

Come to think of it, this reminds me of that Euro HD master for THE FOG that, despite wiping the floor with the piss poor R1 release, was clearly a PAL master converted to 1080p by less than ethical means. It's also worth noting that Scream Factory's parent company, Shout Factory, has released several Jackie Chan BD double features using crumby SD upscales provided by the film's distributors Fortune Star, so clearly they're "willing" to resort to upscales when that's what they're given.

Much as I want to give Cliff the benefit of the doubt on this one, there's just NO DEFENDING THIS CRAP as anything but an upscaled DVD master.

If you want to own Phantasm II, this is clearly the release to get - nothing else is even worth mentioning, even if this isn't an ideal presentation. That said, if you really want to throw money at something that might, potentially, further Don Coscarelli's zany career, go buy JOHN DIES AT THE END on Blu-ray instead. It's really fun!

UPDATE: According to Cliff MacMillan, head of Scream Factory (Shout Factory's cult-horror division), and I quote:


I want to believe him, and it's not as if Universal is well known for keeping high quality HD masters of its less-than-top tier catalog titles on hand, but... well, for reference, I thought that THEY LIVE was an "okay" transfer at best (and isn't even as nice as the Italian BD), and yet THIS is how dramatic an improvement it has over the old PAL DVD.

Further muddying the waters was a PM that "CMAC" sent to another forum member, which was reposted, and then quickly deleted from the thread afterward when asked if Shout Factory knowingly released NTSC upscales on Blu-ray for their recent batch of Jackie Chan double features:



I'll not call the man a liar, only point out that, if true, this film is sorely in need of a new HD telecine. At this rate, I might need to get my hands on the disc proper just to do some proper experiments...