It’s only since I started reviewing games that I found out what it’s like to go into the experience blind.

With Dungeons of Hinterberg all I really had was the name. It had something to do with dungeons, and it was probably set in Germany.

Those guesses turned out to have a fifty percent hit rate, it’s actually set in Austria.

Clearly I know what I’m doing, but there’s more to see here.

Cell shaded art makes colours POP.

That’s my first thought when I see the main menu. It’s not just the comic book style with bold line art, but the actual use of colour throughout. This game is not afraid to present our eyes with a beautiful kaleidoscope.

This art is a strong stylistic choice, but it has its downsides.

There’s not much in the way of dynamic shading, light hits everything uniformly which makes every surface look very… well… flat.

Combine that with the big eyed character design and my first thought when seeing the face of our player character Luisa is that she looks like one of those Nintendo Wii avatars.

We are hit with some contradictions right away. The main character has a sword, but there’s a modern gondola in the background of the main menu; The first hint at the fusion setting.

There’s no music yet, just idyllic birdsong and insects. Lettering also follows that comic book panelling and so does the speech bubbles from our characters.

The story is delivered to us from Luisa’s perspective, she’s the only one we see thought bubbles from because we are in her inner world.

She is a lawyer from Vienna looking to escape the mundanity of her repetitive life by visiting a region where magical dungeons have started spawning monsters thus, naturally, becoming a tourist hotspot.

She waxes philosophically for a bit about the nature of adulthood and the wistful longing for the wonder of childhood she can no longer indulge in.

Relatable.

This was where I first learned my ‘Germany’ guess was incorrect by the way. Looking up the developer, Microbird Games, confirms. Austrian game, set in Austria.

Luisa lands in her BnB, confirms she is there to kill monsters because girls just want to have fun and off we go.

The entire game is basically ‘what if hiking was entering dungeons and killing monsters to get treasure?’.

Hinterberg’s slogan is ‘Enjoy your slay’; NPCs talk to you as though you are a tourist here to enjoy the local scenery, telling you about the best places to gear up and how much we are going to enjoy ourselves.

In the background is a story about how magic mysteriously appeared in this one place in Austria, causing dungeons with non-sapient monsters to start spawning and allowing people to gain magic and cast spells. This caused a thriving tourist industry to develop around the town, with slayers plunging into the dungeons and developing their own economy.

And somewhere along the line all of this became very… ordinary.

One of the first friends we make in the village is a Spanish temp worker doing two jobs, one of which is running a kiddie area where children can practise with weapons. She mentions she finds time on her breaks to grab her battleaxe and get some exercise killing monsters.

NPCs warning us of danger comes off less as them telling us not to get into life and death fights against supernatural monsters and more like a pro telling a newbie not to tackle that triple diamond ski route until they are prepared.

This is exactly the story of a girl going on a skiing holiday to unwind from her stressful job, except ‘skiing’ is replaced with fighting strange creatures in mysterious cosmic sub dimensions.

Landscape and area design is probably this game’s single biggest strength.

Hinterberg itself is gorgeous, as though the developers went to an actual tucked away idyllic Austrian town on the banks of a lake surrounded by peaceful woodland and just translated everything into beautiful splashes of colour for a video game.

As you progress through time, you can increase ‘relaxation’ and ‘amusement’ stats by doing things like going to the spa or spending the afternoon just chilling out in a nice scenic spot in place of tackling a dungeon. The entire game is geared towards telling you to stop and smell the flowers, enjoy the landscapes Microbird have obviously lavished great care on.

The dungeons themselves provide some variety, the first is clearly going for a liminal space effect. There’s human amenities like benches and gardens, roads and cars, but arranged nonsensically in an endless space of floating islands. As though placed there by something that knew what human things were, but not the context they usually appear in. So there’s a bench on a vertical surface, a car on a floating island with nowhere to go and nonsensical houses in ridiculous places.

Then an underground mine and a slime cavern make it clear that this game is not a one trick horse and plans on giving us quite the buffet of unique environments.

I had an immediate dull spike of resignation at the bog standard ‘ledge puzzle with one way to progress’ thing that games sometimes do. Complete with splashes of paint to denote climbable surfaces. I think it was Yahtzee Croshaw who said that this type of game design is just an unusually shaped corridor and a game that puts too much of this in falls into danger of becoming… rote.

No matter how pretty the environments are, if there is only one way to progress through them and no real challenges or fail states on the way, then what you have is a walking simulator with extra steps. Fortunately the puzzles and environments start to increase in intricacy after the first couple of dungeons, adding some much needed challenge in navigation.

You can acquire better gear, better armour and weapons. There aren’t any exotic attributes to this, it’s just ‘bigger number better’ nothing much to say there. You get a couple of spells that change depending on region and some special sword skills that let you do things like leap across the battlefield or spin like an angry Beyblade.

Combat is probably the weakest aspect of the game so far. The dodge is not very fluid, it doesn’t interrupt sword swipes. Most fights boil down to ‘hit the guy, dodge, hit the other guy’. The special abilities can spice things up but there’s not much in the way of customisation if you want to fight ‘your’ way. Every fight is arena based. A fire ring springs up and surprise monsters pop up to fight you in this designated area.

It could be worse, I still had fun with the push and pull of fighting, and an experimental tackling of some monsters way above my level does tell me there is challenge to be found here, but there’s lots of room for improvement.

Dungeons of Hinterberg seeks to be something different than your bog standard hack and slash game, which is good because the actual hack and slash gameplay is probably its weakest aspect.

The game world is stunningly beautiful and encourages you to just slow down, form relationships with the NPCs in the hub area and enjoy it rather than rush your way to becoming the biggest, most powerful slayer in town before the week is out. It’s a good way to curb that gamer instinct to optimise the fun out of the game and I look forward to seeing what Microbird does next.

The post Dungeons of Hinterberg (PC) Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

Boy how I’ve missed a lot of the MCU as of late.

I can distinctly remember a time when I was seeing almost every movie that came out more or less on release day.

I saw ‘Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’ at some point, ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’ was alright… aaaaand lemme do a quick Wikipedia search… ‘Black Widow’, I saw that one.

Those are the only Marvel movies I’ve seen in this decade. Bloody hell, seventeen-year-old me would never have believed it.

Going into Deadpool & Wolverine, hopefully that means I’m a little more inoculated against the Marvel fatigue that has well and truly set into the modern cultural landscape as these movies start coming and they don’t stop coming.

Deadpool & Wolverine is the thirty-fourth film in the MCU and is hotly anticipated for a couple of reasons beyond the ones I just mentioned.

Deadpool is the poster child for a modern fourth wall demolisher. He shares in-jokes with the audience, talks about studio politics, and will occasionally address a character by the name of the actor playing them. If you aren’t into comics and only consume superhero stuff through movies, there’s really nothing else quite like him (I’m told She-Hulk was similar, but nobody seemed to like it.)

But more importantly, Wolverine is back, and that’s a big deal.

Directed by Shawn Levy, we start with Ryan Reynolds’ eponymous merc-with-a-mouth Deadpool drifting through life without knowing what to do with himself. To his great joy he is pulled from such mundane hell to do superhero shit again, but as you might expect he is dropped right back down again when he is informed his entire universe is about to be destroyed. Apparently, due to some incredibly contrived reasons, Wolverine was single-handedly holding reality together and his death at the end of Logan has made things start to fall apart… somehow. Stop asking questions.

So now he has to find a living Wolverine, played by Hugh Jackman finally in the iconic yellow suit, and find a way to save his universe.

So what we have here is a journey of two fundamentally unkillable warriors on a mission, one of whom cannot stop talking to save his life and the other who has anger issues.

As you might imagine, they fight a lot.

And since I mentioned they cannot die, those fights become extremely messy and end up accomplishing not much other than putting more gratuitous violence on the screen and moving the guy who makes fake blood up a tax bracket.

Combine that with universe jumping and Disney money bringing back a few old faces and you have a machine built for hype.

It’s all hype, all the way down.

They even have a moment where Deadpool stumbles onto a faithful recreation of the legendary Uncanny X-Men #251 cover with Wolverine crucified on the X over a field of skulls.

The plot is little more than a vehicle for more hype moments and jokes. It’s loaded with inconsistencies and unexplained phenomena. The entire climax of the film hinges upon a substantial unexplained plot development being handwaved as ‘we’re so awesome’. I can best describe the story beats as ‘stuff happening’ again and again, with fourth wall cuts and quips in between. I watched this with my dad and he claims he lost track of what was going on after the first third of the movie but had fun anyway… which kind of sums up the entire experience really.

It’s a Deadpool and Wolverine movie filled with Deadpool and Wolverine moments.

Every few minutes, a character or situation will be introduced for at least one other existing character to react to, usually by saying ‘Holy Shit’. The plot literally creates an entirely new mechanism for bringing back characters from previous dead end Marvel movies that often pre-date the MCU itself.

Hype, hype… hype. Honestly, it felt less like watching a movie and more like a two-hour TikTok video.

What else… oh yeah, the action. It’s excellent. That’s almost par for the course for a Marvel movie; even the worst ones can reliably be said to have some pretty decent fight scenes, but taking off the kid gloves and letting the characters say ‘fuck’ then successfully impale the guy who can survive such treatment through the head elevates it. Levy had two of the biggest ticket characters of Marvel in his pocket, and by god did he use them to make a glorious, bloody mess.

As for whether I’d recommend Deadpool & Wolverine, that’s the wrong question. If you’ve seen the first two Deadpool movies, then you already know if you are going to enjoy this. Honestly, I feel disingenuous having to even put a review score to it, you will either love it or hate it.

I’ll give it a three out of five, but your mileage may vary.

The post Deadpool & Wolverine (Marvel | Disney – 2024) Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

I have not seen the 1996 film ‘Twister’; I was alive when it came out, but not by much and my parents were fortunately not the type of people to take their three year old into a disaster movie.

So perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that this thirty year old man had to google the film to even realise it was technically a sequel. Though it stands perfectly well alone.

Lee Isaac Chung directs a movie about a group of committed storm chasers running around tornado alley, a region of the central USA that sees more twisters than any other place on earth, looking for a unique opportunity to gather valuable data.

Let’s take a look.

Our main character is Kate, played by Daisy Edgar-Jones. A brilliant meteorologist who used to chase tornadoes, but has been chained to a desk by the trauma of her last encounter with a freak EF 5 twister that she barely survived and several of her closest friends did not.

She is talked into getting back into the game by a fellow survivor to test some new tracking technology that could potentially save lives during an unusually violent storm season.

While on the hunt she and her new team encounter Tyler, a deceptively insightful thrill seeker with a YouTube channel played by walking jawline Glen Powell.

I suppose that’s why they put him front and centre of the movie poster, despite Kate being the main character right? Yeah, it was just the jawline, no other reason…

A story like Twisters is a particular kind of disaster movie. One where all the main characters are actively seeking out the disaster and while the appearance of the true main characters, the twisters themselves, are controlled by the movie makers, they have to at least pretend they are unpredictable.

There’s no looming threat on the horizon the characters can’t just walk away from and no mounting tension beyond the character drama due to the very stop and start nature of a tornado.

Very different from, say, a movie about a volcano that’s about to erupt, where there is a distinct moment we all know is coming where everything is going to go to hell in a handbasket.

So while there is ‘a big one’ at the end (come on, that doesn’t count as a spoiler, you already knew that) there’s no build up to it. Our characters chase tornadoes, find a few, and sometimes things go really wrong.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that the rising tension is held entirely by the characters rather than the environment.

So Kate is the good old trope of the genius who went through something awful and is now struggling to overcome their trauma to apply that genius yet again now that the call to adventure has showed up at the front door yet again.

The movie goes out of its way to show us that she knows her storms like nobody else, it’s only herself stopping her from finally completing the revolutionary experiment that ended in tragic failure four years earlier.

Her suspiciously fortunate friend who’s here getting her back in the saddle has his heart in the right place, but might need his motives interrogated.

Meanwhile that roguish, charismatic YouTuber reveals more of his tender philanthropic, good-ol-southern boy core the more layers of stubble, muscle and branded tee-shirts she peels off him…

God I hope I didn’t inspire any weird fanfics with that last line.

These character journeys of realisation and conflict between professional self interest and inherent morality are what forms the beating heart of Twisters. It’s simple, but that’s all it needs to be.

Acting and writing lets it down somewhat during the opening minutes of the film. We start with Kate’s first doomed expedition and I’m sorry to say but that first impression ain’t great. The actors are trying their best, but the material they are working with isn’t exactly Shakespeare.

The scene appears a bit like a commercial where a group of twenty-something acting hopefuls have to act like friends excited to be with each other for a few seconds before turning to the camera and presenting an ad for toothpaste.

It’s painfully obvious that something horrible is going to happen to all of them.

Fortunately things do become more hopeful as the film carries on and the performers are given more baggage to work with, as bizarre as that sounds.

Action is all go and all here.

The effects are particularly impressive, not a sentiment I really expected to have about any movie in 2024 but the true switch-your-brain-off moments when the convoy of storm chasers drives right into a raging tornado to accomplish whatever goal they have in mind were truly heart pumping. The action choreography was well put together and the violence was interspaced with the interpersonal moments in a good balance between cute character moments and witnessing mother nature remind us all who’s boss.

Overall, Twisters caught me off guard a little.

It wasn’t anything like high art, but there was more substance here than I was ready for and I left pleasantly surprised.

Bonus points for a satisfying ending.

The post Twisters (Warner Bros. – 2024) Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

Capes caught my attention by reminding me right away of two of my favourite obscure media.

The first is Atlas Reactor. One of my favourite games ever before the servers went down, the heroes and their abilities in both games blend turn based combat with unique character abilities… Also Doctrine, the grizzled mentor character in Capes, looks, speaks and acts like Lockwood from Atlas Reactor.

Second, Worm. A webserial by Wildbow that gained my attention because they also call their superpowered individuals ‘Capes’, but similar themes of imperfect heroes trying to hold back the tides of grimdark forces attempting to bring down their world quickly stood out. Doctrine even has a visible super suit peaking out from the tattered jacket he wears as a sign of things that were.

Cape’s title screen is a graveyard looking out over a city lit by the dying sun. Half completed statues of heroic figures tower over buildings in the distance; heroes literally waiting to be built, a sign of your coming struggles.

It’s a grid based tactical game where you control a squad of superheroes, developed by Spitfire Interactive and published by Daedalic… the same guys behind the excellent Shadow Tactics games, which is a good start.

We are treated to a cutscene explaining our backstory.

King city used to be a place where heroes kept the peace until they were overthrown by the nebulously evil organisation known only as ‘The Company’.

We get two types of cutscenes. Those rendered in the in-game engine, and comic style panelling where character portraits are lined up on whatever side of the screen lines up with their place in the conversation.

Capes wears its comic book inspiration on its sleeve. Even the menu select options are little comic panels. The characters have bombastic dialogue that tries and sometimes even succeeds in bringing the ham.

Then our caped crusaders find a blood soaked torture warehouse where the company has been experimenting on captured Capes and the tone is flipped. Jury’s out on whether that counts as a planned tonal shift or a jarring one.

Gameplay wise, combat cleaves closer to Atlas Reactor than something like X-COM.

There are no dice rolls, no missed shots or odds to stun. You can see the movement and attack range of every enemy at the start of your turn and know exactly who can threaten who. Couple that with the fact that none of your superhuman soldiers has an ability as banal as ‘shoot the other guy’ and Capes becomes more of a puzzle game than a tactical squad game. It’s all about leveraging the unique ways your Capes can alter the battlefield and combo their abilities with other teammates.

I would like to see more verticality. There are only a few levels that make use of different heights for your teleporting Super to really get your money’s worth from their superior mobility but it’s never much.

I was playing on the middle of three difficulty levels and never came close to losing a mission. Unless things in the late game get significantly harder, simply finishing the mission will not be difficult.

Things become refreshingly harder when trying to complete all challenges on a mission. There are a selection of targets tailored for each mission, things like: use X character’s ultimate, or disarm five enemies. Getting all of these challenges in the same run nets you a bonus ‘all in one’ challenge. Winning these nets you points to upgrade your Capes, meaning it’s a good idea to go back and do old missions for the points to keep your Capes in fighting form.

If Capes has one glaring area where it really drops the ball, it would have to be sound.

Dialogue could use a go over by a writer or five, make those words sound like something an actual human would say. Then delivery needs work… a lot of work.

I can hear the talent in the voice cast, but I can’t help but feel like they may have been reading their lines from different rooms with zero context.

As an example, you can disarm enemies with certain moves. When a goon drops his weapon, he will sometimes shout “my weapon!”

Except rather than sounding like he had dropped a weapon (“Oh no, my weapon!”) he sounds more like he’s pointing out which one is his (“That’s your weapon, this is my weapon!).

William Roberts as Doctrine is the best of the cast so far, but that’s really not saying much.

Music is also too bland to get more than a sentence in this review; it serves, I suppose.

In the end how do I rate Capes?

I personally had a lot of fun. Figuring out what combos go together really well and seeing your team of ragtag superhero wannabes morph by degrees into the real thing was fun. Sharpen up some of the edges and we could have something brilliant here.

Maybe that’s the X-COM, Worm, Atlas Reactor enjoying part of my brain speaking, but it’s a part I like, so there.

The post Capes (PC) Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ has become one of those films.

You know, one of those movies that has cemented itself into the cultural zeitgeist as just built different.

Like ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ or ‘Godfather 2’ it’s one of those nerd holy sites of which there will never be another quite like.

Wouldn’t it be quite the feat if lightning struck twice?

An entire nine years after it came out, another movie… wouldn’t that be something?

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is a prequel to Fury Road about the life of the extremely popular deuteragonist Imerator Furiosa, played then by Charlize Theron and now by Anya Taylor-Joy and Alyla Browne as young Furiosa.

That word, ‘saga’, gets thrown around a lot by modern Hollywood, but for once this feels like a movie that deserves it.

A meaty two and a half hour runtime told in multiple parts, the movie takes Furiosa from a little girl being kidnapped from her carefully protected slice of paradise to a war rig driving demigod of war with arguably the most badass title in fiction.

On the way there, she finds a nemesis in Chris Hemsworth’s charismatic road warlord Dementus and a partner slash mentor in Tom Burke’s stoic Pretorian Jack.

First thing’s first, the action.

Mad Max: Fury Road had some of the best live action stuntwork, practical effects and co-ordination in any movie, so Furiosa has a hell of a legacy to live up to.

But live up to it does.

You are never more than a minute or two from the next outburst of violence for the entire runtime, leading me to wonder how the hell there are still so many people out in the wasteland when they keep dying at such an impressive rate. Action scenes are masterfully choreographed set pieces with layers of moving parts and razor sharp tension.

Sticking with what works, live action practical effects form the solid core of the movie. This is augmented with amazing stuntwork and an intuitive flow of action that turns the fight into a story. Look away for a moment and you potentially miss a crucial shift of gear in the ever evolving combat.

No shaky cam here. Just nice long takes; signs of a team that is confident the action can stand on what it is instead of needing to introduce the illusion of movement to trick your brain.

Suffice to say director George Millar has forgotten nothing about how to keep his audience firmly hooked.

My plus one to this movie was my father, who, after some deliberation, declared Furiosa superior to its predecessor.

High praise indeed.

He also said you needed to pay attention in this one a great deal more than the last, for unlike Fury Road, Furiosa involves a great deal of grand strategy politics involving the three great fortresses of the wasteland.

The core of the story involves Furiosa trying to hide the location of her verdant and peaceful home from the violent raiders who would be more than happy to ride in and ravage it from top to bottom. But it quickly bleeds into a grand war for the wasteland between Dementus and Immortan Joe, who is here played by Lachy Hulme.

It can be somewhat difficult to asses the character performances of the two actresses playing child and adult Furiosa respectively since for various reasons she doesn’t do much talking throughout the runtime. Most of what we are left with is physical acting, and while the direction makes it clear Furiosa was always a firecracker who shrugs off pain and fear, stoic staring and angry glares aren’t much for an actress to work with.

What I’m saying is, Anya and Alyla do the best they can and do alright.

Demensus on the other hand is going to split audiences, I can already tell.

Chris Hemsworth is finally allowed to use his natural Australian accent, which oddly makes him stand out as the only one speaking as a cultured and modern man when his goon squad is considerably more rough around the edges.

On the other hand, he is the leader. Standing out is good.

And we can see why he is the leader.

Even while the character grows steadily more unhinged as time goes by, Demensus maintains the same effortless charisma that made nations of housewives watch the Avengers movies just to see Thor with his shirt off. It’s clear why these men and women are following him.

The few cracks in Furiosa only truly begin to show near the end and are all to do with pacing.

A major character who forms an important part of Furiosa’s life gets an ignoble off-screen death and is never mentioned again or even during. To the point he could potentially be alive; I’d call it sequel bait if it didn’t read like the movie just clean forgot about him.

Then a major event that is the culmination of the political game the players of the wasteland have been playing is given a montage and a few lines of voiceover from the narrator and leads jarringly into Furiosa’s final confrontation with Dr Dementus with zero lead up.

It feels as though someone realised the movie was too long and the scenes they chose to cut were all near the end.

These are niggling complaints in the otherwise delectable dish that is Furiosa. A worthy character given a worthy story. Lightning does indeed strike twice.

The post Mad Max: Furiosa (Warner Bros. – 2024) Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

Gotta fit more ‘of the’ in there somehow. Let’s really get that sucker going.

My memories of the few Planet of the Apes movies I have seen are vague and not particularly prominent. Like a birthday party you had three years ago, you know you attended, but damn if you can describe anything that went on beyond ‘a bunch of monkey business’.

Such handicapped, I enlisted the aid of my cinematic plus one and brought my Dad.

After watching Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes with him, I asked what he thought of it.

He nodded and delivered his package of paternal wisdom for that day.

“I’d see it again.”

The highest of praise.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes starts with a brief funeral for Ceaser, the all important Ape Jesus who first learned to talk and led the revolution that resulted in the first Ape societies emerging and overtaking humanity.

Then it skips forward by an unspecified amount of time, ‘several generations’.

At once I’m impressed.

A brief link to its past, then Kingdom is right into its own story, neatly severed from any previous baggage.

The last few films become the mythology the completely original characters in this one have to ponder, they are now the mysteries of the past.

In an age of cinematic cowardice, where millions of dollars can only be safely risked on what’s proven to already work, wilfully jettisoning the safety net like that is a move that take some guts.

From then on in we follow a young, intelligent ape named Noah as his tribe of eagle raising Simians comes under attack and he becomes involved in the life of an unusually clever human while trying to save his people.

The greatest impression this movie left on me, one that will stick for a while, was the masterful presentation of its setting.

Human made buildings and urban features sit buried under layers of decay and creeping nature reclaiming it. The world is a jungle slowly overtaking the concrete and metal it’s growing over and some of the scenery we see on Noah’s journey is genuinely awe inspiring.

Never is it made more clear that this is a changed world. The potential of what we unleashed has been realised and we are officially dethroned as the dominant species on this planet.

We don’t get to see the big bad guy on the movie poster for a surprisingly long time.

We hear his name spoken, the bad guys are acting in his name, but we are well into it by the time he first literally swings onto the scene. He is first established as your pretty typical primal warlord type. Seemed the only difference between him and the Scar King from the recent ‘Godzilla x Kong’ movie was that he was much smaller and could talk… also the movie would have been a great deal shorter if he had an ice breathing, weather manipulating Dragon the size of a container ship on a leash, but I digress.

Plot unfolds and dimensions unravel. He gets a chance to explain what he’s about and at some point, the evil monkey dude starts making a worrying amount of sense.

You start to ask if he’s even wrong in the first place. On top of that, the heroes we are following are not necessarily following the same agenda and it becomes a question of who, if anyone, truly has the right idea about what the world should become.

The ending had me genuinely not knowing what was going to happen next. I wasn’t expecting the funny ape movie to have characters with damn near Shakesperian levels of complex motivations and secrets behind secrets but here we are.

By the time we are in the third act, we have multiple conflicting agendas between the main characters and we can’t be entirely certain any one of them is entirely wrong. Even the main villain has goals that at the very least make you hesitate to truly condemn him.

This is a world of Apes now, is it time for humans to really take a back seat? To retreat to our own little islands and let our successors take their rightful place?

Well the characters of the movie have a lot to say on the subject and by the end you won’t be so sure either way.

The post Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (20th Century Studios) Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

Abigail is a movie about a small team of mercenaries hired to kidnap a young girl and keep her in a large mansion for a day until her father pays the ransom.

Naturally not is all as it seems; Abigail is no ordinary girl, her father is no ordinary man and the mercenaries, including our focal character ‘Joey’, are being set up.

The mansion is locked down, elements of the job aren’t making sense, and something is in there with them… hunting.

Alright, minor rant incoming, I’ll keep it brief I promise.

This movie lives on the strength of its primary revelation. That Abigail is less of a ‘who’ and more of a ‘what’.

This would have actually been somewhat compelling… if it were not for the fact that trailers gave basically everything away immediately. There was no attempt to preserve the moment, they spoil it all. I’d be surprised if one cinema goer in fifty didn’t go in already knowing the mid-act twist.

So yeah, if you didn’t know already, Abigail turns out to be a vampire.

Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett claim this is a re-imagining of 1936 classic monster movie ‘Dracula’s Daughter’ so perhaps the surprise was dead on arrival anyway, but still they play off the beginning as if the big revelation is going to be some shocking twist we won’t see coming.

I freely admit I am no horror aficionado. I saw ‘Signs’ at the tender age of too fricking young for that shit and decided from that point onward that movies were never allowed to be scary again thank you very much.

So that’s the guy who’s sitting here writing that this movie was not particularly scary.

It’s a bloody splatterhouse where certain individuals literally explode into fountains of gore coating everything and everyone in the vicinity in themselves; but even for me the jump-scares, who was going to die and when were predictable and fairly reliably patterned.

The mercs themselves are a fairly diverse cross section of stereotypes.

There’s the beefy dumb guy, the asshole professional smart dude, the peppey teenage girl hacker, the tattooed skinhead slurring his words so severely I assume the actor was stoned in real life, the quietly dangerous sniper and Joey. An early scene establishes Joey’s credentials by having her Sherlock scan the other members of the group and tell them all what their deal is, the character building equivalent of speed dating. So we know she’s smart. The movie also shows her hesitating when she learns her target is a child and has her taking care of Abigail pre release in a way that is definitely supposed to establish her as compassionate.

Abigail herself is obviously the main focus, she’s right there in the title.

She’s presented at first as your average rich ballet dancing privileged pre-teen girl. She spends the first few minutes of the movie dancing to an empty theatre and is dressed in the same tutu the entire way through… even after the thing becomes drenched in the blood of several different people.

We are set up to believe this is all an act. That the monster below is putting on a careful façade to lure in her prey and toy with the meat already halfway to her maw.

Then the ending happens.

Here comes the part where I struggle to avoid actual spoilers because what was that? Is Abigail a horrible monster in the form of a little girl, with the innocent act a carefully constructed mask to lure in prey? Or is she a child neglected by her vampire father who just needs a hug?

A last minute shift in the entire direction of the story has me genuinely wondering if the ending was filmed separately to the rest of the movie, it seems to put different motivations into the heads of characters who really didn’t have them five minutes before.

Perhaps I’m wrong, but something about it struck me as a reluctance to truly have the child be the bad guy, no matter how much effort they have spent on convincing us she is a murderous centuries old creature and that her destruction would legitimately be the best for humanity.

In short, Abigail was nothing to write home about. There’s plenty to love in here and the cinematography is actually very good at times. Creepy dancing Abigail is a repeating motif that helps tie the narrative together neatly. Alisha Weir does a convincing bounce between innocent and creepy as the titular character and the whole package was rather well paced.

Just don’t expect it to change your life.

The post Abigail (Universal Pictures – 2024) Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

Ah the ol’ American war movie.

Gratuitous violence all packaged up in a patriotic shell for Americans to watch and feel good about how they saved the world from Nazis or communism.

A clash of good vs evil where the US of A saves the da… Hmm what’s that? This movie is about the USA fighting itself and not a foreign power?

OK… well.

Bet they couldn’t resist the classic red blooded American white dude who’s about 50% testosterone by volume and 50% bald eagle…

Huh? The protagonist is a female journalist who doesn’t so much as touch a firearm the entire movie?

OK… Alex Garland, what are you up to?

Kirsten Dunst is Lee, a veteran war photographer who has captured horrors in battlefields overseas only to find herself doing the same in her own backyard. She is joined by her colleague Joel, played by Wagner Moura; a starry eyed photographer who worships her as a hero named Jessie, played by Cailee Spaeny; and Sammy, a much older mentor acting as the soul of the group played by Stephen McKinley Henderson.

The four of them are journalists, driving their press vehicle to the nation’s capital in a dangerous attempt to interview the President of the United States before Washington falls to the forces closing in on it.

If you want a wider view of the conflict, you aren’t going to find it.

There are titbits and snippets, hints at what’s going on across the country. But there are no cutaway scenes showing that New York is now under the control of the empire of McDonalds.

The entire film follows these four journalists and the only info we have is what they happen across while they make their way across the country.

And it’s not a pretty picture.

Even expecting it, the horror the movie contains seems to creep up on you. Maybe it’s because we have uniquely vulnerable protagonists, protected by the veneer of civility owed to their status as agents of the media and not much else.

It’s not Rambo seeing those bodies, it’s not G.I Joe making his way across this violent battlefield, it’s a woman with a camera and some flimsy body armour.

The American war movie has led to certain expectations within me over time. It involves a very mythic depiction of battle. Even movies that profess to be darker and grittier where the scarred protagonist dies at the end still manage to be fundamentally about the heroism of the brave soldiers who fight for freedom.

But Civil War sidesteps most of this in one very simple step.

This is not the USA vs the word, it’s the USA vs itself.

Our protagonists are here as a neutral party, on a mission to document events. On either side of the conflict are forces any modern viewer, American or not, would simply recognise as American soldiers and secret service.

I am not American.

I feel the need to state that somewhere in here, because this film is going to mean something more to someone who is, but even I can see the confrontational nature of the movie. This is a film showing brother killing brother. It is, at times, intensely uncomfortable to watch; but from start to finish it captivates.

My expectations were ripe for an exploration of a complex political situation extrapolated from the current state of America. A depiction of a near future where the visible faultlines of today have split and the sides people argue on now have become the factions of a brutal war.

Instead, I got a soul shaking narrative about the horrors of war from the point of view of those who wilfully walk through the middle of it to capture it on film.

There’s no Trumpists vs the Woke Left here. If you haven’t looked up the Wikipedia page, you won’t even be entirely clear on where the lines are or who exactly is winning.

This isn’t a condemnation of any currently extant ideology in the states, it’s a dire warning of what the future could hold if the nation doesn’t pull itself together.

Ultimately, Civil War took me by surprise.

An evocative movie that takes a step back and points to where the USA could be heading in the future if it doesn’t course correct.

Captivating from start to finish, this is one that is going to shake people.

The post Civil War (A24 – 2024) Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

I wasn’t sure what to think going into this one.

A film about a modern day folk hero set in India called ‘Monkey Man’. Trailer showed martial arts and some kind of revolutionary undertone.

Was it going to be Bollywood? Was it another paint-by-numbers action flick out of Hollywood trying to cash out on cultural capital?

Indian culture surrounds this film; it is about the faiths that the people follow, it is about the wealth that flows up and the people it leaves behind. It is about a man’s journey for revenge and the cost of obtaining it.

And how can revenge not be worth it when you have nothing left to lose?

Dev Patel both directs and stars as Kid, a young man we see throwing hands in underground fighting rings in a monkey mask to make cash.

It quickly becomes clear he’s up to something when he goes through great lengths to infiltrate a circle of elites and get himself close to a man he seems to have something of a dark fixation on.

From there things escalate into violence, corruption, murder and a tale of the little guy getting stepped on and fighting back.

If, like me, you are a tired soul rusted by over exposure to the marvel formula of hero’s journey exposition heavy storytelling, this is the breath of fresh air you have been waiting for.

Monkey Man respects its audience. There is nothing so crass as an introductory voice-over. No cliché refusal of the call where the tortured soul rejects his destiny as a hero and must be talked into it by the love interest. There is no scene where the main character sits down with the sidekick and explains his motivations verbatim.

The first time we see him, Kid is already mid action. He has a goal and is making strides towards it, everything else is ours to learn.

You must pay attention, and because you must, you will.

The one aspect of this film I can point to and genuinely wish wasn’t there was the shaky cam.

The tendency for action movies, especially grittier martial arts movies, to show rapid cut short clips through the lens of a camera man who came to work tweaked out and is filming in the midst of an epileptic fit is one that I really hoped was dying.

Most scenes in Monkey Man take place at night; couple that with a camera that sways drunkenly and the action may seem violent and evocative, but it’s also hard to follow.

This is fortunately cleaned up somewhat for the final action scene which is a glorious clash of fists, knives and guns in a series of extended long cuts with a much steadier hand. Almost as if the firmness of the main character’s resolve and skill are mirrored by the hand that films him. A clever piece of visual storytelling, but boy I wish the film didn’t give me such a headache on the way there.

There are many films that carry a message. Most of them lead with that message.

Monkey Man doesn’t.

This film puts its best foot forward by leading with a story. The tale of Kid and his journey is the driving force behind the engine and the injustices he suffers are his motivation first and a message for the audience about the corrupting nature of power a distant second.

Key to that, there is very little exposition in this film.

Basically none in fact.

There are non-invasive flashback sequences getting into the guts of our main character’s motivations, but every time a character opens their mouth they establish relationships, manoeuvre themselves on a chessboard or say something that tells us who they are. Dialogue is not just filling us in on the information the director thinks we need to know.

The result is that by the end, I felt as if I knew Kid as well as my own brother. I hated the people he hated, I felt his pain. It takes some excellent film making to make a character whose shoes I felt I was wearing.

Monkey Man is, in a word, excellent.

Beautiful filming, a storyline that flows from one scene to the next with nothing wasted. Characters that feel alive and vibrant, storytelling that shows rather then tells. A complete package of a journey.

And in the background, a quiet reminder of the power of human determination. Of how one man with nothing to lose and the soul of a warrior can move mountains.

The post Monkey Man (Universal Studios – 2024) Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

I was never a fan of wrestling as a kid.

Not like I had anything against it, I just never got into it.

But I knew what it was about.

Sometimes I stumbled upon a bizarre scene on the family TV. A lit ring surrounded by flashing lights and a baying crowd. Ridiculously muscular men in outlandish outfits enacting over the top scenarios of betrayal, shifting allegiances and back-against-the-wall fights and everything… everything was there to build more hype for the next thing that was happening.

So why did I start a review for a kaiju movie by reminiscing about a genre of TV entertainment I didn’t even partake in?

Because Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is an episode of the WWE where the wrestlers are the size of skyscrapers and the audience is getting stepped on.

I realised this some time around the moment I saw Godzilla suplex King Kong off the great pyramid of Giza and yes, that ‘X’ is a part of the title. Certain subsections of the internet are already assuming this is a very different type of movie.

The plot, such as it is, Godzilla roams the earth having daily showdowns with other kaiju. The world seems to consider this fairly normal despite what appears to be the casualties of your average world war occurring with every throwdown.

King Kong, meanwhile, is hanging out in the hollow earth fighting giant dogs and getting steadily lonelier while searching in vain for others like himself.

Then a psudo-psychic high school outcast starts getting visions of a possible blah blah blah lets get to the part where the giant monkey with a cyborg arm punches a radioactive lizard in the face.

I saw New Empire with my brother, a far bigger kaiju fan than me, and he assures me that the movie got the balance between human drama and monster fighting right this time; something he tells me preceding movies have failed to do.

I’m assuming this had something to do with the genius idea of dealing with the usual annoyance of morality pet child child characters that haven’t been endearing since ‘Aliens’ by making both of the ones in New Empire incapable of speech.

One of those is another monkey, just to be clear.

So there is a little bit of angst from an adoptive mum dealing with an outcast, non-verbal daughter and some tension about the political situation surrounding the kaiju and oh hey is that Rachel House? And she’s using her natural accent, neat! There’s also a blogger whose theories about hollow earth aren’t being believed even though they are true and an estranged wildcard monster vet and blah blah blah when does the giant monkey get an augmented robot arm?

This really is a piece of cinematography that speaks to your inner neurodivergent six year old with a collection of hardy, environmentally unsafe action figures you would slam together with sufficient force to risk breaking your fingers.

Giant monsters show up at the last minute to intervene in important fights with other giant monsters, there are team swaps as the power of friendship makes former enemies unite to fight a common foe and is that… by god! It’s Mothra with a steel chair!

There’s going to be criticism out there for the film’s lack of depth, but honestly the only thing I can say to those critics is ‘why did you even watch this?’

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is a film about giant monsters throwing down. It’s about mass destruction and building hype for the next slugfest that’s going on around the corner from the one that’s happening right now. Every change in scenery is like entering a new stage on a Mortal Kombat game and wondering if those spikes on the wall are going to impale someone. There are so many giant monster fights that many of them are happening off screen now. Both Godzilla and King Kong get a chance to fight a giant serpent that we don’t actually see die, they just show up in the next scene with bits of its torn apart body.

So yeah, I’m not going to rag on this movie for not including an in depth commentary on the human condition. It promised kaiju fights and by god…zilla, that’s what it delivered.

The action is as well animated as one can expect from a modern movie with the budget of a small country’s annual GDP and I was certainly entertained.

I’m told Godzilla Minus One has set the new golden standard for what can be done with the big guy, and this film definitely focuses more on King Kong, but as long as your expectations are reasonable and you leave your suspension of disbelief at home there’s no reason not to enjoy watching these titans clash.

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