Tag: Zombie

Pinkie Watches: Zombie Land Saga Episode 3 – Dead Or Live Saga

Yo Little Lights!  It is time for me to watch anime again!  I don’t know yet how to incorporate other anime in my blogging routine, but I am actually creating a pretty big supply of blogs, so expect them to return soon! In what shape way or form will remain the question!  Today however we will continue with Zombie Land Saga!  I will react to it as I watch!  So let’s hope we will have a lot of fun like we did last week.

Idol Noises

The episode starts,  with another pretty delicious recap! I do like text density into something silly like this.   We hear more about the rap and like the episode we begin with another briefing of the manager. Which is about as annoying as you expect. He does give everyone an applause though so I don’t want to turn his head into mush as I kill him with my laser beams.. I just want to slap him in the face for shouting at Sakura like he does in the first five minutes, so she doesn’t get too full of herself after he complimented her.. that’s kinda cruel though!  Like giving a dog a biscuit for being a good boy and then shouting at it for eating the cookie quickly!  I don’t like it! He also scares number six.. whose name still doesn’t linger for me but perhaps as we go along!  

The plot of this episode seems to be a Guerilla Live. Which is like a Flash Mob..for Idol Girls.. where you don’t tell anyone what you are doing and just try to gather a crowd. It reminded me of that scene in Now You See Me 2 , where the Four Horsemen do a magic show in several locations in London, I love that movie!   Sakura is afraid the police might stop them but Saki waves her arm and tells her she won’t be scared of some pigs! Making all sorts of squishy rotting noises as her arm flails.. that is kind of a neat touch!  We also learn that Junko has experience as a Solo artist.. the manager insults her by calling her a loner.  Jeez… This guy!  

Luckily he isn’t too much in the next scene! I finally found out the name of my beloved number 6!   Lily!  So cute! The group trains together but has no direction so Lily tells them they need a leader.  Saki steps up and no one opposes her, and a name has to be chosen. Lily wants to name everyone after her while Saki wants a super edgy name!  I really like that when she screams her voice seems to make bike noises. Much like that one episode in South Park.. but with actual Motor noises. It really shows you her origin and this is done repeatedly throughout, several characters, they all speak a bit .. extreme showing us who they are even if you don’t know them too well! I like choices like that. Especially in an idol girls scenario! Like I would be the moth girl. .if I was an idol girl! something with lamps or kaiju would happen! This is the way!

The Rise of Franchouchou

The naming skit continues with everyone pitching in showing their personality a lot.. Junko and Ai being much more in the background then Lily, Number 5, Saki and Sakura. Even Tae-Chan comes in and meddles with it.. mostly to eat the magic marker !  Sakura thinking eating pens is bad for you rips it out of Tae-Chan’s hands and it lands in Junko’s hands, so she is pestered by Tae-Chan again. Good , recurring jokes like this give it a bit of group dynamic. Look at Holo-Live EN.  Kiara is into Cali and Gura and Amelia have this whole thing going on. Ina does more of her own thing..and while that is semi scripted it also makes them feel like a real group of friends with interaction dynamics. That happens here as well. It’s still in infancy.. but it is definitely there. Sakura is being consulted for a name and she says the name should be something like Framboise or Frangipane and gets stuck on Fran.. when suddenly Tae-Chan begins sneezing due to sucking out ink from the pan. Lily thinks it’s more than just sneezing she is actually pitching in and thus the name Franchouchou comes up!  I love that name! I also love how the actual zombie took part in naming it! 

Number five is revealed as Yugiri .. well at least to me! The name never stuck until the next scene for me.. which vastly confused me!  It starts out with the girls going to practice a song and a dance for the Guerilla Live but no one has experience except for the two girls who aren’t motivated.  The other girls are one one of those spinny playground rides I may have thrown up in once or twice.. you know one with a wheel that you turn like in the Disney Teacups and it makes the thing go round and round but just the teacup.  Sakura gets launched out of it thinking about her idol experience and flies towards the sky crashing in the earth. She tells everyone she’s ready to practice again and will work hard and then she is slapped in the face by Yugiri who tells her not to give up and practice.  Sakura tells her she is about to say that but everyone sides with Yugiri as if Sakura didn’t say anything of the likes. Did she dislocate her jaw or something from the crash and does everyone here do something else?  I don’t get it! 

The next scene is probably my least favorite scene and it’s about Ai and Junko not wanting to participate in all of this because it all seems so half-assed. I get that.. somewhere.. but at the same time.. it’s not like there is anything else to do and it’s not like they had issues being on stage with the awkward rap battle thing.. they looked bummed but they did it! So I don’t get why they are not invested here.. not really at least. I guess some of it may be idol pressure and perfectionism but they are dead and very much aware of it as per last episode. The manager actually gives them a great speech that he did not resurrect them for them to stay dead, the other girls are trying to live!  I like that speech.. a lot.. but at the same time it kind of feels like he should not need to do that. It feels a bit odd in their situation with literally nothing else to do! That same perfection  would make them not want to half ass this?!

The First Idol Song

The second half of the episode contains much less events as we move towards the Guerilla event.  The girls finally get ready to sing their first idol song! Of course it is performed super tiny and the idol girl costumes are missing. I like how the build up is so slow in this series, we really see  them become idols from the very bottom! The song is called Mazame RETURNER.  While it isn’t as sugary as I would have liked to see I guess this makes sense as an amalgamation. The girls even get their weird 3d animation dance you see in a lot of Idol Girl anime!  For the first time it feels like an actual idol show! That being said the 3d animation feels kind of laggy at times. As if I am watching a Bowling Alley Strike Animation.  It takes me a bit out of it.. but because they are zombies it also feels .. somewhat accurate. I love how Tae-Chan is also being part of it and participating.. did she actually kind of awaken but not really?! She does react to the beat and the more tricky dances so there is something going on.  

The act begins fairly well and the dance is cute! I really like  the shuffling animation all the girls make.. but then Lily crashes into Sakura again and she falls.  Since she is much younger Sakura is worried about her and forgets about the act. Thus the audience always walks. Junko and Ai watch this unfold and you can see them cringe at these rookie mistakes. As Lily gets up Sakura comes to a very text heavy part but seeing her audience walk away  causes her to get so flustered that she completely loses focus and forgets her lines. Just as things seem to get worse and worse, Junko and Ai join the group and help them finish the song.  While everyone is walking off they get an audience of one single girl who is absolutely loving it and that makes this worth it for them… and I LOVE that message. You can see the girl having such a great time and that is enough reason for these girls to continue.  That is also a big goal for me! Even if just a single person enjoys your content that be it a song , a video or whatever that will be worth it. It really was such a heartwarming scene!  Seeing Saki go to the kid and tell her, don’t worry next time we will do better. Super cute.

The epilogue  was uneventful and mostly involved Ai-Chan and  Junko talking about liking being an idol!  The other girls had a few cute moments as well but it’s mostly those two the focus is on.. and again.. I am not sure if I like how reserved they are.  A reveal at the end however might make it all a bit more interesting. It seems that Ai is/was part of that idol group that Sakura so adored but can’t really remember! I am not sure if that is correct but that’s what it seems like.  Her reservations seem to originate from having to start up all over again..which I can see would be demotivating… however I still think it makes little sense from where they are currently at.. It’s not like there is anything else for them to do and that has been established. Also why did they get bathrobes?!  The stinky question I had has been answered though! So props to them! I had a blast again!

The Sequel Even Uwe Boll Would Not Touch: House of the Dead 2 Review

Hello again my dear island guest! Welcome back to my quest to review all video game movies!  When Uwe Boll makes a movie, Uwe Boll usually makes a sequel..or two! However even Uwe Boll jumped ship with his House of the Dead movie, so someone took over this video game adaption. A movie so bad that even Uwe Boll doesn’t want anything to do with it? Now that’s what I would call a horror movie!

In my attempt to see all video game movies, I have stumbled upon a new mood, something that holds a middle between stupefied and fascinated. I call it stupenated. It holds somewhere between NANI!!!! !and Hmmmmmm SOUKA!  So it might be called Hmmm NAKA!. This  sequel movie left me Stupenated a lot.

While somehow managing to make me aggressively bored at places as well. A rollercoaster of sub-par experiences that as a whole come out as a much more interesting experience as the sum of its parts, because by Arceus this movie is soooo badly written. However it is so culty and campy and stupid.. that it is quite a bit more enjoyable than Boll’s first outing. Terrible still but at least this felt like a movie. Biggest contributor for that is the movies story.. it actually has one! The first movie basically movie, whose review you can find here, basically had the story of..some (clearly not) teens go to an island to rave..but zombies live there and shit happens, luckily they hired a weapons smuggler so they have guns. Part 2 at least tries to do some world building…it fails… but it tries.

Dr Curien, the father of the main character of the first movie saw his son get killed by his girlfriend who had been given the immortality serum after she was killed by the Spanish priest bloke in the final bit of the first movie. Now he is killing school girls and trying to revive them, however he gets distracted and one of his test subjects he thought was just dead..gets away and kills him.. turning him into and the campus he worked on into a new batch of zombies.  The secret organisation AMS who are professional zombie hunters think this new outbreak might be connected to generation 0 or at least generation 1 zombies. (Those turned by the serum of movie 1 )  From which they hope to synthesise a vaccine. So general Carter sends in some military guys along with two AMS members to find this Gen 0 or Gen 1 blood sample. There even are some wavering allegiances, complicating this important mission. Unfortunately for AMS the military people are more brain dead than the zombies.

Now of course that last embellishment was not a part of the actual story but it is true! These military guys are SOOOO dumb that like half of them gets killed in the first few minutes for the most stupid reasons. One guy just starts punching on a zombie for no reason.. he has guns.. but he just starts fistfighting him and gets bitten. The second gets bitten by that guy after trying to restrain him by .. putting their hand his shoulders and pushing him down so he can get shot to death… of course he bites out of resistance and the next guy is toast as well. These experts in making things safe have to keep the scientist Nightingale and former Secret Service Agent Ellis safe from zombies.Which of course is harder than it might seem.

While Uwe Boll had little to do with this movie the director goes for for that typical Uwe Boll cinematic feel. For example it has that “porn” cheapness to camera images and a really harsh lighting. You half expect things to escalate when a girl walks out of a shower into a locker room full of men.

That means that means except for the “gross” crippled woman from part one.. you know the one whose legs were chopped off, bled out for hours and lay their in an exploding zombie infested house that now has become a leader in a top secret organisation that puts her in a military suit for some reason,  all women are introduced to you in a bikini. bathrobe or in a slutty schoolgirl outfit that gets cut of her body by a professor trying to reanimate her… for which of course.. she needed to be naked. This time however it is blurred out!  …At first.  IN the second half of the movie woman don’t strip as much but we do get a few “odd” moments. Almost as if the writer thinks zombie girls are hot?! I am not sure.. but I think we got a few naked zombies.. at least the zombies look like zombies though … sometimes.

The movie has this campy feel to it.. with woman being a bit stereotypical ..but stereotypical badasses. I think we get one gay woman..maybe two I am not sure, it’s implicit .. there is just this tension between two girls.. although I should not say there is..but I feel like there should be.. based on their dialogue and interaction. Between the bad acting and weird storyboarding it can go either way. There is this also a cool badass science chick with a deep back story and a campus hippie girl…who by far is the best actress in the movie that is like exposition incarnate. It feels like I am watching one of those Full Motion Video , video games. You know something like Night Trap, or those Tanya scenes from those Red Alert cutscenes. It has that same feeling as games like Phantasmagoria.. maybe even Wing Commander. It’s not like there is something wrong with that but they feel like their own thing. Like how a Soap Opera is filmed differently than normal series..FMV games had this “cheapness” to it.. which is very much shown in this movie. 

This is reflected by the amount of exposition in this movie.  “As you Know” is one of the stupidest lines a movie can use for plot revelations..because why would you tell someone something they know?! Well The whole story of AMS is done like that.. In a school that has been abandoned for weeks two people survive and they happen to know everything the doctor did including stealing corpses from the morgue and after the school told him to stop… he went to find other ways.. they tell them how he tried to splice genomes and details of his research and so much more! Why would they know the professor killed a student? There is no reason they would.. why would school allow a guy to keep working there after he stole corpses, why isn’t he in jail?! Why even if they covered this up.. would two hippies know it and have their fingerprint or Bio-signature tied to a cage that holds the first zombie?!  I was stupinated! Everything is acted, filmed and written so clunky you feel like every shot has a big B branded into it.

That is what saves this movie from being worse or as bad as it’s prequel. It is so far distanced form reality it can actually surprise you. In the scenes where it doesn’t it can be boring as heck..but boy when the stupid virus strikes again .. I had a blast.

There is something hilarious about a trained soldier seeing a guy sit in a zombie infested library and say “Oh a survivor” … while being questioned by his peers “Zombies do not read that is a survivor”  meanwhile the guy has a rotting face and is bleeding all over his book and the soldier doesn’t even notice.. while knowing there are zombies everywhere. He even scolds him for being rude… WHY would someone go read a book amidst a zombie infested school?! Why do you think that is feasible?!  Even if he did it to calm his nerves why would you get annoyed he has headphones on and ignores you.. why would you not think it’s a zombie. I was Stupinated how can you think this little about your chain of events it made the movie quite hilarious though.

Soon after a part of the squad hears noises coming from a dorm room which is clearly a news-anchor reading the news.. yet for some reason TRAINED MILITARY staff, ..three of them all fail to notice this and they all think there are survivors in this room! After which they ask people to open up.. kicking in the door 5 seconds after making the request. English is my( arguably)  third language yet I as a untrained civilian, non native English speaker can hear this is a radio or a tv… yet the army can’t ?  That is funny! These people deserve to die so much! One of them does.. because he got bitten by a zombie mosquito?!  Now that is funny! Well he doesn’t die right away but he is written off. He gets bitten by a random mosquito, and just because the girl in this room zombified without any traces of forced entry?! Huh!?! So that must have been the mosquito they say. I have a few problems with that theory. Mosquitoes will only sting those with the highest body temperature in the room, so how it ever would prick a zombie is beyond me already. Maybe these zombies still have warm blood?!

Second that mosquito was in the room for days..meaning the mosquito would have to be a zombie itself, but decay is accelerated so I am not sure it would last that long, it’s not clear if it was THAT mosquito that made the girl turn.. they just guess it was and it’s totally unclear if the disease can be transmitted beyond species.. since the last part took place on an island.. you’d figure they would know if the mosquitoes there transformed. It isn’t even brought up again until the very end, the moment you discover that bugs can spread the deadly disease you might want to inform your colleagues but they just decide to just knock out the guy and leave him to die…I get you would not want to take a risk but this is a colleague, he’s instantly written off, without even asking the zombie scientist, which they can contact on their Walkietalkie thing. Instead they just decide.. well you are dead now. It felt very throwaway and out of nowhere and into nowhere.. nothing is done with this concept. 

The most hilarious death takes place around the same time. A guy sees a weeping woman who beckons him into another room, separating him from his group. It turns out that this woman is misleading him..she is actually a zombie..who acts like a siren of sorts..again.. I’d imagine her rotten face would reveal her to be a zombie or her non response to questions would at least make the man on his guard ..but no .. he gets blindsided by her! He does manage to beat her and lock her into a locker as he tries to exit the room a big zombie is behind the door… while he is already pointing his gun at the big zombie it startles him so hard he just screams and gets eaten……Trained military men everybody! They are so skilled.

If we look at consistency this movie is a lot weaker than the original! The movie does not match up with the world building at all. The set-up for things is super flimsey and it feels a lot plot whole heavier.. then again part 1 did not have a plot so…..

Mosquito guy by the way ends up being the villain of the movie..which of course is not set up at all , why am I telling you this..well because the movie first does set him up as the bad guy! He loots corpses, takes selfies next to a dead half naked girl ..with her camera he “stole” , he tells people they are going to die and basically he is just SUCH a huge douchebag that he went on this mission to get the blood sample for himself and bring it back to the big pharmaceutical companies and sell it for millions. Which to be fair is a much more interesting villain plot than “I want to be immortal because I want to live forever”  from the last part. The problem however  he is “killed off”.  Even when he turns out to be alive.. why would he still try to sell the vaccine so only the rich can buy it…Would he not help get it back so the experts van make a vaccine fast enough to save him. Also upon depolyment he left in a squad of 10 or so who took their jobs seriously! How would he ever get away with that?! Still it had a lot of potential as both sides race for the cure..but no he is killed off only to be brought back again for a weird twist ending. Why make him such an asshole not use him?  I was stupenated!

House of the Dead 2 is nowhere near as bad as its predecessor because it’s possibly worse. Plot happens for no reason at all throughout the entirety of this movie and it can be funny as heck. For example at one point Ellis and Nightingale get trapped in a zombie cage that needs the hand-print to open up… for no reason at all and never explained the door suddenly opens up. The woman who could open the door just got killed by  zombies all the way across the room. While she was bitten by 20 zombies she could still find humanity to crawl all the way across and open the door? If she even did.. not sure just assuming here as it’s the only way to open the door,  while …here we go again.. a trained Military captain began transforming in a zombie within mer seconds of a single bite?!  Sometimes they even transform instantly.. sometimes characters can give entire epilogues.  There is no rhyme or reason to this and it is stupinating to see how often a situation just goes completely derpy!

While the biggest charm of this movie is how dumb it is.. for example a character that got swarmed by zombies and only had a knife.. survives a missile strike without any scratches  while all zombies die, there are actually a few good things about this movie.

First of all the soundtrack is way less stupid than the original and those stupid game flashes are not here anymore.  Characters do actually develop over the  course of this movie and zombies look like actual zombies.  So it looks and sounds a lot better with much less aggressive muzzle flares, a much more believable setting to be decked out in these weapons used and in general a better set of world building. Of course this is nullified by dumb decisions like randomly running around a campus filled with zombies without knowing the schools lay out. At one point one character suddenly knows that in the next building  there is a science lab and this is a good place to start searching for Zombie 0 …. This happens when there are only 3 out of 10 people left… If that is a great place to start… (and sure.. if someone is suspected of making zombies… I’d say the science lab is indeed a fair starting place) why would you NOT start there first then… Stupinated! 

 The acting revealed that the actors could not believe the characters as well because it feels atrociously bad,  think Birdemic Levels of bad.. which is worse than House of the Dead 1, but a whole lot more entertaining. The dialogue is super funny at times as well. For example when Hippie girl fires at the science team thinking they are zombies they flee behind a desk an yell “Ceasefire we are AMS we are here to help” .. the response is  ‘Hmmm .oh. okay..sorry” I had about five other  moments there where I like actively thought like..’they could not just have said that’? Those bad lines are always also almost inaudible.. like tiny easter eggs of weirdness almost as if people accidentally talk trough footage. So bad.. yet some magnificent. This movie might have shown me the least logical action/reaction movie I have watched since the room. It is so bad in every single way..but the fact that it actually has a story and it leans so hard into the bad.. makes this a view I actually enjoyed.. unlike Boll’s movie. So in this case.. the worse movie is the better movie!  That doesn’t make a lot of sense but neither does this movie so it fits as a conclusion.

The Verdict

The movie is still bad and I would not recommend it to any of you guys but I guess when Uwe Boll doesn’t direct a movie it does automatically get better. This movie kept me entertained….at some parts. I still had to take break and come back for it! This movie isn’t even recognised by Wikipedia among video game adaptations so that is saying something.
Did you see this one?! Do you know of any video game movies that do not make the IMDB movie list?! Let me know and I might review it! Among the 38 sh other movies I still have to watch! Next week we will look at the Mortal Kombat Sequel and after that..we take another dip in Boll.

This is Bollshit: House of the Dead (2003) Review

Hey my lovely island guests! For a while now I have been doing movie reviews on monday, and for the last two weeks I have been discussing video game movies! I thought it was a fun idea for me to go to EVERY video game movie made up till this day! You know since we are all geeks and that! Yet there is one man who makes this challenge turn from hard, into a herculean feat! One man whose movies are so bad that his IMDB entire oeuvre  average grade (for game movies at least)  is almost an entire grade lower  of the total score Tommy Wiseau’s The Room has! That man is Uwe Boll.. and my friends made me start with potentially his worst movie! Today I review House of The Dead.

Very few movies are so bad that the director is accused of money laundering. While this movie ‘only’ costs about 12 million dollars, people saw this movie looked so bad, it possibly can not have cost that much. Since 12 million is almost nothing for a film nowadays… that is saying something. Now having seen this movie.. I am pretty sure there was some money embezzled here and there because the zombies in this movie..do not look better than your overzealous halloweenist or what you might encounter in a haunted maze. In this movie we follow Rudy and his friends who go to a rave..of 12 people or so.. on an island known for it’s gun smuggling business and the rumors of a deadly curse that dates back to the golden age of Spanish trade. While Rudy is already on the island his friends miss the boat and they pay a smuggler 1000 dollars to take them to the island.  Before they get there to shit goes down as all 12 rave visitor get killed by zombies.. lead by the immortal Castillo Sermano.. whose big motivations are.. that he created immortality…because he wanted to live forever.

This is the best looking zombie in the movie is by far the main Villian

Yes that is actual dialogue from the movie “You created it all so you could become Immortal, Why?” To which the villain answers “To live forever” Now that’s some pretty hokey dialogue. Mind you.. this man is Spanish..he kills everyone on this island immediately and no one dares to set foot on it.. but he speaks English. Then again he might be the mastermind of the Sega sponsored rave so he could get some new body parts to look fresher.. but I am not sure. Anyway.. people get naked.. and people die..typical Uwe Boll stuff, there isn’t that much more to the movie. Of course since it is based on a light gun game.. there is also a lot of shooting as well. A near infinite supply of hand grenades spawns from a single crate as well. At least Uwe had the video game logic down. In fact.. a lot of times it even looks like a video game, and I don’t JUST mean fake!

Actual Screen-grab from Movie

House of the Dead is one of the classic arcade shooters and if you have ever been at a convention or at an arcade you’ll most likely have at least seen it maybe even played it. If you haven’t don’t worry Uwe has got your back.  I honestly think that game’s pixelated graphics has better looking zombies than this movie. Then again.. if you have your face painted in Mcdonald’s, 9 out of 10 times it will look better than this movie. People just get some white lenses and some blood is smeared on their somewhat whitened face .. and tadaa.. you are a zombie. Well that or you are rotten to absolute heck.. and kinda look like a Jawa without the cloak. I’d imagine. Bullets can leave holes in your torso the size of a soup bowl or not have any effect at all at totally random. Sometimes people lose arms at random or aim for something they clearly are not hitting. So somehow Uwe simulated how actual aged light guns work.. and translated that to a movie! At least that’s faithful. 

Kore we Zombie Desu Ka?! No seriously I am asking here!

To give you more immersion scenes are strung together with actual game footage  flashing throughout the entire movie at random intervals, since people are very bad at acting we do not get death scenes we instead get “game over screens” where the camera spins around a character in a more heroic moment before the screen turns red and fades away. I honestly have never seen a movie whose cinematography is so painfully bad as this one. People look so awkward with their guns yet somehow every one .. from cop, to model to random girl can wield these weapons with pinpoint accuracy..even while being eaten, underwater  and of course while insanely drunk. Sets are so obviously fake that it seems like something Vampirella would present on.. or whatever those horror hosts did. Even Ed Wood might say.. you might wanna adjust those lights.

This is at night by the way

Now sometimes a movie is so bad that it’s good. Not with this movie though! While what I might have said sounds like it is a hilariously bad movie like Birdemic and The Room, this does not have that charm.  Where in those movies.. and Who Killed Captain Alex too for that matter there is passion..this is a movie of paychecks and “let’s get it over with” acting.  People read their lines and that’s it. It feels like a ‘you get your diploma but barely’  graduation project from acting school. It isn’t always the actors fault though Jonathan Cherry who plays Rudy.. really can not carry any dramatic scene. Jürgen Prochnow who is better know for Das Boot and Dune  is passable at times but the character is poorly written. All the characters are poorly written. We have the dumb model, the crazy superstitious sailor, the straight shooting cop and the over sexed bimbo.  However.. our main cast is Random doctor student , random ex girlfriend.. and other random girl who is also a friend. They have no traits whatsoever except for being mean to the model guy. It’s hard to act if your character doesn’t have a personality so I get that. 

Captain Kirk and Captain America working together!

Well the doctor guy.. Rudy Curien  likes girls. That’s his trade.. but with girls named Liberty, Karma and Alicia.. you got a pretty good idea what Uwe Boll things a woman is. A stripper.
Alicia fights the final fight in some sort of leather skimpy corset. Liberty wears one of those 60’s american flag jump suits with some serious push up and there is a lot of boob in this movie. They are meant to look sexy and basadds, so most of the times girls wield Melee weapons.. just so the camera man can get away with some close up shots that follow the line of “hey my eyes are up here’. The cop named Carter (she is never given a first name in this movie)  and captain Kirk..(yes thats what he is called)  are the only two characters I remotely enjoyed. Unfortunately Kirk gets bitten and uses dynamite to blow himself up.. because dynamite is a weapon.. like shotguns and all .. it’s really not but they have tons of it in a weapons crate in this movie.  

Carter gets her legs chopped off by a axe wielding zombie..who throws the axe away and loses it prior to chopping her legs of with it. (Also he gets killed before) So I am pretty sure Uwe Boll pays tribute to the respawning video game enemies.  Carter of course dies from this and in a very well acted Rudy moment *cough*  he says goodbye to her and we see her die.
Afterwards the house her corpse is in gets blown up. Zombies still roam the area and later a special force team clears the area of anything remotely suspicious.  So obviously she’s the star of the sequel… (That’s no joke..despite getting her legs chopped off, laying there for almost an entire night bleeding, getting blown up by a huge gunpowder explosion.. she is the star of the sequel.. that takes place AFTER these events). Oh right and I almost forgot you to tell about the acid spit zombie.. of which there is exactly one! The model whose face is slowly dissolving acts out his pain with so much zeal… who am I kidding.. his acting is on the level of an early 90’s video game voice acting person.  So again! Point for Uwe for faithfulness.

Clearly this woman can survive and entire night of bleeding out and being blown up! Look at how healthy she looks!

Never really get annoyed by a movies soundtrack but in case of this movie.. it literally does everything wrong! We get very odd music choices that do not match their situation at all. A despair fight they are losing gets high octane metal music as if we are playing doom, while someone dying on the table gets a slightly whimsical melody.. a creepy crypt is more generic rock/metal and the rave itself doesn’t really have rave music at all. Then again no one going to this rave is your usual raver either. I found some music choices so painful.. and out of place I just wonder where they got the track.. are they in the video game? If so that game has a really bad soundtrack.. but still I bet it utilizes it more wisely.. this feels like the sound editor just wanted to be cool! And just picked some edgelord music pieces and strung them together. The best comparison I can make is that this movie sounds like one of those strip clubs that serves free chicken wings.. just to get some guests in their place.. you know the place where strippers look more like actual zombies than the zombies in this movie. 

I like that red guy in the back right in front of those zombies without make up near the flame!

To be honest I’d rather go to the stripclub though.. I mean .. free Chicken Wings. Nothing against strippers by the way, I have sex worker friends and as long as you have fun what your doing it’s all good.. I just mean.. some can look a bit .. washed up. Scarier than the zombies in this movie. Anyway I was talking about the sound. Of course this movie constantly has weird camera moments where like a video game the camera spins around a character to show a critical hit or something.. this is accompanied by weird swooshing noises, epic close ups that have bullets whistling and super stock sounding explosions and gun effects.. as if the files have been ripped straight out of a video game. …

The unlockable secret outfits come already unlocked as well 10/10

As far as video game movies go.. it’s about the equivalent of someone taping their let’s play of House of the Dead and selling it as a movie.. except it has more annoying characters, more poorly timed music, worst hit detection and zero gameplay. Less satisfying gore a worse story, worse camera angles and less interesting set pieces. It’s not enjoyable to watch yet has this magnetism to it.. you can’t help but to keep watching.  While I haven’t been positive nor is there much to be positive at all, I do gotta say.. weirdly..I do feel this is a video game movie.. more so than say Assassins Creed. It is as if Uwe Boll does really care about this game and has put so many elements of the game in.. to make it feel like he was playing the game again while shooting this movie. It doesn’t work, it doesn’t treat women right, it doesn’t care about being a good movie.. but there somewhere is some understanding of the source material. I think.. or he somehow managed to make a movie that is so awful that it feels like the game .. in the wrong places by sheer coincidence. 

I saw something.. like a little spark of a connection.. like our inner gamers clicked just for a tiny moment. It’s buried too  much under trying to turn this movie into his persona edgy strip club! Where the chicken wings are free but so oily and greasy..that they look more like zombies.. than the zombies in this actual movie.

While some movies are so bad they are good, this one is just plane bad! A point can be made for it having heart.. but a point can also be made that this movie was made for the reason to embezzle some of the 12 million this movie costs and to turn a movie into your private stripclub! Sorry this definitely deserves my lowest score:

Review System Update coming soon!

PS:

Dear Mister Boll, if you ever read this review…somehow.. or one of my other dips into your Video Game movies, which at least according to IMDB aren’t much better, please do not invite me to a boxing match to beat me up, like you did to other critics. I might die from that! So IF you have to take your revenge on me..please make a movie about my absolute favorite games in the world, making a movie so bad it kills the games?! I would be so sad and you would have the intellectual victory! My favorite games are Fortnite and Call of Duty..possibly Fifa too! I accept that you might want revenge..so these are my tributes to you!….But please do not make these movies within the next year! I have to review all video game movies.. if you manage to make one within 40 weeks.. i’d have to review that too and a Fortnite movie by Uwe Boll sounds like absolute dogshit! Thank you for understanding!

Review: Pokémon Snakewood

Hey big reader people, it’s finally time for me to play games again.. and I played a very special game for Halloween. A pokémon game that is set in Hoenn… that has suffered through a zombie apocalypse. Along the way not only do you fight zombies and zombie pokémon but ghosts and demons as well.  So I prepared for horror .. but nothing prepared me for Pokémon Snakewood. 

Nasty Plot

Pokémon Snakewood starts out promising. Your character wakes up with no memories in a completely destroyed Littleroot Town. Among the wreckage of Professor Birch lab, you find three pokéballs. A Koffing, A Baltoy or a Paras, I knew this game was about zombies so I thought.. they are probably using poison thingies a lot! Let’s pick Koffing! I named it Orby back then.. but later on I would rename it Chokes. Apparently I play the younger sister of Brandon…but he is named Landon here. The game is set just a few years after his winning the pokémon league. Landon has vanished alongside his girlfriend May (awww I am so glad they got together)  and it’s up to you the protagonist to find him again, assisted by professor Birch who wants his daughter back safe. Landon being the champion can surely help against his invasion of the undead. Along the way the protagonist finds out they have a much bigger role to play in this story as they originally thought.

Now this in theory would sound like a story I can get behind, unfortunately after reaching Rustboro town, the original location of the first gym, the story starts to fall apart. It’s still okay by then.. but the first cracks begin to show. The Romhacker Cutlerine uses a lot of humor and fourth wall breaks , which is honestly something I normally love. The plot has a lot of random elements and Seth-MacFarlane-esque humor and storytelling. Again these are things I kinda love! This is coming from a girl who had a good time with A Million Ways to die in the West. While inspired by McFarlane  Cutlerine misses two crucial elements to the golden formula. Restraint and timing. The plot of Snakewood is atrociously bad, filled with very obscure references weird in jokes and poorly timed twists. Basically you have an Ally for one or two cities , after which they stab you in the back, and this loops over and over again. The zombie killing guy?! (While obvious) He’s an enemy.. those who convince you he is a bad guy.. they throw you under a bus, then you find yet another party.. but find out they can’t help that much.. after which you find out that enemy you had on Dewford Island.. no that’s a friend! A good plot twist isn’t bad here and there.. but here it happens in every town give or take. In the end we end up with people frozen into a carbonite chamber, while the evil guy bakes you a cake.. totally destroying the world, after which you have to defeat him with the power of Haiku and References end it ends with a party in your honour.. that gets skipped for some limp endgame content. 

If written with timing and restraint this could have worked still but instead this all is resolved through fourth wall breaks. ‘Oh they are frozen in carbonite looks like Cuterline isn’t even trying anymore’ ‘Oh this happens, that sure is convenient to the plot’. The main character is aware of the bad story and comments on it, which can at times be funny but at the same time the story has no narrative impact as there is no logic connected to how the plot will go. You even face the Elite four somewhere in the first half  of the final act. There is a very big chunk of the game left after that, and that bit seems to fizzle out quite badly.

Mean Look

Technically this game doesn’t far much better, the female protagonist sprite glitches constantly, turning from a normal human into a pale grey, or sometimes even other shades. When diving the sprite of May  and not the protagonist is there. It makes the game feel sloppy. While I give the hacker credit for creating a lot of custom maps, with some of them being neat improvements.. others feel lackluster, usually in the more optional parts. We encounter stuff like invisible walls , which sometime are there  as part of a puzzle but sometimes are just there for cutting you off and sometimes even exist as glitches. at totally random spots that aren’t hidden items. It just feels so sloppy, and I know fangames and rom hacks are prone to this but I am not comparing it to the main titles I am comparing this to other hacks and these errors are way more present than in for example Pokémon Sweet Version or Pokémon Clover.

There is little new sound design, which is detrimental to the tone of the game again. A destroyed Littleroot town should not have the Littleroot town theme, while it is hard to implement this .. again other Rom Hacks have managed to do so and this one could have benefitted from it a lot. In the last part of the game there is some swap arounds but never truly great. I ended up muting the music in the end , but more on that when we discuss the gameplay. Sound design is not bad as in it’s not entirely detrimental to the experience nor does it glitch or is ugly but it is very clear the team of the Cutlerine lacked a sound designer making the hack feel more amateurish. Nothing to bad but I’ve seen a lot better .. and just adding some horror music would have done sooo much for this game. 

The game also has some Fakemon , custom made pokémon and some are actually great. The zombified pokémon all look great. Yuck.. the pokémon that looks like Muk.. but swallowing a little child was absolutely amazing.  The reskins of the kantonian starters.. excellent work. Latios and Latias stitched together bravo. These are really well done.
Then they decided to add in their own custom pokémon and they all look horrible. Like absolutely horrible. I can not do better because I am not a drawing person, but I could conceptualise cooler ones and get an artist to make some well within the time that it took me to finish this game. Nearly 50% of it is like a singularly shape pokemon.. like a rock.. or most commonly circles or an egg. Evolutions are quite lazily designed though compliments to Dragooon and Diamantix , respectively evolutions of Linoone and Steelix.. the sprites look like doodoo but at least conceptually you can sorta make out what they were going for which seemed interesting.. but otherwise most of their pokemon evolve by changing colour.. or becoming a circle. Bleh.

Spite

All in all we don’t have a very solid game just yet.. but it is an intriguing one so maybe some good gameplay can rescue it?! I can quite honestly say that gameplay wise this is the single most AWFUL pokémon game I EVER played. It’s honestly quite atrocious. Once again the first third  of the game feels solid enough. Challenging as but solid. I made the mistake of starting with a skitty as my second pokémon, I had to trade that in fairly quickly when I found a makuhita. The pokémon battle gameplay is solid throughout the first half of the game. Puzzles however are broken from the very first moment we encounter them. They are .. again Family Guy inspired or something .. because they are completely random.
Example one :  ‘I invaded an enemy based and the floor is laced with pressure sensors.. meaning if you step onto the wrong tile, you get reset back to the beginning of this area’ Now this would be manageable, because you only have three options every time, so for about 10 to 20 tiles of traversal this is doable.  However this game decided it was FUNNY to stretch it out for over at about 90 or so tiles. With characters that you have to use (south straight from the last  in a gauntlet of them) to navigate.. glitching in and out of existence, this process is truly hellish.

Example 2: A series of completely random, unanswerable questions (Is fire better than octopus?) wil reset you back to the entire line of questions for every wrong answer. About 30 gates that on first try have about a 50/50 chance to reset your progress. Of course after which you get a reward chest…. that resets you anyway so you also have to know to skip that. Powering an elevator.. can’t use your electric pokémon for that.. you have to catch a very specific one that can be found inside this dungeon, track back (As by now you will have 6 pokémon)  get that pokemon out of the pc.. to power the elevator.. .. catch a ditto so that it can turn into a key.. which afterwards it never can anymore. This would even be okay if you did not already visit this dungeon once where the puzzle solution was a simple item hunt thus forcing you into that mindset. Finally there is also a very particular teleporter puzzle, that if you choose wrong.. will put you in a no win scenario fight..unless you cheated by then.. which losing will put you outside the entire dungeon. And yes.. it’s that 70 tile memory game one where this occurs. 

Being a rom hack this game is meant to be emulated and sped up, save states made to clear these puzzles and so on. The puzzles are virtually impossible otherwise. Never did I have to look up a walkthrough on a pokémon game nor hack to progress through the game as my goal always made sense to me.. here I had to look it up 7 times.  There is a part where you have to find a Hard Rock CD and put it on a stone.. of course the only place to find this cd is on a Rock Lobster.. that is hiding out in a SINGLE dive tile, no where near the area I need to be in. And this is MISSABLE! If you killed the Rock Lobster.. as far as my research goes.. you can not truely finish the game, even if this is technically endgame. Other story mandatory puzzles involve talking to a random girl to give you an item, flying to another town to get some food, Red Stew and feed it to a mirror.. because something something bible reference. It doesn’t even tell you , you need to find the Red Stew,having it in your inventory will cause one of the dialogue options to have a different outcome, so you cant even deduce you are actually missing an item.  There is a joke inside there somewhere but if you don’t get it.. you do not get the puzzle. 

Finally there is  the battling and the grind… oh dear Arceus the grind. Endgame requires your pokemon to be somewhere in the level 75 area. Using speed up to level I clocked about 120 hours to finish this game.  Which means that is about 120 hours worth of grinding.
And I haven’t even leveled much more than my actual chosen 6.. I could have picked up some stronger pokémon with a guide and used legendaries.. but  I wanted to see if this could be done with regulars.. and one legendary because I worked very hard on that. Early in the game you get an egg… it hatches into a MYSTERYEGG, .. which is an egg.. i figured a legendary would be in here.. so i leveled it up until it evolved into SECRETEGG.. I was close to making it evolve just one more stage.. and it evolved into HYPEREGG. Never has a pokemon been able to evolve beyond their second evolution stage.. but HYPEREGG can, I found out by accident because yet again.. trainers intuition would tell you.. this is it. Most pokémon you are handed are sub par to deal with the enemies completely overpowered beasts… there even is a lvl 100 Kamina (yes the one from Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann)   and a lvl 65 , non 1 hp , wonder guard pokemon that I could only hit with toxic. It just made every minute of the second half of this game feel so tedious and frustrating..I wanted to pull my hair out and banish this game to my trash can. Yet I wanted to beat it and I did… and I was rewarded with nothing… no credits.. no nothing.. my char wants to discover herself still.. but that I did before the rest.. so I never really got any payoff.
*Curse Words*

Smelling Salts

I am so salty right now.. that the game ended like that… I put in the time and the work and got nothing in return.. so my judgement is very biassed.  Did I objectively enjoy this game? No.. but the first half was kinda nice just glitchy.. the second half was hell. There is way too much insider humor in it , including an entire act based around what I would assume is another game they made, that sounds kinda like a mix between Devil Survivor 2 and Digimon, the references are often to obscure.. like who of us has read the book of Genesis?  I sure did not! While it has potential it also manages to strangle that same potential completely by catering to a very specific group of people throughout the entire hack, essentially nullifying their biggest boon, their humor only leaving the cool zombie theme as their other.. and who wants to play a zombie game that ends up with Carbonite trapped prisoners and Haiku rap battle final encounters…  I am pretty sure it’s no one…and that is the same amount of people I would recommend this game too.

While this rom enjoys some popularity, that seems to stem from the first half of the game.. which is good and worth a look, however as soon as Mauville city is passed this game plummets like a brick into my most hated game so far. I even had to stop playing multiple times in order to collect myself so I could finish it another day. Be smart and stay clear of this one, at least if you are looking for an actually decent game..for the Family Guy experience go ahead… but just watch Family Guy.

The Pinkest Poké Blogger is blasting off again!
XO
Pinkie