Hack/Slash Omnibus volume 2 review

    Another great collection of stories.

    Oh, you need more?

    Well, most of my early statements about Hack/Slash from my volume one review remain true. The premise is great with poor Cassie Hack attempting to track down and kill as many undead slashers as humanly possible.

    The series premise that sufficiently evil serial killers rise from the dead to become zombie murderers simultaneously is explored further and is set aside frequently enough that it never becomes tiresome. In this volume, Cassie Hack fights Lovecraftian abominations and ordinary serial killers in addition to Slashers. This helps keep everything fresh.

    Despite the fact Hack/Slash is a comic book series with a vested interest in the status quo, we get some character development from both Vlad and Cassie both throughout this volume.  Some of these changes, I honestly did not see coming and worked surprisingly well.

    Vlad starts discovering he is, deformities aside, a perfectly average guy with desires and this leads to some hilarious moments where he throws Cassie for a loop. I won't spoil any but poor Cassie's reaction to Vlad's desire to see Bikini Car Wash is simultaneously hilarious and heartwarming. Even so, despite looking like Jason Voorhees, he remains the emotional and moral center of the pair.

    Cassie, for her part, is struggling to deal with the fact she has an abundance of friends. Cassie Hack, having been a loner for virtually her entire life, has difficulty even comprehending it let alone taking advantage. We also get a really surprising revelation Cassie is gay (or at least bisexual) and this is handled in an unusually sensitive manner. Certainly, she doesn't know what to make of it.

    One thing a lot of modern comic writers don't know how to do is create supporting cast members. I am particularly fond of the character Margeret "Georgia" Crump who is the first genuinely nice "normal" person Cassie Hack has probably ever met in her life. The contrast in their character is tremendous and watching their potential romance blossom, collapse, and spark again is a source of great drama.

    This is the volume where the first main series really begins so we have fewer crossovers than before, which is a good thing. The series has a chance to establish its own voice in this volume and some of its ideas are great. Others...not so much. Overall, though, I was very impressed with the work and enjoyed all of the stories within.

    My favorite stories of the volume include Cassie Hack investigating allegations of devil worship in the music industry (which is true, for once), the Tub Club that manages to take an exploitation premise (lesbian vampire cult!) in a surprisingly sensitive direction, and the Suicide Girls crossover with the comic which is so ridiculous it's hilarious. I kid you not, there's also an unofficial Hack/Slash crossover with Archie. That, much like Archie meets the Punisher, was gut-bustingly hilarious.

    There's some stories I didn't much care for in this volume. The long-awaited reunion between Jack Hack and his daughter isn't all that interesting. Sadly, even the inclusion of Doctor Herbert West from the Re-Animator franchise or the return of Cassie Hack's mother doesn't do much to inject life into a fairly dull story. There's also a story where Cassie has to deal with a group of feral kids I wasn't too fond of--I really didn't know what sort of message the story was trying to convey and it just felt grim for the sake of grimness.

    Overall, though, this volume just continues to impress me with the potential of the Hack/Slash series. It's a comic book with lots of humor and drama potential that it exploits to its fullest. I recommend people pick up the second volume, even if the cover is as unpleasant in its own way as the original one.

9.5

Dredd review

    "In case you have forgotten, this block operates under the same rules as the rest of the city. Ma-Ma is not the law... I am the law."

    Dredd is a great, fun movie.

    Don't get me wrong, it's not going to change cinema the way Alien or Bladerunner did but it might actually be as good as the original Verhoeven Robocop film. That's pretty high praise and a statement this movie managed to actually get a sense of dystopia done right. It is a action-filled, violent, and intense film which doesn't let up until it finishes. What's really impressive about this movie is it managed to make its relatively low budget go pretty far too.

Olivia Thirlby's Anderson is lovely.

    For those unfamiliar with Judge Dredd or (even worse) familiar only with the character from Stallone movie; he's a police officer in a giant post-apocalyptic city where he has authority to arrest, sentence, or execute any criminals he comes across in the course of his duty. Karl Urban plays the character as seriously as Christian Bale's Batman even though he's a character who is meant to be a juggernaut of police brutality.

    The premise of Dredd is nicely simple, brought on by the movie's budget. Judge Dredd and his new partner, psychic Cassandra Anderson, are called in to investigate a trio of brutal murders at a gigantic "mega-block" which is the center for a massive drug-distribution center. Imprisoned when the drug-cartel (led by Lena Headey's "Ma-Ma") seals off the building, they have to fight their way through an army of thugs.

    It's a premise which has been repeatedly compared to The Raid: Redemption but emerged independently or as a result of The Raid actually taking the plot while it was in script-development. I haven't seen The Raid so I don't know and don't particularly care. All I know is Dredd stands on its own and deserves a sequel despite its comparatively low ticket sales. People should really pick this one up on DVD and I rarely say that.

Dredd is...Dredd.

    As mentioned, the highlight of the movie is definitely Karl Urban's minimalist take on Judge Dredd. He has half of his face covered the entire film and has to portray a semi-invincible avatar of justice but, nevertheless, manages to bring a surprising amount of depth to Joe Dredd. He's about 80% rage and focus but there's a 20% of something else--which is just about right for Judge Dredd.

     Olivia Thirlby's Anderson is a much more nuanced character, reflecting a "normal" person's reaction to the authoritarian brutality of the Judge system while simultaneously being exposed to the kind of urban jungle which necessitates its existence. She goes through a lengthy character arc whose end result is not really a surprise but has some twists along the way. She's also beautiful, which I certainly approve of.

    Lena Headey's Ma-Ma is an excellent villain to put against Judge Dredd. Whereas other films might have chosen Rico (*cough*) or Judge Death, this movie nicely realizes you only need a suitably potent criminal to oppose Judge Dredd. Ma-Ma is sleazy, disgusting, and evil beyond reckoning. In many ways, I prefer this kind of diametric opposite relationship versus a corrupt judge or regime.

It'll take more than a prominent scar and a bad haircut to make Lena Headey ugly.

     There's not many other characters of note in the work, which is appropriate since this is a character piece on Anderson and Dredd. Ma-Ma, in a very real way, is the shark our heroes are hunting. The other characters live in abject fear of her or have become corrupted by her presence. Yet, at the end of the day, she's just another criminal to Judge Dredd. No more dangerous than any other. You could call this "A Day in the Life of Judge Dredd" and it would be a perfectly accurate summation.

     The special effects are minimalistic with the drug "Slo-Mo" inducing slow-motion action that the movie uses as excuses to have bloodthirsty executions. The set design and exterior shots of Mega City One are all beautiful, visual storytelling being used to illustrate what sort of world Judge Dredd lives in. Some bits are a little too violent and the dreary set-design could be improved in places but, otherwise, it's quite interesting.

     I think my favorite special effects were only the screen for a short while. Rather than create Mega City One out of a matte painting or CGI, they actually just digitally inserted the Mega Blocks (super-skyscraper apartments) and super-highways into the skyline of real-life New York. That was genius since it makes Mega City One feel a great deal more like it takes place in "our world" despite the massive nuclear desert just outside the city's walls.

    In conclusion, this is a good-good movie. There's satire, action, well-crafted characters, and a simple premise one doesn't have to work hard to appreciate but doesn't talk down to you either. Go out and get the DVD, you won't be disappointed.

9.5/10

A short story I got published...

Hey guys,

    I should have posted this a while ago but I actually had a short story published in this particular work. It's a story starring Gabriel Drake, a somewhat oddball temporal police agent trying to work out the purpose of his job when the only thing that happens when someone time-travels is it creates a new reality.

Thanks for reading, guys!

Hack/Slash Omnibus volume 1 review

    I love Hack/Slash.

    Abandoning all premise of objectivity, I've got to say this is my favorite independent comic currently ongoing and I suggest everyone go and pick it up. I also suggest people pick up the twenty dollar omnibus for the series and buy them each in turn. I could go on with my needless fanboy-ism but I think you all get the picture. So, instead, I'm going to dial it back and try to objectively talk about the series.

    The premise of Hack/Slash is a somewhat darker take on Buffy: The Vampire Slayer: different in execution but coming from the same roots. Cassie Hack is your typical Final Girl in a slasher movie, the slasher being her mother in this case. She's a soft, nerdy, virginal, introverted girl who brings down the big bad monster. Unfortunately, her mother proceeds to come back from the dead only to force her to put it down again. You see, in this world, serial killers are prone to resurrecting themselves as undead monsters.

    Killer!

    Re-inventing herself as a sexy Goth girl, Cassie travels across America with her partner Vlad to hunt these supernatural immortals. Vlad is, quite ingeniously, a "good" version of Jason Voorhees. He's a gas-mask wearing deformed giant raised in near-complete isolation who has latched onto Cassie because she's, quite literally, his only friend in the world. A lot of the comics humor comes from the fact that Vlad is arguably better adjusted than Cassie despite his appearance and upbringing.

    The first omnibus collects a bunch of the one-shots and mini-series which initially introduced Cassie Hack to the world. The first story, Euthanized, is a surprisingly effective horror story that takes its premise dead serious (pun intended). Girls Gone Dead nicely analyzes the "Good Girl vs. Slut" dynamic so frequently parodied in horror movies where the villain is the kind of Bible-thumping bad guy who would approve yet oozes hypocrisy.

    As a religious man, I approved of the fact the satire limited itself to a very limited part of the Christian faith. I also enjoyed Slice Hard, which had poor Cassie having to choose between assisting a corporate conspiracy and helping her friend Vlad get a normal life. I even liked Hack/Slash vs. Chucky despite the shameless crossover promotion which certainly motivated the story.

     Did I dislike any of the stories? Not really. However, I wasn't too enthusiastic about Hack/Slash versus Evil Ernie. Despite the attempt to write a deep and meaningful story about the premise (seriously), I've never been a fan of Devil's Due. Evil Ernie is a parody of 90s anti-heroes taken to the grimdark eleven so the story trying to find emotional poignancy in a world where he hasn't killed 90% of the planet is....difficult to take seriously. Even there, the art is beautiful and we get a sense of Cassie's loneliness.

    I have only one real major complaint about the volume:

    The cover.

    This isn't a minor complaint either. I'm a married man who has difficulty explaining his love of comics to his wife sometimes. This particular cover is deliberately vulgar and seems designed to appeal to the shameless exploitation lovers of the fandom. The cover makes the book difficult to read in a public place and implies the book is nonstop fanservice. What's interesting is while Cassie Hack wears rather fetishistic Goth-wear, I actually found that element of the series tamer than mainstream comics. It's only to the point that Cassie Hack is anatomically possible but that's something.

    Indeed, I think the comic might actually due better to dial back even further because I'm a "less is more" kind of guy (or, technically, more is more since we're dealing with women's state of undress in comics). Cassie is an enjoyable comic heroine and while I love sexiness, I think it could actually be something for readers other than boys (both teenage and otherwise) given how well-realized and well-written a character. I was still impressed enough to order the entire series, however, so this is exalting with faint criticism.

    A warning for the squeamish at heart, Hack/Slash is a comic based around 1980s horror movies. There's parodies of Pet Cemetery, Friday the Thirteenth, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Jaws, and (of course) Child's Play. There are plenty of places the series gets gory and a lot of the supporting cast for each issue gets killed. Still, your love of the series is likely to only go up the more you have experience with these stories. I will say, however, I prefer the original work and and know the series only gets better when it reaches Volume 2.

    This is a great comic, though, and one of the best I've read in a very long time.

9.5/10

Skyrim: Dragonborn review

    I liked it but it's not as good as Dawnguard. That's my short but accurate summary of the Skyrim: Dragonborn DLC. The premise of Dragonborn is that the first Dragonborn, Miraak, has returned from the grave and is upset at you taking his place as the most important person in the world. As a result, he sends a couple of no-name cultists after you. These cultists, of course, fail miserably and leave clues which lead you right to Miraak's doorstep.

    I'm paraphrasing things but Dragonborn isn't a particularly deep story. Once you arrive, Miraak isn't all that difficult to find and the storyline is surprisingly short. It's just a series of dungeon-crawls culminating in a final boss fight with Miraak. Compared to the story of Dawnguard, especially with Serena serving as an emotional anchor, it just seems to be far weaker.

The buildings are very different from the rest of Skyrim.

    There's also a slight issue with the fact the storyline builds on a premise which doesn't get too much exposure. Miraak is the first Dragonborn, we are the last, but we learn very little about what it means to be a Dragonborn during the storyline. Even more so, we learn very little about the villain who is supposedly the antagonist. At the risk of spoiling one of the DLC's plot twists, we actually learn more about the Daedric Prince Miraak made a pact with long ago.

    This doesn't mean the DLC is bad as the bulk of the work clearly went into making the unique environment of Solstheim and it shows. Solstheim is an environment wholly unlike Skyrim with giant mushroom buildings, weird buildings, and many visual homages to Morrowind. I never played Morrowind so it was interesting to see and hear a bunch of references to the game I only recognized second-hand.

    The environment is beautiful, strange, and bizarre all at once. They become especially surreal when you take a journey, later, into one of the more intriguing planes of Oblivion. Sadly, by the time the main quest finishes, Oblivion is starting to feel a little stale and that's something it should never be. I say this as a person who had to shut down more than a dozen gates of Oblivion while playing the Elder Scrolls game of the same name.

    Dragonborn offers a variety of new equipment for characters but I can't honestly say I'm particularly impressed by it. A lot of it is merely window-dressing that will probably appeal to fans of Morrowind more than me. I have no particular desire to dress my character up in armor based on spiders but now I have the option if I ever change my mind.

I like the Eskimo feel of the Solstheim Nords too.

    The biggest change is now the option of dragon riding. Unfortunately, this system doesn't really wow me anymore than the rest of the DLC. Basicaly, you have the option of using a new Dragon Shout to enslave a dragon and can use your Fast Travel marker to send it in a certain direction. You can also target things on the ground. This should be awesome but it feels somewhat clunky and unwieldy.

     Overall, I really enjoyed Dragonborn and think it was a good additional set of material for people who enjoyed Skyrim and Dawnguard. I wasn't blown away with it but I think it's a perfectly serviceable piece of gaming.

7.5/10

John Dies at the End review

   This is a hard movie for me to review. The reason for this is due to an unlikely bit of circumstances which is unlikely to impact your average movie-goer. Basically, I thought of this exact same story premise twelve years ago in high school.My idea was for a Call of Cthulhu campaign I wanted to run but didn't have the players for. I thought Cthulhu was growing stale and it was difficult to convey to our modern jaded humorless generation what it was like to "go mad from the revelation."

     Many modern readers are atheists with the belief the universe doesn't care about us already, so Lovecraft's obsession with humanity having knowledge so terrible it would break your sanity seems a trifle odd. I say this as a Presbyterian, some people don't get it. It's not about god or innate meaning to the universe, it's about helplessness.

The dark and dangerous world of a...Chinese restaurant.

    The premise I went with was a variant on the one in this movie. That the universe is, by  itself, a terrifying place ruled by cosmic horrors beyond our comprehension. That nightmarish things happen around us on a daily basis. We just lack the mental capacity to perceive the monsters. If we ever were able to perceive them, their omnipresent nature would drive us completely mad.

    John Dies At The End takes this premise and plays it for comedy. Two twenty-something hipsters accidentally ingest something which gives them the ability to see past the illusions which protect the supernatural. The world is actually an infinitely stranger and more dangerous place than either of them ever imagined (which isn't that difficult since neither of them seem to be the sharpest tools in the shed).

    This description doesn't really illuminate how incredibly strange the movie is. From the start to the finish it functions on a surreal dream-logic which doesn't make any sense until the very end when it all starts making a twisted form of sense. I hesitate to reveal anything because that might remove you from the pure enjoyment to be had experiencing the movie's oddity for yourself.

Just one of the MANY weird places they go.

    The special effects in the movie are, for the most part, pretty good for the limited budget they had. It only falls down towards the end when they're forced to represent a creature which would have been taxing even on a much larger one. Likewise, some of the humor falls flat because it's a little too juvenile. Overall, though, I laughed throughout the entire movie and enjoyed its science-fiction premise.

    The acting in the movie is above passable, showing characters who are able to react to very strange circumstances with an understated horror. They're not particularly realistic characters but the enjoyment from watching slackers try and parse the unimaginable. It reminds me a bit of Supernatural's Winchester Brothers crossed with Clerks.

     I'm especially fond of Chase Williamson's performance as Dave. He gives an easy-going, almost stoned, performance which highlights the character's disassociated nature. Rob Mayes' performance as John is signifcantly more animated, showing him to be more "in" to the supernatural world. An almost unrecognizable Clancy Brown plays a hilarious Doctor Marconi, who is what would happen if your typical Lovecraft protagonist became a History-channel host.

    The movie isn't perfect. In addition to the failure of the special affects towards the end, some of the jokes fall flat. A little bit more editing and some rewrites could have made the movie a great deal tighter and more enjoyable. Still, I can't say it wasn't unenjoyable and I couldn't say what would have replaced the things I wasn't blown over by.

    Overall, I strongly recommend people check out John Dies At The End. It's a hilarious, surreal, and delightful experience that's probably the best thing to happen to horror since the Scream movies.

10/10

Scream 4 review

 
    "They just don't know when to stop. They keep recycling the same ****. There's no element of surprise. You can see everything coming."
    -Rachel (Anna Paquin).

    The opening of Scream 4 has a movie within a movie within a movie. Really, towards the end of the opening scene I was of the mind that we were going to find it a movie within a movie within a movie within a...you know, screw it. You know what I meant. Scream 4's opening threatened to collapse on itself into a mass singularity of meta-textual self-awareness. It only barely avoided it by segueing into a slightly-less-self-aware-but-still-paint-by-the-numbers slasher film.

    Which is what I'm going to have to say about this. For a movie series which was based on avoiding formula, it has become its own formula. What's worse, is it actually references this in the movie. The attempts to lampshade the lampshade hanging occupy a fairly large portion of the narrative and I'm sure what to make of it.

    For those of you who don't know what the Scream formula is, it's fairly simple:

    You have Sidney (Neve Campbell), Gale (Courtney Cox), and Dewey (David Arquette) get involved with the latest attempt to imitate the original Woodsboro murders. Maybe the killer is a fan of the in-universe movies, maybe it's someone with a personal motivation.

    It doesn't matter. Everyone in the world will display an alarming lack of compassion towards the murders, treating them like a horror movie. A lot of new characters will be introduced, usually humanized in some manner. Most of these characters will end up dead. At some point, a character will explain some largely bull**** laws about horror movies fans will take as sacrosanct. There will be a climatic battle and our heroine(s) will triumph (or not since the movies' advertising goes to great lengths to imply no one is safe this time around).

I love Neve Campbell. I'd say I don't know why but I'd be lying.

    I'm not sure how you can do a series like this as strictly formula but they succeeded. The gimmick of Scream 4 is this is the reboot of the franchise. You could very easily call this Scream 4: The New Generation. I heard rumors about an MTV weekly series about the Scream franchise and you could very easily imagine this as one of the pilot scripts. You have a large cast of new teenage characters, one loosely related to Sidney, and you get to watch them react to the same events of the original taking place.

    This could have worked.

    Unfortunately, we once more run into the problem of the unnecessary Sidney Prescott. Except, this time it's the unnecessary Dewey and Gale Weathers too. Neve has much more to do this time around and I really enjoy her every time she's on screen but the new characters become stock archetypes the way the franchise used to be (semi-)good at avoiding. The only one who distinguishes herself is Hayden Panettiere's Kirby who isn't interesting but is sorta-interesting. That's how much of an impression they all made.

    It's not bad, though.

    That may surprise you. In fact, I may go so far to say that I enjoyed it more than Scream 3 despite the narrative starting to tick me off with how clever it thinks it's being. Scream 4 is strictly by formula but it's not a bad formula. Neve Campbell is the girl next door if the girl next door was really hot. Courtney Cox is effective as Lois Lane's best portrayal by anyone other than Margot Kidder. Hell, I even love Dewey despite David Arquette almost single-handedly destroying the WCW.

Our franchise's new heroines/possible victims. Some actual surprises here.

    Part of this is the movie piggy-backing on the original franchise's success and going in a direction I'm satisfied with. Rocky Balboa wasn't a good movie but it left you feeling okay about where the characters were at the end, even if it didn't do anything interesting with them. If you gave a **** about Rocky the character, it was a nice apology for Rocky V.

    This is relevant because the Scream characters start the movie in a place I appreciate. Sidney is now a self-help author, Gale and Dewey are married, and the Stab movies are finally dying down. Wes Craven made me care about the original heroes as much as I can for fictional people so I'm happy for them. That goodwill goes a long way.

    I'm just not sure it belongs in a slasher film.

     The movie doesn't have any of the laugh out-loud moments of Scream 3 but that's probably for the best. Even if the series has fallen into the same old trend of creating cardboard cut-outs for the Slasher to kill the humor detracts from the seriousness of the situation. Overall, I liked the film but I would be entirely okay if this were the ending of the franchise. I don't really see much room left for the (surviving) characters to develop.

7.5/10

Victory over a Lovecraftian abomination

The rats...are dead.

Yes, by the power of modern science, they are all dead and removed from our house.

The Apocalypse is averted for another year.

Huzzah.