Zombies, Zombies Everywhere! (2011) - Zombie Horror Videogame Review (X-Box Indie)

Oh goodness me, another day another darn X-Box Indie channel zombie game review. Zombies are numerous on the indie channel as they don't need any A.I to speak of, here it is no different. I have to say my review is based on two goes at a 40 second demo so do take that into account.

The game is played from a fixed first person perspective. You are in a fantasy style world with huge red and blue mushrooms either side of the screen. From the distance groaning zombies walk forward, using an antique looking double shotgun you blast them away to stop them reaching you.

I assume you get access to a variety of different weapons to battle the zombies with. The controls are a bit twitchy for my liking. The zombies are as bland as always even if there is a bit of variety, they are more cartoony than realistic. The title screen has some decent horror music but for the game itself it is just unmemorable filler.

Not an exciting game, this does nothing to stand out from any other number of cheap zombie games, hard to recommend in the slightest.

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Camping (2013) by Mike Eshelman and Alex Levasseur - Horror Comic Review

Camping is a short 20 page indie comic from Dust Bunnies Comics. Originally it was planned as a short film but adapted to comic book form as it was felt it would be better suited.

Three men have gone hunting in the woods but have gotten lost. They sit around their camp fire drinking beer and talking about how anyone could have gotten lost and how they will be rescued soon enough...but is everything as it seems?

This isn't going to be much of a review as I can't really say too much without ruining the surprise. The tale would feel perfect in a horror anthology and has a great last few pages twist to it that was the perfect icing on the cake. At first I thought the text was a bit off but there is reason for that, and the extreme close ups of objects and the characters gives a slow reveal. The black and white art is well suited and the dialogue is actually well written.

Camping can be purchased for download or physical from the Dusk Bunnies Comics website for $1 or $3 respectively. Good stuff!

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The Prospector's Curse (2013) - Short Horror Film Review

Back at the start of 2012 I posted some news about a Canadian made Western themed horror short titled The Prospector's Curse. This has now been finished and I have had the pleasure of seeing it.

Set during the American gold rush The Prospector's Curse follows two criminals on the run from a nearby settlement. 'Tubby' Ellsworth has murdered a man sleeping with a prostitute he was in love with, while Jack is a confidence trickster. While up in the mountains they encounter a dying prospector who begs the two men to give him a Christian burial and to also deliver a pouch of gold nuggets to his soon to be widow. Greed takes over the two men and they instead leave his body to rot and decide to find the source of the gold. However at night the spirit of the prospector comes to haunt them in revenge for their broken promises.

This is a fifteen minute short that while clearly not on a huge budget manages to create the atmosphere of the wild west, it has a fantastic Western theme playing through out and the actors all look the part with their clothes and mannerisms taken to levels of stereotype that gives it a comfortable feeling. Johnny Quinn; a Quentin Tarantino lookalike is fantastic as the swindler Jack, while David Roberts as Tubby brings some comedy to his role with his anger management issues. The Prospector himself is well made up to give him a disgusting look.

The Prospector's Curse is not a film I would call creepy, scary, or horrific but it is a decent enough morality tale. Where the film succeeds is its embracing of all the Western tropes that give it a warm feel and got me in the mood for some of the Western classics. It is true that some of the acting is a bit off, and the closed locations reduce some of the sense of scale the genre is known for but this was an enjoyable fifteen minutes that I am glad I got to see. The trailer can be seen here.

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BBC Archive Voices: Alfred Hitchcock (2011) - Audio Book Review

BBC Archive Voices was created for AudioGo, that specialises in audio books. The one I am reviewing today features archive interviews with the master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock.

The audio book consists of nine different interviews spanning around thirty years from the 1950's up to the 1970's. I had been concerned that it would concentrate too much on Hitchcock as a person but was delighted to find that it is mostly about the various films he has done. I have not seen all of his films, Rear Window for one is a film I have always wanted to see but not yet got around to doing so, a lot of the films talked about I had heard of at least, though I did study the films of Hitchcock during A-Level Media Studies back at sixth form so would be expected.

There is some interesting talk of Psycho, giving more depth into that, such as how there is only horror shown at the beginning and that it is left more and more to the viewers imagination as it goes along, the infamous shower scene is discussed briefly, and also the stairway scene death. Also there is a bit of talk about The Birds including Hitchcock's reason for filming it in colour and what the film really means; humans taking nature for granted. He argues is it wonder nature would turn on us when we abuse it so readily.

What I didn't know about him was his big distrust of the police which stems from being locked in a cell as a child, he always refused to drive at least in America for fear of the stress and suspense that would come should he ever get given a ticket, this distrust can be seen in many of his films where the law are shown to be incompetent.

At around an hour and twenty minutes BBC Archive Voices: Alfred Hitchcock is quite fascinating, it can be purchased from the AudioGo website for £1.99 as a download, or £4.95 on CD. Has really gave me a thirst to see some of his classics I have yet to see.

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The Animal Cage by ANiMAL - Horror Music Video

I have never heard of ANiMAL, they are a London based EDM/Punk trio apparently. I don't actually even know what EDM stands for, not really up with the modern music. Anyway The Animal Cage is their debut music video that sees the band being kidnapped by a demented stalker. Quite a fun one that made me wince at one point, doesn't take itself seriously!

Eyam: The Plague Village UFO Mystery Issue 1 (2012) by Craig Daley - Horror Comic Review

Craig Daley is someone who puts a heck of a lot of research into his comics that often border on the surreal such as Football Crazy and Meadowhell. Eyam: The Plague Village revolves around the idea of UFO's.

In 1665 plague broke out in the English village of Eyam. To contain the plague the villagers willingly put themselves in quarantine for fourteen months in which time two hundred and sixty of the three hundred and fifty villagers succumbed to the disease (this actually occurred in real life by the way). The comic takes place in 1965 where Jenny Taylor returns home after a night out in Sheffield to discover the village is deserted. Amid reports of UFO sightings the place is closed off by the military, paranormal expert Carnacki is called in and teams up with MI6 agent Hannay to solve the mystery.

As usual the art style is so bizarre and unique that it remains one of the selling points, at times it looks like photos have been used and 'comic'ed up' to fit in with the bright primary colours. Real people are used for some of the characters, and again real information used, specifically about the governments UFO agendas of the 1950's and 60's and the plague of Eyam of 1665. This is part one of two so the reason for the townsfolk missing is not revealed but I'm sure as usual it would be something quite clever and left field as that is Daley's trademark.

At thirty seven pages Eyam: The Plague Village UFO Mystery is an entertaining read and leaves you wanting to know more, it can be found at Amazon and other places for download at the cheap price of £1.28.

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Zombominous (2012) - Zombie Horror Videogame Review (X-Box Indie)

I need to clear space on my 360's hard drive so I delved back into the horror of the Indie channel to play some more zombie games. I was not expecting much thankfully...

Zombominous is quite a mouthful of a title. It has you as your avatar in a zombie over-run city where two towers under construction stand that house human survivors. Armed with a baseball bat each level you have to protect the humans from the attacking zombies.

This game is pure garbage! It is a third person game that looks terrible, has no music and very limited sound effects. Your baseball bat is very awkward to use, you have a ridiculous jump button that propels you forward and the controls in general are rubbish. This may well be one of the worst indie games I have played on the 360. Nothing to recommend it at all, a boring waste of space; avoid like the plague!

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Battle Royale (2000) - Horror Film Review

Battle Royale is one of my favourite films of all time, having seen The Hunger Games last year I felt compelled to once again see this film due to the similarities that film had with it. As a side note apart from the first five minutes Battle Royale II: Requiem is not a good film and should be avoided. As an extra side note the novel Battle Royale by Koushun Takami (that the film was based on) is fantastic and very recommended reading!

The film takes place in Japan in the near future where a piece of legislation named the 'Battle Royale Act' has been passed to combat the rising unrest by the young. By impartial lottery once a year a class of children are picked to be taken to a remote location and forced to fight to the death as a scare tactic for others. The teens are all fitted with explosive necklaces and given three days to fight until just one is left. More than one left after three days and the necklaces will explode. Shuya Nanahara (Tatsuya Fujiwara of Death Note) and his class mates are drugged and awaken on a deserted island where their 7th grade teacher Kitano informs them of what awaits them. The rest of the film follows the class as they battle and fight to survive. Some decide to try and win, some try to hide, while others come up with plans to try and escape the island. Shuya, his love interest Noriko and mysterious transfer student Kawada are the main protagonists.

This was such a unique film at the time and still today feels quite unlike any other. Despite the grim tone of teens being forced to murder each other the film has quite a comic feel to it, violence is over the top with characters often taking ridiculous amounts to get killed, there are darkly humorous moments and some prolonged death sequences that give it a fun unrealistic feel. With a class of 42 kids there is plenty of room to fit in all the school stereotypes that exist. The geeky kids, the loners, the bullies and the bullied, the class joker; all are featured and it is interesting to see their interactions with each other as their day to day relationships change now they all have weapons and permission to kill.

The teacher Kitano is a fantastic, unnerving character, having taught the class previously he knows them and for the most part dislikes them, he seems to have a lot of enjoyment being in charge of the act, commanding from the nerve centre, giving reports every six hours of which of the classmates have been killed, and giving light hearted advice to the survivors. Transfer student Kiriyama (who volunteered for the event) is menacing as the bad kid, for the whole film he doesn't utter a word, systematically killing everyone he comes across, he even gets his own theme tune that plays whenever he appears like he is some sort of boss character which reminded me of the Final Fantasy VII Sephiroth theme!

Words cannot do justice to this film, I am having trouble expressing just how awesome this is, awesome scenes of violence (a severed head with a grenade jammed in the mouth thrown through a window is a fantastic moment) and great classical music to go with the violence that just fits perfectly. The plot is really interesting, you really come to care for a lot of the characters and the way that many different short stories are neatly fitted in creates a lot of emotion for characters when they die. At times it is almost like a collection of short stories, something that the book also gave the impression of.

Some of the flashback sequences are not that exciting to see even if they do give some context for characters relationships, and the translation text is sometimes quite messily done but other than that this film is near perfect. Battle Royale is a film I can just watch time and time again and never get bored of.

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28 Weeks Later (2007) - Zombie Horror Film Review

Having recently watched 28 Days Later I just had to watch the sequel. This had stuck in my head as the better of the two films, having not seen it for a while would I still think this of it?

Don (Robert Carlyle) and his wife Alice are hiding out in a countryside house with a bunch of other survivors post rage virus outbreak. The arrival of a panicked child brings disaster as the house gets invaded by a horde of crazed infected. During the chaos Don abandons his wife to save his own skin. 28 weeks later and the American army have started the process of reintroducing people to Britain after all the infected have died of starvation. A small zone in London has been created for the people to live in, Don is the caretaker of this safe zone. The arrival of his children back to Britain spells disaster as a chance encounter with an immune victim of the virus unleashes another outbreak which the American forces are prepared to stop at any cost.

The opening sequence to 28 Weeks later is in my opinion one of the best I have seen. It wasn't until the final sequence in 28 Weeks Later that the action ramped up but here, within 5 minutes that familiar, fantastic signature song is playing and zombies...sorry, infected are everywhere. Don running across a field pursued by scores of infected remains the highlight of the film, expertly shot.  After this opening there is a brief period of calm before the film degenerates into pure action. I complained that there were a few too many quiet sections in Days but here with nothing but action I sometimes wished for some breathing space.

The main characters of Andy and Tammy (the kids) are very annoying and unlikeable. Everything bad that happens in the film is down to their actions so it is hard to feel any pity at all for them. The American army are shown as ruthless for the most part, perhaps a commentary on the 'war on terror'. They are far more concerned with stopping the outbreak then saving people, going to extreme lengths to contain the outbreak. Maybe having the holding area for non infected in such a weak, pathetic place was not such a good idea as one infected is able to pretty much turn everyone within moments.

For the most part Weeks is a road trip film in so far as the characters have a goal they are aiming for and must encounter trials to get there. evading snipers, infected, gas attacks, helicopters and other dangers it really is quite action packed and full of lots of violence. Highlight for me was a helicopter flying at an angle so that the blades were slicing up bodies left, right, and centre. The direction is again quite kinetic, hand held, quick flicking shots much like Days. A trip into the London underground takes the film almost into a different genre as it becomes a first person film in the style of the Blair Witch Project and The Tunnel. It is kinda weird  and feels odd and out of place.

The soundtrack is fantastic, even better than Days but the plot is more bland and predictable, and with heroes you can't root for (I guess Jeremy Renner as Doyle is ok) and no let up in action it does get a bit too much on the non stop action side of things. Maybe the middle part of Days was not so needless after all. A worthy sequel regardless, maybe one day the rumoured 28 Months Later will be done to complete the trilogy!

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Castlevania (1986) - Horror Videogame Review

Though I already own Castlevania on the Wii's Virtual Console I just had to buy it for a second time when I saw it on the 3DS E-Shop, who wouldn't want Castlevania on the go?

You play as Simon Belmont who has started an assault on Dracula's castle (fittingly named Castlevania) in a bid to defeat the dark lord and restore peace to the land. That is about it for the story. You work your way throughout Castlevania, starting in the castle grounds, and ending in Dracula's throne room at the very top of the place, each level preceded by a map showing the route you are taking. The game is split up into six different levels made up of a variety of stages and all ending in a boss fight.

Still the best thing about this game is the music, the Castlevania series for the most part has been full of amazing songs and this can be seen even in the original. The years have not been kind to this game, Simon controls very badly, his whip attack is unreliable at times, he walks as slow as a zombie, actually scratch that, he walks slower than the zombies as they are quite fast! Your jump is terrible, unable to move once you have jumped and is just weird feeling. The power ups of axe, holy water, throwing knives and crucifix are all classic and all useful for different situations, while the stopwatch is...well it is the stopwatch.

One of my favourite things about the series other than the music is the horror aesthetic that was quite unique at the time and appealed to me, having the game all wrapped up in a castle gives it a strong theme so that levels don't feel disjointed. Common enemies are bats, bone throwing skeletons, leaping flea men and floating Medusa heads. Bosses are a chance for the game to shine and while they can be cheap to fight against they are memorable and crop up many, many times in future instalments. Death and Dracula are pretty much the same in all the games and both great battles, while the giant bat, Frankenstein's monster, giant Medusa head and mummy duo make up the other ones (also appear in future games as both boss characters and demoted to ordinary enemies).

While Castlevania is a classic game it is just a tad frustrating nowadays, I know this is due to the challenge vanishing from games and my past self would hit me for saying that but I found myself impatiently rushing through the thing, cursing every now and again by the random nature of the enemies attacks. If you like the series and have yet to play the original it is worth it, but otherwise move along, there are far better games in the series.

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Bram Stoker's Dracula (1993) - Megadrive/Genesis Horror Videogame Review

I have quite the backlog of games to be playing, today I chose Bram Stoker's Dracula based on the film of the same name from 1992. You play as Keanu Reeves' character Jonathan Harker, not surprisingly the bland depiction of this character injects 100% more emotion and pathos into the character than the cardboard cutout character Reeves played in the movie could ever do!

The game doesn't really explain what's going on, there are titchy level introductions that are quite vague such as 'journey back to civilisation' or something that opened one level, these introductions are shown in a digital book titled 'Vampyres' that is a fun touch. Anyway from what I can gather (and going by the game, not my knowledge of the Dracula tale) Jonny Harker starts off in a pub somewhere, where some bloke with a hat tells him via a dream bubble to retrieve a...tooth? Stick? something or other. So Harker leaves and battles a ten foot tall man with a whip. Later on he finds himself in Dracula's castle, battles a fire breathing dragon, and a ten foot tall Dracula who flings fireballs Castlevania style, and then gets chased by Dracula's brides out into the countryside. Eventually he gets home to a mansion in London...then I died by a low flying bat.

Hey! You may say, you did not complete this! Well no, I didn't but I did complete it on Trainer mode which gives you the first and fourth level to play through only. Like most movie tie ins of the early nineties this is a platformer. Harker is armed with a sword and can pick up limited use guns. Levels are open ended, an arrow kinda points where you need to go. Enemies mostly consist of bats, rats, spiders, and wolves. Every now and again a human opponent will appear, later levels see the appearance of skeletons, ghosts and zombies. 

Six levels make up the game, each broken into two acts. The first act has you exploring an area to locate what I assume is Van Helsing who thinks an item at you, then with this thought you must then locate the exit (not an exit per se, just a hovering arrow titled 'Exit'). The next stage is a more straightforward left to right jobby that ends in a boss battle with a usually unexplained giant boss. My favourite boss was a monstrous 'Flash' style character who zoomed around the screen in a blur before stopping to throw knives at you. The bosses all explode when defeated for some reason, maybe that is explained in the film?

Dracula has the feel of an old Amiga game. It has a nice retro feel to it and the music isn't actually that bad. Graphics wise it is ok, no animation to speak of really, a lot of the levels are grey and brown, not good looking. Hit detection is quite terrible, bats float through solid objects and you take damage if you so much as look at an enemy. Annoyingly enemies respawn if you go off screen. You character is patchy in his attacks, and enemies are patchy in when it will register your hits as affecting them.

I remember at the time Bram Stoker's Dracula got bad reviews, playing it now it does have a nice old school feel to it, it is not terrible, but it is a bad game that could have done with more care and attention done to it. Aside from one level where you are being chased there is no variety and as a side note zombies kinda just sink into the floor when defeated which is funny. Worse than average.

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Keep Calm and Kill Zombies Mug

You know what? I have been really lazy this week with my blog updates. I have so much stuff people want me to talk about on this site of mine and instead I am using the excuse of my day job taking all my energy! Not good enough. Anyway, to finish the week on a high here is another quick post...

A fellow survivor I know braved the apocalyptic streets to deliver this belated birthday gift to me. A mug with the wise words 'Keep Calm and Kill Zombies' which anyone with eyes would already have read. The 'Keep Calm and...' products have become popular here in Britain, I approve of the zombie spin off merchandise. There shouldn't actually be blood on the mug, that was a desperate attack on a weak headed ghoul that caused that...the Rotting Zombie HQ defences are not that tight!

Good for drinking tea from; love me my tea.

Zombie Chews - Zombie Chew Bar

This undead chew bar came all the way from Australia. It promises to be sour strawberry but I have to say it kinda tasted like a plant, not really a sweet taste to it. There are apparently other flavours available to buy as well, I assume brain, flesh, and rot are the other three flavours.

It is cool that there are zombie themed sweets, but if I were a zombie I would not stave off my taste for flesh to eat this. Good all the same, just not that tasty.