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NEWS AND VIEWS - SEPTEMBER 2021
WRITING NEWS Still haven't found a cover artist for The White Ribbon and the Heart of the Night. To be honest I don't really even know where to look. Apart from the cover, though, the book is done; it's just a matter of getting it out there. Haven't really been doing any serious writing this month; I'm still assembling ideas for the third Chemical Empires book, A City Burnished Silver. I've got the basic plot figured out, but it's going to take me a while to put together a good outline. * * * * * * * * WHAT I'M PLAYING 
I finished Ao no Kiseki (Trails from Azure) earlier this month. I absolutely loved this game; I can't say enough good things about it. The story was great, full of twists and turns, the characters were likable, and the mechanics were engaging -- battles in this game are fun and strategically interesting; it was only occasionally that they started feeling a little grindy. I do think the finale went on a bit too long, but overall, I'd give this one a ten out of ten. Oh, and the Geofront's localization was fantastic. It's no wonder NIS America decided to join forces with them to officially release the game in English. (It does strike me as kind of suspicious that instead of localizing the Crossbell series themselves, NIS seems to have sat around waiting for the fans to do it for them for free. Hopefully the Geofront folks are receiving some remuneration for their work, because if they're not, NIS's actions here seem kind of exploitative to me.) I haven't played Trails of Cold Steel III or Trails of Cold Steel IV yet. I'm really anxious to try these, but I also don't want to burn through these games too quickly, so I think I'm going to wait a while and maybe play something else in the interim, like Bravely Default II or the Famicom Detective Club games. * * * * * * * * WHAT I'M READING Here's what I've been working on this month: 
* * * * * * * * MOVIE REVIEW: BASKET CASE 2 Another movie review I wrote a few years ago for another site. This is not a good movie. Basket Case 2 is a cheap horror flick with very few redeeming qualities -- there's a few mildly interesting scenes and characters, I guess, but on the whole it's just weird and gross, and no one in the movie can act worth a dang -- least of all our "menacing" anti-hero Duane (played by the bland Kevin VanHentenryck) who's about as scary as a bowl of Count Chocula. The movie picks up immediately after the first Basket Case. We quickly meet Duane and his "brother" Belial, who are both lying half-dead on the street after having been knocked out of a window. Belial is the real star of the show: he used to be joined to Duane's hip until surgeons removed him. Basically he's just a lumpy piece of flesh -- two scrawny arms and a deformed head. Despite his lack of legs (or any other limbs that might give him the means to move about on his own) he's nevertheless surprisingly adept at murdering people five times his size. He's so small, in fact, that Duane carries him around in a picnic basket. Hence the title. The two are sent to a hospital and escape about five seconds later thanks to some of Belial's improbable killings. Two other folks lend them a hand -- an old lady named Granny Ruth and a girl named Susan, who help them out in the interest of "freaks rights". They think freaks get a bad rap, so they spend their time collecting them and bringing them to a safe house, sort of like Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. The students here, though, don't have superpowers -- they're just deformed or weird-looking. One has giant sharp gopher teeth that jut out about three feet, and one has seven noses. All of them have weird-shaped heads, and some of them are like Belial and can't really be classified at all. Of course, they're all puppets or prosthetics, and some of them aren't very good, but one or two of them are at least cleverly animated. 
While Belial makes friends with the freaks, Duane spends his days hitting on Susan and wondering if he belongs there, since he's not technically a freak anymore. Meanwhile, Granny Ruth looks for more freaks and more freak-haters (freaks, of the kind described above, are apparently commonplace in the bizarro world of this movie) and when she finds the freak-haters, she sends her personal army of freaks to kill them. This happens quite a few times, and if you ask me it's kind of a bad strategy for a freaks rights activist. I mean, aren't people more likely to hate freaks if they're always out there killing people in gruesome ways? The biggest chunk of the movie, though, follows a reporter who wants to find Duane and Belial and do a story on them (both of them are wanted by the cops). She tracks them down to Granny Ruth's place, which really annoys Granny; she doesn't want any publicity. The reporter can't leave well enough alone, however, even after the freaks kill her cameraman, and eventually they simply visit her at her home and carve up her face so that she'll be a freak too. Oooh, the irony. Duane finally asks the seemingly-normal Susan to run away with him, but after he discovers she's pregnant with a worm or something (don't ask) he totally loses it and stitches Belial back on to his side. The end. The bad acting and bad writing were plenty annoying, but the character of Duane was probably the worst thing about the movie. He constantly whines, has bad hair, and likes to deliver these long speeches about "who the real freak is". The movie tries to make him both wickedly psychotic (he usually orchestrates the attacks on the freak-haters and the cops that are after him) and sympathetic at the same time, which simply does not work. As a cheap horror/slasher flick, the gore ought to be a selling point, but Basket Case 2's gore is just run-of-the-mill crap. There's nothing special here. The puppets and costumes are all right, I guess, but not worth watching the movie for. I haven't seen the original Basket Case. My friend Anthony tells me that this sequel is about a hundred times better than the first one; I can't imagine how that could be possible, but there you go. (He also says that Basket Case 3 is pretty good, or at least as good as this one, but Anthony has a much higher tolerance for these kinds of movies than I do.) |