I just noticed today that a video I had posted in YouTube was just blocked in the U.S. because of some music I used in the background. Specifically, they blocked my PC Transporter video that I used to demo some hardware I was selling on eBay. The video is pretty mundane, but I used a Señor Coconut track in the background along with various beeps and noises from the Apple ][gs. Come on, who is going to download the song with all sorts of disk drive noises on top of it? WMG thinks people will do this, so now only people outside the U.S. can view the video. But, get this, if you can view the video in your region, it gives you direct links to download the song on iTunes or Amazon! That is a brilliant business move, but apparently using user created videos as a promo tool in the U.S. is beyond the pea brains at WMG. So, for my sake, please steal Señor Coconut’s record off the Internet (search for it on Google, you’ll find it for download from Rapidshare or similar site) and don’t buy the record if you live in the U.S.A.! I will find a way around YouTube’s blocker soon and repost the video here as soon as I can.
This is not so much a parody as a straight-up recreation of a low budget 70s black exploitation film. The humor comes from the exaggeration of the style and it spares us (for the most part) from the Scary Movie-style moments of obvious jokes.
No-budget Japanese zombie movie with a dumb story a few good gore shots and lots of horrible iMovie-quality digital effects. I guess it’s played for humor, but there aren’t really any truly funny moments.
The French comic upon which the movie was based. Stunning 60’s stylized artwork, but the story is just a series of bland sci-fi episodes with a little titillation thrown in here and there.
This is a collection of the Aliens comics that were released by Dark Horse in the late eighties. These came out before the awful Alien 3 went and killed all the characters we loved from Aliens. The plot picks up shortly after Aliens with characters returning to LV-426 to explore the crashed alien ship. I think I would have preferred it if the later movies took this direction, but the comics are just poorly written fanboy garbage for the most part. They try to be deep and end up just being a confusing mess of clichés and movie re-quotes.
Giallo isn’t quite the return to form I wanted from Dario Argento, but it’s a much better movie than the majority of his post-Opera films (I still think The Stendhal Syndrome and the Masters of Horror episode Jenifer are much better). Gone is the visual style that really was what made Argento’s best movies so great. Instead, we have a good Italian-style thriller with the usual graphic violence, bad acting and plot holes. Generally, this is enough for me, but I always want more from Argento.
Ya know, I love me them video games. I would go so far as to argue that video games are, well… can be, art. However, I have to admit that even the best video games are a bit lacking in the originality department. Take, for example, this screen shot from Yahoo showing three upcoming games:
Stubble-faced muscle men abound in the video game world.
This was a cartoony and fun side-scrolling platformer with nice2.5-D graphics. A bit easy and lacking the exploration and precise control of a Mario game, but enjoyable and worth playing through especially for the unexpected ending.
A somewhat miscast French costume drama based on a 19th Century erotic novel. The male lead is played by a creepy man-boy / Macaulay Culkin look-a-like who is like a kid playing dress-up in his ill-fitting costumes. Asia Argento is good as usual, but I don’t think tattoos were that common among Parisian society women at that time.
A bit of speculative fiction showing how the world would deal with a zombie apocalypse. The book is written as a collection short vignettes, each told by a different character. Overall, it was an interesting read, but I would have preferred a bit more of a continuing narrative structure to keep me turning pages. Although, thankfully, it avoids the “the real monster is us humans” zombie fiction clichés.
