DVD Reviews

Angels & Demons
Ron Howard
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Review by Brad Harmer

Based on the bestselling novel by Dan Brown, Angels & Demons follows Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks – Mazes and Monsters, Joe Versus the Volcano) as he uncovers the perilous secrets of the Illuminati. Caught in a conflict between science and religion that threatens the Vatican City, Robert races to find the clues to lead him to the hidden weapon he seeks.

A new Pope needs to be chosen, and there are four candidates. The Illuminati, however, want to make the decision themselves. As the prospective candidates are killed off one by one, the killer lets it be known that he is from the Illuminati, but what do they want?

Angels and Demons is well produced and packaged, but for all that, it’s rather hollow. There’s never any real substance or “bite” to the whole thing, which is a real shame, as it’s pretty and well presented nothingness. The main problem lies with its storyline, which sits in a literary no-man’s land: too fantastical to be realistic, and too realistic to be fantastical.

The author uses real subjects, possibly because they happened to be buzz words at the time – Illuminati, antimatter, Large Hadron Collider – but shows no knowledge at all of who they are, what it is, or what they or it do. If you’re going to make stuff up about an underground cult, why not just make an entirely fictional cult, so that you don’t end up looking stupid? Oh, because that wouldn’t be as sensationalist and sell as many books/cinema tickets? Good. Glad we’ve got that cleaned up.

Besides the rather overlong (by at least thirty minutes) story, there is a ridiculously stupid ending. A truly great twist ending, like Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, should leave the audience kicking themselves, because in retrospect the answer is so obvious. A truly bad twist ending, like Angels & Demons, leaves the audience wanting to kick Ron Howard and Dan Brown, because it’s so ridiculous and convoluted it’s obviously a twist ending for the sake of a twist ending.

To say that Angels & Demons is a bad film would be wrong (especially relatively speaking, considering some of the crap we have to watch), but it is astonishingly average. Whilst it’s well shot, well-produced, and very pretty to look at; it lacks any truly engaging elements in the story. Langdon runs around like a very dull Indiana Jones/James Bond hybrid, but never really makes us identify with him as a character.

The Emotionally Fourteen Rating:
Violence: Several torture scenes, some gunfights, usually with all the participants hurting themselves in a stupidly clumsy manner.
Sex/Nudity: None.
Swearing: Almost none.
Summary: Angels and Demons would be a great way to pass a couple of hours on a lazy Sunday afternoon, but there’s not much to see here. Stick with Indiana Jones for your excitement. 5/10

LA Ink: Series 2
Revelation Films
Review by Brad Harmer

LA Ink is a documentary series that follows the staff and customers of High Voltage Tattoo in Los Angeles, focusing mainly on the store owner and lead artist, Kat Von D. A spin off of the original series, Miami Ink, it’s a fairly shallow imitation, but that doesn’t mean that the show is completely without merit. For starters, the artists and artwork is of just as high a quality, and this is what the show is all about. At least it should be, right? It would suck if it constantly diverted into MTV style pseudo reality TV all the time, right?

When LA Ink focuses on being a documentary, it’s very good. Not only is the artwork on display absolutely top-notch, but often the stories behind why the shop’s clients are getting tattoos are genuinely interesting – be they humorous, or heart breaking. There’s an insight into laser removal of tattoos - something that people don’t talk about all that often, so that was definitely interesting to see.

Kat Von D’s attempt to get into the Guinness Book of World Records by tattooing four hundred people in twenty-four hours was also highly entertaining, and certainly the highlight of the series. Whilst the show was typically devoid of any real dramatic tension, the question of whether or not Kat will actually break the record was in suspense from the start of the episode.

However, the show all too often falls into staged melodrama. The artists at the shop, talented though they may be in other areas, aren’t actors; and they fumble their way through re-shoots and set pieces in a manner that is both intrusive and rather pathetic. What’s more, some of the pacing seems a little off. Kat Von D decides to quit drinking in an early episode, but asides from one vague mention in the following episode, the angle is all but dropped. Similarly, Von D’s cancer scare is handled badly. A genuinely scary time for both her and the cast of the show, it’s unfortunate that the editing and production of the episode sucks any dramatic tension there may have been.

The show suffers from a rather poor sense of pacing across thirteen episodes. There’s often a good chunk of an episode given over to nothing happening, only to be followed by a sudden flurry of activity in the last ten minutes.

It’s a real shame that the presentation of the show is somewhat marred by these flaws, as the real subject of the show – the artists and their artwork – is stellar. If the producers turn down the MTV, and turn up the Discovery, then they could have a real winner on their hands.

The Emotionally Fourteen Rating:
Violence: No direct conflict, but there’s a slagging match between the receptionist and one of the artists, which involves physical threats.
Sex/Nudity: Some skin is revealed for artwork, but nothing explicit. Corey Miller does some work on a porn-star (not like that), which involves a discussion of her work.
Swearing: Some, but mostly blipped out.
Summary: A great show, especially if you’re into tattooing or tattoo artwork, but casual viewers may find the overproduced veneer a little irritating. Recommended for fans of either LA Ink or Miami Ink. 7/10

The Dragon Chronicles - Fire and Ice
Pitof
Metrodome Distribution
Review by Brad Harmer

Ruled by the mighty King Augustin, Carpia is a peaceful kingdom in a fantasy world inhabited by dragons, knights and magical forces. All is great and well until the land’s serenity is unexpectedly shattered by a Fire Dragon rising from a distant land. The evil beast’s rampage spreads almighty fear and death amongst the kingdom’s innocent people.

In order to save her subjects from terror, the daring Princess Luisa asks Gabriel, the son of a legendary dragon slayer, for help. Together, they must free the Ice Dragon, the only creature who can defeat the monster that brings destruction upon their kingdom. But soon their saviour will become their worst enemy.

Good fantasy movies are surprisingly hard to come by. That’s why I’m pleased to report that this is one of them. Sure, it’s low budget, but that doesn’t hold back an otherwise excellent film. First and foremost, all of the characters are solid, well defined and realistic – something that a lot of fantasy falls down one, happy to take a stroll in the realm of cliché with its characters.

One of the first things to strike me was the dragons. They don’t look like the typical mental image of a dragon (either Western or Eastern), but rather resemble a hybrid of a bat and stingray. It’s the little touches of inspired originality like this that lift what could have been a dodgy B-movie head and shoulders above the competition. The CG isn’t mind-blowing, but it’s adequate – at no point do you “see the strings” as such.

Of course, it’s not all perfect. The action frequently stops to provide some rather clunky exposition breaks – but most of the faults are tragically on a technical level. The editing seems off at times, which can have a jarring effect during action or fight sequences; and the dialogue often winds up a little low in the sound mix, buried behind sound effects and music. Niggling points, perhaps, but they do mar what could have been a much better film had they been addressed.

The Emotionally Fourteen Rating:
Violence: Several sequences of swordplay and/or fantasy combat. Two dragons tear chunks out of each other whilst pinwheeling across the sky.
Sex/Nudity: None – the romantic sub-plot is very understated.
Swearing: None.
Summary: An above average fantasy movie that’s great Sunday afternoon fun, especially for younger viewers. The limited budget doesn’t hamper its presentation, although some silly technical errors are noticeable. 7/10

Creature (Not final box art)
William Malone
Video International
Review by Brad Harmer

A crew of scientists arrives on a far, cold planet to examine archaic artefacts of unknown origin. They discover that the German enemies have already a ship there. When they seek their help after a failed landing, they only find the German's bodies, obviously slaughtered by one of the archaic creatures, awoken to new life. Now the alien is after them.

Well, that’s the plot that the DVD case claims. In actuality, this is a shameless knock off of the Ridley Scott movie Alien, in virtually every way. Except that instead of the budget of a Hollywood movie, it has the budget of an episode of Blake’s Seven.

Well, that is something of an understatement: it’s actually a shameless knock of everything. It’s like it was penned by a twelve year old, stealing everything he could from his favourite TV shows, books and movies (I’m looking at you, Christoper Paolini). This hits home doubly hard when the laser blast noise is sampled directly from Star Wars. You can picture the conversation in the editing booth.

“Aw, man, we need a laser sound.”
“No problem. Just rip it from something else.”
“Won’t that be kind of obvious?”
“Not if you use some sci-fi movie no-one’s ever seen.”
“Star Wars?”
“Sounds good.”

Yes, Klaus Kinski is in this movie, but he’s basically playing a bad Rutger Hauer. When you consider they could have gotten Rutger Hauer for a fraction of the price, you realise how truly dumb that is.

Oh, and seriously, could the special effects director of this movie please write an official letter of apology to H.R. Giger? His foam rubber Xenomorph is both a) hilarious and b) an embarrassment.

There are some positive aspects of this movie, but they’re pretty grim pickings. The foam rubber alien aside, the gore and model work is really good (even if the gore is a little Friday The 13th over the top at times). That and Creature definitely falls under the heading of “So Bad It’s Good”. If you’re looking for a bad movie to get together with a few friends and take the piss out of, then I wholeheartedly endorse this movie. You’ll have a blast.

The Emotionally Fourteen Rating:
Violence: Several fight scenes, several extremely gory deaths.
Sex/Nudity: I can’t remember any, but I can’t deny that this movie was so bad that it did cause me to black out on a couple of occasions. There may have been some hardcore sex in those gaps, or there may not have been. I’m not watching it again to find out.
Swearing: A slightly more than realistic amount.
Summary: An awful knock-off that’s so bad, that as a fan of the Alien franchise, I was personally offended. Yup. It’s even worse that Alien Versus Predator: Requiem – 1/10

Newsfalsh! - September 2009

Welcome once again to Newsfalsh!, where we look at some of the news stories you may have missed the first time around.

Microsoft in web photo racism row

This made me laugh so hard when I read the first blurb. Microsoft, one of the biggest multi-national corporations in the world or indeed history, can still become affected by something as silly as casual racism. I would dearly love to be involved in the meeting where that decision was made (I don't speak Polish, but I'm paraphrasing and translating as best I can):

"Looks like the ad's about ready, want to take a look at it?"
"Wait, what's that in the photo?"
"It's a black person."
"I've never seen one of those before."
"Well, this has been sent over from the US arm of the business."
"Yeah, but have we EVER had a black person in one of OUR meetings?"
"I guess you're right, I'll get that changed."

Suggestions according to the article are that the Polish culture is predominantly white people, and thus they decided to change the face of the black man in order to do that. Now, I'm not the cultural attaché to Poland, but I'm sure they have at least SEEN black people in their lives, and thus the idea of a black person in existence shouldn't be that earth-shattering. I'm sure the Polish spirit can cope with the idea that black people are involved in meetings in many other countries. Besides, surely if they wanted to satisfy the largely white Polish community, they'd have done well to photoshop out the Asian gentleman behind him as well.



Ok, and say for argument's sake I supported the idea of removing the black guy from the photo completely. I don't, largely for the reasons stated above, coupled with a liberal dose of common sense. I do, however, believe that if you want to go about removing any sort of ethnicity from a person you should do it completely and NOT LEAVE THEIR FUCKING HANDS BLACK. I mean seriously, that shows a lack of attention to detail akin to the temp who signed for the wooden horse on behalf of Troy.

As if all that wasn't enough, it's not even a good photoshop job. Would YOU want a photo of this sort of photoshop quality on your website, especially if you were working for Microsoft, one of the most important corporations in the world? Surely they must have SOMEONE at Microsoft who can photoshop better than the guy they surely paid to do it. Well, in the spirit of shit photoshops, I thought I'd weigh in with my own. I did this for free as well, bear in mind.



Fake Dutch 'moon rock' revealed

I love stories like this for a very simple reason; Sometimes, in the span of human history there's a certain level of innocence to the actions of mankind. From the aforementioned Trojan Temp, all the way to Jim Henson deciding he'd be alright with just a Lemsip and an early night, humanity sometimes allows its sense of what's easiest to overshadow what's more logical.

Take, for instance, this news story. Rather than question the validity of a moon rock given to them by the Apollo 11 astronauts just under fourty years ago, or indeed even TAKE A GOOD LOOK AT THE MOON ROCK, the Dutch former Prime Minister was fine to just sit there and stare longingly, mouth agape, at what turned out to be a nice sturdy lump of wood.

Who was it who noticed? Was someone passing one day with another bit of wood, and noticed the similarities? Was there a visit of some local lumberjacks who'd never seen the 'moon rock' before? Was it as simple as someone being short of a doorstop and getting the rock out of the case for the first time?

See, more than anything, I'm intrigued by the technical and clearly very scientific tests that they must have done on this rock in order to ascertain that it was actually a piece of wood, so much so that I googled "How to tell a rock apart from a piece of wood"



Unfortunately, the search yielded no results of that variety. However, I do now know the best way to make a wooden bike. As well as the lyrics to "Piece of Wood and Steel" by David Allan Coe.

Named: The UK's Deadliest Biscuit.

Finally, a Facebook group I can get behind. Imagine it: Rob Wade becomes a fan of "NAME AND SHAME THE UK'S DEADLIEST BISCUITS!" Frankly, they've been getting away with it for too long, and it's got to stop. I'm amazed that there's not been one of those preachy television pledges, telling us that "Biscuit eaters need a voice, but they're choking on crumbs so give us money for a drink so they don't choke and stuff. Eight pounds a month should do it."

What troubles me about this article is that the makers of the Rocky biscuit have CALLED for this survey to be taken of biscuits. Why the hell would they want to do that? Were they sick of being told that Rocky was the most dangerous of all biscuits, causing more fatalities and injuries per capita than any other biscuit brand? You can see the logic to a degree.

"Your biscuit causes more deaths than any other."
"You're wrong...and I'll PROVE it!"

Reading some of these injuries makes for depressing reading, especially when you consider that the repeated injuries caused in this category led to the establishment of something called the Biscuit Injury Threat Evaluation (ahh, it abbreviates to BITE, how clever...). Ultimately, such injuries as "People poking themselves in the eye", "Falling off a chair while reaching for the biscuit tin" and "Suffering burns after dunking a biscuit in hot tea" can all be reclassified under the E14 Arsehole Stupidity Evolutionary Ladder, or EASEL.

Oh, and incidentally, Rocky bar didn't even place on the top ten riskiest biscuits. Probably because no fucker buys them at all.

Video Game Reviews

GI Joe: Rise Of Cobra
(PS2, PSP, WII, DS, Xbox 360 & PS3 (Version Tested))
EA
Review by Blake Harmer

I believe that there are certain stages of anger that people can experience. However, I will admit that when I played GI Joe: Rise of Cobra that I rose to the lofty heights of becoming so enraged as to make up my own swear words. Who did I swear at? My fiancée’s dog, who to be honest was only indulging in his favourite game of barking loudly when no one was at the door when I least expect it so I jump out of my skin. So I called him a “Chocolate Fuck Alarm”. Now, the dog doesn’t normally enrage me enough to make insults that make no sense, the special X-factor could only have come from playing this game.

The premise of the game is simple, you play as a team of two members of the GI Joe squad (you get to unlock more members but apart from the different sprite and a slightly different special ability they are all essentially the same) and you take on the forces of Cobra by just walking around and firing madly at anything that moves and dodging any thing that fires back at you. This does mean you just hold down the fire button for the entirety of the game, but that is actually not the reason this game is so bad.

So where do I begin to explain why this game angered me so? How about the fact that the game designers have been so lazy that they have obviously taken the code of the PS2 version and just chucked it on the PS3 with very little noticeable graphical enhancements? If you don’t believe me, check out the trailer and bear in mind this is the PS3 and Xbox 360’s graphics:



Another reason could be that the level design is so awful that in one section I had to snap to cover and then choose to leap over the said cover just to progress through the level, why I couldn’t just walk around the cover is beyond me. I think the thing the that annoys me most however, must be the simple ideas that just seem to be botched. For example the camera, is zoomed so far out in some parts of the game that I couldn’t see what random thing I was shooting at, and the cover system is so appalling it feels as though the awesome cover mechanic used in games such as Gears of War and Uncharted has been taken out and smashed over the head with a sledgehammer repeatedly until it stops working.

If there is anything nice to say about this game it would be two things, firstly: the supersuit powerup which makes you do more damage and are faster, so in a sense it speeds the game up which is definitely a good thing in this case. That and it plays the movies main theme soundtrack incredibly loud and it feels incredibly over the top for what is essentially about 15 seconds of blasting. Secondly: whilst I didn’t get a chance to test it, I can imagine that the game could be pretty fun in two player. Not because the game would be any better, but it would be more fun to mock the awfulness of the game like people would with a bad movie, especially as some of the in game dialogue is also pretty bad. Also, you could play the “who can make the most random insult whilst playing this tripe” game, and that would be infinitely more fun.

So to summarise, like most video game tie-ins of movies, this feels cheap and rushed and it will do nothing but leave a bad taste in your mouth. It is more Noooo Joe than Yo Joe. 3/10


Tropico: Reloaded
PC
Review by Rob Wade

Tropico is one of those games that's easy to explain and easy to place. Falling into the real-time strategy/"God" game genre, Tropico puts you in the role of a communist dictator (and you get to choose from several!) and allows you to create your very own island paradise.

Tropico allows full customisation of the island that you play on, all factors affecting the game difficulty in some way or other, either by reducing or increasing the game difficulty. The amount of options are quite staggering in this regard, with all sorts of combinations for whatever difficulty the player wants. Choice is a big proponent of strategy games in my opinion, and Tropico doesn't disappoint in this regard.

Once you get into the game, you'll find plenty of options there as well. Part of the appeal of this type of game on PC is choice as I mentioned, and Tropico allows for absolutely tons of information to browse through at your heart's content. Another popular feature, however, is that you can easily perform in the game without assimilating ALL this information, allowing the player to get as in-depth as they like without them feeling like they're missing out in any way.

However, this is not all you get in this package either, as the game comes with Tropico 2: Pirate's Cove in the box as well.

The sequel retains many of the familiar charms of the original game, but overlays it with a fresh coat of paint and a new gameplay mechanic. Unsurprisingly from the game's title, the sequel is pirate-themed. However, you'll be pleased to know that this game is just as good as the predecessor, in a different way of course. Tropico 2 retains all the appeal of the first game, with all the same information available, but reskins it effectively with a pirate theme.

The Emotionally Fourteen Games Rating
Graphics : Simple and colourful graphics. Everything's nice and clear and easy to see, which helps. Let's be fair: it's not trying to compete with the technological powerhouse games.
Sound/Music : Some pleasant calypso music, and an advisor who speaks to you letting you know what's going on, themed with accents and vocal styles appropriately.
Gameplay : Enjoyable RTS/God game gameplay, with the suitable themes that allow you to get immersed as much as you like.
Lasting Appeal : Plenty of customisation options and this DOES contain two games and an expansion, after all.
Summary : Tropico Reloaded is an absolute steal if you enjoy your RTS/God games, with two top games in a pack along with all the expansions released with them. You really can't go wrong here if you want a fresh twist on the strategy genre, as Tropico Reloaded provides absolutely tons of gameplay for a reasonable price. 8/10