Manhunt

Thing Number One to get out of the way - I know all I seem to post about are video games. I didn't intend for this to be a video game blog, but whatever, it is what it is. Talking about movies is okay, but takes some research... most movies are, at most, 2 hours. A single video game can take up anywhere from 5 to 40 hours. Experiencing something for 2 hours or less, unless it is both really fresh in my mind AND provoked a STRONG response, such as Rob Zombie's Halloween when I posted about it, I just don't feel like I have much to say about it. For example, I had been wanting to see Stuart Gordon's From Beyond for, like, almost 10 years. Literally. It was only in the last few years that I realized it was out of print. Okay, that's fine, from there I had two choices - buy a Tawainese bootleg off of ebay, spend WAAAAY too much on an old VHS cassette from an Amazon reseller, or wait until it *eventually* got reissued on DVD. I decided to wait, and the wait was worth it - in that when it was finally released on DVD this past September 11th (NEVAR FOGHAT!), it was an unrated directors cut previously not available. So I got it, watched it with the future-mrs., enjoyed it decently enough (the future-mrs. and I gave it a C-)... Not only is Re-Animator obviously waaaay better, but I think I actually enjoyed Castle Freak more... So yeah, pretty anti-climatic, but that's life. I'm glad I watched it, I don't regret buying it, but overall my review is, "meh - it's pretty okay." But to write a full article about a single movie that I've only sat through once just feels kind of weak... I don't know how professional film critics do it, but then most of them are chuckle fucks any ways, so... But it's kind of this crossroads between, I don't feel like I'm doing a movie justice to see it once and then write a response, but I'm also not so much into watching a movie multiple times in a short span of time just for the sake of having something to say on my blog.

As for music... I'm just, not in my skin about that, right now. 6 years of music school, I'm kind of sick of writing about it, and I've decided I'm not going to be a weenie and give academic treatment to the "pop" music that I love. When academics start writing glowing articles about your genre of pop music, it is a death sentence, and the industrial music scene is already on life support as is, so... not going to go there. I also don't feel comfortable writing "reviews" of industrial CDs and what not. When I buy a CD, I already know I will like it, either because I heard it on internet radio, myspace, the band's website or amazon's preview links, or because it is a band I already know and love well enough that I don't *need* to hear a preview (Skinny Puppy). So I could write glowing reviews about bands I already love, or I can talk shit about bands that, for whatever reason, I don't like. Not going there. I'm old, I'm crusty, I'm mature, if I don't like a band, I just don't care anymore. In high school, it's fun to absolutely *hate* on bands and genres, but there's a point where you grow up and work a mundane job and realize, "so-and-so might suck, but they're making their living doing *that*, and I'm making my living doing this bullshit..."

As for politics, I've had an idea to do a brief write up of all the major presidential candidates for the two major parties, but, meh... what does it really matter? I'll probably do it, just because it's 75% written in my head, whereas this post is so far 100% improv...

Which brings me to the subject of this post... Manhunt.
(Warning, longwindedness is a symptom of 6 years of academia. Consult your doctor.)

So in my last post about Psychonauts, I briefly brought up Manhunt... oh, and by the way, I finally did finish Psychonauts... great game, check it out if you haven't already.

Manhunt... gameplay... first off, the only "stealth games" I've played are Hitman 2, Hitman Contracts, Hitman Blood Money and Manhunt. Of course, I've dealt with the pain and frustration of "stealth levels" in many FPS's and platformers, generally where they DO NOT BELONG. I'm not interested in "traditional" stealth games, but I DO like the idea of sneaking up on people and murdering them in horrible ways. Go figure. Of the Hitman games, I've so far only ever finished Hitman 2 for PC. I have Contracts for PS2 and Blood Money for PC. I will definitely finish Blood Money on the PC someday, Contracts on PS2, I don't know. The PS2 interface is vastly inferior for the Hitman games, in my experience.

In mentioning Manhunt in my last post, I decided to "look it up." Read old reviews, glance at some of the "tips and tricks" on gamefaqs.com... My mind is a perverted and vile Rorschach test. I think of something, anything, and I start looking it up online... and I learned something. I never did "get" how to properly play Manhunt. The shadows in Manhunt render you completely invisible. I did not realize this the first time around. I would hide in the shadows, an enemy would turn in my direction, come close to me, be 2 feet away, and I would, for some reason, instinctively run the fuck away. I guess I was holding the game to a higher standard of realism, or something. I only got to the fourth level this way and never finished a level with more than 2 out of 5 stars. I guess I need things EXPLICITLY spelled out for me, because I am a moron. In talking to Herr Rotwang about this, I described it this way; "It's like playing Super Mario Bros., and every time you see a mushroom, you decide to run the fuck away from it because you think it's poisonous." Yeah, I'm that stupid.

So, I decided to give Manhunt another go... I think it's on my mind because I'm kind of wet and creamy about Manhunt 2 using the motion controller on the Wii... I've never played a Wii before, so I may hate the new control scheme, but I must admit that I am intrigued...

I last played this game in September of 2005. Go me! I decided it would be prudent to start all over again from the beginning, and instantly I get 3 stars on the first level. Shadows, it's all about the fucking shadows. I see the light now, and I am a fucking murder machine. I'm now on the 7th level after only a couple sessions, a huge improvement over my first crack at it, and I've got 3 stars on all 6 previous levels. I suck at doing this shit in a timely manner, so I lose my 4th star there, and I'm playing "fetish" difficulty rather than "hardcore," which disqualifies me from getting 5 stars on any level.

So Manhunt isn't as bad as I initially thought... though the gameplay of Manhunt and the Hitman games are in no way "addictive." They're very much games where you play in short bursts, which is good for me... a half hour to an hour of Manhunt, then I get frustrated and do something else. That's much better for me than something like Psychonauts, where I'm glued to the game for 2 or 3 hours at a time. Manhunt is also far more forgiving than Hitman, so it's a good balance overall and I'm enjoying it for now. I hear the later levels are a bitch and a half, so we'll see how I feel about it then. Just as long as there's no escort missions, I should be fine.

Psychonauts

Downloaded Psychonauts off Steam for $20... seems like everyone talks it up. It's a great game, the gameplay is unbelievably fun and addicting... however, it, like Bioshock, is a great game that ends with a fucking escort mission.

Who has ever played a game and said, "...and my favorite part was the ESCORT MISSION!!! It was totally awesome!!!" NO... NOBODY FREAKING LIKES ESCORT MISSIONS!!!

Yeah, I'm raging against a game that is two years old, but Bioshock pulled the same shit and that was released last month, so...

...I haven't finished Psychonauts yet, I should really spend more time making music and less time playing games. I'm on a bit of a binge lately, I updated my computer back in April/May, went from P4 1.6ghz PC-133 SDRAM with an ati Radeon 9800 to an AMD X2 (4200, whatever that means) with PC-667 RAM (motherboard can handle PC-800) and a Geforce 7600, so I'm kind of catching up with the past few years of PC gaming. Steam has been absolutely addicting for me. I downloaded Half-Life 2 and Episode 1, bought the Dawn of War games before they were available on Steam (if you're like me and hate multiplayer gaming (I hate people, I hate teenagers and I hate assholes) just buy Dawn of War: Dark Crusade. The singe player campaigns for Dawn of War and Winter Assault are totally weak compared to other RTS's. Dark Crusade is actually lots of fun, and you can be all the races in single player but not multiplayer). Then I bought S.T.A.L.K.E.R., didn't like it at all (sorry Phil, real life sucks enough!), Bioshock, Hitman: Blood Money, and finally Psychonauts. I'm still in the middle of Hitman: Blood Money, I like the Hitman games, but I tend to play them a little bit, leave them alone for a while, then come back to them. I'm not really big into "stealth" games, but the premise of the Hitman games is too cool for me to pass up.

So yeah, Psychonauts. Awesome art, awesome setting... best of all, it's a game that is obviously designed around the gameplay. Old school classics, like Super Mario Brothers, Zelda, hell, even Donkey Kong and Pac Man, they were all about the gameplay. None of that shit makes any fucking sense, narratively. Narratives and stories and concepts have become primary in the video game industry, some games are just plain not-fun to play - hello S.T.A.L.K.E.R.! Hitman too, although moreso the old games than Blood Money... and fucking Manhunt... oh god. But Psychonauts is just plain fun to play, it's fun to mash the buttons, it's fun to do everything in it.

Except escort that little shit around the meat circus. FUCK YOU PSYCHONAUTS!!!

Anonymous comments now allowed on this blog

People can now leave anonymous comments. I didn't realize they were not allowed by default. I doubt I've missed anyone, but whatever.

PS.

Haujobb - Vertical Theory. I just recently got this even though it was released in 2003. I saw Haujobb live in Milwaukee when they were touring to promote Polarity in 2002, and this album slipped past my radar... I was in grad school, dirt poor, and not really paying attention to this kind of music. For the past year I've been playing catch up, and this is seriously not only the best Haujobb album since Soultions for a Small Planet/the rmx matrix, it's one of the best industrial/ebm/whatever albums ever. Or at least I think so this week.

In Defense of "Torture Porn"

So today at the pork plant, Dr. Rotwang sent a pigeon over to me with a note that said something along of the lines of, "So what do you think of torture porn movies like Saw and The Hills Have Eyes remake?" I immediately flew into a frothy rage, ripped the head off the pig carcass I was gutting, and hurled it clear across the room. "Dang blast it!!!" I exclaimed as I proceeded into the men's room to write my response...

***

Torture Porn. Wow that sounds horrible. There are few more pejorative terms in the realm of art and entertainment these days. I love the Saw movies. Every Halloween, the girlfriend and I go see the latest Saw movie. We saw Hostel in theaters and loved it, but skipped Hostel 2. And, as I mentioned in the Halloween post below, I hated Wes Craven's original Hills Have Eyes, but loved the latest remake. So what do I think of movies like Saw and The Hills Have Eyes remake and Hostel and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning? I fuckin' love them. They're grrrrr-eat!

1) Torture porn - what kind of propagandistic "focus on the family" bullshit term is this? First, what is pornography? People have struggled with this question for far too long in this country, and I'd like to say, once and for all, that pornography = people being photographed or videotaped actually having sexual intercourse. Blow jobs, hand jobs, anal, masturbation, missionary, foot jobs, boob jobs, blah blah blah. Naked people? Not pornography. So-called softcore porno, where actors and actresses simulate having sex? Not pornography. A Photograph of a penis penetrating a vagina, but hung in an art gallery? Pornography. Does that mean that pornography should not be seen? should not exist? or should not be hung in an art gallery? Of course not. Pornography will always exist as long as human beings have the means to photograph and videotape themselves and each other. There is some innate human desire for some to photograph and videotape themselves in sexual acts and for others to view said photographs and videos.

One of the essential "problems" our society has had in defining pornography is that, in terms of human history, the ability to literally photograph, literally capture a moment, is relatively new. It used to be drawings, sculptures, woodcarvings, paintings, etc. were the only way one could perceive such acts without actually being there in the room with the... fornicators? (I don't like that word much, but I'm at a loss for a better one.) I put forth the argument that, in today's modern world, only actual recordings of people engaged in sex acts qualifies as pornography, and all drawings, representations and simulations of such acts can not compete against the actual act. And while there are moralists with authoritarian agendas cropping up every week to convince us that this idea or that is "pornographic" and "obscene," we as a society must learn to ignore the bait of those who would seek to gain power over us by turning us against things that we already don't like.

Following the definition of pornography I've laid out above, it is my intent to argue that literal torture porn would be photographs or video of actual people being actually tortured - therefore, the only widely disseminated "torture porn" of the modern era would be the Abu Gharib photographs. Does that mean they should not have been aired on the evening news? Absolutely not! Pornography in and of itself does not intrinsically harm anyone, it is how individuals react to it that is harmful, and that ultimately depends on the individual themselves and not the record.
But this is all beside the point of my argument, which is this: Movies that portray actors and actresses simulating being victims or perpetrators of extreme and/or graphic violence do not fit the criteria of pornography in our modern era of reality TV, cell phone cams, web cams, etc. etc. etc...

2) The level of so-called graphic violence in today's R-rated horror movies is a reaction to two things.
a) Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ made it okay for studios and major theater chains to show extreme, graphic violence and prolonged sequences of torture. (Chew on that, moralists!)
b) A new generation of filmmakers reacting to previous restrictions put upon the entire horror genre in the 80's and 90's. Rob Zombie, Alexandre Aja, Eli Roth, etc. etc. etc...

In the 70's you had the "Grindhouse" era of horror movies, where a decentralized system of theaters and drive-ins could show low budget movies depicting extreme situations, although the special effects weren't really that realistic... movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Don't Look in the Basement, I Spit on Your Grave, and Last House on the Left. When these movies went from being occasionally shown for short periods of time at certain theaters to being readily available on home video, the UK threw a shit fit known as the "Video Nasty" era, where movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Evil Dead and The Exorcist (the latter of course being an acclaimed, Oscar winning, major Hollywood motion picture) were banned outright, and other movies had offending scenes edited out by a government office. Meanwhile, in the United States, horror movies released by the major movie studios suddenly went from "scary" to "slapstick." For example, compare Friday the 13th Part 4 with Friday the 13th Part 6, or Return of the Living Dead with Day of the Dead. Not to say that humor has no place in the horror genre, see: Evil Dead 2 and Peter Jackson's Dead Alive, but there was, in the major Hollywood studios of the 1980's, a concentrated effort to neuter the horror genre. However, extreme cinematic violence did not go away - foreign directors, especially from Italy (like Argento and Fulci), continued right on making "splatter" movies. Meanwhile, in the 90's, with the greater availability of camcorders, amateur filmmakers began making and distributing their own low budget horror movies - with violence as graphic as the special effects they could afford and devise.

So in my view, the extreme violence of today's mainstream, major studio horror movies is simply an inevitable reaction of about two decades of the repression, censorship (whether governmental or commercial) and "ghetto-ization" of the genre. Today, it seems like every movie is available on DVD and easily obtainable from Amazon.com. (A month ago, I ordered the first DVD release of a movie I have sought after for years, Stuart Gordon's From Beyond.) Meanwhile, one can obtain the major works of Italian horror directors like Fucli and Argento, as well as the films of many other foreign directors from all over the world that you won't find at Blockbuster or on HBO. Horror fans of my generation are rediscovering a whole era of films that were seemingly kept hidden from us in our youth, films that our authoritarian moralist "overseers" surely intended to be forgotten.

***

Why extreme violence? Because it's there. Because it exists in our world. Because everything that *is* will be portrayed, will have a story written around it, and will be used as an allegory to demonstrate some larger point. And whenever a lid is put on anything, whenever anything is repressed or hidden away "for our own good," it will fester, it will rot, and it will become corrosive and eat its way out of its prison. Everything that is denied and everything deprived, will be fetishized.

And when a level of violence and a grimness of subject matter becomes taboo for two decades, that existed before and was repressed after, it is eventually bound to return in full force. And for every Hostel or Devil's Rejects, there will be a Turistas or Captivity, and audiences will learn to recognize the difference between purely shocking crap and a decent violent movie. In response, the movie studios won't erroneously assume that graphic violence = money, and the prevalence of it will once again recede a bit.

***

"...and finally, my dear Dr. Rotwang," I scrawled on the toilet paper with my shit-covered fingertip, "I'd like to remind you that your beloved Robocop was held hostage by the MPAA, and threatened with the same X rating given to lesbian, incestuous, fisting porno - and over what? 30 seconds worth of violence!!! You who would stand upon your mountain of smugness and look down upon me!!! According to some, your desire to see a man pulverized by a never ceasing shower of bullets form a giant robot makes you no better than me!!!"
And with that I rolled up the toilet paper, walked past the sink and went back to my pig carcass and the pigeon waiting there for my response. When I got back there, however, I found a second pigeon, this one with a note from Rotwang that read, "...because I really like Day of the Dead."

Rob Zombie Presents Rob Zombie's Halloween Directed by Rob Zombie

Remakes - we all love to talk shit about them. We're in an era where it has been determined commercially viable to constantly remake older movies, especially horror movies. A remake is not inherently bad, one of my favorite movies of all time is John Carpenter's The Thing, a remake of Howard Hawks' The Thing from Another World, which is a damn fine movie itself. Classic movies tend to get remade the most, but I personally like the idea of taking movies from the past that were flawed and remaking them. For example, I hated Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes, but I really liked the remake of it from a few years ago. The new one took the premise and built upon it, improved it and ended up being a better movie because of it. On the flip side, John Carpenter's The Fog definitely had room for improvement, but The Fog remake instead ended up being far worse than the original.

John Carpenter's work has been getting remade a lot in the past few years, and even though the quality of the new versions is nil, I don't get my panties in a bunch over it, because, fuck it, he's getting paid, so I'm sure he's happy about it. Unfortunately, the John Carpenter remakes are kind of becoming an obnoxious franchise of self-parody - I mean, go ahead, remake mediocre movies like Assault on Precinct 13 and The Fog, but then they announced remakes of Halloween and The Thing.

When I first heard that they were remaking John Carpenter's Halloween, my reaction was, "Well, whatthefuckisthismotherfuckingcocksuckingbullshit?!" And I'm not even a HUGE fan of Halloween or Michael Myers, but come on! Then I heard Rob Zombie was attached to direct, and my attitude changed to, "Well... maybe it can work." Let me explain - I really think Rob Zombie is a great director, but, in my opinion, is a mediocre writer (I feel the same way about M. Night Shyamalan post-Unbreakable, but I don't feel compelled to write about him).

House of 1000 Corpses, as a whole, was a crappy movie, at least when you look at it as one single narrative with its assigned beginning, middle and end. But - if you take it apart and look at each scene independently and appreciate it visually, the colors, the design, the cinematography, and, of course, the gory special effects, it could have actually worked as an abstract, art house horror movie if the narrative was either abandoned or at least backed away from just a bit.

Rob Zombie followed up House of 1000 Corpses with a quasi-sequel, The Devil's Rejects. The two movies are almost like parallel dimensions, where the over-the-top bad-acid-trip cartoon monsters from House of 1000 Corpses are re-imagined as ruggedly naturalistic real world serial killers in The Devil's Rejects. The visual style of Rejects is beautifully retro, even winning over horror-movie-hater Roger Ebert for its artful homage to 70's era grindhouse flicks (and might I add this came out a year or so before the movie Grindhouse attempted to make that kind of thing the latest trend in horror cinema.) Unfortunately, the plot of Rejects meanders aimlessly, and while each scene stands on its own, strung together it leaves the narrative lacking, especially since there's supposed to be a pretty heavy point to the movie about how one's morality can become compromised when the pursuit of justice becomes the pursuit of vengeance. Oh, and the end sucks ass. Seriously. Fuck Skynard, and fuck Freebird.

So anyways - Rob Zombie's Halloween. When the credits rolled, as I was walking out of the theater, I could visualize one word, in ten foot tall flaming letters: RETARDED. This is not just a remake, but also a prequel. In the original, Michael Myers was a little tyke from what appeared to be a well-to-do family who killed his sister and never spoke again. In the remake, Michael has a home life very similar to that of real-life serial killer Henry Lee Lucas - instead of his mother being a prostitute, she's a stripper, and instead of a legless father, he has his mother's wheelchair bound, abusive boyfriend. Not only does New-Michael off his sister, he takes out his mom's boyfriend, his sister's boyfriend, a bully from school and some animals for good measure, in case you were, y'know, doubting his psycho-cred. Then after the night of the initial murders, he goes to the loony bin and chats up a storm to Dr. Loomis, makes masks to pass the time, kills a nurse, and finally turns into a giant (what the fuck were they feeding him in that institution, steroids?!)

The rest of the movie is a condensed retread of the original, because, afterall, we just killed 30 to 45 mins on Michael Myers' new, more edgy, more extreme back story, and, as we learned from Grindhouse, 3 hour movies don't put butts in seats. Michael Myers is now a Rob Zombie cartoon monster, in addition to the aforementioned gigantism, his mask, which represented blank emptiness in the original, is now all worn with lines in the face to make it look more edgy, extreme and haggard. Oh, and New-Michael Myers has the magical ability to sense that Laurie Strode is his sister, a development that was left for the original Halloween's sequel, and which was, in my opinion, totally stupid back then. Why Zombie felt like honoring that part of the Halloween "canon," yet [spoiler!!! felt the need to kill of Dr. Loomis /spoiler] I will never understand. And of course, since the final act of the original is one long drawn out series of "is he dead? oh no he's not!" (which was great in the original, btw) Zombie has to get more edgy and extreme than the original and drag it out even longer, to the point where you feel like the movie has ended five times before it actually ends.

Wow, see how many times I used the phrase "more edgy and extreme?" Yeah, Halloween 2007 is like Halloween 1978 filtered through a Mountain Dew commercial. Personally, I like my Michael Myers as a normal kid who up and killed his sister one day, never spoke after that, and chose to stalk Laurie Strode because she won the bad luck lottery and happened to deliver a key to the wrong house on the wrong day. If Rob Zombie wanted to remake Henry: Potrait of a Serial Killer, or, hell, make a whole new movie about Henry Lee Lucas and the controversy surrounding him, I think that would've been awesome, but cramming this shit into a remake of the one good movie in the Halloween franchise was just weak.

In the end, I wish Rob Zombie the best of luck on his future films and hope that he takes his fat paycheck from this, collaborates with someone whose equally as great of a writer as he is a director, and makes something totally awesome that will blow everyone away. I think he has it in him.

DAMN YOU, BIOSHOCK!!!

You're the best FPS I've played in forever, hell, the best video game I've played in forever, yet you end with an ESCORT MISSION followed by the most LIMP WRISTED FINAL BOSS EVER?!

For shame!

(I'm gonna play through you again on hard and get the other ending.)