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ganymedesclock · 1 year

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Hi, I've got a Hollow Knight question for you. How much do you think PK actively designed his small body, vs just wanting certain criteria and the rest just sorta happening? Also, how much do you think the anatomy resembles normal bug anatomy vs Wyrm anatomy vs entirely unique anatomy?

I think PK had full control over what he would become within the limits of physiology (so, he couldn't, say, have had his head fully detached from his body) but he didn't understand the ramifications very well until later.

PK, as far as we can tell, is an extremely detail-obsessive individual. He's not caught by surprise by the features of his creations, but he is often dangerously wrong about what this implies about their more ephemeral traits. Considering he is his own work, I think this applies to him.

So, he chose to become smaller- and probably lowballed it intentionally because he did not want to tower over others. (I'm a slightly boring person who doesn't think he minds being short, though his ego wouldn't be untouchable in that subject, the fact that he's "actually" godzilla-sized in origin and chose to leave that life voluntarily behind suggests that he doesn't exactly have hangups about needing to be taller)

He chose to redefine his bladed mouthparts as a sharpened crown, and to give himself a Face, that bugs would like to look at and find familiar. He chose to- at least in my interpretations of what lies under his cloak- give himself multiple flexible, dexterous graspers.

As far as anatomy goes, I'm going to share this older (warning for bug mandibles) art I did of a possible gijinka design, because that gets at about what I feel like his features would read as to mundane bug and beast.

Basically, he has some unusual features but a lot of those things are flattering or pretty from a certain angle; he has a very smooth, graceful gait (almost floating, without distinct strides) he has a very bright, shiny exoskeleton (literally shining) without blemishes or asymmetry, he has long horns- which are apparently a sought-after trait in Hallownest's society given the journal description of the Husk Hornhead. This is why his gijinka form as I drew it is, superficially at least, a handsome swishy fantasy elf-wizard-looking type. He is literally a piece of art sculpted by his own hands and his eye for aesthetics is not only obvious but pretty clearly lines up with what the average layperson considers beautiful- look at how nice the White Palace looks!

Granted, though, I think that he also exists deeply in the uncanny valley. We're not used to seeing people who are beautiful the way a ceramic doll might be, and these kinds of beauty removed from humanity are a common subject in horror for a reason.

And because I can't ever really separate my read on PK from a sense of compassion that this was a very miserable creature, this is where my personal read leans- he can stay on the "pretty, desirable" side of the uncanny, but only with effort and restricting his behaviors a lot. Hence me doing a gijinka take of him with a four-point mouth; imagine negotiating those hinges to make a sufficiently Nice, Human, Politically Polite smile. It'd be so difficult to manage, especially while speaking, that it'd be far more likely for him to do much what he's shown to do in canon- become a recluse that avoids people so the times you have to make a public appearance are a minimum and a few people are initiated to your circle where they get to see and deal with you all the time.

Part of this would even be rather simple and straightforwards- Hallownest is a setting where predator and prey dynamics coexist fully with sapience. There is a nonzero concern any stranger might eat you, and this probably factors into how warlike or predatory features are considered- size, claws and fangs. PK's mouthless plate of a face and seemingly smooth body as projected by his robes would seem doll-like in another sense- utterly bereft of predatory warning flags. His head-body proportions and sleek, unblemished appearance would invoke a child and we know the creatures of Hallownest care for their children by default- even the more brutal societies like Deepnest or the Mantis Lords.

But this utter lack of predation is an illusion. In reality, PK is not only a living organism actively feeding on worship and devotion, but the organism in question is a colossal entity whose true "face" is nothing but mouth and fangs, and a thickly armored body covered with spikes. Blades, and spikes, and methodical surgical torture are major motifs repeated throughout the palace and in other environments of PK's power. By implication, every part of him is a blade and him being easy on the eyes is the way that a parade sword can glitter so invitingly that any kid might want to pick it up, but if that parade sword is made with good steel and its twinkling gemstones real diamonds, it could still slice you to ribbons and probably won't seem so inviting afterwards.

A friend of mine @betterbemeta pointed out that my writings of him in Refuge For Resolve give him more than a passing resemblance to the figure of the King In Yellow, and I've always liked that one.

#Hollow Knight #The Pale King #readmore #mm been a while since I shrimp meta'd

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everlasting-rainfall · 1 year

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Hi just wanted to say ignore the haters there acting like d.cks, I find your ocs really interesting. What inspired you to create them ? I like Arabella sounds she sounds really cute I wonder how does her devil fruit work ?

Oakleigh already deserves a hug for having to deal with Judge ( aww Sora x Zeff~) , I wonder what made him love her ? If there do have kids would there like Sanji sibling ?

I already like Lyra already XD I wonder has Lyric ever tried to convince the Blackbeard pirates to show mercy or has she failed ? How do Lyra and Lyric react each other situation with one being pregnant and the other got a lot of husbands ?

I feel like Harmony and Apoo music playlist has some songs from the book of life film (Heaven knows your name , I’ve been praying🎶 For an example)

Aww hope we get more moments with Mabelle acting like a mother figure to Luffy and Uta 🥺

I really like all your ocs , I wonder will we see more of them in the future or maybe see new ocs ~

Hey there, friend! Thanks for sending in this ask about my OC’s as it makes me really happy to talk about them like it always puts a smile on my face! Unless it’s an angst scenario of course in which case I usually just cry…

But hey! Nothing wrong with crying especially if it makes you feel better afterwards! It’s always just good to have a good cry sometimes!

Anyways…

!-MINORS DO NOT INTERACT FOR ANY REASON-!

!-POTENTIAL TRIGGER WARNINGS-!

OC x Canon, Image of a Syringe, Images of a Hospital, X-Ray Imagery, Horror Images, Stalking, Kidnapping, Forced Marriage, Pregnancy, Death of a Loved One

!-POTENTIAL TRIGGER WARNINGS-!

!-MINORS DO NOT INTERACT FOR ANY REASON-!

So what inspires me to make these characters is personally private information that I will only disclose to friends as I don’t feel comfortable telling people what inspires me to create these characters but I can tell you the process of how I make them

So the idea for the character hits me in one of two ways and it’s through getting lost in my thoughts or thinking about random topics while I’m in the shower

I do some working, run it by another friend of mine whose more knowledgeable about One Piece then I am to see if it makes sense in terms of the OP world, design them in Gacha Club once I have an idea of what I want the character to look like, make jokes that give way to new character traits and development, read through a long list of names to pick one out, and boom! There’s a new character!

All in all though, I have about 20+ OC’s who are meant for being shipped with canon characters with the most recent one being an unnamed one that I have named Goth Bunny who is the S/O of Penguin and Shachi while one that I still need to design is one named Ember who doesn’t have anything going for her other than that she’s Ace and Sabo’s S/O and I wanna make her be related to water in some way

Anywho, I actually do have some Aesthetic Boards for these characters too which I will include after I have finished answering your questions!

Arabella was actually my first OC x Canon and believe it or not, she didn’t actually start off as a writer or even a One Piece character as she was just a woman that I designed one day and after I didn’t like how the Admirals original wife turned out, Arabella stepped up to the plate after a dumb scenario that I had a long time ago where her Devil Fruit went out of control and she started Godzilla Rampaging only for the Admirals to be dispatched to deal with her and them seeing that she’s just a normal lady when they knock her unconscious and she reverts back to normal

As for how her Devil Fruit works, Arabella’s Devil Fruit causes her to constantly have horns on the sides of her head, eyes that resemble that of a goats, and the tendency to grow wool around her neck like a scarf. Other than that, it acts like a typical Zoan Devil Fruit would.

Not too much special about it in all honesty besides the fact that she can have those parts even as a fully fledged human and the fact that she has a much stronger skull that’s meant for ramming into things

Oh! And she actually does have a Dad whose a canon character as well and if you’re familiar with One Piece Film Z then it’s actually Z himself, he had her with his wife when he was younger so the age difference between her and the Admirals isn’t too egregious

They actually didn’t know that her Dad was Z too until much later in life as they always assumed that she was another trainee until they married her and got her pregnant only for Z to come crashing through the entirety of Marineford by himself to fuck up the people that dared to knock up his daughter

Also if you’re wondering why Arabella didn’t invite him to her wedding, it was because she had lost contact with him a year after he had formed the Neo-Marines to the point where neither had any clue on how to contact the other

They had only just figured out how to talk to each other again when Z found out that she was pregnant and went on a Godzilla Style Rampage through Marineford sending Marines flying everywhere that he went

Z did eventually calm down and talked with Arabella for a long time before the two of them exchanged contact information and parted ways with Z promising to teach her Haki after she gives birth so she can properly get revenge on Kizaru if he starts being very, very annoying

I also did give Arabella a body type shape so if she did have a body type shape then it would actually be a Strawberry and Arabella prefers to walk with her hands clasped in front of her

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Yeah, I’m not gonna lie when I say that sometimes I feel sorry for Oakleigh as well especially considering that she’s married to Judge

What caused Judge to love Oakleigh wasn’t anything on her part as she wasn’t trying to make him fall in love with her, she was just trying to make sure that the King didn’t die from sadness by giving him the best therapy that she could about every week

It was all just talking about how Sora leaving him for a cook out in the East Blue was making him feel and things that he could potentially do in order to feel better that wasn’t stalking her or attempting to make plans to get her back

Things were going quite well but way back when Judge initially woke up after losing consciousness, he did mistake Oakleigh for Sora because he had never met her before and she looked somewhat close to her but turns out that it was just Oakleigh

During the therapy sessions, he started thinking about things more and more until he finally decided on something that could really truly help him which was to get down on one knee in front of her and propose to her, she did try to refuse at first but it’s Judge so he forced her to marry him

She was a bit of a replacement for Sora but don’t get Judge wrong as he does know that Oakleigh is not Sora to an extent but he’s lonely and misses his ex and Oakleigh looks like his ex so… That’s kind of how he wound up falling for her, it’s the fact that she looks like Sora and she was so kind to him…

There are scenarios actually where Zeff and Sora meet Oakleigh like a while after they get married because Sora and Judge agreed to visitation with the kids like one week with Sora then one week with Judge but Sanji never goes to Judge’s

Anyways I’m getting off topic but when they meet Oakleigh, sometimes they decide that they like her too and want to be able to marry her as well because she’s cute, she’s great with the kids especially Sanji, she’s caring, and she’s a fairly good cook on top of that

Oakleigh really can’t catch a break especially as I have a small headcanon that Sora is rather possessive like not to the level of a full blown Yandere but close so imagine walking in on your forced husband and his ex discussing how they want to split time with you

To answer your question about the children, it’s likely that if Oakleigh ever fell pregnant then I think that Judge might try to see if the kids belong to him or Zeff as if they’re Zeff’s then he’s going to let them be Zeff’s problem but if they belong to him then those babies will definitely turn out like Sanji’s brothers

However I can also see Judge being an incredibly overprotective partner when Oakleigh is pregnant as although he did let the same thing that Sora went through happen to Oakleigh, he’s overprotective in other ways

To give you an example, Oakleigh will be walking calmly along then turn around. There’s a soldier following her. She continues on her walk and turns around again. Now there’s two and this continues until she has like ten soldiers following her all trying to be inconspicuous but failing really badly

Also just like Arabella, she actually did have a previous concept that I’ve completely dropped for her in favor of her current one. Her original one that she was actually a creature that liked to make people fall in love with her so she could eat their love then leave them heartbroken but couldn’t leave because Judge wouldn’t let her and she could never get close enough or be alone long enough to eat his love but I dropped that in favor of her current self

——————————-

Lyra was actually a character that I completely pulled out of my ass when I first made her up as I had no inspiration for her and came up with it while I was designing her as she was an investigative reporter seeking out the truth behind recent disappearances only to be led to Thriller Bark. She eventually did evolve into a Mortician after I watched the Mortuary Assistant

Lyric also was different too as Lyra and her weren’t even related at first and originally Lyric was based off of the game Changed where she had this bag of bottled liquid that when poured on her would turn her into an animal/human hybrid that could help out with things but she could also only be turned back by sea water as it would wash off the liquid that turned her but I dropped that as it didn’t feel like it quite made sense with the One Piece world and eventually she became an Acrobat

To answer your question about if Lyric has ever been able to stop them from doing bad things, she can if it’s something small but these people burnt her circus to the ground leaving her as seemingly the only survivor just because she didn’t want to go with them so there’s not much that she can convince them to not do

Lyric is very strong and somewhat intimidating for a lot of them but at the end of the day, they’re much stronger than her and if she puts up too much of a fight then they can’t easily just lock her up until it’s over

To give you an example of things that she has been able to talk them out of versus things that she hasn’t. She has been able to talk them out of just killing one random person who insulted them, she can’t talk them out of pillaging an island

As for the showing mercy part, she might be able to depending on the situation but no matter what it is. If they’ve already started doing it then it’s very unlikely that she’ll be able to convince them and if she does then Teach usually makes her give them something in return like pleasing them in some way

And although Lyric does hate doing it, she tries not to care too much as long as they keep their end of the deal on showing mercy and she doesn’t wind up pregnant as although she loves kids, she doesn’t want to have any with them as at the end of the day, she is a prisoner

If Lyra and Lyric were to meet after Shiryu takes Absalom’s Devil Fruit then the two of them would talk for a bit, they’d be happy to see each other at first but then Lyra would reveal that she’s a single parent now

Lyric would feel so sorry for her and eventually when she gets details about Lyra’s ex-husband, she’s pissed as she’d excuse herself. Go straight to the Blackbeard Pirates with her head hung low, they’d try to ask what’s wrong with her but proceed to her calling everyone to one room and going on such a long rant about what they did that they’re all sitting on their knees in front of her

Don't try to stop her either as Teach tried to and she’s now holding him tightly by his ear basically turning him into her bitch for as long as she’s on this rant

Eventually though she’ll chill and it’s after Lyra came to find her when Lyric was gone too long, Lyra followed the shouting and found her chewing out the Blackbeard Pirates

They all expected Lyra to get it too but plot twist when Lyric let’s go and gets down onto her hands and knees in front of Lyra to beg for the woman’s forgiveness in what happened to Absalom

Lyra would be pissed and would show that rage strength isn’t just something that Lyric has as Lyra goes right up to Shiryu and beats him so bad that he’s in the hospital for like two days, she just didn’t kill him because she isn’t a murderer

Lyric would do her best to comfort Lyra after that but as for how Lyra would react to Lyric’s new life as the crew wife of the Blackbeard Pirates, she would actually feel sorry for Lyric like she knows that she can’t do anything for the Acrobat though because it’s the Blackbeard Pirates

She does try to give advice to Lyric though on things that she thinks would be useful for Lyric to escape though and even tries to help her figure out what would be the best island to run away to if Lyric ever did manage to escape

————————————

I have to say that I’ve actually never heard that song but it sounds like it will be good, I own the movie The Book of Life though so I’ll watch it the next time that I have time to kill

Here’s something about Harmony though, she actually isn’t biologically related to Lyric and Lyra as she was basically adopted by the two of them as their cousin and stuck with that story and where Harmony came from is incredibly chaotic but that’s a story for another day

As for music that I could see fitting Harmony and Apoo, I gotta say that I’m not entirely sure as I’ve never been too good at assigning songs to people but I do know that Harmony would dedicate some soft and quiet love songs to Apoo while he probably dedicates some more loud and funky sounding love songs to her that probably consist of rapping

Thing is about their music tastes as well is that if they were to ever have a child together then the child would inherit both of of their parents music styles meaning imagine either really soft and calm sounding rap that you can fall asleep to or a singer whose really loud with lyrics that would belong more in calmer style of music

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You’ll find out more about Mabelle later as there was an ask about her and I intend to speak more about her there

As for my other OC’s then I can list them all off right now with their partners!

Sleepyhead Estelle and Caesar Clown

The Snow Woman Talvi and Dalton

Infiltrator Thalassa and Magellan, Sadi-Chan, Domino

Investigative Reporter Honey and Big News Morgans

Time Traveller Paislee and Joyboy

IRL Girl Vanessa and Baccarat, Whitey Bay, Wanda, Hina

Clothing Designer Morticia and Law, X-Drake, Hawkins, Sanji

NSFW Star Nova and Oven

Travelling Selkie Lorna and Laskey

Community Leader Esther and Garling (DON’T LOOK HIM UP IF YOU DONT WANT MANGA SPOILERS)

Glass Artist Soleil and Cobra, Pell, Chaka

IRL Artist Ariel and Kalgara, Herb, Noland, Acorn (Noland’s Wife)

Something Something Water Ember and Sabo, Ace

Morticia’s Model Unnamed Goth Bunny and Penguin, Shachi

#the rain talks back #minors dni #yandere #one piece oc #🌺#read the trigger warnings #original character #one piece #yandere one piece #oc x canon #akainu sakazuki #kizaru borsalino #fujitora issho #aokiji kuzan #blackbeard pirates #thriller bark #scratchman apoo

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tyrantisterror · 3 years

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THE A.T.O.M. CREATE A KAIJU CONTEST 3-D!!!

YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE SAFE! YOU THOUGHT THAT THE TIME OF MONSTERS WAS AT AN END! BUT YOU WERE WRONG, FOR NOW YOU MUST WITNESS…

THE A.T.O.M. CREATE A KAIJU CONTEST 3-D!!!

That’s right, it’s back! Celebrating the publication of The Atomic Time of Monsters Volume 2: Tyrantis Roams the Earth! (which in turn completes The Ballad of Tyrantis arc for this series), I’m holding another monster design jam. The third of such jams, in fact!

Like the first A.T.O.M. Create a Kaiju Contest, the aim of this contest is to create kaiju that would fit within the setting of my big kaiju story series, The Atomic Time of Monsters. Think of it as me letting you into my sandbox to play with my toys for a bit, or like you’re being put in the director’s chair of a new ATOM-verse kaiju movie. That means your entry does have to fit into ATOM’s world, which in turn means that yes, there are limitations to your creativity here. But limitations can be good sometimes - they can make us explore options we wouldn’t consider when given completely free rein to do what we want!

(also you don’t have to make a three dimensional image or anything, the title’s just a pun on how the third movie in a monster movie franchise will often be a 3-D film)

Read below the cut to learn the rules and whatnot:

THE RULES:

1. You are limited to one entry per person. Work hard and make your entry count!

2. Your kaiju must have some sort of description of its physical appearance and its personality - you can submit a drawing or a written description (or both!) for the physical appearance depending on what you’re most comfortable with. Using the same template/format as my official ATOM Kaiju Files (https://horrorflora.com/monster-menageries/atom-kaiju-files/) isn’t required, but it was cool when people did it in the last contest, so feel free to do so this time too!

3. The kaiju you create must specifically be created for this contest - no repurposing characters you made for other, wildly different stories. This is not “trick TT into drawing/canonizing my main OC” time.

4. The kaiju must fit the setting and aesthetics of ATOM. I’ll explain this in more detail down below.

5. The kaiju should add something meaningful to the world of ATOM. The more unique and interesting your kaiju is, the more likely you will win the contest.

6. Don’t make your kaiju too dependent on pre-existing ATOM characters - no “Tyrantis’s long lost evil brother who’s the strongest kaiju in the world.” These should be to Tyrantis’s story what War of the Gargantuas is to Godzilla’s movies – heroes (well, monsters) of another story in the same world.

THE REWARDS:

I will make pencil sketches of the top 5 entries in the contest.

I will then make fully rendered illustrations (lineart, colors, & shading) of the top three entries.

The winning entry will be made into a model ala the ones I’ve been making for ATOM’s core 50 monsters, which can then be shipped to the person who created it (should they be able to cover the shipping costs). That’s right, your kaiju could be brought to life in THREE GLORIOUS TECHNICOLOR DIMENSIONS! (Hey, we worked the gag title in to the prizes!)

THE DEADLINE: All entries must be submitted by July 3rd, 2021. You can submit it here on tumblr, via the horror flora e-mail, or any other channel you know how to reach me through. I’m in a lot of places.

THE GUIDELINES (TO HELP YOUR ENTRY FIT THE RULES AND WIN):

The smartest thing you could do if you want to win this contest is familiarize yourself with the world of ATOM by, y’know, reading all the material I’ve published on the subject. In addition to the many kaiju files that are free to read on horrorflora.com, there are now TWO, count ‘em, TWO novels in this series for you to peruse, both of which establish many of the rules of the setting as well as its general themes and tone! You can get them in either paperback or e-book formatting (I’d recommend the former over the latter since I lack the technology to make a really nice ebook, but if money is an object, the kindle version is only $1). Here’s the links again if you missed them:

Vol. 1: Tyrantis Walks Among Us!

Vol. 2: Tyrantis Roams the Earth!

However, since I know reading a bunch of stuff is, y’know, not something everyone is inclined to do, I’ll jot some good bullet points for you in an attempt to outline how ATOM works in a brief, easily digested way:

ATOM is an homage to the monster fiction of the 1950’s and 60’s (i.e. the Atomic Age), and is set in those two decades, albeit an alternate universe version of them where, y’know, monsters and space aliens exist. If you aren’t familiar with the monster fiction I’m referring to, there will be some reference material provided at the end of this post along with some recommendations for further research.

Kaiju/giant monsters in ATOM work under very specific rules. There’s a full description of those rules at this link, but here’s the jist:

ATOM Kaiju are created created by the radiation of a mineral called Yamaneon, which naturally converts harmful radiation into its own unique energy. In natural circumstances, it takes hundreds of years of exposure to Yamaneon radiation for a creature to become fully transform into a kaiju (luckily, Yamaneon radiation slows the aging process while speeding up the healing process). However, an explosive burst of energy - such as the geothermal and kinetic energy released by an earthquake, or the blast of a nuclear weapon - can speed up the process, turning a normal animal into a kaiju within a matter of seconds.

All ATOM kaiju can heal grievous wounds within minutes or even seconds, are supernaturally strong and durable, and can convert harmful radiation to harmless energy that they then feed off of. Kaiju do not have an equivalent of old age, and can theoretically live forever (though their violent lifestyle means that few do).

ATOM Kaiju generally don’t need to eat unless they are severely injured, getting most of the energy they need from solar or geothermal radiation - but many still have instincts that drive them to seek out food from time to time.

Most ATOM kaiju stand roughly 100 feet tall (depending on their body shape), i.e. smaller than the original 1954 Godzilla. There are exceptions to this rule - younger kaiju can be smaller, while exceedingly old kaiju can be significantly larger, but these are rare.

In general, ATOM kaiju are significantly more intelligent and emotionally complex than people expect animals to be, though most are incapable of speech or complex tool use. There’s a reason ATOM Kaiju Files have a “personality” section.

Most ATOM Kaiju are tooth and claw fighters - ranged weapons are a rarity in this setting.

While the terrestrial monsters in ATOM look strange, they are intended to fit within the taxonomy of animals in reality - reptiles, mammals, fish, arthropods, molluscs, etc.

ATOM’s mesozoic era was dominated by a fictional clade of crocodile-relatives called retrosaurs, which are based on the outdated paleoart that one would find in the 1950’s/60’s fiction - i.e. when dinosaurs were viewed as trail dragging lizards instead of strange birds. You can learn more about retrosaurs here (https://horrorflora.com/2016/11/15/atom-kaiju-file-bonus-a-guide-to-retrosaurs/).

Kaiju appear on every continent in ATOM, but certain areas tend to be dominated by different types.

North America is mainly besieged by retrosaur kaiju and giant arthropods.

East Asia is technically also mainly plagued by retrosaurs and big arthropods, though they tend to look more fantastical and mythic - and, often, oddly well suited to being portrayed by a person wearing a monster suit.

Russia is beset by prehistoric monsters that seem to come from the Cenozoic, particularly the Ice Age.

Western Europe is plagued by creatures that vaguely resemble creatures from myth, if they were also prehistoric. Dragon-y lizards, fiery birds, etc.

Towards the mid-way point of ATOM’s timeline, earth is invaded by a coalition of aliens from different solar systems called the Beyonder Alliance, and as a result a bunch of alien monsters can be found on earth.

Mars and Venus both host (or hosted in Mars’s case) animal life. The surviving Martians colonized Venus, and sent some of their kaiju guardians to earth to help us fend off the Beyonders (who are responsible for the destruction of Mars’s ecosystem). Martian and Venusian kaiju have specific anatomical quirks, which you can see by looking at these kaiju files:

Venusians:

https://horrorflora.com/2017/01/03/atom-kaiju-file-29-karamtor/

Martians:

https://horrorflora.com/2017/01/17/atom-kaiju-file-39-kemlasulla/

https://horrorflora.com/2017/01/17/atom-kaiju-file-40-podritak/

https://horrorflora.com/2017/01/17/atom-kaiju-file-41-sombarvot/

https://horrorflora.com/2017/01/17/atom-kaiju-file-38-ullawdra/

Giant robots exist in ATOM, but are big, bulky, and incredibly expensive. Fancy beam weapons also exist, but are similarly clunky - there are no sleek, elegant machines in ATOM.

Since the fiction ATOM takes inspiration from was made at a time when interplanetary travel was only just beginning to be possible, its scope is significantly smaller than modern sci-fi. Alternate universes/dimensions were pretty uncommon because the idea of alien planets still held a lot of wonder to it. So, as a general rule, don’t try to go farther than the one galaxy.

ATOM is a setting for stories that are focused on humanity learning to coexist with monsters, rather than humanity destroying them. A certain level of sympathy is put into almost every creature of its canon, even the ones that are meant to be villains.

REFERENCE MATERIAL

Here is a playlist of 1950′s monster movie trailers.

Here is some reference material from various monster comics of the 50′s and 60′s.

Good movies to track down to understand ATOM’s inspiration and tone include Ghidorah the 3 Headed Monster, Son of Godzilla, Destroy All Monsters, Them!, The Black Scorpion, 20 Million Miles to Earth, Gamera, The Giant Claw, and The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra.

And here’s the intro cutscenes for all the different giant monsters in the PS2 videogame War of the Monsters.

#The Atomic Time of Monsters #The ATOM Create a Kaiju Contest 3D

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nealiios · 3 years

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The Supernatural 70s: Part I - Corruption of An Innocent

"We're mutants. There's something wrong with us, something very, very wrong with us. Something seriously wrong with us - we're soldiers writers."

-- with apologies to the screenwriter of "Stripes"

Dear reader, I have the darkest of revelations to make to you, a truth when fully and wholly disclosed shall most assuredly chill you to the bone, a tale that shall make you question all that you hold to be true and good and holy about my personal history. While you may have come in search of that narrative designer best known for his works of interactive high fantasy, you should know that he is also a crafter of a darker art, a scribbler of twisted tales filled with ghosts, and ghouls, and gargoyles. I am, dear innocent, a devotee of horrors! Mwahahahaha!

[cue thunderclap, lightning, pipe organ music]

Given the genre of writing for which most of you know me, I forgive you if you think of me principally as a fantasy writer. I don't object to that classification because I do enjoy mucking about with magic and dark woods and mysterious ancient civilizations. But if you are to truly know who I am as a writer, you must realize that the image I hold of myself is principally as a creator of weird tales.

To understand how and why I came to be drawn to this sub-genre of fantastic fiction, you first must understand that I come from peculiar folks. Maybe I don't have the Ipswich look, or I didn't grow up in a castle, but my pedigree for oddity has been there from the start. My mother was declared dead at birth by her doctor, and often heard voices calling to her in the dead of night that no one else could hear. Her mother would periodically ring us up to discuss events in our lives about which she couldn't possibly have known. My father's people still share ghost stories about a family homestead that burned down mysteriously in the 1960s. Even my older brother has outré memories about events he says cannot possibly be true, and as a kid was kicked off the Tulsa city bookmobile for attempting to check out books about UFOs, bigfoot, and ESP. It's fair to say I was doomed - or destined - for weirdness from the start.

If the above listed circumstances had not been enough, I grew up in an area where neighbors whispered stories about a horrifically deformed Bulldog Man who stalked kids who "parked" on the Old North Road near my house. The state in which I was raised was rife with legends of bigfoots, deer women, and devil men. Even in my childhood household there existed a pantheon of mythological entities invented explicitly to keep me in line. If I was a good boy, The Repairman would leave me little gifts of Hot Wheels cars or candy. If I was being terrible, however, my father would dress in a skeleton costume, rise from the basement and threaten to drag me down into everlasting hellfire (evidently there was a secret portal in our basement.) There were monsters, monsters EVERYWHERE I looked in my childhood world. Given that I was told as a fledgling writer to write what I knew, how could anyone have been surprised that the first stories I wrote were filled with the supernatural?

"The Nightmare" by John Henry Fuseli (1781)

My formative years during the late sixties and early seventies took place at a strange juncture in our American cultural history. At the same time that we were loudly proclaiming the supremacy of scientific thought because we'd landed men on the moon, we were also in the midst of a counter cultural explosion of interest in astrology, witchcraft, ghosts, extra sensory perception, and flying saucers. Occult-related books were flying off the shelves as sales surged by more than 100% between 1966 and 1969. Cultural historians would come to refer to this is as the "occult boom," and its aftershocks would impact popular cultural for decades to come.

My first contact with tales of the supernatural were innocuous, largely sanitized for consumption by children. I vividly remember watching Casper the Friendly Ghost and the Disney version of the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. I read to shreds numerous copies of both Where the Wild Things Are and Gus the Ghost. Likely the most important exposure for me was to the original Scooby Doo, Where Are You? cartoon which attempted to inoculate us from our fears of ghosts and aliens by convincing us that ultimately the monster was always just a bad man in a mask. (It's fascinating to me that modern incarnations of Scooby Doo seem to have completely lost this point and instead make all the monsters real.)

ABOVE: Although the original cartoon Scooby Doo, Where Are You? ran only for one season from 1969 to 1970, it remained in heavy reruns and syndication for decades. It is notable for having been a program that perfectly embodied the conflict between reason and superstition in popular culture, and was originally intended to provide children with critical thinking skills so they would reject the idea of monsters, ghosts, and the like. Ironically, modern takes on Scooby Doo have almost entirely subverted this idea and usually present the culprits of their mysteries as real monsters.

During that same time, television also introduced me to my first onscreen crush in the form of the beautiful and charming Samantha Stevens, a witch who struggles to not to use her powers while married to a frequently intolerant mortal advertising executive in Bewitched. The Munsters and The Addams Family gave me my first taste for "goth" living even before it would become all the rage in the dance clubs of the 1980s. Late night movies on TV would bring all the important horror classics of the past in my living room as Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, the Invisible Man, the Phantom of the Opera, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Godzilla all became childhood friends. Over time the darkened castles, creaking doors, foggy graveyards, howling wolves, and ever present witches and vampires became so engrained in my psyche that today they remain the "comfort viewing" to which I retreat when I'm sick or in need of other distractions from modern life.

ABOVE: Elizabeth Montgomery starred in Bewitched (1964 - 1972) as Samantha Stephens, a witch who married "mortal" advertising executive Darren Stephens (played for the first five seasons by actor Dick York). Inspired by movies like I Married a Witch (1942) and Bell, Book and Candle (1958), it was a long running series that explored the complex relationship dynamics between those who possess magic and those who don't. Social commentators have referred to it as an allegory both for mixed marriages and also about the challenges faced by minorities, homosexuals, cultural deviants, or generally creative folks in a non heterogeneous community. It was also one of the first American television programs to portray witches not as worshippers of Satan, but simply as a group of people ostracized for their culture and their supernatural skills.

Even before I began elementary school, there was one piece of must-see gothic horror programming that I went out of my way to catch every day. Dark Shadows aired at 3:30 p.m. on our local ABC affiliate in Tulsa, Oklahoma which usually allowed me to catch most of it if I ran home from school (or even more if my mom or brother picked me up.) In theory it was a soap opera, but the show featured a regular parade of supernatural characters and themes. The lead was a 175 year old vampire named Barnabas Collins (played by Johnathan Frid), and the show revolved around his timeless pursuit of his lost love, Josette. It was also a program that regularly dealt with reincarnation, precognition, werewolves, time travel, witchcraft, and other occult themes. Though it regularly provoked criticism from religious groups about its content, it ran from June of 1966 until it's final cancellation in April of 1971. (I would discover it in the early 1970s as it ran in syndication.) Dark Shadows would spin off two feature-length movies based on the original, a series of tie-in novels, an excellent reboot series in 1991 (starring Ben Cross as Barnabas), and a positively embarrassingly awful movie directed by Tim Burton in 1991.

ABOVE: Johnathan Frid starred as Barnabas Collins, one of the leading characters of the original Dark Shadows television series. The influence of the series cannot be understated. In many ways Dark Shadows paved the way for the inclusion of supernatural elements in other soap operas of the 1970s and the 1980s, and was largely responsible for the explosion of romance novels featuring supernatural themes over the same time period.

While Dark Shadows was a favorite early television program for me, another show would prove not only to be a borderline obsession, but also a major influence on my career as a storyteller. Night Gallery (1969-1973) was a weekly anthology television show from Rod Serling, better known as the creator and host of the original Twilight Zone. Like Twilight Zone before it, Night Gallery was a deep and complex commentary on the human condition, but unlike its predecessor the outcomes for the characters almost always skewed towards the horrific and the truly outré. In "The Painted Mirror," an antiques dealer uses a magic painting to trap an enemy in the prehistoric past. Jack Cassidy plots to use astral projection to kill his romantic rival in "The Last Laurel" but accidentally ends up killing himself. In "Eyes" a young Stephen Spielberg directs Joan Crawford in a story about an entitled rich woman who plots to take the sight of a poor man. Week after week it delivered some of the best-written horror television of the early 1970s.

In retrospect I find it surprising that I was allowed to watch Night Gallery at all. I was very young while it was airing, and some of the content was dark and often quite shocking for its time. Nevertheless, I was so attached to the show that I'd throw a literal temper tantrum if I missed a single, solitary episode. If our family needed to go somewhere on an evening that Night Gallery was scheduled, either my parents would either have to wait until after it had aired before we left, or they'd make arrangements in advance with whomever we were visiting to make sure it was okay that I could watch Night Gallery there. I was, in a word, a fanatic.

ABOVE: Every segment of Night Gallery was introduced by series creator Rod Serling standing before a painting created explicitly for the series. Director Guillermo del Toro credits Serling's series as being the most important and influential show on his own work, even more so than the more famous Twilight Zone.

#horror #70s #occult #supernatural #television #writing

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adultswim2021 · 3 years

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Welcome to Eltingville: “Bring Me the Head of Boba Fett” | February 26, 2002 - 4:00 AM | Special

Lots of personal baggage to unpack on this one, so please forgive what will surely read as a personal blog post:

Welcome to Eltingville was the first of Adult Swim’s “failed pilots” which aired as a special. It’s failed in the sense that it didn’t get picked up, presumably for being too expensive. It originally aired as a stealth premiere at 4:00AM on Monday night/Tuesday morning, I’m assuming to fulfill a contractual agreement. It had a “for real” advertised premiere on March 3rd, which is what you’ll find cited on various web sources.

It’s time I confess something here: I didn’t like this show the first time around. The early 2000s was a time when “nerd” culture was being clumsily embraced as a novelty. People suddenly started gravitating towards movies and shows about nerds, all usually portrayed in a cutesy and toothless way. Yes, I was too blinded by my own shunning of this trend to realize that this show was the antithesis of that. And yes, I was unfamiliar with the original comics that these were based on, which probably would have blown my mind if I was aware of them in the 90s. Hell, I would have shunned a Dan Pussey cartoon if I weren’t already in love with Dan Clowes comics.

Was it all overblown in my own head? Well, I can only come up with two examples to illustrate my distaste for “nerds stuff”, so yes, it probably was. First, Super Nerds, which was a 2000 pilot staring Patton Oswalt and Brian Posehn as two nerds who worked at a comic book store. I was sold on it by a friend as being the best sitcom he’d ever seen in his life. I also loved Patton Oswalt and Brian Posehn. But good lord, did I hate that show, a lot. The more mainstream example is the Comedy Central show Beat the Geeks, a trivia game show where normal people compete against experts (or geeks) in certain fields (usually popular culture related). The promos showed the geeks in question strutting around and ironically looking cool and triumphant. These promos were so profoundly unfunny to me that I found it insane and offensive when the whole “geek” angle seemed to hook other members of my family. “there’s this game show where guys have to compete... against GEEKS! haw haw!” I can still hear my dad’s voice echo in my head. I still hate it!

I also didn’t relate to traditionally geeky things, like superhero comics, science fiction/fantasy, etc. I hated all of that stuff, and I still mostly do (did I go through a multiple year phase in my early 30s where I tried to force myself to like super hero comics? Yes! I did! It didn’t particularly take). I am absolutely a comedy nerd, though, which is a much MUCH lonelier pursuit.

Hell, the comedy nerd isn’t even an archetype on TV shows; Freaks and Geeks came fairly close, but those guys also liked sci-fi and role-playing games and stuff. Square Pegs also had a comedy nerd character. There was that episode of Undeclared where Martin Starr is boring the rest of the cast by trying to explain that Freddy Got Fingered was an intelligent anti-comedy (the closest I’ve ever seen myself be portrayed on screen). All of these shows lasted one season, making the comedy nerd character the most potent poison since (NOTE TO SELF: google FAMOUS FICTIONAL POISONS, please pick a cool non-nerdy one [leave note-to-self in write-up if coming up with one is impossible {will come off as intentional meta-humor (everyone will love this)}]).

Welcome to Eltingville is about four friends who have created The Eltingville Comc Book, Science-Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Role-Playing Club. They’ve presumably been together for a long time when this episode starts, and we see the dynamics of the club right away, the main thing being the constant petty bickering that quickly becomes violent and destructive. They’re all gigantic jerks who presumably only hang with each other because nobody else will. The main conflict of this show has to do with Bill, the Stan of the group, and Josh, the Cartman, who eventually come to blows over a rare Boba Fett doll-- I mean, figure. The first half of the show is a pretty good introduction to the would-be-series, with the guys playing a D&D style role-playing game and then getting into a full-fledged fist-fight over a VHS compilation of nude scenes that turns out to be a recording of the Hair Bear Bunch. The second half is an adaptation of the comic story “Bring Me The Head of Boba Fett”. Had I thought of it I might have read the entire run of Eltingville Club comics before reviewing this. Unfortunately it was a bit of an afterthought so I just read the first two stories, including the Boba Fett one. For the record, I own the Eltingville book, and definitely read and loved the two-issue series that serves as the ending of the Eltingville comics. It’s all those comics in the middle I still need to get to.

The show is very funny and it looks beautiful. According to the few interviews that I’ve found regarding the show (including a page of text found in the Eltingville book, which precedes a section showing off some of the character design sheets), there really wasn’t much reason given for the show not getting picked up. The show definitely looked better than anything else on Adult Swim, so the whole “too expensive” thing seems like as good an assumption as any. Apparently Dorkin spread himself too thin working on this, attempting to design/draw every little thing seen on screen. I actually wondered that while watching the show, because his art style is faithfully preserved here, which is great! The episode ends the same way the comic story does, with Bill & Josh in a trivia-off, competing over the buying rights for a 12 inch Boba Fett action figure at their local comic shop. With every rewatch of this show I confront one basic thing about myself, and it’s how much of the trivia I’ve picked up since the last rewatch. Bill & Josh’s trivia-off is a flurry of questions regarding all kinds of geek garbage, and the few years between viewings of this results in me knowing a few more answers. But, I have the internet, and can usually get hold of a movie or TV show or comic book almost instantly. It’s important to not lose sight that these kids (especially in the comics) are either high-school or college-aged and they learned all of this shit in an era when the internet wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is today. The original comic is set firmly in 1994, and when there’s a dispute over a question Josh runs home to get a large Godzilla reference book to prove that he’s correct. This changed in the pilot to Josh losing on a technicality with a slip-of-the-tongue; attributing a famous catchphrase to a fellow club-member who had adopted it for himself (the comic actually SEEMS to set this up, but doesn’t go in that direction at all, which is weird when you read it AFTER watching this special. I think that means the cartoon improved on that idea).

Wikipedia makes no mention of this stealth broadcast. It would SEEM to make more sense that it aired Monday morning following late night Sunday, but Adult Swim ended at 1AM back in these days, making early Monday morning still technically “out of bounds”. In fact, I very nearly “corrected” the air date to reflect this, but a quick google search for “Welcome to Eltingville” + “4AM” yielded this message board thread where we can see in real time that early Tuesday morning is indeed correct. So, if you’re ever arguing over a 12 inch Boba Fett feel free to uses this trivia in your trivia off.

#adult swim #welcome to eltingville #adultswim2021

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ms-rampage · 3 years

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The New Trainee

Summary: Paige, Kate and all the other hunters show Felix how to kill monsters. Monster Hunting 101.

Word count: 1.7k

Warnings: Some language

Note: OC Felix Miller belongs to @the-chaos-siblings (also requested by him)

“Okay so the monster you saw us killed. That was a Wendigo, they’re pretty much humans that resorted to cannibalism, and turned into monsters” Paige tells Felix.

After he witnessed a Wendigo, and saw how they killed it. Paige and Kate along with everyone that lives on the compound showed Felix how to hunt, and kill monsters.

“Humanoids that are tall and pale. A huge part of Native American mythology” Kate adds.

“So fire and silver bullets kill them?” he asks.

Both sisters nod, “Yep, they’re usually in groups, but they’re more likely to be by themselves” Paige tells him.

Her husband Kenneth, along with their hunters friends/family Adrian, Cody, Mark, Martin, Nate and their mother Mandy walk into the living room.

“That Wendigo was living by itself, but I’m sure there’s more lurking out there in the woods” he tells them.

“So what other monsters exist?” Felix asks, “Do vampires exist?! Werewolves? Demons?! The loch ness monster?!”.

“Yes, yes, yes, yes and maybe” Paige answers, “Unless it's freakin' Godzilla, it real!”.

There were some “animal” attacks in the wood areas of Hope County, Montana, and everyone including forest rangers have concluded them as either bear, or cougar attacks, but the local supernatural hunters say differently. Because after Wendigo’s attack they leave nothing behind, and the campsite had some blood evidence, but no bodies of campers. The site was “too clean” for the Cult to have kidnapped any innocent “sinners”.

“So I kinda know how to kill vampires” he tells them, but he has an unsure tone in his voice, “A wooden stake to the heart, holy water, sunlight and garlic”.

They all exchange looks, knowing that’s how you kill them in movies, and it's a huge misconception.

Kate awkwardly clears her throat, “Well umm, Felix, that’s actually a huge misconception. We all know in movies and tv shows. Killing vampires with a wooden stake or repelling them with garlic is actually false”.

He looks at her confused, “Then how do you kill them?”.

“Decapitation” Kenneth tells him, “You chop off its head, and that’s it”.

Kate takes a seat next to him, “So we’re gonna start off with vampires, and how to kill them, and how they originated”.

Paige clears her throat, giving him a lesson in Monster Hunting 101, “So as you may know, vampires live forever. Never age. Up until you give them a nice clean head cut. Vampires originate from the Alpha vampire, the very first of the kind. Progenitor of vamps. Killing them is easy, decapitation, but those bastards are fucking strong and fast. Sneaking little bastards”.

“You can “cure” a vampire” Cody tells him, “Dead man’s blood. The blood of a dead person. It sedates them”.

“It doesn’t really cure them, it just makes them weak, and causes them pain without actually killing them” Ken adds.

“Next!” Paige exclaims, “Demons! Corrupted human souls!. Twisted, perverted evil spirits! Ghosts with an ego!”.

“Abominations” Adrian mutters before taking a sip of his whiskey.

“There are many, different types of demons” Kate tells him, “There are the typical, everyday black eyed demons. Then there’s red eyed demons, white eyed demons, and yellow eyed demons. Princes of Hell, Knights of Hell. Crossroad demons. It’s all a goddamn hierarchy!!”.

“Basically demons are human souls that were sent to Hell for whatever reason, and were left in the fiery pit to be tortured until there is no humanity left in them” Mandy tells Felix, “Turning them into demons. Direct opposites of angels”.

“Killing them is very easy, depending on who and what type you’re dealing with. Holy water, salt and iron. Holy fire, hex bags and exorcism” Kenneth explains, “Are all all you need to deal with those bastards”.

“A Devil's trap” Nate tells him, “Is what you need to trap a demon. It imprisons, binds and overpowers them. Most demons are unable to cross a salt line, but it can be used to harm them”.

Felix is trying to process all this information, not even 10 minutes into “Monster Hunting 101” and he already feels confident on killing monsters.

"Okay I'm starting to feel confident in this!" he tells them, "Where do find these monsters?!?".

“You may feel confident now, but these evil sons of bitches? They’re the worst!” Adrian says, before taking another sip of his whiskey, and filling his glass up again, "They're everywhere! Any small town. Like Hope County for example". He takes another hit of the alcohol, drinking it like water.

“Hey, hey cowboy shit, easy on the whiskey” Paige tells him, "Drink water for once!". He gives her a mocking look before drinking again.

“Anyway! Werewolves are pretty simple to kill, silver bullets” Kate says loudly “Now ghosts are also very easy. They hate salt, and iron. If you want an evil ghost/spirit out of your house. You find the bones of the person, salt em and burn em”.

“Now if the person was cremated, you have to find something they love, something they held dearly to, and you destroy it” she adds.

“We’re just teaching you the basics on killing monsters because there’s a lot of information on this crap” Paige tells him.

“Okay so how did all of you get into this stuff??” Felix asks them, “How did you all discover these creatures??”.

All the hunters exchange looks, “It’s a very long story, but to summarize our story. Our family has been a part of this whole game for 5 generations” the eldest Winchester explains to him.

“My family’s been doing this for 3 generation” Cody explains to him, “I’ve been hunting monsters since I was 5 years old”.

“My family’s been loyal members of the Men of Letters” Martin tells him, “They do the same thing, track and hunt down monsters”.

“Well in your case it's British Men of Letters” Kate tells him.

“Pretty much all of us come from 3-5 generations of monster hunters” Mandy explains to him.

After getting to know everyone in the household, and now having the acknowledgement on hunting monsters. but Felix knows he’s gonna have to learn a lot from these people, and get used to the special weapons they use to kill these creatures. Learn how to speak, and read Latin and Enochian.

“Pretty much Halloween will be an everyday thing for you” Kenneth tells him, “Our lives are a horror movie”.

With that all said, Felix has one hell of a journey into this life ahead of him.

“Actually for great practice, we actually summoned a demon” Paige tells them, everyone looks over at her.

“You did what??” her husband asks her, “You summoned a demon?? When we have our toddler and infant kids in the house?!?”.

“Yeah but it’s fine. I have him trapped in the bunker. In the torture chamber” she tells them.

Kenneth was always strict when it came to summon monsters in the house for training, or for getting information.

They go down to the bunker, into the chamber where they keep monsters and interrogate them.

“Before I open the door Felix” Paige turns to him, “No, you can’t fuck it because its an evil entity”.

He gives her a bummed out expression, “Then what has all this training been about??”.

“Killing monsters” Kenneth answers. Patting his shoulder.

She opens the loud metal door, and they see a man tied to a chair, inside a devil’s trap.

He lifts his head, with a smug smile on his face. “Well hello there red” he says to Paige with a teasing and cocky tone in his voice.

“Shut up demon trash” she responds, throwing holy water in his face, making it burn.

He growls in pain and also in annoyance. “Stupid human!”.

“She said shut up!!” Kenneth orders him, throwing holy water in his face again.

Paige gets into the killing demons lesson. “Okay, so this thing on the floor is a devil’s trap. If the trap is broken, then this fucker right here will smite all of us”.

“I will boil your flesh!” the demon growls at her, his eyes going black.

“Anyway!” she says loudly, ignoring him and his threats, “There are many ways to torture demons. Like for example throwing holy water in their faces. It burns them, and they can’t cross a salt line”.

Kenneth goes to a table on the other side of the chamber, and brings over a variety of weapons, setting them down on a table next to his wife.

“Demons also hate iron. Like holy water it burns them” she continues.

Kenneth hands Felix a knife that can kill demons. A knife with a wooden handle, and a sharp blade. It looks like an ordinary hunting knife, but it can do great damage to demons.

The blade can’t kill all demons, it can’t kill Knights of Hell, and Princes of Hell. Like Abaddon, Alistair, Samhain and Lilith.

“Now what you’re holding is an Ancient Demon-Killing Knife of the Kurds” Kenneth tells Felix.

“Or, you can just call it a demon killing knife” Paige corrects him, taking less time on saying the name, "Or just simply a demon knife".

“Ohh I see. He’s the new trainee!” the demon mutters, “How cute!!”.

“Demons are cocky little bastards” Kate tells them, leaning against the chamber's doorway.

“Oh Katie how ya doing?!” he asks, eyes blackened “I heard about your little boy toy Johnny Seed getting possessed by Saleos”.

She scoffs, rolling her eyes “Yeah and what happened to Saleos afterwards?? He got casted out and sent back to Hell. He knew he fucked up when Lucifer punished his ass".

“So you all do this for a living??” Felix asks them, "Do you ever tell people about this sort of stuff??"

“Yep! And nope because people tend to freak out if they were to ever find out about this stuff” Paige answers, “And now we’re showing you how to kill evil sons of bitches”.

“So take the knife and stab douchebag” Ken tells him, “Stab him right in the chest, or stomach. Wherever you’d like”.

The demon starts to laugh, “He doesn’t have the guts to kill me!. He doesn’t-”. Getting cut off by Felix without hesitating, stabs the demon in his abdomen, doing a knife trick before stabbing him. Making the redish orange light come out of his eyes, mouth and the stab wound. They all look at him like proud parents.

“Well shit” Paige chuckles, with a smile on her face.

“I didn’t think you were gonna stab him” Ken tells him.

“I think he’s ready for a real hunt” Kate tells them.

#my writings #oc: paige winchester #oc: kate winchester #oc: kenneth smith #oc: mandy winchester #oc: adrian wray #oc: mark massie #oc: nate massie #oc: cody reynolds #oc: martin quinn #oc: felix miller #writers on tumblr

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siobhanreviewsmovies · 5 years

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Siobhan Reviews Movies: the 2019 Re-review

we may be a month and a half into 2020, and maybe at the end of this cinematic year I’ll actually do this on new years. But anyway. It’s very obvious when you read a few of the reviews that my rating system is based on how I’m feeling about the movie as I sit through the credits. Because that’s when I write the reviews. But my dad gave me an idea yesterday - to rank all of the movies against each other, to come up with a better rating system. So here goes, I guess.

29: Dora and the Lost City of Gold

I saw this with my friend for my birthday, which was a mistake, but in our defense, there actually wasn’t anything else on, and it’s a tradition. The big problem was that we weren’t the target audience, but then, we couldn’t work out who the target audience actually was.

Original Score: 4/10 New Score: Also 4/10. (not actually bad enough to beat the lowest score on here, transformers 5, the one with the knights of the round table story line)

28: Alita: Battle Angel

I saw it twice, and I regretted it both times. I regretted it so much the second time that I actually downgraded my rating. It was that bad.And now, I’m going to downgrade the rating again.

First Score: 6/10 (What was I thinking?) Second Score: 5/10 New Score: 4/10

27: Dumbo

I don’t even really know why I went to see Dumbo. I’ve never been a Disney fan. I don’t even think I’ve seen the original Dumbo. It was a cg horror-show, and not in the fun way. Sometimes you should just leave movies as the original 2D animation.

Original Score: 6/10 New Score: 4/10

26: Maleficent: Mistress of Evil

Again with the disney movies. I actually enjoyed the maleficent movie. it was nice. But the second? it was weird and unnecessary. The only redeeming feature was Michelle Pfieffer.

Original Score: 6/10 New Score: 5/10 (I mean, it was pretty, so it had that going for it)

25: It Chapter 2

I’ve never been that much of a Steven King fan. But some of his movies are decent. It Chapter 2 was decent. But it was weird. I kinda like my horrors on the non-alien-clown-side of weird, thanks.

Original Score: 5.5/10 New Score: 5/10

24: Fast and Furious: Hobbs and Shaw

I mean, they should really stop with the fast and furious films. They really should. It was enjoyable, as long as you suspended your disbelief at EVERY SINGLE PART OF THE MOVIE. They’ve decided to go straight into actual scifi, with no reason why.

Original Score: 5/10 New Score: 5/10

23: Pet Sematary

You know what I said about Steven King movies? Same deal, but at least Pet Sematary was coherent. To an extent. It still had that weird, second story-line that wasn’t resolved.

Original Score: 7/10 New Score: 5.5/10

22: Avengers Endgame

I gave it a high score on the day, but it wasn’t that great. It was... a big screen spectacle where they didn’t actually put that much effort into making it make sense. which was sad. But anyway, now I’m only going to watch Thor movies. I like Thor movies.

Original Score: 8/10 New Score: 6/10

21: Aladdin

It was really pretty, and really lovely. Was it an outstanding movie? nah.

Original Score: 8/10 New Score: 6/10

20: How to Train Your Dragon 3

It really bugged me that the light fury was feminised when literally none of the other dragons were. It was like “how do we show that this character is a love interest and not just another character?” But other than that, it was a decent movie.

Original Score: 7/10 New Score: 6.5/10

19: Rocketman

I think, in my head, I was trying to compare Rocketman to Bohemian Rhapsody the whole movie. I tried not to, but alas, sometimes it’s difficult not to compare similar movies. Anyway I liked it, but I felt weird watching a biopic about someone who helped make it. I can’t really explain it.

Original Score: 6.5/10 New Score: 6.5/10

18: Godzilla: King of Monsters

It was a monster movie. It was pretty. There’s not actually much to say besides that.

Original score: 7/10 New Score: 6.5/10

17: Spider-Man: Far From Home

Look, it was pretty enjoyable, and I really liked Jake Gyllanhal as Mysterio

Original Score: 7.5/10 New Score: 7/10

16: Charlies Angels

The new Charlie’s Angels was fun. it wasn’t necessarily well written, but it had the same appeal as a fast and furious movie. It was action packed, it was cheesy, it was fun. I’m looking forward to more movies like it.

Original Score: 8/10 New Score: 7.5/10

15: MIB International

It was silly, it was ridiculous, it had aliens. MIB International was everything I wanted.

Original Score: 8/10 New Score: 7.5/10

14: Hellboy

I know I’m supposed to not be comparing movies to other movies, but I was hard pressed not comparing the new Hellboy to Guillermo Del Toro’s early 2000s movies. Which I love dearly. It was violent and gruesome, and sat about even with the old ones, but for different reasons.

Original Score: 8/10 New Score: 8/10

13: Black Christmas

I’ll always watch a movie that frames the american college sorority/fraternity system as a cult. Especially if it has aesthetic.

Original Score: 7/10 New Score: 8/10

12: John Wick 3

John Wick 3 was funny. And it was pretty. What more do you need from a hyper-violent action movie?

Original Score: 8/10 New Score: 8/10

11: Yesterday

Yesterday was a really lovely movie. it was a beautiful feelgood movie, but not in the lame way.

Original Score: 8.5/10 New Score: 8.5/10

10: Detective Pikachu

I re-watched detective pikachu today. Man I love that movie. It’s sweet and funny.

Original Score: 8.5/10 New Score: 8.5/10

9: Captain Marvel

Despite how much I’m starting to dislike marvel, I really did like Captain Marvel. Probably because, if you ignored the links they put in to prove that it’s part of a franchise, it could actually stand alone.

Original Score: 10/10 New Score: 8.5/10

8: The Lego Movie 2

YOu know when movies self reference, or reference other movies, and it’s super annoying? The Lego Movie 2 did those things, but in a not annoying way. It a “this is really stupid but in an enjoyably way” kind of way.

Original Score: 10/10 New Score: 8.5/10

7: Zombieland 2: Double Tap

So it was a shameless cash in on a very fun movie, but that didn’t make it less enjoyable.

Original Score: 9/10 New Score: 8.5/10

6: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

I’ve heard that Scary Stories wasn’t actually super well received, but I really enjoyed it. It had everything in it that I wanted to see, which is really all I need from a movie.

Original Score: 10/10

New Score: 9/10 (Okay, so it does need to go down just a little bit, since it’s number 6 on the list.)

5: Knives Out

In a year of sequels and franchises, Knives out was a refreshingly original movie. A whodunnit where you thought you knew who the killer was for 70% of the movie. With interesting characters who all got what they deserved. It was awesome.

Original Score: 8/10 New Score: 9/10

4: JoJo Rabbit

I don’t watch war movies, as a rule. JoJo Rabbit is an exception. And a brilliant one. They managed to make light of very, very dark subjects,but not in a way that trivialised any of them. Nothing felt trivial in JoJo Rabbit, despite the comedic take. It was beautifully done.

Original Score: 9/10 New Score: 9.5/10

3: Happy Death Day 2 U

The perfect sequel to the perfect groundhog-day-slasher-flick. and I say that with all the love in my heart. I’ve watched Happy Death Day and its sequel so many times. They just makes me so happy.

Original Score: 9/10 New Score: 9.5/10

2: Us

Us was my number one movie of the year until Ready or Not came along in all its slasher flick glory. It ticked all of the boxes: compelling story, beautiful cinematography, and outstanding acting. It deserves every award, if only they’d give the big awards to genre films, which they don’t, for some reason.

Original Score: 10/10 New Score: 10/10 (even if it’s not my favourite movie of the year, it’s my second favourite still)

1: Ready or Not

Genuinely the most fun movie I saw this year. The aesthetics were great, the action was amazing, and the story line was coherent. I was laughing with impressed glee the entire movie.

Original Score: 10/10

New Score: 10/10

#Siobhan Reviews Movies #2019 #movie reviews #this took way too much of my afternoon #but that's alright #it was worth it

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doll-in-the-walls · 6 years

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Horror Movie Reviews

This is a redo of my post on my main, minus the gifs that way I can make it as long as I want. That being said, this post gets long. Not in any order really though towards the end it’s in order of me watching or remembering movies I’ve seen.

Keep in mind: These are just my personal opinions/reviews.

Rating Key - Pumpkins

🎃🔶🔶🔶🔶 - HATED IT

🎃🎃🔶🔶🔶 - Really didn’t like it but it wasn’t that horrible

🎃🎃🎃🔶🔶 - It was decent. Neutral. No strong opinion.

🎃🎃🎃🎃🔶 - Really liked it but probably wouldn’t watch it again.

🎃🎃🎃🎃🎃 - LOVED IT. 10/10. Would watch again. (Probably already have)

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Halloween (1978)

🎃🎃🎃🔶🔶 3/5 Pumpkins

It was very slow to me. Didn’t seem to really get going until the last 10-20 minutes. I don’t like movies that do ADR honestly but it’s to be expected from older movies. It was a nice start to the series. Don’t hate it. Ending definitely worked to make me watch the next one.

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Halloween II (1981)

🎃🎃🎃🎃🔶 (4/5 Pumpkins)

Not sure why but I liked this one better even though I didn’t get answers to most of my questions. More action, some VERY nice camera shots (in my opinion) and cool lil moments that make you gasp.

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Halloween The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)

🎃🎃🔶🔶🔶 (2/5 Pumpkins)

I left with even more questions and very few answers… Looks much better effects/fake wound wise though.

I was super happy to see Paul Rudd. Nice surprise, I didn’t know he was in it.

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Freddy vs Jason (2003)

🎃🎃🎃🎃🔶

Very enjoyable to watch. (I of course was rooting for Jason the whole time. Just not a fan of Freddy). Didn’t need to watch either original movie/series to understand the two. (I’ve only seen parts of Nightmare on Elm Street, and honestly never watched Friday the 13th.)

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The Boy (2016)

🎃🎃🎃🎃🎃 (5/5 Pumpkins)

I LOVE Brahms and CAN’T WAIT for the sequel. Movie kept me guessing and shocked me at the end (I was pleasantly shocked). The scares weren’t too in your face and the movie kept me interested the whole time. Definitely going to watch again.

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House of Wax (2005)

🎃🎃🎃🎃🎃 (5/5 Pumpkins)

Loved it. I’ve already watched multiple times. I feel so bad for Vincent (pretty much any mask man from horror movies I seem to love. Idk why). Loved the effects and set/props (wax stuff obviously lol). Never really liked the opening scenes though, I’d rather we get right to the House of Wax but understand it’s necessary.

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Child’s Play/ Chucky Movies [1-6] (1988-2013)

🎃🎃🎃🎃🎃 (5/5 Pumpkins)

(I’m going to do each one at some point so grouping these all together just for now).

I’ve rewatched these so much. I find 4 (Bride of Chucky) and 5 (Seed of Chucky) more funny than scary honestly.

Though no idea what they were thinking after that, the one after Seed is no good in my opinion. They should have ended it after Seed. BUT (See below)

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Cult of Chucky (2017)

🎃🎃🎃🎃🔶 (4/5 Pumpkins)

Watched this only cause it was on Netflix and I gotta say it wasn’t that bad. I actually loved the ending though I’m usually one for happy endings. Probably wouldn’t watch it again but it was better than the one before

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The Lost Boys (1987)

🎃🎃🎃🎃🎃 (5/5 Pumpkins)

Love it so much I have it on DVD. Watched it as a kid and never found it too scary but it that’s just cause I fell in love with the characters.... Love Kiefer Sutherland. Didn’t care for any of the sequels.

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Friday the 13th (1980)

🎃🎃🔶🔶🔶 (2/5 Pumpkins)

It’s one of those that was probably super scary at the time it came out. I was between 2-3 Pumpkins for the rating. 1) I knew who the killer was. Hard to avoid spoilers when the movie came out in the 80s 2) I could figure out who survived 3) I like the acting by “Alice” but “Marcy” and “Annie” (omfg).... don’t get me started on Annie.

I am however excited to see the next one. Gimmie some Jason.

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Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)

🎃🎃🎃🎃🔶 (4/5 Pumpkins)

Liked it much better than the first. Acting was better. I like how this (like Halloween II) basically showed the ending of the first movie as a reminder (though I didn’t like that it was shown as a nightmare Alice had) And I had a few issues. 1) MUFFIN 2) WHERE’S PAUL? (What was real? What was a dream?)

I also have played the Friday The 13th The Game and it was cool to see one of the maps and basically one of the challenges kill for kill. I didn’t know the challenges were based off the movies, I knew the maps were.

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Friday the 13th - Part III (1982)

🎃🎃🎃🎃🔶 (4/5 Pumpkins)

I liked this one but was left with questions that I don’t know if I missed the answer or what.

Idk how I feel about them changing Jason’s face. Part 2 his face was half deformed (and he had hair!) And now suddenly it’s his whole face and he’s bald. (which, don’t get me wrong, I don’t care what he looks like. I’m just confused as to why they changed it.)

Again cool to see a place the game has as a map (I knew what rooms were what lol) and again how certain people died. And now that kill in the barn (in game not movie) makes sense to be called a revenge kill.

Can’t wait to watch the next one.

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Friday the 13th The Final Chapter (1984)

🎃🎃🎃🎃🔶 (4/5 Pumpkins)

First off…. Yay tiny Cory Feldman. Second … WHAT THE WHAT?! So I liked this one and only had a few problems with it. Namely.. I thought Jason only killed people who we teens/“being bad”/on his land. The family of three had to have been there during the 3rd movie, it was only like a day after the end of that one. I think he shouldn’t have killed the only blonde mom (maybe he doesn’t trust anyone who looks like his mom anymore). And the kid did nothing

WHICH BRINGS ME TO TOMMY. (Who I didn’t know was a kid in the movies…) Why and how did him making himself look like a young Jason work? A simple “he moved” would have assured his sister he wasn’t going insane. And also, what did Jason possess him at the end?? (Or was it just to show he’d grow up to like hacking people?)

And my last problem was… Why did the “peace” girl have to die?! She wasn’t doing anything!

Also … Trish… Why didn’t you just jump over that body…you did going back. Anyway I liked it. (XD)

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Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The beginning (2006)

🎃🎃🎃🎃🔶 (4/5 Pumpkins)

Well right off the bat I want to hug Thomas and never let go. (I also want to maim everyone who insults him and calls him the R word. I really HATE that word). Honestly didn’t know about the whole cannibal aspect to the movie(s) I just knew about the face wearing. “Hoyt” gave me the fucking creeps but I did like how he defended Thomas in the beginning. I still have to watch the movie that came before this and the originals (Where his name isn’t Thomas apparently. I like it as Thomas) but Thomas has been added to the list of Slashers I like.

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Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2

🎃🎃🎃🔶🔶 (3/5 Pumpkins)

This one was meant to be a dark comedy, which I can see how but yikes...

I watched this one before the first one just because I heard that he ends up liking a girl in it and I love Bubba so I wanted to see that. Now I know where the “Wiggles” gif comes from. I find him so adorable even though he makes the girl wear a face… I like him a bit better than the one in the first movie only cause we see more of him not just chasing someone. I’m a sucker for anything even slightly romantic.

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Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

🎃🎃 🔶 🔶 🔶(2/5 Pumpkins)

I honestly started it and stopped it so much just cause I was bored... I kinda knew what happened so maybe that had something to do with it but for most of the movies I knew what was gonna happen, this one just kept loosing me anyways.

One of those movies that makes you wanna scream at the victims for how stupid they were. Who goes up to a house and after not getting a response the first five or so times GOES INTO THE HOUSE. That’s trespassing and STUPID.

I really both loved and hated the way Sally screamed the ENTIRE time she ran. It really made her sound actually terrified but also...if he lost sight of her it wouldn’t matter cause he could just follow the screams.

I prefer Thomas’ family better cause they’re not as mean to him...

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Scream (1996)

🎃🎃🎃🎃🔶 (4/5 Pumpkins)

I had seen Scary Movie, which is a spoof/parody of this movie, so even if I didn’t already know who Billy was I would’ve known who the killer(s) was. Probably actually scary for its time but also I don’t personally get too scared by horror movies like this. Billy is very yummy though…

Took me forever to realize where I knew Stu from… The live action Scooby-Do movies… XD

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Jason Lives Friday 13th Part VI (1986)

🎃🎃🎃🎃 🎃 (5/5 Pumpkins)

Okay.. just reading the lil blurb on Show Box… TOMMY DID WHAT NOW? How do you accidentally… I’m just gonna watch the movie…

Was it supposed to be as funny as it was? XD The whole thing could’ve been avoided if Tommy just didn’t stab his body during a storm. (Also... Tommy is very yummy, omg)

I would honestly watch it again just because it’s so funny and I don’t mind looking at Tommy.

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The Babadook

🎃🎃🎃🎃 🎃 (5/5 Pumpkins)

I loved this. Technically a “drama/thriller” but damn some scenes got me. I loved the meaning behind it all and would definitely watch it again.

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Working on watching more movies. Below is what I still need to watch.

Friday the 13th A New Beginning (1985)

(which apparently isn’t even Jason so I’m probably going to skip it)

Friday the 13th Part VII The New Blood (1988)

Friday The 13th Part VIII Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)

(What is he, a giant monster like Godzilla now?)

Jason Goes to Hell The Final Friday (1993)

Jason X (2001)

Halloween (2007)

Halloween II (2009)

Scream 2 (1997)

Scream 3 (2000)

Scream 4 (2011)

House at the End of the Street (2012)

Probably a ton more I need to see but that’s all I can think of for now. Got a movie suggestion? Lemme know.

#horror movies #slasher boys #movie reviews #horror reviews

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specialyinterested · 6 years

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Spooky’s House of Jumpscares/Jumpscare Mansion Info Dump

(Some of my favourite facts about Spooky’s Jumpscare Mansion)

It’s most likely Spooky from Spooky’s Jumpscare mansion Died on October 31st 1964.

In the HD Renovation if the player enters the code 1235 into one of the arcade machines you will see Spooky’s backstory. In this she can be seen Trick or Treating with her dad. Her red costume at first could be mistaken for a Devil costume.

However in the Karamari hospital DLC if you go into the basement you can a note from Spooky’s father part of which reads “I was confounded no one understood your costume but I guess people don’t read Poe anymore, even with the new Price film.” Given this information it’s most likely Spooky was dressed as the Red Death from The Masque of the Red Death a Edgar Allen Poe story that was made into a movie staring Vincent Price and released on the 24th of June 1964.

Another note implies that it was Spooky’s father who brought her back as a ghost. In the note he writes “A second device is needed to bind the spirit to the earth after it has been brought back. I know this sounds macabre but I will turn it off and let you return to heaven after your mother and I get to see you again.” why he didn’t turn off the machine/turning off the machine didn’t work is unknown.

In Spooky’s own notes she refers to the internet as the Spider Portal, and mentions “a cluster of webs centred around short horror experiences as well as some sort of Italian cooking” most likely referring to Creepy Pastas which could be further proof to her dying before the internet was really a thing. (She also refers to LP people which most likely means Lets Players).

(It is also theorised that the child in the notes could be the Demon Child found in Karamari Hospital and that the backstory found on the arcade machine was fake. Though the lines about liking to scare people and binding the spirit leads me to believe this is not the case)

(Facts about the specimens bellow the read more)

Specimens

Specimen 1) The pumpkin is named Sam in reference to the movie Trick R Treat. There was originally going to be a werewolf cut out. After a while the face on the green slime becomes corrupted. This face represents SCP-106. One of the cut outs resembles Jeff the Killer who is also referenced in Spooky’s research notes in endless mode. Specimen 2) First appears in Room 60 and is triggered by the player reading the note in said room. Their death screen reads "I know what you have done, and what you have yet to do. But it's alright, because I'm inside you now. We are one but I am many...". Their chase theme music is titled UNKNOWN HUG They were inspired by the Lub Glub monsters from Adventure Time. They also may be a reference to SCP-106 (who also apears from puddles [Specimen 1 only does this in thr HD renovation]) and the creatures from the 1030 cartoon Swing You Sinners.

Specimen 3) First appears in the GL Lab rooms (that start at Room 120) and is triggered by reading a GL assistant note in which they mention hearing a clicking sound. Their chase theme music is titled WRITHING SNEEZES. They were inspired by the game Resident Evil. They are refereed to as Subject 5. Subjects 1-4 can be seen floating in the walls of the GL Labs rooms.

Specimen 4) First appears in Room 166 once the player has reached the end of the room. Her death screen reads "Hush now my child, you're safe now." She has four chase themes; BREAKFAST WAS TOO EARLY BREAKFAST WAS TOO LATE BREAKFAST WAS TOO WATER DAMAGED RINGU_AMB She is a homage to Japanese RPGs (especially Corpse Party).The second version of her could also be a nod to the Fatal Frame games. Her being the fourth specimen was probably deliberate as 4 is seen as a bad number in Japan The room number may be a reference to SCP-166 She is the only specimen with two different chases

Specimen 5) First appears in room 210 Their death screen reads “Tiny, Shining holes in the sky. Delicate, perfect emptiness. Black, growing absences of life.Cold, swarming death. And we shall become them." Their chase theme music is called LUSTING STRAWBERRY They are thought to be a reference to the Silent Hill Series It is theorised it may be the “Mother” mentioned in the notes leading up to its first appearance They are referred to in the game data as bab

Specimen 6) First appears in Room 310 Nicknamed Ben and The Merchant by fans He will attack if the player doesn’t look at him, but also if the player looks too long “To become a puppet is to rid oneself of the pain and harshness of choice. Now nothing you do is your fault, now you belong to something... You belong to me..." Their chase theme music is titled The Merchant His inspiration was most likely the Happy Mask Salesman from LOZ Ocarina of Time/Majoras Mask and Ben from the Ben Drowned Creepypasta He may also be a reference to SCP-173 or the Weeping Angels from Dr Who Specimen 7) First appears in room 411 They are slow but an instant kill They are only effective against people with past trauma or mental illness. This means the player character could be mentally ill/traumatised (though it’s possible their trauma is their encounters with previous specimens) Their chase theme music is titled STRANGE WIGGLES It’s appearance resembles Giygas from Earthbound and it’s behaviour is similar to the mind flesh wall in Penumbra: Black Plague Specimen 8) Nicknamed Deer Lord First appears in room 558 Their death screen reads “ "And I saw, from eyes that were not mine. And I felt, with a fear I could not reason. They watch us, they invade us. And keep us happy, committing treason. To a King we didn't deserve. To a Son who waits weeping. That I knew, from knowledge gained while sleeping." Their chase music is called Your Consenting Mind. While chasing the player they will say four different phrases: “Join us” “Why do you run, child?” “Your submission is inevitable” “Your flesh will sustain my children” Their inspiration was The Best from Over the Garden Wall They are also similar to Herne the Hunter from English folklore, the Wendigo from Native American lore, a Kyrkogrim from Scandinavian folklore, Remor from Fran Bow and SCP-1417-A

Specimen 9) Can appear anywhere from Room 52 onward Can be triggered by staying in one place for too long or walking down one of the endless coridoors They also act as a final boss to the game Their Cat_Dos entry appears to be corrupted They can kill the player in any of the Safe rooms It’s theorised their inspiration could be Red from the NES Godzilla Creepypasta Their Cat_Dos entry says they were terminated, evidently this is not the case.

Specimen 10) First appears in Room 617 Was the reason the GL Labs were abandoned The original Specimen 10 is described as being Docile Whether Cat_Dos shows the original or current Specimen 10 is random chance Their death screen reads "Now you have nothing to fear. Now you have nothing to think. Follow your selfish desires. Follow your natural instinct. After all you're just an animal. It's much easier than trying to think." behind this text something written in binary flashes on and off screen. When translated this reads "You are more than just an animal. Use the soul you've been given. And be responsible for your actions." Their chase music is called GETTING THERE They seem to be inspired by Necromorphs from Dead Space as they are both parasitic in nature They also seem to be inspired by the creature from the movie The Thing or SCP-610

Specimen 11) Nicknamed Food Demon First encountered in Room 710 after the player has picked up the key in the freezer Once the player character has run out of health Specimen 11 teleports them to a looping hallway made of meat before finally killing them Their death screen reads "With every bite with bone and skin. The temple groaned and shook again. His dwelling place did I neglect. To the end with bad effect." just like specimen 10 a second message in binary can be seen. This translates to read "Believe in God, but question the teachings of men." Their chase music is called We Have the Beef If you reverse the sound heard while they chase the player you can hear the phrases “Come here”, “Stop running away”, “I see you” and “I’ll catch you” Specimen 11 and the Fast Food restaurant rooms resemble a Little Big Planet Akuma Kira made The meat hallway could be a reference to SCP-106′s pocket dimension

Specimen 12) First encountered in room 810 Specimen 12 is actually the Mansion not the Old Man as people might think. The old man is simply the mansion’s Host They are the only specimen with a hide mechanic In endless mode they have to modes Docile and Actvie While active the theme Here Comes Trouble plays. While Docile the theme Gummy Worms With Gummy Bear Heads plays. Was mansion was based off the game Clock Tower and the chase music is similar to the chase theme Don’t Cry Jennifer The old mans appearance was based off the Adult Swim cartoon Too Many Cooks The Old Man was voiced by Vernon Shaw from Hot Pepper Gaming on Youtube According to notes found in endless mode show he was a vlogger who would explore abandoned locations

Specimen 13) First appears in room 910 She will only move if the player is in the water Once the player gets back in the water she starts chasing again. However she is always a little further away than the last splash to allow the player time to move away She will not pause between her attacks Her chase theme is called Something In The Water She is similar to Kaernk from Amnesia The Dark Decent

#special interest #infodump #long post #spookys house of jumpscares #spookys jumpscare mansion

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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Could Spider-Man: No Way Home Redeem The Lizard?

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Admit it, the moment you heard Willem Dafoe’s familiar Green Goblin cackle in the Spider-Man: No Way Home trailer you smiled. The legendary character actor isn’t even seen on screen, yet the sight of his pumpkin bomb from 2002’s Spider-Man and the sound of his laugh were a blast of sweet, sweet nostalgia. So much so that fans immediately began speculating just how different his costume might look this time out—hoping the green plastic get-up from 20 years ago never again sees the light of day.

And while that instinct is understandable, it comes mostly from a place of love, as well as comfort in the knowledge that no matter what, Dafoe’s Green Goblin will once again be spectacular. Perhaps that’s why I can’t help but wonder about the other Spider-Man villains who were teased; the ones who despite great comic book legacies left something to be desired the last time we saw them at the cinema. I’m thinking about the Lizard.

First appearing in The Amazing Spider-Man #6, the Lizard was only one in a long line of immediate home runs for Stan Lee and Steve Ditko during the early ‘60s. Genuinely, the bulk of the web-head’s rogues gallery (which is only rivaled by Batman) was created in a handful of months during those early days, with Lizard’s origin story being sandwiched in between our first introductions to Doctor Octopus and Sandman on one side, and Electro, the the Green Goblin, Mysterio, and Kraven the Hunter on the other.

Yet even in that first appearance, the Lizard was a special creation. Like many of Peter Parker’s greatest foes, Lee and Ditko’s scaly variation on Jekyll and Hyde was yet another authority figure whom the wall-crawler needed to defeat in generational combat. As the first youthful superhero created in the decade of youth, Spidey was originally presented as a kid sticking it to the man, and unhip authority figures like Doc Ock. But the Lizard? Unlike the others, he was a tragic figure with a tragic backstory: a war hero surgeon who lost his arm in combat and in an attempt to regrow it for his family turned into a six-foot dinosaur. It’s ridiculous, yet at its heart it was the archetypal horror we’ve seen in every great werewolf story, complete with the emotional stakes of Dr. Curt Connors’ wife and son being left behind as collateral damage if Spidey couldn’t save the Lizard from himself.

All of those elements were there from the jump with the Lizard, which makes their absence in 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man all the more baffling. Despite the studio apparently championing the villain as being the next foe in their fourth Spider-Man movie—to the point where it became apparently one of many disagreements with director Sam Raimi who was fixated on doing a Vulture movie back in the late 2000s—the finished product showed a genuine lack of comprehension about what made the character one of Spider-Man’s great foes.

Through no fault of actor Rhys Ifans, who plays Dr. Curt Connors as serviceably as possible from the thin screenplay he was provided, that film robs the Lizard of the character’s tragedy or even a hint of pathos: gone are Connors’ wife and son, as well as his tragic war backstory. In fact, Connors is a fairly shady individual in the film with vague connections to the deaths of Peter Parker’s parents. In other words, he’s a stock mad scientist, who neither Peter or the audience has much reason to sympathize with.

Additionally, the design of the character was nearly every bit as atrocious as the Power Rangers costume Dafoe got stuck with a decade earlier as the Green Goblin. While The Amazing Spider-Man filmmakers apparently chose to honor the flatter facial design of Ditko’s initial concept of the Lizard, they nonetheless removed other key elements of Ditko’s design which made the character so visually appealing: aspects like the shredded lab coat which belied the character’s lost humanity, and created a striking visual contrast to the green scaly look. Which is to say, without the white cloak, he looks a bit like a shrunken Godzilla running around town, with the ugly face of those misbegotten Goomba designs from the Super Mario Bros. movie.

As with the unwise choice of redesigning Spider-Man’s costume to better resemble a basketball in that movie, these poor choices made the Lizard look visually goofy and poorly thought out. When one contrasts this with how the character has been more or less drawn since the 1970s, including famously by Venom co-creator Todd McFarlane, who made the Lizard look like a demonic viper in human clothing, the ineptness of the cinematic Lizard becomes a failure on every level.

Admittedly, it’s unlikely Curt Connors’ motivations can be saved in Spider-Man: No Way Home. With One More Day fallout left to be resolved from Spider-Man: Far From Home’s cliffhanger ending, the multiverse needing to be set-up for audiences who don’t watch every Disney+ series, Doctor Strange fan service to squeeze in, and, oh yeah, the rest of the Sinister Six to reintroduce—including cinematic high points like Dafoe’s Goblin and especially Alfred Molina’s Doc Ock—there probably isn’t a lot of room for the cinematic also-rans of Lizard, Jamie Foxx’s Electro, and Thomas Hayden Church’s Sandman.

However, at least two of those became “also-rans” because of poor choices made by other filmmakers. Marvel Studios has had much better luck in interpreting Spidey villains to the screen than The Amazing Spider-Man duology, if still not on the level of Molina or Dafoe’s contributions. In the same way they turned a questionable concept like old man Adrian Toomes into a Michael Keaton showcase in Spider-Man: Homecoming, they could also reimagine the Lizard, and even Electro, into cooler characters that younger fans who never read the comics might actually care about this time. At the very least, they can give Lizzy his coat. And maybe just make him Dylan Baker’s Dr. Connors, who despite only appearing as a supporting character in Sam Raimi’s original Spider-Man trilogy, already had more gravitas and sympathy than whatever the hell The Amazing Spider-Man was up to.

If the Green Goblin can get a new look, so will hopefully the ones who are not remembered quite so fondly.

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weekendwarriorblog · 3 years

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The Weekend Warrior 8/13/21 - CODA, FREE GUY, DON’T BREATHE 2, RESPECT, THE LOST LEONARDO, WHAT IF, and More!

Well, that was kind of a disappointing last weekend as James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad pretty much tanked at the box office, making less than Birds of Prey did back in February 2020 with all sorts of backseat analysis explaining why it didn’t do well as anyone, other than a scant, few thought. I mean, I’m still kind of stunned, even though COVID and the Delta variant seem to be losing steam as far as being news. It certainly didn’t help that HBO Max decided to release the movie concurrently on HBO Max on Thursday at 7pm.

The nice thing about this week is that we have three new movies, none of which are on streaming or On Demand at the exact same time, so if you want to see any of them, you’ll have to put on your N96 masks and get yourself to theaters. Two of the three movies are originals, while the third is a sequel to quite an original horror movie from about five years back. All of them are pretty good, actually. We’ll get to them soon...

But first, let’s start with this week’s “The Chosen One” and it’s gotta be Siân Heder’s CODA i.e. “Child of Deaf Adults,” which will play in select theaters and on Apple TV+ starting Friday. If you hadn’t heard, it was the belle of the ball at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, winning the Jury Prize and Audience Award alike. Heder previously directed Tallulah and is the showrunner on Apple’s Little America, but this really is a very special film that I’ve enjoyed on repeat viewings now.

It stars Emilia Jones as Ruby Rossi, the sole hearing person in her family of Gloucester fishermen, who are out every day on the sea making the latest catch in their nets. Ruby has other aspirations, and when she joins the school choir, the teacher, Mr. Villalobos (Eugene Derbez) sees talent in Ruby that he thinks might get her into the Berklee College of Music. Ruby has to weigh that with her family’s need to have her as an interpreter while dealing with the other fishermen of the town.

I didn’t know what to expect when I saw this at Sundance back in January, and it still surprised me when I rewatched it again, because it’s a movie that involves a lot of elements that shouldn’t necessarily work, between the fishing and the singing and all the ASL between the amazing ingenue, Ms. Jones, and the deaf actors playing her family, including the one and only Oscar-winning Marlee Matlin. If not for these disparate elements, Coda might be a fairly standard indie family drama, but Heder finds just the right balance of showing how these disparities in Ruby’s life make it hard for her to pursue her dreams.

Ferdia Walsh-Peelo from Sing Street plays the classmate who Ruby is set up with to perform a duet at their high school recital, and of course, he also becomes an unwitting love interest. Unfortunately that’s the aspect of the film that’s the weakest, because Jones’ scenes with Matlin and the other actors, including Derbez, as well as Troy Kotsur and Daniel Durant, as Ruby’s father and brother, are just so powerful and moving even if they’re all in ASL with no dialogue or even incidental score.

Coda is Heder’s second film after Talllulah, a movie starring Elliot Page that never really connected with me, but Coda is such a strong and exceedingly crowd-pleasing film that I have to imagine that this would connect with everybody. I’m not sure if Apple’s gonna be able to get this movie all the way to Oscar night, but I do like its chances for Adapted (?) Screenplay, and maybe Matlin and Kotsur Supporting? I don’t know, because it’s so early and hard to tell, but hopefully the decision to wait so long after the virtual Sundance won’t hurt this movie as it hurt other Sundance award-winning films. Coda is just a joy that I’m sure will be many people’s favorite movie.

You can read my interview with Ms. Heder over at Below the Line.

Incidentally, in last week’s column, I talked about the 20th New York Asian Film Festival, but I didn’t realize that it was only running at Film at Lincoln Center for a week before going down to the SVA Theater on 23rd Street, and you can check out the schedule of movies playing there at the official site. And of course, there’s still the Virtual Festival that’s running through August 22. Also, Fantasia is still going on in Montreal, and I still haven’t had time to watch very much. What can I say? I suck.

Let’s get to some wide releases, shall we?

First up and probably the most likely to win the weekend is Ryan Reynolds’ new action-comedy, FREE GUY (20th Century Studios), directed by Shawn Levy and co-starring Jodie Comer from Killing Eve. The high-concept comedy has Reynolds playing Guy, a bank teller, who actually is a non-player character in a video game called “Free City” that’s kind of a cross between Grand Theft Auto and Fortnite. When he meets Comer’s character in the game, he falls mady in love and decides to do whatever it takes to get on her level. (Get it?) In doing so, Guy ends up becoming a hero for Free City, as well as a viral sensation across the globe as gamers thrill to Guy’s adventures.

Free Guy is Ryan Reynolds’ first live-action starring role theatrical release since…. Oh…. the action-comedy sequel The Hitman’s Bodyguard’s Wife a little under two months ago. Considering that barely made half of what its predecessor did, and that’s with Reynolds sharing the screen with Samuel L. Jackson and Salma Hayek, one wonders if his draw as an A-lister can be maintained during a pandemic. Before that, you’d have to go all the way back to 2018’s Deadpool 2 for a fully live Reynolds movie, because he wasn’t seen as himself for most of his role in and as Detective Pikachu. Of course, Reynolds’ unmistakable voice was back in DreamWorks Animation’s The Croods: A New Age, the sequel to the 2013 blockbuster that made the ballsy move to be one of the first movies to open during the pandemic. It grossed $58.6 million in theaters, which was slightly more than Christopher Nolan’s Tenet and even more than the Warner Bros. sequel, Wonder Woman 1984.

This is also a big movie for Jodie Comer, who won an Emmy and was nominated for two Golden Globes for Killing Eve, but hasn’t really been in too many movies, other than playing Rey’s Mum in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Later this year, she’ll star in Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel and may possibly be back in the awards game again, we’ll see. The movie also stars Lil Rel Howery, who seems to be everywhere and in everything these days, as well as Taika Waititi who is super-hot right now due to 2019’s Jojo Rabbit, and his various television projects, as well as having a small role in James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad last week.

In some ways, Free Guy is gonna be a test for a lot of things, the first one being whether Reynolds is a big enough draw when not playing Deadpool to get people into theaters, just as people are starting to get skittish again about going into movie theaters. More importantly, it will show whether not having a movie on streaming or VOD means that people who want to see it will put aside their fears and return to theaters… like they did with F9 and Black Widow and Godzilla vs. Kong. Is an original non-franchise movie like Free Guy enough to get people interested in getting their butts off the couch and into a far more comfortable movie theater seat? (I’m being facetious, if you didn’t guess.)

After The Suicide Squad last week, I’m really not sure whether I can trust my own instincts, but I also don’t want to lower my prediction to something ridiculous out of fear that the pandemic really is destroying any chance of the box office fully recovering. One thing working in Free Guy’s favor, besides its PG-13 rating is that it’s not available on streaming and VOD. Anyone who has been intrigued by the film’s great reviews will HAVE to go out to a movie theater to see it or else, they’ll have to wait 45 days.

Maybe if this opened last month, I could see it open in the $30 million to $40 million range, but with things being the way they are, I’d probably go with high $20 million, so close to $30 million but not quite.

You can read my review over at Below the Line, and I’ll have an interview with the film’s Production Designer, Ethan Tobman, fairly soon.

Also opening Friday is the horror sequel DON’T BREATHE 2 (Sony/Screen Gems), starring Stephen Lang as the blind former Navy Seal who terrorized a bunch of kids who broke into his house in 2016’s Don’t Breathe.

The original movie, which starred Jane Levy, reuniting with director Fede Alvarez after the two remade Evil Dead for producer Sam Raimi, opened in late August, on the fourth weekend of the original Suicide Squad, in fact, and it knocked the movie out of the #1 spot. Its $26 million opening in 3,000 theaters was impressive for the time, partially because late August has never been great. It stayed #1 for a second weekend, over Labor Day, and it ended up grossing $89.2 million in North America, which is great for an R-rated horror film.

Levy isn’t around for the sequel and Alvarez has moved into a co-writer/producer role for his creative partner, Rodo Sagayes, to take over the directing reins, but honestly, I’m not sure how many people will know or care, because Lang’s character and the film’s violence and chills are it’s real selling point. Like many horror movies, there isn’t much in terms of star power other than Lang, but that has never really hindered the success of a horror movie in the past.

As with every movie I cover in this column, there’s the pandemic in the room and whether that might hold people back from going to theaters. I wish there was a way to calculate the effect that’s had on moviegoing, because it seems to affect movies differently. For instance, the recent The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It was able to open with $24.1 million just two months ago, although that was down from the $40 million of the previous two chapters. So that’s about a 40% drop-off in a similar five-year gap between movies. (Actually, it’s kind of strange that 2021 is replicating 2021 with three sequels to movies from five years earlier.) There’s no denying that the number of Covid cases are way up since June and movie theaters are still being painted as the “enemy” even though no significant cases have been traced back to the movies.

We also have to look at Sony’s last horror sequel, Escape Room: Tournament of Champions, which I quite enjoyed, but it ended up opening with about $10 million less than the original movie a few years back. We can probably expect Don’t Breathe 2 to have a similar pandemic drop-off even if it’s another movie that won’t be on streaming or VOD this weekend.

I think Don’t Breathe 2 should be good for around $15 million this weekend since it’s catering towards a young audience that’s a bit more devil-may-care about going out to theaters. It will also probably appeal more to older single guys than something like Free Guy, which seems different enough to pull in a different audience.

My review will be posted over at Below the Line later on Thursday, plus I have a bunch of interviews coming, including this one with Rodo Sayagues and Fede Alvarez.

Next up is RESPECT (MGM), the long-awaited Aretha Franklin biopic (for those that didn’t see Genius, like me, I guess), starring Oscar-winner Jennifer Hudson as the Queen of Soul. The movie directed by Liesl Tommmy was supposed to be released in January to take part in last year’s Oscars race, but I guess MGM wanted to make sure it got a proper theatrical release, which wasn’t possible since NYC and L.A. movie theaters didn’t reopen until March after the cut-off. But MGM had already decided to push the movie back to the summer in hopes of having more theaters able to play the movie, which is kind of true now?

It’s been a while since we’ve seen JHud in a high-profile theatrical release, and unfortunately, the last one was 2019’s Cats, a movie in which she probably was the best thing, although it still only grossed $27 million domestically, a flat-out bomb. Before that, she provided her voice for the animated blockbuster Sing in 2016, and then a bunch of smaller movies before that. She’s joined in the movie by the likes of Oscar winner Forest Whitaker, Marlon Wayans, Titus Burgess, Mary J. Blige, Marc Maron, and Audra MacDonald, quite an impressive array of talent that shows how many wanted to be involved with this project. Director Liesl Tommy is making her feature directorial debut after directing a ton of theater and TV shows like The Walking Dead and Jessica Jones.

Even so, it’s obviously that the ongoing popularity of Aretha Franklin, especially since her death in 2018, is going to go a long way into getting people into theaters, which includes a lot of older black women who really haven’t had much to get them out into theaters in recent months. Will this be enough?

Before Respect was delayed from its original January release, many thought that Hudson would receive another Oscar nomination for her performances. Having not seen the movie at the time of this writing, I can’t confirm or deny those chances. If that’s still the case, then releasing the movie towards the end of the summer (similar to The Help, successfully, and The Butler, not so much) is an odd decision rather than just holding the movie for festival season by holding until next month.

Either way, I think the love Aretha’s fans have for the Queen of Soul as well as Hudson’s fans, Respect should be good for between $8 and 10 million this weekend -- hard to pinpoint exactly without knowing how many theaters MGM is getting for it against the stronger summer movies.

Mini-Review: I wasn’t really sure what to expect from Respect, even after seeing the trailer a couple dozen times in front of other movies, but it’s a respectable biopic that cover 20 years in the life of the Queen of Soul from singing at a young age in her father’s church to returning to church for the gospel records as captured in the recently-released doc, Amazing Grace.

But first, we go back to 1952 where Aretha is a young girl (played by Skye Dakota Turner) is uncertain of her future as she’s being ordered about by her preacher father (Forrest Whitaker) and trying to find direction. The movie casually sets up the fact that young Aretha was sexually abused by a family friend, and maybe she got pregnant, too? It’s hard to tell and maybe a little odd since she would only have been 10 at the time, but it’s something that will be brought up (just as subtly) over the course of the film.

Jennifer Hudson takes over as Aretha as she turns 19 and goes to New York City to start recording, meets Marlon Wayans’ Ted White, makes him her manager and marries her, which basically has her going from one abusive man in her father to another one. It feels like the movie spends a long than normal time on the ‘60s, which is when Franklin’s career really took off with “Respect” and then a series of hits that took her all around the world. That whole time, she’s dealing with Ted’s abuses and jealousy while trying to write and record those hits, before her dark demons return and she starts drinking heavily.

As you might imagine, you go to see Respect to see how well Jennifer Hudson pulls off the Queen of Soul, and she’s an incredibly complex character that needs a nuanced performance, which Hudson tries to pull off by bringing different aspects of her life into different scenes.

There are some scenes that don’t work as well as others, and it feels like there’s a bit of time-crunching or futzing around so that at a certain point, her father seems to be de-aging, although I was just as impressed (possibly even moreso) with Forrest Whitaker, whose performance as Aretha’s father is more than just a full-on villain despite his violent treatment of his daughter. Wayans is also good and almost unrecognizable at first, and there are a few other nice performances in there as well, including Marc Maron as record label head Jerry Wexler.

But the performances Hudson gives as Franklin are goosebump-inducing, leading up to the recording of her record-selling gospel record as depicted in the aforementioned doc.

A fairly decent representation of Franklin’s little-known life leading up to her fame, Respect probably succeeds the most when Jennifer Hudson is performing as the Queen of Soul, but she’s also created a fairly moving portrait with strong dramatic moments that far outweigh any of the film’s issues. Rating: 8/10

With that in mind, this is how I see the weekend looking with two of the new movies bumping Suicide Squad down to third place where it will be facing off against Respect.

1. Free Guy (20th Century/Disney) - $28.5 million N/A

2. Don’t Breathe 2 (Sony/Screen Gems) - $15 million N/A

3. The Suicide Squad (Warner Bros.) - $10 million -62%

4. Respect (MGM) - $9.6 million N/A

5. Jungle Cruise (Walt Disney Pictures) - $8.7 million -55%

6. Old (Universal) - $2.5 million -36%

7. Black Widow (Marvel/Disney) - $2.4 million -39%

8. Stillwater (Focus) - $2 million -39%

9. Space Jam: A New Legacy (Warner Bros.) - $1.3 million -43%

10. The Green Knight (A24) - $1.1 million -56%

Donnie Yen stars in Bennie Chang’s RAGING FIRE (WELL GO USA), which premiered at the New York Asian Film Festival on Monday and at Fantasia in Montreal on Tuesday, and I’m not going to review this, because honestly, it’s such a cookie-cutter Hong Kong police action-thriller that I’m not sure I really have much to say about it, so I won’t.

On the other hand, I do have more to say about Andreas Koefoed’s documentary, THE LOST LEONARDO (Sony Pictures Classics), the Leonardo being Da Vinci, the master artist behind the Mona Lisa and many other works. Since I don’t really follow the world of art, I really didn’t know about the Salvator Mundi painting found about 10-12 years ago that was thought to be an original Da Vinci worth in the hundreds of millions, often dubbed “The Male Mona Lisa.” But it’s also a painting that was surrounded by controversy due to the 5-year restoring job that may have left very little of the original painting.

As the film began, I was groaning a little about sitting through another movie of art experts and historians talking about how important a find this is and why it’s either great or horrible, depending on who is being interviewed. Eventually, the film gets more interesting as it starts getting into the idea of selling it. After being sold to a wealthy Russian oligarch by an unscrupulous Swiss art dealer who made a nice profit on it, the painting ends up being auctioned by Christie’s, and the story just keeps getting more and more interesting as it goes along.

While I’m not one to go ga-ga over any painting by Da Vinci or otherwise, I do like a good mystery or suspense-thriller, so good on Koefoed for realizing about halfway through this movie that the talking heads will never be as interesting as actual footage. And that’s what happens here, too. I actually feel a little ignorant that I wasn’t aware this was going on as it was, maybe because I don’t really follow the art world in that respect. Maybe I just missed it, so it’s good that Sony Classics (who loves making movies about art) is giving this a fairly high-profile release following its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival a few months back. In that sense, The Lost Leonardo is quite a gem.

Heinz Brinkman’s USEDOM: A CLEAR VIEW OF THE SEA (Big World Pictures) is a somewhat intriguing doc about the Baltic island of Usedom, the location of a number of imperial German health resorts, beaches and such, and how the Jews were kicked out by the Nazis before Usedom was split into a German and Polish half after WWII. I wish I could get into this more, but I just have a limited mental capacity for a lot of German talking heads.

Which brings us to Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein’s THE MEANING OF HITLER (IFC Films), the new doc from the team behind Gunner Palace, which looks at the cultural fascination with Hitler and Nazism and the recent rise in white supremacy, antisemitism and the “weaponization of history itself.” I don’t know what that last part means, because I got so swamped this week that I didn’t get to watch this, and like another recent doc on the subject of Naziism and the Holocaust, I just couldn’t get into the right head space to hit play on this doc. Maybe I’ll watch it sometime down the road.

Similarly, I didn’t get around to watching Dutch filmmaker Jim Taihuttu’s THE EAST (Magnet Releasing), which I may like as a fan of Paul Verhoeven’s Dutch WWII films, and I probably should give this a look, but I just ran out of time this week. It’s about a young Dutch soldier who joins an elite unit led by a mysterious captain called “The Turk,” and it takes place in the Indonesian War of Independence after World War II.

As far as TV goes, Wednesday sees the debut of Marvel Studios’ WHAT IF...? on Disney+. I’ve seen the first three episodes, and I was a pretty big fan of the comics in the ‘70s (sadly, part of the giant collection that I sold a few years back), and I guess this is okay. The first episode is the one with Haley Atwell voicing “Captain Carter” i.e. Peggy Carter gets the Super Soldier Serum, which is one of the more obvious What Ifs that could possibly done, so that we can get another “women are as good as men, and they need to be heard” storyline that’s in 90% of the Marvel movies already. On the other hand, the first episode does include the voices of Sebastian Stan and others, so it’s quite a coup in that sense, but whoever wrote it, clearly doesn’t understand that people spoke differently in the ‘40s. I liked the 2nd episode, a mash-up of Black Panther and Guardians of the Galaxy, which is a fun idea that brings together a lot of great characters -- including Chadwick Boseman’s last voice performance -- but again, hearing the voices just isn’t the same when the writing isn’t as good as the movie. I feel like the animation for the show is okay, maybe not quite on par with some of the great Batman or Superman cartoons we’ve gotten over the years. On the other hand, the entire series features the great voice of Jeffrey Wright as The Watcher, acting kind of like the Rod Serling for the series, much like the Watcher does in the comics. I also dug the music by Emmy winner Laura Karpman (Lovecraft Country), and I’ll watch the rest of the series as it debuts, but I’m not sure it’s as much a rush to see each episode to avoid spoilers as with Loki or WandaVision.

Hitting Netflix this week is the limited series, BRAND NEW CHERRY FLAVOR (Netflix), starring Rosa Salazar, Eric Lange, and Catherine Keener. The tagline is: “Lisa Nova (Rosa Salazar) comes to LA dead set on directing her first movie. But when she trusts the wrong person and gets stabbed in the back, everything goes sideways and a dream project turns into a nightmare. This particular nightmare has zombies, hit men, supernatural kittens, and a mysterious tattoo artist who likes to put curses on people. And Lisa’s going to have to figure out some secrets from her own past in order to get out alive.”

Also, TITANS Season 3 debuts on HBO Max, but since I haven’t watched seasons 1 or 2 yet, it might be some time before I get to it.

Next week looks like it could be a bit of a dog with four or five new wide releases but nothing that really jumps out, plus I’ll be in Atlantic City all next weekend, so who knows how much I’ll be able to watch or write about?

#The Weekend WArrior #Movies #Reviews #Coda #Free Guy #Respect #Don't Breathe 2 #the Lost Leonardo #Box Office

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tyrantisterror · 3 years

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I did a four part series of trivia posts when ATOM Volume 1: Tyrantis Walks Among Us! came out, and that was pretty fun! You can see that set of trivia posts here if you’d like. I thought it’d be fun to do another now that ATOM Volume 2: Tyrantis Roams the Earth! is out - just one this time, because a lot of the trivia I talked about with Volume 1 still applies.

I’m gonna divide this into two sections: non-spoiler trivia, for things that really don’t give a lot of plot points away, and spoiler trivia, for things that DO give away major plot points. I recommend not reading the spoiler trivia until after you’ve read Tyrantis Roams the Earth!, for obvious reasons, and will put the spoiler trivia under a cut.

Ok, let’s go!

- So if you read ATOM Volume 1, you probably noticed that the book is split not only into chapters, but “episodes,” which consist of four chapters a piece. It’s kind of a nod to how the series owes a great deal of its DNA to various monster of the week shows, with Godzilla: the Series and The Godzilla Power Hour being obvious influences. It also allowed me to pepper in some illustrations and cheesy b-movie style titles into each volume.

- The first “episode” of Volume 2, Tyrantis in Tokyo, pays explicit homage to the giant monster movies of Japan, perhaps even moreso than the chapters that came before it. Given how much Japanese media influenced ATOM - from tokusatsu like the Godzilla, Gamera, and Ultraman franchises to anime like Digimon and Evangelion (hell, the title of this episode itself is a tip of the hat to Tenchi Muyo by way of one of its spinoffs) - it kind of felt obligatory that Tyrantis visit Japan and pay his respects.

- Tyrantis in Tokyo also fits in a tribute to another staple of Atomic Age pop culture: Rock and Roll.

- Kutulusca, the giant cephalopod that appears in Tyrantis in Tokyo, is one of the oldest kaiju in this series, dating back to the first iteration of Tyrantis’s story that I put to paper back in 2001 or so. It’s changed a lot since then, but its fight with Tyrantis goes more or less the way it originally did.

- Old Meg, the giant placoderm/shark, and Nastadyne, the bipedal beetle, both owe their existence directly to Deviantart’s Godzilla fandom. Old Meg originated as a dunkleosteus monster I submitted to a “create a Godzilla kaiju” contest held by Matt Frank, while Nastadyne is based on a Megalon redesign I made during the “redesign all the Godzilla kaiju” phase of DA’s kaiju fandom.

- The second episode, Tyrantis vs. the Red Menace, gets dark as we visit the USSR, which had enough REAL horror with atomic power in its history to make creature features seem a bit defanged by comparison. It’s probably the episode with the strongest horror elements - ATOM’s always been influenced by Resident Evil, and this is probably where that influence shows the most strongly.

- It also features the first fully robotic mecha in the series, the mighty Herakoschei! Its name is a combination of “Heracles” and “Koschei the Deathless,” with the former part being added by its Russian creators to make it seem a bit more international as they offer it to the U.N. in hopes of gaining aid for a very extreme kaiju problem they’ve developed.

- Most of Tyrantis vs. the Red Menace takes place in the Siberian Monster Zone. Its name is a reference to the Lawless Monster Zone in Ultraman, which is such a cool fucking name I wish that I wish I could go back in time and steal it.

- The next episode, Tyrantis’s Revenge, is... full of spoilers, so we’ll move on for now.

- The penultimate episode, Tyrantis vs. the Martian Monsters, is a love letter to MANY different sci-fi stories that involve life on Mars, though the most prominent of them is of course The War of The Worlds (one of my top 3 favorite books) and its various adaptations. From its tentacles sapient martians, the tripodal leader of the titular monsters whose name includes the word “ulla” which is uttered by said sapient martians, the plant monster made of red vines, the cylinder-shaped spacecraft the Martian monsters are sent to earth on, the copper-skinned stingray-esque flying martian who shoots lasers from its tail, and the fact that every chapter title in this episode is a quote from the book, the H.G. Wells influence is STRONG.

- The final episode, Invasion from Beyond!, is shamelessly inspired by Destroy All Monsters, although there’s a dash of “To Serve Men,” Godzilla vs. Monster Zero, and The Day the Earth Stood Still mixed in as well. It’s also sort of a tribute to my first “published” bit of a kaiju fiction - a rewrite of Destroy All Monsters that included EVERY Godzilla monster that had appeared at the time, which my middle school self wrote back in 2002 or so for Kaiju Headquarters, a kaiju fansite I’m not sure exists anymore. Invasion from Beyond! is just as ambitious (but hopefully better executed) as my DAM Remake, with dozens upon dozens of different kaiju duking it out, earthlings vs. aliens.

- There were three different documents I made to outline the final battle of Invasion from Beyond! It’s the largest episode of the series so far and more than half of it is that fucking fight. My inner child is pleased, though, so hopefully you will be too.

Ok, that’s all I can share without spoilers. READER BEWARE WHAT FOLLOWS BELOW THE CUT!

JUST MAKING SURE you know that SPOILERS will follow from here on out. Read at your own peril! YOU WERE WARNED!

(I’m gonna start with lighter ones just in case you scrolled too far and want to turn back)

- There’s a number of explicit Spielberg homages in ATOM Volume 2, from a “we need a bigger boat” joke during a chase with a giant shark to the fact that Invasion from Beyond! opens with a group of people flying to an island of monsters to review whether or not it should get more funding.

- When Tyrantis appears in the first chapter, I snuck in modified lyrics of The Godzilla Power Hour’s theme song. “Up from the depths”... “several stories high”... “breathing fire”... “its head in the sky”... Tyrantis! Tyrantis! Tyrantis!

- The two rock bands in Tyrantis in Tokyo have real life inspirations ala Gwen Valentine, albeit a bit more muddled than hers. The Cashews are inspired by The Peanuts (see what I did there), while The Thunder Lizards are a mix of The Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Buddy Holly, and the Big Bopper. I wanted The Thunder Lizards to be more akin to the myth of a famous rock and roll band than the reality - less the real Beatles and more the Yellow Submarine cartoon version of them.

- The song The Thunder Lizards write for Tyrantis was written to fit the tune of “The Godzilla March” from Godzilla vs. Gigan, though ideally if someone made an actual song of it it would be its own song. I got the idea from Over the Garden Wall, which used the Christmas song “O Holy Night” as a a starting point for “Come Wayward Souls.”

- Perry Martin, UNNO reporter and peer of Henry Robertson, is a nod to Raymond Burr, with his name being a combination of two of Burr’s most famous roles: Perry Mason, and Steve Martin from Godzilla King of the Monsters (1956).

- Dr. Rinko Tsuburaya is a few homages in one. Her name comes from Rinko Kikuchi (who played Mako Mori in Pacific Rim), while her last name is obviously in homage of Eiji Tsuburaya. Her being the daughter of an esteemed scientist is inspired by Emiko Yamane from the original Gojira.

- Nastadyne’s Burning Justice mode is named after a similar super mode from various Transformers cartoons, though it’s more directly inspired by the Shining/Burning Finger super move from G Gundam.

- Martians sending kaiju to different planets via shooting them out of cannons (with or without cylinder spaceships around them) is another War of the Worlds shoutout. So is martians living on Venus after their homeworld was made uninhabitable, actually.

- Kurokame’s vocalizations are described as wails in explicit homage to Gamera. His name can be translated as either “black tortoise” (a reference to the mythical guardian beast Genbu, which can also be construed as a Gamera reference thanks to Gamera: Advent of Irys implying Gamera and Genbu are one and the same) or a portmanteau of the Japanese words for crocodile and turtle - “crocturtle.”

- Burodon’s name is just a mangling of “burrow down.” It also sounds vaguely like Baragon, who Burodon is loosely inspired by. AND, since Burodon is sort of a knockoff/modified Baragon, that kinda makes him a reference to various monsters in Ultraman!

- The final battle of Tyrantis in Tokyo is sort of a hybrid of the finales of Ghidorah the 3 Headed Monster and Destroy All Monsters.

- The Japanese kaiju teaching Tyrantis the art of throwing rocks at your enemies is both a joke on the prominence of rock throwing in Japanese kaiju fights AND the tired trope of an American hero learning secret martial arts from a Japanese mentor ala Batman, Iron Fist, etc. In this case, the secret martial art is throwing rocks at people.

- When introduced to Herakoschei and its pilot, we are told that the strain of piloting this early mecha is so intense that many pilots have died in the process, with the current one passing out on more than few occasions. This is of course a Pacific Rim homage - sadly, no one invents drifting.

- Herakoschei’s design is a loose homage to Robby the Robot and Cherno Alpha, because big boxy robots are cool.

- The Writhing Flesh and ESPECIALLY Pathogen are both hugely influenced by Resident Evil and The Thing. Giant body horror piles of raw flesh, tendrils, mismatched mouths and limbs may be a bit outside the main era of monster design ATOM homages, but they fit the themes and bring a nice contrast.

- I came up with Pathogen long before Corona but MAN it definitely feels different in 2021 to have a giant monster whose name is a synonym for disease driving other creatures crazy in a quarantine zone than it did when I plotted out the story in 2016.

- The chapter title “Hello, Old Foes” is a riff on “Goodbye, Old Friend”

- Minerva, the kaiju-fied clone of Dr. Lerna, is meant to be an homage to Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, which is a genuinely good giant monster flick. I am sure many of you will also believe I included her because I’m a pervert whose into tall women, but you’d be wrong! I included the seven foot tall Russian mecha pilot Ludmilla Portnova because I’m a pervert whose into tall women. Minerva’s inclusion was just coincidental, I swear!

- Since Promythigor is a play on the archetypal ape kaiju to contrast Tyrantis as a play on the archetypal fire-breathing reptile kaiju, their fight has a lot of nods to King Kong movies. Promythigor attempts the famous jaw-snap maneuver of Kong (with less success), J.C. Clark paraphrases the “brute force vs. a thinking animal” line from the King Kong vs. Godzilla American cut, and Tyrantis slides down a mountain to knock Promythigor off his feet in a reversal of Kong doing the same in King Kong vs. Godzilla.

- Tyrantis sliding down a mountain on his tail doubles as a Godzilla vs. Megalon homage.

- Though Promythigor is the archetypal Ape and Tyrantis the archetypal Fire-Breathing Reptile, I think it’s fun to note that in some ways, Promythigor is the Godzilla equivalent in their matchup, and Tyrantis the Kong. Promythigor has a slight size advantage, was scarred by humans performing unethical weapons technology, and is associated with violent explosions. Tyrantis is a good-at-heart prehistoric beast who humanized in part by his unlikely friendship with a human woman.

- Of course, in the context of the famous quote from the American cut of King Kong vs. Godzilla, they remain in their archetypal lanes. Promythigor is the more intelligent of the two (though not necessarily wiser), and Tyrantis is in many ways a brute reptile. Their battle is a rebuttal of sorts to the assertion that Kong is the “better” animal because he is closer to human. Promythigor’s near human creativity and emotions don’t make him the kinder/more benevolent monster, but instead fuel a very self-centered and destructive attitude that makes him the far more dangerous threat. On the other hand, Tyrantis, who is less intelligent, limited in communication with others by his reptilian mindset and instincts, and simple in his thoughts and desires, is nonetheless a sweet creature that is easily dealt with when others consider his animal needs and mindset. There’s a quote from Hellboy I love that probably sums up all of my writing thus far: “To be other than human does not mean the same as being less,” and that’s what the matchup between these two in particular tries to illustrate: the “less” human Tyrantis is nonetheless more benign than the “more” human Promythigor.

- Kraydi the psychic lizard began life as a soft sculpture I made of the Canyon Krayt Dragon from The Wildlife of Star Wars. The sculpture didn’t look much like the illustration, but I liked how it came out, and so I made it an original monster named Kraydi (see what I did there). Figuring out an explanation for that name in ATOM’s world was possibly the most difficult kaiju naming task in the series, but it worked out in the end.

- Kraydi and Promythigor having psychic powers is a result of my time on Godzilla fan forums in my middle school years. Most of the forums had OC kaiju battle tournaments, and SO many of those kaiju had a wide array of beam weapons and psychic powers just to win the tournaments by beam-spamming and mind controlling their foes into oblivion. There’s a special kind of rage you get when your original creation is beaten by “Fire Godzilla” because he has a genius level intellect and the power of unstoppable telekinesis. Kraydi began as (and still is I suppose) my attempt to do a psychic kaiju well, while Promythigor’s villainy being tied to psychic powers being forced on him is sort of my passive aggressive commentary on people foisting powers on a monster without any real thematic reason for them.

- Henry Robertson and Dr. Praetorius chewing out the laziness of people giving kaiju completely unaltered names of mythic beasts will probably be seen as a jab at the Monsterverse and/or the numerous writers in the kaiju OC scene who do the same, but it’s ACTUALLY a jab at my past self, who had DOZENS of kaiju whose names were just Greek mythological figures verbatim. There are dozens of kaiju named Hydra, Scylla, Charybdis, Chimera, etc., past me, try to make the names stand out! Oh wait you did. I mean, don’t pat yourself on the back too much, you still went with “Mothmanud” as a canon name and never came up with something better, but, like, good on ya for trying I guess.

- Dr. Praetorius takes his name from the evil mad scientis in Bride of Frankenstein, who basically has all the wicked traits that Universal’s Frankenstein downplayed in their take on Dr. Frankenstein. Ironically, ATOM’s Dr. Praetorius is a bit less evil than his fellow mad scientists in ATOM. I really like how his character turned out, he surprised me.

- Isaac Rossum, the pilot of the USA mecha Atomoton, is named for Isaac Aasimov, whose robot stories are to robot fiction what Lord of the Rings is to high fantasy. His last name is a reference to Rossum’s Universal Robots, which is where the word “robot” came from.

- The unfortunate pilots of MechaTyrantis in ATOM Volumes 1 and 2 are all nods to Jurassic Park. John Ludlow = John Hammond and Peter Ludlow, Ian Grant = Ian Malcolm and Alan Grant, Dennis Dodgson = Dennis Nedry and Lewis Dodgson.

- A good way to pitch Invasion from Beyond! would be “what if the staff and monsters were able to fight back when the Kilaaks tried to take over Monsterland?”

- Ok, here’s a fun joke that no one will get but me because it requires a very specific chain of logic based on some obscure and loosely connected nerd bullshit. There’s a rocker in ATOM’s universe named Sebastian Haff, right? One of his songs, “Darling Let’s Shimmy,” is referenced right before a mothmanud larva emerges from the ground in both ATOM Vol. 1 and 2. Ok, so, in the Bubba Hotep, an aging Elvis impersonator named Sebastian Haff claims he is actually the real Elvis Presley, having changed places with the real Sebastian Haff as a sort of Prince and the Pauper deal that went wrong. Got that? Ok, so, in UFO folklore, a common joke is the theory that Elvis didn’t die, but was rather abducted by aliens (or he actually WAS an alien the whole time - the whole “Elvis didn’t die, he just went home” joke in Men in Black is a good example of this). Ok? Ok. So, in ATOM’s universe, we can surmise that their equivalent of Elvis, whose name is Sebastian Haff, WAS abducted by aliens, and that his song “Darling Let’s Shimmy” is subconsciously influenced by his repressed memories from his time aboard the Beyonder spaceships, which is why it accidentally awoke a Mothmanud larva in Volume 1. There’s a lot of bullshit jokes I put into ATOM, but this is perhaps the bullshittiest of them all.

- One of the most common bits of feedback on ATOM Volume 1 I got was “I kept waiting for something to eat Brick Rockwell, he’s such an asshole.” And I had to smile and go, “Oh, yeah, guess he never got his, huh?” the whole time without letting on that he was going to die here all along!

- Dr. Lerna and Brick Rockwell’s nature as foils to each other is probably most apparent in Invasion from Beyond!, where both are given fairly similar situations - a nonhuman approaches them with a solution to a global crisis - and react to it very differently. I worry that some people may think they both made the same choice and got different results, and that that’s hypocrisy on my part, but I hope I wrote it so you can see how their choices and situations actually differ in key ways, and why their decisions, while similar on the surface, are ultimately very different, and thus result in almost opposite outcomes.

- So, when I planned out this book in 2016, I swear I didn’t know about the Orca from 2019′s Godzilla King of the Monsters. Having the plot hang around Dr. Lerna deciding whether or not to use a sonic device to rouse all the kaiju to save the earth was not INTENDED to be a Monsterverse reference - it came about from me looking at Pathfinder’s take on kaiju, who are all explicitly influenceable by music, and thinking, “Oh, wow, music and songs DO have a major connection with kaiju in a lot of media, I should do something with that.” Whem KOTM came out a few days after Volume 1 came out I realized I was kinda fucked here, because the comparison was definitely going to be made, but I’d also set this all up already and you can’t just change suddenly to avoid looking like a copy cat and make a good story, so... I dunno, I leaned into it a bit, but it is what it is.

- While most people will probably think they’re a reference to the Reptoids of UFO folklore, the Reptodites are more inspired by the Dinosapien of speculative evolution fame and, even morso, by the Reptites from Chrono Trigger. Me wanting to avoid the “lizard people control the government” conspiracy theory trope is one of the main reasons why Reptodites have this non-interference clause with humanity.

- Lieutenant Gray is a bunch of different humanoid aliens rolled into one - a little Hopskinville goblin, a little classic gray, a little this one weird alien with five-fingered zygodactyl hands, etc.

- There’s some Beyonder Mecha in this volume that are basically kaiju-fied versions of the Flatwoods Monster. The species that built them ALSO engineered the Mothmanuds, because connecting Mothman and the Flatwoods Monster is fun!

- Pleprah is, obviously, a one-eyed one-horned flying purple people eater.

- Tyrantis’s brush with death, in addition to being so very anime, was inspired by my dad outlining how mythic heroes often have to travel to the underworld/land of the dead before they can finish their journey. It’s one of the plot points that I’ve had planned for this series since middle school.

- I’m sure some will view it as hackneyed and corny, but as a person who’s battled with depression for decades, having Tyrantis’s choice to live be the big heroic turn of the finale was very important to me. Tyrantis incorporates elements of a lot of imaginary friends I made as a kid, and in many ways he’s kind of the face of my more positive side in my head. He’s been telling me to choose to live for a while, and while maybe to an outsider it may seem hackneyed, it’s just... very Tyrantis. He chooses life and kindness in the face of pain and struggle. That’s Tyrantis.

- Tyrantis’s powered up form is called “Hyper Mode,” which is another Gundam reference. Originally it was a lot gaudier and involved him turning gold like a fuckin’ Super Saiyan. I opted for something a little more toned down here.

- Also, speaking of KOTM references, I decided to make Hyper Mode Tyrantis’s final duel with Pathogen be a sort of foil to Burning Godzilla’s final bout with Ghidorah in KOTM. Instead of ravaging the city, Hyper Tyrantis’s pulse of energy rejuvenates his fallen allies, and as a result he is “crowned” not out of fear for his supremacy in the wake of killing a powerful enemy, but in gratitude for his kindness. See? Leaning into it!

- And now I can finally reveal that Yamaneon is ATOM’s equivalent of The Monolith Monsters - that is, a kaiju that is also a mineral. I took the “strange continuously growing rock” thing in a very different direction, though, as unlike The Monolith Monsters, Yamaneon is actually alive.

- At various points in the pre-writing process, either Promythigor, MechaTyrantis, or both were going to die fighting Pathogen. I ultimately decided to let them both live, with MechaTyrantis even getting his flesh and blood body back, because I think it’s more interesting and thematically consistent that way. They get a chance to heal their wounds by changing their ways.

- The Great Beyonder and Dorazor both almost didn’t make the cut, as I felt they didn’t have the same pull as villains that Pathogen, Promythigor, and MechaTyrantis did. But then I thought that could actually be the gag - build them up as the final boss, only to have Pathogen take their crown. I want to explore post-face turn Dorazor a bit more, though. We’ll have to see about that in a later volume.

- Volumes 1 and 2 make up what I call “The Ballad of Tyrantis Arc” for ATOM. I call it that because Tyrantis’s storyline in these two volumes was patterend after Chivalric ballads like Yvain the Knight of the Lion. Tyrantis, a heroic warrior who is kind but dumb of ass, learns of strange goings on outside his home and investigates. During his journey into the unknown he falls in love with a powerful woman, whose favor he tries to win. Through happenstance he is separated from his love and, distraught, wanders around fighting various foes to prove his worth, before finally returning to his love a better hero. Invasion from Beyond! could even be seen as a sort of Morte d’Artur, with Tyrantis and a bunch of other kaiju heroes (including Nastadyne and Kemlasulla, who are built up as Hero Kaiju of Another Story) take part in a huge battle that threatens their idealic kingdom (of monsters).

- Volume 2 isn’t the end of ATOM, but it’s designed to work as an ending if you want to tap out here. As a reader I feel a definitive ending is important, but as a writer I’m always tempted to revisit my beloved characters, so I feel giving closure while leaving a few doors open for possible future adventures is a good compromise between these positions. There will be more ATOM stories, some (but not all!) following Tyrantis and Dr. Lerna, but if you want to know that Tyrantis and Dr. Lerna get an ending and the resolution to their arcs such a thing promises, here you go. An ending, if not THE END.

#The Atomic Time of Monsters #A.T.O.M. Trivia

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man-creates-dinosaurs · 7 years

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REFLECTING ON CLOVERFIELD AT TEN

***This essay contains spoilers for the recent film The Cloverfield Paradox*** “I thought, we need our own American monster, and not like King Kong. I love King Kong. King Kong is adorable. And Godzilla is a charming monster. We love Godzilla. But I wanted something that was just insane and intense.“ - J.J. Abrams, on the genesis of the first Cloverfield film The brainchild of producer J.J. Abrams, Cloverfield (2008, Dir. Matt Reeves) – which turned ten earlier this year – remains the best “serious” non-Japanese attempt at a kaiju film ever. Why? Because it is essentially the American equivalent of the original Japanese Gojira (1954, Dir. Ishiro Honda) in that the power which resonates behind both pictures is the fact that what one sees on screen when watching these movies is not simply just the sight of a giant monster attacking a major city but a carefully crafted allegory which works to convey the war-time horrors wrought upon their respective nations. For Japan this was the Second World War, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Lucky Dragon No. 5 incident. For Americans it was the tragedy of September 11th 2001 when the four commercial passenger planes were high-jacked by Al-Qaeda terrorists, two of which were flown into the World Trade Center in New York City and a third into the Pentagon. By transforming such catastrophes into the specter of a rampaging kaijū both films attempt to create for viewers a kind of catharsis through which they can come to understand the tragedies which have befallen their countries.

At the time of its release and still today some have accused Cloverfield of merely co-opting and exploiting the imagery of 9/11. But Cloverfield was not the first film to make use of that imagery. By the time it was released in early 2008, Hollywood had already produced two explicitly 9/11-themed movies: World Trade Center (2006, Dir. Oliver Stone) and United 93 (2006, Dir. Paul Greengrass). In addition, both Steven Spielberg’s 2005 adaptation of the alien invasion classic War of Worlds and Frank Darabont’s The Mist (2007) made use of the haunting images of falling buildings, rolling smoke clouds, people covered in the dust and debris, scenes of people attempting to evacuate in mass, confused information about what is happening, and frustration with the U.S. military to invoke the trauma of 9/11. Even Cloverfield’s now iconic decapitation of Lady Liberty – a scene which can be read as both a literal and symbolical first attack on America – was itself preceded by 2004’s The Day After Tomorrow (Dir. Roland Emmerich) which prominently featured shots of the Statue of Liberty engulfed by water and/or ice as part of its ad-campaign to much of the same effect. What makes Cloverfield different from these previous cinematic attempts to talk about 9/11 is that it does more than merely invoke memories of terrorist attacks but rather actually allegorizes and mythologizes them within its story.

The protagonists of Cloverfield are a group of twentysomethings who have gathered together for their friend Rob’s going away party. Well into the night the party is interrupted when a massive fireball erupts across the NYC skyline. Soon the head of the Statue of Liberty is seen hurtling through the air, crash landing on a nearby street. As Rob and his friends follow the crowds of people attempting to evacuate the city it quickly becomes apparent that the source of the chaos is a giant monster which has appeared out of nowhere and is now causing unquantifiable amounts of death and destruction. With civilians still present the military moves in and war erupts between the monster and the U.S. Army.

Admits this chaos and confusion, Rob decide to set out across the city to try to find and rescue his girlfriend Beth who is trapped in her apartment building which has collapsed into the side of an adjacent skyscraper – the film’s most overt reference to the World Trade Center. As it was for millions of New Yorkers on 9/11 the most important thing for Rob amidst all that has happened is finding his loved ones.

While Rob does succeed in rescuing Beth, the end of Cloverfield is nevertheless both bleak and ambiguous. Traditionally monster movies end with the defeat of the monster via man’s scientific ingenuity. In Gojira, Godzilla is defeated via Dr. Serizawa’s Oxygen Destroyer and though the audience is left with Dr. Yamane’s dire warning that should nuclear testing continue another Godzilla may one day appear they can also rest assured knowing that at least the present Godzilla is dead.

Cloverfield however offers its audience no such reassurance. Following the deaths of their friends, the climax of the film finds Rob and Beth huddled under a bridge in Central Park with both the Monster above them and the military raining bombs down on all sides of them. Both characters look into the camera and deliver what most assuredly is their last will and testament. Ultimately it is unclear if the army has succeeded in killing the monster or not, though it appears that they have almost certainly killed our two surviving protagonists. Such bleak ambiguity seemingly speaks to the ambiguous nature of the American War on Terror which followed in the wake of 9/11. At the time of the film’s release it was still unclear if Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is alive or dead though it is clear that many young American soldiers and Arab civilians have lost their lives in the aftermath.

David Kalat has noted that one of the unfortunate side effects of the metaphorical weight invested in the original Gojira is that it has resulted in the broad dismissal of its many sequels as nothing more than lazy cash grabs. An attempt to bank on a brand name. While I think that criticism is unfair when directed at the Godzilla series it may ultimately prove to be the case when it comes to the Cloverfield franchise.

In 2016, J.J. Abrams unleashed the first of two Cloverfield “sequels”; 10 Cloverfield Lane (Dir. Dan Trachtenberg) and The Cloverfield Paradox (Dir. Julius Onah) – the latter of which debuted on Netflix this past Sunday (Feb 4th). Both of these films suffer from the inherent problem that they were never intended to be sequels to Cloverfield in the first place! Rather Abrams appears to basically be running this Faustian gambit for aspirin young filmmakers and writers where he’ll agree to produce your original sci-fi movie as long as you agree to allow him to shoehorn in a connection to Cloverfield. In the case of Lane this ultimately didn’t amount to much and that movie is a fine thriller in and of itself that plays out like a feature-length episode of the Twilight Zone. In the case of Paradox however, attempting to try and make it a Cloverfield movie pretty much ruins it through a combination of sloppy post-production editing that would make Terry Morse blush and a ridiculous final shot in which the Cloverfield monster pops up on the screen for all of three seconds to do his best impersonation of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion. With news of a fourth Cloverfield already in the can all I can say is that if Paradox is what the future of the Cloverfield series has in store I would suggest stopping now before the original film is ruined by association.

#cloverfield #cloverfield monster #10 cloverfield lane #the cloverfield paradox #kaiju #kaiju eiga #jj abrams #netflix #godzilla #gojira #9/11

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its-just-like-the-movies · 7 years

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Date Night!: Death Note (17, F)

I think part of the reason it’s so much harder to really analyze a perfect film than a perfectly shitty one is that a great film leaves you wondering how they did it. What geniuses had the decision to write that score, to edit in this style, to write that character in such a way, to interpret them so fully? I can’t imagine how much time I’ve spent wringing my hands at Annette Bening in 20th Century Women, trying to understand Dorothea Fields as a creation, as a conscious work of art by way of multiple collaborators as well as the actress playing her, amidst a film that feels utterly human and alive, and without seams in any way. I bring up this film here because I had this thought watching Adam Wingard’s disgusting, dull take on Death Note only a few nights ago. You may be asking “Why is it that both of your Date Night pieces have been centered around demonstrably monstrous acts of garbage?” and I say wait a minute, we’ve seen good things. One day I’ll talk about Shin Godzilla. But that’s just me postponing the inevitable. Tommy and I, and our very good friend David, sat down on the first of September and decided to watch a train wreck that was even worse than we could have imagined. It hasn’t just been whitewashed, but striped of all the source material’s morality and mythology, about as far removed as one could be from anything in the original series while vaguely needing to use certain character names and still actually having a death note, and Americanized in the worst possible way. But it steals baldly from other films and makes it central character completely unbearable while everyone else is vaguely more interesting and doomed to the sidelines of the story. No one wanted this film, necessarily, but is it too much to ask that it be good?

The first immediate example we get of the film’s selective pilfering of its Japanese source material is that our central character is named Light Turner. It’s not in any way a typical American name, especially for white boys with dye-blond hair, but because the source material starred a dude named Light, why not? They couldn’t let that central character stay Japanese, though, because this is America, so it has to be about a white dude and his white girlfriend trying to dodge the world’s greatest detective, a young black man who is still called “L”. The white soon-to-be girlfriend is named Mia, and we know that she is Serious and Not Like Other Girls Or Whatever because we see her looking Hardcore and Bored and Over It during cheerleading practice, a brunette in a sea of blondes, who finally just starts smoking rather than letting the Other Girls catapult her in the air. This is probably because they wouldn’t hurl her into the sun itself, which is the only thing Hardcore enough for her to join. And we know Light is Hardcore and Over It but Still Has Morals because we see him doing another student’s homework and later trying to save another student from the most college-graduate-looking motherfuckers who ever decided to teleport from the 90’s to now and bully someone.

It’s almost too easy to tear down this shambling mess of a film. Wingard shoots Ryuk as though the filmmakers either couldn’t afford to make him look presentable or were just embarrassed to look at him. Light is a terribly bland protagonist, made even blander by the far more interesting sociopathic tendencies of said soon-to-be girlfriend Mia and the truly bizarre spectacle of Wingard’s remodeled L. This version of L is at least someone interesting to watch, even if it’s in such a conventional way as to have almost no resemblance to the original version of the character. Mia, on the other hand, is only altered insofar as her obsession with Light is really just an obsession with the death note itself, and a desire to kill off people more indiscriminately than he does. There’s something deeply uncomfortable about how Mia and Ryuk are eventually aligned as the villains of the piece for lacking a moral compass, especially when Light’s feels superficially arbitrary and utterly dull, and even moreso given that Mia’s eventual betrayal of Light feels like some version of “bitches be crazy”, but both are still the most captivating characters on the screen. If Ryuk has almost no real reason to be there after his introduction, Willem Dafoe’s self-satisfied line readings make the character a welcome presence. That this character egs on Light to commit his first killings was perhaps the biggest sticking point to David early on, given the manga version’s role as an excited but impartial audience surrogate more than anything else, but his presence is still entertaining. Dafoe’s reading of the line “Humans are so interesting!”, one of the few moments where Ryuk got an actual close-up, was also the only actual chill I got during the whole 100 minutes, though credit must partially be given to my shock that any line from the manga - let alone one of its best, in the early going - even made it into the film.

My previous interactions with the Death Note media empire is having gotten partway through the manga and the anime dub in early high school, losing interest a little while after the death of a major character, though not necessarily because that character died. Maybe it felt like the end of the series, or maybe I just straight up lost interest, or moved on to a different property. That being said, I still remember Death Note and its characters fairly well, and certainly well enough to know how butchered this abominable film was. It’s astonishing how much Wingard tries to alter these characters away from any resemblance to their source material, but it brings up what strikes me as the largest question I have about this film, and all the grossest politics and connotations I can think of surrounding the terms “whitewashing” and “Americanizing”. Of course America’s version of Death Note had to star a white boy in the lead role, because Hollywood can’t just have a leading character of color for no reason at all. Of course he had to be saddled with a faux, crummy version of “morals” with a faux-tragic backstory behind his killings while his girlfriend is giving the depravity that made the original so noteworthy and framed as the eventual Big Bad for it. Mia Sutton is perhaps the only character Death Note has going for itself, a genuine female sociopath on film who barely seems motivated by her hubby-in-crime and is more than willing to ditch him once he gets cold feet. Apparently Wingard credits Mia as having more of Original Light’s traits instead of Misa Amane’s, which makes sense to think about but speaks plenty about Wingard’s seeming disinterest in actually adapting his source material. I kept thinking about The Hateful Eight’s Daisy Domergue, featuring another case of villainous characters whose only point of agreement is that the lone lady of the bunch is the worst of them all, though there her crimes are left mainly vague, her threats treated like bluffs once she has the room to say them rather than getting smacked around by her walrus-moustached captor. It’s the film’s most toxic element, one that I’m not convinced Jennifer Jason Leigh’s performance makes the right decisions about in portraying her. The Hateful Eight is also a much better film than Death Note - what film isn’t? - albeit with its own, significant flaws, but in Death Note Mia’s crimes and the crimes of her allies and enemies are all equally defined, because the film is so awful it needs her amorality if only to give the viewer someone compelling to root for, as my squad saw it, because Margaret Qualley commits to her character and makes us sad to see her go. I don’t mean to imply that Qualley is a better actress than Leigh, nor is her performance necessarily stronger in these respective films. But sometimes mere competence in a shitty film is easier to like than a commendable misfire in an uneven one, and Qualley’s work is one of the few umbrellas we can run under in this heaving shitstorm of a film.

I truly don’t know how to engage with L, who seems like the most conspicuous victim of Wingard’s rewrites. LaKeith Stanfield is clearly giving his all to the performance, and if you told me he was the only person on set who’d ever read the manga I’d believe you in a heartbeat. But all the intrigue of his work, the intensity it achieves in certain moments, is drowned out in how overly mannered this character is. Repeatedly L is seen sloppily eating gummy bears ascribed with ingredients that enhance thinking capabilities, rather than strawberry shortcake because it’s fucking delicious, that’s why. Twitchy behaviors are augmented by the character’s complete lack of chill, rather than the naturally super-intelligent, laid-back L the manga gave us, one in terrible physical shape and complete physically incompetence. Here, L gets a chase scene by car and by foot, and brandishes a firearm. Here, L gets a traveling Victorian set to be imported into the middle of the San Diego Police Department’s office area. At least he still gets to keep his own brand of amorality, perfectly content as he is to use some criminals as bait to see where “Kira” is based, but he’s not the savvy liar and manipulator detective of yore. This character is conventionally compelling, but perhaps the most emblematic case of Wingard’s seeming desire to write a Death Note film that doesn’t actually resemble any previous Death Note property. Who knows why this character was cast with a black actor in a shocking white version of San Diego - or even if there was a “reason”, and Wingard just liked Stanfield’s ideas about the character - but the spectacle of him being placed in a chokehold by SDPD chief Light’s Dad was easily the grossest thing Death Note had in store. I can’t help but wonder what Stanfield really saw in this opportunity, how much he got out of it, and what the disparity is for having highlight roles in the best and worst horror films of 2017.

And then there’s Light, remixed from a type-A, grade A model student into an angsty loner who has literally nothing going for him but a wonky dye job and being lucky enough to get a handheld killing machine. Putting a hat on the guy makes him instantly the blandest man alive, and he as much as anyone else is shorn of the traits that made the character such an interesting protagonist. Yes, Mia gets so many of Light Yagami’s traits, but can Light Turner have anything going for him? Can he not nearly shit himself once Ryuk (in such a bitchy spectacle of an arrival) storms onto the scene? Can he not have a motivation so forgettably stitched on the film all but abandons it twenty minutes in, and can his morals actually be interestingly complicated instead of bland, Americanly contrived? Nat Wolff’s Light, possibly the worst performance of the year, is such a guileless goon that his last-act transformation into a criminal who’s actually capable of planning out a long con to save his own life and kill one of his enemies is easily the least believable part of the film. It’s astonishing how much the want of having Evan Peters and Emma Roberts in the lead roles is present in how Light is styled and in how much Margaret Qualley just fucking looks like a less actively bitchy version of Emma Roberts. There’s even a little card that says “Normal People Scare Me” in the American Horror Story font in Light’s locker, like some emo kid in 2011, which gets to the heart of this character’s deep mischaracterization. Why make this kid into a Tate Langdon-type who’s so blatantly angry at the world it’s honestly shocking his father takes as long as he does to realize his son is a fucking mass murderer? How is it in any way a bold, difficult statement that the valedictorian can be a sociopath, that kids with ostensibly no real problems can also want to end the world themselves? There’s a lot I didn’t like about the fourth season of AHS but at least it gave us an emblem of corrupted white, heterosexual male privilege and prejudice that this film just can’t recognize, or won’t.

A funny, somewhat poignant, and very quick moment in Okja sees a character flash a newly made tattoo on his arm that says “Translation is Sacred”. Death Note is not just an abominable act of translation, but of adaptation, of fidelity to a source material’s characters and themes. Outside of its vaguely compelling supporting cast, a lot of Death Note feels haphazardly cobbled together from a multitude of sources and bad ideas all meant on making the film more palatable to an audience that only wanted this film because the source material was so rich, most notably that killings in the Death Note seem to be primarily carried out by Final Destination, Rube Goldberg spectacle-type accidents, rather than simple, mundane accidents. Why make a Death Note film if you’re not going to make it resemble Death Note at all? It feels late in the game to say that I’m not fundamentally against molding source material to suit an adaptation, especially with something as dense as Death Note into a feature film under two hours. But there’s not a single alteration that this film makes to the material that helps it in any conceivable way, no small high point worth the heaps of garbage you have to sift through to get it. It’s not so much a misfire as a willful rejection of any sharp edges or idiosyncrasies that made the original property the hit that it became. It’s also, hopefully, the kind of misfire that kills a hoped-for sequel dead in its tracks. If there’s one thing we can do to reckon with the fact that this shambling corpse of a film exists, the best thing we as a viewing audience and as people who want adaptations of ambitious, international properties can shout from the rooftops that hypnotized FBI agents are leaping off of like synchronized divers. We liked them for a reason, and if you shear off that reason to be more appealing, all you’re left with is a boring white boy nattering on about his schemes in a hospital bed, outshone by a demon barely in focus, and failing in every way to live up to that demon’s last, great line. In the world of Adam Wingard’s Death Note, humans aren’t interesting. They’re cardboard cutouts of characters that aren’t tarnished by association, but shine a little brighter in comparison. You couldn’t ask for a less ambitious take on this property, no one did, but we got in anyways, and if no one will bother to learn from it, then all we can do with this maddening pile of shit is heave it straight into the sun and hope it burns into an even greater state of nothingness than the film has achieved just by existing in this neutered state.

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