The first chapter about sea creatures is probably the best part of this book. Lots of great illustrations of ships being attacked. There is a hint of reality to tales of giant squids and the potential of undiscovered deep sea creatures. Then there’s the coelacanth. You cryptozoologists have one example of the discovery of a long-thought extinct creature and you’re just going to rub it in our faces like so much Sasquatch musk. I’ll give you that victory, but I’ll be damned if I am going to accept your extraterrestrial bigfoot sightings.
This game is part of a Tomb Raider three pack at GOG.com. I tried to play Tomb Raider 1, but I had already played the vastly superior remake, and I felt no need to revisit the same game but with bad controls and visuals. I would like to think that the second game has some technical improvements on the first, but it’s still clunky as hell.
Lara’s movements are slow and take a lot of getting used to. The graphics are as primitive as one might expect, but the animations pretty smooth. Almost too smooth as I was constantly waiting for one movement to end before initiating a jump or drawing out my guns. The thing that really dates this game is the sprawling level design. Completing a section starts to become tedious pretty fast as you are backtracking constantly and always getting lost amidst the repetitive textures and shapes.
Still, the core of Tomb Raider game play is still there. There are plenty of genuinely interesting platforming challenges, especially if your are on the lookout for secret areas. The final few areas were the best part of the game. The underwater areas were the worst.
I absolutely hated Beyond the Black Rainbow but felt I had to watch it before watching this. Mandy might be a tad over-hyped, but it is leagues better than that artsy garbage fire. There at least is a story here. Even though it’s kinda dumb. It gives you something to hang on to while you watch the images fly by. I get the feeling that Mandy was just an excuse to make a movie that looks like 70s prog-rock album covers complete with glowing geometric shapes and demonic, shadowy motorcycle riders.
The final installment in the Scorpion series is much more straightforward than the previous movies. From what I can tell, most reviewers rank this as the worst in the series but I think I liked it a bit better than Beast Stable. Sure, it’s not as crazy, but there is a more coherent story and a semblance of character development for Nami. There’s a bit of a love story and you think she might find peace. But by the end she still comes off as a variation on Jason or some other mindless slasher villain. You want to root for her, but then she has no moral compass at all and quickly negates any hint of relatability.
A huge drop in quality for this the third Scorpion movie. Much of the visual flair is gone and the plot, which should be a simple revenge story, has trouble finding any focus. It does open with an absolutely fantastic scene involving a severed arm and a casual walk through Tokyo. I feel like the whole movie would be better if they just stayed with the arm the whole time. Instead we get another uncomfortable rape, but this time add incest to the mix. Throw in a couple of abortions and then we’re back to prison for the final revenge. Could have been so much better if they just focused on Scorpion trying to live among the normies.
The second film in this series has the same visual flair of the first. This entry is a pretty standard prisoners on the run plot where the escapees do stupid stuff that will, of course, lead them to being captured again. A little bit more gory than before, which is good. But a little bit more rapey than before, which is not so good.
Japanese horror anthology from the mid-sixties that features beautiful surreal sets and cinematography but is very light on the horror. There are four stories. I liked the first two in which there was killer hair and an ice ghost. The third is the longest segment and spends way too much time in historical flashbacks. The fourth one is about a ghost that lives in tea. Yeah, that’s about it.
In the middle of the film I kind of forgot that it opens in with crazy dreamy imagery. It wasn’t until it started to return to its more obvious dreaminess that the whole thing began to click with me. I still don’t think I fully got it… something about art and truth and a mid-life crisis. Doesn’t matter. It’s beautiful to look at and by the end you want to watch it again, knowing where it’s heading. I’m surprised I liked this as much as I did.
I guess fantastical prison movies have been a thing in Japan since long before Story of Ricky. This one is as sleazy as a Roger Corman outing but ups the brutality of the guards to crazy levels. It’s not terribly gory, just ruthless and hyper-stylized. The best scene is when a fellow prisoner goes nuts in the shower and the lighting plus the make-up turn her into a wild kabuki killer. There are apparently three more films in this series, so we’ll see how far they are going to take things.
