Burning the midnight oil at noon

‘Ween Movies 2025 – Volume 1

It’s that time again. Halloween is coming and as a fan of horreur, I have to up my movie-watching game. Well, I suppose I don’t have to. But it’s basically all I do for the season any more so… I don’t really know where I was going with this thought. Let’s just do the thing.

V/H/S/94

This is an anthology film, for all the good and bad that entails. In addition to the four short films that are featured in it, the framing device also has its own story. It’s about a SWAT team that busts into a warehouse to… I don’t really know what they were up to, but they find a bunch of corpses and mannequins and screens that lead into the other segments. This was by far the weakest part of the film, and honestly I would have been happier if there had just been a Crypt Keeper-style host that introduced each segment. Points for having each of the short films tie into the framing device, but it was still lame and had the worst actors by a country mile.

This first short follows a news reporter and her cameraman as they investigate a local legend of a sewer-dwelling creature known as the Ratman. It starts off with your average interviews of random townsfolk, but then the big boss demands that they actually go into the sewer to get the real story. Our heroes reluctantly comply, entering a storm drain where they find a dirty old homeless man. He creeps them the heck out, and as they run away, they’re knocked unconscious and, well, things take a bit of a turn from there. I can’t say I saw what happened next coming, and it’s definitely a much better ending to the story than if they’d just found a monster and got mauled by it. While this was the most surprising story in the anthology, I wasn’t totally sold. The whole climax was shaky-cammed to Hell and while I know that often the scariest things are what you don’t see, the obfuscation was very clearly there because they didn’t have any money to actually put the action on screen.

It Begins Again

Friends, Romans, countrymen – Spooktober is here! Well, it got here yesterday but I can’t embed videos until they’re live, so I had to do this post today, and, yeah…

Anyway, with the month of October comes a full slate of horror (or at least horror-adjacent) let’s plays over on TE Video. I mean, nobody’s going to watch any of it, but I’m excited! And that’s all that counts.

It all kicks off today, with an older game from TurnVex called Within Skerry. I’ve played most of TurnVex’s games, and they’re generally decent. Unfortunately, this one includes a mechanic that requires you to take dozens of photos of split-second events to unlock the best(?) ending, so I didn’t get that one.

https://youtu.be/FuFew3OUh-4

I’m not going to type out everything that’s scheduled to go up during the month because I’m kind of over doing that, but rest assured that there are plenty of thrills, chills, and spills to come over the course of the month!

Month End Video Game Wrap-Up: September 2025

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The Lancaster Leak (PC) – This is actually a trilogy of 20-30 minute games. An anthology that tells three different stories, each in a different style, and with an overarching plot thread that connects them all. Looking forward to more!

Kirby and the Forgotten Land + Star-Crossed World (Switch2) – I’ve been wanting to replay this game ever since I finished it, and the new DLC was more than enough reason to do so. Still the best Kirby game, and now there’s even more of it.

Replay (PC) – A 7-minute-long indie horror where you play as a person playing a haunted video game. Gave off FNAF vibes despite not being anything like FNAF, and left me wanting more.

Let’s Talk Dragon Quest Heroes

Ten years ago, Square-Enix and Omega Force released a video game called Dragon Quest Heroes: The World Tree’s Woe and the Blight Below. It is a “musou” game, which means that it’s a generally mindless hack-and-slash game where you mostly just tear through thousands of hapless goons. It’s also a spin-off of the Dragon Quest series, but I think that part’s a little more obvious.

Nintendo did a similar thing with the Legend of Zelda the year before, Hyrule Warriors, which is a game that I played obsessively. Twice. I didn’t end up playing Dragon Quest Heroes, though, since I was poor at the time and had to be more selective about my video game purchases. But it has stuck in the back of my mind all these years. Ironically, now I have enough money to buy all the games I want, but there isn’t nearly enough time to play them all. The grass is always greener.

All that to say that I finally bought and started playing DQ Heroes the other day.

Thunderhead

I played a short game called Thunderhead a… some time ago. And while I was playing it, I just happened to have OBS running, so it captured the whole experience. I’m very glad, because despite it being very short and simple, this game stuck with me for days. Weeks, even. I really liked it. I wish it had been longer.

At least I can re-live the experience whenever I want.

Month End Video Game Wrap-Up: August 2025

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Donkey Kong Bananza (Switch2) – I expected to enjoy this game, but I never expected it to be one of the best games of the year. It’s Super Mario Odyssey 2 in a lot of ways, with a little Banjo-Kazooie and Minecraft sprinkled on for flavour. And the ending? This might have the most perfect final hours of a video game ever.

Under the Waves (PC) – A swimming simulator where you help a man overcome his grief (or not). It’s kind of like Firewatch by way of Subnautica, but also not as good as Firewatch because it’s like twice as long and a lot of the “gameplay” is really tedious valve-turning. I liked it, but could have liked it a lot more.

Christmas Night (PC) – Look, I like to have my let’s plays recorded months in advance, okay? This is a very basic haunted house kind of game with a little bit of stealth thrown in. Nothing special or ambitious, but it was free.

Bottoms (as in butts) up!

The other night I watched a movie called Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead. I don’t think another movie has ever had a title that is so descriptive of its quality.

For real, I don’t even want to type out a full-on review for this one it was so bad. Here’s a synopsis: Mutant tapeworms are turning people into zombies. But before you turn, you suffer from really intense gas. For some reason there’s a focus on poop. The main character’s big trauma is that she’s afraid to fart in front of other people, and then at the end of the movie, she is able to fly around and battle the queen tapeworm using her farts as jet propulsion.

It may have been the absolute stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. If only I’d heeded the trailer’s advice not to watch it in the first place!

The funny thing is, after watching it, I couldn’t bring myself to give it a thumbs-down rating on Tubi, because I’m fairly sure that it accomplished exactly what it set out to do. It’s not trying to be a legitimate film. It’s not even trying to be a good horror comedy. I’m convinced that the director (Noboru Iguchi) had the goal of making the stupidest movie of all time.

The other funny thing is that I’ve actually watched a couple of the director’s other movies, The Machine Girl and Robo-Geisha. Now, I watched those well over a decade ago, so my memory is hazy at best, but I don’t recall hating them. I no longer have the DVDs, so they clearly weren’t good enough to keep. And that was the era of my life were I was deeply into the cheesiest movies going, so they may have also been terrible and that was just my taste at the time. But we’ll never know!

On a more positive note, I also watched a movie called Monster Island on Shudder recently. Sadly, it is not based on the David Wellington novel of the same name, because I love that novel and would like nothing more than to see it be made into a (good) movie. It’s really more of a re-imagining of Creature from the Black Lagoon, and I liked it! The problem is, there’s just not that much to it. It felt like it was over just as it was getting started. So I don’t think there’s all that much for me say about it, other than I really liked how it’s a 2024 movie but the creature was a dude in a rubber suit. Felt so comfy. I would for sure recommend this one.

UFO 50: The First Row

A new game… compilation… thingy came out recently. I’m not sure when it launched on Steam, but it got shadow-dropped onto Switch last week. (Some) people were in quite a furor about it -apparently the game is quite good- so I dropped some fraction of a Benjamin and decided to see about it myself.

UFO 50 is a compilation of 50 very retro-styled games. Many are early 80s arcade quality, or not unlike more rudimentary NES games. That’s not to say that they’re all simple score-chasers! Oh my goodness, no! There are some like that, however, the game’s whole framing device is that these were lost games for a lost console that’s been retrieved and refurbished. And so you can play through the history of this console and watch as the games grow in quality and complexity. And that’s what caught my attention: it sounded very much like another Retro Game Challenge, which was a Nintendo DS game with a very similar premise that I remember very fondly. I quite wish I hadn’t sold it.

Anyway! UFO 50 is what I’m playing now, and today I want to tell you a little bit about the first ten games in the collection. Provided you’re looking at them in chronological order. Which is the default. So you should be. Enough preamble!

Month End Video Game Wrap-Up: July 2025

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Gestalt: Steam & Cinder (PC) – A totally average metroidvania. The gameplay is solid and the world design is good, but the unlockable skills are largely useless and the story is waaaaaay too wordy. Also the ending is poo.

Deltarune (Switch2) – It’s absolutely wild that somehow each chapter manages to be better and more mind-bending than the last. I guess that what happens when there are years of development between them. Hopefully the rest of the chapters are released in my lifetime!

Five Nights at Freddy’s: Secret of the Mimic (PS5) – A complete 180 from the unfinished mess that was Security Breach, I thought this game was genuinely really good. It’s a ton of fun, has plenty of variety, didn’t crash once, and has a plot that you could clearly follow from start to finish. Great success!

Hi, I’m here

I haven’t written anything this month. I’ve been very distracted.

Much of that distraction has been video games, as you’ll see in a couple days on the MEVGWU. But a other stuff is going on too.

Like, for instance, I saw Fantastic Four: First Steps last weekend. It’s good. Not really fantastic, but it was enjoyable enough that I didn’t fall asleep. I just didn’t really feel very strongly about it in any way. A perfectly average film.

The best part was that it takes place in an alternate universe, and as such it was allowed to have its very own, very excellent-looking, retro-futuristic visual identity. It’s too bad that it’s going to get absorbed into the rest of the increasingly bland MCU.

The worst part is when they send an eight-months-pregnant woman into space. I don’t care if she’s a super hero. There’s just no way. And then they spend the rest of the movie protecting the baby at literally all costs. It’s… I mean, a lot of things happen in this movie just so the plot can move forward, but that was the least believable.

It was fun to see on the big screen, but I don’t think it’s necessary. Also the tickets were just shy of $25, which is way out of control. I’d like to go see more movies in the theatre, but when it costs just as much as it does to buy them? Hard to justify.

Anyway, that’s all for now. Maybe I’ll write more in August. Maybe I won’t!