-
You're nuts! You're crazy as a coconut!"
2002-06-07 00:40:24
Yeah, yeah, "neglect, neglect" etc. etc. Thing is that I'm really not in a position to write much recently, as that's all I've been doing for work.
Don't wanna talk about it.
So, anyway, as I'm not feeling terribly inspired tonight, I wouldn't expect much in the way of editorial brilliance. It's kind of saddening too that most of the latter half of my "Journal Buddies" seem to have dried up, including shaister who appears to have entirely removed all of his old entries. Sigh.
Bowler: Response to your note has been put off indefinitely. I have a response, but it's going to be rather big, and I simply don't have the time right now. Re: Metropolis, I'm betting you already knew this, but I think the character designs were based on the originals by Osamu Tezuka only translated into more three-dimensionality. Not sure who the "translator" was though. As I said in my entry on the movie, I really liked it. I noticed the artistic clash between characters and backgrounds, but I thought it set the figures off well in a manner somewhat reminiscent of Giant Robo (No, the backgrounds weren't nearly as "rendered" or detailed there, but still...) and acted as a mechanism for pulling the characters apart from their surroundings. Kinda like doing animation over live-action. (Not rotoscoping, I mean for the backgrounds) 'Course, I watched Heavy Metal again a while back, so the experimental nature of the technique appealed to me. Reminded me a bit of the flight scenes from the final story.
Eh. Guess it just comes down to aesthetics.
Incidentally, I'd like to thank all the people that keep stopping by to check and see if I've written something. I get almost as many hits when I don't write as when I do. That's reader loyalty...
Got into an old-fashioned geek-out with an associate last Monday night at dinner who, it turns out, outclasses me in every manner of horror knowledge. We got into a rather elaborate discussion about varying films (It was all started by another friend who said something about the idea of a giant killer rabbit film, and we both went "Been done." [Night of the Lepus or possibly Food of the Gods I & II]) he never actually stumped me badly, and I managed about as well with him, but I could tell I was terribly outclassed and chose my topics carefully. Shows some signs of being a horror snob, though, as, diverse as his viewing experience was, he hadn't seen all the Friday the 13ths, but had seen all five Hellraisers. Hmm. Not passing judgment yet. I'll have to go at it again when we meet up next.
On a similar bent, another couple of friends had recommended and lent me a copy of some Dario Argenti flicks to fill in that particular blind spot in my viewing experience. He's one of their favorite directors, and I confess that I'd never seen ANY of his films. You see, I've always liked horror films, but I'd never made a directed effort to watch them until they started coming out cheap on DVD, so there's quite a lot I don't know, and entire sub-genres I've never seen. (That's right folks, I only LOOK like I know what I'm doing.) So, anyway, I'd heard of the director, in a directorial capacity, so I trusted this offering to be better than our last trade, (It HAD to be better than "Children of the Living Dead" ech.) and I figgered they owed me.
Thus I'll review the first of the two films "The Bird with the Crystal Plumage" which I watched first, appropriately enough, as it was Argenti's directorial debut (although he had written several others
[Intercession: Just got off the phone with my mother. Naturally, now I have to go get a beer...]
in the past). Almost upon the initial receipt of the CD I knew why it was that I'd never heard of him. The box cover had a very Hitchcockian feel to it, black gloved hand holding out a knife while a red-hued profiled woman stands aghast, backed against a skylight. "Murder-mystery-suspense," this image said to me, and I wasn't far wrong. Suspense, being just a half-step from simple drama, has never greatly interested me. My mother is something of a mystery hound, and I used to enjoy watching the weekly "Mystery" program on PBS or any of the other British mystery shows (including the excellent '90s version of Sherlock Holmes...at least on par with the original Basil Rathbone version, and even included some of the screwier Conan Doyle stories like "the Creeping Man."), but as a genre, they were always her favorite stories, not mine. Dario Argento, I'm discovering, lies somewhere near the junction of slasher films and mysteries...not too "good" to avoid showing scenes of vicious violence, but not so "bad" as to pass up excellent opportunities of suspense and terror without shedding blood. In his native Italy, these stories are called "gallo" or "yellow" after the manner in which cheap penny-dreadful (there's a term I need to use more often) paperbacks of suspenseful, rather trashy horror novels are bound in bright yellow covers. Although I'm not certain, I think the term is rather depreciating and dismissive, like "pot boiler" or "Harlequin Romance."
That said, "The Bird with the Crystal Plumage" can be seen plainly as an early work of a very promising writer and director...but a first effort nonetheless.
The film itself was, I believe, originally in Italian, where it's title read as "L' Uccello dalle piume di cristallo". The story concerns a late-20's American author named Sam Dalmas who is plagued with writer's block on vacation in Italy. Days before he and his erstwhile girlfriend are about to leave from a thoroughly uneventful holiday, he is out wandering the streets late at night when he sees something strange. This is a little complicated, so pay attention. Walking past a sculpture gallery of "modern art" (this was made in 1970, so the art is rather inspired, but HUGE and heavy, and all vaguely resembling something that belonged in a Hellraiser movie) he chances to glance inside and sees a struggle on the second floor overlook (also part of the exhibit). A Woman in a white dress is struggling with a figure dressed all in black with a dark hat, leather gloves, and black overcoat. Naturally, we cannot see any identifying features. A large, wicked looking knife flashes between them, and suddenly the woman staggers. The dark figure vaults from the balcony steps and runs out a side door. The woman stumbles towards the front of the glass-walled gallery, and our hero, naturally, runs to help. This next bit is really clever. The front of the gallery is actually two walls of glass parallel to the street. There is an entrance through the outermost one on the left, and into the gallery to the right, thus defining a corridor walkway across the front of the gallery. Sam darts in through the open door on the street, but becomes trapped between the two walls when the door mysteriously closes behind him. We are then treated to a five minute display of Sam vainly trying to figure out how to open either door while the woman crawls and contorts strangely on the floor mere feet from where he stands while a crimson stain continuously spreads across her dress. When Sam recalls the scene later, though, he keeps thinking that there was something odd about it... (Rewinding and fast-forwarding through the scene gives no hint, so don't bother.) Artsy and gruesome, no? Metaphor of the audience, perhaps, with the evident parallel of sheets of glass (television) preventing us from helping the pained damsel in distress? Perhaps macabre would be a better term.
Surprising everyone (especially me) the woman actually survives, but with no details to help the police find her assailant. The intrepid, and slightly Machiavellian Inspector Morosini questions Sam at some length, but isn't able to get anything useful from him either. It is then that we learn of several other killings (more successful) that have occurred around Rome in the last few weeks. The next day, it appears that the dark figure has targeted HIM for death, as he barely avoids decapitation by meat cleaver. There's a short investigatorial circus with the investigator involving a lineup of known perverts (hey...that's their term...and an especially weird joke concerning a misplaced transvestite) and a massive set of reel-to-reel computer banks (1970, remember) with an attempt at ASCII-art profiling, complete with a little ASCII-stick figure. At the end, Sam's passport is confiscated to prevent his leaving the country during the investigation.
Intrigued, as well as directly dependant upon the investigation's solution, Sam begins his own amateur detective work on the case, encountering an extremely affectionate antique dealer, a horribly stuttering pimp (whose integral joke I assume just didn't translate well...leaving some of his conversation nonsensical), an informant with the most practical solution to "bugs" I've ever seen, and a batty (or perhaps "catty?") scuzzy artist living in a walled-up studio. Further attempts are made on his life, additional murders are committed, and even his girlfriend Julia (Suzy Kendall, who later married Dudley Moore) is targeted, leading to perhaps the only film incident of a hastily assembled barricade actually keeping the bad guy out. That's really as much detail as I should give, seeing how the secrecy of the plotline is so essential to enjoyment of the film.
In total, the movie is a very good film with lots of turns and twists one would expect from a mystery, but it does have some rather amateurish flaws in places. Several of the scenes felt rather contrived, especially all of the attempts on Sam's life. For example, we learn that, while dead men may not wear plaid, Hitmen shouldn't wear BRIGHT YELLOW jackets when chasing our protagonist through the confines of a transit-bus parking lot. Further, when Sam escapes into the company of three complete strangers, the hitman puts his gun away and walks briskly down the street.....followed closely by Sam. The Hitman must've known he was there. Why the Hitman didn't just turn, shoot, and run, I don't know (although it may have something to do with his atrocious aim). Further, once the "big secret" of the film is revealed, I can't figure out in retrospect why the Police were unable to get ANYTHING out of Monica Ranieri (girl stabbed in the art gallery). One of Dario Argento's favorite methods of murder (at least I assume so based on these two murders) is the straight-razor, which is used once in this film. Unfortunately, I've always felt that this was a terribly impractical weapon due to the tiny cutting surface, the difficulty in holding, and the inability to stab with it (no point). It's really only suited for disfigurement or slitting someone so they bled to death. This could just be me, but I've always felt that the dramatic scene of a killer slashing someone to death with a three inch straight razor looked a little....uh....impotent? Here it does manage to open a few high-pressure veins, though. Perhaps the best example of this slightly amateurish writing lies in the title, named after a tiny plot point that leads them to the killer....for which nearly anything else could have served just as well.
These flawed scenes are the exception, though. Most of the scenes, the killing scenes in particular, are filmed with a remarkable intensity that verges on the pornographic (both literally and figuratively...topless shots, again, are apparently not taboo) in closeup, detail, and flow. After watching the film for a bit, I remembered something I had heard about Argenti's films. They strike a particular chord of resonance with some of the classic fetish crowd. The killings are usually portrayed from the killer's perspective, only the black leather gloves and shiny rain-coat visible as the work progresses (another Argenti trend I saw in the second film...come to think of it, EVERYONE is wearing leather jackets or coats in this film). One particular death scene (first killing after the failure at the gallery) could hardly be described as anything other than sexually charged. Then there's that little bit of bondage subtly slipped in near the end of the film. In short, by slipping little bits of perversity into the film (like sexually charging the deaths), or the addition of little weird details (like the perverts' lineup, transvestite, pimp, or the constant hinting at lesbianism and homosexuality) Argento is able to accomplish, in a more roundabout manner, the sort of "sick obsession" with women's deaths that horror films are typically reviled for. Personally, I think this demonstrates exactly how outdated such accusations and concerns are, but no one will listen to me on the subject.
The film is very Italian, as would be expected. Many of the scenes have a kind of spaghetti-western-with-the-tension-removed feel about them (I'm talking about the everyday scenes, not the death scenes, naturally). I cannot for the life of me figure out what is wrong with the sound, though. From what I can tell, the film was originally recorded in English (watch Sam, aka Tony Musante, the original actor lined up for the TV series "Baretta", as he goes through his lines.) as we can tell from watching some characters' lips. Others I'm not so sure of. Some voices are rather difficult to understand, and I found myself continuously turning up the sound just to hear the conversations. I think that many of the lines were recorded in a sound studio later (with video cues) and lined up appropriately. The only reason I can guess this is that several times characters talk without a break in inflection when there probably should be. Getting up from a chair has no effect on tonal quality, etc. Anyway, this subtle off-alignment from non-perfect synching makes the entire dialogue track "feel" odd. Other scenes show a touch of aping Hitchcock, especially a kind of triangular version of the "Vertigo" shot (although without the zooming aspect-change effect), and a kind of revisiting of Rear Window in that first "double glass wall" scene. Bullshit science puts in an appearance at the repeat appearance of the wall of reel-to-reels. Also, I should mention that the film breaks one of my cardinal, inviolate rules. Not gonna tell you what it is though. Guess. :)
In summary, a very good suspense horror-thriller-mystery that suffers from some slightly amateurish writing flaws and direction, but is certainly worth seeing by anyone fancying themselves an amateur sleuth. Sits just on the other side of what I normally consider horror.
Lessons learned from this film:
Dialing for help on a rotary phone is a BITCH!
Never stab a police officer if you are standing next to a window.
Always bring a wood chisel with you on your killing sprees. you never know when it might turn out to be useful.
Modern art is just inherently dangerous. (No! Really! Just think about it...have you ever seen "modern art" appear in any film unless it was there to either trap or injure someone? Happened in Betel juice, Hellraiser III, this film, the next of Argenti's films I'm going to review...)
I debated whether or not to put the solution to the mystery here, appropriately surrounded with Spoiler space. After all, these reviews are largely for people who are curious about the film but don't want to see it, or don't want to be tricked into seeing a film they won't like, and the "killer secret" is the most essential aspect of that in mysteries. Hmmm...... I'll think about posting it later.
Next time...more nudity! Lots more gore! More twists and turns! More awkward scenes for guys who brought their dates! Same director! -
"The Gods are not Crazy, they're Higher than Kites..."
2002-05-31 21:13:09
(Hmm...Maybe I didn't have to split it up after all.)
No, I'm not dead. Events have conspired to prevent my updating any time recently. The following entry was typed over about 4 days, and will probably have to be split up into separate entries. Check for subsequent entries posted about the same time... (Oh, and I'm well aware no one will know what I'm talking about in most of the rant/review at the bottom.....but that's never stopped me before... Besides, I'm working off all my frustration from having to watch EVERYONE ELSE go to JACON. I hate you all...)
Warning! Maudlin alert ahead!
My life sucks.
Actually, no it doesn't. It strikes me that much of all this impotent stupid rage and clinical depression that we see develop across the US has to do with people who realize that they lead absolutely wonderful lives, but their physiology and brain chemistry doesn't allow them to be happy all of the time. It's not mentally healthy to be happy ‘round the clock as it tends to screw one up emotionally. (The technical term for someone who is depressed all the time is "clinically depressed". You know what the term is for someone that is happy and outgoing all the time? "Maniac." Hence "manic-depressive.") Thus, tiny little inconveniences tend to tip one into a towering rage or a bottomless depression, amplified by the fact that you know there's no good reason for such an extreme response. Worse, these reasons are nearly impossible to articulate when in one of these states. Teen angst as a result of the mood-swings accompanying social development are easily understood by adults, because we all went through something similar, but these adult bouts tend to manifest as accumulations of events and feelings pontilistically painting entire individually-specific lives, and thus have no real point of reference for other people. It's like telling a clinically depressed person to "cheer up, what have you got to be sad about?"
This would explain much of celebrity behavior, wouldn't it? "I can't believe he acted like that when he's getting paid so much to play."
There was a nasty little event last Friday when a good friend of mine, who is one of the nicest guys you could ever meet, finally got fed up with no one tending to the cleanliness of their lab and went into an EXCEEDINGLY loud towering rage at no one in particular, including a rather nasty string of profanity audible down the entire length of the lab wing. Scared the hell out of the little Chinese labworker there at the time. This is the sort of thing that would presage firing in more professional settings, but apparently the mood burned out fairly quickly and things are a bit back to normal.
As for myself, I've hit a rather nasty bump of depression recently, but it's for entirely personal and exceedingly maudlin reasons, so I'm not going to explain them other than to comment that my review may be in a bit darker light than previous ones. (Guinness, give me strength...) The ironic thing is that I was feeling this way for a while and called home to cheer myself up. During the call, I learn about some family business that drove me even deeper. *Sigh* I've been feeling like this all during the holiday weekend (naturally) so that should explain the lack of an entry.
You know, in general, irony's a great literary tool, except when it happens to you. In preparation for the perfect opportunity the memorial day weekend presented for editing, I spent a good bit of Friday night organizing and sorting out all the files in my computer, discarding old stuff, and consolidating material into secondary drives so I could have some great big empty spaces to work in my base drive. Then I defragged the whole thing during the night. Now my capture card can't find my VCR. Just a big black screen with no discernable reason for the lack of picture. It was used less than a week ago for capturing still material for an application at work, and now...nothing.
Gahhh.
In general, this holiday weekend has been utter crap. Friday was spent almost entirely doing the defragging and watching random crap on TV. Saturday morning was spent in the lab for about 3.5 hours as I tended to my own work AND the work of everyone who could afford to go somewhere more interesting over the break. Then it was off to the weekly game in Winder, which, I discovered, I had completely forgotten was to be a pick-up game run by yours truly. Fortunately I really only require some time to think on the way up there to be mostly prepared for the game. They never do what I expect them to ANYWAY, so there's very little point in my making up elaborate diagrams and statistical charts except as an exercise in futility. [In fact, I advocate having no notes at all for the running a CoC game other than perhaps a list of names and a general flowchart/timeline for the events in more complicated games. Anything more and the players will be able to feel out the direction of the story just by watching to see if you make something up or fumble for your notes. The real trick is to make up none of the names until after the players ask for them. If you're like me and you have a terrible time coming up with character names off the cuff, the players know who to talk to just by seeing who's name you've got written down. You have to keep the list after it's made just to keep things consistent, along with a line to remind you who each person is, but so long as you can hold the rest of the plot in your head from week to week, nothing else is necessary. Make up NPC stats on the spot and just try to be consistent. (This is a lot easier in a % system than D20, as the values rolled are usually more telling.)] Anyway, Sarah was back in town for the weekend and, as always, wanted in on the game. This is fine since she's done this multiple times before and we just have a character on standby to break outta the nut-house whenever she's around. The bad bit is that I see her only maybe twice a year, and it's always in this "hey, I'm in town, anything going on?" aspect. I wish she'd give us a little warning, like a week or so, so we could arrange something more fun/exciting than hanging around and rolling dice until 1:00 in the morning. (Didn't help that the CoC story had just hit a lull in the action....not that that stopped her. She has an uncanny ability in these games to take a perfectly safe, reasonable scenario, like, say, investigating a robbery on campus, and devolve it, within an hour, into a seduction of a faculty member and thence into a panicked run from the cops during a raid on a speakeasy. She tends to go through characters quickly.)
[I just have to stop here and say that, love or hate their music, Tool always manages to do something clever with their album covers.]
Of course, this is probably a bit unreasonable of me, as she probably wants to spend her time in town with her boyfriend, but still, we'd like to do something special. The whole troupe were friends from undergrad and we don't get much of a chance to talk anymore.
The game went off reasonably well, despite her knocking a great honkin' hole through the middle of it with her more.....direct.....methods, but it's all in fun. She'd even dug up a present for me, but forgot it in Florida.
So, anyway, Sunday I accomplished absolutely NOTHING. The troupe were planning on going to see Attack of the Clones at 7:00 since Sarah hadn't seen it yet, and I'd nothing else to do before then, especially considering that I'd been up to 4:00 the night before having a few beers after I got back from the game. As I was expecting a call on the details, I hung around my room for a good long time on Sat., only to discover at 5:30 that I'd missed the e-mail that was sent instead of calling. Due to delays and lost directions I showed up at the diner after everyone else had finished eating and I had to bolt my food so that I didn't hold everyone up too much on the way to the theater, meaning that I missed out on even the tail end of the "catching up" conversation that I'd wanted to do instead of the game the previous night.
Monday I'd received two invitations to Memorial Day events, but they were mutually exclusive (due to the distance between) and just sat around my room for the whole day feeling down until it was time for the latter event.
I really need a cat out here. Nothing cheers you up like a cat on your lap who wants nothing more to secure his unconditional love than to be petted. My two (inversed-siamese and snowshoe) are home with my parents, as I have on-campus housing. To make it worse, I had a dream last night about my old cat, Whiskers, that I got when I was six and died when I was 24. Poor old thing went diabetic for the last six years or so and was pretty senile by the end. In the last three years or so he would "kill" his little stuffed yellow mouse and show it to us at least twice a night. Although he eventually tolerated their presence, I don't think he ever forgave us for taking in those two feral kittens when he was on his way out. Eventually passed away in his sleep and is buried out in the back yard with his "mouse."
Boy, this is getting bad, isn't it?
Let's see. Other topics. Don't have a stein for the beer, so I'm drinking it out of a coffee mug (only philistines would drink Guinness out of a can). The mug of the moment is a memento from "Howard's Bookstore" in Bloomington, IN, the town where I grew up. (Was born in Boulder, CO, but that's a different story.) The Bas-relief on the mug shows silhouettes of two cats lounging around on a pile of books. The pic comes from two cats owned by the store owners, Pearly-Mae and Jasper. The two jet-black cats were something of town celebrities as they were always sitting in the front window of the bookstore, watching the traffic and pedestrians go by. (Bloomington IN is a college town in the truest sense of the word. Everything is centered around IU, and there is very little outside of an 8-10 block radius around the campus. Thus, something as simple and charming as having two affectionate cats sitting in the store window was sufficient to receive "celebrity status.") Anyway, when I was a kid, going to Howard's Bookstore was one of only a dozen things to do in town (let's see....the rest were visiting this labyrinthine pizza parlor called "Garcia's Pizza," stopping at the "Penguin" for soft-serve ice-cream, going to the "Corner Bookstore," going to the public library [a story in itself], catching fireflies in the campus park after dark, going to listen to the symphony play on the union steps [boring for a 10-year old], stopping by "24th Century five-and-dime" (the sole source of comics, RPGs, and other refuges of the imaginative nerd in town) going to "Pygmailion's" art supply, and stopping at the "Red Chair Bakery" for a cookie) so the place was firmly engraved in my memory, even though I never found anything there that I wanted to read. The cat's owners furthered their celebrity status by calling in to the local radio-quiz show with answers, using the names of the cats. Years after we moved away we came back to the town and walked around. Pizza-place was closed, Penguin's had been forced out by a bar, the public library had been massively renovated, but "20th Century" was still there. Howard's had moved, but the two elderly cats were still tottering around in the stacks, knocking books off the shelf so they could get a better look at the passing cars. I sat on the floor to look at some books on the bottom shelf, and Jasper walked straight over to me, climbed into my lap, and looked at me with the "Well? PET ME!" attitude I always remembered. Two years later we stopped in again and they had both died of old age. Their replacements were nearly identical, though, in every aspect.
Hmm.. I have actually gotten my system working again, (this was written over two days) although I've forgotten all of the proper capture settings for the utility, so I'm gonna have to fidget with the system until I've optimized the picture and minimized the filesize. *Sigh* I really don't want to have to read through the info blocks at amv.org. Maybe I can winnow a quick answer out of Quu, although past experience has shown me that NO ONE can get my vids to play entirely properly on any system other than my own.
In other news, Lileks steals my job AGAIN! Not on a recent title, either, but on one of my all-time favorites, the "Hellraiser" series. (Hmm...he's using some new date-assignment system I can't nail down in my currently intoxicated state. Just go here: http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/02/0602/060102.html and advance one day.) He's incorrect on one minor point, in that Hellraiser IV was the one in space, but it was not the most recent, Hellraiser V being a direct-to-video release of rather high quality about a year ago. I debate his assigning all "gross" stuff as leading out of Alien, though. I'm more inclined to point to it as a high-water mark for a trend going back to George Romero's dead stompin' trilogy and continuing in a more metaphysical manner through David Cronenburg's work. His being utterly turned-off by the various aspects of "Hellraiser II" I find particularly recommending of the movie. Isn't the absolute abhorrence of the ideals behind the film he expresses simply a statement of how "horrible" the central concept of the film is, and how the ideas insinuate themselves within your mind and warp your perceptions of the world? In a genre that seeks to assault the viewer's perspective and involve them directly in the film itself either through the faux-danger reaction of "jumping" at moments of tension or through the utter abhorrence of the actions expressed, driving one completely away from the genre through the excessive quality of the product presented, ironically enough, could be viewed as the ultimate accomplishment. (On the other hand, I find his "Backfence" column to be almost incomprehensible. http://www.startribune.com/stories/804/2855542.html It's obvious what the governor MEANT, even if it was phrased badly. Enforcement of patriotism removes all the value from patriotism, similar to the application of laws removing the moral portion of moral decisions (as responses are now dictated by the punishments of law...even if the end physical result is the same, it is no longer a MORAL decision by the individual, but one of self-preservation.) Supporting your country is, by its very nature a choice, and enforcing the pledge of allegiance would remove that choice. No it ain't Stalinist Russia or Big Brother talking, and we are dealing with children who aren't intellectually equipped to PLEDGE allegiance, but it's still a hypocritical stance to require it, even if it's only a small hypocrisy.)
On that note (the non-parenthetical one), on to the review! This one is going to be a major geek-fest, as I've finally finished reading through the entirety of the Call of Cthulhu D20 conversion. Summary? It's too bad this system sucks so badly, because there's some really cool color text in here.
To understand the critiques of this conversion of the game, it's necessary to understand where fans of the game, like myself, are coming from. CoC was about the only widely recognized horror RPG anywhere before the goth movement hit and "Vampire: the Masquerade" and its numerous iterations cropped up. The game is supposed to be based around the writings of HPL and the HPL literary circle. (Lovecraft corresponded at GREAT length with most of the influential pulp-horror writers of his era, writing an average of about 15 letters A DAY. He wrote to them at great length on innumerable topics, from literary tropes to ancient philosophy to the cheapest brand of butter beans. Many of his corespondents, out of respect to HPL's work, and with his honestly modest permission, wrote stories that played around in HPL's world or possessed similar themes, resulting in an immense, but highly irregular and disparate mythology and menagerie referred to en-mass as "The Cthulhu Mythos.")
The difficulty with assembling such a game lies in the fundamental conflicts within even HPL's own writings. HPL never intended to create a unified mythology or picture of the universe. Each story employed some plot mechanisms of vast, unfathomable nature, usually only vaguely or peripherally described. Occasionally he would cart a particularly vivid ideal-made-manifest from story to story, but there was never any effort presented to maintain uniformity or even sensical nature from story to story. The effect, which was only furthered by re-interpretation and re-stylization of different authors ever since, has been the creation of wonderfully convoluted imaginary constructs never fully defined and leaving a playground for our imagination to run wild in. Here, the "Great Cthulhu" can be either a Godzilla-style creature, rising from the depths to mindlessly destroy the world with his insane thrashings, a hyper-intelligent alien life-form destined to destroy mankind without ever noticing our presence, the manifestation of subliminal fears and terrors of the great depths of the ocean, an aspect of the Devil, an ancestral fear made flesh, a life-form that exists more as a force of nature than a sentient being, etc. etc. etc.
The writers of the original game understood that, and left almost the entire game as this open realm for wandering around in. CoC games do not support rules-lawyers, as everything is, by definition, determined by the "Keeper of Arcane Lore" (GM). The only thing kept uniform throughout the original game is the one thing most essential to understanding HPL and the associated authors' writings, the essential magnitude of the menace, and the relative helplessness of the characters to confront it directly. In the original system, most of the rules have been described as "wonky," especially those concerning sanity and magic. This, however, is the game's strength. In the end, the players will not KNOW how the devices of magic work, nor the convolutions of the human mind that comprehend and process reality sanely, which is entirely appropriate for the game, because the characters will be entirely in the dark as well. The essential "unknown" of the "Cthulhu Mythos" is it's strongest characteristic, as it is meant to summon up the wizened old man who finally, after decades of research, comprehends the entirety of the universe...and is driven to suicide by it. (Zaphod Beeblebrox, if you will step into the chamber and truly comprehend the enormity of the universe, and your tiny little importance relative to it...) "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."
So what's so great about the game? If you can't know anything.....
Well, what's great about the game is the way in which it is played. As opposed to D&D, which can often devolve into dungeon-hacking or lengthy role-play "parlaying", CoC, being a horror story, plays out much more like a mystery-story. And not just a mystery story, but one set in the time of HPL's life, the 1920's-1940's. Eras particularly suited to a world of horrors. The decadence of the roaring 20's, the jazz scene, the criminal gang wars, the exploration of the last few unseen areas on earth (one of HPL's stories speculates on what would be found when the south pole was finally reached...), the time of prohibition and women gaining the right to vote, while racial tensions start to mount. The windup to WWII and the Hindenburg disaster, the further shrinking of the British empire, political corruption, sitting smack between Sherlock Holmes and Sam Spade, and that's not even mentioning the newly-developing ideas about science, nuclear warfare, the resurgence of spiritualism and mediumship, the presence of Harry Houdini, etc. etc.
Oh, how to put this more succinctly...
It's the era of Indiana Jones.
Yes, this is all in hindsight, and I'm certain that our own era will appear similarly fascinating sixty years from now, but that is beside the point. (HPL himself felt he had been born 300 years too late...) The eras explored in this game are eras romanticized now, and filled with events, both real and postulated, which grant a solid mood and sentiment to the game's direction, creating a strong basis to work from (at least for fans of literature from the era).
The original writers took advantage of this by pouring their own evident love of history into the sources. I've found tables listing 1920's prices on Model Ts, dissertations on firearm regulations of the late 40's, explanations of political and social rivalries that I didn't even know had existed, all contained within CoC source books. (And that's not even mentioning the Fortrean Times (Charles Fort) entries, enumerating the various "weird" occurrences from those eras.) Hell, just the history of the Thompson SMG (the 2-handed 100-round "barrel" machine guns used in all the old gangster flicks) is fascinating.
And you have all of this going for you BEFORE you start hinting at something sinister and unnatural about that shop down the block.....
To make a long story short (too late!) the writers for the D20 conversion didn't quite comprehend this. Although the original game had (much less popular) supplements for playing earlier (1890..Victorian England) and in the present day, the primary game was always situated somewhere between 1909 and 1949. It is rather telling, then, that the only two games given in the back of the D20 book are written for the modern era....
Much of what follows will be RPG geekery, so everyone who could care less about this stuff is welcome to stop reading. Just a warning.
I've covered in an earlier entry the essential difficulty involved in converting the physical system from the percentile CoC system to the new, universal D20 system, so I'll just skip that diatribe here. (Summary: The D20 system assumes "level-wise" advancement, and thus eventual reaching of a point whereby the Great Old Ones are no longer as great a threat....undermining the alien omnipotence implicit in their literary creation. The phrase "yeah, we killed Cthulhu" should not even make sense in the CoC system.)
As soon as I read the first page of the book, I knew it wouldn't be a total loss. Within the first two paragraphs, they use the words "Gestalt," "Weltanschauung" and "Verisimilitude", hinting that the authors are going to give our intelligence and our literacy more credit than in most RPG intro source books. In fact, the color text and the examples given are real high points of the book, simply for the ghoulish delight with which the writers dreamed up horrific situations for the characters to find themselves in, and how it would affect dice rolls. The problem is, these dice rolls. There's simply too many numbers to keep track of as the game is presented. In the % system, you had your six characteristic points, your % skill points, and everything else derived from those. Here you have a steadily advancing HP, skills, saves, characteristics, characteristic bonuses, separate combat statistics, and weird stuff like "attribute damage" to keep track of.
Much of the rest of this is going to be rather scattered, as I wrote random notes as I read the book.
One of the funnier, and more meaningless changes the book brings in, is the sanity value. I think it's a good demonstration at the silly manner in which they attempted to bring the system into the "universal" template. The percentile nature, manner in which SAN is lost and regained, and initial derivation of the SAN points is left almost entirely alone (taking into account that there is no "POW" in the D20 system). However, when your character hits "0" SAN, he does not go insane. You ready for this? OK, the character starts "bleeding" sanity points at a rate of 1 a round. You become insane when you hit -10! And how do you stop this terrible progression? Why, someone has to run up and GIVE YOU EMERGENCY PSYCHOANALYSIS! (Quick! Bob! Tell me about your mother!) Is that not the silliest thing you've ever heard? This mirroring of HP loss in D&D (which is also applied to HP here) serves no purpose other than to undermine the seriousness of a character going slowly nuts as time goes by, and minimize "casualties" for the sake of continued gameplay, and to the detriment of mood and atmosphere. Additional silliness includes the gaining of 1D6 SAN points for LEVELING. (Oh brother.) Although they do admit that such advancement may be considered antithetical to HPL's setting and may be disallowed.
Further exploration of the sanity chapter reveals a wonderfully well organized sourcebook for insanities, including broader definitions and more inclusive, interesting mental disorders detailed at greater length than in the percentile system source books, including suggested applications and effects on gameplay. It is, however, a little too detailed for it's own good, as it includes "eating disorders" on a list of possible effects. ("The great mindless thing rose up before me scattering corpses like cordwood and dashed off into the woods gibbering horribly....and now for some reason I can't stop eating?") A minor quibble, but an amusing one nonetheless. -
"Where was I / I forgot the point that I was making..."
2002-05-31 21:10:11
(Continued from subsequent entry above...)
Those of you who remember the hapless example character "Harvey Walters" from the percentile system will be happy to see that his replacement "Dr. Shiny" is equally as unlucky in his exploits.
Another plain difficulty lies in the character creation. As a friend pointed out, they removed all the aspects which have proven to be eminently workable in other systems and kept the ones that are only adequate. CoC has no classes, at all. The entire class system has been removed. Characters define themselves by choosing "core skills" and fitting them with a profession template. The saves and attack bonus progression (think 3rd edition D&D for each character class) are chosen from a list of.....two. You pick "Defense" or "Offense" and your progression as you level proceeds along those lines for the rest of the character's life. Kinda cuts down on the variety, doesn't it? With the removal of individual character classes, most of what was cool about 3rd edition D&D just falls through the cracks. No individualized "class skills", bonus feats from a select list, or anything along those lines. Aside from initial attributes and different core skills, the characters will all develop identically. Sorta like deadly Hardy Boys. Bleh.
Oh, speaking of feats...you get feats in this game. My friends and I were joking that feats within the system could hardly work into the game without ruining the mood, unless the feats were "scream really loudly" or "run really fast." Well, we were mostly right. There's very little of interest in the feats section, as it's built almost entirely to serve the ludicrously complicated combat section later on. One new set of feats has some promise, though. Apparently, characters are able to develop "psychic feats". They're rather difficult to work, and there's only a handful presented, but it's one of the few new mechanisms introduced into the game that has some potential. On the other hand, it's sorta like introducing ‘the force' from the Star Wars D20 conversion into a horror game. The good psychic feats are the more vague, random items like dowsing or second sight. The more direct ones essentially hand too much power over to the player through feats like mind reading, psychokinesis and telepathy. Introduction of what essentially constitutes as insanely convenient spells would tip the game from the horror genre into "supernatural suspense" or some-such other bastard child of horror.
Combat. Whoo. It's plain at this point that the analogy between the D20 and the percentile system just falls apart. Anyone who's played CoC can tell you that combat is to be avoided at all costs. Simply comparing the number of hit points of a character in the percentile system with the amount of damage done by any gun on the table tells you that there is a remarkably high chance of getting killed by a single bullet. Critters and creatures of the Mythos are, if anything, MORE deadly than firearms, and thus screaming and running is almost always the right answer to a confrontation. The D20 system devotes 32 text-packed pages to the ins and outs and round-abouts of combat in the new system. I swear it's more elaborate than even the D&D system. The grapple system alone is two solid pages. Most of this grows directly out of the level advancement system instilled in the central concepts of D20 conversions. Specifically, the gaining of 1D6 HP at every level advancement raises the possibility of a hail of gunfire, ingestion by "the blob," or the rupture of a sub at a thousand fathoms NOT downing an individual permanently. D&D, due to the essentially heroic nature of the game (even when playing evil characters) must always hold out the possibility of success against overwhelming odds. CoC, at the opposite extreme, always holds out the fact that death of the character in the arms of some uncomprehensible, alien evil, is inevitable, and virtue lies in defiance before imminent death. Thus the original percentile system rarely, if ever, allowed for the possibility of a gain in HP (only really possible through blasphemous rites or working out/bulking up significantly), and any gains accomplished are of such minor magnitude that the character would only last a single round longer. As such, the rules on combat have always been a bit scattered, even mildly unfair (the manner in which dodge and parry, the only real elaborations on combat in %ile system are flat weird and unreasonable...and I disallow the use of any Thompson SMGs in my game as the rules involving them allow stupid advantages), but it made little difference, as the characters new better than to get in fire-fights or boxing matches with alien races anyway. Oh, the system works, but not to the elaborate level that makes D&D dungeon-crawls even mildly interesting.
To their credit, the D20 conversion tries to preserve this aspect of the game, but does so via a rather stupid mechanism that contradicts much of the other mechanisms. In D&D, there's something called the "massive damage" rule. If a character takes a certain amount of damage all at once, there is a certain chance that the enormity of the blow kills the creature automatically, regardless of remaining HP. For human-sized critters, that value is 50HP. In CoC? Ten. What, exactly, is the point in having a 100 HP 18th level character, if the largest increment you can receive damage in without a chance of instantly dying is nine points? (Practically anything might give you 10 points of damage. A 20-foot drop is 2D6.) The only advantage given is in the prolonging of a nickel-and-dime death...something very rarely encountered.
Other attempts are made to increase the severity of combat and damage within the game, but through effects that wouldn't really scale with level, such as a random disease effect being permanent blindness (effectively reducing the character to unplayability), or drowning effects that kill you three rounds after your first failed roll. (Even the percentile system gave a bit more leeway than that.)
It's also rather telling that the example combat which begins the chapter is remarkably like a D&D dungeon crawl...with particularly hideous results. They also use a "heal" spell in the example (utterly unheard of in CoC) and make the weird assertion that Lovecraftian Ghouls are "undead." In addition to the standard confusion over attacks of opportunity, they've got modifiers for Disease, Poison, Landslides, Drowning, Heat, Cold, Tornados, windstorms, hail, dust, invisibility, acid, ice, smoke, pressure damage from very deep water, and falling, as well as numerous others. (Actually, I could've used this table in a game just finished...trying to get off a mountain during an earthquake is difficult...) The number of ways in which a character can be done in is just staggering...
Moving on to the Equipment section (12 pages on weapons, three on equipment. Ohhh yeah, D&D), it become plainly evident that the percentile system writers were hired to do the firearms section. Apparently the conversion is largely a cooperative effort between two crews, and those sections written by the original writers shine through in their absurd detail level. Massive and unaccountably detailed is the equipment section and their HISTORIES of each notable firearm. Stuff is supplied here that could never possibly be relevant in a game (The 1,000,000 th Winchester M1894 rifle was presented to Calvin Coolidge, the 1,500,000 to Harry Truman, and the 2,000,000 to Dwight Eisenhower.) and is plainly an example of the history and firearm buffs being unable to contain themselves for fifteen pages. Is it any surprise that an obscure trivia-hound like myself likes this game? The detail on the weapons spans all the way up to modern firearms and the popular CounterStrike (Half-Life multiplayer mod) assault rifles, pistols, and sniper gear. I was a bit puzzled by this until later in the book where it turns out that the writers viewed the entirety of the span of 1890's to present as a continuous flow for play, as opposed to the previous delineation of three distinct eras, 1890's, 1920's-1940's (classic HPL), and present. Frankly, this is an improvement, although, as I'm used to only playing in the 20's, I'm hard pressed to come up with some other era-specific stories that interest me. As such, the wider span tends to dilute out the background resources into eras I don't plan to use. Eh. Personal taste.
Magic. Magic in the original system was always wonky, and terribly random. You spend some Magic points, loose some SAN, and something weird (possibly deadly, although rarely in a direct manner) happens. There were only two commonly-accepted direct-damage spells (think "Magic Missile" in D&D) in CoC for the first five editions. Everything else had more to do with summoning, contacting, calling, or pissing off the various creatures in the world or mucking around in the non-Euclidian incomprehensible spaces that surround us. None of this "blow up the goblin hordes" or "summon up a flaming sword" combat-intensive cast-in-three-seconds spells that D&D is rife with. Most of the magic could take days of preparation and hours of action to work, but the effects could literally be world-shattering. (Call Azathoth in particular.) The new system can't resist pouring more of the combat-related spells from D&D (in effect if not in name)_to add another page to the elaborate combat modifiers listing in the chapters, and the absconding of "concentration checks" for spellcasters in D&D. At the very least, the absence of classes prevents the "class restricted spell lists." The system actually works quite a bit differently. The SAN losses are there, but there are no "Magic Points" in the new system, so something else had to be substituted instead.
Attribute points.
Ouch, huh? The stats that rules-lawyers and munchkins to their best to maximize for another 5% bonus on smackin' people around, gets frittered away, sometimes PERMANENTLY, on transient spell effects. Such an effect wouldn't last five minutes in a dungeon-hack D&D group. One spell, 10 temporary INT damage, and you're really not doing anything at ALL until it comes back. Here's a further example. For the creation of permanent magical objects in the D&D world, you have to spend experience points. In CoC, you spend permanent attribute points, and enough are often required as to reduce the caster to a gibbering idiot. The (eventual) point being that magic in the CoC world isn't intended to be incidental aspects of a character, but full-blown plot devices and the driving force behind stories instead.
So where's the balance? If the spells aren't level or class dependant, anyone could cast them, and they could literally destroy the world, what's to prevent some whacko from doing it? Well, there is one ultimate balancing factor. No one knows the spells. Spells can only be found by digging around for decades among musty old tomes of half-understood antique lore in forgotten languages, receiving them directly from the Great Old Ones in exchange for a terrible price, or tripping accidentally over OTHER people's decades of work and benefitting from their effort. The last one is where most PCs come in. In HPL's stories, the books from which this blasphemous knowledge derives play a central part in the stories, carrying the ancient tomes over from book to book. The most famous of these fictional (if anyone tells you they're real, they're selling you a load of shit) books is the infamous "Necronomicon". Yeah, Evil Dead/Army of Darkness. "Klatuu Verata Nicto" comes from an old sci-fi flick, though. In the game, these books grant %s of "Cthulhu Mythos", knowledge of how the "real world" actually works, and inherently limiting your sanity as your ability to function normally is destroyed by these dark revelations. The new system's skills don't work that way, though. Instead they give "plusses" to your D20 Mythos skill. ‘Al Azif," the original lost manuscript from which the Necronomicon was derived over two thousand years ago, the most powerful book in the entirety of CoC, gives you....."+3". Bleh. Why bother? Claiming its rough equivalence to "Unausprechlichen Kulten", "The Revelations of Glakki" or "The R'leyh Text" is a joke. Even sillier is a "random event" table for failing to comprehend the book during study. Sure, the book's disappearance or apparent infestation with live insects could be really cool in a horror game, but only if planned that way. Making it a random event just makes it silly.
Boy, this is taking forever.
OK, coming into the "listing" part of all source books. The critters listings. I really hate that even the original game has decided to break up the monster listings, and list "standard critters" separately from the "Great Old Ones" and the "Outer Gods" This just needlessly complicates the indexing when you're looking for something, since the divisions are largely artificial and imposed randomly upon an enormous range of critters. At least the %ile book put the two listings NEAR one another, instead of sticking the Great Old Ones and Outer Gods in an index in the back of the book. Anyway, commenting on all of them individually would take even longer than this is taking now, so I'll just say that, in general, the authors seem to like more specified definitions of their critters than Lovecraft ever granted his stories, and thus make occasional wild, unsupported assertions. Some are in conflict with the original stories, and some are in conflict with the precedent set by the original game through six revisions. Picking a few at random.....Deep ones are immoral? Dholes have teeth? Ghouls are undead? Byakhees are constructs? The Colour out of Space is radioactive? Mi-Go, the FUNGI from Yuggoth are more like CRUSTACEANS than anything else? Nightgaunts can achieve gargantuan size classes?
Even beyond these nit-picks, they leave large, well established critters out of the listings. Ghasts, Star Spawn, Shantaks, and Sand Dwellers are all left out of the listings. This is especially weird for Shantaks, because the creatures are used multiple times in examples and color text throughout the book. Further, the writers fall into a common trap of these games. Although nearly all the critters have intelligence equal to or greater than human, their habits are described as though they had the rough intelligence of an animal.
Two critters deserve special attention. The "Hunting Horror" is just flat wrong. At first I thought they had merely screwed up the quote, but then I noticed the "Challenge Rating" (average party level that could stand a chance against the creature) was slated at 20. What's happened is a rather stupid mistake wherein the Hunting Horror, a creature from an August Derleth story (The Lurker at the Threshold) got mixed up somewhere with "The Haunter of the Dark," an ASPECT OF NYARLATHOTEP from an HPL story of the same name. Hunting Horrors are nasty, but they aren't even in the same league as Nyarlathotep, the most directly malicious of the Outer Gods.
The "Tcho-Tchos" are a race that really should have been left out of the book. The problem is that they are a hold-over which (IMHO) most directly reflects HPL's rampant and highly vitriolic racism. It's rarely brought up in discussions on the author, but he was an exceptionally racist man, even for that day and age. Browsing through his collected correspondence, this one issue tends to erupt violently from his letters. Though he often wrote hyperbolically in a faux-melodrama to make his points, and thus perhaps didn't literally mean it, he did write once that he advocated complete extermination of all the Chinese in New York, through war if necessary. This rather distressing aspect of his personal beliefs does seep into his writing, unfortunately, but I try to extract the things I love out from around it. Anyway, the "Tcho-Tchos" are sort of this racism made manifest, described, essentially as a racist ideal of an entirely degenerate race of man, closer to some kind of blasphemous talking animal than "real" humans. (Although the authors are from HPL's circle, not HPL himself, they speak in specific what HPL spoke about in general.) Fortunately, these cannibalistic inhabitants of Tibet are only ever referred to in a round-about manner, minimizing the trouble. The D20 system, however, demands more detail, and in their fleshing-out try unsuccessfully to avoid furthering the racist core of the creatures. If it is any consolation, the "descriptive literature quote" for the race in the D20 book comes from an unlikely source. They essentially propose that Sherlock Holmes once encountered a Tcho-Tcho in "The Sign of the Four" (The vicious little midget with the poisoned darts.)
Moving on, there's an entire section devoted to explaining how to treat the Cthulhu Mythos. Once again, in attempting to properly define the Outer Gods and Old Ones, they make some distinctly weird assertions with no real support from the stories, and directly contradicting 6th edition characteristics. They set up Azathoth, Shub-Niggurath, and Yog-Sothoth in a kind of "Wild, Weaver, Wyrm" dynamic from Werewolf: The Apocalypse. Doesn't leave much room for Nyarlathotep in this dynamic, and he's always been presented at least on a level with Shub-Niggurath. Further, the beings are divided in the D20 book into "True Gods" and "False Gods," a confusing and utterly misleading designation that does more harm than good. They've also introduced a new "False God" by the name of Mordiggian, the charnel god. I'd never heard of it, and thought it a cast-off from D&D, but close examination showed a source in Clark Ashton Smith's work. Actually looks rather interesting, if difficult to work into a game.
Other interesting misappropriations is a total reworking of Y'glognac. One of the most conniving and power-grubbing of the Great Old Ones is described as "mindless and direct" and then entirely forgotten from the statistics in the back of the book. Essentially, all of the beings are summarized and simplified in single-paragraph descriptions that entirely miss the point.
Finally, from the stats in the back of the book for the Outer Gods and Great Old Ones, I have to make one comment. Assigning CRs to some of these beings is simply ludicrous. The best example is Azathoth. He has a CR of 50, which I believe is higher than any individual creature in the entire D&D catalog, but it's still far too low. Picture this. Azathoth is less an actual being, and more a manifestation of nuclear chaos, an amorphous physical law. Mindless, chaotic, and possibly (literally) infinite in size, merely its partial appearance is sufficient to destroy planets and consume suns. And a party of 50th level players can fight that?
Once the D20 system finally gets out from under the weight of describing the essential core ideals of the Mythos and enforcing a game system into an environment where it doesn't really work, the book actually gets better. There are chapters on story, setting, and gamemastering, that, for once, proved to be actually interesting, amusing, and instructive instead of the "storytelling goes back to the greeks..." crap like every other system insists on doing. Lists of possible story threads are given for every era and style of play. Excellent flavor text and unique, inventive, and occasionally non-linear methods for gamemastering are suggested to good effect. Much of it is on a low-level beginner basis, but other parts are things that anyone could benefit from. 57 pages are devoted to giving the "Keeper of Arcane Lore" (GM) the proper perspective to run the game.
All that remains are the example games supplied in the book. It is particularly telling that the only two games given are written for the modern era, but that said, they're actually pretty good. The first, "Farewell to Paradise" involves a unique celluloid creature and an ancient society unearthed through the renovation of an antique movie house. Some of the stingers and special effects for this game are nicely inspired. The second one isn't bad, but is essentially a scaled-down version of the old B-flick version of HPL's "From Beyond." Neat in conception, not so good in execution.
(Finally) In summary: a kludgy, contradictory system application of an unrelated game to an old favorite that, nonetheless, makes a good sourcebook on the gamemastering, historical, and mood areas of this RPG. The color text alone is worth it, but don't try to get the system to work.
Next time: A crappy, or maybe even a good horror flick. Really! I swear! -
"Oh my God they're TURKEYS!"
2002-05-23 14:12:51
Gahh...just been pointed out to me that this was the end of Buffy's sixth season, not fifth. Which means I'm forgetting a season ender in there somewhere. Maybe it was the revivification of Drusilla (another favorite but declined character).
EK: Ahyup.
AbsoluteDestiny: Isn't it great? Forgot to mention the weird-ass music myself, but I had a lot of ground to cover. -
"...and the worms ate into his brain....."
2002-05-22 23:57:35
Worst season ender ever.
Well, anyone who watches Buffy knows by now that they wimped out in the end and didn't kill Willow. Which they really should'a. Because it would have been a lot more satisfying than the teary "have yourself a good cry" sequence everyone indulged in at the end of the 2-hour season ender. (Hey, I like Willow, but still...) Plus, that "end of the world" shtick just came right outta Joss Wheadon's ass. Literally mentioned for the first time at 1 ½ hours into the show, it had utter plot device painted all over it, and it really wasn't even necessary. They could have done exactly the same scene with Willow attempting to blast Buffy or Giles or Anya into little bitty pieces and Xander stepping in, and it probably would have been MORE meaningful. Not that it would have been any less contrived, but it would have been accomplished with fewer ludicrous props. Threatening the end of the world at the season's end has become depressingly predictable for Buffy. (Let's see how my memory serves....1st season: Master breaks loose, tries to open Hellmouth. 2nd Season: Angel turns evil, tries to end the world through Akatha (sp?) 3rd Season: Mayor converts to major big-baddie...presumably to end the world. 4th Season: Glory attempts to get home, ripping open the earth dimension in the process. 5th Season: Willow gets a wild hair of empathy and decides to kill everyone on earth to end their suffering.) Hell, it was so contrived that they had to explain the whole thing to us.
Of course, that's being a bit uncharitable. There were some good points to the episode. I, personally, felt vindicated because they acknowledged the "Jean Grey" aspect when one of the nerds mentioned how Willow had gone all "Dark Phoenix" up there. (Dark Phoenix was Jean after she went a little sadistic with all the power.) I suppose I should just be glad that they didn't retcon away the death of Warren. The sudden and unannounced return of Giles was a bit of a "this is how we get the ratings up" trick, but they pulled it off with the aplomb of a Yoda entrance. Remarkably, all the high points of the episode were during the interactions of the characters, and when they actually attempted to move the plot along it dipped down into contrivance-ville. With the exception of the very end (where everyone's lines were lame) Willow did remarkably well with her "dark persona." Yeah, some of the lines were silly, but most of the time she pulled them off. 'Course, I always liked the "leather Willow" episodes, so you can chalk this up to predilection anyway. There were some especially good bits of Willow-Dawn and Willow-Buffy interaction. The best, though, was when Giles burst out laughing. That was just perfect. It was what the series had been missing, and what I'd originally signed on for. Just shattered the tension and recalibrated everyone's attitude for a few minutes.
Anyway, on to some personal replies. I'll keep typing until my fingers lock up (I'm outvoted as to the setting for the AC in the apartment).
EK: Congratulations. Now I have to clean a mouthful of soda outta my keyboard. (snerk)
Bowler: I'm presuming you disagree with my position? Don't really blame you. I posted the first of those lengthy replies after an exceedingly bad day and employed a particular temperament (which I rarely break outta the box) that was specifically designed to piss people off. I had been in a really pissy mood and the collective smarm from many of the respondents just pushed all the wrong buttons. Yeah, I was trolling, but trolling in the particular "shut the hell up" manner that doesn't normally elicit much complaint. Although the sentiment is a bit misplaced, I still remain in the basic stance as exemplified by a few points. The brigade against smoking (IMHO) is presently in a transitional motion between a moral brigade and a legal one. Nearly all moral brigades, when they get enough misplaced steam, end up as legal brigades. Happened with alcohol (temperance movement), happened with explicit lyrics in music, happened with porn (both in literature and men's magazines), happened with comics, and happened with dissenting politics. I call them moral brigades, because they operate under the direct impression that A) anyone ignorant enough to choose "wrongly" on the topic in question deserves to be forced (one way or another) into choosing "rightly," as we know better what will be to their benefit or B) choosing "wrongly" is a judgement on their character, which they need fixed or C) their choosing "wrongly" will somehow prevent others from making that choice properly or otherwise adversely affect people. (There's a whole essay in there about the idiocy of "corrupting ideas", but that's more space than I'm willing to fill today.) In essence "people who know better than you, making your decisions for you, because you, being too close to the subject, aren't adequately equipped to make that decision." The other point for my little outburst is exemplified by a lab-mate of mine. One of the members of our lab smokes, and this other member is constantly hassling him about it. She calls attention to every time he leaves to get a smoke (a bio-lab is one of the few places with hard-set reasons for requiring smoking outside...although there's now a regulation that you can't smoke within 60 feet of the building...) and pretty regularly browbeats him about it. No, she isn't physically preventing him from smoking, but he caves at every point and is now giving it up because he's been trying to get "with" her since the day they met and she is well aware of the fact. (I have it on her authority that she has no intention of dating him.) And yet, the one time I called her on this crap, she referred to herself as "tolerant" of his smoking. Yeah.
As far as the advertisements, I find it intensely hypocritical to legally order someone to produce ads calling THEMSELVES corrupt, racist, and murderers of little children, and yet NOT make their activity illegal while trying NOT to get them to drive themselves into bankruptcy. Frankly, I think our government should have better things to do with our money.
I intensely wish I could link this next bit, but the original appears to have disappeared from the front page.....
Whooo Hooo! Just found it squirreled away elsewhere on the page! I can link it! Read the bits that follow before you go there, though.
http://www.faans.com/carrot1.html
FANS! is an online comic that plays out sorta like a "page a day" comic book. I think I've spoken about it briefly here before, but in quick summary, it's sorta a "super-fandom" comic, in that a local sci-fi club thwarts evil geniuses, extra-terrestrial invasions, and civil war battles all while engaging in some shameless soap-opera-ing along the "hallowed" halls of fandom (conventions, MST3K sessions, collector markets, etc.). In general the writing is rather spotty and, frankly, a little too scattered to keep continuity evenly together from day to day. (Read a month at a time, the stories make much more sense.) It's not brilliant, but the art is fairly good (the recent story is done by a guest artist) and I like some of the characters. The guy who runs the site is a unashamed fanboy, though, and the link above proves it.
When I was a kid of six or eight I didn't really read comics. Just picking up an issue or two at random, the scale of the storylines (and especially the expense...I was on an allowance of $0.50 a week FOREVER) was staggering to my little mind, and being the premie-nerd that I was, I would rather read "real" books than comics. I just couldn't find the funds to follow several comics regularly.
I made one exception, though. I remember going shopping and spotting a "#1" on the single rotating wire-rack of comics in the store and deciding to beg Mom into buying it for me. That comic was....(wait for it)
"Captain Carrot and the Amazing Zoo Crew."
It's a funny-animal superhero comic.
This was my single viewport into the world of comics for MANY years. I never picked up or followed ANY other comics until I was in my early teens (most of the trivia I recite here I got after the fact through friends' collections), and then it was only after this title folded (or disappeared from the local shelves, anyway). The thing is, though, since I had no other exposure to other comics......I didn't know it was a parody. Yeah, yeah. Hey, I was six, OK? I did spot the comedy in "Oklahoma Smith" but that was about it.
I can't tell you how enamored I was of this comic, and how much all of those memories came rushing back when I saw the first part of this little tribute. Even now I can recite off the roll-call: Captain Carrot, Pig Iron, Yankee Poodle, Fastback, Rubberduck, and Alley-Kat-Dabra.
God, I'm a geek.
The sad thing is that I never had even NEAR a complete collection. I had 2/3 of a "arch-nemesis attack" storyline, the first half of cliffhanger episodes, and the latter half of issues where I had no idea who the characters were. Most treasured was that first issue, stained in one corner with Pepsi, pages sitting inside a cover worn off of the staples through constant reading. The story featured a cross-over with Superman (flung into an alternate dimension) where they kicked the crap outta "Starro," an actual DC villain from back in the 60's. I would pay an exceedingly large amount of money to be able to read the series once again. However...
I'm pretty certain that my Mom threw them away. When I was 14. Snif.
OK, you can go check out the link. Other kids had Spider man, or Superman, or Batman. I had Captain Carrot. Explains a lot, don't it?
Well, after that bit of sentimentalism, on to a review! I mentioned before that someone handed me a movie with the line "you review bad films, right?" Today we delve into that movie, perhaps a more aptly constructed, much better acted, and much lower budgeted "Dungeons and Dragons."
The movie is "Hawk the Slayer." I should mention right now that being much better than "Dungeons and Dragons" really doesn't elevate the film very much. Quu handed this film off to me after transferring it to DVD from laserdisc for a friend. To the best of my knowledge, antique laserdisc is about the only way to get ahold of this film, despite the fact that it's ranked as the best RPG movie ever made by our friends over at "Knights of the Dinner Table."
It's easy to see why.
Hawk is the story of six teenaged guys (five characters, one GM) gathered around a big-ol' solid oak table in someone's basement as they plough through "a story of Heroic Deeds and the bitter struggle for the triumph of Good over Evil and of a wondrous Sword wielded by a mighty Hero when the Legions of Darkness stalk the land" while getting potato chips stuck in their teeth and reaching the strangely bland-toxic point of cherry coke overdose. Of course, we never actually see them. We just see the story itself as it plays out before us, in all of it's hackneyed, yet heartfelt glory. Imagine if a Renaissance fair made their own fantasy movie. Not one of the big fairs with funny individuals and competent actors, but one of the fairs put together over a weekend by a bunch of people who just thought it would be fun, and who never did get enough use outta that old costume of theirs. This is a cult film that never got up enough energy to START the cult. Besides, it would be a cult of basement-dwelling acned D&D players...and who really wants to get a lot of them together in one place, much less out into the light? (I say this as a firm member of said group.)
I was genuinely surprised when I looked up the heros on imbd. I rather assumed that this was a typical cast of "no one, going nowhere" but I was VERY wrong. All of the PC (player character) stars have long and surprisingly diverse resumes, although they really aren't "stars" in the readily recognizable sense, being merely highly prolific character or bit parts. I should have known as much, since there wasn't any of the REALLY horribly fumbled lines in the film, despite the ridiculous dialog and silly special effects. One actor, however, required no introduction.
Jack Palance.
Jack Palance, looking almost as timeless 22 years ago as he does today with the approach of his 82nd birthday (HOLY COW!), appears as the villain in this flick, Voltan. (You know, I think maybe Jack Palance was one of those people born fully grown. Like Jonathan Winters.) Much as I give credit to actors who don't consider crap horror flicks beneath them after they've made it big, JP gets a lot of credit from me for this film. He must've known that he was dealing with a bunch of amateurs with no budget and only silly props to work with, but he still gave a good "only one take, we don't have enough film" performance. It wasn't like he could have been hurting this bad for work, either, since (according to imbd) this was his 84th movie appearance in 30 years.
Jack plays the disfigured Voltan, a man driven insane with jealously at the success and happiness of his brother, Hawk. Flashbacks tell us of his lust after his brother's wife, her burning half his face off, and his accidental killing of her. His wound, covered during most of the movie with a specially designed helmet for the sake of the makeup expense, constantly bothers Jack ("Leave me...my face pains me." Yes Jack, it pains the rest of us too.) and requires the constant ministrations of an evil wizard who manifests as a fuzzy dark blob in an exceedingly over-saturated red blob at a local cave. Knowing that an evil act will draw out his PC brother, Voltan, under the ministrations of the GM, kidnaps the abbess of a nunnery and holds her ransom for 2,000 GP. Recognizing the PC glow around a one-handed crossbowman at the abbey, and apparently not hearing about the plight of Dr. Richard Kimble, Jack lets him go. That PC, Ranulf, (who later did some voices for Disney's Gargoyles and commanded a fleet of Klingons) runs off to find Hawk. Hawk, (John Terry, later showing up in "Full Metal Jacket") meanwhile, has been wandering the woods looking for random monster encounters so he can level up and take on his brother. Rescuing a blind witch, who naturally turns out to be a high-powered NPC, Hawk learns of the other PC looking for him, intercepts him, and goes about gathering the rest of the PCs at the table, all of whom are off bolstering their experience with individual fights or contests. There's the brute of the party, a giant named "Gort" with a disproportionate hammer, who, three years later, became the Cyclops in Krull. Then there's the requisite elf (short version) "Crow" with a frame-droppingly fast bowshot (they stop the film, reload, start the film, fire, stop the film...) and either high cheekbones or a selective 5-o'clock shadow. He later showed up in "Empire of the Sun". Finally there's the equal-opportunity dwarf "Baldin" with a sharp tongue, a sharper wit, and a disgusting diet who eventually devolved into a goblin in "Legend". Now that the whole party is gathered, they withstand the slobbering Welsh of a local slaver to rob him for the cash, fend off the WORST LINE EVER uttered by Voltan's adoptive son ("...I am no messenger, but I will give you a message....a message OF DEATH!!") and are betrayed and captured. After the dwarf gets the pointy end of Voltan's personality, they are all rescued by the NPC blind witch and her spells.
Her spells.
OK, this is the part you have to see to believe. A guard is immobilized by an overdose of silly-string. At one point she "throws balls of fire to blind them". I wish I knew what this was. It looked like six guys standing behind an overactive smoke machine and a flocking gun throwing bright neon tennis balls. Her teleportation involves one of those rotating neon ring columns from late 70's discos. I nearly fell outta my chair.
Naturally all of this leads up to a duel between Voltan, the "man with no depth perception" and Hawk, "the highest level fighter." The rest of the PCs musta rolled terribly, though, since two of the five don't make it out and have to roll up new characters for the next game.
All in all, for everything in this film that sucked, this is a surprisingly fun movie. The costumes are remarkably good while they fend off rubber goblins and stumble through every possible degree of British accent. The cinematographer makes sure the film is filled with FRAMING! AND MUSIC! AND FRAMING! AND MORE FRAMING! while simultaneously coming up with a film print so dark you have to turn up the TV's brightness to tell what's going on. Fortunately, the editor foils you even then during the weirdly-spliced action sequences, passing off sudden cuts as special effects. (Horses disappear, repeat firing crossbows, an elf who doesn't need to reload while jumping in place, and a +3 kryptonite-embedded "mindsword" that...sorta...jumps to Hawk's hand when he needs it.) The dialog is all over-emphatic and dramatized to the degree of a bad fantasy novel....or six caffeine-inspired D&Ders coming up with valiant phrases off the top of their heads. There's actually enough character-development in the film for everyone to be distinct in your mind by the end, and a few scenes of intentional, fairly standard humor, carried off by perfectly competent actors. This actually sits a step or three above MST3K fodder.
In the end, if you can derive any enjoyment at all from listening to other people play or talk about playing RPGs, you need to hunt down this film. It really is the determining factor, as the kitch qualities only have value for those "in the know."
JOURNAL: MCWagner (Matthew Wagner)
Current server time: Jan 11, 2025 06:51:46