Flavours of the Month: September 2014...

Jaw dropping WW2 television drama, neo-giallo style, transgressive fiction, surgery, and Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag have been some of this month's flavours.

Click "READ MORE" below for the looks, sounds, vibes & flavours of my September 2014...

Flavours of the Month: December 2013...

LOOKS:

The Walking Dead - the Mid-Season 4 finale and Season 3 commentaries. The first eight episodes of season four have been the most consistently entertaining and well written episodes since the first season. Season 2 got off to a slow start, and the back half of Season 3 had some structural problems and a couple of other issues, but this recent batch of eight episodes has been a straight run of top quality TWD goodness (and well worth a second run-through in a pre-Xmas marathon session). Roll on Season 4B!

What Happens In Kavos - for the uninitiated, this is a Channel 4 documentary series about young adults jetting off to the titular Greek resort for a cheap holiday that's nothing more than sun, sea, sex, and astonishing amounts of alcohol. It's eyebrow-raising, jaw-dropping stuff ... like watching animals in a zoo, but with sloshed Brits mangling the English language and throwing every last shred of caution and decency to the wind.

Click "READ MORE" below for more looks, sounds, vibes & flavours for December 2013...

Saints Row IV Teaser Trailer Analysis...

It's official: combining “Enter the Dominatrix” (originally intended for DLC) with new content, Volition and Deep Silver will be releasing the sequel to the highly successful (and highly entertaining) Saints Row The Third later this year - the month before GTA V's launch. It was announced in a brief teaser trailer packed full of hard-rocking insanity – but let's take a closer look at some of the details we got caught a glimpse of.

Click “READ MORE” below for lots of screen shots and what to expect from Saints Row IV...

SAW V...

Yes - it has taken me ages to get around to musing on this flick - but never mind, because here comes some muse-juice.

Saw V, basically it's an entire film made simply to explain what the fuck happened in Saw IV, and why the fuck that Hoffman dude - who looked pretty much identical to that Strahm guy - decided to come over all Jigsaw's New Apprentice. As Amanda got the Alan Sugar treatment for not paying attention to "the rules", and simply made torture devices to do nothing but kill, she was out of the game.

There's a similar strand connected to this Hoffman dude, but it's all pretty up in the air to be honest. Why bother investing the time and effort into believing what's happened when it'll just be re-explained in the next movie or two?

I thought the original Saw was a genuinely interesting and fresh slice of low budget indie horror ... then Saw II happened (resulting from a non-Saw script that was so similar to the franchise in question here, they just said "oh fuck it, just make that the next Saw movie instead") which was decidedly "meh" ... then Saw III came along, and I thought tidied it all up quite nicely. I would have ideally left it there - Jigsaw dies, Amanda dies, that nurse dies, the dude dies and the kid is left in that room - a suitably bleak, but final ending to the franchise.

Then they simply had to blunder in with the abominable Saw IV, in which they thought "oh bugger, we've practically killed off every single character except for one or two 'background artists' who had a couple of lines - let's make them the new focus of the movie!" ... so we ended up with that SWAT guy, who suddenly decides to overstep his official duties and come over all Inspector Gadget - minus the gadgets, humour, dog, niece, but with all the dopey barging forward.

I bet he wishes he had a ruff-talking dog and a super-smart crime-fighting niece watching his back though, because like many of the characters in the Saw franchise, they don't pay a blind bit of notice to "the rules" - a factor especially galling in Saw IV and now Saw V. You'd have thought that, mostly being detectives, they'd detect the key to surviving a Jigsaw "test" - do what he says, listen carefully to the message (although admittedly, you don't have to listen that carefully to get the underlying message).

At this stage it's become a franchise centred around torturing bastards and testing career-obsessed people in possession of one-tracked-minds.

Saw V is no different - you've got the ludicrous amount of time-line-bothering back-and-forth, a protagonist that doesn't pay attention to "the rules", a bunch of daft twists, more evidence of how Jigsaw seemingly possessed the ability to foresee the future as clear as crystal (explained limply by saying 'if you can predict human behaviour, then you'll do alright in this game sunshine') and of course - lashings of gore.

Now, as a gore-hound, the effects are eye-saucering ... although the sheer volume of nastiness, rather than Savini-style spectacle and magic, becomes swiftly hard-to-swallow, especially when you realise that there's yet more Saw films to come ... a sixth for sure.

Like I suggested earlier, it should have ended at Saw III, nuff said ... but oh no, they've gotta keep blundering on, making the franchise stray into intensely preposterous territory and further and further away from it's indie roots of intrigue and shock.

Saw V didn't shock me. I did grimace a couple of times - but then again, if you don't grimace at some poor bastard's forearm bursting through his flesh with squishy sound effects, then you simply aren't human and nobody in their right mind would want to meet you down a dark alley. Was Saw V any better than Saw IV? Probably, because it explained (mostly) what the fuck Saw IV was supposed to all be about.

The franchise really has become an industry unto itself (with spiralling production costs, and diminishing returns) ... a cookie cutter industry. Take the "Hello Zepp" theme tune, whack it on the audio track, give the cameraman some speed and some assorted hallucinatory drugs so he can flap around all over the latest trap like an ADD-addled hamster, have the writers take another kind of drug that lends itself to developing vast plot twists that could rival the daftest conspiracies bandied about by morons on "teh intarwebz" for head-scratched "eh?"-ness ... ... *gasp* ... ... then get an editor who also acts like a drug-addled rodent, and some CGI whizz-kid to splash a bit of digital-gore about to help turn the whole film into a frenetic lump of chaos in post production.

And new to the method with Saw V, add a bunch of distracting oval patches of post-production work where you've had to lighten the image up because you've suddenly realised the image is too dark, when really, you should have just left it alone.

So in summary (about time too), Saw V ... well I guess it's better than Saw IV, but that movie was utter shite, so it's not saying much really is it? Well, see you in a few months for some chit-chat about Saw VI, I guess...*sigh*

141st post spectacular...

GTA IV arrived this morning ... just getting used to the controls (moving & looking, and driving are a bit fiddly off the bat) ... watched the entirety of the Weazel channel straight away before even venturing outside of Roman's apartment ... will go off and play more later ... otherwise, awesome.

Laters...

Deadly anticipation...

*sigh* you'd have thought having GTA IV pre-ordered for over a year would have entitled me to have it arrive at least on launch day from the online retailer ... but no ... lame.

I could have gone to town this morning and gotten one at the local Woolies, but of course my money was already taken as it was posted yesterday morning ... so I continue to wait ... tomorrow (Wednesday) is possible, but who knows, a big dollop of lame could spoil my day and make me wait yet another 24 hours to gawp in utter awe at the gaming event of the year ... now yes, there are famines and all sorts of nasty things in the world that actually matter ... but I'm not talking about GTA IV in the global realm, but rather exclusively in the realms of entertainment ... this much anticipation is insane, and having to wait longer and longer is of course - annoying.

Still though, when it gets here ... awesomeness will be had.

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Anyway, onto other things - speaking of anticipation, I'm proper looking forward to checking out Gary Ugarek's Deadlands 2: Trapped. He sent me a short zombie clip from it and bloody nora does it look awesome - for those not in the know, it was on the DVD of Deadlands #1 that I Am Zombie Man appeared, it even appeared (along with IAZM2) at the theatrical run at the Hagerstown 10 cinema (where DL2: Trapped was shot), so we tend to share clips of what we're up to back and forth, teasing each other with little snippets of entertainment anticipation.

Good stuff indeed.

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Onto another thing, I was off out filming today for this not-for-profit campaign film that Joe Jenkins is doing. I'm shooting and editing it, and it'll end up being something like 10 minutes and will be shown in his local parish, or ward, or whatever you call your local area/village in rural communities. Not sure of a title yet, but that as well as other info regarding will be posted as-and-when-appropriate.

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One more thing - VHS-2: Long Play is currently being edited, even though I've got a bit more filming to do for it ... I've done some rough editing (cutting down the footage basically for the more choice cuts), and next up I'll be doing the colouring via the superb Magic Bullet - after that the proper editing will be done, and of course, as soon as it's up on YouTube I'll pimp it about.

Oh yeah, on my YouTube page I recently posted a short, random 'behind the scenes' sort-of video for VHS-2, so check that out if you will ... it's rough-as-old-boots, just a bunch of clips really, but well it might be of interest to those wanting to check out the film itself as-and-when.

The post-Halloween round up - part 2...

Additionally I checked out "SAW IV", which from the off I felt was unnecessary. To be honest it was tied up nicely at the end of the third film, but they've found a way to keep it all going (albeit a bit of a naff one, just find a new apprentice in pretty much the same way as before).

I am a huge fan of the original "SAW", it was fresh, unique and the ending left my jaw on the floor (although not hacked off in a pool of blood thankfully). The follow-up however, I didn't really like. The premise wasn't as good, the characters were cut and paste bastards - whore, junkie, whiny little bitch teenager, panicky white collar worker, school-of-hard-knocks black guy and so forth. No wonder it wasn't as good, it was based on Bousman's own script for a completely different film, and James Wan did not have a hand in the script (only Leigh Whannel). However, those two chaps did have their hands in the script for "SAW III", which produced a much better film than "SAW II" I feel, the ciclical nature of the film - treading alternate and unseen angles of plot from the first two films - was what I enjoyed most ... and yes, rotted-pig-slush-device-thing was the grossest thing I've seen for a long time.

As for "SAW IV", with damn near everybody from the previous three films slaughtered - including the main man himself - you just think, what's the point? Sooner or later everyone is going to die, even if they do escape a trap, they'll just be brought back and continue to not think outside of their own boxes so they'll just get hacked up again. With the first three, particularly the first and to a lesser extent the third, you actually cared and wanted people to escape their fates (I could have barely given a thrupny toss about those in part two, bar Donnie Wahlberg).

Another gripe is the sheer scale of the tricks, devices and so on. The scale of the devices is getting a bit silly now, particularly the main set piece in this fourth outing. It's just too big, too flashy and too designed. The great thing about the first film was it was just some grotty old bogs in a grotty old tiled room and the premise of their predicament was fairly simple, yet still terrifying and horrific.

Inevitably this was going to happen to the franchise, everytime you show a bit more and get a bit more outlandish, you have to go further the next time...but can't you just make it more mentally torturous than visually icky? 100 ick units and 0 mental units (to use a bizarre equation I've just cobbled together) is nowhere near as good as 50 ick units and 50 mental units.

The sheer thought of the predicament in the first "SAW", plus the adequate (and at the time actually fairly extreme) gore was an ideal combination. No doubt this won't be the case for "SAW V" or "VI" (which are to be shot back-to-back apparently - not a good sign, most back-to-backs usually suck, and this late in the day as well - have they not seen "Return of the Living Dead 4 & 5"?!)

But to end on a higher note, what I did enjoy about "SAW IV" was the continued way the franchise circles around the same area of events and characters, minor parts from earlier films become main parts (with varied success), and events flash back to earlier events as well as parallel events. You could say that the "SAW" franchise is the new "Friday the 13th" franchise for the 2000's, but in terms of horror in general, at least this franchise seeks to link the films together with at least some depth and complexity.

I appreciate what they're doing with the franchise immensely, but they really need to look back at the first film and regain control over themselves before it gets completely ludicrous and out-of-hand. The best way to make a good sequel is to properly understand the films that preceded it, rather than the cliche of "bigger this, this and this".