Follow a Terrifying Investigation of the Supernatural in Noroi (2005)

For some, the horror subgenre of found footage has become the bane of good horror filmmaking. Much like the slasher and zombie subgenres in previous decades, found footage has become the subgenre of choice for aspiring horror filmmakers who have very small production budgets at their disposal. Of course, the talents of such filmmakers vary and while some of them have produced found footage films of high entertainment value, many more have made films that are simply average, below average, or so below average that they are unwatchable.

Even though some found footage narrative conventions have become clichéd due to their recent overuse, I still think that this subgenre has the potential to tell stories that other subgenres can't. As the name suggests, "found footage" is just that--footage that was shot by one person or group and found by another. With so many forms of video technology available these days, the footage could come from anywhere: home video, security cameras, news footage, live Internet video feed, and so on. In other words, wherever a video camera can be found, a found footage horror movie has the potential to be made.

In the case of Noroi, the found footage in question is a documentary that was completed by a journalist two days before he went missing. Unlike most found footage films, Noroi is shot like a documentary with very few "shaky cam" shots. What also sets this film apart from others in its subgenre is the span of time it covers: most found footage films cover events that occur within a few hours or a few days, but Noroi examines events that occur over the course of several months. Such differences result in a different kind of horror movie, the kind that foregoes jump shocks and excessive gore in exchange for an eerie, creeping mood that stays with you long after the film ends. Read on for my complete review.

Noroi is about the last documentary made by Masafumi Kobayashi (Jin Muraki), a paranormal investigator, and the events that led up to his disappearance. Kobayashi's documentary tracked a handful of what initially appear to be separate incidents of supernatural activity (EVP recordings, psychic visions, spirit photography, etc.) but they all have connections to the sinister occult practices of Shimokage, an abandoned village located in Japan's Nagano Prefecture. The footage in the documentary includes interview footage shot by Kobayashi and his crew, along with footage from other Japanese TV shows about the paranormal and archival footage from 1977.

Noroi is a complex movie with a large number of characters and subplots. For the complete story to make sense, the viewer has to pay close attention to the video clips that are shown to identify clues--both spoken and unspoken--that tie each of the narrative threads together into a complete story. Furthermore, because most of the film's footage is shot like a documentary, it feels like you are watching a horror movie from the outside and looking inward. Almost all of the deaths that happen in the movie occur off the screen, so you'll never see a single scene where a victim is being stalked and attacked by some mysterious threat.

This is not to say that Noroi isn't scary at all; far from it. Director Kôji Shiraishi knows how to build a fragmented narrative that slowly converges into a whole and rewards viewers who are willing to put the pieces together in their minds as the film progresses to its conclusion. Noroi is not an example of cinematic shock, but a layered supernatural mystery that will make your skin crawl if you let it. That said, just because it doesn't feature much explicit violence or gore doesn't mean that Noroi is neither brutal nor gruesome.

Horror fans who love films that are loaded with high-intensity frights and bloodshed will be disappointed in Noroi because it is not that kind of film. However, horror fans who love a good mystery should see this movie, particularly the version that includes the alternate ending. That's the version I saw and I think that calling it an "alternate" is a misnomer; it's actually an extended ending that it delivers a chilling conclusion to Noroi's engrossing, intricate mystery.

Adults Become the Ultimate Monsters in the Vernon Smith's Hide

"Killer kid" stories, stories where one or more children become bloodthirsty murders, has long been a popular subgenre in horror. A few of my favorite killer kid horror movies include Village of the Damned (1960), Who Can Kill a Child? (1976), and The Children (2008). Yet for a many killer kid novels, short stories and movies that there are, there are very, very few that reverse the roles in this subgenre. In other words, while there are plenty of stories about previously normal children becoming relentless and remorseless killers of adults, few dare to depict a situation where previously normal adults become relentless and remorseless killers of children. Not so with Hide, a new comic book series that's written and drawn by Vernon Smith and published by El MacFearsome Comic Squares.

The plot behind Hide is as simple as it is scary: One day, people over the age of 18 decide to go on a killing spree against everyone who is under the age of 18. (By everyone under 18, I mean everyone--no child is spared.) No clear reason is given in the comic (at least not yet) as to why this is happening; even creepier is that the adults still behave normally around each other and only become consumed by a violent rage whenever they see a teenager or a child.

The first issue of Hide is currently available at comic stores, and you can read it online at the El MacFearsome Comic Squares site. According to the site, Hide should total at 140 pages in length when it is finished; judging by what I've seen in the first 22 pages, this is going to be a wildly terrifying ride.

KMD Artistry Restores Two of Hollywood's Classic Human-Insect Freaks of Nature

KMD Artistry, which is owned by visual artist Kelly Delcambre, specializes in restoring and replicating props and costumes that have appeared throughout Hollywood's history. To date, KMD projects have included replicating costumes from Universal's classic monster movies to restoring mechanical props used in films such as the original Fright Night (1985). Delcambre has also designed and produced many cosplay costumes, which are very remarkable in their own right. Yet with me being a huge fan of "Big Bug" movies, I wanted to call attention to one of KMD's restoration projects that is near and dear to my dark, twisted heart: the human-fly costumes from the original The Fly (1958) and its first sequel Return of the Fly (1959). Click below for more pictures of the human-fly monster restorations, as well as a few thoughts about how the restorations compare to the original costumes. All pictures are provided courtesy of KMD Artistry.

KMD's recreations of the human-fly monsters from the early Fly movies speak for themselves--they are very faithful to the original designs. The fly head from The Fly is closer to human proportions to accommodate the hood that concealed it through most of the movie, while the fly head from Return of the Fly is larger and more grotesque to add shock value to the sequel's lean, low-budget script.

Because KMD's fly head recreations are not meant to be worn by actors, additional details were be added to the heads and claws while others were removed. For example, David Hedison could move the fly head's proboscis in The Fly by using his mouth. As you can see from the replica produced by KMD below, the proboscis does not move because there is no one inside the mask to move it.

David Hedison in The Fly ... 

... and KMD's replica of The Fly.

The fly mask in Return of the Fly had two triangle-shaped patches of mesh fabric that were below the eyes, one on each side of the mouth. These patches were put in the mask to allow the actor who wore the mask to see and breathe.

The man-insect monster from Return of the Fly ...

... and the same monster mask on display at the "It's Alive!" Animatronics Exhibit at

the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles, 2006.

Note the triangular patches on the lower half of the mask.

Since KMD didn't have to worry about an actor underneath the mask, additional monstrous details were molded into the fly head in place of the mesh patches.

 Kelly Delcambre and his Return of the Fly replica.

KMD's life-size Return of the Fly bust. 

The Delambre-Delcambre connection: Brett Halsey (who played Philippe Delambre 

in Return of the Fly) and Kelly Delcambre at Monsterpalooza 2010. 

Check out KMD Artistry's Facebook page and YouTube channel for more examples for Delcambre's amazing work. Click here for some additional commentary about the original Fly trilogy.

Classic Italian Horror Cinema Lives on in Insidious (2011)

One of the great things about being a long-term horror fan who watches both American films and films from other countries is noticing how older horror films impact newer horror films in different cultures. No, I'm not talking about Hollywood's current infatuation with remaking horror movies, both domestic and foreign; I'm talking about how filmmakers from one country adopt the look and feel of horror that is often associated with filmmakers from another country--while at the same time remaining faithful to their own cultural roots. Such mixture of styles result in horror movies that are much more engaging than those that are content to merely imitate the cinematic approach used by the most well-known horror movies.

Take Insidious, for example. When it was released in 2011, the ad campaigns promoted the fact that it produced by people from the Saw and Paranormal Activity franchises--namely James Wan, Leigh Whannell, Jason Blum, Jeanette Brill, Oren Peli and Steven Schneider. Wan directed Insidious, while Whannell wrote its screenplay and Blum, Brill, Peli and Schneider assumed producer duties. Such advertising was done to capitalize on popular American horror franchises, and the plot of Insidious does bear some plot similarities to Paranormal Activity (2007) and other popular American horror movies such as The Exorcist (1973) and Poltergeist (1982). Yet what I did not expect when watching Insidious was just how much it was influenced by classic Italian horror directors such as Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento. In other words, as American horror movies go, Insidious is the most Italian movie I've seen that wasn't made by anyone from Italy.

Insidious tells the story of Josh and Renai Lambert (Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne) who have just moved into a new home with their three children. After one of their children Dalton (Ty Simpkins) slips into an inexplicable coma, strange occurrences begin to plague the Lambert family. The Lamberts move to a new address to escape what they believe to be a haunted house, but the haunting continues in its frequency and intensity. Josh and Renai soon learn that the key to ending the haunting lies with saving their comatose son, a task that requires the Lamberts to look to the past for answers.

I don't want to say too much more about Insidious because it will give too much away. What I can say is that I think it is a movie that delivers an ample supply of scares, largely through Wan's careful attention to detail: the film features many visual and spoken clues that pay off greatly during the film's final act. I also encourage horror fans who love films by Italian directors such as Bava, Fulci and Argento to see Insidious because they will find much to appreciate in this movie. As the film progressed, it reminded me of classic Italian thrillers such as Shock (1977), Suspiria (1977) and The Beyond (1981).

I think that Wan's homage to Italian horror was intentional: If you look closely in Dalton's bedroom in the second house, you'll briefly see a page from a Diabolik comic book displayed in a picture frame. The character Diabolik made his first appearance on the big screen in 1968's Danger: Diabolik, a film that was directed by horror maestro Bava. That said, I'd also advise that fans who don't care for Italian horror, which is known for balancing surreal creepiness with low-budget camp, might want to avoid Insidious for the same reason why I appreciated it. If spaghetti horror isn't your thing, Insidious probably won't be either.

Insidious is a welcome addition to the haunted house subgenre of horror, but fans who know their foreign films will also be thrilled by the movie's frequent nods to the classic Italian approach to fright flicks.

Star Wars Flashback: Early Star Wars Remote Control Toys and Model Rocket Kits

This weekend marks the release of the Wii U, the new Nintendo gaming console. The big selling point for the Wii U is the touch screen control pad, which offers new ways of interacting with video games. With me being a sci-fi fan, hearing about a new kind of video game control scheme immediately leads me to wonder how the new scheme will allow me to better interact with and control the iconic vehicles from my favorite sci-fi franchises when they are ported into a video game environment.

Take Star Wars, for example. The earliest video games that put fans in the seats of Rebel and Imperial star fighters first appeared during the 90s, with titles such as X-Wing and TIE Fighter. (There were also the Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back arcade games in the 80s, but those were more like rail shooters than flight simulators.) Yet even before video games had enough sophistication to create a vehicle simulation fit for a galaxy far, far away, Lucasfilm tried to give fans the experience of controlling a Star Wars vehicle through remote control toys and model rocket kits (with varying degrees of success, of course). Click below to look back at these early attempts to put fans in the seat of their favorite Star Wars vehicles.

Lucasfilm has been consistently licensing remote control Star Wars toys and model rocket kits for almost two decades, ever since the mid-90s. Even now, you can purchase remote control Star Wars vehicles that can also seat action figures. Yet the very first Star Wars vehicle toys with remote controls and jet packs date way back to the 1970s, which is what I'm looking at in this post.

In the area of remote control toys, there was Kenner's "Sonic Controlled" Land Speeder, which was available as an exclusive from J.C. Penney between 1978 and 1980.

The good news about the Sonic Controlled Land Speeder was that you could put Star Wars action figures in it. The bad news is that the sonic control system rarely worked. Such shoddy controls made the toy prone to frequent malfunctions, which would explain why it wasn't widely distributed outside of J.C. Penney Christmas catalogs. So if you wanted a toy that would allow you to portray a young Luke Skywalker going on a drunken bender after chugging too much blue bantha milk and running over a few Stormtroopers, jawas, droids and Mos Eisley aliens with his Land Speeder, you were out of luck.

Then there was Kenner's Radio Controlled Jawa Sandcrawler, another J.C. Penney exclusive that appeared in the 1979 and 1980 Christmas catalogs.

From what I've read, the Sandcrawler worked better than the Land Speeder, but not by much. The price tag didn't help either--it was one of the most expensive Star Wars vehicle toys of its time at $30, a rather sizable cost for one of the movie's less popular vehicles. Regardless of its technical issues and price, it was still better than Kenner's other Sandcrawler, the Sandcrawler that was included in the Land of the Jawas playset. While the Remote Control Sandcrawler was made of plastic and could contain action figures, the Land of the Jawas Sandcrawler was a cheap cardboard backdrop that couldn't contain anything.

Kenner may have fumbled in the area of remote control toys, but Estes was able to deliver a few functional Star Wars model rocket kits. Basically, they were just regular model rocket kits in Star Wars drag and you couldn't make them duel each other in a dogfight, but at least they could fly. The two vehicles that Estes released as model rocket kits were the X-Wing Fighter and the TIE Fighter.

Curiously, Estes' TIE Fighter model rocket kit was the only model kit version of the standard TIE Fighter that could be found in the U.S. for the longest time. A TIE Fighter model kit didn't appear on American hobby store shelves until 1995, even though Darth Vader TIE Fighter model kits were sold after the release of Star Wars in 1977 and TIE Interceptor model kits were sold after the release of Return of the Jedi in 1983. Come to think of it, I'm sure that a few hobby enthusiasts bought the kit in the late 70s and early 80s with no intent of launching it just so they could have a TIE Fighter among their Star Wars model collection.

The other vehicles in Star Wars didn't lend themselves well to rocket model kit designs: the Millennium Falcon and Blockade Runner weren't aerodynamic enough, and kits based on the Y-Wing Fighter and the Star Destroyer wouldn't appear until 1995. So what else did Estes release in the 70s? An R2-D2 model rocket kit.

Attack of the Clones would later reveal that astromech droids could have rockets installed in them, but back in the 70s it seemed very odd to have a rocket kit based on a droid and not a vehicle. It was like something an exceptionally cruel droid owner would do to one of his hapless droids: strap a rocket to it and blast it into space. Just looking at the kit's packaging made me think of R2 loudly emitting one of his shrill electronic screams as he's launched into the air.

The R2-D2 rocket kit may have seemed like a stretch, but at least that looked like something from the Star Wars movie. The same could not be said for the Star Wars Photon Torpedo rocket kit.

Even though the Photon Torpedo kit was the most rocket-like and probably flew better than all of the other Star Wars kits, it really felt like Estes was scraping the bottom of the barrel with this one just to get another piece of Star Wars merchandise on the shelves. As you can see from the ad above, the Photon Torpedo kit was marketed as "the missile that destroyed the Imperial Death Star", even though the X-Wings in the movie never launched anything that looked like a missile. (The ad copy sounds like something a huckster would say on the streets of Coruscant to score some money from some unsuspecting dupe: "Why, of course this is the exact same missile that Luke Skywalker used to destroy the Death Star! Why would I lie to you about such an priceless piece of Rebel Alliance history?")

Star Wars wasn't the only sci-fi franchise that sold remote control toys and model rocket kits in the 70s. Battlestar Galactica produced a Colonial Viper model rocket kit and a remote control Cylon Raider (although it didn't fly--it just rolled around like a Roomba--and you couldn't put action figures in it), while Star Trek sold model rocket kits based on the USS Enterprise and a Klingon Battle Cruiser and a battery-powered "Star Trek CSF Controlled Space Flight" toy. Yet Lucasfilm was willing to go the extra mile to put Star Wars fans at the controls of their favorite futuristic vehicles, even if there were a few defects and malfunctions among its earliest attempts. Since that trend continues to this day among many sci-fi franchises, it's clear that such an effort really paid off in the long run for all sci-fi fans.

Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) is Fantastic

Through my blog, I do what I can to call attention to movies, TV shows, video games, prop replicas, or other things that I think deserve some additional recognition among the fan community. Most of the things in question are from the genres of horror and sci-fi, but I'm happy to make exceptions to this rule for things that fall outside of these genres. This brings me to the topic of this post, my review of Wes Anderson's stop motion animated film, Fantastic Mr. Fox, which is based on a book by Roald Dahl.

I'm not sure how Fantastic Mr. Fox escaped my attention for so long. I only have a passing familiarity with Anderson's films but since the movie is based on the work of an author who's as popular as Dahl, I'm surprised that it didn't earn a more successful reception. I've read that 20th Century Fox had no idea how to promote this film, so it became the victim of an extremely poor marketing campaign. That shouldn't have happened, because Fantastic Mr. Fox is a witty animated fable that is entertaining for children and adults alike--all without loading its script with pop culture references, casting the most popular movie stars, or clogging its soundtrack with the latest batch of one-hit wonders. Read on for my complete review.

Fantastic Mr. Fox is about the titular Mr. Fox (voiced by George Clooney) who promises his wife Mrs. Fox (Meryl Streep) that he will stop raiding the local farms for chickens and assume a less risky career for the sake of their son Ash (Jason Schwartzman). Yet Mr. Fox decides to pursue one last "big score" before completely retiring from his old ways, which sets in motion a series of events that leads to a near war between Mr. Fox and the local farmers.

Anderson is known for his low-key, quirky humor, and it is surprising how well it complements Dahl's imaginative story. One of film's the running gags is how anthropomorphic the animal characters are and how oblivious the humans are to the animals' complex parallel existence. The animals in Fantastic Mr. Fox don't just talk to each other in English; they also wear clothes, paint landscape pictures, have careers, go to school, play sports, engage in real estate transactions, and so forth. Yet the humans in movie only seem marginally aware of what the animals do, which results in many hilariously absurd situations. Adding to the film's humor is its strong voice cast, which also includes Bill Murray, Michael Gambon, Willem Dafoe and Owen Wilson.

What ties everything together into a great movie is the stop motion animation itself. For someone who is not known for animation, Anderson has a keen eye for using stop motion to create characters, environments, and complicated visual gags. The amount of detail in the animation is amazing, and anyone who has an appreciation of stop motion animation should see this film. Even though Fantastic Mr. Fox did poorly at the box office, I'm hoping that it builds enough of a following on home video to convince Anderson to try his hand again at animation. Animation fans would be much worse off if he didn't.

I can't recommend Fantastic Mr. Fox highly enough. It's both a wonderful example of stop motion animation and proof that you don't need studio-mandated gimmicks and market-ready product tie-ins to make an entertaining animated movie that can be appreciated by all ages.

Three Wii Horror Games That Were Never Released

With the official release of the Nintendo Wii U console just a few days away, I thought I would take the time to look back at three promising horror titles for the Wii that never made it to the store shelves. Mind you, I'm not talking about horror games that were released for the Wii overseas but not in the U.S. (although there are a few of those, such as Japan's Night of the Sacrifice), nor am I talking about horror games that were released for the PS3 and Xbox 360 and not the Wii. No, these are games that spent plenty of time in production and development but for whatever reason were not released--ever. Click below to read more about these unseen Wii games (listed in alphabetical order), games that may still have a chance on the Wii U.

Title: The Grinder

Developer: High Voltage Software

Plot: The Grinder takes place in an alternate world where vampires, werewolves and zombies are very real problems for humans. Players can choose to play one of four monster hunters--Hector, Doc, Miko and AJ--who are hired by a secretive organization called Book to exterminate hordes of these monsters and to discover their origins.

Background: From what I know about this game, The Grinder looks and feels like what Hunter: The Reckoning would have been like if it had been designed as a first-person shooter. And what a first-person shooter The Grinder would be: Players would spend level after level gunning down rows of gargoyle-like vampires, hulking werewolves, and hard-to-kill zombies. The game is also supposed to feature a "dual wield" option for the weapons, as well as online cooperative play that could accommodate up to four players simultaneously. See the videos below for the teaser ad and a game play preview.

Wii U Release?: There's no word on whether The Grinder will appear on the Wii U. The last I read about it, this game was put on IGN's "Games in Danger" list back in 2011 and I couldn't find anything else about this game since that article was posted. Still, with plans to broaden its player base by porting this game over to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles as a top-down, third person shooter--while still remaining a first-person shooter for Nintendo--I'm hoping that The Grinder will have some kind of afterlife through the Wii U. Click here to see IGN's page about The Grinder.

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Title: Last Flight

Developer: Bloober Team

Plot: Last Flight takes place on a gigantic passenger airplane during its maiden flight. A mysterious virus spreads through the plane that turns many of the passengers into vampires. Players can either play as Larry, a portly American food critic, or Anna, a Romanian vampire, to fight off the new army of bloodsuckers and find a solution that can stop the virus before the plane lands.

Background: Even though its fate has yet to be decided, I'm still excited about Last Flight. It features some very bloody hack and slash action, and it puts the survival horror format into a very confined and claustrophobic environment: an airplane. The plot device of a passenger airplane that carries a virulent pathogen has been used before in movies like Flight of the Living Dead (2007) and Quarantine 2 (2011), but Last Flight would be the first video game that I know of to exploit such a premise to challenge and scare gamers. Furthermore, the game was intended to be released as an ongoing WiiWare title with new episodes released every few months, thus bringing serialized storytelling to horror gaming. See the videos below for the teaser ad and a game play preview.

Wii U Release?: News about Last Flight has been circulating since 2008, so I would like to believe that at least the first episode of this game is ready and waiting for release. However, I have no idea if it will be released for the Wii U or if it is, if it will need to be updated to add features for the Wii U's touch screen controller. Click here to see IGN's page about Last Flight.

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Title:Winter

Developer: n-Space

Plot: Winter puts gamers in the role of Mia, a young woman who awakens within a wrecked ambulance and cannot remember anything about herself or the events leading up to the wreckage. The town she finds herself in is experiencing an unusually powerful snowstorm, which is causing the temperature to drop to dangerous, frostbite-inducing levels. As players keep Mia alive and search for clues regarding her past, they encounter strange creatures that seem connected to the snowstorm ... and to Mia herself.

Background: It's hard to read about Winter and not compare it to another Wii title, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. Nevertheless, the development team behind Winter wanted to emphasize the "survival" aspect of survival horror within their game, and that's a creative goal that I'm willing to support. It also helps that the pictures I've seen so far of the game's creatures are as intriguing as they are disturbing, so I'm itching to find out what they have to do with a temperature-plunging snowstorm that never seems to end. See the video below for a game play preview.

Wii U Release?: Of the games listed in this post, I think that Winter has the greatest likelihood to make it to the Wii U. Gamers have shown their interest through a few fan petitions, and a representative from n-Space had this to say in an interview that was posted on the Nintendo Everything site last August: "There's an intense amount of love among the team for the game. And the more we've seen the survival horror genre switch its focus from surviving to reloading, the more we feel the market is hungry for a game like Winter. So what's the bottom line? The bad news is that we haven't yet found the right opportunity. The good news is that Winter is just like any good horror movie monster. It's not dead." Click here to see IGN's page about Winter.

REC 3: Genesis (2011) Movie Review: 'Til Demonic Possession Do You Part

After watching all of the films in the REC franchise so far, I've come to this conclusion: The ending for the first movie in 2007 was that film's "twist" ending. Period. I don't think that the film's creators had any plans to explore that ending in any greater detail, let alone build a franchise around it. Yet a franchise is what REC started and as of the latest entry, REC 3: Genesis, fans are no closer to learning anything more about the larger significance of the ending of the first film within the REC universe.

To be sure, REC 3 is not a bad horror film; its director Paco Plaza has a lot of talent and it shows in many sequences of this sequel. But even though REC 3 is a more polished movie than its predecessor REC 2 (2009), it still is a weak sequel in terms of advancing the plot that was started in the first movie. Read on for my complete review. Note: If you haven't seen REC yet but would like to, skip this review now and come back later because this review will spoil the ending of that movie for you.

REC 3 is takes place on the wedding day of a young couple, Koldo (Diego Martin) and Clara (Leticia Dolera). Everything appears to be perfect on this day of holy matrimony, except for one of the guests who arrives with a peculiar injury that he sustained just before the ceremony. As the wedding ends and the reception festivities begin, the guest's injury erupts into a vicious epidemic that threatens to engulf everyone in its path.

As a sequel, so much goes wrong here--even its title is a misnomer. The term "REC" suggests "record", which calls attention to the found footage style of the first two movies, but REC 3 only features found footage-style cinematography for the first third of the movie and the rest is shot like a regular feature. The subtitle "Genesis" suggests to REC fans that the second sequel might reveal something significant about Niña Medeiros, patient zero of the demonic possession epidemic first seen in REC. It doesn't, and the real meaning of the word "Genesis" within the narrative of REC 3 will leave fans disappointed. The connections between REC 3 and the other two movies are negligible, so much so that it almost feels like REC 3 is a sequel-in-name-only. Indeed, REC 3 does not live up to the description provided on IMDB, which states: "In a clever twist that draws together the plots of the first two movies, this third part of the saga also works as a decoder to uncover information hidden in the first two films and leaves the door open for the final installment, the future REC 4: Apocalypse."

So, with REC 3 failing as a sequel, how does it fare as a horror movie? Better than you'd expect, but still it falls short where it counts. Using a wedding reception as the site of a gory outbreak leads to some unique scenes and situations. Plaza sets up a few good scares and keeps the pace running smoothly; he also throws in plenty of gory gags that will remind horror buffs of splatstick classics such as Evil Dead 2 (1987) and Dead Alive (1992). Yet Plaza's turn towards humor after the previous two films, which were very serious in their portrayal of horror, indicates a reluctance of sorts on his part. Such reluctance dovetails with the ongoing problem of the REC franchise's portrayal of victims of the demonic possession, victims who behave more like zombies than anything else. Sure, the reflection of the victims in mirrors and other reflective surfaces show their true demonic nature, they refuse to set foot in churches and they stop dead in their tracks whenever someone quotes Bible verses, but otherwise the victims are indistinguishable from most movie zombies. If the victims acted more like they were possessed by demons and less like zombies, they'd probably be much scarier.

The demonic possession/zombie outbreak quandary in the REC franchise brings me back to the beginning of this review. Plaza and his co-director Jaume Balagueró set up the situation in REC to seem like a zombie outbreak (particularly a zombie outbreak similar to the one seen in 2002's 28 Days Later) but then threw in a twist ending that revealed the cause of the outbreak to be a communicable form of demonic possession. Yet with this narrative rule established in the first movie, REC 3 doesn't get much mileage out of it. After all, if someone is possessed by a demon, a non-corporeal embodiment of pure evil, then the victim should torment, torture and do other evil, vile things while under the control of the demon. A demonic outbreak on their wedding day should be an unrelenting nightmare for Koldo and Clara, since demons possess their family and friends--people who are the closest to the couple and could thus psychologically abuse them in grizzly, twisted ways. That doesn't happen, so instead we get the usual zombie high jinks: blood-gushing cannibalism, dismemberment, disemboweling and decapitation. Ho-hum.

There was a lot that I didn't like about the first sequel, REC 2 (read my review of that film here). One of the worst things that it did was to bring up a very interesting and revealing plot point early in story--that the priest who was assigned by the Vatican to treat Medeiros also infected children with the demonic possession while searching for a cure--and then ignoring it for the rest of the film. That thread alone could have been expanded for the plot for REC 3, tracking the Medeiros case from its beginnings in Portugal to its arrival in Spain and its subsequent involvement of child test subjects. This plot could also have be used by Plaza and Balagueró to provide metaphorical commentary about the ongoing child abuse scandal within the Catholic Church and/or the Vatican's reinstatement of the dubious practice of exorcism in contemporary society. It could be that Plaza and Balagueró never considered such possibilities for their franchise, or they did but decided against doing so to avoid courting controversy. Nevertheless, the refusal to take the REC franchise to darker, uglier places makes its sequels feel like increasingly bashful continuations of the bold REC. With that in mind, I'm guessing that the upcoming REC 4: Apocalypse will not be nearly as apocalyptic as its title wants you to believe.

Between its splatstick sense of humor and well executed but otherwise unexceptional demon/zombie gore, REC 3 feels less like a sequel to REC and more like a sequel to Lamberto Bava's Demons (1985). In fact, with some minor edits and some bad English dubbing, REC 3 could be re-titled as Demons: Rebirth and put into a DVD box set with Demons and Demons 2 (1986) and few would be the wiser for it. If you view REC 3 with that in mind, you might enjoy it; if not, expect to be disappointed.

It's a Beastly Bare-Skinned Bloodbath in Wii's Onechanbara: Bikini Zombie Slayers

As of this post, I have come to the end of the horror video games that I'll be reviewing for the Wii, at least for the time being. With Wii U's release set for later this month, I figured that I'd ease off the video game reviews for a while until the new Nintendo console has a chance to settle in and demonstrate how its new selection of touch screen controls complements the pre-existing motion controls. Thankfully, the Wii U is reverse compatible with Wii games, so feel free to come back to this site for reviews of low-priced Wii games that you can play to tide you over until you can afford the more expensive Wii U games.

This review is of Onechanbara: Bikini Zombie Slayers, which was released for the Wii back in 2009 by Tamsoft. In case you couldn't tell by the title, Onechanbara is a big, heaping serving of campy Japanese gore cheesecake, a video game counterpart to films such as Tokyo Gore Police (2008) and Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl (2009). As a game, it feels like an oversimplified version of Hunter: The Reckoning, but the main appeal of Onechanbara is found in its endless supply of blood and dismemberment. Read on for my complete review.

Onechanbara allows you to control up to four different characters: Aya and Saki, two sisters who have inherited something known as "Baneful Blood", and Reiko No. 9 and Misery, the game's villains who seek to understand and control the Baneful Blood for their own purposes. Each of the four characters has her own set of skills, strengths and weaknesses, but all of them have the Baneful Blood. The Baneful Blood causes the characters to go into a nearly unstoppable rampage after coming into direct skin contact with enormous amounts zombie blood; thus, Aya wears only a bikini when fighting zombies so that she can maximize her power. (Yes, really.) Where the Baneful Blood becomes a liability within the game is that the longer a character is under the influence of the Baneful Blood, the more that character's life will drain. If a character stays under the spell of the Baneful Blood for too long, she will die and the game will end.

The level environments you play through for each character in Onechanbara are the same: a graveyard, a church, a hospital, a series of streets in a city, a subway station, a forest, and an underground research facility. The sequences in which levels are provided and the kinds of zombies and monsters that inhabit them differ somewhat depending on the character, but there are no additional environments outside of this set. Such simplicity makes Onechanbara feel more like an arcade game than a home console title, since fast-paced action takes a much higher priority than diversity and complexity of game play. There are very few cut scenes, and many of those scenes are just internal monologues that provide expository information about the Baneful Blood, the latest zombie outbreak, and the characters themselves. The game does feature a multi-player option, but that is only available in levels that have been completed in single-player story mode. Curiously, for as simple as the game is, it includes four different stories that have four different endings, one for each character.

I normally don't like hack and slash and brawler games, largely because they become repetitive and eventually bore me. Even the visually impressive and hyper-violent game MadWorld lost my interest after a few levels. Yet in spite of its rote game play, Onechanbara stands apart from other hack and slash games for one major reason: its massive amounts of gore. I would even say that Onechanbara is as gory as (if not gorier than) House of the Dead: Overkill. Such violence may not appeal to some gamers, but gamers who are fans of movies such as Night of the Living Dead, Evil Dead and Dead Alive--and/or fans of the Japanese gore titles I mentioned above--will be thoroughly entertained.

In each level, you'll hack and slash through many hordes of zombies, as well as slay a few other kinds of monsters that appear to keep things interesting. (Of particular note is a monster called the Exorcist, a spider-like creature that's made from the torso of a partially dismembered corpse.) The zombies in the Onechanbara universe are not the kind that can be stopped with an injury to the brain; these zombies must be completely dismembered in order for them to stop moving. As you use your sword to cut the zombies to pieces, blood gushes in all directions from the limbs, heads and torsos as they spin through the air, and a few droplets of blood splatter even hit the screen from time to time. There's so much zombie blood in Onechanbara that you frequently have to clean off your blade with the flick of the Wiimote so that your sword won't get stuck in a zombie.

It should also be mentioned that Onechanbara is the only non-fitness game for the Wii that made my arms sore. The control scheme requires you to keep the Wiimote and nunchuk moving almost all of the time, so playing this game through multiple levels in a single sitting will make you sweat.

Other than its limited set of levels, the only other complaint I have about Onechanbara is that the story behind the game is more interesting than the game itself. After doing some online research, I found out that Bikini Zombie Slayers is just one of ten games set in the Onechanbara series. Of these games, only two were released in the US: Bikini Zombie Slayers for the Wii and Bikini Samurai Squad for the Xbox 360. (Note: Bikini Samurai Squad features the first appearance of Misery, and her subsequent resurrection is one of the story arcs in Bikini Zombie Slayers.) Thus, if you're like me and want to know more about the Onechanbara universe, you'll either have to buy the other games that were released overseas or just be content to watch the live-action Onechanbara movie that was released in 2008. Personally, I'd rather play the games.

In a nutshell, Onechanbara: Bikini Zombie Slayers delivers a game where scantily-clad women drench themselves with gallons of blood as they hack and slash through legions of zombies. If that sounds like your kind of entertainment, then you probably won't mind the game's repetitive game play and small selection of level environments.

Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome, a Pilot Movie about Humans Fighting Intelligent Machines, Debuts this Friday on a Computer Network

Oh, you silly SyFy Channel. Have you ever liked the sci-fi genre at all, or was your initial airing of sci-fi TV shows just an excuse to sneak more professional wrestling and reality TV on the air?

I just found out that the two-hour pilot episode of Blood and Chrome, the long-delayed prequel spin-off of Battlestar Galactica, will be making its debut this Friday. However, the pilot will not be seen in a single showing on the SyFy Channel, which was home to the rebooted Galactica and Caprica, the first prequel spin-off series. Instead, the Blood and Chrome pilot has been edited into ten chapters that will be made available on Machinima's YouTube channel starting this Friday. You can learn more about this segmented premiere here at the Entertainment Weekly site.

I enjoyed the Battlestar Galactica reboot through most of its run, although things started going downhill when the "Final Five" Cylon infiltrators started hearing Bob Dylan in their heads. Don't get me started about the series' finale--that frustrated me so much that I completely avoided Caprica. But anyone who knows anything about television knows that if you really, really want to promote a new TV project, the last thing you do is chop it into pieces and dump it in some obscure location. (Wait--did I just describe a mob hit?)

To be sure, Machinima isn't the most unpopular site for video content on the Internet (see this page for stats about Machinima) but from what I've read, putting the Blood and Chrome pilot on Machinima is not a teaser for a new TV series, but some kind of weak promotional campaign to help sell the pilot when it is released on DVD in 2013. In other words, this is part of SyFy's attempt to ensure a return on its investment in a failed attempt at creating a new TV series. I suppose that impressive DVD sales and high ratings from online viewings could earn Blood and Chrome the series commission that it didn't earn initially, but I wouldn't bet on it.

Anyway, here’s a preview trailer for those of you who give a frak:

Nerd Rant: Darth Vader Goes to Disneyland, while Terminator Remains Lost in Time

Everyone knows by now that George Lucas has sold Lucasfilm and all of its creative properties, such as the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises, to Disney for over $4 billion. This is big news for both Star Wars fans and sci-fi and fantasy fans in general, so I thought that I would contribute a few of my own thoughts as to what this means for the future of Star Wars and sci-fi/fantasy film franchises in general, as well as how it compares to the current status of the floundering Terminator franchise. Read on ...

I'm kind of torn about Lucas selling Star Wars to Disney. It's not much of a surprise that he would do this, since he's worked closely with Disney before on other Star Wars projects. In fact, the last time I visited Disney back in 2007, it was during one of the "Star Wars Celebration" weekends at the park (events that were held to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the first Star Wars) and people were getting their photos taken with actors dressed as various characters from the Star Wars universe. This was before the recent renovation of the Star Tours ride at the Disney parks, a renovation that completed in 2011.

The rationale I've heard Lucas provide in interviews is that Disney will provide a safe environment for the future of his creative properties. I can't argue with that logic, because I think that Star Wars will do better under the ownership of Disney than, say, Star Trek has done under the ownership of Paramount. The same could be said about the relationship between Marvel and Disney in comparison to the relationship between DC Comics and Time Warner; in other words, given its creative roots in fantasy storytelling, Disney will be a safer, more supportive environment for fantasy franchises such as Marvel and Star Wars than a less niche-focused media company such as Paramount or Time Warner.

For example: Two of the four Star Trek spin-offs, Voyager and Enterprise, were put into production for the sake of attracting the Trek fan base to provide a steady supply of ratings for Paramount's fledgling--and later cancelled--United Paramount Network (UPN). This was a revival of Paramount's original plan to launch its own TV network back in the 70s and use a new Trek TV series, Star Trek: Phase II, as the new network's flagship show. That plan fell through and the Phase II pilot script later became the script for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but that didn't stop Paramount from using the Trek franchise (twice, no less) to help establish and sustain the non-Trek project that was UPN. Given Disney's long-established system of media production and distribution, I doubt that Disney will put the Star Wars franchise into the same kind of awkward and ill-conceived situations.

All that has been determined so far for the immediate future of Star Wars under Disney is that a new trilogy is in the works, the long-rumored Episodes 7, 8 and 9 of the saga. Episode 7 is currently in pre-production and is scheduled for release in 2015, with the sequels following every two or three subsequent years. The Star Wars: 1313 video game is still scheduled for completion and release. As far as I can tell, everything else about the franchise has yet to be determined. I still don't know how many more episodes of The Clone Wars series will be produced and how long it will remain on Cartoon Network, a network that's owned by Time Warner. I suspect that Cartoon Network's recent rescheduling of The Clone Wars from its successful Friday night slot to a Saturday morning slot was probably based on the pending sale of Lucasfilm to Disney--in other words, Cartoon Network's relocation of The Clone Wars to a less successful time slot could be a signal of its near cancellation--but this is only speculation on my part.

Where I feel uncertain about Disney's acquisition of Lucasfilm is in light of how much else Disney owns right now--it's currently the largest media conglomerate in the US--and how much more it will go on to own after the profits from Star Wars are added to its collective revenue. In addition to Lucasfilm, Disney also owns Pixar, Marvel, and The Muppets Studio; the combination of these companies' creative licenses amounts to an enormous piece of pop culture real estate, along with all of the creative licenses that Disney already has by itself. This doesn't even include the other assets that Disney owns, such as ESPN, ABC, Touchstone Pictures and Hyperion Books. Sure, the creative side of the Disney media empire may do wonderful things for the Star Wars franchise, but I'm not very comfortable with the corporate side of the Disney media empire using Star Wars revenue to gobble up even more chunks of domestic and international media--something that is inevitably going to happen, unfortunately. How future sci-fi and fantasy film franchises can achieve success in a media landscape that's dominated by Disney remains to be seen.

Bringing things back to a more geek-centric level, I'm also hoping that Disney's ownership of the Star Wars franchise will not prompt it to abandon its own Tron franchise. The Tron Uprising series is a fantastic show and the franchise as a whole has a lot of potential, so I would hate to see Disney completely ditch their cult fan favorite in exchange for the more well-known and much more lucrative property.

Concerns aside, the transition of Star Wars from Lucas to Disney is a good example of a well-maintained franchise that will see more success under new and proven ownership. Say what you will about what Lucas has done with his franchise since its inception, at least he made sure that there was always someone at the helm to manage the Star Wars universe. The same cannot be said for the Terminator franchise, which is currently struggling to break free of its current state of limbo. For as much as I love the Terminator franchise, I'm still shocked that it has made it as far as it has without a consistent leadership figure such as James Cameron--or anyone else.

As of now, the Terminator franchise is currently owned by Megan Ellison and her production company Annapurna Films, but the rights to the franchise will revert back to Cameron if a new movie is not made by 2018. Some rumors suggest another sequel, while others hint at a complete reboot. Personally, I think that the franchise made its worst mistake when it associated its success with the bankability of Arnold Schwarzenegger, a mistake from which the franchise may never recover.

Terminator 2 was a big hit in 1991 and the most profitable film in the franchise, but I think that most of its success was due to Schwarzenegger's peaking popularity during the late 80s and early 90s. (Then again, T2 is the most positive and optimistic movie in the series, which might also have something to do with its appeal to a larger, blockbuster-sized audience. As film critic Sean French observed, the violence and anti-social nature of The Terminator were sanitized by Cameron himself in T2, essentially transforming the franchise that started as a gritty, violent, grindhouse-style low-budget sci-fi movie into a sleek, high-tech summer blockbuster movie with a then-popular leading actor.) Utilizing Schwarzenegger to produce a successful sequel was a shrewd decision on Cameron's part, since T2 salvaged his own career after The Abyss tanked at the box office in 1989 (without T2, there never would have been True Lies, Dark Angel, Titanic or Avatar), even though this decision would ultimately cripple the Terminator franchise.

T2 led many to regard the Terminator franchise as strictly a Schwarzenegger vehicle, even though his creative input to the movies is negligible and his character was the most disposable one in terms of the franchise's overarching narrative logic. The Schwarzenegger connection was further reinforced by the T2 3-D: Battle Across Time ride in the Universal Studio theme parks--in a story which depicts Schwarzenegger's T-800 character as the triumphant vanquisher of Skynet and recasts humanity's post-nuclear savior, John Connor, in a secondary and superfluous role--and by Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines in 2003. Schwarzenegger appeared in T3 under the direction of Jonathan Mostow, after years of saying that he'd only do another Terminator movie if Cameron directed it. Schwarzenegger hoped that T3 would do for his career what T2 did for Cameron's; it didn't, and I don't think a Terminator 5 would either.

As any devoted Terminator fan knows, there are plenty of Schwarzenegger-free, universe-expanding Terminator stories to be told through the narrative rules established in the movies. For example, the Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles TV series explored the Terminator universe in entertaining and character-driven ways that the movies never had time to do, all without involving a cyborg that looked and sounded like an Austrian bodybuilder.

I enjoy Terminator 3 and Terminator Salvation for what they are (as well as the Terminator novels connected to those sequels), but I think that Josh Friedman's involvement in the franchise through his creation of the Sarah Connor Chronicles series was the last real chance to get the franchise back on stable creative ground. This chance was lost between the writer's strike during the show's first season and the Fox network's dwindling support of the series during the second. Alas, the association with a faded campy action star, the lack of behind-the-scenes leadership, shifting ownership of creative rights, and an unstable production schedule and distribution venue for its TV series have all combined to terminate the Terminator's chances of significant continuation into the future.

The Schwarzenegger-Terminator link is inescapable by now, and how his future, post-political film career fares will determine what the Terminator franchise will do next. If the poor sales of his recent tell-all book and his god-awful Governator cartoon series proposal are any indication, Schwarzenegger's blockbuster days are long over and the Terminator franchise will move on without him--that is, if it ever moves again at all.