The Adventures of Sam & Max: Freelance Police (1997-8)

 

Studio: Nelvana

Director: Steve Whitehouse

Screenplay: J.D. Smith, Steve Purcell, Hugh Duffy, Marty Isenberg, Robert N. Skir, Bob Ardiel, Jamie Tatham, Tim Burns, Dale Schott and Tracy Berna

Based on the comic book series by Steve Purcell

(Voice) Cast: Harvey Atkin as Sam; Rob Tinkler as Max; Dan Hennessey as the Commisioner; Tracey Moore as Darla "The Geek" Gugenhee; Patrick McKenna as Lorn the Friend for Life

An Abstract Candidate

 

It might not look much, but in two weeks they put me on fries. Then they’ll pay!

By episode two, this show has parodied 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), when tuning the monolith to stop it causing suffering leads to the simian people living around it to discover roller disco for the better. This is somewhat appropriate for this title, a one season adaptation of Sam & Max, originally a comic book by Steve Purcell, adapting the characters his brother Dave started in their youth, apatly being the result of Steve parodying his brother’s own comics just to annoy him¹. Most will know the videogame adaptation by LucasArts, the point & click game Sam & Max Hit the Road (1993), as Steve Purcell became a staff member and brought the characters with him. From their golden age of these titles, Sam & Max was a strange game as much as a funny one, a touchstone to weird Americana which this series gets into, a franchise which would see a reboot in 2006, when with Sam & Max Save the World, Telltale Games would bring the characters back in a series of episodic games. In the midst of this, was this Canadian animated series that I actually saw an episode of on Fox Kids on satellite television in the UK, the episode about a “glazed McGuffin”, so I have had an emotional investment to track this series down.

Wondering why the series was cancelled, effectively thirteen episodes with twenty four segments, I would not be surprised alongside how precarious television is in general, where even a good show will not be continued with, that a work which feels more inclined for adults to appreciate it more was not going to succeed. It feels barely like a children’s show, disguised as such when it is more a dissection of one, where in episode two, going by each being ten minutes stories, the leads are looking directly to the camera and breaking the fourth wall among many times, saying that they will not have commercials only to cut to one. Even the music is eclectic as it goes – the title theme is jazz verging on avant-garde, and eventually with the Apocalypse Now parody in a later episode, when the leads are in central park in New York City, a literal jungle here searching for the commissioner’s lost keys, you get psychedelic rock in the score.

The premise is scatter shot on purpose aside from the fact that Sam in an anthropomorphic dog in a suit, Max is a bordering psychotic “rabbit-thing” and both are true best friends forever. As “freelance police”, in a world where New York City is even more rundown to the point you get a joke about a rat literally carrying a baby on its back away, they are the only sane thing to bring in for the weirder cases if they do not get into their own mischief along the way. The original videogame was already unpredictable, getting into a secret tribe of Bigfoot, as this show gets into for an episode, and an apocalypse to be averted, so this is not strange ground for the franchise. Even with prior awareness of this, however, this show is still legitimately strange, the kind of show which does not try to explain why it has shifted into a parody of the night Mary Shelley devised the story of Frankenstein, set in the period past, to allow a story of Max’s tale being resurrected and developing sentience, or how episode fourteen involving them having to deal with a giant robot which has done its job, even if that means taking it over to Japan to fight a kaiju sized baby.

Probably more striking before you get into the plots or the visual look of the series is how verbose the dialogue is. Likely to go over some adults’ head, and even referencing Aristotle at one point, it is hilarious at times and shows how the series is able to get away with pure disregard for logic, in how this show finds ways to be this gleefully witty even when it is weird. A lot of the experience is just viewing the series and not expecting what will transpire, but there are good episodes just by themselves – a Die Hard Christmas parody is funnier because you have Sam’s grandma, an awesome one-off of a woman who apparently survived the Korean War and put most of the prisoners away she now visits and gives gifts too on the series, even if being a stereotypically lovable grandma, and armed with fruit cake both likely to be bulletproof and proven to break a whole foot’s worth of bones when used as a defensive weapon. And it is amazingly twisted in a lot of its humour as well, where the sense it is merely pretending to be a children’s show is clearly obvious at times, in how the Frankenstein parody gets into the idea of desecrating graves, only to get a Victorian era drive-in fast food place to provide fake body parts, or helping sentient rats on the moon avoid being used to stir into coffee by giant cockroaches. There is one entire segment, about the practical uses of a pancreas, such as being a door stop, which is just an excuse to get body organs onscreen without being too gory.

There is also stuff in here I wish, as original concepts from this TV series, returned into later videogames, such as Darla "The Geek" Gugenheek, the sole female character in the cast but a cool one as the most sober figure in the leads’ circle, as their gadget creator and friend, cool in the sense of the straight man in their comedy who still has the appropriate cynicism for the tone as a teen prodigy able to accept the lunacy that transpires in this world. Some may not be as fond, in his two episodes, for Lorne “the Friend for Life”, one of many ways these shows were perversely mocking their own obsessive fan bases, something you see even in the Comic Book guy in The Simpsons, a super fan for Sam and Max whose enthusiasm is too much even for them. That he willingly breaks the law, and eventually ends up hijacking a Swiss tourist blimp to for his heroes to save the day in, is an ultra-cynical joke contrasted by how potentially annoying or insulting the character could be, as he really cuts down into the bone with hindsight about fandom for pop culture. (The blimp episode would also not be acceptable, in its jokes, post 9/11).

A huge portion of the show, and these characters included, is a fixation on weird and “lowbrow” Americana, the world of the largest balls of string attractions, which was a prominent aspect in locations in the first game, alongside junk food and general pop culture, be it the bigfoot episode, explosive corndogs as a single episode joke, a Jerry Springer parody required to settle the marriage problems of Greek Gods Zeus and Hera, or that one of the villains’ plans, only evil because he has the brains removed from the locals to turn them into zombies for his lair, is to create sea monkeys which actually live up to the years of false advertising. Said villain, Mack Salmon, also has to be a hyper intelligent fish in a robot suit which, like Bob the Goldfish in the Earthworm Jim franchise, is general weirdness that can also be found throughout the nineties in general. Fast food employers, unwisely, are employed by a super villainess who wishes to extract all the worst traits of tourists and use it as a biological viral weapon, and like the game, Sam and Max clearly like their strange on the road attractions as they do junk food and television. The glazed McGuffin episode I remember in fact, a reference to the “McGuffin” Alfred Hitchcock used as a term, is entirely of its era of idiosyncratic (and highly unhealthy) junk food full of preservatives and the streak of political correctness campaigners from the time, as someone gets their favorite snack taken off the shelves and, in their attempts to hound him to change his mind, ends with him snapping and trying to murder them. Mocking fifties pop culture, at a time when nineties culture reflected on the past, you get an entire episode, if slighter than the premise could have become, about a figure from a children’s TV show named Dangly Deever being brought into the then-present and being forced to accept a world worse than Rudy Giuliani’s worst nightmares.

As for the leads themselves, they nonchalantly take most of this in, with the show having a streak of post-irony to it all, the pair blasé no matter how dire the situation, such aliens running a diner where they feed customers other customers, effectively riffing on Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste (1987)  in as child friendly form as they can. They do not act like cartoon characters in fact, as in possibly one of the issues a viewer could have, they never go off-model as anyone else in this world, a concept for comedic timing in animation of distorting your characters for moments for emphasis in the moment, instead the two figures appropriate for this highly details and vivid world standing back and commenting in the absurdity until they need to get their hands dirty, even in reference to being a fictional show. They are capable of nobility, such as getting an artificial heart as quickly as they can to the President of the United States, but they also willingly mess around with time travel and change it, giving a caveman a rocket launcher, to see what happens in the future. It is not with surprise these characters, in this version, were not going to take the show over more than one season, for they seem as much reflections to their writers, gleefully stepping on clichés in the medium, rather than making something which is meant to have adventure and fill space between advertisement.

I have nothing but admiration for the show. It dangerously gets close to being too weird for the sake of it, but the level of humour is so consistent that it succeeds, with how many jokes land and even when something is so abrupt, in strangeness or just kneecapping expectations, to cause me to laugh. The show is helped simply by the fact that it is one season and cannot outstay its welcome. As much as I am fascinated by the idea of how they could have continued this, a one-one season which knew it was doomed, ending on a final episode which, in another inspired touch, is a clip show using scenes that are newly animated from stories we never saw, there was as much chance it would have been compromised if it managed to be hit. I think, truthfully, its home in videogames where the big success came from was where these characters can rightly stay, with this instead the tangent that we really just need to be more readily accessible.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric / Metatextual / Surreal

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

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1) The History of Sam & Max: Part 1: The Early Years. From Telltale Games’ site, archived from the original on January 3^rd 2008 and preserved on the Wayback Machine.

Silent Hill: Revelation (2012)

 

Director: M.J. Bassett

Screenplay: M.J. Bassett

Based on the videogame franchise by Konami

Cast: Adelaide Clemens as Heather; Kit Harington as Vincent; Carrie-Anne Moss as Claudia Wolf; Sean Bean as Harry; Radha Mitchell as Rose Da Silva; Malcolm McDowell as Leonard; Martin Donovan as Douglas; Deborah Kara Unger as Dahlia

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #227

 

Silent Hill: Revelation is not a good film. It says a great deal that, with my negative reaction to the original film by French filmmaker Christophe Gans, Revelation manages to convince me that the prequel was a better production. The problem is simply that, adapting Silent Hill 3 (2003) from the videogame franchise, is that you have a film at ninety minutes having desired to elaborate on a complex narrative but never bothers to let the viewer ingest and soak in the world. Everything within this film, whilst cliche, will always been intriguing for a fan of horror storytelling like myself, and there is plenty to work with. Cults, an evil god, a cults, a god, a figure in the lead Heather (Adelaide Clemens) who is in hiding with her father (Sean Bean) and her connection the place of Silent Hill, an abandoned town which descends into an alternative world hellscape when the alarm sounds.

In mind that the original video games are famous for their slow drip feeding horror and psychologically complex content, and a lot of horrifying monsters, there is a film here like so many American horror films of the 2000s onwards (even popular ones) which are like rollercoasters but not for me imaginative ones. Looking at Revelation without the context of the videogames, it runs out of the gates very early into itself. Following from the prequel, Heather is connected to a dark past of Silent Hill, an abandoned town lost to a nightmare based on a former form of herself left there, on her eighteenth birthday drawn back to the environment and a cult there wishing to dispose of her dark other half. It makes very little makes sense beyond this. It does, but it is thrown abruptly onto the wall, and in mind to what the videogame narratives might have had, one would hope they are not this abrupt throughout with their use of their plotting. This crowbars a lot including the other half of Heather, Heather as a character herself, and a large part of the Silent Hill mythos including cults and trying to resurrect gods, but what you get is a lot of exposition and CGI monsters rather than trying to elaborate on this.

Originally commissioned in three dimensions for the theatrical screen, part of the return of 3D as a gimmick in the late 2009s and early 2010s, this does have the presentation of a haunted house experience as, at the moment Heather is in a mall, you get more absurd kooky horror than psychological dread where kids turn into demonic figures eating bloodied offal, and she enters a kitchen where a tied up male victim is having flesh cut off him to cook on the griddle. This is definitely, even as someone who came to the film never playing the Silent Hill games in time sensitive context, not what I came to knowing those video games for, even when they at the time of this film had Western made sequels not well regarded. Even if its original creator Konami have not been as kind or strict to their franchise as you would think, including commissioning a pachinko machine from the series' iconography¹, but the problem in truth is that, even if this is the divisive goofy entry in the franchise, it was never actually an experience to sit through, just a case of a film which hurdles along and leaves no impact, every decision ill advised in presentation even if everything in the plot ideas is not inherently bad.

It is not scary, but the worst thing is how abruptly put together the film is and how predictable it is. The moment the cult subplot is introduced, it is one I have seen in other American films, but that is less of a concern than how it feels ultimately pointless as a plot thread, never interesting and is barely with context in the scheme of things. The sequel follow on from the first film, but it feels an abrupt extension, including a sister from the original antagonist who is barely given screen time and only stands out for her pale skin and lack of eyebrows, ultimately a figure to turn into a Hellraiser film character design abruptly as a final antagonist. Knowing, in video game lore, the character Claudia Wolf is actually important to the original Silent Hill 3 game as an antagonist makes this even worse in how she was handled, even worse for film fans knowing they cast Carrie-Anne Moss, who many know for the Matrix franchise, and barely gave her screen time in this role.

You have a generic male love interest, feeling sorry for actor Kit Harington as for everyone in front and behind the camera, a figure has a secret to him which is obvious. Pyramid Head, the iconic figure from the Silent Hill franchise, is misused again, here a guardian figure who spends most of the film tied to a merry-go-round as its tormented engineer. Malcolm McDowell, the legendary actor once behind Lindsay Anderson films like If... (1968), makes for some fun and a potential H.P. Lovecraft tangent this film could have had as a man deemed insane for having realised there are multiple dimensions, including the Silent Hill hellscape itself. He is only in the film briefly, turning into a monster, and to throw out the term "Metatron" abruptly, thus burying a figure from the real Rabbical Talmud as merely an unseen plot exposition, so this is sadly a brief glimmer of joy.

The truth in Revelation is the opposite problem to the prequel, the first 2006 wanting to tell a story in its slower pace ultimately not that interesting, and Revelation hurdling along without thought to its material being more creative or unique either. Neither haunts the viewer, which is the biggest lasting mark of the original video games whether their writing and technical aspects (like voice acting and graphics) age for every new gamer or fan to the franchise or not. Even the prequel had a haunting nature in briefest of moments where you wandered through an abandoned town full of raining ash and Akira Yamaoka's score from the games standing out.

The one moment which offers something at least lurid and creative, only to be lost, is the one monster in the film clearly designed to stand out. A freakish doll monstrosity with multiple heads, held in hands too, and including the heads of victims turned into mannequins and ripped off the petrified corpses to become part of its form. A weird spider creature, its creation in CGI is unfortunate, but alongside with the one exploitive moment in the film, with an actress cast to do nudity as the victim turned into a mannequin, you have at least something which is weird and perverse even if the CGI and knowledge this creature will never return to the film to be dealt with neuters it. It says a great deal to that, when you research the original Silent Hill 3 videogame, there was even more weight made of what is called "The Memory of Alessa", effectively an evil doppelganger created in the game's complex lore who is talked if here in exposition with weight and ties back to the first film. Within that game, you at least had a boss fight, whilst here osmosis by hugging abruptly resolves that issue quickly. Cast who returns to the film, even in cameo, never have any context for them being here, such as Sean Benn, and baring a weird context of lopping limbs of prisoners in an asylum and a boss scrap, Pyramid Head is a concept without any of its initial context, sapping the horror of a figure who, merely made from polygons, became iconic in the first place for gamers.

The fact the film came to me, and will go, is a tragedy. It is a tragedy, not wishing to bother to talk of it in any elaborate detail, where I feel sympathy for its director-writer M.J. Bassett, or the cast, feeling that it in another time could have been something special but is tragically a work that shot itself in its feet. If we have to talk about this in terms of videogame adaptations, for myself personally the greatest sin with many of them was never accuracy to their source material, as I tended to come to many without the original context, but whether any had energy to them. Super Mario Bros. (1993) is a terrible adaptation of the source material in terms of adaptation, but I openly admit it is a compelling goofy and bizarre creation, turning a platformer into a Blade Runner pastiche with fungus people and Dennis Hopper, whilst Street Fighter (1994), a bad adaptation of the source, is entertaining just for Raul Julia's godlike scenery chewing.  Nothing in either film, even if angering the fanbase, of the Silent Hill films really stood out as memorable in terms of interpreting the source material, and ultimately between them they are a real tragedy in their own ways together with such promising source material.

 

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1) Dubbed Silent Hill: Escape, as detailed HERE, Konami can as mistreat their own franchises to their fan bases as anyone else can, so I will not just cruelly dog pile Silent Hill: Revelations for tonal choices only.

Silent Hill (2006)

 

Director: Christophe Gans

Screenplay: Roger Avary

Based on the videogame franchise

Cast: Radha Mitchell as Rose Da Silva; Sean Bean as Christopher Da Silva; Laurie Holden as Bennett; Deborah Kara Unger as Dahlia Gillespie; Kim Coates as Officer Thomas Gucci; Tanya Allen as Anna; Alice Krige as Christabella; Jodelle Ferland as Sharon

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #226

 

Truthfully, this is going to be a very negative review. I will preface this in saying that, coming to the film with no experience of the horror videogame franchise, this is not a slight on that property, but entirely about the film adaptation. Historical context, what I know, is worth however bringing up. Meant directly as a title to rival Resident Evil (1996), a Capcom produced "survival horror" game which spawned an ongoing franchise including a long running film franchise, Silent Hill (1999) on the original PlayStation was a creation which became a success, on a games console which innovated as a CD based machine with three dimensional graphics, and with a lot of companies throwing the kitchen sink in for curious experimentation. Interestingly, and the curious detail I am however fully aware of, this film and its 2012 sequel are directly based on the narrative thread of that original game and Silent Hill 3 (2003), both following an elaborate narrative about a cult and demon summoning, surrounding the titular location, which will be elaborated on later when discussion the film. Ironically, the game in the franchise which became its magnum opus was Silent Hill 2 (2001), which on the following console the Playstation 2 has a legacy of a work that, whether technical and artistic has aged well or not, took video gamers by surprise through a very adult and surprising narrative seperate the original plot, without demon summoning cults, and followed a psycho dramatic drama of a man dealing with the past of a wife who died of a terminal illness. Among other characters tormented by horrifying entities which channelled his sins and even repressed sexual and moral shades, it is talked with high regards for a work still.

That is to note as, whilst not coming to this with any context of the original videogames, I am fully aware Silent Hill 2 was arguably the game which cemented the franchise and still does. The series has had a complex history. Produced by the company Komani, the original four games were developed in Japan through a team within them called Team Silent. The games after those first four would be developed by Western companies after the 2006 film, starting with Silent Hill: Origins (2007) up to Silent Hill: Downpour (2012), the game which came out the same year as the film's sequel, for that timeline and all not gaining as strong a reputation¹. Infamously, after a playable demo called P.T. (2014) became a thing of incredible lasting memory for gamers, to the point it itself became the other watershed moment for the franchise, Konami cancelled that game as part of a falling out with one of their key members Hideo Kojima, a highly regarded video game auteur who was in the director's seat for that project.  Alongside collaboration from director Guillermo del Toro, actor Norman Reedus and horror manga author Junji Ito, this project that was to become "Silent Hills" never came to be, ending up in a very dramatic breakup which painted Konami as villains and would be a compelling story for a video game related blog to tell. Rumours in late 2020 talked of Konami patching things up², to create the unmade "Silent Hills", but contextually if one was to talk of Silent Hill in one movement, the franchise which existed until its violent end at that Silent Hills cancellation in its first arch, this was a franchise whose later Western made sequels were not as well regarded at all, with arguably the 2006 Silent Hill film hitting the time when it was at its highest in recognition.

And the fact my review is going to be so negative is miserable as I am open to its creator, French filmmaker Christophe Gans. Gans is fascinating, as a man who cut his teeth with producer/filmmaker Brian Yuzna for the H.P. Lovecraft anthology Necronomicon: Book of Dead (1993), as a man who attaches himself to distinct ideas, exiting titles or his one unique film Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001), and completely commits to their concepts. Crying Freeman (1995) for example, adapting manga author Kazuo Koike's breakthrough work, is a very faithful adaptation of the first few chapters. Gans however has not as large as a filmography as you would think. After Silent Hill, Gans would not direct again until 2014, with an adaptation of Beauty and the Beast.

Silent Hill the film is sadly a very dull film. After the set-up - a mother (Radha Mitchell), learning of Silent Hill through her adoptive daughter through her moments of split personality and sleep walking, travelling to the location only to be involved in a car crash and then have to look for her daughter in a strange nightmarish world - the problem is entirely that a very predictable and not very interesting narrative takes place. This is one of the problems, but it is one of the biggest, as for a film based on a franchise highly regarded for its premise, you are having a game franchise flaws and virtues being pared down to the least interest tone.

The one thing that succeeds in stepping into the titular Silent Hill is some of its atmosphere. Based on the real abandoned town of Centralia, Pennsylvania - a near ghost town in the United States where the populous had to flee due to underground coal fires in 1983 that were said to have started in 1962³ - the version of Silent Hill as initially depicted in this film is exceptional. A barren abandoned town raining in white and grey ash. An air raid siren, from the games, blares at the moment the world will turn into its alternative form, a place of hellish creatures, but even in the world as is, monsters are occasionally found and you are stuck within an atmospheric place where a breathing mask is still needed in the real world outside due to the fume from down below the ground. Helped considerably is that, whilst composer Jeff Danna is involved, the film uses choice musical cues from the games by Akira Yamaoka. These pieces of soundtrack are frankly, out of context, better than a lot of horror film soundtracks I have heard, be it between the industrial noises to the more ethereal pieces, Yamaoka's music out of context is immersive and unique.

The problem immediately is shown in how, to depict the nightmarish hell world of Silent Hill once the siren goes off, we are treated to a large cavalcade of CGI which has dated significantly. Without context of the videogames, it is difficult to make complete judgements, but one thing to state is that the flexibility and type of work you can make in a videogame, with polygons/sprites/etc., is difficult to cinema where, unless animated, you have to work around the physical reality, of how CGI has never really worked for me as a viewer unless in certain circumstances. As much of this is contrasting real actors, rather than digital characters, to prominently digital effects to depict the growing decay of the nightmare world when witnessed, the human faced giant bugs or blood coming from the walls. Honestly, using more real (if still artificial) practical effects would have helped considerably.

It does not help with the fact of how perfunctory the adaptation is. Whilst it feels as if following the progression of a videogame in pace - some exposition, some exploration, even acquiring tools like a knife to cut through a painting as if a game puzzle - eventually for a narrative which does not really capitalise on a franchise, reading of it, capable of strange and completely nightmarish content. The whole narrative involves a cult as well, but a very hackneyed Christian fanatical cult, which causes me to roll my eyes, particularly as Silent Hill's greatest issue is one that plagues so many films and sticks out more for someone increasingly disconnecting from conventions of cinema. Namely that whenever a film is entirely focused on a narrative and telling it, if said narrative is a conventional one it is now becoming torture, more so as truthfully in art, it is not the narrative which is of concern, as it repeats tropes even in new ways from the dawn of human storytelling, but how. Silent Hill intrigues me as a video game franchise both for what it gets right, what is morbid and dark and surreal (like a giant head in a hospital room starting at you), what is accidental, and what is even irrelevant or intentionally silly like the UFO endings or the one with the town being controlled by a small dog.

Silent Hill the film has references to the games, and whilst I cannot tell the legitimacy of the adaptation, it feels wary to take a risk. Even I as well can spot, within in this context, the problems with the film can be shown in metaphor with how the figure of Pyramid Head is used. The franchise's mascot, a horrifying human-like figure with a giant blade and a painful metal pyramid helmet which it drags along, I am aware too of is how this character was originally created for Silent Hill 2, with a significance to every part of its iconography symbolically. This also means the character can unfortunately be pulled out for any follow up as the most iconic figure but losing his (their?) point outside that game. Even without that, you have a creature, a hulking form, with a giant blade and a strange atypical headgear designed to be as much to cause self harm, a potential horror film icon, and what you get is effectively fan cameos even if they strip the flesh from a person at one point. A lot of the iconography and content feels the same way, even that original to the film, or that which is adapted with an inspired idea, such as the figures of ghoulish yet eroticised female nurses, again from Silent Hill 2 with loaded symbolism, being portrayed by dancers in how they move or even stand still like statues for one scene.

Everything is without bite, even in a film fixated on dirty locations, dirty razor wire (including going into one area of the human body that is pretty grotesque even for a film deemed suitable for fifteen year olds in the United Kingdom), but feeling sanitised. I have not really described the plot because, alongside Sean Bean attempting an American accent as the husband trying to find his missing wife and adoptive daughter, a lot of clichés are here and, in mind to what I said earlier, they are not told in an interesting way, meaning there is not a lot of difference to Silent Hill from other run-of-the-mill horror films I saw from this period. Everything from witch burnings to a ghostly curse feel trite, and this is in mind that Silent Hill originated from Japanese video game developers wanting to recreate American horror films, only to touch something idiosyncratic to itself that compelled people in the West to adore this franchise. The production design and some of its other aesthetics are worthy of praise, the proof of the quality of any film if you have creative figures on staff, but this was definitely a disappointment to witness.

 

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1) One exception, on the list of entries in the franchise worth investigating, is Silent Hill: Shattered Memories (2009), which brought in a complex psychological and emotional narrative entirely as much based on giving the player a psychological profile depending on their choices and answers.

2) One reference to this rumour can be read HERE.

3) HERE

St. John's Wort (2001)

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Director: Ten Shimoyama

Screenplay: Goro Nakajima

Cast: Megumi Okina as Nami Kikushima; Yōichirō Saitō as Kōhei Matsudaira; Kōji Ōkura as Shinichi Ukita; Reiko Matsuo as Tōko Ozeki; Minoru as Soichi Kaizawa

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #127

[Warning: Major Plot Spoilers]

Something from the early 2000s, trying to embrace videogame aesthetics and culture. In fact it's based on an actual videogame, a visual novel for the SNES also called Otogirisō (the Japanese name for this film adaptation), thus proving a fascinating side note to this material¹.  A small, three person team of students are creating a horror game, one based on the memories of one of said staff's ex-girlfriend Nami (Megumi Okina). When her old family home is inherited, she goes to explore it with her ex-boyfriend Kōhei (Yōichirō Saitō) to dig up more material for the game, whilst the other two stay in communication at the office. The videogame aesthetic is only really embraced by the numerous colour filters that wash over your eyes. Very little of the film is actually based in stereotypical videogame styles, but instead as a low budget film with a tiny cast has everything filtered in digital effects, to the point that I even started to question what was a computer effect or actually real. The front courtyard covered in Saint John's Wort, a symbolic plant never really connected to the actual plot, up the main characters' knees? The house itself on the outside? The chandelier in the main half? It becomes absurd how many times during this film I was sure an object was cheap CGI only to realise it was a real prop.

It's reminiscent to a Japanese FMV videogame called The Fear (2001) in which a larger group of people are trapped in a gothic haunted house². Early into the story, its established the heroine's father was a legendary painter responsible for Francis Bacon like pictures, as depicted in (admittedly awesome) prop paintings. There's also the fact he tortured young boys to acquire the depictions of agony in these images, referring to a notion in horror from Edgar Allen Poe to even Herschell Gordon Lewis' Color Me Blood Red (1965) of the extremity of where art can be led to for inspiration. The notion of the extremes one would take to create art is something which feels more masochistic as a concept than sadistic for me, particularly as the extremes of performance art suggest otherwise, such as the elaborate cycles Matthew Barney went through to push his body before he even got to cinema and allowing elaborate movie quality prosthetics being attached to himself for onscreen. But it's a fascinating idea, sadly one which St. John's Wort barely covers.

It's a merely interesting film first but not a great one to ever want to have. I have considered acquiring and collecting as many Japanese horror films as possible, no matter how lacking in quality they could be. However even looking for second hand copies of VHS quality prints doesn't deal with the issue of something like St. John's Wort, that type of film worst than actually the worst films ever made because of its extreme averageness. Averageness doesn't compel one like the dire or the best does, lacking in even morbid qualities (like suffering through Ring 0: Birthday (2000)³). With a plot that consists of its two protagonists being stuck in the central location with the possibility of Nami having a twin, there's more of a curiosity in this film for its production value. The plot itself eventually becomes dull, a plot twist evoked where said twin (also played by Megumi Okina) reveals herself to actually be Nami's brother which feels like the deflating of a balloon in terms of my interest by then, the music at the worst possible timing immediately stopping when the twist is spoken aloud, as if to maximise the moment for an unintentional hilarity. It's a blank flat end for a film which ultimately wasn't successful completely, not even when they have the videogame multiple endings for a cheap shock, not even when its revealed the events were merely part of the videogame itself within the film and never happened at all, undermining the point of the whole film dramatically. As a result St. John's Wort is one of the significantly lesser J-horror films I've covered. One even as an obsessive collector, and cinematic masochist, would hesitate now to own on physical media due to its utterly blandness.

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1) A Japanese only title, where the console's called Super Famicom, what little bit I've seen for background for the review is a literal novel, text with images in the background. Whilst the film takes the heroine's first name Nami from the game, and pay cute tribute with a screen full of text boxes, this does take a drastic direction in terms of narrative beyond a two characters at a Western style haunted mansion. The game also had a PlayStation One re-release, spruced up, and a Wii re-release in 2007.

2) I've not been able to play The Fear, only see a Let's Play online. A game that was never released outside of Japan, it would've been difficult to acquire in any case, a shame as its actually a better work on a similar premise to St. John's Wort. Its ending, for a game or a film, is dumb but its softened (alongside multiple endings) by a considerably cooler aesthetic style. A later inclusion of the FMV (Full Motion Video) trend of nineties videogames which incorporated real video into interactive games, it's entirely done in live action with actors and some digital graphics to make this interaction possible. Entirely from the perspective of a faceless cameraman you play, its elaborate and over-the-top production style is worth witnessing even in a Let's Play clip alongside the performances, a fun and ghoulish campiness that would be fun to also play. It also deserves mention in this context too as the actor who plays Higuchi, a bald production crew member and horror enthusiast who gives quizzes to the player,  appears in Wild Zero (1999) [Reviewed HERE] with golden hot pants and military weaponry as a sleazy club owner.

3) Reviewed HERE. An obsessive desire to collect every Ring related film, Japanese and American (even Korean), has recently come over me. A franchise with enough fascination in the creative decisions and good entries is worth wasting shelf space for the bad sequels and spin-offs of. 

The Flying Luna Clipper (1987)

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Director: Ikko Ono

A 1000 Anime Crossover

Abstract Spectrum: Psychotronic/Surreal

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

One of the more curious (and obscurest) works I've covered on this blog or on 1000 Anime. A near hour long film made entirely from 8-bit technology of a Japanese videogame console called the MSX, The Flying Luna Clip is an inherently strange creation, the limited animation and vibrant, bit colour in elaborate detail already creating a fascinating tone before you get to the actual content. A trip both in plot and effect - whose passengers include snowmen, and anthropomorphic fruit and plants, flying in a plane boat around the Hawaiian Pacific whilst also experiencing dreams that the viewer also experience. The result is a haze with a tentative narrative, more a series of scenes and incidents, even a musical number with singing volcanoes, but one which for the most part is so innocuous and charming I felt love for it as a creation.

And its definitely strange. The actual existence of the film and how it was made, alongside its obscurity, adds to its weirdness but there's legitimate oddness on display that can only be described as pop surrealism, a kind that is constantly found in Japanese culture but, far from something to trivialise into the crass "weird Japan" term feels so much more sweet on multiple viewings. For the full review, follow the link HERE. 

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