Posted in: Dare to Play the Game, News and Opinions by Michael Durr on September 3rd, 2008
Learn by Death, More Fable items on the Web, and Europe becomes the real place for gaming? - Welcome to the column that thinks the more you punish a player, the less likely they are willing to take up bondage as a vocational hobby known as Dare to Play the Game.
Welcome to another edition of Dare to Play the Game. The Labor Day weekend was full of watching various web pages to determine whether or not Gustav was going to come anywhere near by backyard of Texas. Thankfully, it did not and Louisiana despite damage avoided a tremendous disaster.
Posted in: Brain Blasters by David Annandale on August 30th, 2008
A few weeks ago, I nattered on about how Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace differs markedly from the very slasher genre it helped create. The same is true of Bay of Blood, though the comparison is rather more complicated.
The connection between Bay of Blood (AKA Twitch of the Death Nerve) and the slashers is one of the purest examples of superficiality one could think of. Many of the murders in Bava’s film were lifted holus bolus by the first couple of Friday the 13th films (machete to the face, love-making couple speared in bed, and so forth).
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on August 29th, 2008
Spinoffs are nothing new in the world of Hollywood. Take a successful film, take some supporting or bit actor from the film and put them in a situation that is like the original but not quite and boom you got a spinoff. However, these movies or series usually take time to develop. On rare occasions, they might be released after a mere six months in some cases. For Get Smart’s Bruce and Lloyd: Out of Control, it was released a mere 10 days after the parent remake found itself in theaters. Could they capitalize on a market that was eager to go see the remake or would the parent bomb and leave this kinda movie in a bargain bin tucked far far away in the back of a Big Lots?
Posted in: Dare to Play the Game, News and Opinions by Michael Durr on August 27th, 2008
Y’s makes it to Virtual Console, Fable Pub Glitch to be patched, and Space Invaders recreating 9/11? - Welcome to the column that thinks bad ideas are fine as long as you take that rental chicken suit to the proper dry cleaners known as Dare to Play the Game.
Welcome to another edition of Dare to Play the Game. Last Friday, I went to go see the Dark Knight with my girlfriend & one of our mutual best friends. What did I think? It was very awesome, however not as uber-awesome as my girlfriend and the best friend would lead you to believe.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 26th, 2008
Man, has television come a long way in just over 50 years. There was once a pretty strict code that applied to television programs. Men and women, even when married, couldn’t be seen to have shared the same bed. Anything stronger than a “golly gee” was strictly forbidden. You couldn’t even show a woman’s belly button. And the good guys always had to win, while the bad guys got their comeuppance in the end. Alfred Hitchcock was one of the first to push those boundaries by telling mystery stories where the bad guys often appeared to get away with their evil deeds.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 26th, 2008
I remember the first time I saw a Herschell Gordon Lewis film. It was Blood Feast, and it was sometime back in the early 1970’s. Lewis was ahead of his time and was doing extreme slasher before even mainstream slasher films were cool. It was shortly after that bloody experience that I saw the original Wizard Of Gore. Perhaps those experiences didn’t prepare me as much as I thought they would for the remake of Wizard Of Gore. I have to honestly say that I don’t really see the connection between these two films. Certainly the main idea of the magician remains, but little else of the original material survives.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 26th, 2008
Animal Planet has created their own new genre of television show over the last few years. Nature shows have been around forever. I remember spending time with my family as a kid watching Animal Kingdom. Since then very little about that type of program has changed. With Discovery Channel the nature show certainly became more sophisticated. Everything changed with Shark Week. Now we have an entire cable network dedicated to animals, so it stands to reason the nature show, like the animals themselves, had to evolve.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on August 25th, 2008
Sonic Underground would be an interesting study in the land of Sonic Cartoons if one was into such a thing. The series lasted forty episodes and was made at the request of Sega who needed the promotion for their Dreamcast console in the fall of 1999. The show itself was an odd departure from the first two series in that it always contained a musical number and featured three main hedgehogs instead of just one. The show did serve to introduce a couple of new sub villains and Knuckles the Echidna. I honestly don’t remember Sonic Underground; I am more familiar with the previous two series, but with one look at the dvd cover and description on the outside, I might have begun to see why.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on August 25th, 2008
Current indie It-girl Ellen Page stars in this pre-Juno effort as a similarly headstrong teenager but whose life is far, far worse simply being pregnant. Here she comes from a dysfunctional home, her high school would be called a snake pit if that weren’t disrespectful to snakes, and her baby brother has disappeared while she was supposed to be taking care of him. She plunges into the underbelly of Toronto in a quest to find him, and an unending picaresque nightmare ensues.
Posted in: Brain Blasters by David Annandale on August 22nd, 2008
Apparently, achieving just the right level of success can work against you. This would appear to be the case of the recent Spanish horror effort [REC]. Co-directed by Jaume Balagueró (who gave us the underrated Darkness and The Nameless) and Paco Plaza, this was one of Spain’s biggest box-office hits last year. Does that earn it a theatrical North American release? Not a bit of it. Instead, it earns itself a remake, under the title Quarantine. Though there are, apparently, some changes being made (the unfortunate jettisoning of the supernatural angle being one), from the looks of things, the new version is going to be a pointlessly exact retread (and speaking of pointless, why give us a trailer that shows the very last shot of the film?). Not only is [REC] not gracing the theatres, it is also being deprived, at least for now, of a domestic DVD release. But if I might speak a word to the wise, it is available as a Region 2 release, so those of you with region-free players know what to do.
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