Spooky – Page 27

Monthend Video Game Wrap-up: October 2013

Hey! It’s this thing again! Now it’s officially a recurring feature! That was my plan all along, of course, but I’m kind of a flake so who even knew if I was going to even get around to writing up a second entry. That said, I’ll probably stop caring about this stupid thing by the time 2014 rolls around.

In the interest of further categorizing and complicating things, I’ve decided that MVGW needs a third header. I felt like “Now Playing” and “Game Over” were pretty self-explanatory, but you might wonder about what exactly the new “Reruns” header is for. It, my friends, is reserved for short games which I have played before and which were started and finished within the month. You can think of it as a subsection of “Game Over” if you’d like.

~ Now Playing ~

Pokémon Y (3DS) – Just assume that this is the only game I played after the 11th. Aside from short breaks to collect the Spooky furniture series in Animal Crossing. I have, of course, beaten the story, but I still have a bunch of post-game stuff to do and plenty of empty pokédex entries.

Continue reading Monthend Video Game Wrap-up: October 2013

Halloween 2013: 5 Best Horror Movies

Welp, it’s Halloween today, and pretty much the only thing I’ve done in the spirit of the season is watch a whole buttload of horror movies. Most of them were absolutely terrible, and sometimes that’s the appeal, but once in a while there’s one in there that I feel was legitimately good. Those movies are the ones we’re going to talk about today.

What’s going to separate this from anyone running down a list of their favourite horror movies is my single criteria: I must have watched the movie for the first time this October. So all of these are new to me, and

Curse of Chucky – I love me some Chucky series, but I was a little worried about this one before it came out. It’s a direct-to-DVD movie, which is usually enough to confirm that a movie is going to be baaaaad. I was also under the impression that it was going to be a reboot, and reboots are dangerous territory.

Curse of Chucky is not a reboot. For the first half of the movie, it could be. The Chucky doll looks new, and there are no ties to the previous films. And then one of the characters notices that Chucky’s face has a layer of latex on it that’s covering up all his scars, proceed to peel the latex off, and BAM ITS THE CHUCKY WE KNOW AND LOVE.

And then, AND THEN the events of Curse all end up tying back into the very first Child’s Play and then Jennifer Tilly shows up right at the end and it all fits together and it is damn glorious. Unlike the two previous films, Curse is not a horror-comedy. It sticks to straight-up horror, and I like that they decided to go back to basics. Also, Curse has the best, most amazing post-credits scene ever filmed.

Curse of Chucky is absolutely the best direct-to-DVD movie I have ever seen, and it’s a fantastic sequel to a series that was having an identity crisis. Easily the best horror movie I’ve watched this season, and maybe even one of my favourites of the year at large. It’s creepy, it’s surprising, and it’s a big love letter to fans of the series.

Fright Night (2011) – I’m also a huge fan of 1985’s Fright Night. I mean, who isn’t though? It’s one of the legit best horror movies ever made. So you can understand why I didn’t really want to see the modern remake. But it was $5 at Wal-Mart and with a price like that, I figured it’d be worth the gamble. Oh man, you guys.

The remake of Fright Night is great. It’s pretty much exactly what I like to see in a remake: it’s got a lot of the same elements as the original, but mixes everything up enough that it’s its own movie. Kind of like how a good cover song works. If you know Fright Night well, you’ll have a good understanding of the basic plot of the movie, but it throws enough curveballs at you that you’re going to be shocked at least a few times.

It’s a really good thrill ride too. In the original, Jerry is a fairly passive vampire. He comes after Charley that one time, but mostly he’s just like “hey mind your own business kid.” In the remake, he is the most bad-ass vampire I have ever seen. 2011 Jerry Dandrige does not mess around. He will stalk you, he will threaten you, he will blow your mother-loving house up. It is magnificent, and I am so very sad that I hesitated to watch it for as long as I did.

World War Z – I think the theme of this list so far is “movies I thought would be bad but then they really weren’t” and World War Z is probably the most fitting for that title. You watch the trailer, and you see the wacky zombie tidal waves, and you think that it’s just going to be utter garbage. In fact, if I hadn’t gotten it as a free rental from Redbox, I probably still wouldn’t have bothered to watch it.

The thing you have to understand is that while World War Z has zombies in it, it’s not really a zombie movie. You could more or less sub in any kind of global disaster and tell the same story: Brad Pitt doesn’t give two craps about saving the world or finding a cure or anything, he’s just doing what he has to to keep his family safe.

So then what separates it from other, less great apocalypse movies like, oh let’s say 2012? Brad Pitt helps, that’s for sure. I mean I love John Cusack, but there’s really no competition. World War Z is also paced really well, and I dare say that using zombies as a disaster makes the situation much more interesting. The movie is very tense and interesting from beginning to end, and it’s absolutely more of an action/drama than a horror movie, but I’ll keep calling it horror so I can justify putting it on this list.

From Hell – This is a movie I’d never even heard of that Wifey picked up because it was cheap and it has a young(ish) Jonny Depp in it. It’s a slasher that gives an identity and motive to Jack the Ripper. But it’s not really about Jack, it’s more about the prostitutes that he kills. And also a detective that solves crime by having psychic visions while wasted on opium.

It all sounds a little silly, and it is. It’s very silly if you stop to think about it. But it’s a fairly enjoyable movie to watch. I especially liked that it’s a somewhat unique variation on the usual slasher formula. You know who doesn’t like it though? Alan Moore. The movie is based on a graphic novel of his, and apparently devolves his fine story into a goofy whodunit. I haven’t read said graphic novel (and probably never will), but the movie version worked for me, and that’s all that mattered.

Christine – You know the episode of Futurama where Bender becomes a were-car? Apparently that’s also an old horror movie! Well, not really, but I can’t seem to separate the two in my mind despite the fact that all they really have in common is the theme of homicide by automobile.

It’s based on a Stephen King novel, which is usually a good thing, and has a pretty good story and a handful of great characters. What really impressed me about Christine though, was the special effects. At one point, Christine (who is a haunted car), is completely destroyed. Shortly after, she magically restores herself, and the scene looks so friggin’ good. Like, these practical effects from 1983 are considerably more convincing than most of the computer-generated effects in current movies.

The only thing that really bothered me about the film is that there isn’t even a hint of an explanation as to why the car is haunted. I suppose that’s a fairly common omission is movies based on Stephen King stories, as they’re typically more about the characters and how they deal with the situation than the situation itself. Still, it’s a pretty great movie, and despite the difference in popularity between the two, I think it was way better than Carrie.

A Decorate-Your-Own-Cookie Halloween

Halloween is fast approaching (tomorrow!) and I’ve done a terrible job of trying to post Halloween-themed things on here. And also doing Halloween-themed things in real life. Wife and I have been watching as many horror movies as possible, but that’s about it. We didn’t even bother to dig out the ‘Ween decorations.

I did buy these cookies a while back though, and they are undoubtedly the most Halloweeny thing that I’ve done this season. So good on me for that, I guess.

Somehow, I managed to keep them hidden (on the kitchen table) from Wifey until last weekend, when I deemed it appropriate to bring them out and get into the Halloween cookie spirit. She was pretty damn stoked, and that was pretty much the point. Both of us get unusually excited about anything that comes with a tube of icing packed in, and these cookies had three packs of icing each, so it was basically Christmas in October up in here.

If you’ve never seen a product like this, they’re naked cookies that come with a few packs of coloured icing and some sprinkles, so that you can work your own artistic magic on the cookie. These were pretty cheap, and came with two cookies each. They were a steal if I’v ever seen one.

Of course, being cheap, there had to be some sort of catch. That catch is that the chocolate pumpkin-shaped cookies were fused together. Trying to separate them ended with a big mess, and both cookies were broken in the process. It’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on with the cookie in that photo, but a lot of the top cookie’s backside remained stuck to the bottom cookie. I wasn’t pleased. The ghosts came apart nicely though.

I tried to “glue” my pumpkin cookie back together using some of the black icing. It didn’t work out too well, but it held together long enough to get photos, and I suppose that’s the best I could have asked for.

We then proceeded to bust out the icing and decorate our cookies. I cut the holes in my icing packets too big, and it didn’t squirt out very well, so my pumpkin looks like complete garbage. After that mess I decided to just go with a simple design for the ghost. I’m a terrible craftsman, so I’m going to blame my tools; the icing did not want to stick to the cookies at all, but it sure as Hell wanted to stick all over my fingers.

Wifey’s came out looking fairly nice though. Her Barney-coloured pumpkin is a cute little mess, and I really like the eyes on her ghost. They stare into your soul like no cookie has before.

It should be noted that I had a ton of icing left, so I slathered it all over my ghost once I was done with pictures. Also, the bag of sprinkles that come with these things has enough sprinkles to liberally cover four to five cookies, so there were orange and black sprinkles everywhere by the time I was done. Like, look up at my pumpkin there, and imagine him with at least three times as many sprinkles. You just can’t waste all that perfectly good sugar, right?

And that’s about that. I quite enjoyed devouring the ghost cookie, but the pumpkin cookie was that gross off-chocolate flavour you get with cheap cookies. It wasn’t very good at all.

A Pokémon Halloween

I’m a pokémaniac; we’re all clear on that, right? Good.

So I’ve been enjoying Pokémon Y as much and often as I can, having just finished the main story. Now it’s on me to travel across the land of Kalos, searching far and wide for all the little monsters that I haven’t ~~forced into slave labour~~ caught yet. And there are a lot of them this time around. Generation Six was fairly stingy with the new ones, with the total Gen VI pokémon numbering less than 70. That still brings our total to a rather robust 718. Which is, at the same time, too many and not enough.

Now, the thing you need to know is that pokémon design is a very, very small part of the game. Not even something I think about often. However, I recently read an article that highlighted a few of the “best” designs of this generation. This article, in fact! It’s a pretty good read, and very funny. I also agree with most of his points (Tyrunt/Tyrantrum are amazing), he forgot something, so I stole this DeviantArt picture from a Google Image Search to illustrate the point I have to make.

Pumpkaboo and Gourgeist are my absolute favourite new pokémon of this generation. Combination grass- and ghost-types, they fill a niche in my team that I’ve never really bothered with. I don’t think I’ve ever used a ghost-type pokémon regularly before, and only during the last generation did I start to warm up to any grass-types (Abomasnow and Simisage).

Design-wise, they’re beautiful. Little Pumpkaboo is the most adorable little guy you’ve seen; some sort of ghosty-bat-thing riding around on a jack-o-lantern. Or mabye the jack-o-lantern is its body? Who knows for sure? And who cares? Just look at that cute little frown! You’ve gotta love that! I just wanna give him a big ol’ hug <3 <3 <3

Pumpkaboo, also, has the best name ever. It’s fun to say and write!

Usually when pokémon grows up, they get pretty ugly. Gourgeist, luckily, does not suffer that fate. Gourgeist is pretty darn cute too! A ghost with pants made out of a lack-o-lantern and hands made out of hair. It doesn’t look quite as huggable as Pumpkaboo, but at least Gourgeist can hug back.

The very special trait that Pumpkaboo and Gourgeist have that no other pokémon species have is that they can come in four different sizes: small, average, large, and super. The larger sizes are stronger and have more HP, but the smaller ones have the benefit of a higher speed stat.

The only big drawback to Pumpkaboo is that you have to trade it to make it evolve into Gourgeist. Which means that you have to have a friend who plays Pokémon to get the more powerful monster. Fortunately, all you need to do is trade it. No fancy items or experience levels necessary.

As far as battle goes, my Gourgeist (who hasn’t left my team since I caught him) rocks Leech Seed, Trick-or-Treat, Seed Bomb, and Shadow Ball. Leech Seed is a move that drains an opponents health each turn and then heals Gourgeist. Seed Bomb and Shadow Ball are pretty standard attack moves, of the grass- and ghost-type respectively.

Trick-or-Treat is my favourite move of the bunch though, What it does is give the opposing pokémon the ghost type. This is great because ghost-type pokémon are weak against ghost-type attacks (don’t ask). So using Trick-or-Treat and then Shadow Ball enables Gourgeist to do a huge amount of damage to pretty much any other pokémon. The best part of it all is that Trick-or-Treat’s attack animation is a bunch of ghosts swarming the enemy. It’s pretty great!

Now all I have to do is go back out into the wilds and catch me a lady Pumpkaboo. Then, I’ll be able to start breeding ’em and create my invincible Gourgeist army! Hooray!

Chocolate boos

There isn’t nearly enough Halloween going on here, so have this: a fun picture of spooky chocolate bars. Also pictured: 7-11’s most demanding slogan.

Really, outside of the punny names, they’re nothing special. Even then it’s a 50/50 split. Kit Kat didn’t change at all, it just has a picture of a cat on it. And Scaries doesn’t sound enough like Smarties to constitue as even somewhat clever. Coffin Crisp and scAero are pretty damn great though. I wish they were called that all year long.

I didn’t actually buy any of these, hence the picture taken in 7-11. I don’t really care for Nestle chocolate bars, and I think the only one that’s changed at all are Scaries, which are coloured orange and brown insted of rainbow.

Seriously, how great is scAero? There are very few words that allow you to put a capital letter in the middle of them, and that’s something I really respect. And no, products with a lowercase “i” or “e” tacked on the front of their names do not count.

Monthend Video Game Wrap-up: September 2013

Welcome, good reader, to a new thing that I want to be doing each month. I’m calling it Monthend Video Game Wrap-up, and it’s basically just going to be a snapshot of what I’ve been up to in the world of video games over the course of each month. Why? I dunno. Same reason that I put anything on this blog, I guess: to keep a cheap record of stuff I do and think.

Okay fine, I’ll admit it. This is all just a big excuse for me to make a banner. It’s one of those odd little things that I really love doing, and I can’t really be bothered to make them for common blog posts. Also I guess since it’s going to be a big thing I’ll make a section for it on the Features page.

~ Now Playing ~

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD (Wii U) – I played through WW only twice on Gamecube, but it’s still one of my favourite Zeldas. People seem to be pretty split on the graphical changes, and I am firmly in the “I love them” camp. The swift sail changes the pace of the game from “pretty slow” to “not as slow” which is nice, but what really I appreciate is the improved Picto Box. It’s making completing the Nintendo Gallery seem less like the most horrible, tedious task ever and more like something that’s actually pretty fun! I’m about halfway through the game, just entering the Earth Temple.

Continue reading Monthend Video Game Wrap-up: September 2013

Insidious: Chapter 2

There isn’t any easy way to say this: I was a little disappointed with Insidious: Chapter 2.

It’s not that I thought the movie was outright bad. No, it was decent enough; it certainly held my attention for the duration. What I have a problem with is that it’s not the movie that I was expecting/hoping that it would be. Which I suppose is kind of a petty gripe, because as a sequel it’s actually quite good, so take that as you will.

Insidious 2 begins right where we left off at the end of the first movie, so there’s really no way to describe the plot of the flick without letting slip at least some minor spoilers for the first one. So I guess you’re gonna have to deal with me being all vague and mysterious. This will not go well.

The story picks up with the family dealing with the fallout of the events from the first film. Everyone’s all shaken up, and while they thought that their biggest problem (being haunted) was solved, it quickly becomes apparent that it was not. Well, it was, but it wasn’t. Now they’re being haunted by different spooks. And when the identity of one of those spooks was revealed, I slapped my head so hard because OF COURSE. DUH.

The promotional materials for the movie (like the poster above) will lead you to believe that the movie is about the baby being haunted or possessed or something, but really that’s all a lie. There are a few baby-related scenes, but really the baby has absolutely nothing to do with the actual plot. And if she was supposed to, they certainly did not get that point across very well, because I have no idea why they even bothered with the baby scenes.

All in all, Insidious 2 is more of a murder mystery than your typical paranormal horror flick. I think that the best way to describe it would be Scooby-Doo meets The Shining. Only it’s less dumb than the former, and not nearly as scary as the latter. But it’s a pretty apt description, and the more I think about it, the more fitting it seems. What disappoints me about this is that the movie spends almost all of its time figuring out who the antagonist is and what their motivation is instead of providing us with more of the dreamland shenanigans that I loved so much in the first movie.

In fact, when it comes to the otherworld at all, it’s used even less than it was in the first movie. Again, it only really comes around in the third act, and this time it’s not as full of creepy, surreal imagery. Now it’s… complicated. I won’t get into it in detail, but the story ends up folding in on itself and interweaving with a few scenes in the first film, which is all really cool for a while. And then you realize how weird it is that somehow being in the otherworld allows the characters to actually affect the past. What? Yeah, it’s… it’s not great, especially since they don’t make any effort to describe how this is even remotely plausible or ties into the rest of the established lore.

I want to say that I’m being unnecessarily critical here, because I wanted to just turn off my brain and enjoy the ride, but man, I’m sure that there’s a better way they could have resolved the scenario here than shoehorning in some time-travelling bunkus. I can easily gloss over a minor plot hole or inconsistency here and there, but this one just made no damn sense. Fans seem to be trying to make a case that there is no “sense of time” in the otherworld, but it still seems like a bunch of malarkey to me.

Another thing that stuck out to me is that while the first movie was straight up dramatic horror, part two here has a rather generous helping of comedy relief. I’m not sure it was necessary, but most of the jokes are pretty good so I’ll let it slide. Also, like the first film, this one’s mostly devoid of glaring special effects, except for one scene near the end. In contrast to the rest of the movie, where everything looks very natural, this one bit really stands out. It’s short and fairly inconsequential, but I figured it was worth mentioning.

In conclusion, I did like Insidious: Chapter 2. It wasn’t as good as the first one, and that whole time-travelling bit was annoying, but overall it satisfied. The atmosphere was pretty much what I’m looking for in a horror film, and while it was a bit too big for its britches, I thought the story was pretty good. I just preferred the relative simplicity of the first one. A third film is confirmed to be in the works, and while I’ve got my fingers crossed that they’ll go back to the unsettling distorted reality theme of the first movie, I’ll make sure not to go into it expecting that.

Insidious

Wifey and I are going to the movies tonight. For a long time, we used to go see a movie every week, but over the last couple years our moviegoing has diminished quite a bit. We still try to catch the really big ones, but generally we’ll only go out to the theatre once a month at the most.

Tonight, we wll be seeing Insidious: Chapter 2. I am pretty excited, because Insidious was so much better than I ever would have imagined it to be. And that’s what I’m going to talk about today, because we watched it again last night as a refresher before we check out the sequel, as I had forgotten pretty much everything about it. I thought that I’d made a post about it back when I saw the movie for the first time, but a site search shows otherwise.

Insidious is a horror movie from the creators of Paranormal Activity and Saw. While I do have a morbid fascination with the myriad different ways they come up with to kill people in the Saw flicks, and the first Paranormal Activity is legit spooky, I’m not a fan of either series. Which is fine because Insidious is totally different from either of them. It’s more of a back-to-basics kind of horror movie; it just wants to tell you a spooky story.

The film starts with a couple, Josh and Renai, moving into a new home with their three kids. While goofing around in the attic, the oldest of the kids, Dalton, wangs his head on the floor, sees something spooky offscreen, and doesn’t wake up the next morning. Doctors call it a coma, but have no explanation for it, saying that the head wound didn’t cause any serious damage. The parents are obviously grief-stricken, and Josh starts spending as much time away from home as possible to avoid dealing with all the stress there.

Meanwhile, stuff starts going bump in the night. And in the day too, I guess. Renai hears voices in the baby monitor, the house’s alarm system goes haywire, and spooky figures begin appearing. This all culminates in the family deciding that the house is haunted and moving again. We’re only about half an hour in here, so obviously that does not work.

Eventually Josh’s mom hires them a team of paranormal investigators, and all the pieces start falling into place. I won’t spoil anything here, because this is a movie you probably should actually watch, but I think it’s obvious enough to note (indeed the box is trying to give it away) that it’s actually Dalton that is haunted, which is why the ghostly people are still stalking around the new house.

What I like here is that it takes the usual “haunting” movie trope of the dad/boyfriend not believing that anything supernatural is happening and twists it on its ear. Josh outright denies the problem at hand when the insvestigators lay their theory on him, but comes around within minutes. I was shocked at how suddenly he changed his mind and got the plot rolling. I was all like “Pssh yeah, typical. Of course he’s not gonna believe it” and then WHAM! ~~George Michael out of nowhere.~~ Totally didn’t see it coming.

The entire third act of the movie is really surreal and cool, too. While the first two acts are business as usual, most of the third takes place in a dreamy otherworld, and ends up kind of making me feel like Insidious was a better Silent Hill movie than the actual Silent Hill movie or its tepid sequel. It’s fairly subtle about the horror elements, and gets its spookiness through more with unsettling imagery, foggy darkness, and the gravity of the situation than violence and gore. A lot of the scary stuff in the movie isn’t immediately threatening; it’s frightening because it’s out-of-place and unnatural. It takes the familiar and distorts it, and that kind of mucking around with reality is the kind of horror that I love to see in movies.

One of the really cool things about Insidious is that while it’s a movie about the supernatural, I’m pretty sure that it uses absolutely no special effects. It’s all makeup, camera trickery, and other practical effects. Smoke machines and lighting are used to great effect here, and they do a really great job of setting the scene. At least, this is what I’m assuming. I haven’t researched the film enough to know for certain that they didn’t use special effects, but there aren’t any that are glaringly obvious. There’s also absolutely no gore, if that’s the kind of thing that’ll keep you away from a movie.

I have two problems with the movie. The first is that it takes way too long to get to the more interesting parts of it. Only about a sixth of the movie is spent in the spooky otherworld, and I feel like if they’d given it a little more time to shine, we could have seen some truly scary things in there. As it is, a lot of the frights before that part of the movie are jump scare variants. Admittedly, a lot of them are really good and you won’t see them coming, but still. I will admit that in this case, it’s probably a good thing that they spent most of the movie building up the story and characters.

My second gripe is the ending. Considering that the rest of the movie feels pretty fresh in a fairly stale genre, the ending is all too predicatable and stands out as nothing more than a hook on which to hang their sequel. Then again, I did just literally ask for more otherworld shenanigans, and I suppose the sequel is giving me exactly that. Or at least, that’s what I’m expecting from it. The reviews are not great, but I find that I almost always enjoy movies that I go in wanting to enjoy. And that’s really the secret. That and my “don’t poke holes, just enjoy the ride” mentality.

At the end of the day, I went into Insidious expecting another paint-by-numbers haunting movie, and came out very pleased at the direction it ended up going. It’s not a renaissance for horror movies by any stretch, but it tries earnestly to do its own thing, and I can dig on that. I highly recommend you check it out if you’re big on the genre in general or a specific affinity for old-school horror.

Don’t Watch Hemlock Grove

Throughout April, The Wife and I watched a show called The Killing on Netflix. It is an excellent crime drama with a fun twist: the entire two-season run focuses on a single case. My initial thought was that stretching one investigation over 20-something episodes would make the show too slow and repetitive, but I was so wrong. There were no filler episodes; each one offered something pertinent to either the case or character development. It wasn’t perfect but god damn if that thing did not have me absolutely hooked by the end. And the ending! Oh, that ending. Powerful, powerful stuff.

So after that, I was thirsting for something similar. I have never been big on the television crime drama, but The Killing left a very good taste in my mouth. So when Netflix started advertising for their upcoming exclusive series called Hemlock Grove, my interest was piqued. Here, take a look at the description pilfered directly from Netflix:

When the mangled corpse of a local teenager is discovered, rumor and suspicion spread like a plague through Hemlock Grove. As dark secrets bubble to the surface, everyone becomes a suspect in the hunt for a monster that may be hiding in plain sight.

Hey! That sounds exactly like what I’m looking for! Seriously, if you replace ‘Hemlock Grove’ with ‘Seatlle’ that could (very) loosely describe The Killing as well. If only I could go back to a couple weeks ago and tell my past self that no, oh sweet crepes no, it is not what you’re looking for.

The Netflix poster/cover thing for Hemlock Grove is a hand protruding from the mouth of a wolf. I figured that it was more symbolic than anything, especially since the O in Hemlock is stylized as a snake eating it’s own tail, as in the Ouroboros symbol. So, “okay,” I thought, “this seems fairly deep and rooted in some sort of mythology so I am so in.”

Yeah, it didn’t turn out that way. I won’t spoil too much, but Hemlock Grove is kinda like what would happen if Twilight took off the kid gloves. So it’s an awful, stupid, confusing mess, but at least it’s an awful, stupid, confusing mess that shows boobs pretty often.

Basically what goes down is that this chick gets killed -disemboweled “snatch-first”- and two teenage loners decide that they want to investigate the murder. One (Roman) is a rich pretty boy who’s got a blood fetish and can do the Jedi mind trick. The other (Peter) is a Gypsy that just moved into town and people just assume that he’s a werewolf for no real reason. Apparently there is some sort of vague enmity between their families (this is only barely touched upon in the final episode) but they bond pretty quickly. Which becomes somewhat problematic for the viewer.

The chemistry between these two is one of the more aggravating parts of the show. Roman has his way with all the ladies and Peter develops a pretty serious relationship with a girl throughout the series, but they are so impossibly gay for each other it hurts. I don’t know if maybe it was written that way on purpose or the actors just don’t understand body language, but they are constantly giving each other the look and spouting off gay innuendo but nothing ever comes of it. There is so much more unresolved crap in this show, but the sexual tension between these two is thick enough to bludgeon someone to death and if the two of them had just admitted their true feelings and gotten their queer on, I’d have been satisfied enough to not demand my thirteen hours back.

The very, very worst part is that the best, most sympathetic character, Roman’s sister Shelley, ends up just being a deus ex machina. It is infuriating and whyyyyyy do we not spend more time getting to know Shelley? All she is over the course of the series is the sheltered girl who’s pretty much Frankenstein’s monster less the neck bolts and sometimes she glows blue for no well-defined reason. I don’t really know about that last one, I fell asleep during the episode where I’m guessing that maybe they explained her backstory. But rather than have her slow growth towards independence mean anything, it just turns her into a big ol’ plot device out of nowhere. It is infuriating.

As for the other unresolved crap.. well, I guess the show answers the main questions, those being “who is eating all these vaginas?” and “why is someone eating all these vaginas?” but not a single one of the character arcs comes to a satisfying conclusion. Every member of Peter’s family has some sort of supernatural quirk about them, but not a one of them gets any real explanation. His mom sort of gets some backstory at the end, but even that isn’t enough to explain really anything at all outside of why she’s so damn frigid. It really confuses more than it enlightens. I guess the best way to explain it is that the show tries to frantically wrap up a handful of loose ends in the last episode rather than let the resolutions work themselves out naturally over the course of the series. It would make a much better payoff to have some sort of revelation during or at the end of each episode, rather than just adding a bunch more questions onto the pile. You know, like LOST. LOST was pretty great.

Side note: There is also a cubic buttload of fantasy terminology that is used but never even given context, nevermind outright explained. So if the words Upir and Vargulf and Ouroboros don’t mean anything to you (and they probably don’t unless you’re some kinda goth douche), you might want to keep your smartphone next to you while watching. You know, so you can Google some of the wacky fantasy garbage. Actually, Ouroboros is friggin everywhere in the show, but isn’t really all that meaningful in the context of the show. It sort of represents one character’s major development (at the very end), and is also the name for a big science project that we never learn a damn thing about. HEMLOCK GROOOOVE!! *fist shaking*

I suppose the “silver lining” here is that Hemlock Grove is based on a book, which is the first in a trilogy. So maybe some day its insanity will all work itself out, but really, that’s not the point. The point is that this first season of the Hemlock Grove TV show is deeply disappointing outside of some pretty gnarly gore effects. I guess two or three of the characters could have been pretty likeable too if they had gotten anything resembling real character development but oh well. Mostly every character who isn’t Roman or Peter or Shelley is a straight-up douchebag or a babbling idiot (sometimes both!), so why should I even care?

TLDR: Don’t waste your time on Hemlock Grove. Read a plot synopsis or something if you’ve got a burning desire to know what it’s about. Hopefully the writer will add some supplemental information, because that’s the only way any of this garbage is going to make sense.

TE’s Top 12 Video Games of 2012

Another year has come and gone, and a big ol’ stack of videogames with it. I made a point in April to keep a list of every game I played throughout the year, and by the time July or so rolled around, I had decided to make up this list of the Top 12 Games of 2012. There are a few rules I decided to put in place for this list, though I ended up breaking them. Heck, there somehow managed to be 14 games in my top 12. Obviously the rules are more like suggestions.

Going in, I had decided that the games which would populate this list would have to be games that I started and finished in the year 2012. They would also have to be games that I’d never played previously. While most of the list fits this rule easily because they were released in 2012, I did make a couple exceptions. Technically there is one game that I did not beat on the list. However, I am right at the end of it, and I haven’t pulled the trigger on the ending sequence because there is more that I want to accomplish and I’ve heard whispers that ending the game ends the game for reals. Justified. The other exception is a pretty major one: a collection. I couldn’t help but add it because 2012 is the Year of the Video Game Collection and it’s by and large the best one I’ve seen so far. Also I did play through two of the games included on it this year. Good enough.

I think that earlier on in the selection process I had another stipulation on what could qualify, but I’m pretty sure that I broke it so many times that I can’t even remember what it was. Probably would have cut down the eligible games to under a dozen anyway. That said, let’s take a quick peek at the honorable mentions. These are games that either didn’t quite make the cut, or games that I really liked but didn’t even come close to finishing. They all deserve to have words written about them, but this is neither the time nor place. So let us look at their boxarts and dream about what could have been.

Now that we’ve got those losers out of the way, you can go ahead and check out what games earned the most of my affection and/or time last year. The list is exactly as Nintendo-centric as you might expect, but there are a couple games on here that will probably come as surprises. I’ll warn you now though, the total word count goes ever so slightly over 10,000 words, so if you’re in, be ready for the long haul. Maybe go get yourself a sandwich or a drink before you get started.

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