She does look FAAK-ing familiar, but that’s a good thing.
Speaking of metal, Crian Soft’s new game in progress looks like something out of the pages of Heavy Metal magazine circa 1983 or so. This is a good thing as the developer’s not known for 100% tight gameplay (I’ve played and liked Age of Barbarian despite it being a bit of clunky fun), so I’m not expecting it to break a mold or anything like that. Actually, it is a mold breaker in one way, as it’s the company’s first console release, which is cool (about time!).
Here’s a peek at the game’s first trailer and some screens to ogle. So cheesy it hurts, but hell, I’ll be onboard if it nails more that just the looks just right.
Oh yeah, it’s on, even if it’s not so hot at the end of the day. Hey, if I’m surprised that it’s good stuff, all the better, right?
Nice. Coming soon, a dose of hard metal for your daily supply, courtesy of Big Sugar and Steel Mantis Games (which, as Black Wolf Games bought the world SLAIN: Back from Hell for PC and consoles a few short years ago.
I played the PC demo on STEAM a while back and came away very impressed indeed. Now, it’s about ready for retail and digital in more polished form. When? Well, look out below, folks.
If the demo is any indication, this one’s going to be fun, tough side-scroller for the ages. See you down on the planet – I’ll be the one hiding out, but easy for enemies to spot.
La calma prima della tempesta: Ray Milland as Inspector Thompson does a bit of gardening (sans FROGS to interrupt him).
Loosely based on a true story (that’s still a tad unresolved), Flavio Mogherini’s 1977 film La Ragazza Dal Pigiama Giallo (aka 1978’s The Pyjama Girl Case) is a pretty depressing flick to sit through when all is said and done. It’s skillfully edited to spool out two tales: one of a retired police detective (Ray Milland) coming back to work on the trail of the person who murdered and mutilated a woman, and the second is the story of Glenda (Dalila Di Lazzaro), a Dutch immigrant who comes to Australia, gets a job as a waitress and later ends up a victim of a particularly horrifying crime.
Even more horrifying are the police coming up with the idea to preserve and display the unidentified remains to the public (yes, this actually happened in real life for a whopping ten years) and painfully getting information though beating up a few suspects (not sure if it’s 1977 addition, but man, is it so not an OK thing to do even if a guilty party is eventually found). Nevertheless, Milland is clearly having a blast in his role, and Di Lazzaro is a lovely, tragic victim you want to see not a bad thing happen to. The film even makes you feel sorry for a suspect in her murder, but you’ll have to watch this to see how the director plays that out.
In fact, save for Milland’s Detective Thompson who’s eager to take on the case, most of the detectives and investigators here seem to be all too happy (and incompetent) with finding the quickest means to end the case, even if it means one seemingly obvious suspect is discovered early on who’s a pure creep and not a killer. This adds an air of hopelessness to the narrative as the film plays out and you witness the results of haphazard work (save for the one man who should be home with his flowers). Granted, poor Glenda would still be deceased even through the shoddy police work, as Detective Thompson is only called after she’s been disposed of.
Oh, boy. Severin Films has a nifty set of three horror-filled films you’ll want and a hell of a lot of ways to order them.
Here you go, in the speediest manner as possible. You get to do all the clicking and buying, I get to be as lazy as hell because it’s been a busy day and my poor wrists are giving out thanks to too much typing. Get ready to pick up some nicely restored vintage sleaze:
So sleazy, but you know that’s how you like it, uh-huh.
Given the subject matter, The Lady of the Lake is a better title than The Possessed, lets get that out of the way first and foremost. Granted, it’s also the name you’d use if talking about the legend of King Arthur and with a slight tweak, it’s the name of a 1947 film noir classic that’s a neat experiment. Still, this 1965 Italian murder mystery from co-directors Luigi Bazzoni and Franco Rossellini is a compelling, arty proto-giallo well worth a look.
The film blends both director’s styles in an impressive and intentionally at times hard to follow plot, but its intents are made to keep you guessing what’s true and untrue until the mystery is resolved. While based loosely on a series of actual murders, the at times dreamlike presentation keeps things a lot less grounded as our less than heroic “hero” figures out why the gal he was so madly in love with was possibly murdered.
Virna Lisi as the ill-fated Tilde. She’s not a good girl, it seems.
Bernard (Peter Baldwin), a morose young man with a bit of fame is in the process of writing a new book, visits the same slightly dull Italian village he grew up in only to discover that a pretty maid named Tilde (a stunning Virna Lisi) working at the local inn has died. A little poking around reveals she may have been murdered, but why is that important information held from him (“You didn’t ask.” comes one rather surprising answer early on) and why are there a few potential suspects that happen to be from the same family that owns the inn?
Hmmm… why, indeed? Tilde only appears to him from a few mysterious dreams and flashbacks that may or may not be related to Bernard’s mental state, so he’s maybe as unreliable a narrator as it gets. Hey, at least his hazy, surreal nightmares are pretty darn interesting to say the least.
Deceptively beginning as a charming budget flick, Joseph H. White’s 1946 film noir So Dark The Night becomes so much its name as it devolves into sheer bleakness despite a fairly cliché-filled script. Without spoiling too much, its tale of a defective detective is a lot less Clouseau and a lot more Hitchcock as time goes on. But on a second viewing, it’s clear that the cheery tone the film begins with is a perfect setup to what’s to come.
When happy go lucky but weary Parisian detective Henri Cassin (Steven Geray) takes a much-needed vacation to a peaceful French village, a series of murders occur that has him using his years of well-honed skills to solve the crimes, but a proper solution escapes him until he realizes the shocking truth.
This corker of a thriller is expertly directed and shot, clocking in at a tidy 71 minutes has a few issues, but considering them in a film that looks so polished when judged in today’s terms, it’s a hidden gem that deserves a second look. Yes, some of the “Frenchiness” is stereotypical Hollywood and parts of the third act seem as if they come out of thin air. But when you realize what’s taking place earlier may be the results of a deluded mind (and excellent score), it all makes sense.
Kid: “Hey, mom What’s for lunch!” Mom: “Why, the corridors of the MIND, child…”
While it’s technically imperfect and a bit unpolished, Abramelin Games has a pretty frightening survival horror game for PS4 owners in Injection π23 ‘No name, no number’ ($9.99). That ten bucks gets you a pure passion project (made over the course of five years) in the form of a multimedia game experience featuring puzzles guaranteed to test your brain cells, unsettling monsters to avoid or fight (in that order) and plenty of horrific nightmare fuel imagery. It’s noted before you start to to wear headphones and play in the dark, but I opted out of the headphone use part after trying this for the first hour and needing to remove them because I was kind of freaking out a wee bit too much (the sound design is pretty damn intense).
You play as a rather troubled man living alone with his dog in Villanueva de Tapia (a village in Málaga, Spain). When his pet runs off, he’s seemingly struck by a truck while giving chase and regains consciousness only to find himself in a twisted variation of the village and yes, still needing to find that dog. In pure survival horror fashion, you get disturbing visuals, locked doors that require opening in one way or another, and as noted, the aforementioned monsters. You’ll also discover a mystery about missing townspeople, murders and torture rituals with a religious angle and more depravity. The mix of Unity engine assets, enhanced live action video clips and appropriately timed jump scares keep things tense throughout where when things do quiet down, there’s still the sense that something’s going to happen. Let’s just say Villanueva de Tapia’s tourism numbers will either rise or decline after this game gets more notice, although my take is it’ll increase if horror fans are curious enough to see how scary a spot it is in real life.
A little walk in the woods to clear the head isn’t going to help much when you’re too scared to take another step.
Exploration will be the first key to your survival, as the game places all sorts of clues to what needs to be done but doesn’t highlight where you need to search. One of the great things the game does right off the bat is allow for four camera angles to choose from on the fly, similar to Riverhill Soft’s Doctor Hauzer and OverBlood games. This freedom lets you explore how you want from classic Resident Evil style, two different third-person mode and first-person, although you can expect that first-person mode to deliver those creep-tastically ugly monsters in your face as they try to eat your face off. Plan accordingly, but expect to do a bit of jumping in fear on occasion when you’re surprised.
If I’m not mistakes, we got a load of these posters in the NYC subways as well when the film was initially released in the US. I’d kill for a few to sell off now. Uh, figure of speech, that.
Yum. If you’re an old coot like me (or old enough to remember), this pair of TV ads for Lucio Fulci’s horror masterpiece, ZOMBIE. Hey, even though I was 15 at the time, they both kind of sunk into the memory like a… well, like a zombie munching on some fresh brains. I didn’t actually see the film until a few years later thanks to a friend who had it and a bunch of other horror flicks on a VHS tape he’d put together and, yeah, it was worth the wait.
Between the jump scares and general relentlessness when things got going, Tisa Farrow (Mia’s sister) getting it in the eye like Moe Greene, but slower and with a rather pointy piece of wood (ouch), a zombie versus shark scene (no pirates, sorry… but that’s a real shark!), and the classic line delivery early on: “Hey, watch out for the sail!” that kind of starts off this gore-fest in the most comic of manners before things get grim. Yes, there are slow stretches, but the film delivers all the goods when it counts from the icky to the just plain weird (conquistador zombies, ftw!).
Anyway, the fine folks at Blue Underground and MVD Entertainment Group are releasing not one, not two, but THREE 4K cover variants of the film, newly remastered in 4K and set to crawl your way on November 27, 2018. Actually, there are a whopping SIX variants total when you add in the older 2K BR and DVD versions on the BU site listed here, here, and… wait a sec…HERE. Collect ’em all!
Okay, the film looks kind of cheesy (in the best possible manner) and that soundtrack is pure 80’s perfect (as in equally cheesy, plus tax). But I kind of want to see this, iffy acting, tralier-iffic clunky action scenes and all just for actor Robert Bronzi doing a dead on Charles Bronson impersonation. I almost thought for a hot second some digital effects team got the rights to Bronson’s likeness and stick it on some actor’s face, but nope. Bronzi’s the real unreal deal. I’d bet a buck that Uncork’d Entertainment figured out right away this one would be somewhat of a hit among nostalgic Bronson fans wanting a slice of the old days and old ways.
While I’m not sure he’ll be game for hopping into the Bronson role should there be some studio bold enough to try for a reboot of the Death Wish franchise or a new series with a different name that has Bronson, er Bronzi playing a similar character, actors DO need to work and this guy’s got the looks to get the asses in seats. Oh yeah, Bronzi has an official website, so feel free to pop in and say hello as well as tell him what you thought of his work r his spot-on Bronson impersonation. He seems affable enough not to want to hunt you down and exact justice if you’re a poor judge of his talents.
The film is available on a bunch of VOD services now (Amazon, Hulu, Xbox One, the usual suspects), but as I despise streaming services (mostly because streaming up here blows), I’ll be holding my breath for the December 4 DVD release which seems to be a Walmart exclusive if the film’s facebook page is accurate. Eh, it’ll likely pop up on ebay as well, so at least I can get it there because the nearest Walmart is a bit of a pain to get to. Well, it’s a long bus ride away and I hate the super steep hill that bus needs to go down because it’s somewhat vertigo inducing in a slow roller coaster about to roll over manner. I have no idea how people make that trip along the route, because I’ve seen passengers do stuff like shut their eyes and/or mumble out assorted prayers to all sorts of deities during the trip down. As I don’t have a particular Death Wish to make that treacherous trip, I’ll go the slow and lazy Pony Express route on this. Hell, my backlog is big enough that I can hold out for a few months.
Neocore Games’ mighty, meaty Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor – Martyr ($59.99) should have come with an advisory that if you like the game, you’re going to have to be completely committed to long-hauling it from the get-go. It’s a demanding and addictive time chomping experience that kicks off with an about 45-minute set of tutorial missions that ease you into the swing of things before it rips away most of its training wheels and lets you carve your own route through its astounding wealth of randomly generated missions. There’s a nicely spread out story here that has your Inquisitor of choice attempting to solve the mystery surrounding an ancient warship packed full of heretics, mutants, xenos and Daemons of the Chaos Gods. Detective work isn’t your sole task, thankfully. You’ll definitely get to do quite a load of daemon dispatching as you uncover assorted clues during your journey.
While you can indeed compare what’s here to Diablo III on a few fronts, the game feels like more of a throwback to Crusader: No Remorse, Origin Systems’ excellent PC (and later, console) classic from 1995. Partially destructible objects, alarms that summon packs of enemies and a few more familiar elements from that game appear here, but the game also has more than enough loot dropping, skills, upgrades and rewards to keep even the most jaded players quite busy. As with a few other games in my rather large backlog, I’ve held off doing a full review because the game really needed to be patched up so I could give a it a solid recommendation. The latest patch (1.0.5) now makes this one a greater (yet still flawed) game rather than a somewhat decent one that needed a lot more polish.
Get ready to do a whole lot of this, plus a nice bit of detective work. it’s like CSI with demons and a hell of a lot more weapons.
Loosely based on a true story (
Given the subject matter, The Lady of the Lake is a better title than 
Deceptively beginning as a charming budget flick, Joseph H. White’s 1946 film noir 
While it’s technically imperfect and a bit unpolished, 
Neocore Games’ mighty, meaty 
"DESTROY ALL FANBOYS!" 