June of this year saw the fortieth anniversary of Blade Runner, Ridley Scott's genre-defining cyberpunk film. Nightdive Studios had targeted the anniversary for the launch of its remake of the Blade Runner adventure game, a beloved classic developed by Westwood Studios and originally released in 1997. Launch day arrived on June 23, Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition went up for sale, and the reviews began trickling in. They were not good.
This post contains spoilers for the "Sandman" comics.
The first season of "The Sandman" has introduced us to more than half of the Endless, the seven siblings who serve as living embodiments of core human concepts. The series focuses on Dream (Tom Sturridge), a man who's personality is shaped by the dreams humans have, and who in return holds the power to shape human dreams. Dream's older sister Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) receives her own spotlight episode six episodes in with "The Sound of Her Wings," in which we see her go about her daily job. She's not the one who kills you, but she's the one who shows up when you die and gently guides you to whatever comes next.
All the Endless siblings have names that start with "D" for some reason. Not yet introduced is Destiny (the oldest), Delirium (the youngest), and Destruction (the forgotten middle child). The other two siblings are Desire (Alexander Mason Park) and Despair (Donna Preston), who are twins tied for second youngest in the family. The two haven't had a ton of screen-time so far, but they've definitely made an impression. Park portrays Desire as appropriately mischievous and seductive, and Preston nails her role as the depressed, masochistic Despair.
More than anything else, these are two characters who evoke a lot of questions. Why does Desire seem to hate Dream so much? Why are they the only twins in the family? What exactly is the point of them? These twins will continue playing an important role in the series, so let's take a moment to unpack their whole deal.
"Desire has never been satisfied with just one sex, or just one of anything," the narration reads in their official introduction in volume 2. Desire can switch back and forth between male or female, often settling somewhere in between. Desire is able to make humans want things, but is also beholden to the human idea of desire itself. As a result, their actions are often driven by pure emotion, leading them to make decisions that probably aren't wise in the grand scheme of things, even considering their own self interest.
This is made clear in season 1, which ends with the reveal that Desire was the one who impregnated Unity Kinkaid (Sandra James-Young) while she was in a coma. Desire does this knowing that Unity is supposed to be a dream vortex, meaning that when Dream is finally released from captivity, one of Unity's offspring will end up becoming the vortex instead. Because Dream has no choice but to kill vortexes for the safety of the universe, Desire will be forcing Dream to unknowingly kill a family member.
The show doesn't touch on this plot point much so far, but Dream killing a family member would be a huge deal. It would allow the Kindly Ones -- the trio of women who've shown up in the episodes "Imperfect Hosts," "24 Hours," and "The Doll's House" -- full authority to "hound him to the grave," as they themselves put it in the ninth volume. The Kindly Ones are an old, powerful force that Dream would have a hard time defending himself from, and if Desire's plan this season had been pulled off, Dream would've been in real mortal trouble. But will Desire actually be happy with Dream killed? It doesn't seem like they've thought that far ahead.
Despair in the comics is personified as a naked, heavyset woman with messy hair. She's pale and clammy looking, like a living corpse. The TV show changes her appearance to go for more of a "sad cat lady" vibe, with her wearing a sad-looking sweater. One feature the show kept was Despair's hooked ring, which she uses to carve into her own skin whenever she's feeling any strong emotion.
We don't know much about Despair's early history, except for the fact that about 100,000 years ago, she was killed and then reborn as a slightly different version of Despair. (Because the concepts the Endless embody still exist, they're always soon replaced by another version of themselves.) Beyond that, Despair's personality is pretty constant: she delights in human suffering. We see this in "Brief Lives," where she's introduced watching a man contemplate suicide. "Isn't it beautiful?" she asks Delirium at the sight of him.
Despite this, Despair tends to be pretty nice to her siblings, comparatively speaking. She has a particularly sweet relationship with her older brother Destruction, as we see in volume 7's "Brief Lives," where a flashback ends with Destruction giving her a friendly kiss on the cheek goodbye. "No one ever kissed Despair, save her brother," the narration reads. When Delirium asks Despair to help her find their missing brother Destruction, she says no, but we can tell she regrets turning Delirium down.
Despair is closest to her twin Desire, whom she tends to tiptoe around. The reason she rejects Delirium's request is because she's afraid of making Desire angry. The two may have been born around the same time, but Desire definitely seems to be one in charge. Despair is severely depressed throughout the series, so it makes sense that she plays a more passive role.
Because Desire doesn't think things through that much, their big season 1 plan fails, and their relationship with Dream only grows worse. Dream's relationship with Despair, however, stays pretty consistent. They rarely interact, but there doesn't seem to be nearly as much antagonism between the two. The only real time we see them fight is in the volume six short story, "Three Septembers and a January." There, Despair is in the middle of claiming the soul of Joshua, a man in 19th century America whose life had fallen apart. Despair challenges Dream to try to take Joshua away from her, asserting that his "little dreams" are no match for her. In the end, Dream wins the bet, but Despair doesn't seem to hold any grudge over her loss.
In the same story, however, we also see Desire attempt to claim Joshua, offering him money and attractive women in a sort of deal with the devil. Joshua refuses, and Dream basically gloats a little to Desire about their loss, calling their schemes unsubtle. After Dream leaves, we see an angry Desire saying, "He wants subtle? He'll get subtle. Just watch me... I'll make him spill family blood. I'll bring the Kindly Ones down on his blasted head..." It's a moment that makes it clear that despite Desire's relative short-sightedness, their plan to take down Dream has not been merely a short-term urge. Desire's been wanting to kill him for a long time, and they're not going to stop just because the Vortex plan failed.
Throughout the series, the Endless often feel like static characters, which makes sense. They are mostly immortal, after all, and they serve as the embodiment of human concepts; a single year won't change them the way it could change a human.
Despite that, the Endless do change. They just change very slowly, over the course of tens of thousands of years. This is shown most clearly in the collection "Endless Nights," which features the story, "The Heart of a Star." The issue is set billions of years before the rest of the series, back when Desire and Dream got along. Not only were they on good terms, but Desire used to be Dream's favorite sibling. But then Desire influences one of Dream's first girlfriends to fall in love with someone else, and so begins a multi-billion year sibling rivalry.
If they've changed over the billions of years since "Endless Nights," it's only been for the worst. Despair still feeds on human suffering and Desire is still selfish and short-sighted. Unchecked desire often leads to despair, after all, so each twin's flaws seem to feed into the other's, and that doesn't seem to be changing anytime soon.
But "The Sandman" comics are all about the illusion of permanence. Even if you're an immortal being with an eternity of experiences, you don't have to stay the same forever. We've seen through Dream's once-a-century meetings with Hob Gadling (Ferdinand Kingsley) that he's certainly grown a little kinder over the past six hundred years, even if he doesn't want to admit it. Perhaps Desire and Despair can change for the better too.
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The post Desire and Despair: What You Can Expect to See of Dream's Troublesome Siblings in The Sandman appeared first on /Film.
My love of gaming came a little bit later in life than most, so there are a ton of well-loved games that I need to catch up on, whether they're old classics or recently-released bangers. What's nice is that there's an endless stream of hits for me to pull from, which means I've been binging titles like Pokémon, Ratchet & Clank, and Mass Effect over the past few months, just to name a few. For the most part, it's been really great to have so many games to play that knock it out of the park — playing the all-time greats all in a row has me reeling over how awesome this medium is.
While I've loved a vast majority of the games I've played recently, there have been one or two that just didn't connect with me, which is a shame considering they're such well-loved titles. The prime example of this is Annapurna's smash hit from 2019, Outer Wilds. In the game, you play as an alien caught in a twenty-two-minute time loop as you explore nearby planets and try to unlock the mysteries of the universe.
When I've asked people what are some must-plays that I missed out on over the past few years, Outer Wilds always seems to make the list, so I gave it a shot a little while ago. People describe it as a "once in a generation gaming experience" or "one of the best adventure games ever made," and I can't miss out on something like that, right?
I can't put my finger on the exact reason why, but there's just something about that game that didn't work for me. Maybe it's the fact that space unlocks an existential horror spiral in me, or that I'm even worse at flying mechanics than I am at platforming, or that I was going through a bad depressive episode when I was playing it — I'll never know for sure.
I watched a video essay about the game from someone who loves it, and it all made so much sense. I could understand why it was a masterpiece and all that, but that still didn't make me want to pick it up again.
These days, it feels like we've gotten pretty combative about liking or disliking media. Something is the best, or it's the worst, and a lot of times we fall on either side of that binary. I kind of had to have this moment with Outer Wilds where I let myself be okay with not loving the game, even if I thought it was really cool on paper. Sometimes we don't like things — that doesn't make them bad, it means they're just not for us.
Maybe one of these days I'll rope in my friend who sings Outer Wilds' praises all the time and have him sit down with me and walk me through why he loves it, because I find that to be helpful when a piece of media doesn't connect with me. For now, though, I'll just have to be okay with the fact that there are some games that I won't really get.
So, are there any well-loved games out there that you bounce off of, or can't get yourself to finish? What's the last game you abandoned, and why?
Let's discuss in the comments below!
The post What’s a well-loved game you bounced off? appeared first on Destructoid.
Dan Trachtenberg's "Predator" prequel, "Prey," features two of the most fierce female protagonists in recent cinema history: the Comanche warrior Naru (Amber Midthunder) and her canine companion, Sarii. As Naru battles against a deadly extraterrestrial threat, she has Sarii by her side to help. The two are a regular Predator-fighting team, and who doesn't love a horror movie with a tough, lovable dog? Sarii is one capable canine, but it turns out that the dog who plays her, Coco, took a little bit more wrangling than your average actor.
In an interview with Dexerto, Trachtenberg and Midthunder revealed that while they loved scenes with Coco so much that the crew kept putting her into new ones, she was also a "hot mess" who required some extra patience on set. Most working dogs are trained for years, and that includes dog actors, but Coco was adopted specifically for filming "Prey," and she needed a bit of acting practice first.
Coco is an American dingo, also known as a carolina dog, and they're one of the oldest breeds in existence. The ancestors of today's carolina dogs came across the Bering land bridge between Asia and Alaska with the Indigenous people who traveled east and then south to populate the Americas. They are incredibly smart, a little shy, and full of energy, with similar temperaments to the Australian dingo and Japanese native breeds like shiba inus and akitas. If "Prey" becomes popular enough to inspire people to adopt their own carolina dogs, I hope they do their research and are prepared for a dog that's more wolf than golden retriever.
The idea for having a dog in the film was heavily inspired by "Road Warrior," the "Mad Max" sequel that features an Australian cattle dog/blue heeler named simply "Dog." The buddy relationship between these two badasses informed the characters and the story, but that meant Coco would have to really hit her mark. Trachtenberg explained that while Coco was a very good girl, she was a little too excitable sometimes. He described her as:
"Super rambunctious. Very energetic. Always a nail-biting moment for us on set, 'Is Coco gonna like, make her mark and do what she needs to do?' It was sometimes a journey to get there, but eventually she always did. It was very exciting, lots of cheers would happen when we finally got a great take with Coco."
Coco wasn't causing major trouble or anything, she was just being a dog and doing dog things, which isn't always conducive to filmmaking. Dogs are unpredictable, and apparently Coco was just a bit extra random.
Midthunder, who worked pretty closely with Coco since they're onscreen together so much, said that she wasn't very well trained and was "kind of a disaster," but that she was the most lovable kind of disaster. Coco was adopted for the movie and lacked movie dog training, so they were sort of just trying to get her to "act" and hope for the best. Midthunder explained that while it was occasionally a hit or miss proposition, no one really minded because Coco was so sweet:
"She was a little bit of a hot mess -- but in a sweet way. She was not a movie dog, she was literally adopted to be in this movie, and she just happened to be very high-energy. She was such a delight to have around, she was so fun and very playful. And then it would be time to do stuff ... sometimes she'd do it, sometimes she wouldn't. But obviously, it all ended up fine, because she was great, and everybody loves her."
Coco's sweet and playful nature definitely comes through the screen, and the end result is more than worth the extra takes required to make sure she hit her cue. Sarii is sure to go down as one of the greatest doggos in movie history, and it's all thanks to Coco. Watch your step, Lassie. There's a new four-legged star in town.
"Prey" is now streaming on Hulu.
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The post The Dog Actor In Prey Was Adopted Especially For The Movie – And She Was A 'Hot Mess' appeared first on /Film.
It's hard to explain why James Cameron's "The Terminator" has found such a tender spot in pop culture history. Let's be honest: a sci-fi flick about a time-traveling robot killing machine isn't exactly a sure-fire recipe for widespread commercial success. Yet somehow, the metallic assassin found his niche: "The Terminator" was a box office smash back in 1984, earning over $78 million worldwide and numerous fans in the process (via The Numbers).
Beyond introducing us to a terrifyingly determined killer robot, "The Terminator" is also the film that launched Arnold Schwarzenegger into the Hollywood spotlight. While Schwarzenegger had been in movies before, it seemed like directors focused on his muscles more often than his acting skills. To be fair, he did win a New Star Of The Year Golden Globe for his role in the 1976 film "Stay Hungry,", but he played an Austrian bodybuilder who seemed allergic to shirts -- not exactly a stretch for the budding actor. In contrast, "The Terminator" played to both of Schwarzenegger's strengths, combining the bodybuilder's cold demeanor with his larger-than-life physique to create a truly terrifying villain.
Despite the fact that Schwarzenegger owes much of his current movie glory to "The Terminator" (and its sequels), it seems like he was among its early skeptics. According to a print-only article in Total Fil" that was later reposted to fansite Terminator Files, the then-budding actor was initially less than kind when describing the movie to Rick Wayne, a fellow bodybuilder.
In the article, Wayne describes visiting Schwarzenegger as he was filming "Conan The Destroyer," the actor's last project before the "Terminator" franchise changed his career forever:
"As we sat there talking he picked up the Conan sword, which weighed a ton, and went through the moves he'd practiced. Then he grabbed a pair of shoes and I said: 'What are those for?'. He said: 'Oh, some s*** movie I'm doing, take a couple of weeks.' It was 'The Terminator.' That was the movie that made Arnold. For him it was just some crap film."
To be fair, there's a chance that the actor was simply letting off a little steam by venting because he was tired from a long day of filming a sword-and-sorcery epic. At the same time, we wouldn't exactly blame Schwarzenegger for having reservations: the premise for "The Terminator" was literally driven by fever dreams and ecstasy, a fitting combo for such an unconventional film. And then there's the fact that writer/director James Cameron was not the Hollywood titan he is today -- he was just some young newcomer helming a low-budget slasher movie about a killer robot. Schwarzenegger was right to keep his expectations in check.
While Schwarzenegger might have had reservations about "Terminator" before filming began, he claims to have changed his mind pretty quickly. In a YouTube interview with GQ, Schwarzenegger talked about his most iconic roles, including "The Terminator." He recalled being absolutely amazed by an early cut of the film's first 20 minutes, going so far as to say that he knew then that the film would be "bigger than we all think."
While Schwarzenegger's comments don't necessarily contradict Wayne's story (and we wouldn't blame the actor for feeling hesitant initially, only to get excited when he saw how things were actually shaping up), they do come with a twinge of irony. In that same video, Schwarzenegger complained that the studio executives treated "The Terminator" as a B-movie at the time, but would likely say "I told you so" now (implying that they'd say that they always had faith "The Terminator" would become a hit). In light of Wayne's comments, it's hard to tell if Schwarzenegger himself changed his mind or if the interview was yet another "I told you so."
Either way, one thing's for sure — from the safety of 2022, we can definitely say that the "The Terminator" was the start of something big.
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The post Arnold Schwarzenegger Didn't Think The Terminator Had A Whole Lot Of Potential appeared first on /Film.
Animator Genndy Tartakovsky began his professional career as an assistant animator on the seminal '90s cartoon "Tiny Toon Adventures," right when the medium was evolving into a new animal. Thanks to the late-'80s and early '90s success of creator-based cartoons like "Beavis and Butt-Head" and "The Ren & Stimpy Show" animators like Tartakovsky suddenly found themselves in a marketplace that was aching for edgier, unique cartoons that were not based on existing IP. In 1996, Tartakovsky created the hit Cartoon Network show "Dexter's Laboratory," and he has been a household name ever since. Tartakovsky went on to create the stoic action series "Samurai Jack," and developed and directed many episodes of the "Star Wars" spinoff series "The Clone Wars." He is currently overseeing the Adult Swim series "Primal," currently in its second season.
In film, Tartakovsky directed the first three "Hotel Transylvania" movies, intentionally stretching and expanding what could be done in CGI (in a 2009 San Diego Comic-Con panel which this author had the pleasure of attending, Tartakovsky said that he aimed to move beyond the "puppety" nature of most CGI characters). He is currently in production on the film "Fixed" for Sony Pictures Animation. And "Fixed" is, in many ways, quite a departure for him.
One may not be able to tell by the above image, but his upcoming feature "Fixed" is, in fact, a raunchy, R-rated comedy film about a dog's last 24 hours before its owner is set to take him to the vet to be neutered. In a recent interview with Paste, Tartakovsky talked about how the pivot from kid-friendly projects to R-rated adult fare wasn't too much of a philosophical change, although it did require flexing "a different muscle." He also revealed that the studio assumed it was going to be full-on pornographic.
Tartakovksy, when making an R-rated film or a silly G-rated film, focused on what was important to the project, namely its humor and its characters. In a way, it doesn't matter the "roughness" of the content, comedy is comedy. If it made the creators giggle, it was going in the movie. Tartakovsky also, in setting his shows in the distant future ("Samurai Jack") or the distant past ("Primal"), has the excuse of jettisoning any bothersome acknowledgements of the present day. "Fixed," in being about dogs, was equally allowed to ignore the foibles of human media and focus on what dogs are like.
"For kids, I still do what I think is funny, and if the crew laughs, then it will be successful. And then for adults, it's kind of the same thing. I know what I find funny. With 'Fixed,' what's been really interesting about it is that it's not based on one-liners. It's not based on pop culture, so we're not making fun of the Kardashians. It is a character story, so it's very in tune to what I do, I think."
Tartakovsky may have made that statement in reference to several DreamWorks animated projects -- films like "Shrek" and "Shark Tale" -- that rely quite heavily on pop culture references as the key to their humor. Or perhaps he was making a very general dig at reference-heavy pop culture in general. Either way, Tartakovsky's projects tend to take place in hermetically sealed universes, and he seems to want to stress that "Fixed" is the same way.
And the dogs are dog dogs, not people dogs. Tartakovsky pointed out two Disney animated precedents as his models, each one about dogs, and each one set in a world where dogs can communicate with one another, but not with their human owners. There will be no upright walking, talking dogs in hats and ties in "Fixed," and they will not converse with Ranger Smith. Tartakovsky may like Yogi, but that's not what this is. According to Tartakovsky:
"The animation is turning out to be top notch. It's cartoony, but it still has a sense of reality because the dogs act like dogs. They don't act like Yogi Bear. We're following the '101 Dalmatians' and 'The Lady and the Tramp' rules. But then some jokes and some visuals are very raunchy, pushed all the way. But because it's hand drawn, it's done very nicely."
Tartakovsky's comment on lovely hand-drawn animation would lead him to immediately acknowledge the raunchy content of "Fixed," and point out the difference between depicting a dog's testicles in CGI vs. drawing them by hand. In one version, testicles are not appealing. In another ... well, according to Tartakovsky they can be. Tartakovsky was careful to warn the interviewer that he was about to be a little crass.
"If I can be so crude for a second, if you can picture CG testicles, there's something very gross about it, because you can put in all those extra details. But when it's hand drawn, it's such a caricature that it's kind of still cute."
Tartakovsky's description of dog anatomy had him recalling an early stage in the production of "Fixed" wherein he would have to explain to the studio heads that the script was far more, uh, descriptive than the visuals would end up being. In short, the studio assumed there would be multiple shots of dogs in flagrante. Despite the content, Tartakovsky had to explain that it would be a mere R-rated comedy and not something relegated to the adults-only section in record stores. Tartakovsky said:
"It's funny, because in the beginning we couldn't get a studio to work on it with us. When they read the script, they thought it was X-rated. When they were reading it, they're picturing everything. But when you think about a rated R movie, it's a suggestion of the inappropriate, and we're doing the same thing. It's a R movie, so we don't show penises. Anything that a live action movie won't show, we don't show either."
There's no polite way to put this, but Tartakovsky had to say out loud that dog genitalia were not a part of his plan. Raunchy, he feels, is a far cry from crass or tasteless, and he certainly wanted to skew toward the former. Dog penises, he had to assure execs multiple times, were right out:
"... I had to literally go through the script and write the way I'm going to execute it. They were like, 'Our animators are not going to draw a dog penis, I'll tell you that right now!' And I'm like, 'What are you talking about? Of course, there's not going to be that!' I'm not a gross person. You can see anything I've done and it still has, I think, good taste."
"Fixed" is set for released in 2024.
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When making a show that feels as timeless as "Samurai Jack," a conclusion is not something you have in mind when writing episodes. Genndy Tartakovsky was not allowed to follow a serialized format, with the story of one episode having almost nothing to do with another. Unfortunately, that leads to problems in creating a cohesive story with character development. In the case of "Samurai Jack," solving the lack of a throughline was found in the title character's unwavering will and stoic nature. The initial four-season run felt like the old episodic adventures of television series past. While Jack never truly inched closer or further from his goal, there was entertainment to be had in Tartakovsky's world building and incredibly animated fights.
The only problem with lacking a definitive conclusion is the story "Samurai Jack" had set up from the beginning. Jack's need to return to the past stems from a duty he has to protect his people from the demon Aku, who sent him into the future to begin with. Would Jack's people be doomed to eternal suffering due to the lack of an ending in the original run of the series? Thankfully not, as a revived fifth season 13 years after its initial run provided a definitive conclusion. Before the Adult Swim revival, though, Tartakovsky didn't have an ending in mind.
Genndy Tartakovsky spoke to The Verge about handling the first ending of Samurai Jack back in 2004, where both he and the studio had an unspoken understanding about being done with the series for the time being. Tartakovsky also acknowledged the dark undertones of the story and the implications of not having a conclusion:
"Yeah, even initially, because we made such a big deal about Jack's origin, and all these people in his life that were left to suffer and die, basically. He had to come back at some point if he had a hope of finishing his quest, and I always wanted to finish it. But at the end of the fourth season, we were all burnt out. The network didn't know what they wanted to do, I didn't know what I wanted to do. And then we were getting 'Star Wars' handed to us. I realized, 'I don't want to rush out an ending.' I didn't even know what the ending was back then. So we decided just quietly to finish the fourth season."
Tartakovsky's patience with his story saved "Samurai Jack" from a forced ending in its initial run. Not having an end in mind is understandable given the network constraints the team behind the show had to deal with. Moreover, the patience paid off when it came time to tell the suitable conclusion Tartakovsky wanted for the character since he first conceived the concept in the early 2000s.
Genndy Tartakovsky eventually come up with an ending to "Samurai Jack," speaking about potentially turning this conclusion for the character into a movie:
"It [the ending] popped up first, probably a couple of years after I finished the show. I realized, 'Oh, this is the way I would want to do it.' There was all this various interest in doing a Samurai Jack movie, where I would reinvent the show and finish it in the same movie. In the movies, especially back then, they wanted a completion. The same core idea I had then is what we're doing now."
"Samurai Jack" wouldn't receive the film treatment but instead got the 10-episode final season that aired on Adult Swim in 2017. This option allowed not only for fans to get reacquainted with the character of Jack, but also gave the story more room to breathe compared to the runtime of a feature film. The ending saw Jack finally return to his time in the past, albeit at a tremendous personal cost. The conclusion of the series was epic in scale and finally allowed Jack to overcome the demon Aku. Tartakovsky overcame his own creative struggles and gave Jack the definitive ending he deserved.
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Back in May, we informed you about a must-have mod for Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, Star Wars Jedi Knight Remastered. And today, modder GeneralTantor released a new version that supports its expansion, Star Wars Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the Sith. Star Wars Jedi Knight Mysteries of the Sith Remastered 2.0 features JKGXMOD … Continue reading Star Wars Jedi Knight Mysteries of the Sith Remastered 2.0 available for download →
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There are few directors whose films are so unique and definitive in their style that audiences can easily point out their handiwork within only a few minutes of viewing. Sergio Leone is certainly one of those directors, a filmmaker who cultivated a singular approach to moviemaking and took the medium to new and interesting places it had not yet been. He first made a name for himself on the "Dollars Trilogy" — "A Fistful of Dollars," "For a Few Dollars More," and "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" — and in the process breathed new life into the western while also launching the career of Clint Eastwood. This trilogy also brought his signature cinematic techniques to the fore, like extreme close-ups, perfectly framed wide shots, economic storytelling, and more.
While Leone's output is relatively small for a filmmaker of his stature in cinema history, the contributions of the few films he directed are impossible to quantify and continue to impact filmmakers today. In fact, one of our era's most defining directors, Quentin Tarantino, has made no secret of his love for Leone, writing in a Spectator essay, "For my money, I think he is the greatest of all Italy's filmmakers. I would go even as far as to say that he is the greatest combination of a complete film stylist, where he creates his own world and storyteller." Leone has worked on many films in a variety of capacities, but let's take a look at the ones that he directed himself.
Set in 280 BC, "The Colossus of Rhodes" tells the story of Darios, a war hero who has just arrived for a vacation on the island of Rhodes from Greece with his uncle, Lissipu. The people of Rhodes recently built a massive statue of Apollo in its harbor, and it isn't long before Darios begins a romantic relationship with Diala, the daughter of the man responsible for the gargantuan structure. As his relationship with Diala deepens, so does his connection to a group of insurgents who've made it their mission to depose the ruthless king of Rhodes, Serse. What Serse doesn't know is that there is more than one faction that's trying to remove him from power, as his right-hand-man Thar is planning to take Serse's position for himself. Where do Diala's loyalties lie, and how will it impact her relationship with Darios?
Sergio Leone's first outing as a director gets the last spot on this list, but that doesn't mean that it's unwatchable. Before directing "The Colossus of Rhodes," Leone cut his teeth working on other epic sword-and-sandal movies, taking over directing "The Last Days of Pompeii" from its original director Mario Bonnard, and served as second-unit director on "Ben-Hur" and "Quo Vadis." The grand film is well-handled by someone with prior experience working in the genre but doesn't pack the same punch as similar films, and its convoluted plot makes it a bit of a slog.
During the Mexican Revolution, Juan Miranda and his band of bandits take advantage of the chaos plaguing their country to loot what they want from whoever they feel. One day Juan runs into Sean H. Mallory, an explosives expert with the Irish Republican Army, and notices his expertise with dynamite. Calling him "John" from then on, Juan recruits him to help rob the Mesa Verde National Bank, but upon their arrival at the bank they discover that it's been turned into a political prison. When they release the prisoners, Juan and John inadvertently become heroes of the revolution despite only wanting to make some quick money. With their newfound recognition, the two men are left with no other option but to continue serving in the revolution against the merciless Colonel Günther Reza.
"Duck, You Sucker" doesn't quite reach the same heights as Sergio Leone's previous four western films, but it does come damn close. Rod Steiger as Juan Miranda and James Coburn as Sean "John" H. Mallory make an amazing pair as reluctant champions of a cause they wanted nothing to do with, and the development of their unusual friendship is surprisingly layered. Leone pulls out every trick he learned/created during his time doing Spaghetti Westerns, ending his time in the genre with a bang. The film is also bolstered by one of Ennio Morricone's best scores ever, perfectly accentuating the wide range of emotional colors conveyed in this thought-provoking shoot-'em up.
"Once Upon a Time in America" follows childhood friends David "Noodles" Aaronson and Maximilian "Max" Bercovicz, chronicling their lives as Jewish gangsters in New York City across several decades. In 1918, Noodles and Max first made a name for themselves as young hoods in Manhattan's Lower East Side committing small crimes until they used blackmail to ensure police protection while getting involved in the bootlegging business during Prohibition. When one of their jobs results in Noodles killing a rival gang member and injuring a cop, he's sent to prison for years, not released until 1930. Noodles reunites with his old friends and returns to his criminal ways, but when Prohibition is repealed in 1933, cracks begin to form between the criminal friends, leading to betrayal, heartbreak, and lust.
Without a doubt, "Once Upon a Time in America" is Sergio Leone's most ambitious film as it dances back and forth across many years to tell a story that — at a surface level — is about crime, yet digs deep into the nature of friendship. A sweeping epic to rival "The Godfather" movies, Leone's masterpiece is frequently touted as not only one of the best mobster movies ever made but as one of the best films ever made period. Fans of crime dramas should check out this film immediately, but it's recommended that they watch the longest version they can find as it has been subjected to multiple cuts over the years.
Set in the final days of the Old American West, the story begins with a man known only as Harmonica who arrives in Flagstone with the intention of killing a man named Frank for private reasons. Currently, Frank is a henchman for the wealthy Morton, who is trying to get ahold of a plot of land called Sweetwater and hires Frank to kill the plot's owner Brett McBain (and his family). Upon completing his job, Frank makes it look like the murders were carried out by an outlaw named Cheyenne. It's soon revealed that Brett had previously married a woman named Jill, thus making her the sole beneficiary of his property when he's killed. As Morton and Frank clash over who should get Sweetwater, Harmonica and Cheyenne agree to help Jill get what's rightfully hers since they have scores to settle with Frank.
"Once Upon a Time in the West" moves at a slower, more deliberate pace than Sergio Leone's previous "Man with No Name Trilogy," which took a more action-oriented approach to revamping the American Western. While this film's somber tone may put off fans of Leone's more up-tempo westerns, film lovers will adore its more mature style as the next step in his evolution as a director. "Duck, You Sucker" is Leone's last Western film, but "Once Upon a Time in the West" is really the culmination of everything he learned while forging the Spaghetti Western genre.
San Miguel, a small town on the border of the U.S. and Mexico, is besieged by a fight between two families: the Rojo brothers and the Baxter family. Things reach a new level of tension when a mysterious gunslinger, known only by the name "Joe," arrives in town. Upon learning about the two warring clans, Joe decides to use his cunning and marksmanship to pit them against each other, starting off by selling vital info to both of them leading to a shootout in a cemetery. However, when Joe meets Marisol — whose family has been suffering because of the infighting in the town — he learns that the Rojo brothers are the real villains of San Miguel and sets out to bring them down, one bullet at a time.
This was the film that really established Sergio Leone as a force to be reckoned with. "A Fistful of Dollars" is a landmark film in many ways (despite facing plenty of troubles during production): It introduced us to Clint Eastwood's ultra-masculine Man With No Name, it was the first entry in the legendary "Dollars Trilogy," and while there were numerous other Spaghetti Westerns before this one, "A Fistful of Dollars" was the first film to truly crystallize it into a legitimate genre. Leone's directorial style evolved by leaps and bounds from the more straightforward approach seen in "The Colossus of Rhodes," and featured many of his classic trademarks that would go on to influence cinema forevermore.
Set against the backdrop of the American Civil War, the story revolves around a gunslinger called Blondie and his rambunctious bandit partner Tuco as they wander from town to town making money with a clever scheme: Blondie turns Tuco over to the authorities in exchange for a bounty, only for Blondie to rescue Tuco and abscond with him to split the bounty. Blondie eventually gets sick of Tuco and dissolves their partnership, but when they both get a different piece of information from a dying fugitive about where $200,000 worth of gold is buried, they must work together. However, they're not the only ones looking for a dead man's treasure, as a hitman named Angel Eyes was on the same trail. Angel Eyes has made it his mission to track down Blondie and Tuco about the gold's whereabouts.
Sergio Leone's "Dollars Trilogy" ends in a suitably grand fashion with one of the most iconic Mexican standoffs ever committed to celluloid. The world of "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" is far more expansive than its predecessors, bringing it closer to the territory of an Akira Kurosawa or David Lean film. It's arguably Ennio Morricone's best work on the trilogy, giving the world not one but two iconic themes, and let's not forget the immortal trio of Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach (who actually nearly died multiple times during the making of the movie).
Manco is a mysterious gunslinging bounty hunter on the trail of the merciless outlaw El Indio, whose men recently busted out of jail. El Indio's next target is the Bank of El Paso, which he believes is in possession of around one million dollars. After catching wind of this plan, Manco heads to El Paso to stop him but meets another bounty hunter, Douglas Mortimer, who's also been tracking down the outlaw. The two men reluctantly agree to work together to bring down El Indio, with Douglas convincing Manco to infiltrate his gang to get closer to him. After Manco wins El Indio's trust by helping to steal a safe, Douglas follows suit by offering to open the safe without resorting to explosives which could destroy the money inside. Of course, Manco and Douglas' cover gets blown and they become the target of the one they've been trying to bring down.
It might be controversial to place "For a Few Dollars More" over "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," but it's a tighter, leaner film. Clint Eastwood's Manco and Lee Van Cleef's Douglas Mortimer make a delightfully uber-tough pair, and Gian Maria Volontè's El Indio is one of the most brutal villains in the western genre. From another spectacular Ennio Morricone score to Sergio Leone's perfect directing (which improved on his masterful style seen in "A Fistful of Dollars"), this film marks the high-water mark in the career of a true cinema virtuoso.
Read this next: The 20 Best Westerns Of All Time
The post Every Sergio Leone Movie Ranked Worst to Best appeared first on /Film.
(Welcome to The Daily Stream, an ongoing series in which the /Film team shares what they've been watching, why it's worth checking out, and where you can stream it.)
The Movie: "Honor Society"
Where You Can Stream It: Paramount+
The Pitch: With streaming services and giant studios crumbling before our very eyes, it's the perfect time to give some love to underappreciated streaming platforms and the movies they fail to properly promote but are great fun. Case in point: "Honor Society," a movie that quietly debuted on the platform without the parades and celebrations it deserved, and one of the best high school-set coming-of-age comedies in years.
The film stars Angourie Rice (the breakout performer in the phenomenal "The Nice Guys") as Honor. She is a high school overachiever with a Machiavellian grin that puts up a front in order to survive high school without anyone really knowing the real her, all while coming up with nefarious schemes in order to get enrolled in Harvard next year. All she wants is to get out of her small-town middle-class life with parents too busy to care about her — without realizing that her life doesn't suck and her parents are the coolest. More importantly, she wants to avoid the fate of many adults in her life that left town with big dreams only to come back with a crushed spirit and no future prospects.
The problem is that she needs a recommendation from a sleazy guidance counselor (a fantastic Christopher Mintz-Plasse), so she concocts a plan to distract the other three candidates enough that their grades drop. Of course, things get complicated when she falls for the brainiac Michael (Gaten Matarazzo), who she was supposed to manipulate into falling for her.
Though the film pays homage to classics of the high school genre both old and new, from "Election" and "Clueless," to "Easy A," the best parts of "Honor Society" have more in common with the excellent heist thriller "Bad Genius" and the horror slasher "Tragedy Girls." Both of these tell very effective genre stories that still comment on the high school experience, one with a very serious tone and life-or-death stakes, the other with tongue firmly in blood-covered cheek.
Honor may be seen as the perfect girl and the queen of high school, with an Instagram-ready room filled with posters of Billie Eilish and Beyoncé, a perfectly curated Instagram, and the most popular girls in school as her best friends. But even that is part of her elaborate heist for Honor to appear as if she was conforming to societal expectations. In reality, everything about Honor's life is fake. She despises her friends, whom she treats more like minions, and the only "real" thing in her room is an old but cherished copy of "The Handmaid's Tale."
"Honor Society" uses genre to tell a poignant story about the way we put up walls in high school, not letting anyone truly know us in fear of rejection. And when it comes to the caper elements, the film shines like a diamond hidden inside the most secure vault. Seeing Honor plan and execute her plan — with constant fourth wall breaks to let the audience in on the "real" her that she's been hiding for years — is a true delight. First, she sabotages the reclusive aspiring playwright Kennedy by convincing the drama club to stage her original play, which she knows will consume all her free time. Then, she pulls a "High School Musical" on athlete Travis and talks him into joining the school play with the hopes that he lets a secret side of him free.
"Honor Society" touches upon almost every high school and rom-com film trope imaginable, but it is a testament to the script that the film zigs whenever you expect it to zag. What starts as a caper film evolves into a rom-com, while never forgetting to be a "Brat Pack"-type movie where kids come of age and realize their passions and potential. At its core, the film is about expectations and societal roles, and much like "Booksmart," another high school movie that subverts genre tropes, it is all about realizing that people are more than meets the eye.
As for the caper plans, Honor may border on sadistic psycho for most of the film, but she never fully goes serial killer like the protagonists of "Tragedy Girls." Still, that doesn't mean she is fully sympathetic. The film rewards good actions, but it also hands down punishment to those who do wrong in karmically satisfying ways.
Read this next: 12 Shows Like Stranger Things You Definitely Need To Stream
The post The Daily Stream: Honor Society Mixes Caper Thrills With High School Drama appeared first on /Film.
It’s finally time to admit streaming apps and digital distribution have ruined most creative media industries, and maybe physical media was the right choice all along.
Modder “Stane” has released a brand new version of the Half-Life Source: Remastered Collection Mod Pack. This pack features numerous mods that aim to improve the graphics of Half-Life Source. Version 2.0 features the following new mods (alongside the ones that were present in its previous versions). Half-Life: Source Fixed High Quality HL1 Sounds AMMO … Continue reading Half-Life Source: Remastered V2 available for download →
The post Half-Life Source: Remastered V2 available for download appeared first on DSOGaming.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Note: this piece contains major spoilers for "Prey," so read at your own risk if you haven't seen it yet.
Just when you might have thought that the movie career of the Predator was over, "Prey" proved that the franchise can still produce some great scares and thrills. While it's a shame that audiences won't be able to see them in a theater, at least we've got another good "Predator" movie again, and this one comes with a very deep-cut continuity reference.
In order to explain why the pistol is such an important Easter egg, let's take a look at how Naru (Amber Midthunder) acquired it in the first place. After she and her brother Taabe (Dakota Beavers) survive being used as Predator bait by a group of French settlers, Naru encounters a translator she met earlier in the movie, credited as Waxed Mustache (Nelson Leis). He appears to be severely injured by the alien, offering her a gun in exchange for medicine. She reluctantly accepts his offer and is told how to use the gun as she's tending to his gashed leg — don't put too much or too little powder into the keg. However, it isn't long before the Predator returns to the French campsite, killing Waxed Mustache and leaving Naru with the gun. At the end of the movie, she gives it to her village elders, where its original owner of Raphael Adolini is revealed.
Raphael Adolini might not have been seen in "Prey," but that doesn't mean he's an unfamiliar name in the "Predator" universe. In the Dark Horse comic story "Predator: 1718," Adolini was introduced as a pirate captain whose ship is anchored in Guinea as he's dealing with a potential mutiny. Tensions quickly escalate, resulting in a full-blown battle between the captain and his crew.
In the distance, a Predator is found hunting for his next trophy and watches the battle. Wanting to eventually claim Adolini's death as its own, the creature decides to side with Adolini in the conflict, and the two end up fighting side-by-side despite their staggering differences in abilities. That is until the two almost begin to fight themselves before Adolini is shot by a hidden crew member. He dies of the gunshot wound and gives the Predator his engraved gun as a sign of respect. Needless to say, he sounds like a pretty cool dude outside of the normal pillaging that pirates were known to do.
However, the most significant appearance of the Adolini pistol happened far before the "1718" comic was even published. It first appeared in the most underrated "Predator" film, "Predator 2" (do not argue with me on this), in 1990. As one may recall, that movie took place over two centuries after the events of the comic in the "futuristic" war zone of 1997 Los Angeles.
After a cat-and-mouse chase through the city and many people getting killed along the way, it finally looks like LAPD Lieutenant Mike Harrigan (Danny Glover) is about to be defeated by the invading Predators. After all, groups of them are suddenly teleporting around him after he killed one of their own, nicknamed the City Hunter for the film and once again played by Kevin Peter Hall. However, what he wasn't expecting was for them to show not only mercy but respect for the cop. Instead of punishing him for killing one of their own kind, they instead give him a trophy as a sign of respect before returning to their spaceship. If you've been keeping up with what I've been dropping, then it isn't hard to see what form this trophy took.
However, the existence of the pistol does bring up an interesting plothole. The comic that the character of Adolini was developed in technically isn't canon, at least not anymore. When taking the comic into account, it's pretty implausible how Waxed Mustache was able to have the gun in the first place to give to Naru.
The Predator being given the gun by Adolini is all fine and good, but the problem is that there is no way that this origin for the gun can be possible now. Remember, "Prey" takes place in 1719, one year after the events of the one-shot. Thus, there is no logical way for the translator to have obtained the gun having no knowledge of the Predator's existence up until then. Sure, the series has never been a stickler for maintaining canon, but it's a weird mix-up given how it's a clear callback to an important part of the franchise.
Another place where things get tricky is how the Predators now even obtain the pistol in the first place. Well, the end credits to "Prey" could hint at it, but even the definitive nature of those is a bit confusing. As you might recall, the painting-inspired end credits to the new film end with Naru being celebrated by her village like how the movie itself ended. However, it then transitions into a painting version of what appears to be several Predator ships arriving on Earth.
There are two potential ways this could have turned out. The first is very bleak and sad, but also unfortunately likely; the rest of the Predators have located Earth and are ready to attack the rest of Naru's village. From there, the Predators could have easily taken the pistol for themselves. This would be a pretty upsetting ending, given how so much of the movie felt like an allegory to the horrors of American colonization, and this would seem like a significant step backward.
However, let's go back to "Predator 2" for a second. Remember when a group of Predators also came to surround Harrigan, only for them to pick up their dead comrade and leave? The same could very well have happened here, with the elders giving the Predators the pistol as a sign of respect instead, as why would they want to keep the gun given to them by colonizers?
"Prey" is now streaming on Hulu.
Read this next: Every Ridley Scott Movie Ranked From Worst To Best
The post The Significance of the Raphael Adolini Pistol in Prey Explained appeared first on /Film.
As a man of wide-ranging curiosity, Terry Pratchett was drawn to personal computers early. In 1981, he purchased a Sinclair ZX81 in kit form and soldered it together successfully. He soon upgraded to a Sinclair Spectrum and then to an Amstrad CPC 464, which was his first computer strong enough to run a practical word processor. From the second Discworld novel on, he wrote all of his books digitally; this was undoubtedly a factor in the prodigious writing and publishing pace he maintained for so many years. But computers were more than a tool to him: right from the beginning, he also played computer games enthusiastically. In a 1986 interview, for example, he mentions being obsessed with Infocom’s interactive version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
The first Discworld computer game came surprisingly quickly, courtesy of a teenage entrepreneur named Fergus McNeill and his little company Delta 4, who had made a name for themselves by writing slapstick fantasy parodies as Quill-based text adventures, with names like Bored of the Rings (which didn’t share anything but a name and a certain sensibility with the book of the same name) and The Boggit. While it would be a stretch to say that they transcended their author’s age and the technology used to create them, they were amusing in their way, and became quite popular. Some of them reportedly sold as many as 20,000 copies, a very impressive number in the British games industry of the mid-1980s. They made McNeill a natural to adapt Terry Pratchett to an interactive medium, given that the latter’s first couple of Discworld novels were content to plow much the same satirical territory, albeit in a more erudite and sophisticated way.
The Boggit contains its share of literal toilet humor.
McNeill says that he originally bought the novel The Colour of Magic “as a present for someone else, but I accidentally started reading it myself and found myself unable to stop.” It was he who suggested an adaptation to Pratchett’s publisher, to capitalize on the British appetite for bookware. “It’s important to remember that this was Olden Times — the 1980s, for goodness sake,” he says. “So, when I said ‘Terry Pratchett,’ people didn’t laugh at my audacity for wanting to work with the great man. They frowned and said, “Who’s he?'”
Thus McNeill was able to make the deal, and created his Colour of Magic text adventure in short order, with some direct input from Pratchett himself. The end result, which was released in late 1986 in Britain and Europe only, is an abbreviated version of the novel, walking through its plot scene by scene. Solving it entails looking up what Rincewind did in the same situation in the book, then figuring out how to express the concept to the balky, fiddly parser. Those who have read the book, in other words, will vacillate between boredom and frustration, while those who haven’t will be utterly lost. Even in its day, when a disconcerting number of players were willing to accept fighting the parser as an inherent part of the challenge of playing a text adventure, the game was less popular than its license might suggest.
The Colour of Magic replaces the standard text-adventure compass directions with those of the Disc: “hubward,” “rimward,” “turnwise,” and “widdershins.” One plus for verisimilitude, but ten minuses for annoying the heck out of the player.
McNeill speaks of his communications with Pratchett fondly, going so far as to call him “a big inspiration for me,” whilst calling being allowed to make the game at all “a huge privilege.” Yet Pratchett was enough of a gamer himself to recognize how underwhelming the final product really was. In his view, it cheapened the Discworld brand, of which he was always keenly protective; he would refer to the interactive Colour of Magic only as a “bad experience” in later years. It was enough to make him shy away from further game adaptations for quite some time, despite his personal fondness for computers and the games they played. It wasn’t until mid-1993, when Discworld mania was in full swing, that someone managed to convince Pratchett to give the idea of ludic Discworld a second chance.
Actually, there were two someones, the first of whom was one Angela Sutherland, who had gotten her start in the games industry back in 1983. She had been studying to become a sculptor at that time at the Edinburgh College of Art, when a fellow student and good friend named Sandy White had showed her a simple action game called Ant Attack which he had been writing on his Sinclair Spectrum. She helped him to flesh it out and get it published, whereupon it became one of the big early hits on the Speccy. Sutherland worked with White on several more games after that, moved on to become head of development for Firebird and Rainbird, and then became a producer for the British division of Beam Software, the Australian software house famous for The Hobbit, probably the best-selling text adventure of all time (and the thing which Fergus McNeill’s early games were really parodying, at least as much as Tolkien’s books).
Seeing an opportunity in the market, she left Beam and founded her own studio, Teeny Weeny Games, in 1991. Its name reflected its focus: games for handheld systems like the Nintendo Game Boy. Such gadgets were not yet hugely popular among consumers in her home country, but the average British wage was lower than that of the average American or Japanese, making a British studio such as the one she was setting up a good option for big publishers looking to get a product onto the international market quickly and fairly inexpensively, but also competently. So, Teeny Weeny cut their teeth on playable but forgettable licensed fare and ports. For all that it was the games industry’s version of flyover country, this was also a space where a pragmatist like Sutherland could do very well for herself. These sorts of projects would remain the studio’s bread and butter throughout its lifetime.
Teeny Weeny enjoyed an unusual symbiotic relationship with another studio called Perfect 10 Productions, founded at almost the same time by Gregg Barnett, a former colleague of Sutherland from Beam. Perfect 10 had much the same business philosophy as Teeny Weeny, but focused on the full-sized console systems; this created an opportunity for the two developers to collaborate in order to bring the same game out on living-room and handheld consoles. And indeed, they came to share code, assets, strategies, and even office space and to some extent employees with one another, until it became difficult for the outside observer to see where one stopped and the other began.
Thus it was Sutherland and Barnett together who made the pitch to Terry Pratchett for a Discworld adventure game. It seems that their pragmatism had served to conceal a streak of more ambitious creativity, a desire to make something more exciting than the games that were currently keeping the lights on in their offices. But at the same time, they were still hard-nosed enough to appreciate the value of licenses — particularly a license of the biggest literary phenomenon in Britain, a series of novels which Sutherland and Barnett happened to adore, just like millions of their countryfolk.
Angela Sutherland, Terry Pratchett, and… Death.
Pratchett, however, was not easy to convince. It took six months of tireless courting, and ultimately the presentation of a complete design document written by Barnett himself, to get him to say yes. “The main reason he signed,” says Barnett, “was that we did a design, which showed we were willing to put in the work without any initial reward, and that we understood and respected the property.” Sutherland and Barnett promised Pratchett that they would wash away the bad taste of the Colour of Magic text adventure by sparing no expense or effort this time around. They would make a fully-voiced point-and-click graphic adventure for the latest CD-ROM-capable personal computers, one that was as good or better than any of the big titles coming out of the United States.
In fact, the Discworld game almost came out under one of those American publishers’ imprint. Using their international connections to maximum advantage, Sutherland and Barnett signed a deal with Sierra, along with LucasArts one of the two biggest names of all in adventure gaming. The agreement would let them make their game using that company’s state-of-the-art SCI engine, with the support of some Sierra personnel who would temporarily relocate to the project’s South London headquarters. But the American publisher didn’t quite seem to grasp what a huge license Discworld really was on the other side of the Atlantic. Bleeding money from their visionary but unprofitable online gaming space The Sierra Network, they backed out of the deal. Talks with the American giant Electronic Arts also fell through, whereupon Sutherland and Barnett finally signed with the homegrown publisher Psygnosis, best known for the global hit Lemmings, the most popular British-developed videogame prior to the Grand Theft Auto franchise many years later. By virtue of their location at Ground Zero of Discworld mania, Psygnosis knew very well how big a Discworld game could be, such that they had already tried without success to pitch the idea directly to the wary Pratchett. At their first meeting with Sutherland and Barnett, they became the suitor rather than the courted: they “wouldn’t leave until we did a deal,” says Barnett.
Pratchett himself was if anything even more into games now than he had been during the previous decade. For a man who had grown up in a house without electricity or an indoor toilet, the games of the 1990s were nothing short of wondrous. “I play games a lot — and I mean a lot,” he said in a contemporary interview. “Sitting in front of a screen writing, you need some relaxation, and what better way than to load in something like Wing Commander, which is one of my faves. One of the nice things about making lots of money from books is that I can go down to the local Virgin Store and buy what I want!” This habit, combined with his protectiveness of Discworld as a property, ensured that he would take a healthy interest in the Discworld game. He went so far as to rewrite some of Gregg Barnett’s dialog.
Barnett’s script borrows heavily from Pratchett’s 1989 novel Guards! Guards!. Given how close Watch Commander Sam Vimes, its protagonist, was to his creator’s heart, it must have rankled Pratchett a bit when Barnett elected to write him out of the story, replacing him with Rincewind as chief investigator and player’s avatar. Ditto when Barnett cut out most of the novel’s serious subtext, leaving behind only the gags, jokes, and tropes. And double ditto when the game’s developers eventually cast Eric Idle of Monty Python — a part of the archly absurdist Oxbridge comedy tradition that also included the likes of Douglas Adams, and to which Pratchett did not see Discworld as belonging — to voice the part of Rincewind.
Yet Pratchett was also a reasonable man with a good grasp of what it took to sell creative product, and he could see the logic behind each of Barnett’s decisions. Rincewind was still the series’s most well-known character at this stage in its evolution; serious themes are even harder to bring off in a comic adventure game than they are in a comic novel; and the casting of a real live member of Monty Python in any game was a tremendous coup, even if Eric Idle wasn’t Barnett’s first choice of John Cleese. (According to Barnett, “Fuck off! I don’t do games,” was the latter’s response to his inquiry…) The finished game does absorb some of the flavor of Monty Python — Barnett admits to making the onscreen Rincewind into something of a doppelgänger of Idle’s typically disheveled Python personae — but the combination works. I dare you to try to read a Discworld novel that stars Rincewind after playing this game without hearing Idle’s voice in your head.
The voice-acting cast was rounded out with some other enviable comedic talents: Tony Robinson, Blackadder’s perpetual sidekick; Kate Robbins of Spitting Image; Jon Pertwee, the third incarnation of Doctor Who; and Rob Brydon, a relative newcomer with a prolific career still in front of him (international audiences may know him best today for starring in the very funny Trip series of travel mockumentaries). The only problem with the cast is that there just aren’t enough of them, meaning that everyone with the exception of Idle is juggling many roles, a fact which mugging and accent-switching can’t completely obscure. Still, if one must settle for a cast of less than half a dozen, one couldn’t do much better these actors. It’s a pleasure to listen to the game’s collection of skittish, skeevy, occasionally lovable characters, every single one of them more or less off their nut, prattle on about nothing much in particular. “Is this fish fresh?” Rincewind asks a fishmonger. “Fresh? Fresh?” he replies. “It just made a pass at my wife, sir!”
The game’s visuals are equally distinctive. Under the direction of veteran artist Paul Mitchell, the metropolis of Ankh-Morpork, where the entire game takes place, becomes a Disney film as viewed by a cock-eyed drunk: everything is subtly warped and shifted, with nary a straight line to be seen (or heard, for that matter). Rincewind shuffles from location to location in his bedraggled wizard’s robes, looking like he would rather be anywhere else. (Maybe that’s understandable, given that every other character in the game asks him why he’s wearing a “dress.”) He’s trailed all the time by The Luggage, an inexplicably sentient suitcase with the legs of a centipede, the disposition of a pit bull, and the teeth of a bear trap; this movable feast serves as the means of conveyance of the incredible amount of stuff Rincewind will eventually collect and tote through the city.
As in the novel Guards! Guards!, the plot hinges on a fire-breathing dragon which a cabal of less-than-upstanding Ankh-Morpork citizens have summoned. Thwarting the monster and its minions requires playing through three lengthy, non-linear acts, followed by the climactic showdown with the dragon. Two of the main acts are scavenger hunts: find the five ridiculous things that are needed to build a Dragon’s Lair Revealer; steal the six golden talismans from the dragon-summoning cabal. We’ve all been here before — as has Rincewind apparently, judging from the scorn he is constantly heaping on the whole enterprise. Many adventure games use this sort of self-referential humor as a lazy excuse for derivative, uninspired design, and perhaps Discworld cannot be fully absolved of this sin. It does, however, have the virtue of being much, much funnier than the vast majority of such exercises. And, given that it’s meant to evoke the aesthetic of the early Discworld novels, which lampooned the conventions of paperback fantasy fiction in a similar way, the sin is venal rather than mortal.
Still, the game’s satire is at its best when it aims slightly higher in a meta-fictional sense. The point of the third act is to manipulate circumstances so that Rincewind will have exactly a million-to-one chance against the dragon. Because, as Terry Pratchett himself once put it, “we know — it is built into our very understanding of the narrative universe — that if it is a million-to-one chance that might just work, it will work. Because no one has ever heard of a million-to-one chance that just might work not working. In other words, a million-to-one chance is a certainty. It’s a cliché that we accept. We accept it from James Bond and from Bilbo Baggins.”
Josh Kirby, Terry Pratchett’s longtime cover illustrator, provided the art for the Discworld game box as well.
Rincewind with the Luggage.
Unseen University, where Rincewind has been studying without any obvious benefit to himself or society for years and years.
Death makes a cameo in the first Discworld graphic adventure. He will take a starring role in the second.
“A wizard’s staff has a knob on the end of it…”
Released in Britain in early 1995 under the name of simply Discworld, the game was praised to the skies by reviewer after reviewer. PC Zone magazine wasn’t that much of an outlier in calling it “possibly the best point-and-click adventure game ever made.” Everyone marveled over the graphics, the voice acting, and the humor, declaring that it really was like seeing the world of the novels come to life. Most of all, though, they marveled over the sheer size of the thing. They noted, accurately, that each of the game’s first three acts could easily have been a standalone game in its own right. It was and remains abundantly obvious that the people who made this game did so for all the right reasons, that they genuinely loved Anhk-Morpork and wanted to shove as much of it as possible onto a CD.
Unfortunately, these same people had never actually made an adventure game before. And, once the initial euphoria died down, players could all too plainly see this too in the finished product. It is — or at least ought to be — a truism in adventure design that every puzzle you make is ten times harder than you think it is. The only way to calibrate your game’s difficulty is to put it in front of real players and see how much they struggle. Sadly, it is all too clear that the people who made this game failed to do that in the midst of their zeal to keep adding more, more, more to it.
Discworld is for all intents and purposes insoluble. There is simply no way to reason out many of its puzzles; this is where the cockamamie nature of the world comes back to bite. The designers have paid no heed to what Bob Bates calls the “else” rule of good puzzle design. It states that, if the player has not done the correct thing, but she has done some other thing that might make some degree of logical or comedic sense, the game should recognize and acknowledge that in some way, ideally whilst embedding within its response a hint as to the correct way forward. In this game, though, everything you try to do that isn’t the One True Way Forward is met only by a scornful Eric Idle telling you, “That doesn’t work!” This is the one quote from Discworld that absolutely everyone remembers. Long before you finish the first act, it will have begun to haunt your very dreams, will pop back into your head to enrage you at random moments throughout your day. And just to ensure that you get to hear it even more often than you otherwise might, the game is littered with red herrings that have no purpose whatsoever.
To sum up, then, we have a huge environment to wander around in, one which provides no shortcuts to get from place to place, just Rincewind’s lackadaisical stroll; an enormous pile of objects, many of which are literally good for nothing; puzzles whose solutions are amusing in retrospect but cannot possibly be anticipated before the fact; and no middle ground between wrong and right when it comes to solving them, to provide useful feedback or at least some small dollop of amusement. Oh, and there are also dead ends that you can stumble into without realizing it, after which you’ll get to spend hours banging your head against brick walls even more fruitlessly than usual. As a piece of game design, Discworld is hopeless.
When the game came out in the United States several weeks after its British release, the reviewers there were clearer-eyed, being carried away with neither excitement over the very existence of a Discworld game nor home-country partisanship. Computer Gaming World magazine wrote that “the overall impression the game conveys is not one of richness but one of clutter and surfeit.” It sold in only middling numbers in the American market.
But that was not the case in Britain and much of Europe. There the game sold hundreds of thousands of copies before second takes started to appear in the gaming press and on the Internet, noting belatedly that labeling it “best adventure game of all time” may have been laying it on a bit thick. Needless to say, it was full speed ahead on the sequel.
Before starting on it in earnest, Angela Sutherland and Gregg Barnett finally did the logical thing and merged their two companies together as Perfect Entertainment. The new entity continued to devote the preponderance of its effort to workaday projects for the console market, but the connections forged thereby brought more than financial benefits to the passion projects: both Discworld and its sequel would be ported to the Sony PlayStation and the Sega Saturn, opening up whole new worlds of potential sales. (Their publisher Psygnosis had in fact been bought by Sony in 1993.)
If the first Discworld game is a sad story of good intentions and soaring ambitions derailed by a lack of experience with the nuts and bolts of adventure design, Discworld II: Missing, Presumed…!? is a happier tale of a development team willing and able to learn from their failures — a less common phenomenon than one might expect in the world of adventure games. It doesn’t so much try to break new ground as to perfect the experience which Perfect Entertainment had attempted to deliver last time around. And it succeeds on these terms rather magnificently. Right from the first page of the manual, where they promise that this Discworld game is “a little easier,” the makers make it clear that they understand what they did wrong last time.
Interestingly, Pratchett was less involved with the sequel. “I let them have their heads a bit more,” he said after its release. “It seemed that they could create a game that had the right kind of feel to it, so I didn’t have to shepherd them so much. There wasn’t quite so much shouting this time around.”
Once again the broad plot is lifted from a beloved Discworld novel: this time it’s 1991’s Reaper Man, in which Death leaves job and retires to the countryside, with chaotic results for the whole Disc. As in the last game, matters are rejiggered to insert Rincewind into the story as the protagonist, while space is also made for elements of the 1990 Discworld novel Moving Pictures, an entertaining if not particularly deep pastiche of old Hollywood (“Holy Wood” on the Disc), with motion-picture cameras which consist of fast-painting imps trapped inside windowed boxes.
The second game is another joy to listen to; Eric Idle agreed to return, as did Kate Robbins and Rob Brydon. Tony Robinson elected not to, however, while the elderly Jon Pertwee was too ill to participate. (He died in May of 1996, leaving Discworld I as one of his last media legacies.) To take up some of the slack, Perfect hired Nigel Planer, another stalwart comedy veteran, who would go on to narrate almost all of the audio-book versions of the Discworld novels. Barnett tried to recruit Christopher Lee for the role of Death — an inspired choice by any standard — but Perfect couldn’t afford his asking price in the end. So, Rob Brydon took the role instead, and did very well with it, bringing out the mix of fussiness, petulance, and compassion that has since made Death arguably the most popular Discworld character of all time. On the whole, then, the voice acting in Discworld II is on a level with that of the first game — including, alas, the same major weakness of there just not being enough different actors. Kate Robbins, for example, voices every single female character in both games, and most of the children to boot.
The truly striking change from the first game to the second is the look of the production; the difference here is truly night and day. The switchover in the mid-1990s from the VGA graphics standard, with a typical resolution of 320 X 200, to SVGA, with a resolution of 640 X 480 or more, strikes me as the second of the two most dramatic inflection points in the history of computer-game graphics. (The first, for the record, is the arrival of the Commodore Amiga in the mid-1980s, followed soon after by VGA on MS-DOS machines.) The first and second Discworld graphic adventures stand on either side of the VGA/SVGA Rubicon, which divides games that look undeniably old today from those that can at least potentially still look quite contemporary. I would place Discworld II among this group without hesitation.
The higher resolution allowed Perfect to outsource the animation to Hanna-Barbera’s studio in the Philippines, a decision which would have made no sense under the constraints of VGA. Characters and backgrounds that looked a bit muddy and blurry in the first game pop on the screen in sharp, vivid cartoon colors this time around. Meanwhile the static views of the first game are replaced by fades, pans, and close-ups; it’s like going from the typical 1930s film to Citizen Kane.
Most importantly of all, Discworld II plays better. We have the same three-act structure as last time, with all of the acts no more than scavenger hunts at bottom. But this time we get to venture beyond Ankh-Morpork to other locations on the Disc. Counterintuitively with this last, the game as a whole is a bit smaller — and yet this is by no means a bad thing. The combinatorial explosion is much reduced, thanks to fewer locations, fewer objects, almost no red herrings, an absence of dead ends, and a much more concentrated effort to calibrate the puzzles to that sweet spot which lies equidistant from the trivial and the impossible. Discworld II isn’t an easy game; its puzzle-dependency chains are sometimes nested a dozen layers deep. Yet it is a soluble one, with puzzles that make a modicum of sense on the vast majority of occasions. Rincewind even deigns to say something other than “That doesn’t work!” some of the time when you try something that, well, doesn’t work. And the world of the game is even more of a delight than last time just to explore, being stuffed to the brim with eccentric characters and curious sights. Meaty, funny, generous, and yet unabashedly traditionalist, it succeeds in actually being everything its predecessor tried but failed to be.
Josh Kirby again provided the cover art for Discworld II.
On a “Holy Wood” set, complete with troll security for the actors’ trailers.
You can move around on a larger world map this time. Notice the Luggage swimming behind Rincewind’s ship.
Visiting Death’s home, which is as Gothic chic as a Bauhaus song.
Oh, my, what’s happened here? In one of the best gags in a game that delights in pulverizing the fourth wall at every opportunity, Rincewind 2.0 gets transported for a few minutes back into the world of Discworld I, where he meets his low-res counterpart.
Thanks to already-built tools and the outsourcing of the animation, Perfect Entertainment was able to finish their second Discworld game in less than eighteen months, and Psygnosis released it in late 1996. By this time the adventure market in the United States was showing undeniable signs of mushiness, but it was still holding up comparatively well in Britain and Germany; Broken Sword, another homegrown British production from Revolution Software, would be a substantial hit that holiday season. Still, a sense of gloom was creeping in even on this side of the Atlantic. Discworld II testifies to this with a considerable amount of gallows humor about its genre. “Aren’t you gonna miss it when they stop making these games?” says Rincewind at one point.
Discworld II did reasonably well in the friendliest markets, but not as well as the first game. And it again made even less of an impact in the United States, despite a gushing review from Scorpia, Computer Gaming World‘s long-tenured, infamously cantankerous adventure columnist. “It’s been too long since I could unreservedly recommend a game,” she wrote. “I can do it now.”
Between its computer and console versions, Discworld II sold just well enough to justify one more game. This would be a brave effort which eschewed the low-hanging fruit of cartoon comedy in favor of a dramatically different direction, enough so as to justify comparisons with Equal Rites, the Terry Pratchett novel which proved that the literary Discworld was more than just a fantasy version of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. We’ll turn to that final Discworld computer game to date, as well as the later years in Pratchett’s life and literary career, in due course, in another article.
For now, though, let me echo Scorpia’s unreserved endorsement of Discworld II. Its predecessor is an interesting but badly flawed creation, best left for hardcore fans of Rincewind who are willing to play with a walkthrough by their side, but the sequel deserves to be better remembered today as the minor classic it is. It represents the Discworld comedy game perfected.
(Sources: the books The Magic of Terry Pratchett by Marc Burrows and Terry Pratchett’s Discworld: The Official Strategy Guide by Glen Eldridge; Starlog of August 1990; CD-ROM Today of April 1995; Computer Gamer of January 1987; Computer Gaming World of June 1995 and May 1997; Computer and Video Games of September 1986; Electronic Entertainment of July 1995; GameFan of September 1997; Next Generation of August 1997; PC Zone of January 1995, August 1996, November 1996, and May 1999; PC Powerplay of November 1996 and July 1997; Sinclair User of December 1986; The One of September 1993; Retro Gamer 94 and 164.
None of the Discworld game are available for legal purchase today, doubtless due to complications with the literary license. Thankfully, Perfect Entertainment’s Discworld and Discworld II are available in ready-to-play Windows versions on The Collection Chamber. Mac and Linux users can import the data files there into their computer’s version of ScummVM.)
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When you think of the movie "Misery," one terrifying scene likely comes to mind. It's the scene when Annie, the deranged captor and "biggest fan" of historical romance novelist Paul Sheldon (James Caan), violently prevents him from trying to escape. Kathy Bates' performance is utterly chilling as her honeyed voice details a practice in African diamond mines called "hobbling" that stopped workers from running away with the jewels. As she cooly explains the brutal ritual, director Rob Reiner heightens the tension by gradually pulling in closer and closer to Paul's anguished face and Annie's calculating sneer. Against the eerily calm background music of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata," Annie gently reassures Paul that what she is about to do is for the best, then swings a sledgehammer and viciously breaks his ankles.
The harrowing scene is quite different in Stephen King's novel version. In the book, Annie cuts off Paul's foot with an axe and cauterizes the stump with a blowtorch, and later cuts off his thumb. Screenwriter William Goldman was excited about bringing this to life on screen, but he would soon discover that not everyone working on "Misery" felt the same way about the nightmarish sequence.
George Roy Hill was set to direct "Misery" but abruptly pulled out because of the hobbling scene. "I was up all night. And I just could not hear myself saying, 'Action!' on that scene," Hill said according to Goldman's book "Which Lie Did I Tell? More Adventures in the Screen Trade." Hill was not the only one who opposed the scene; Bette Midler turned down the role of Annie because she "didn't want to saw off someone's foot" (via The New York Times). Warren Beatty was interested in playing Paul, but he was concerned about the hobbling scene and its effect on the character: "Beatty's point was this: He had no trouble losing his feet at the ankles, but know that if you did that the guy would be crippled for life and would be a loser," Goldman writes.
All of this resistance forced Goldman and Reiner to question how closely they should follow the novel. Reiner polled everyone at his production company Castle Rock about whether or not they should change the gruesome scene. Eventually, Reiner and producer Andrew Scheinman re-wrote the script without Goldman. They sanitized King's version by having Paul suffer two broken ankles instead of a chopped off foot. By the end of the film, Paul regains enough mobility to murder his abductor, bashing Annie's head with a typewriter and one of her beloved pig statues.
In the DVD commentary (via Yahoo!), Reiner explains his decision to alter the scary hobbling scene:
"We wanted Paul Sheldon at the end of this movie to emerge victorious over Annie Wilkes, and if he wound up without a foot ... then he maybe paid too high a price for that. Most of the people who have seen this movie say it was pretty darn painful to look at, so I don't think we compromised it too much."
According to his book, Goldman was initially devastated by the changes but came to appreciate them:
"I was wrong. It became instantly clear when we screened the movie. What they had done ... worked wonderfully and was absolutely horrific enough. If we had gone the way I wanted, it would have been too much. The audience would have hated Annie and, in time, hated us."
The ankle-breaking allowed "Misery" to have a more uplifting ending where Paul emerges a hero and Annie is never able to truly best him. It is easier for Paul to put the horrifying ordeal behind him, rather than live with a grim reminder for the rest of his life.
Keeping King's version of the scene could have made it harder for audiences to see Annie as anything but a malevolent villain, unable to empathize with the broken woman inside — her deep loneliness and delusion. Bates was not afraid to highlight Annie's evilness, telling Access Hollywood, "I always really thought that Annie should have cut his foot off." But hobbling is such a strange, sinister act of violence that it still makes for a cringe-worthy and unforgettable scene.
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The post Misery's Most Famous Scene Cost The Film Its First Director appeared first on /Film.
After winning over horror hounds' hearts by being the cheekiest and creepiest horror host in town, Elvira moved into the world of comics in 1986 with DC's "Elvira's House of Mystery #1." Like her stage and television persona, Elvira's comic character hosted DC's spooky tales. However, she didn't see much of the campy action until the character found a new home with Claypool Comics in 1993. Debuting shortly after Elvira's first film, "Elvira: The Mistress of the Dark," hit theaters, the "Elvira: Mistress of the Dark" comic series finally let the Queen of Halloween play a pivotal part in her title, facing off against monsters, giant ant aliens, and even the dreaded telemarketer. Legendary comic artists, like Nightcrawler co-creator Dave Cockrum, brought Elvira's stories to life. Notoriously, these creepy tales have been difficult to find -- especially after Claypool Comics stopped printing operations in 2006.
Thankfully, Dynamite Entertainment resurrected these tales by re-releasing them into a two-part omnibus collection titled "Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, The Classic Years." The first crowd-funded book came out in 2021, and now its second book, "Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, The Classic Years Vol. 2," has launched its crowdfunding campaign. In celebration of Elvira's comics rising from the grave, I chatted with Cassandra Peterson about Elvira's 40-years of adventures and how it feels to see her character kicking butt in comics.
Decade after decade, Peterson has protected and grown her dynamo persona into a celebrated icon for our queer horror community. After starring in a Shudder special, rereleasing her classic '90s comics, coming out in a poignant and vulnerable memoir, and landing a starring role in Rob Zombie's upcoming "The Munsters" film in just over a year (!), it's clear that neither Elvira nor Cassandra are slowing down anytime soon. And I learned there's a chance that the actor and persona might be co-starring together soon.
Elvira first appeared in the world of comics underneath DC Comics. At that time, she was definitely more Elvira, the horror host. When Claypool came around in the '90s, the Elvira comic character became the star of her sci-fi and horror adventures, all while looking fantastic --
[laughs]
-- which is also incredibly important for Elvira! I would love to know how it felt to see her starring in her own comic for the first time.
Yeah. It was awesome because I grew up being a comic book nerd. I was really into Superman when I was a little kid and then later, sorry to say, Archie and Veronica -- just before puberty hit. [laughs] I loved comic books. So the fact that I could be in a comic book was pretty damn thrilling for me.
The Claypool comics came a couple years after your feature film "Elvira: Mistress of the Dark." After writing and starring in that film, how did it inspire what things you wanted Elvira to take on in the comic world that maybe she couldn't do in a movie form? The scale is so different.
The great thing about comic books is you have all the budget in the world. In the film, of course, we had a fairly low budget by industry standards and our special effects weren't that special. Let's just put it that way, because we didn't have the money for it. But we had to develop the character a lot for the movie because prior to that, she had only been hosting horror movies. She'd mentioned a few little glimpses into her life, like that she had a macabre mobile. We didn't know what it looked like or anything. Nobody knew what she was, where she came from, why she looked the way she did. So that all had to be developed for the movie, and that was a really fantastic launching pad for all the comics that came after that.
There was a Marvel comic book of the movie right when it came out, and that pretty much set out the storyline. But then after that, with comic books and animation, you're able to go to the moon. You're able to go to hell. You're able to go and do anything you want. So it opens up such an incredible world. Like I said, it doesn't cost any money to turn Elvira into a rat [laughs] or anything you might want.
Throughout the decades of Elvira's comics, have there been any moments where you're like, "Take that, CGI! I dare you to try this on-screen"?
[laughs] Oh gosh. Well, I think one of my favorites was when Elvira went to Dante's "Inferno" in "Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, Elvira's Inferno." I did go to hell. I met up with Divine and a lot of different characters. That was really fun, because I had this idea, if Elvira Mistress of the Dark would've gone into a series of movies -- which was the plan in the beginning, like the Ernest movies. I don't know if you're familiar with those?
Yeah!
Yeah, we wanted to continue it. The next movie we had lined up, we wanted to call it "Elvira Goes To Hell." When that issue came out, it was really fun for me because it was like seeing that idea that I never got to do, only done with lots of things I could have never afforded to anyway.
These days, the connections between comics and movies are so interesting. Aside from the MCU, DC Horror did a comic that tied-in to "The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It." Would you ever consider doing a tie-in comic to an upcoming feature film? Would that be something that you would love to do?
Well, we're actually ... I probably can't get into the details. [laughs]
[laughs] We'll skirt around it...
But we've been talking about a graphic novel that is a tie-in with a project I've done recently. And it's very exciting, but unfortunately I don't think I'm supposed to really talk about it until it's progressed along a little bit.
Well, it's fantastic to hear it's coming along!
Yeah, it's a good idea...
In a lot of interviews, you've talked about how artists and writers take on Elvira's character in comics -- and what a character! She's sassy. She's a dynamo. She's basically a drag queen and a horror hostess monster slayer all-in-one!
True. Exactly. That's great. I think you hit the nail on the head there.
You've talked about how you never want to see Elvira cooking dinner. That's not something we want to see in the comic world. Is there anything else you want to steer your character away from doing?
Changing baby diapers -- no. No.
So no domestic duties! [laughs] Anything else?
Pretty much, no. Elvira could do almost anything.
After I did my first movie, we decided Elvira can be anywhere, any time, any century, any time period, whatever. When we did the followup movie, which was "Elvira's Haunted Hills," we decided to put her in the 1800s in Romania. I still don't think it worked as well. Elvira works when she is a fish-out-of-water. When she was in the first movie juxtaposed against the super straight, morally ... whatever the word, I don't know what it is. But when she's up against that, that's when the fun ensues. When you put her in the element of...
Gothic horror?
Yeah, yeah, and all of sudden, there's not as many laughs. There's not as many jokes.
But the nice thing is, with the comic books, she can go in and out of that stuff real quickly, wind through this century, that century, this movie, that movie, and it's always changing. So it doesn't get into that aspect where she's just in a dark and gloomy castle trying to be the Addams family. So I think she just does work better when she's juxtaposed against the normal world a little bit.
I wanted to bring up Dynamite Entertainment's "Death of Elvira" comic. This is a bit of a spoiler, but it gives us a Cassandra Peterson cameo! It was great seeing you on page alongside the persona you created. Do you ever imagine furthering that with writer David Avallone? I loved seeing that!
Oh, well, thank you. That's an interesting idea. So, the project we're working on has little elements of that ... possibly. So, that might be something that is going to be coming up, but again, I can't really get into it. [laughs] I'm sorry.
You've hosted so many horror films over the years. Are there any older films that you never got to cover that you'd like to? Or newer ones? It was great to see the horror host come out again in "Elvira's Very Scary, Very Special Special" this past Halloween season on Shudder.
You know, I hate to tell you, but I think I've tackled every damn old movie that ever lived. [laughs] Man, I'm not sure there are any left that I haven't done.
The new movies, I enjoy them, but they're not as easy to host because they're too good. Back in the day, there was a lack of budget, but there was also this naivety that people just weren't hip to all this stuff that was going on -- giant leeches and all that. It wouldn't really play now, except for camp purposes. The new horror movies are really, really difficult for me to host, doing what I do -- making fun of them. When they're too good, you certainly can't make fun of them because everybody says, "What are you talking about? That looks great." So, yeah, that's a difficulty. For me and my line of work, I need really old cruddy movies.
As someone who has a background in stage shows, burlesque, drag, singing, and has worked with the likes of Peaches Christ, do you have any advice for either fellow drag queens or queer stage performers that you wish someone would have told you earlier? Whether it's about stage work, behind the scenes things, or just how to get up on the stage and do it every night?
Yeah. I would say pick a more comfortable outfit than I have. [laughs]
[laughs] The tassels aren't comfy?
'Cause you might be working in it for 40 years. [laughs] Start out with lower heels and less makeup and hair. That doesn't really play so well for drag queens. But man, that's 90 percent of the battle -- your look. Be very smart about the one you choose, because you will be doing it a lot. Elvira is 100 percent a drag queen. The only difference between me and a drag queen -- I always say this -- is that I don't have to tuck. Other than that, exactly the same. But I wish I wouldn't have started out with six inch heels. I wish they would've been sensible kitten heels or something.
Ghouls looking to find out how to purchase "Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, Classic Omnibus Vol. 2," can find out more information on the book's crowdfunding site.
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The post The Mistress of the Dark Discusses Resurrecting Elvira's Classic '90s Comics [Interview] appeared first on /Film.
One of the bigger "Star Trek"-related surprises to come out of the 2022 San Diego Comic Con was that the animated series "Star Trek: Lower Decks" (about to begin its third season on August 25) and the most recent "Trek" iteration "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" (which just concluded its first season) are going to have a crossover episode.
This is an odd notion for several reasons. For one, "Lower Decks" takes place in the mid 2380s -- after the events of "Star Trek: Voyager" and the "Next Generation" movies -- while "Strange New Worlds" takes place in the late 2250s, prior to the events of the original series. This, of course, would present no serious obstacles to "Star Trek" writers, who can easily open up a time portal or invent a temporal nexus where characters from all across history can meet; Kirk (William Shatner) and Picard (Patrick Stewart), while separated by 87 years, still managed to meet in "Star Trek: Generations."
Secondly, the two shows possess drastically different tones. "Strange New Worlds" is a straightforward, story-of-the-week, classically-bent "Star Trek" series about optimism and diplomacy. "Lower Decks" is a crass slapstick comedy show about the more demeaning jobs on a Starfleet vessel, and a crappy one at that. One is about clear-thinking, peerless commanders. The other is about shallow, scattered novices.
Thirdly, and most baffling for the cast, is how are the shows going to interact if one of them is animated? It turns out the "Lower Decks" voice cast will play themselves in live-action. But Anson Mount, who plays Captain Pike on "Strange New Worlds," initially thought it was going to be much different. He assumed it would be a "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" scenario.
For those unaware of one of the biggest hit films of 1988, Robert Zemeckis' "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" is a noir film set in 1947 in which the day's hottest cartoon stars lived in the real world, and were hired by studios as actors. The film features state-of-the-art technology that allowed cartoons to interact with the real world. Mount admitted his confusion during SDCC -- not only did he think he'd have to act with animated characters, but that they, like Mickey Mouse, would be tiny beings. He said:
"Oh, I thought it was going to be Roger Rabbit, I can tell you that. I was like, we're gonna have animated characters running around, following us around. How? Are they gonna be small, are they gonna be big? Then [showrunner] Akiva [Goldman]'s like, no no no no no no no, that's not what we're doing. And once they explained it to me I was like, 'Oh, that's actually kind of brilliant,' the way it's being done."
Celia Rose Gooding, who plays a young Uhura on "Strange New Worlds," addressed the tonal balance between the two shows, commenting that the comedy of "Lower Decks" is not necessarily meant to undercut the messaging and complexity of "Star Trek." Indeed, they complement one another. Gooding said:
"'Lower Decks,' I think something that's really special about that specific iteration of Trek compared to ours is that it's so comedic and light, and it has a way of making even incredibly high-stakes situations incredibly comedic and incredibly digestible. And when I heard that we were gonna collab with them I was super-duper excited, because that's probably one of my favorite new Trek shows, besides ours of course."
Gooding also talked about working with Jack Quaid and Tawny Newsome, who play ensigns Boimler and Mariner on "Lower Decks." Because their show is primarily a comedy, they brought a comedic sensibility with them to the bridge of the Enterprise. Gooding talked about how their looser attitudes toward "Star Trek" bled into the on-set tone on "Strange New Worlds." In a way, the visiting "animated" characters provided a relatively serious crew a chance to play the straight man. Gooding said:
"Yeah, it was incredibly exciting to read, and Tawny and Jack are both class acts and incredible comedians, and I think they gave all of us permission to show up to work in a way we haven't before. I didn't feel comfortable riffing and doing my own thing, and they showed up guns blazing and it was really awesome to work and collaborate with them."
The actual date and story of the "Lower Decks"/"Strange New World" crossover as not yet been announced, other than to say it will be part of the second "Strange New Worlds" season, set to be released in 2023. Also slated for release that year will be a fifth season of "Star Trek: Discovery," the third and final season of "Star Trek: Picard," and the back half of the first season of "Star Trek: Prodigy." Just bushels and bushels of Roddenberries.
Read this next: Every Star Trek Show And Movie In Chronological Order
The post Star Trek's Strange New Worlds/Lower Decks Crossover Caused Some Initial Confusion For The Cast appeared first on /Film.
It's time to howl at the moon again, with the announcements of the Paramount+ projects "Teen Wolf: The Movie" and the "Teen Wolf" spinoff series "Wolf Pack" from MTV Entertainment Studios off the ground. "Teen Wolf" premiered on MTV in 2011 and ran for six seasons. Now the story will continue, first with the film, and then the subsequent show. The recent panel at San Diego Comic-Con for "Teen Wolf: The Movie" included a surprise guest, according to Deadline's report from the event. "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" star Sarah Michelle Gellar appeared with movie and series writer/executive producer Jeff Davis, and stars Tyler Posey and Tyler Hoechlin to announce her "Wolf Pack" casting.
According to a tweet from Paramount+, "Teen Wolf: The Movie" will set up the new series, which is based on the books from author Edo van Belkom. There are four books in the run, including "Wolf Pack," "Lone Wolf," "Cry Wolf," and "Wolf Man."
Armani Jackson ("Chad") will play Everett, and Bella Shepard ("The Wilds") will play Blake, two teens that have their lives upended by a wildfire. Chloe Rose Robertson ("Wildflower") will play Luna, and Tyler Lawrence Gray ("KidCoin") is Harlan. (There are a whole lot of Tylers in the "Teen Wolf" universe, huh?) Gellar will play the role of arson investigator Kristin Ramsey, which Deadline calls, "a highly regarded expert in her field and no stranger to personal loss, brought in by authorities to catch the teenage arsonist who started a massive wildfire which may have also led to the reawakening of a supernatural predator terrorizing Los Angeles."
While Gellar is best known for her work on "Buffy" and her appearances on its spinoff series "Angel," she's also appeared in "The Crazy Ones" with Robin Williams, The CW's "Ringer," in which she played twin sisters, and voiced the role of Seventh Sister, one of the Inquisitors on "Star Wars: Rebels," leading fans to speculate on whether or not she'll appear in any upcoming live-action "Star Wars" series on Disney+.
As mentioned earlier, Jeff Davis will write and executive produce. Also executive producing "Wolf Pack" are Gellar, Jason Ensler, and Joe Genier and Mike Elliott from Capital Arts.
In addition to what Deadline reports, we can guess at a little more from the synopsis of the first book in the series:
"After a devastating forest fire, a ranger discovers a litter of wolf cubs. He and his wife soon learn that they are no ordinary wolves. They are both animal and human. Although the young ones try to fit into the human world, their true nature makes the challenges of being teenagers all the more difficult.When one of the pack is kidnapped, the others must draw on both sides of their nature -- human and wolf -- to find the cunning, the strength, and the courage it takes to rescue her."
Not having read the books, one could assume that Everett and Blake are the werewolves who have been trying to fit in, but that is just conjecture. Having Gellar as an arson investigator makes it seem like the fire happens when Everett and Blake are teens, perhaps making them suspects in the arson. Of course, with the frequency of California wildfires, there could have been one when they were children and one when they're teens.
There is no release date for "Wolf Pack," but it will premiere later this year on Paramount+ in the U.S., and internationally where available.
Read this next: Horror Movies That Even Horror Fans Could Hardly Finish
The post Wolf Pack: Everything We Know So Far About the Teen Wolf Spin-Off appeared first on /Film.
Barbarella and Zach Villa Talk Sex in HYPOCHONDRIAC
Hey, friends. Barbarella here after speaking with Zach Villa, the lead in HYPOCHONDRIAC, a horror film that peers at mental health treatment through a darkly comedic lens. Written and directed by Addison Heimann, the story takes an honest approach at how one deals with his own blossoming mental health issues amidst an assortment of personalities, who all may seem to have his interests at heart, but who perhaps don’t know the right ways to assist. I appreciate that the movie shows actual techniques used for panic attacks, but also parodies the professionals who occupy this world, all while showcasing the writer’s own experience with a breakdown he had years ago. Also starring Devon Graye, Madeline Zima, and Paget Brewster, the film just became available on demand and digital today.
Speaking with Zach Villa about the film was such an enjoyable experience, I genuinely felt like I could’ve easily had a three-hour conversation with him about a number of topics. When I spoke with his costar Paget and writer/director Addison earlier, both said how wonderful Zach was, but I didn’t grasp how completely on point those compliments were. He’s one of those people who’s made my list of those I’d love to take out for drinks if they ever came to Austin. In fact, Addison and Paget both made that list, too. I'm always up for conversations with great people. At any rate, check out our brief chat.
“What's up, Barb?”
Hey, Zach. Not a whole lot. How are you?
“I'm good.”
I'm going to jump in
Dan Trachtenberg's "Prey," set in 1719, stars indigenous actress Amber Midthunder as a young Comanche woman named Naru who is often rejected from her tribe's hunting excursions because of her sex. This, in spite of her acknowledged tracking skills and tremendous capability with a tomahawk. In the film's early scenes, Naru begins to find evidence that a strange, large animal -- something larger than a bear -- may be lurking in the woods, killing anyone who wanders too far out. The creature is, of course, a space alien (Dane DiLiegro) who has come to Earth to hunt the most sophisticated game it can find. "Prey" climaxes with a face-off between Naru and the alien wherein she manages to evade and outwit a creature three times her size.
Midthunder gives a compelling performance in "Prey," imbuing Naru a richness and personality that extends beyond general action movie badassery. She has a complex relationship with her brother Taabe (Dakota Beavers), and her confidence is so palpable that it comes as no surprise when other characters decide to listen to her and believe her claims. The film's careful pace and Midthunder's performance are its greatest strengths.
In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Midthunder said that finding a role like Naru wasn't the easiest thing in the world. The 25-year-old member of the Fort Peck Sioux Tribe was reportedly told by acting agencies that lightweight, kid-friendly performances should be more on her radar. Midthunder, aching to stretch as an actress, handily rejected the notion.
While Disney owns a sizeable portion of the current media landscape (Disney, for instance, owns Hulu, the service distributing "Prey"), the instruction to "do Disney" has a clear connotation. To "do Disney" is to make thematically simple, non-threatening, commercially viable, not-at-all-challenging family entertainment that requires only a certain amount of affability from its actors. It's not a call to involve yourself in emotionally harrowing tales of suffering or gory monster movies. Midthunder wanted to do the latter. Acting agencies, to her annoyance, encouraged the former. Said Midthunder:
"[Agencies] were like, 'Okay, you can go on the Disney Channel.' And I was like, 'No, no, no. That is a skill for a lot of people, but that's not a skill that I have. I want to cry. I want to feel horrible things through my art. I want to suffer!' And they were like, 'That's cute. Go do Disney.'"
"Prey," which belongs to the long-running "Predator" franchise that contains six previous chapters, is by no means "a Disney." Indeed, when Disney bought out the Fox library in 2019, there was some snickering that the famously family-friendly company now owned a string of popular, violent, R-rated movies. It's a relief that "Prey" is more in keeping with the spirit of the original 1987 "Predator" film than anything gentler, like what one might see out of their Marvel canon. Midthunder is able to depict desperation and fear, and commit acts of awesome violence. One cannot repeat the famous line "If it bleeds, we can kill it" unless one first makes the creature bleed. Which Midthunder does -- a lot.
Midthunder has been acting professionally since age 4, her first role being "Little Girl" in Paul Winters' 2001 film "The Homecoming of Jimmy Whitecloud." By the late 2000s, she could be seen in bit parts in notable indie and Hollywood productions. She appeared in "Hell or High Water," as well as the hit TV shows "Longmire" and "The Originals." In the Hollywood Reporter interview, Midthunder admits to feeling the shock of acting in her hometown of Santa Fe, and actually negotiating with Hollywood bigwigs, saying that "It felt like going from playing in your backyard to doing something in front of people for real, with real stakes and real consequences."
"Prey" was a great opportunity for her not just because of the visibility of appearing next to a Predator, but because of the film's respectful indigenous representation. She said of the script:
"You very rarely get good representation — good being accurate, respectful or something to be proud about ... This is the first time you get to see an Indigenous female action hero at the center of a film. That in and of itself is a really incredible statement."
Midthunder's career has been a typical Hollywood upward swing. Her talent and intensity has been noticed enough to get her involved in higher and higher profile projects, leading to a film like "Prey." Her next project will be the live-action adaptation of the hit cartoon show "Avatar: The Last Airbender," in which she will play Princess Yue.
If her career continues along the track it's been on, it won't be too much longer before Midthunder's is a household name. Given the caliber of her performance in "Prey," this is a fate the public could easily be at peace with.
Read this next: The 18 Best Action Movie Actors Ranked
The post Prey's Amber Midthunder Says She Was Told to 'Go Do Disney' While Pursuing Acting appeared first on /Film.
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The now venerable Nintendo Switch turned things around for the games company. Before the hybrid console appeared, the Wii U was languishing well in third place in the console wars and, after considerable pressure, the company was making its first steps into mobile gaming with Miitomo and Super Mario Run. Seven years on, Nintendo continues to sell millions of Switch units each year, with tweaks on the hardware formula introducing handheld-only models like the Switch Lite and a premium Switch with an OLED screen.
With an ever-growing game library of in-house games (Zelda, Mario, Kirby and more) and uncharacteristically strong third-party support, the console hits the sweet spot between casual and die-hard gamers. Over the years, the console has curated an incredibly strong collection of indie games, too. Whether you’ve had your Nintendo Switch for many years or you just bought one, there are plenty of great titles to try for the first time. We’ve collected our favorite Nintendo Switch games here, in a list we’re constantly reevaluating. And don’t worry if you have a Switch Lite — every game on the list is fully supported by all Switch models.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-21-best-nintendo-switch-games-in-2024-183005073.html?src=rss
