Legend of Dinosaurs & Monster Birds (5/10)

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I had this movie on my DVD wishlist for many years and never got around to buying it. I had heard that it was a gory, bonkers Japanese giant monster movie. Well, it does have one moment of low rent gore for a few seconds, but most of the movie is slow-paced and boring. We really only get about twenty minutes of poorly shot, shaky-cam monsters and then the movie just ends without any sort of resolution. Little bits taken out of context might make a good trailer: the aforementioned gorey attack and perhaps the Japanese country band scene. Most of this doesn’t even rise to level of cheese you’d want from a film of this era (except maybe the disco soundtrack). I was very disappointed in this one.

Sieben Tage Frist (4/10)

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Also known as School of Fear, this krimi is about a boarding school for boys where the students sneak off to visit a lady of the evening™, get in trouble with the professors, then start to disappear. I was mostly bored by this because nothing exciting ever really happens and the culprit, who turns out to be an ex-Nazi, is never shown as a intimidating bad guy. It comes off as a proto-Porky’s sex comedy without the humor and a mystery without the mystery.

#Alive (6/10)

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A Korean fast-zombie zombie movie that focuses on the survival of a single kid in an apartment complex. His character is set up as being a streaming gamer dude but his knowledge of tech only pays off a little bit when he flies his drone around. Otherwise, this was mildly fun but not terribly memorable.

Der Mörder (7/10)

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This 1963 black and white Krimi opens up with a nebbish man killing his wife at a rural bus station. We know he did it, but the papers report that he had an alibi for the crime. Enter our hero, Walter, who is curious about the crime perhaps because he wants a way out of his own failing marriage. The murder plot fades into the background as the film starts to become a straight up marriage drama until the second act, when Walter’s wife turns up dead nearby a bus station. Coincidence? Well, maybe. The two suspected murderers become intertwined in blackmail and other noir hijinks until it all comes to a somewhat unsatisfactory conclusion. I thought this was entertaining, but I wished they tied it up better.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on Nintendo Wii U (9/10)

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Zelda games had been in a bit of a rut lately (as in 2015 lately). Sure the games were good, but they followed the exact same formula that they have had since Ocarina of Time. Go to a dungeon, gain a new power, use that power to defeat the boss, and on to the next dungeon.

Breath of the Wild breaks the formula by going completely open-world and giving you most of your powers in the first few hours of the game. Instead of focusing on the next big task, you are free to take your time and explore the world.

While it’s not the most densely populated game world, there are tons of little tasks to accomplish. Unlike other open–world games, these aren’t simply collectable items floating here and there. You have to be observant (korok seeds, photos, chests) and you have to be able to use your wits and abilities (shrine quests, towers). At its core, the gameplay is good old-fashioned puzzle solving. The shrines are the best part of the game. They offer plenty of challenge and its always a nice sense of accomplishment to complete one. There’s also a bit of crafting (the bane of modern gaming) in its cooking system. My daughter spent most of her hours in the game cooking various stews and skewers. I blame her Tik-Tok attention span.

All this puts you on the path to building your strength, stamina, and inventory size—all things you need to fight off the monsters and, eventually, Calamity Ganon. If there is any flaw to the game it’s the uninteresting story. It gets the job done, but it’s as shallow as the Toh Yahsa swamp. I’m sure idiot Zoomers have spent hours “shipping” the various Hyrulian species characters together in their fanfic notebooks, but me, an aging Gen-X’er have no patience for this drivel.

In the end, although I probably ranked some of the older games higher, this is probably the best Zelda game in the series. It has much more replayability, more to do, and more to discover. As I type this, Tears of the Kingdom is tearing up the charts. Maybe someday I will get to that one, but I am holding out for the Wii U port. It’s the way the game was meant to be played.

Garth Marenghi’s TerrorTome by Garth Marenghi (9/10)

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The audiobook is the way to go here. The character of Garth Marenghi (who reads the book) is hilarious no matter what he’s saying but it helps that, at least for the first part of the book, every line is a joke of some sort either parodying horror fiction or delving into the narcissisms of Garth Merenghi. It was inevitable that that pace couldn’t be retained for an entire novel but it does manage to stay reasonably hilarious through all three stories. This is about as close as we’re going to get to ever seeing another season of Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place and I’m fine with that. Another volume is going to be released this fall.

The Anarchist Handbook by Michael Malice (6/10)

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A collection of essays about anarchism from 1800s to the present. The older essays were quite tedious and repetitive. In the end, some of my key disagreements with anarchism still remained. What do we do with criminals if you need to consent to be incarcerated? How do children fit in this world? Anarchism is a good directional goal, but I doubt it would work at scale.

The Occult in Art by Owen S. Rachleff (7/10)

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This massive coffee table book seems like it would be a lot cooler than it is. Despite its size, it’s mostly fluff and not a deep investigation into occult artists. The bulk of it amounts to finding an old-timey painting that has a monster or witch in it, including a photo of the work, and then describing the work in the text. The book best serves as a starting point in finding artists who occasionally created fantastic imagery. The one point in which the author tries to push some scientific skepticism into the occult happenings, he gets his facts all wrong by describing how the phases of the moon are the result of the Earths shadow being cast on the moon!

Brian and Charles (7/10)

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This is a one joke movie about a man who creates a robot. The joke is that the robot is obviously a guy in a cheap costume comprised of a cardboard box, oversized clothes, and a wig stand. For some unknown reason it starts off as a faux documentary but that stylistic choice is quickly dropped once the story takes hold. It uses well-worn tropes of children becoming adults but everything hinges on that one joke being funny. I was entertained in the same way I might enjoy a competent kids movie and I did laugh a couple of times, but whatever.