I think it’s almost cheeky of me to review this game. I haven’t played the original trilogy of games that some people seem to adore so much and I have a particular bias towards Ubisoft for filling my pants with the Anvil engine which gave us the Assassin’s Creed series. So I’m going to have to review this game on its own merit.

Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands sees a Prince (unnamed, and if he is named I forgot) go to his brother’s kingdom which is under attack and then his brother unleashes a horrible curse upon his land which he must end. That’s it. There’s no other development really, there’s a lady who looks like Calypso from Shadowman who’s a Djinn and slowly gives you more powers (when she should really just give you ALL of them) , but apart from that the story is just a way of linking some platforming together.

Graphically, this game is actually rather pretty and although I try not to do the whole “graphics are nice” thing and these aren’t particularly stunning, it’s pretty enough.

Unfortunately, that will probably be the only wholly nice thing I’ll say about this game. Whilst the controls make sense and seem to work, the combat is functional but lacks style and flow and since a lot of the rooms require you to clear them of baddies before you move on it gets tiresome, boring and frustrating. The upgrade system though allows you to have full health from very early on in the game and means that the fights become even more of an annoyance as they present no real challenge. The boss fights are straight out of Batman: Arkham Asylum. IE: boring and unchallenging as they constitute the same dodge-attack-run away rota as Arkham.

Despite the lacklustre combat the platforming is some of the best I’ve seen in a good long while and the different elemental mechanics make for some challenging and interesting gameplay. However, each of these puzzles has a fixed camera and you have to do the correct thing to get the camera to change position, unfortunately what you have to get to is out of camera shot meaning that the beautifully crafted platforming is ruined by something which should be easy to get right by now. This became especially apparent during the FINAL chamber for me when I got stuck on the first puzzle due to me not being able to see how something worked, not any actual problems with the controls or my operation of them just a dodgy camera meaning I can’t see how to correct my mistakes. Sometimes the platforming would feel a little clunky and based on trial and error rather than any immediate skill or clever planning.

It’s said that the time reversal mechanic is what makes Prince of Persia so interesting and whilst it can deflate a tricky situation I found dying to be preferable because the game is so well checkpointed and the time reversal so limited. It got to the point for me where I was dying instead of using my time reversal because time reversal is so precious, which kind of defeats the object of the exercise.

Perhaps this is a stylistic point but despite the game being well checkpointed it lacks any definable chapters. This, for one, shows how shallow the story is in that the whole game is one chapter. It also has no manual save function meaning you have to complete the chamber you’re currently doing before you can safely turn your console off and these combining factors give them game a lack of any definition. Nothing definite happens, it’s all a minor variation on a theme. Your twatty brother becomes more of a twat. That’s about it and it sort of bugged me throughout the whole game how loose it feels.

I want to bring something up here, and it’s the traps. I appreciate how the circular saws moving around walls works, that’s fine. I like the moving pillars and spike traps and whizzy columns but the fucking swinging bars are a pain in the cunt. I took more damage from those fucking things than I ever did from combat and they just broke the flow of the game for me. In fact I found almost ALL the trap sections boring, especially when so much of the joy was to be found in the FLOWING platforming. Having to stop, walk around slowly and get unnecessarily worked up about a stupid feature is not a pelasant experience. I’m aware that this is something that was part of the original series or whatever but it’s just unnecessary and boring. It’s like chocobos in Final Fantasy games, unnecessary but there just because “it wouldn’t be a real part of the franchise if it wasn’t there”.

I was one of the very few people who enjoyed the 2008 reboot of Prince of Persia and even though the ending was fucking stupid and the smugness cranked right up, the platforming was superb and the advent of timed platforming was welcomed for the challenge. It lacked the traps and upgrade system which I see as unnecessary and even though the combat in that was stupid as fuck it was at least difficult in places and didn’t just feel like a grind.

I can recommend Prince of Persia: TFS, I suppose. I mean, I enjoyed the time I spent with the game but the combat was shoddy, the camera a real mess and the story’s development was so paper thin I almost shat out a kidney when something genuinely half-unexpected happened. In fact, looking back on it I would rather play the 2008 version again.

Where have the days of the good old gothic horror movies gone? Whether it was Christopher Lee majestically stalking his prey as Dracula or Vincent Price being depressingly obsessed with death in a good old Edgar Allen Poe story such as the Fall of the House of Usher? Why do we have to modernise movies now and soften them so they can be sold to teens?

As a child growing up (and ironically part of this growing up was as a teenager) I remember being able to go to bed and turn on the TV and more often than not you could find a horror movie on.  This was the days of the VHS were you could record more than one of these movies on one tape and have a whole collection rather than just one DVD per movie.  I’ve lost count how many times I’ve seen all Lee’s vampire movies and even the ones without him (my personal one without Lee of course being The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires).  We seem to lack the ability to make movies like that anymore.

I know it’s arguable that The Wolfman was a return to the gothic horror, but I’d counter argue that’s just a modern horror with an almost Photoshop style gothic world coloured over it.  You can take that movie and almost say “that’s out of American Werewolf in London” or “that almost feels like The Howling”, even though I did LIKE it, it felt like a facsimile of a true werewolf movie.  If you want a good gothic style werewolf movie hunt down The Curse of the Werewolf, another movie the Wolfman stole off.  Oliver Reed plays the tragic Lycanthropicly cursed character perfectly, but then again I doubt you could show me a bad Reed performance.

My point is we lack good old fashioned horror nowadays.  They don’t even show Hammer Horror movies on TV anymore which is a crime itself.  We have hundreds of channels on TV now, we even have horror channels so why can’t they show them? Look at Sci Fi (SyFy) now in the UK.  Almost every night they seem to reshow American Werewolf in London, it’s an awesome movie BUT why not replace repeats of movies with some classic horror? I bet it would be easy to really if they wanted to.

As much as I applaud the fact the Hammer Company is back making movies I find it a shame that they aren’t helping the cause of the old Hammer movies.  Clean them up, get them on Blu Ray! (if the new Hammer company have rights to the movies of course).  I know I for one would buy a Blu Ray collection of all the old movies, even if it did cost a lot.

The same goes for Roger Corman’s Poe movies with Vincent Price of course.  I would love Blu Ray releases of these movies so I could add them to my collection.  Even if it was just Fall of the House of Usher, Pit and the Pendulum and Masque of the Red Death they would take pride of place in my collection.  They were always my favourites and I miss that they’ve not been shown for years.

My guess is that the lowly horror geek who wants to see these movies shown again is a little spec of dust on the wave of the “WE WANT TWILIGHT” voices that seem to control horror now.  I’m just an old school fan who has to sit back and watch horror become all glittery and fluffy so that teens can be easily manipulated into buying into crap.  So yes, BRING BACK REAL HORROR! That’s what I say.

Antichrist; if you’ve seen it you’ll know how “controversial” it is, if not then just search for it online and you’ll get an idea that the politically correct can’t handle a movie that’s more about imagery than it is about in your face dumbed down storytelling.

After the death of their child a man and his wife (they remain nameless throughout the movie) deal with their loss, the wife deals with it badly and falls into deep depression.  Her husband a therapist decides to pull her away from her doctors and taken her to Eden, a cabin in the woods where they have travelled before.  This is a place the wife is scared of and the husbands belief is that if she faces her fears she can pull herself out of the depression she feels.  Once they make it to Eden it seems that nature is against them and is trying to send them into madness.

That is the basic plot of the movie, but what the movie actually is is an examination of how deep and dark depression can actually be.  Yes, it has explicit sex scenes and strong violence which includes sexual violence.  Some critics have questioned why there is no explanation of this violence and why is it so explicit? The question is why they cannot work that out for themselves.  If they forget about being so shocked for the sake of being shocked can they not look at the characters motives and work it out for themselves?

I’d say this is a movie where you form your own views and understanding on what is being shown to you.  You see the events through the eyes of both the husband and the wife and if you open your eyes you see the explanation.  You are given the evidence as to the woman’s insanity as well as the man’s (because in my opinion the husband is just as depressed as the woman but he lives his illness through his inability to cure his wife).  His wife who blames herself for the death of the child manifests her hatred of herself into the hatred of woman as a form, hiding in her research she once did that women were seen as evil.  She (being a woman) see’s the evilness she once argued against within her and sees herself as the personification of a that was argued to be evil within women.  This is not true of course but it is her illness that makes her believe it is.

Nature is the catalyst for both the husband and the wife’s downfall into insanity.  As a fox says to them “chaos reigns” and that is exactly what the movie is saying, that between these two people chaos does reign.  The one thing they have together that gives them any kind of happiness is sex, which is why they appear to do this so much.  They are fighting for the happiness that they can no longer find.  The fact that violence comes between this happiness is just another manifestation of the process in which they are going through.

It surprises me that when people open their eyes and take notice of what’s going on in the movie there is a meaning between all of the scenes in the movie.  I could watch it again and come up with a whole new theory based on the nature theme within the movie.  This is why this movie interests me so much, it is open to interpretation by the watcher and that is something we do not often see from Hollywood (and of course this is very far away from being a Hollywood movie).  So if you watch this movie watch it with your eyes open and not shut.  If all you are going to do is complain about explicit sex scenes and violence then you have missed the point completely and should stick to the Saw series for your entertainment.

Twilight annoys me, that’s the simple way to start this really.  I can understand why it’s such a success for teenage girls sure, it’s just like a typical magazine they read (full of men with no tops on).  Even past the sexual factor though there is another thing, people assume it made vampires and werewolves sexy.  Did it? Or did it turn them into whiney little school boys who should have left school over a year ago and “tribes” who are at best shape shifters rather than werewolves.

Vampires will always be sexy and it did not take Edward to prove that to us.  Look at Dracula, he can hypnotise people to do whatever he wants until the point at which he “penetrates” them and they become his.  I’m sure you noticed my sexual innuendo there and there was a point in it.  The vampire mythology is one of sex and societies fear of the freedom of being a sexual being.  Remember, we live in a society where sex is something that should be hidden and to be ashamed of (or that’s what we are taught all the time).  Established fonts of all knowledge such as the church tell us sex is something that will cause us no end of troubles, think of Adam and Eve.  It’s only when Adam and Eve taste the “apple” from the “tree of knowledge” that they are driven out of the garden of Eden for being unclean remember,   it’s the metaphorical roots of the teaching to us that sex is bad.

That is why vampires are seen as such evil characters.  They represent sexual freedom and the evil lure of sexuality upon we innocent pure children of God.  Silly isn’t it really when a lot of peoples so called “faith” is diluted to a point nowadays that we either have no belief of a God or “sin” then confess to try and rid ourselves of the guilt of doing things that we actually enjoy.  The vampire is a “demon”, he or she does what they enjoy and that is drinking blood.  It’s the sharing of bodily fluids from person to person, it’s the lust to devour that person and consume them.  Now tell me, does that remind you of Twilight? No? Probably because Twilight is more a warning to keep your virginity and look at the emo vampire that cries all the time because he did “it” and now sparkles in the sun, how pathetic quite honestly.

Now to the “werewolves” which I can’t really comment on in Twilight to be fair as I’ve not seen New Moon as of yet, I can still look at the “traditional” werewolf of course.  The werewolf like the vampire is a creature of lust, but also destruction.  He/she is the creature that lusts after the taste of flesh and the need to consume.  They lack no control and just as the vampire where a legend created to warn people the evils of not living a stable life within society.  I will say though that the werewolf is often the more tragic character who is forced against their will to turn into a beast when the moon is full.  How did they obtain such a curse? The passing of bodily fluids of course, blood and saliva.  It is a werewolf’s bite that causes the transformation and it is often pushed onto them against their will.  You could probably argue that the werewolf legend was a warning to people that if you have sex then you too will become this beast who lusts after innocent virginal people and take them against their will.  They are the work of the devil! Evil! No matter if the curse was passed onto them, they are a beast and should be killed.  Hardly seems to fit with the Twilight angry teenage shape shifters we see in New Moon does it?

So yes, Twilight annoys me.  It’s not the fans or their beliefs, let them have it and enjoy it but if anything I hate that the books were ever written.  Nothing against writing about werewolves and vampires but if the writer states that she hates horror and has never read anything else about the subject as research for her books? That quite honestly is a slap in the face for the legends and mythology of the creatures she is writing about.  I’d have thought the number one rule of writing such books would be to research what you are writing about.  If a book was written about drug addicts or alcoholics would you just write the book based on a very minimal knowledge of the subject material? I bet not, because it would come across as very immature and full of inaccuracies from the writer.  That is the problem with Twilight really, it’s very immature in its portrayal of the vampire and werewolves and even immature in its portrayal of love between two characters.  The “love” in Twilight seems to come down to stalking, selfishness and control;  If that’s love then what have I been doing wrong all these years because I’ve never had that kind of love.  We’re ok though, Twilight will teach all the little teens that that’s the way you should love people, they’ll be a generation of stalker emos and everything will be fixed.

Jennifer’s Body is a strange horror movie, you could say that it’s not even a horror movie at all just a teen comedy with the added teenager deaths to add the drama to it.  I know people would think from that I’m describing it like Heathers, but this is not Heathers because Heathers was a lot more intelligent than this with a far superior script.

Jennifer’s Body is of course the story of Jennifer.  She’s just a bitch, simple as that.  Stuck up her own ass is how I’d describe her quite honestly.  She has a friend Needy, who is ironically quite need and for some reason takes all the abuse from Jennifer.  Jennifer decides they must go see the latest emo band at a bar outside of town, it’s quite a shame really that this band ends up sacrificing Jennifer so that they can get some success (even if they do still suck after they make the sacrifice).  Once she is sacrificed Jennifer returns but can only stay living and look pretty as long as she eats boys.  So using her feminine charms she seduces several of her school friends and eats them.  Needy noticing this obvious change in her friend finds she is the only one to stop her.

I’ve heard many things said about Jennifer’s Body and quite honestly a lot of it I don’t agree with.   One example is that the movie is a feminist movie because of the way Jennifer dominates the men and eats them; I beg to differ on that point.  Is it a feminist belief that a woman must use her body to control men to get what she wants? That she must become a tool of their lust so she must survive? That she can only survive because of men? No, that’s not feminism at all.  If anything Needy is the “feminist icon” of this movie, she is the girl who must take on the beat (Jennifer) and save the day.  She shows the real strength in the movie and she is in fact the star, even if Jennifer should be (I mean come on Megan Fox is the big name of the movie right?).

So, why don’t I think Megan Fox is the big star of the movie? Well other than the fact her acting sucks in this she has one of the worst scripts to work with ever.  Everything that comes out of her mouth is a metaphorical mess of over complicated vocabulary that could have easily been said in far fewer words and a lot more intelligence.  The blame for that of course is in Diablo Cody’s style of writing.  I’m not going to hate on the woman because I think she’s quite good.  I loved Juno and it’s “hip” vocabulary was not an issue at all, and in this movie Needy also uses this style but to less of a degree which I find to be way more tolerable.  Yes, it’s ok for the script to be all “hip” and “cool” but don’t overdo it.  Jennifer’s style of talking in this movie comes across as highly annoying and in a way it could have damaged Fox’s ability to make the character convincing.  You could also take the view that maybe it’s just Fox that can’t handle such a script and could not deliver the lines in a believable enough manner; it’s just a matter of opinion really.

So, would I recommend this movie? I say wait till it comes out on DVD and rent it.  It’s an ok straight to DVD style movie that only got in the cinemas because of Megan Fox’s name and Diablo Cody’s Oscar for Juno, and if this movie had half the style that Juno had I’d highly recommend it.  I did enjoy this movie but only when Megan Fox kept her mouth shut, then the story could progress without the garbled mess of a script.

Rating 6/10

So, for movie three of my Halloween reviews I chose to review Alone in the Dark, I know it’s a bad movie and I chose to do it so I could bitch about it.  The thing that I did not realise is this is quite a unique movie.  Bad movies can sometimes get better with repeat viewings, you come to understand what the director is trying to convey with the images he puts onto the screen.  Alone in the Dark is not one of these movies.

This movie just succeeds in getting worse with every viewing.  Whether it be Christian Slater and Stephen Dorff’s bad acting or the complete lack of continuity, this movie is just bad.  It’s not even based on the game of the same name.  You would think that if they purchased the rights to the game now they would at least LOOK at the game and at least try to match the movie up to it, but no.  Nothing in this movie makes sense, not the casting, the script or anything.

Another argument would be “but some movies are so bad they are good”, well this movie blows that argument away with an atomic blast of crapness.  This movie is just bad, bad bad bad BAD do you hear me? I said BAD.  There is nothing that could make me recommend this movie at all.  Uwe Boll should be arrested for crimes against humanity and movies, seriously it is THAT bad.

I’ve bitched about the acting already but let’s look at some of the cast.  First we have Christian Slater, watching this movie makes me wonder did he EVER make a good movie? Yeah he was quite good in True Romance but then again was he that good? True Romance was a good movie because of the cast yes, but I’d argue Slater was actually one of the weaker stars in it.  Dorff in this movie is just as bad.  He’s another actor who I have to re-examine after watching this.  His best performance for me may be Blade, but on second thoughts it was hardly a strong character he played in that.  Finally there is also Tara Reid, what the hell is she doing playing a character that is meant to have brains? I’m sorry but she never had brains, she can’t ACT like she’s got brains so why the hell was she so miscast? She’s a brainless bimbo that is all.

Another thing that annoyed me in the movie was the so called “Xenos”, any fans of Alien and Aliens would be also pissed off with this.  This is pretty much a rip off of “Xenomorphs” from Aliens, the creatures themselves are quite Gigeresque in their design which to me is annoying.  The makers of this movie (yes thats Uwe Boll) should get more of an imagination or as I said before USE THE SOURCE MATERIAL when making his movies.

So, would I recommend this movie? Only if you wanted to commit suicide.  Saying this movie is poor is just being nice, and too nice.  This movie is fucking horrendous, simple as that.  There is no saving it.  From bad acting to a bad script, to even worse direction this is a movie straight out of hell made to make you want to rip your eyes out of their sockets.  Don’t watch it, if you own it burn it.  IF YOU OWN IT?!?! Who would buy this shit seriously? If you ever did buy this crap I doubt you have taste, I really do.

So yes, think about this review and realise this is my reaction from a second viewing.  I’ve managed to see this crap two times and it’s literally made me want to pull my eyes out of their sockets.  Tomorrow I’ll be reviewing a movie I know I like, not crap like this.  My sanity can only take so much attack and movies like Alone in the Dark are made to make you crazy, simple as that.

My rating for this movie? 1/10 whats the 1 for? The fact it ended.

Now I’ll warn you ahead of time on this one, this will be a rant to end all rants.

I’m sure all horror fans can look back and realise that moment they became hooked on horror.  No matter how small it is everybody has it.  For me it was an American Werewolf in London.  I’m not sure how old I was when I first saw it on TV but I was young enough for it to scare the hell out of me and from that moment on I’ve seen it at least once a year.  It’s comedy is perfect, it’s arguably the benchmark for any movie maker wanting to make a horror comedy so does it need a remake? Hell no.

It’s arguable that some movies are dated and could do with a brushing off and re-imagining but why this movie? The only answer is going to be money.  Hollywood has run out of ideas so they have to fuck with the movies we have grown up with, simple as that.  I’m just waiting for the news this remake will be in 3D.  Movies such as Hellraiser and Scanners have planned sequels to make use of this technology why not Werewolf? Can’t you just imagine it? The wolf popping out of the screen trying to bite your head off? Thats sooooo cool, seriously…it is, love it! You must! Because Hollywood want your money!

In truth, Hollywood don’t give a shit what the fans want.  Hollywood looks at the modern Twilight humping teen and thinks that they are the average horror fan.  If the werewolf in this remake looks anywhere near as crap as the Twilight werewolves? Shoot me now, put me out of my misery because there is only so much CGI fluffiness one movie watcher can take.

There is a chance of course that Werewolf won’t be all twilighted out (yeah right).  It could of course go through the gore porn pimping out that is also popular at the moment.  The original movie was gory enough but lets add way more gore! Oh! We could add puzzles and make it Werewolf meets Saw! Where the werewolf plays with his food! Now just how awesome would that one be? Lame? Oh you so know it.

One thing I know for sure, if Landis does not work on this movie it will lose some of it’s magic.  The movie is full of his comedy, it’s his style.  Can you imagine them trying to remake Animal House? Any fan of that movie knows they can’t remake that movie.  Especially not without John Belushi, but I bet they would give it a damn good try.  They would lose the magic of course, but who cares…gotta make the mighty dollar don’t ya? Gotta get paid.

It will be interesting to see what “news” comes out about all of this.  Will it be the “Shaun of the Dead” of werewolf movies? Point to note on that one…Shaun was INFLUENCED BY WEREWOLF.  It’s not hard to see really, that’s how influential Werewolf is as a movie.

What of the transformation scene? Are they going to top that? But of course.  I can imagine it now “lets do it fully CGI! We so know they will have learnt nothing from the travesty that was American Werewolf in Paris.  Yes, it was an entertaining movie but the CGI transformation sucked big time.  There is nothing dated about the transformation scene in American Werewolf in London, it has never been topped by any other werewolf movie and never will.  This remake won’t give us anything new in the SFX department, if anything it’ll just give us another inferior scene and another reason to hate it.

A remake should look to improve the original movie it is based upon.  The problem with a lot of remakes right now is that the movie maker does not attempt to improve at all.  They add in some gimmick like “3D” to make it seem more entertaining and churn it out onto the viewing public to enjoy and spend money on.  The problem with that is part of that public are FANS of the original product who actually look at these remakes with such revulsion that it puts them off even bothering looking for good movies coming out of Hollywood ever.  We now live in a movie world where superior movies are being produced in the Asian and European market and the sad fact is Hollywood don’t fight back by making better movies, they remake old movies or just remake movies from other markets around the world and sell it off as their own ideas.

All we can hope for is something goes wrong with this Werewolf remake.  I’d love for them to decide not to do it.  Do you think they will even FILM it in London? Or just fake it in some studio.  I guess time will tell, and I can tell you something….if they change the ending and actually use silver bullets to kill the werewolf? Then they don’t know fuck all.

So yeah…rant over…