Silent Hill (1999)

You were expecting the movie, weren't you? Well, the title does say "movie and game" review, doesn't it? So here's a blast from my past and one of the first PlayStation games I ever played. Silent Hill.

Anywho, it's a horror-survival game, and if I'm not mistaken, it was Konami's first foray into the genre. Capcom had just released the second game in one of their flagship series (Resident Evil 2), and Konami felt they could make a game just as good, if not better.

The game follows Harry Mason, an average man, who's searching for his daughter Cheryl after a car crash in the town of Silent Hill. And this town of Silent Hill is right out of a Stephen King novel. It's deserted, covered in a thick fog, and crawling with zombie-like monsters. You visit a deserted school, hospital, and other various locations which are eerie enough on their own, but halfway through, they become creepier. I mean there's a transformation; the lights go out and make you rely on a pocket-flashlight which only illuminates a few feet around you in a feeble cone. The floors are made of metal grates, the walls are covered in rust and blood, and these grey, faceless creatures want to stab you. And with your impaired vision, you need to rely on a radio that mysteriously emits static when an enemy is near. Yay.

This is a game that needs to be played in the dark. Alone. It's a short game, it only took me around five hours to beat it on my first walkthrough. If you want all the secrets, though, plan on ten hours. Hey, you could even beat it if you had an all-night Silent Hill party.

The pluses: (slight plot spoilers)

Story. The story is creepy, and if you can get past the bad voice acting, it's pretty enjoyable. Some people say it moves slowly in places. Others say it's anti-climactic. Keep in mind, there are four endings (and one gag ending that can be unlocked after beating the game), and it is possible to beat the game without all of the information that is necessary to fully get the story. So if it makes no sense to you the first time around, try again, and maybe you'll enjoy it more. You start out trying to find your daughter in a ghost town, but you end up following a series of clues to unlock a sinister secret about the town's residents while fending off hoards of monsters. And when you find your daughter, you're in for a shock.

Gameplay. Very open-ended. You get almost the whole of Silent Hill to explore. Gameplay consists mostly of running, shooting, screaming, and solving puzzles.

Sound. From the static on the radio to the atmospheric music, the music will probably scare you more than the monsters. But don't count them out.

Cons:

Graphics and camera angles. You can't move the camera, which leads to some awkward "I CAN'T SEE WHAT I'M SHOOTING, I HEAR THE STATIC AND I'M DYING!" moments. Plus, the graphics pale in comparison to some other 1999 PS releases.

Overall, I love this game. It spawned a bunch of sequels and a gut-wrenchingly bad movie, and has a huge fan base. If you want scare after scare, look for a different game. This is a game full of mystery and suspense, though it will make you jump a few times. Taking points off for voice acting, graphics and camera (which may sound like a turn-off, but give it a chance), I give Silent Hill a 4/5. Speaking of, if you own a PS3, it's available for a $5.99 download. And if you're up on Internet culture, Pyramid Head is not in this game. He gets a wicked memorable intro and role in Silent Hill 2.

Alice in Wonderland (2010)

This movie is based off of one of my favorite books, directed by one of my biggest idols, and starring a favorite actor of mine. Don't expect too much prejudice though.

When I first heard that Tim Burton was getting a chance to re-imagine one of the weirdest children's stories of all time, I smiled. Just imagine what he could do with the mad and wonderful characters. I even bought a poster of Johnny Depp in his Mad Hatter makeup, because I've never seen a more wonderful clown-leprechaun hybrid in my life.

But then the actual movie came out...

And, I really hate to say it, but it wasn't amazing. Many movie critics were saying that Tim Burton doesn't do his best work with remakes (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Planet of the Apes), but even they had a glimmer of hope when it came to his twisted mind.

The film opens with what the audience believes to be the night Alice had her famous Wonderland dream. Then it skips twelve years and she and her high-class mother are attending a stiff upper lip sort of party. It turns out to be the nineteen year old Alice's surprise engagement party.

Oh god, this is going to be a metaphor, isn't it? She's going to escape into Wonderland, stuff's gonna happen, and then when she returns, she'll be an independent woman and won't have to marry this Scottish lord. But there's still an hour and a half left. Burton's going to throw us the most creepy and engaging Wonderland we've ever seen. Alice was clever in the beginning of the movie and there were a few shining pieces of dialogue (especially a few lines between Alice and her possible future mother-in-law), but then the White Rabbit appeared.

Wonderland, or should I say 'Underland', is a macabre re-imagining of Alice's fantasy world. If you play video games, think of how Silent Hill takes an already freaky place, then rusts up all the walls, adds shadows and zombies and atmospheric music. It was sort of like that. Dark, very dark. Not that I minded, really. I'd have walked out if it was as colorful and migraine inducing as the 1951 Disney version.

But now onto the reason that most of us went to the theater: the Mad Hatter, the Red Queen, and the White Queen. Make-up, and CGI, and tongue-in-cheek humor galore. We all expected Johnny Depp to steal the screen, but it was really Helena Bonham Carter who made me laugh the most. With her head too big for her body, her strange vocal pattern, and her demeanor brought some life to the otherwise listless plot. Anne Hathaway played the White Queen, whose performance makes fun of her own "angelically-pure" image. She glides with this airy aura across the screen and throughout the film.

Depp. After appearing halfway through the movie, he almost becomes the main character. We know more about his past than Alice's, and his wicked strange accents and antics threaten to steal our attention. The problem is, we don't want them to. We sort of want to get to the end of Alice's story. His clown face begins to unnerve you after awhile, and you can't help but notice that Johnny recycled most of his motions from his much better role as Jack Sparrow. Pardon me, Captain. In fact, I have the DVD in my hand right now and his Mad Hatter is in the DEAD CENTER of the cover doing the patented Sparrow-walk. Excuse me, but who are you? You're not hardly Alice. (Yes, I resorted to quoting the movie itself for an insult).

The plot was a predictable fantasy coming of age thing. If you wanted a fantasy coming-of-age about a girl in a strange land, you should watch Spirited Away. Alice bumbles through the semi-recognizable settings of Underland, meeting CGI animals with amazing actors providing voices that barely help the linear plot. And one thing that drove me absolutely mad the entire time. The Mad Hatter character says it himself, "Beware the Jabberwock." It's not a Jabberwocky! That's just the poem's name!

I want Tim Burton to go home, kiss the kids, take out a pad of paper and write something strange. Original, crazy, and outlandish. He's the man who brought us Edward Scissorhands, Corpse Bride, Beetlejuice, and The Nightmare Before Christmas. Or better yet, I want to see him redo the classic TV series Dark Shadows.

Alice was dark, rarely funny, and even slightly confusing. But because of the costumes, effects, and Carter's performance, I stayed through the whole movie. I give the movie two out of five stars.

Daybreakers (2010)

Daybreakers is the type of vampire movie that we all desperately need after the Twilight Saga fiascoes. With Eclipse coming out soon, I thought I'd review an actually decent vampire movie to kick off this blog. I'll give you an in-depth look at its weirdo plot, and then my final verdict.

Daybreakers stars Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe, Claudia Carvan, and Sam Neill, but that's probably not why you're here. The plot goes a little something like this:

Edward Dalton (yes, Edward) is a vampire who is working on a blood substitute for a supply company. He's got a lot of pressure on him, because all of the humans are dying out. Why, you ask? Because the vampire population now accounts for 95% of life on earth, or some ridiculous figure like that. There was this poorly-explained plot device that some plague turned a large number of humans into vampires, and they began to turn the humans around them. That happened in the year 2009. This movie takes place in 2019, 10 years later, and the food supply is almost gone. Vampires have begun farming humans in these creepy factories that try to harvest every last drop of blood from them. Bad news is, there's only enough left for a month. So what does a society of vampire do? They make a substitute. And that nifty back story brings us to the actual movie.

Edward is close to making a breakthrough, and he tries the substitute on a "living" patient. He seems to be a military private, and Edward injects him. There's a nice visual effect with the vampire having his non-existent pulse monitored, but something goes awry. The patient's temperature rises to a sweltering 70 degrees! He replies, "I'm fine, sir" and then projectile vomits like the screen hasn't seen since The Exorcist. Then I'm pretty sure Michael Bay takes over filming because the poor vampire explodes in a gory spray shower.

The poor, forlorn hematologist gets in his shiny Chrysler with futuristic displays and whatnot and drives home. He catches sight of a police car, and another car. They end up nearly colliding. Edward gets out (probably to ask for insurance and gets licence plates), but these humans jump out with cross bows. He decides to take pity on them and put them in his car so the vampire police won't catch them. The woman, Audrey, makes a mental note of him, and they drive off.

Our protagonist heads home to see his brother, a human-hunting soldier, named Frankie. Frankie offers Ed a wine bottle full of human blood, but it turns out that Edward won't drink human blood. Who does this remind me of? Ah, probably no one. Anyway, they are attacked by a man-bat thing. It turns out that they are called "subsiders", vampires who fed on another vampire's blood.

The next day, Audrey comes to Edward in his home to ask him for help. She asks him to meet her at noon in some field-y place. He goes and meets the other central character, Elvis. Yes, the one who's been dead for over thirty years. Actually, that would've made a much better film, but Elvis is actually a southerner who was-once-a-vampire-but-is-now-human. I need a better term, so they'll be called "transvamps". Elvis is a transvamp, and this news excites Edward. There's a cure! He'll market it, become rich, and retire with a rich old-man cat. Only problem is, the troops come in with tanks and begin to blow them up. Frankie is heading them. This is decidedly not good, so they all pile into Edward's car. But bullet holes rip through the automobile and light streams in which leads to an incredibly humorous scene where Edward shrieks and cowers as the sunlight threatens to burn him.... okay... maybe I'm the only one who'd find that funny. They leave Frankie behind, where he gets singed in the sun.

Now for the interesting part. Edward gets cured in a long and complicated process which involves fire, water, and fried chicken. So he's a transvamp as well. Back at the vampire city, Charles's daughter comes for a visit and Frankie forcibly turns her into a bloodsucker. She feeds on herself and becomes a subsider. I think there's a metaphor there... but you're not reading this for the metaphors. There's a public burning of the subsiders, and Frankie becomes worried. As the film winds down, there's tons of violence and blood. Edward talks to his co-worker about the cure but ends up being betrayed. They get Charles to feed on Ed, so Charles becomes a transvamp. And his bodyguards eat him, and become transvamps. Nice domino, effect, no? So, the army eats itself, there's another small scuffle, and the movie ends with a moving voice over about the cure.

Damn, that was long. My other reviews won't be that lengthy (unless you guys find them amusing) it's just that the plot needed to be explained... in so many, many words. I'd recommend seing it though.

My verdict: Better vampire flick than Twilight, New Moon, and possibly even Interview with the Vampire. I actually enjoyed it. The color scheme is blue, grey, and black, so no need to worry about your color-blind uncle watching with you. There's a few great scenes and quirky visual touches, including a Starbucks-like stall in a subway which sells 20% blood coffee, a sign with Uncle Sam reading "I want YOU to capture humans", and the Subwalk, and underground daytime transport.

All in all, as my first review, I need to let Daybreakers off the hook with three and a half stars out of five.