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A brief return to horror, as a new Lucky 13 dawns on the horizon.

This week we discuss the greatest Vampire films ever made. You have to go read it because, goddamn, its vampires!

...oddly enough, Lost Boys didn't get brought up. Honorable mention, however.

And when you're done here you can head over to Vault of Horror for their picks as well. But, the fun all begins at Brutal As Hell.

     

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A bit more E3 coverage... I probably have months worth. :P

This time at bat we have High Voltage Software and their top-down shooter The Grinder.

If you like monsters and splattery humor, this one's for you.

Its here at Padinga.com!

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The last of the E3 Tech reviews is up, as I share final, parting thoughts on the Kinect, and the Yoostar 2 makes its internet debut.

If you've ever wanted to see me making a foolish attempt at an Arnold Impersonation, this is your time!


Its over at Padinga.com!

External Linkage: Two-fer

For any who missed our impromptu live edition of The Game Show, its up in the iTunes store now. This webisode is a quick 'un, featuring a brief recap and personal reflection on E3. Perfect accessory to all of the articles we're putting up. Via Padinga.com


Back in the movie front, the newest Lucky 13 came out, a trip down memory lane as we talk about some of our favorite horror comedies. From the fine folks at Brutal As Hell.


  

E3 Games: Square Enix

The Mega-gaming entity Square Enix puts out another massive stack of what looks to be colossal games. Check out the future of RPG and strategy titles from E3, all at Padinga.com

Follow this link to the Human Revolution.

E3: Sony's new The Move controller

Allright Sony, time for your time in the limelight.

Their new product debut was The Move, a motion controller that seeks to dethrone the Wiimote. Come see the results at Padinga.com!

Yes, its as awesome as this looks...

E3 Nintendo Madness Continues!

All the buzz is about Nintendo... again.

While I've got scads of games to cover, a few interviews to post, all of the talk, and all of the lines at the con, lead to Nintendo.

If you haven't figured out yet what all the buzz is about, its all centered around the Nintendo 3DS portable game system.

And if you haven't figured out why yet, maybe this look will clue you in. More at Padinga.com!

We're breaking into the next dimension!

External Linkage: E3 Edition- A Visit with Nintendo!

E3 continues to bowl me over. I got enough material for four articles, easy, but only had enough time to get one put together.
Of course, that's just me, the rest of the staff is out gathering information too. We could be writing for days if we feel like it, there's just that much new stuff floating around.

Of course we gotta cover the big guns first, and it doesn't get any bigger than Nintendo. Here's coverage from their press conference this morning, including new titles for the Zelda and Metroid franchises, as well as a look at the new Nintendo 3DS!

Its at Padinga.com!

   

External Linkage: E3 Edition

This was a huge, long day. I'd forgotten what the convention scene felt like!

Its has been said to me that at conventions, there are three things to do: Eat, Sleep, Play Games (or whatever the con is about). Pick two of those, that's all you have time to do.

Well, after a pair of press conferences and a huge concert, the Padinga crew has returned home with a belly full of pie to report the news.

We need to get back down there in two hours, so guess which option we're NOT taking. And the con hasn't even officially opened its doors yet...

Anyway, Day 0 coverage is up at Padinga.com. Go, read, enjoy. It was definitely a WTF kind of day for seasoned Gamers...

It Has Begun!... E3 with Padinga.com!

We interrupt our usual movie-related ramblings to bring a taste of digital delight your way. I'm out with your friends and mine from Padinga.com (former contributors of BreakmanX.com, and some fresh young talent to bolster the roster) as we cover the E3 Gaming Expo in Los Angeles.

There's not much going on today unless you're out watching the promotional circus act they have going on right now (from which a few news nuggets have already been spied. IE: Some new Xbox Model this year, also the Natal motion control is now re-labeled the Kinect, more on these later), but we had a good start to the week's coverage.

Day 1 consisted of a signing and photo op with Metal Gear creator and gaming legend Hideo Kojima. (seen here signing a copy of a friend's game for me) Sadly the press conference was cancelled, but we did set up an exclusive interview with him in the future, and we are certain to get some great game demos at the Konami booth, courtesy of their very gracious and apologetic company reps. Those guys have a lot of class.

But enough chatter for now. Check us out on Padinga.com, and look for updates all week long!

  

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Week four of the Lucky 13! This week we examine the greatest and grisliest scenes of Gore ever created!
This is the biggest week so far in the series, everyone's got something to say!

When you're done here, pop over to the Vault of Horror for part 2!

Great big gobs of greasy, grimy, people guts!

    

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This month's brand spankin' new BthroughZ.com! Lots of nifty, nasty nuggets of horror served up in heaping helpings! YOU'VE NEVER BEEN SO EXCITED!!

Not only do I have a particularly damning rant about crap-fest Exorcism of Emily Rose, but dear friend and generally foxy lady Abbie Stutzer joins the fray! THRILL! as she reviews the classic 'Brain Damage' and uses scintillating phrases like 'Love Meat'!

Now! New @ BthroughZ.com!

  

Splice: The importance of marketing

This weekend, one of the worst on record for the film industry, millions of people still went out of their way to throw down money at the movie theater, looking to escape the heat, and reality, for a few hours.

About ten people probably saw Splice.

Okay, obvious exaggeration, but the movie was a bomb, taking in just over $7 million with a #8 opening. Of course, it won't take much to make back the modest $26 Million budget, it'll do that over time with home video release, but its still not very impressive. Still, the question remains, why didn't people see this movie?

I know that I was excited to see Splice, but then, it had been talked up among the cinema world for several years. The script was well received when it first made the rounds. Then we were treated to shots of the film's creature, Dren. With the very sleek creature design, sharp CGI work, and production work by noted Director Guillermo Del Toro, there was a lot of buzz and positive talk about the film. Finally it debuted at Sundance, and it was very well received; there was even a bit of a bidding war over the distribution rights. And who can blame them? For a completely independent film, Splice looks wonderful. The 'net was getting hyped. All of the pre-game motions were set to see this indy-turned major release become a major hit.

And then we got this trailer.

Well... that doesn't look anything like the movie I had heard about in the production stages, the smart and creepy sci-fi. That looks like... Species 4 or something.

Then we finally got the poster and it too.... looked like part of the Species series. And the Species poster was a derivative of the original Alien poster. Coupled with the catch phrase "Science's Newest Miracle... is a Mistake" it looked like we had yet another 'cloning is bad' movie, stealing its visuals from a history of films that wished they were Ridley Scott's Alien. The film-going community shrugged, labeled it 'just another horror flick' and promptly ignored it.

I had a free ticket coming this weekend, so I braved Splice anyway, remembering what I had seen of it back in production and, wow, did they peg this movie wrong.

First off, Splice really isn't a horror movie at all. There are a couple jumpy moments when Dren is first introduced, and a big scary sequence at the film's climax, but the film doesn't really set out to scare you so much as make you ask questions. That's not horror, that's classic sci-fi. Though it has a creature in it, Splice is less about the monster, and more about the scientists; the focus is on the consequences they face when their own human infallibility enters the laboratory, their flawed compassion taking precedence over scientific reasoning.

Splice follows scientists and married couple Clive and Elsa (Adrian Brody and Sarah Polley) just after their biggest scientific breakthrough. They have created a protoplasmic creature that is a mix of the DNA structures of many different animals. Though lacking any real shape or function, the creature creates a series of proteins not found in any single creature in nature that can be used to cure livestock of many different ailments. The couple hopes to gain approval to add human DNA to their next proto-creature so that it might make proteins to cure Parkinson's Disease, Diabetes, and some forms of Cancer.

They are denied this, as most laws prohibit human cloning, even in a hybrid like this, and do the thing any two scientists in a film would do: they go ahead anyway.

At this point, the movie could have become the horror flick it was billed as, with the creature coming to life, escaping, and a bunch of people with guns trying to hunt it down in the sewers. Instead, it takes the more intellectual approach, and becomes about parenthood. From the offset, we know that Clive wants children, and Elsa does not. But when confronted with the partially human creation, Clive's first reaction is that of a scientist: destroy the creature, autopsy, examine, keep the lab controlled; meanwhile Elsa is immediately overwhelmed by her humanity, clothing and naming the creature, protecting it, and eventually taking it from the lab to nurture it. Despite Elsa's displayed superiority at lab science, she cannot keep the boundary of objectivity that is considered a necessity.

Throughout the film, the relationships between Clive, Elsa, and Dren all develop and change in startling ways. Dren ages at an advanced rate, going from embryonic to child to teenager over a matter of months. Over this time, Clive's strong paternal instinct begins to emerge, and he bonds with the creature. Elsa, maternally driven to protect the small Dren, now finds haunting memories of her traumatic childhood moving her in odd ways towards the adolescent she is now faced with. The rapid succession and development of emotions is more than the couple seem prepared to handle, and caught in the middle is a creature with many of the same human emotions, but lacking the reasoning to control them, having instead the instincts of the animals she was cross-bred with, play, eat, mate, survive.

From this set-up comes a number of questions. At what point do scientists cease to be humans, and should they/can they progress forward without humanity and compassion guiding them? This movie seems to suggest that it is the adoption of compassion over clinical behavior that can lead to disaster. At what point does a 'specimen' become something more? To what degree is a scientist 'married' to their work? The film suggests that there is truth to the notion that the results of an experiment are the scientists' 'child' in many ways, and that the experiment is a part of them.

Removed from the science, Splice has a few emotional questions at its core as well. Dren lacks much in the way of human reasoning, but her face and motions convey a full array of emotion. The longer the film continues, however, the more we begin to see that no matter how 'evolved' or adult humans are, our own reasoning can still be overwhelmed by the same instincts that drive Dren, or any animal. We seek control, we seek love, we seek comfort and joy. When hurt, when threatened, we lash out in the same way that an animal would, and we see that exhibited in many of the decisions Elsa makes. Splice questions our moral superiority that we, as humans, presuppose, looking at both our capacity for compassion and love, and our capacity for violence, incest, beastiality, rape, dishonesty and murder. Everything the scientific world fears Dren is capable of we ourselves are already committing; again it is emotion over reason. Emotion, perhaps, spliced with instinct; and maybe we don't really know how to separate the two.

All of this leads to our climax where Dren, overwhelmed by the emotional tempest of her two 'parent' figures and her isolation in their country home, makes a startling metamorphosis.

Obviously, I was impressed by the movie. Some of the story points you can see coming, I won't say that everything in the film is completely original, but by now everything seems to be borrowing from something else. But Splice is very smartly written and filmed, and presents its story in a new way, with more thought and depth than many sci-fi horror films in a long time. The performances are excellent, particularly Delphine Chaneac, who builds Dren into a believable and empathetic creature without speaking a word. CGI effects are also top-notch. It all adds up to a solid film that earned more than the meager audience it received this weekend.

In a summer of awful releases, this is one you should go see to escape the tedium of a useless Sex in the City sequel, or some needless remake.

Now, given it was mislabeled as a straight horror flick, I have to wonder why this one didn't attract more of the horror community. But that'll be saved for another entry...

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The Lucky 13 continues as this week Brutal As Hell examines the greatest Occult films of all time: Witches, Demons, and Satan himself.

Once you read our review here, don't forget to pop on over to Vault of Horror to see what our fellow writers have to say over there. The whole of the horror-net is in on this one!

http://www.brutalashell.com/2010/06/the-lucky-13-week-three-demons-witches-and-the-devil/


      

Marmaduke

Hollywood... you're really stretching here, aren't you?

It seems like whenever the box office starts to slump, and it has been a bit lately, you panic. And when you panic, what to you do? Do you turn to smart directors like Spielburg or Cameron for advice? Do you look at the kind of quality pictures that Chris Nolan has made, all of which were 'unmarketable' $100 Million + success stories (and, of course, the Mega-hit Dark Knight). Do you look for scripts and directors who's films are quality and will have long-lasting appeal in the theater and on home video?

Or, do you make some bullshit with talking animals in it? Yeah.... that's it.

Now, hey, I get it, kids like talking animals. I know I saw more than a few Disney movies in my youth. I saw Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey. I took in Milo & Otis at the dollar show. But those movies were a lot further apart 'back in the day', and Disney, especially old Disney, is miles above any of the crap you're producing now. In fact, new Disney is buckling under the strain of losing its connection with kids. And rather than find new ways to engage them, they're relying on nostalgia for those old releases to keep the wind in their company's massive sales. (see: Cinderella 3, Junglebook 2, any other sequel 30 + years after the fact)

Furry Vengeance, Beverly Hills Chihuahua, Dogs v Cats 1&2, Chipmunks and Squeakuel, Garfield, G-Force... man, you guys are just pumping them out lately, aren't you? And its all enough for a quick cash-grab, but where's Snow White? Where's Lion King? Where's anything that gets kids to come back over and over again, and doesn't kill the soul of their parents at the same time? Only Pixar seems to have what it takes. Dreamworks is doing okay but, please DW, let Shrek die.

And so, now we have Marmaduke. A movie based on a comic strip, which is neither funny nor popular, coming out about thirty years after the strip lost any relevance it might have had.
Now, hey, props to creator Brad Anderson for still being a working cartoonist after all these years. He's still doing a one-man show on Marmaduke after 55 years and, at age 85, shows no signs of stopping. I appreciate that kind of long-lived effort.
But still, you've taken the creation of an 85 year old man, who bases many of his gags on old Laurel and Hardy skits, and expect it to be relevant and amusing to kids.

Of course, at the same time you've gone against the source material, and made Marmaduke talk. Have we ever had insight to Marmaduke's thoughts?

You know what is a better Marmaduke movie? Beethoven. The dog didn't have to talk in Beethoven, he just ripped off most of Marmaduke's gags and earned like 4 sequels. But then, that was 20 years ago. Shit has to talk now.

So, I don't know what's worse, the fact that you made some BS movie that panders to the lowest common denominator in a desperate plea for summer box office receipts; a film that shows you still have no idea how to engage kids without treating them like little idiots. OR the fact that the creator of Marmaduke will go see this movie, and have an aneurysm and die when he sees this piece of shit and realizes that the children of tomorrow will remember his pooch more for this dreck than the long-running strip he lovingly crafted for decades.

Where was I going with this?... oh yeah, Hollywood, fucking get it together.

No one go see this movie. If you need further evidence, the trailer... Dance sequence totally ripped from Beverly Hill Chihuahua.

... kill me