'BONE TOMAHAWK' IS MY BONE DADDY

Whatever your doing right now probably isn't as important as watching this movie. It is customarily routine for me to keep a watchful eye on interesting films in some of my favorite genres: Horror and Westerns. I think we can all raise a guilty hand to being some form of genre fanboy or girl. Neglecting a shitty flick for a great set or setting- for the flavor of the story alone. But we need those bad movies don't we? They are just as important as the good ones because, of course, they elevate the great films and show us what 'good' is suppose to look like. 

You ever find something online so  perfect that you covet it and share it with your friends with your own 'trust me its awesome' seal of approval? Only to watch those friends turn around- claim it as theirs? Isn't it hard not to claim it as your own treasure? And doesn't it hurt a bit when your friends fail to acknowledge that it was you who found it in the first place? This is one of those treasures for me but im sharing it with yous guys in case you might have missed it.

It is what it looks like. Its a Western Horror movie. Two things I've unknowingly and unconsciously desired for quite some time. Probably ever since i saw Unforgiven as a kid and fell in love with the Western genre. Its well written, all the sentences are complete and courteous. With every syllable perfectly accounted for. Back in the good ole days when using slang was like saying 'CUNT' to your grandmother. 

IMDB is showing that the budget for the movie was $1.8 million. So virtually nothing. With all the great acting littering the story you can almost see Kurt Russell reading the script and calling all his friends to climb on board. Everyone is here because they fell in love with the script. Clearly they are not as interested in the money as they are with telling a unique story. It's original, oddly compelling and suspenseful. 

You will hear us talking about tension and suspense a lot, so your going to have to get use to that. It's an intriguing device in storytelling. It's cheap ( pretty much free) but rarely used effectively. But when it does- WHOAH BABY! Although the tense moment mean nothing without the payoff. Usually the payoffs ,in this case, look like somebody getting there head blown apart, point being the film doesn't chise out on you. Also the jaw bone tomahawks are magical and can cut anything in half. The action is very brutal and gave my wife a rough 'sleep.' The violence here felt like a rich meal -  something you can understand and fill up on with a few bites.

So the deal here is some drifter walks all over some cannibalistic native predator monsters 'sacred ground' and get chased into town. They kidnap sheriffs deputy and some hot chick doctor. Sheriff "old Kirtypants" heads out to recover them. Nice and simple, like a western should be.  The 'savages' are a cartoonish version of a 'Native' Its the furthest thing from human. Im glad they took the enemies to the extreme physically, it would have been awkward if they hadn't gone so monsterish. 

All told this was a well thought out surprise from, not a first time director, but someone getting the hang of things. Thanks Craig Zahler your bones are really sharp. 

TWITCH ALERT: OLD GAMES STREAMING SUNDAYS

The coming Sundays of late winter, do come and join me for a few hours on Twitch, as I slog through a disorienting, frustrating, and often hilarious GAUNTLET of renowned old PC games. There may be cat meows. Maybe my friend Superhands will be there?

stream will be available HERE!

This Sunday at 130pm I'll be streaming Thief Gold. Thief, thief... I assume I will be stealing stuff at single-digit resolution? It'll be funny. Come and watch.

'ALRIGHT YOU PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS LISTEN UP'

  SPOILER ALERT. SPOILER ALERT. AWOOGA .THIS WILL RUIN THE SHOW IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN IT YET.

Ash vs Evil Dead could be the most flawless, badass show on tv right now. I'm only done the 3rd episode as of last night and had to jump online to write about it with all the enthusiasm of a rookie cop, or that UPS dude from Mad TV. I'm tripping over myself searching for convincing words for you and have no doubt at all that it's the best show of the year already. Yes it's presumptuous, brazen maybe even slightly audacious, but this show is so fucking good that its amazing that your reading this blurb instead of watching the show right now.

I'm reeling in a bloody pool of mixed nostalgia and disbelief- this show shouldn't exist. It's a miracle that it was ever made at all. Its out of its feature film habitat. 30 years later, a cult horror movie that was a student project of a young enthusiastic- very hands on filmmaker and a b grade lead actor. Well B+. It's like the Mad Max of TV. A project that by rights has no business existing but does, It not only exists, it flourishes.

So what the hell happened?! I mean a great show on tv is like finding a Leprechaun, I feel like I can't even breathe too hard or the show will blow over. It's a fragile and delicate thing that must be protected and studied. This is how fan service is done. Having something turn out so well and exceed all expectations is so very rare. Ash vs evil dead comes across so authentic.

The first thing an Evil Dead fan might notice is how Ash vs Evil Dead seems to totally disregard the last film in the series. At the end of Army of Darkness he's sent back in time to s-mart, fucks up the words again and fights more Demons that somehow caught up with him. In the pilot episode he just has the book already and drunkenly reads passages from it to impress a girl. That whatever attitude from the writers is exactly the spirit of what evil dead is. So ash has the book of the dead now and the fans are fine with that, if your an Evil Dead aficionado and you don't have a sense of humor then you must be dead already. If all the sequel ducks were in a row here then they would have to explain how he got the book back which would bring up the medieval timeline and kind of ruin the story, not to mention the budget.

Which brings me to the writing. "I hear a lot a yappini'n and not a lot a happeni'n'" or "The first thing i gotta do is see a guy about a book. The other first thing i gotta do...is some cardio, cuz my hearts jack hammeri'n like a quarterback on prom night." are probably my favorite phrases since 'Wu peed on my rug.' Its written with love and a blase' attitude that made the show perfect all those many years ago- creative, not very PC and the best one-liners around. My epiphany was realizing, I guess in episode 3, that  the audience has never really had the chance to explore the Necronomicon ex mortus by itself. All we've ever really seen is the same couple of pages over and over again. There's a whole show just in the book. In episode 3 we got a taste of whats possible. Summoning crazy boss daemons. It's like pans labyrinth had dirty demon sex with a hologram and its fucking badass!

"Ya know, you don't look anything like your picture!"

I also never realized what an idiot ash is. I mean yeah he forgot some words way back in the 90's. Now he's single, over weight,  lives in a trailer and is still a stock boy at not S-mart. He reads the pages again and  So he's got absolutely nothing to lose so the show has room to just not waste our time and get movi'n. But he's so oddly likable and sentimental and has a strange courageous charisma that only seems to reveal itself when the demon blood's flying. This character is so iconic that even the Millennials must know who Bruce Campbell is. 

The camera angles and the gore are exactly what I was hoping for. Writers and filmmakers these days are so concerned with being creative that they totally forget that the source material was perfect just the way it was. Just re-create that and shut up, stop thinking and simply re-purpose the old goofy shit! Garden hoses of monster blood is just fine with everyone, trust us Starz. Even the demons look the same, it's the exact right amount of nostalgia with a fresh episodic vigor that should support the show all by itself.

The Icing generously slathered onto the cake is that it's only episode 3 and the momentum seems to be in favor of a very promising and hilariously entertaining story. Let's hope they don't fuck it up.

Oh yeah ans Xena is on it. Remember the last time you saw those two together!? Damn shes hot, i think she was my first crush. I also remember the strange Lesbianish relationship she had with that red headed maid girl she was with all the time. 

The Art of Saving

People kept telling me to play Dragon Age: Inquisition so I did the obvious thing and got the first game in the series, Dragon Age: Origins. It came out in 2009 so it wasn't too hard to get a handle on the interface.  But with the last two games I've played through being Deus Ex: Revolution and Hitman: Absolution (wait a second, what's with every single game title being 'SERIES': ... -ion !? Many sequels trying desperately to bring back fans while standing apart from the series... OLD GAME: NEW GAME. Good games though.), I was lulled into mental dependence on the modern luxury of the autosave.

Nowadays it seems like every 10-15 minutes of play in most games is broken up by checkpoints to fall back on when you screw up and your throat gets shredded by a rusty chainsaw, or when you fail to intimidate some highwaymen and they rob you, or when your cat jumps on the keyboard and your newly erected civic monument is permanently demolished.

In the recent revival of indie roguelike games, the absence of checkpoint fail safes is a reaction against their ubiquity in mainstream game design. They reject the convention of a linear, piecemeal experience in order to give you a die hard, unique, unrepeatable experience each time you play. The idea of saving at all, is abhorred - there is never anything to come back to. Yet when playing Dragon Age I found myself in an awkward place between the two - the autosave and the antisave. Dragon Age seems to save at certain checkpoints, like entering a completely new region for the first time, but nowhere in between. Sometimes I'd spend forty minutes combing every square inch of a dungeon level, only to blunder a little too deep into the aggro radius of a camp around the corner and get TPK'd (if there's a way to retreat from fights I ain't found it yet) -- only to realize none of my giving wine to Alistair and rearranging my dog named Kyle's decorative furpaint and chest-looting was remembered by the game. There's something miserable about retracing your steps in an RPG, it becomes a ghost of your previous play. Anyway I kept "ghosting" dungeons and struggling -- so I had to develop the habit of intentionally saving again.

The little lamp goalies are a nice touch. I did not forsee myself being completely absorbed by Bloodborne. The most pleasent suprise of the year.  

Unless the mechanic of the gameplay itself involves save points. Any 'From Software' game utilizes a similar save mechanic. Get to the lamp or fire without dying and as a reward you will be afforded the privilege of saving your progress and celebrating your tenacity (for like 5 seconds anyway.) 

Bloodborne disguises its save points as lanterns littered throughout the sprawling  multi-level nightmare labyrinths. Nixing any pausing or save menus. Which, psychologically, seems to alleviate any anxiety a player might have about how and where to save. Disguised as an effigy or a shrine, the cold blue glow of the lanterns never felt so warm or inviting. Auto saving in this game would totally ruin the experience, the game itself hinders on the sheer will of the player to complete the area and light the lantern - where your allowed, finally, to travel back to the hunters dream and level up your character, buy items and take some deep breaths. Bloodborne is the antithesis of autosaving. In a strange way this anti save type scenario works out very well for all those forgetful stoned gamers that wiff on saving their progress and direct frustrated heads up towards the spackled ceiling asking 'Why?'.  

'Would you like to save your progress?'  

The modern day AAA titles have totally scrapped the idea of 'lives' for their characters. Replaced with one perma-life if you will. You play, you get shot, stabbed, eviscerated then you get another chance. This can be in the form of a recharging health bar or hiding behind something until you somehow recover from the 18 bullets you've just taken. Yeah its just a game, but those lives use to mean something. An ominous but unsaid contract between the game and the player. If you use up all the lives your dead and you had your chance. GAME OVER BRO. I love the idea of that. Nintendo understands this as well. They could simply replace the lives system with a perma-life system for their platformers but there is no cost to the player. They are left to simply continue playing until they succeed. With no consequence at all.

The genius of the itemized save system is that your constantly searching for the 'ink ribbon,' or 'tent.' In Resident Evil finding a type writer save point is just part of the act of saving. You also need an ink ribbon to use the typewriter which is brilliant. So, instinctively, the player learns to not rely on any kind of computerized auto-save but rely solely on the items in there inventory and there own good sense. Few games have utilized this method of discovering a save point and requiring a specific item to activate it. It creates a deeper immersion for the player during gameplay. Problem is every game is different so we have developed specific habits for specific games and it fucks us up big time. 

What really needs to happen here is some kind of disclaimer before each game clearly stating how and when the game saves by itself or that the player is responsible for said saving points. Nobody wants to redo the same area 30 times over. Old habits don't die as easily as our digital heroes do. Fallout 4 has caused me many hours of pain so far.  Amazingly I have not learned my lesson to 'quick save' fucking everywhere, all the God damn time. Turning any old corner in the wasteland can be extremely punishing. So you die. Then re-spawn a la Dragon Age. Waaaay the hell back where you really didn't want to be. 'Are you fucking serious,' or 'godamnsonofabitch' have been heard to be remarked. Finally, after many hours I've re learned the art of saving all over again. It tends to take me out of the moment and causes mild anxiety. Maybe that's a new kind of game mechanic done on purpose?

The take away here kids is to what?.....save as often as humanly possible, unless the game does not allow it or your in the very middle of a melee battle with a mutated bear. I feel with every game  i'm attempting the classic 'trust test.' I'm standing on a chair with my arms crossed over my chest and my eyes closed, ready to fall back into the open arms of whatever copy of game i happened to be struggling with. Usually i imagine the literal game packaging with gangly arms and legs attached to it ready to catch my sorry ass. I fall, hoping for the best. 

THROWBACK THURSDAY: ORDERLY

This is musician Neil Cicierega at the ripe age of, what, 16? belting out an uncontested anthem of 90's kid culture. Newgrounds.com: the hipsters of the future, today!

I got  away with playing a lot of videogames as a youngster. Ours was a fairly relaxed household and the siblings in my family were trusted to spend their free time wisely, watching TV, playing games, and eventually surfing the web to excess. Internet in particular was a powerful influence, and was even more so back in the late nineties when I started using it as a 7 year-old. At first, the Internet was just an extension of my other interests -- I would just look up the YTV website, or Fox Kids, or video-game guides. But it didn't take me long at all to realize the Internet was a place where things forbidden elsewhere strode free. My parents sure as shit couldn't keep up, and that gave a sense of entitlement... A spectrum of vulgarity, obscurity, and other media-unattainables were suddenly at my fingertips; and so with a curious eye, I discovered Newgrounds. The problems of the future, today!

The 11th highest-rated Newgrounds video of all time.

Sown in the soil of pirated Macromedia Flash zipfiles and a flagrant exploitation of the Internet's exclusion from any and all broadcasting standards, Newgrounds was a fringe tween's paradise. It was kind of the cable access of the Internet age: mostly crap, but always surprising, always obscure, and occasionally, mind-blowing. There was a series of games called the Negotiator, in which you simply navigated various dialogue trees to reach a certain outcome. My favourite among those was 'The Barfly' as I was confident that in a successful playthrough you would see the lady naked, as in MANY other Newgrounds titles. There were the Xiao Xiao and MADNESS silent series' of ballet-like cartoon mass murder. David Firth's chillingly hysterical Salad Fingers made its start on Newgrounds. I remember an influx of content so massive and sudden following 9/11 that a whole section of the site was devoted to it: half completely tasteless comedy, half inflammatory political commentary, all inappropriate to bring up anyplace else (the most inappropriate fo this content has been taken off of the site by now...). It was a top secret South Park, an island of media apart from the corporatized TV set. It seemed like nobody was making this shit for money or for fame; they were making it cuz they want to make it.

EDIT: Returning to Newgrounds I see it's now inundated with banner and pre-content advertisements which you can pay a subscription to ignore...

Everyone knows the internet is REALLY for isolating yourself from loved ones.

Tom Fulp, the founder of Newgrounds, was himself a prolific content generator, creating such charming titles as fantasy-school-shooting game Pico's Day at School and Disorderly. The latter leapt to mind recently and inspired this post, I'll describe it. It's a sidescrolling beat-'em-up in which you play a disgruntled ginger orderly in a retirement home who needs to reduce the elderly population at the retirement to make room for "younger, wealthier tenants," which you do by... beating up old people. There are mega-old people at the end of each level before moving on to the next-most-dangerous category of octogenarian (I am pretty sure this game taught me that word): 'Wheelchair,' 'Senile,' and so on. There are also side-rooms along each level where you score bonus points or a power-up. There was one I closed my eyes during because it felt so wrong: there'd be this black naked old man in a tub you had to spongebathe, and he'd moan and groan in response to your, uh, stroking. This game's total disregard for social politics is, by today's standards, impressive. The site's content always pushed to get away with nothing less than it could, which, in the Wild West of Internet days, was everything. And what's more, the crude content wasn't reflected in crude design: even today the game plays quite smoothly. I think Newgrounds was dumb stuff made by smart people. But it sure fucked me up.