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purple-dragon · 3 years

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in defense of chapter 139 (spoilers!)

it's still hard for me to get my thoughts in order so this might be a little disjointed but:

the (seemingly) extremely unpopular opinion: i liked it. a lot.

first let me go over the things i'm !!!! about that don't need further discussion: EXTRA FUZZY CONNIE!!!! jean and connie live!!! jean and connie see sasha and get some closure!!!! lmao this is just the jean and connie show isn't it

okay next. did the chapter feel a little rushed? yes, of course. is there stuff i wish was elaborated on? yeah, no shit. i wanted to see how the battle with hallu-chan ended. i wanted to see historia's side of the story. i wanted to see ymir's side of the story. if yams ever decides to come out with a series of epilogues or something that go more in depth, i would 100% support that. i want more. however, i'm still happy with this chapter because even though it didn't answer all of my questions, it was thematically consistent with the rest of the work. the ending made sense with where the entire manga has been building up to. it wasn't some kind of ass pull that came out of nowhere.

on ymir... i'm a little conflicted on how her story ended. i interpreted her backstory like this: she was in "love" with fritz the only way she knew how to be. fritz slaughtered and enslaved ymir's people, and yet he gave her attention, favor (i'm assuming), and sex (which we know to be rape, but she probably did not). this of course isn't actually love, but to an orphan with quite literally nothing else and no one to teach her differently, it must be love, right? it's got all the right ingredients (but we know it has none of the necessary dynamic).

so with all of that, ymir had no concept of what love actually is until mikasa came along. mikasa, who, much like ymir, loved someone so much that she dedicated her whole life to him. who would willingly lay down her life for him, just as ymir did for fritz. they're incredibly alike wrt the people they love, but with this major difference: mikasa is able to put herself and the world first, even if it means killing eren, while ymir has chained herself, intentionally or not, to fritz for 2000 years. mikasa ends up being the real inspiration for ymir - that's why we saw her smiling at the end of 138, because she sees the real, true love between eren and mikasa, but mikasa is still free, so ymir can free herself too.

actually, now that i've typed all that out, the more i realize that i like it, i just wish we saw it, rather than me interpreting a whole character based on a handful of panels.

now i guess i'll talk about reiner and levi? first off, i'm so so so happy that they both survived. levi was arguably the most damaged character through the whole series, and reiner was actively suicidal - i know a lot of people thought they were going to die as the end to their character arcs, but i'm so glad they didn't. i'm very happy that they both get the chance to rest and heal from everything that happened. reiner gets the chance to figure out what he wants to do with his relationship with his mother (and he's still simping for historia alskdfjasld), levi can live quietly (with the kids!!!!!!). they've both found something new to live for and i love it

also,,, gabi and falco are so cute i love them so much (wish udo and zofia were here too tho,,,)

okay. to the meat of the chapter.

i can't fit all of my thoughts on eren here, i'd have to write a whole essay on him, but i will say a little. i didn't see this chapter as a character assassination at all - i saw it as us finally seeing what was under the hard, cold mask he's been wearing since the time skip. because like, we know eren. at his core, he's the same emotional person he's always been - more grown up for sure, and more of an edgelord, but still him? and he must have been in constant pain, seeing all of time all the time... my poor boy. and even knowing that he has become an irredeemable monster, he still wants to live with mikasa and his friends, winning their freedom at the cost of his own... that's tragic, man. that shit hurted.

"thank you for becoming a mass murderer for us" excuse me??? armin??? sir hello?? is this allowed hello??? armin what the fuck?

also,,, did eren reincarnate as a bird? is that what that was implying? what was up with the birds through the story then?

eren and armin finally seeing the world together... i am in Pain

hooooooly shit, that dina reveal was not at all what i expected out of this chapter. like i knew the theory was out there, but i didn't expect it to be confirmed at all? i've seen the interpretation that eren just directed her into shiganshina, or that he directed her straight to carla, and tbh i like the second one more. it's darker and more messed up and i just think it's neat. ymmv, though.

i don't know how anyone thinks this is a happy ending, rather than bittersweet or outright tragic. like sure, our favorite characters are alive (except the obvious), but the world is still massively fucked and will be for the foreseeable future. 80% of humanity is dead, there's probably even more wildlife gone, and most of nature has been absolutely flattened. ecologically speaking, eren might have pushed this world into a mass extinction. additionally, removing titan powers from the world wasn't a magic ticket to peace - all it did was level the playing field between countries, and we can see that where the alliance becomes ambassadors and it says in the narration "this fight won't end until either the eldians or the rest of the world is wiped out". the equivalent to this would be to magically remove all nukes from existing and stop them from being made in our world - would it magically bring peace? no. of course not. would it put countries on a slightly more equal footing? perhaps.

basically, what i'm trying to say is that the fight hasn't ended, it's only been brought down to a human v human level, rather than human v titan v technology. what the implications of that for the world are, i don't know, and i wish yams had elaborated on that a little.

what eren did, then, with the rumbling, was give back the world's choice. there's no more titan threat, no more of his friends being forced to fight and die in 13 years, no more babies born with their choice to fight already stolen from them. he gave them freedom by eliminating the titans - exactly what he said he was going to do.

also on that note, what is up with the jaegerists? it seems like in and before the rumbling, all the extremists died out? maybe? like floch and his ilk, and that's why they aren't rushing to massacre the rest of the world, but who really knows... i want more post-rumbling worldbuilding...

finally (i think), that brings me to mikasa. i'm... not mad about the way we see her story end, tbh. i've seen people saying she just stays on paradis forever with eren, alone and practically in exile, but i don't think that's it? like we only see the gang 3 years in the future. mikasa loved eren so much, she dedicated her life to him from the time they were 9, and in the end he died because she killed him. let that sink in, y'know? the love of her life didn't just die, she killed him herself. if it were me, it would take me a lot longer than just 3 years to heal from that. and i think that's what we see her doing there at the end - resting and healing from undoubtedly some of the worst moments of her life. healing from grief isn't a quick or linear process; you don't just get over something like that. i know the saying goes "time heals all wounds" but sometimes it doesn't.

if we saw her maybe 10 years down the line, it might be a different story. maybe she would be in a much better place, with her own new family and goals. maybe she would be worse off, still missing eren and stuck in the past. i don't think that would be the case, though who knows? but for 3 years in the future, i think chilling on paradis with the memory of eren was the right place to leave her.

here's what i like to think happens in the future (and this is why i love semi-open endings, because some things are concrete but there's so much left open to interpretation): over the years mikasa heals, as does the world. she goes traveling the world with armin, and sees the rest of her friends often. she and levi are close - you can often find them having tea together. on occasion, she returns to paradis to share stories of her adventures with eren('s grave). in the end, she lives according to her definition of happiness, whatever that may be now, and though she never forgets eren, she keeps moving forward, and much like reiner and levi, finds a new purpose in life.

annnddd... that's all. unless i come back to add something i forgot about later, but we'll see if that happens.

#long post #snk #aot #shingeki no kyojin #attack on titan #spoilers #snk 139 #snk spoilers #in defense of chapter 139 #the dragon does meta

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stella-monstrum · 3 years

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Rob Zombie; "Why it's time to step outside the confinements of his own box."

For close to four decades,

Rob Zombie has brought nonstop psychedelic grooves and a rockstar presence while gracing his own music and the silver screen with gut-churning, drug-tripping visuals. He not only commands quite the presence in films (whether his own successes or others’), but also makes appearances within many other horror soundtracks. There’s no denying that Zombie is a bloodied savant who has stayed incredibly consistent.

[ᴿᵒᵇ ᶻᵒᵐᵇᶦᵉ. ⁽ˢᵒᵘʳᶜᵉ: ᴳᵒᵒᵍˡᵉ ᴵᵐᵃᵍᵉˢ⁾]

(Written by Stella, edited by Jacob J.)

(Side note; tumblr’s photo formatting is a pain)

Let’s take a dive into his music before getting into his film library. From 1985-1997, White Zombie released six albums (between studio and compilations). La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Volume One didn’t break into the Billboard 200 chart until a year after its 1992 release. Shortly thereafter, it became the hot and groovy bong success of the band, going on to sell two million copies. Astro Creep 2000, their final and fourth studio release, was their first and only album to chart within the Top 10 of the Billboard 200 in 1995. Up to this day in 2020, “White Zombie” has been featured in 47 TV, film, and video game soundtracks, from Beavis & Butthead to Pen15 to Bride Of Chucky (which includes a personal favorite moment of mine), amongst many others.

After the disbandment and separation, Zombie continued on his solo journey. He has gone on to release six studio albums, with a seventh on the way in March 2021, titled The Lunar Injection Kool Aid Eclipse Conspiracy. A multitude of hits—eight to be exact—sat within the Top 10 of the Billboard 200 records.

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Zombie’s extensive film career is a “Super Beast” on its own.

He has been very vocal about gaining inspiration from 1920s-1980s horror culture. In many interviews, he’s cited Stan Lee, Bella Lugosi, Alice Cooper, and Steven Speilberg as being responsible for molding the brain that we know today.

Some of his influences include:

George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978)

A Clockwork Orange (1971)

Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

The Shining (1980)

Zombie’s upbringing in the carnival industry alongside his family is another key influence.

[[I’ll only be focusing on Zombie’s live-action films here.]]

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In 2000, Rob made his directorial and (very memorable) screen debut with House Of 1000 Corpses.

It took three years to be released because of quarrels with major production companies regarding the film’s majorly aggressive themes of torture, blood, violence, sex—not to mention his arrogance with MGM, fighting to get rights back from Universal. Eventually, Lionsgate bit the bullet, albeit with the major stipulation of having Rob edit it down much further so House could pass with a “tame” R rating.

[[House of 1000 Corpses: Rainn Wilson as taxidermy merman (Source: Tumblr—and if you’re brave, you can view the scene here.)]]

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In 2005 and 2019, the franchise’s next two installments—Devil’s Rejects and 3 From Hell—were released. The franchise is heavily influenced by the shocking, sickening, and unforgettable ’70s classic Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It follows a family of psychotic, sadistic, and bloodthirsty (if I’m being honest) necrophiliacs. They kidnap, kill, torture and brutalize anyone who gets in their way. At the end of Devil’s Rejects, they somehow manage to survive a police shootout, escape prison, and waltz on into Mexico (as seen in the franchise finale 3 from Hell).

Look, it’s all complicated.

Main Characters from the franchise:

Captain Spaulding—Sid Haig

Baby Firefly—Sheri Moon Zombie

Otis B. Driftwood—Bill Moseley

Momma Firefly—Karen Black (recast as Leslie Easterbrook after Karen’s passing)

(Other notable appearances throughout: Chris Hardwick, Rainn Wilson, Danny Trejo, Dee Wallace, Ken Foree, and Diamond Dallas Page.)

⁽“ʰᵒᵘˢᵉˢ ᵗʳⁱˡᵒᵍʸ”, ᵈᵛᵈ ˢᵉᵗ﹔ ˢᵒᵘʳᶜᵉ﹔ ᵗᵃʳᵍᵉᵗ.ᶜᵒᵐ⁾

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The notorious/controversial Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978) remakes from 2007 and 2009.

(ᵃ ᵛⁱᵉʷ ᵒᶠ ᵗʰᵉ ᵇᵒˣ ᵃʳᵗ ᶠᵒʳ ᵗʰᵉ ʰᵃˡˡᵒʷᵉᵉⁿ ʳᵉᵐᵃᵏᵉˢ ⁽ˢᵒᵘʳᶜᵉ﹕ ᵃᵐᵃᶻᵒⁿ⁾)

Look, this is a remake that you either adore or hate with a burning passion. If you’re a horror fanatic, you know what’s up with the original.

I personally adore Zombie’s take. The fact alone that he gave us an entire background story as to why Michael became the psychotic slasher that we’ve come to know and love. Plus, with an increased suspense and gore factor? Worked incredibly well and did justice (in my opinion).

The film made me feel bad for Michael, with moments of child Myers in therapy, particularly his love for making masks to pass the time while he was locked up and the touching family moments between him and his mother Deborah (Sheri Moon).

ᵈᵉᵇᵒʳᵃʰ ᵃⁿᵈ ᵐⁱᶜʰᵃᵉˡ ᵐᵉʸᵉʳˢ ⁱⁿ ʲᵃⁱˡ ᵗʰᵉʳᵃᵖʸ. ⁽ˢᶜʳᵉᵉⁿᶜᵃᵖ, ʰᵃˡˡᵒʷᵉᵉⁿ. ˢᵒᵘʳᶜᵉ﹕ ᵍᵒᵒᵍˡᵉ⁾

[Michael’s cell in the 2007 Halloween remake. (Source: Google)]

Add in the supporting cast of Michael McDowell (Loomis), Brad Douriff (Sheriff Leigh), Scout Taylor-Compton (Laurie Strode), etc., and I honestly think that it came together very well as a remake.

The films rated relatively low, but they did gross higher than the budgets that they originally had to film on. Again, I’m not going to give much attention to the higher-ups of critical perception—it all comes down to personal taste.

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“Lords of Salem” (2013)

[[Promotional art for Lords of Salem. (Souce: Google Images)]]

A film that’s centered within Salem, Massachusetts,

this film—you guessed it—tackles witches, occultism, possession, Satan, and all the usual topics. Heidi (Sherri Moon) is a radio DJ who gets sent a mysterious record that’s labeled as being from “The Lords.” From then on out, shit gets a little dicey and admittedly, very disjointed. You can’t fault the cast here, and I loved the visuals that they were going for. However, with set schedule conflicts and multiple rewrites, which led to essentially running out of time to film? As a whole, what looked great on paper just couldn’t be done justice.

My FAVORITE sequence within the film (SPOILERS):

youtube

I can forgive the disjointedness solely because of how mind-boggling and brilliant the film’s history and proper visuals were. Also, we got to see Dee Wallace, Judy Geeson, and Patricia Quinn as creepy and badass witches who moonlight as Heidi’s landlords. Also Meg Foster who leads their coven? Can we talk about what a femme-fueled power cast that is?!

[[Left to right: Patricia Quinn as Megan, Dee Wallace as Sonny, and Judy Geeson as Lacy Doyle. (Screencap, Lords of Salem. Source: Google) ]]

[[Meg Foster as coven leader Margaret Morgan. (Screencap, Lords of Salem. Source; google)]]

Like I said prior, the film gets a little wild. If you’re...well, buzzed prior to watching, it may make a little more sense.

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“31” (2016)

[[Film poster for 31 (Source: Google)]]

[Synopsis from IMDB; “Five carnival workers are kidnapped and held hostage in an abandoned, hellish compound where they are forced to participate in a violent game, the goal of which is to survive twelve hours against a gang of sadistic clowns.”]

Here, we clearly see that Zombie is invoking his childhood growing up within carnivals. In a 2013 interview with LA Weekly, Zombie divulged more about it:

“When we were kids, my parents would [work at the carnivals], and me and my brother would get dragged along to these things all the time and have to work.”

He went further on to say;

“Yeah, and it's not the nicest world. As a kid, you get exposed to the crazier underworld of the carnival. Me and my brother, when we were very little, we'd be inside the haunted house playing all day. So, already, what people are paying money to be scared [of], we're just playing in because it's fun. We saw the inner workings behind the machines.”

youtube

(”31″ trailer, source; Youtube)

Once again in this film, Zombie brings a powerhouse cast:

Jeff Daniel Phillips as Roscoe Pepper

Meg Foster as Venus Virgo

Malcom McDowell as Father Murder

Judy Geeson as Sister Dragon

Richard Brake as Doom Head

You can view the entire cast at IMDB here.

Set in 1976, Zombie stays true to his nods. Again, depending on taste, this is a huge hit or a wild miss with mindless homicidal violence, campiness, and climbs across the monkey bar of standards that we’re used to seeing from him.

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So at this point, you’re probably wondering why I think that it’s time for Rob Zombie to step out of the confinements of his own box...

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It’s no secret that Zombie sticks to only a small group of tropes:

Slashers, families or groups of homicidals that lack remorse, the occult, etc. There’s no shame in sticking to what you know. Hell, Zombie has seemingly cracked the code over the past two decades that he’s been in the film industry that so many directors still don’t seem to get.

IMO, despite whatever you personally feel about the films mentioned above- I feel like we’re living a freaky groundhog day repeat within Zombie’s filmography.

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Now, if it ain’t broke, why fix it? Look, I’m not saying that Zombie has to change anything. However, I would love to see him tackle some other nuances that we’ve already seen from him in small doses.

- Children: We haven’t seen Zombie exactly take on what horror films depict kids as. Sure, he made a breakout and impeccable choice with young Michael Myers (Daeg Faerch) back in 2007. I personally would adore to see a reimagined (NOT remade) Children of the Corn on acid, one we all know Zombie can tackle and turn every existing view on its head.

- Witchcraft, The Occult, Satan, Voodoo: Zombie genuinely had a phenomenal concept (on paper) for 2012’s Lords of Salem. It was unfortunate that they ran out of resources and ran into unfortunate circumstances on set while filming.

The film wasn’t a total tank, though, given how inspiring and insane all the visuals were throughout the 1 hr, 41min film. I am absolutely positive that, given a full-force opportunity, Rob could rectify the mess that was out of his control. We completely saw that he provided visuals that left quite the impression, and he could take those taboo subjects by the goat horns.

- Animals (not the human form): It’s no secret that Rob and his wife Sherri are ethical vegetarians. It would be so tongue and cheek to see them take on such topics as animals getting their revenge, or even vegetarians torturing carnivores. This twist on the formula would make for an interesting viewing.

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2.) In regard to time periods,

Zombie stays within—and pays homage to—the 1970s and 1980s quite a bit. Obviously, those are the eras that Zombie personally loves the most when it comes to filmmaking. However, it would be very interesting to see him take on current day settings.

Zombie has such a unique viewpoint. Given changing climates in politics, human decline/growth, the economy, etc., he would do work that could easily put Ryan Murphy to shame.

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3.) He could also do with some different casting every now and then.

Let me preface this by saying that I adore every repeat casting choice that Zombie has made for his films.

Of course chemistry is a huge thing, and sticking to his friends is a very smart choice. However, he also has the potential to make new stars, boosting the power of those that may be under the radar. He can support those new stars with cameos from classic actors that we haven’t seen in awhile. I can’t begin to even fictionally cast those who fit the bill, but I do believe that with the “Zombie Touch,” he can bring so much more fresh air to the usual casting.

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There’s no doubting what Rob Zombie is clearly very good at. Despite mixed reviews from the horror world and critics, it’s time that his fans open their eyes to new possibilities. Of course, there are die-hards, but digging your feet in further doesn’t allow the growth of horror and its ever evolving themes.

[[ʳᵒᵇ ᶻᵒᵐᵇⁱᵉ, ˢᵒᵘʳᶜᵉ﹔ ᵍᵒᵒᵍˡᵉ ⁱᵐᵃᵍᵉˢ]]

This theory has been on my mind for a very long time—since 3 from Hell came out. I’m sure, in his usual fashion, we won’t be seeing any new films from Rob anytime soon (what with his new album set to release in March 2021, not to mention the toll that the pandemic has had on Hollywood.)

Still, it never hurts to challenge the set standards and ways.

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kyogre-blue · 4 years

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Naruto Shippuden, ep 453-455

Itachi filler time.

Itachi’s genin team was Team 2, under Minazuki Yuuki. The other two members were Inari Shinko and Tenma Izumo.

Tenma’s dad was his clan’s leader but got sick and needed some special cat whiskers for the medicine. I know fandom likes to discuss team assignments a lot, so I guess this is more signs that they group more “important” kids together. I wonder if Shinko also had some weird deal.

There is a two-legged human-sized cat in Sora-ku. Is Sora-ku the cat version of Mount Myouboku?

Obito WHAT THE FUCK

The anime actually is not adapting this very well at all. It doesn’t give any context at all about what the hell happened, so I had to look it up. Apparently, Itachi’s genin team was given the mission of guarding the daimyo on his annual visit to Konoha (yes, they had genins do this). Why was Tobi attacking the daimyou? Who knows. Did he actually kill him? We would assume so, but wiki does not confirm.

The daimyo seems to have had an ox-drawn carriage?

Tenma was killed. Shinko quit being a shinobi afterwards. Itachi awakened his Sharingan (2 tomoe) and got promoted to chuunin shortly after.

Sasuke’s family home had a pond with lots of koi fish.

Shisui was apparently a jounin when Itachi was still an 8-9 year old genin. He actually still looks younger than Naruto and co did, so he’s like 12 at most. He really, really doesn’t sound like a kid tho.

They just... didn’t even show any of the stuff with Shisui and Danzou, only Shisui dying. This filler is not well handled.

Fugaku’s parenting is absolutely awful. Like, this filler does show him as being... a more moderate voice within the Uchiha, and he has moments where he smiles and is genuinely happy about his kids. But he’s just... whacked. Took a 4 year old out to the battlefield for some reason. Told a 9 year old that it’s cool that he saw his friend die because now he has a magic eye power. Etc.

It’s really... something, to know that the scene where those three policemen are threatening Itachi about not betraying the clan, he’s only 11. What the fuck, seriously.

Izumi is good at taijutsu.

The Uchiha were spied on with long distance cameras, monitoring all over the district. The police’s activities were also kept track of.

Fugaku had Mangekyou lol. This is why I can’t take it seriously any time someone says Madara and Izuna were the first to awaken it. He gained it during the 3rd war, when a friend gave his life to save him. He kept it secret from his own clan, to avoid more pressure to act.

They are still reading the damn stone tablet.

Fugaku says that only Madara has been able to control bijuu through the Sharingan and they don’t know if anyone else would ever be able to do so. But then he also says that he can use his Mangekyou to control the Kyuubi so??? What is the truth. Of course, Fugaku doesn’t know anything about how seals work, apparently, so whatever.

Fugaku specifically wants to restrain only the higher ups in the village, rather than have outright fighting in the streets. His goal is a bloodless revolution.

By comparison, Danzou just goes “lol kill them all, except your brother I guess” and Itachi goes for that?? “I could help the side that wants to kill no one, or I could go ahead and kill my own family” WOW

I’ve seen comments that Tobi was the one who killed kids and such to make Itachi seem less to blame, but it’s the other way around here, at least. Tobi kills the police force, while Itachi is slaughtering people in their homes.

Sandaime, when Itachi reports about killing hundreds of innocent people: “Good job! You did great. There was definitely no other way.”

Obito cuts his hair after the massacre. He was already part of the Akatsuki at this time, as a “newbie.”

Orochimaru, Sasori, Kakuzu and Zetsu were also part of the roster. There is also Juzo and an unnamed extra.

On the whole, this filler is rather poorly handled. The storyline is disjointed because they decided not to go over certain parts. Repeating themselves never stopped them before, and they could have... you know... wasted less time on the dumb Tsukuyomi dream filler instead...

Also, Itachi’s decision to favor the village does not feel like it has any basis. All his musings about the meaning of life don’t link to the idea of the village over all else at all. Fugaku is literally giving him a choice with less death, and yet Itachi reasoning for rejecting it is not at all clear. You can only assume that he hates the clan, but why?

#now playing #watching naruto

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mana-burns · 6 years

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You Can’t Go Home Again: An Analysis of Resident Evil VII

I'm comin' home, I've done my time Now I've got to know what is and isn't mine If you received my letter telling you I'd soon be free Then you'll know just what to do If you still want me

Introduction

Resident Evil VII is deceptive. Resident Evil, as a series, is deceptive. Numerous spinoffs and unnumbered entries turned the franchise into a tangled mess of intersecting characters, monsters, and conspiracies.

From the original trek through the Spencer mansion to the bombastic high-stakes setpiece-fest that is RE6, Resident Evil, after three console generations, had descended into itself, becoming bloated and seemingly incorrigible, impossible to nail down and define.

REVII was positioned as a return to form. Like the original Resident Evil, it is a straightforward story set in a spooky house, starring an inexperienced protagonist, Ethan, there with a simple but sympathetic and relatable mission: Rescue his girlfriend and get out. But REVII can’t help but dip into massive conspiracy as it navigates through what should be a relatively easy-to-digest story.

As Ethan searches for the missing Mia, who was away on a, get this, babysitting job, he encounters the deranged and inhuman Baker family, who have been granted a twisted immortality. There’s a pervasive black goo simply referred to as the Mold that seems to be infecting the family and their estate, spawning undead creatures and giving the Bakers supernatural powers. It’s not long before Ethan himself is infected, too.

The game then becomes a series of fetch-quests and races to various Macguffins as Ethan hurries to assemble a cure for himself, Mia, and their newfound ally, the Bakers’ daughter Zoe.

Resident Evil VII is a game running from its own past. As a linear narrative, it works fine, but it works better as a mood piece, a love letter to American horror films. It is meant to emulate a series of tropes and conventions. It's the product of two cultures—East and West— colliding head-on, and as a result it feels disjointed, dissonant, and yet wholly unique, fascinating, and, ultimately, compelling.

Resident Evil VII is an allegory for itself. It is a battle for the series’ soul.

Aesthetics

Let’s get one thing out of the way first: Resident Evil 7 is not concerned with realism. It’s about simulating a horror movie; recreating their grit, visuals, and mood. In this way, it is a simulation of a simulation, and it leans heavily on the history and conventions of the American horror film without ever fully understanding them. You see this in direct, 1-for-1 tributes, such as the chainsaw fight with Jack that evokes Evil Dead 2, or the Saw-like machinations of Lucas Baker’s deathtraps, or the body found in the basement corner in the Derelict House Footage tape, positioned just like the victim in Blair Witch Project. And practically the entire front-half of Resident Evil 7 is pulled straight from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

This is par for the course for the Resident Evil series. The first game was a pretty standard take on haunted mansion horror, with some limited ventures into ‘80s action films, casting STARS as the badass special forces team in way over their heads a la Predator or even Aliens.

Resident Evil has always been about taking American horror and action tropes and sort of sifting them through Japanese culture. It is a imitation of American conventions, and it works precisely because it is so imperfect. Its dissonance happens to work perfectly for the mood of the genre. There’s something unsettling about how the details are just off; Louisiana looks like a still frame from an episode of True Detective, but it’s still evocative of how Americans perceive the swampland. Little mistakes regarding the area’s history and culture—the strange references to football, the inaccurate Civil War uniform—make things uncomfortable and strange. It’s like taking an English sentence, running it through Google translate into Japanese, and then translating it back into English again. Some general meanings are there and you may even be able to gleam some sense out of it, but it has lost all context and syntax and turned into something that isn’t quite English and isn’t quite Japanese—something that occupies the space between, something that has become a totally unique method of communication, with its own new signifiers and meaning. That’s Resident Evil. And that may explain a bit of the franchise’s ongoing identity crisis, too.

On a more surface-level reading, the aesthetics of REVII are vastly different from those of its predecessors, an approach to horror that’s a bit brighter but no less terrifying than previous entries. Remember, VII tells us, sunlight casts deeper shadows than darkness. This approach to horror is largely possible due to the wonderful lighting and particle effects at Capcom’s disposal, and though their tech struggles with faces, the uncanny valley works in their favor for this particular title, elevating that otherworldly feeling of imperfect simulation.

The Baker mansion and its surrounding area are dirty, grimy, grotesque. It’s southern gothic. The word “squalor” comes to mind. They choose to live in filth. Is there something ableist and maybe even contempful towards poverty about this dehumanizing of the Bakers? Maybe, but any sort of prejudice that the designers might be preying on here comes from a degree of separation, in that their only knowledge of that context, as mentioned before, is through American horror films, through simulacra. It is seperated by multiple layers, and so I find it hard to condemn their visions of the impoverished American South as anything but pulpy horror. Whatever the case, the true antagonists of the story betray any idea of prejudice against the lower class.

Perspective

Resident Evil 7’s protagonist is a camera. The series shifts to a first-person perspective for the first time, placing the player behind the eyes and within the mind of the game’s lead, Ethan. Despite this, the game has no qualms separating the avatar from the controller; there’s a sense that Ethan is his own character, with his own motivations not necessarily in line with the player’s.

I’ve heard the argument that what Ethan sees within the first half hour of the game would be enough to make anyone turn back. Why does he choose to go in alone? Why doesn’t he get help, or at least arm himself before he starts literally wading through corpses? No justifiable motivation could explain that.

Ethan is ostensibly motivated to look for his lost love, Mia. We’ll talk more about Mia later, but first I want to challenge the idea that this surface motivation is all that is propelling Ethan forward. Of course, you and I, and the developers, know that Ethan’s true motivation has nothing to do with Mia, and in fact nothing to do with Ethan himself, as he has no autonomy in the story. No, the motivating action propelling Resident Evil VII forward lies in the hands of the player. In a horror movie, the sort of films REVII is explicitly invoking, we can feel smarter than the protagonists. We know not to take a shower, we know not to look behind the curtain. In a horror game, we must specifically put ourselves in dangerous situations, and we do it because it’s fun. Without doing that, we can’t participate in the game. In REVII, since there is a degree of separation between player and avatar, our attention is specifically brought to Ethan’s flimsy-seeming motivation. In fact he moves forward because we push him forward, we keep him fighting. There’s a sadistic, manipulative relationship between Ethan and the player, but it’s also more complicated than that.

We sympathize with Ethan because of his love for Mia. Still, in some of Ethan’s barks and challenges to the Bakers, he expresses confusion, true ingenuity, sincerity, and a surprising and inspiring amount of courage and mettle. These motivations are enough for us to bind with Ethan, more so than in any other game in the series. Ethan is dumb, and we love him for that.

Mechanically speaking, first-person allows for some admittedly cheap but still fun jump scares, but it more importantly creates room for and necessitates an extreme amount of detail. Players can inspect drawers, cabinets, and cracks in the floorboards, unlike ever before. Monsters have a more threatening sense of scale, and so Resident Evil VII frequently plays with perspective and height, making its signature footsoldiers, the Molded, lumbering, giant masses of black knots, while also making its primary villain surprisingly pint-sized.

The first-person perspective also gives way to an effective new move, the block, crucial on the higher difficulties. The block gives Ethan a defensive verb and sort of grants the player a satisfying “cower” button. It doesn’t always make sense (how could an arm block a chainsaw?) but it paces out the game quite well against melee enemies, and it lends a visceral clutter to an already elegantly messy game screen.

Speaking of visceral—the new perspective’s greatest strength is probably the way it facilitates body horror. In RE7, you’ll have limbs chopped off, knives driven into your ribcage, and horrible masses of crawling grubs shoved down your throat. It’s a very personal, intimate horror, one that wants to gross you out while it makes your controller shudder and vibrate in resistance. It brings the player deeper into the shell of Ethan, and it creates a atmosphere of trapped, hopeless dread.

In a way, Resident Evil has been grasping at this perspective since its inception; think of the first encounter with a zombie in the first title, how the game shifts to Jill or Chris’s eyes, how the undead slowly turns to face you, its rotted mouth stuffed with human brain. This moment of body horror was essentially our introduction to Resident Evil’s mood. The perspective in Resident Evil VII, and our mouth being stuffed full of rotten flesh as we watch on, helplessly, brings the whole thing to a complete circle.

Kinetics

The movement in Resident Evil VII is deliberately slow, almost plodding. There’s a sense of weight to Ethan and his actions, necessitating such things as the aforementioned block button as well as a dedicated turn, a verb that is becoming more and more common in triple-A games, it seems. There is a sprint button, but there’s no real way to get Ethan to break out into an actual full-on run, ironic considering the urgency of the situation he’s in.

You could hand-wave away his plodding speed by saying it has something to do with his recent infection, but the Resident Evil series has always inhibited its protagonists in order to simulate the physical ramifications that fear has on the body. Despite arming the player to their proviberial teeth, early RE games aren’t about player empowerment; they still want to be a struggle to survive. So the series balances its arsenal of weapons by inhibiting the avatar’s movement. This is of course subverted in Resident Evil 4, further dismantled in 5, and completely out the window by the time 6 rolls around, but 7 is, again, intended as a return to form, and so we see a slower pace to all of Ethan’s movement. It makes up for the increased precision in aiming that the first person perspective allows.

REVII’s movement and control schemes are nowhere near as innovative and revolutionary as RE4’s over-the-shoulder controls or even RE1’s tank controls. But they still work remarkably well, and this is largely due to how the environments are designed to accommodate them. RE7 is filled with little nooks and crannies that demand careful consideration. Most of the time, they’re empty, but they are so discomforting they feel like intrusive negative space. A quick-turn button means that you always have a way to quickly glance over your shoulder. It creates a paralyzing set of blindspots to the player’s immediate left and immediate right.

Some of the guns in RE7 feel flimsy to fire, unsatisfying and cardboard-thin. The pistol has little weight or feedback, and despite the fact that the submachine gun is one of the most effective weapon in the game, it never really feels great to pull the trigger. It’s all just a bit too high-tech and light, and it clashes with the game’s mood. The shotgun, on the other hand, is incredibly satisfying, with a wonderful kick and a beautiful cascade of gore and blood to compliment each round. Meanwhile, swipes with the knife feel weak and desperate, appropriate as the knife will be little more than a box-breaker or last-ditch effort for the player.

I want to note how well the sound design compliments the movement in Resi 7. Each creek of the floorboard that comes with each step enhances the mood. Everything works harmoniously towards a feeling and an atmosphere, even if it isn’t, by the strictest definition, realistic. Remember, Resident Evil VII doesn’t strive for realism. It strives for a different sort of immersion, one that engulfs the player in familiar iconography rather than relatable and recognizable situations.

The puzzles in Resident Evil VII include the lock-key affairs that are synonymous with the series, though some of them work in interesting or subversive ways. Take the shadow puppet puzzles, that ask the player to rotate a certain key until it casts a shadow that fits into a mold or image. It’s clever to ask the player to think about the game’s lighting; it weaves together the environment and the objective. It draws attention to light and shadow, it takes time and manipulation. What it doesn’t quite take is the lateral thinking necessary for most of what you’d call puzzles. No, the puzzles in REVII are slave to the game’s pace, not its challenge. They give you tasks to do, things to fetch, and moments of quiet discomfort to break up the sometimes bombastic noise of gameplay.

Doors

Doors play a significant role in the Resident Evil series. In the first title, they masked loading screens and acted as gateways for player progression—a lot of that game’s pacing is defined by finding and using keys. In REmake, some doors will shake and slam as you walk past them, implying that enemies are waiting for you on the other side.

But doors are also important tools for survival; each door in Resident Evil is a barrier to keep enemies at bay, because each room is treated as its own discrete environment. Zombies (mostly) can’t get through doors. If you can’t deal with an enemy or enemies, you flee towards the door and use it to place a divide between you and them. Doors are powerful mechanically and thematically in Resident Evil and REmake.

In RE7, they work in a different way. You press a button to initially crack them open, but the game makes you physically push them open as a separate action. In this way you must commit actual movement to the action of entering a room to open a door. You need to make a serious mental and physical investment in order to progress.

This is nothing short of brilliant. You can’t back away from a room after opening the door and survey it for safety before plunging in. You have to go in headfirst, and this gives the game control over moment-to-moment player progression. The doors in Resident Evil VII area synecdoche for the game’s entire design; a mindfulness in mood, movement and control that services a feeling rather than a sense of realism or accuracy.

Videotapes

Resident Evil 7’s obsession with horror films extends beyond the game’s aesthetics and into its mechanics. It is fascinated with the concept of video tapes, beyond simply using these tapes as a way to evoke the mood of found footage horror. Rather, it finds a mechanical purpose for the tapes, turning them into puzzle pieces that help Ethan escape.

When we are first introduced to the videotape mechanic, it’s in the initial shack area, part of the demo that was released before the full game. The tape belongs to an unlucky film crew, working for some imaginary (but wholly believable) reality show about plumbing the depths of abandoned houses. In what is RE7’s most obvious expression of its main purpose—placing the player in a horror movie—the player takes control of the cameraman, and indeed the camera itself, and by proxy—through the method by which Ethan diegetically experiences this scene—the tape. We are the footage, and though it supposedly happened in the past, we are now controlling it in real time.

Disturbingly, the crew goes through almost exactly the same paces that Ethan went through just moments ago, and since we see how it ended up for them, it suggests that he is probably in a great deal of danger.

But the tape shows that there is a secret passage in the fireplace, one that the player could have totally missed without its aid. This establishes a pattern; the player will encounter three more tapes during their journey, and each one will convey a little more information and context to not only the player, but to their avatar, Ethan, as well. Not all of the tapes are mandatory for progression, but they are a wonderful way to present missing pieces of the puzzle to the player, through methods that are thematically appropriate and never wrestle control away from the protagonist. The tapes are essentially keys, but they are infinitely more interesting than a simple progression lock.

The most effective and interesting tape is perhaps the most well-hidden one. “Happy Birthday” is buried in a cupboard in the attic, and it is disturbing footage kept safe and secret by the Bakers’ son, Lucas.

The footage is of an elaborate deathtrap set up by Lucas, who’s positioned as a sort of genius psychopath as an in-universe explanation for some of the game’s puzzles. Lucas has captured one of the poor erstwhile documentarians, and the player takes on this victim’s perspective. Interestingly, all semblance of artifice—a camera recording the footage—drips away in favor of this perspective. Through the magic of movies, we become this character, one-step removed from our hero Ethan, yet still somehow viewing it through his eyes. If the intro tape had us jump back in time to where Ethan has been, this tape foreshadows where he will go.

Since we already know that the victim of the trap doesn’t survive, it’s not a failure to participate in Lucas’s machinations. Instead, it’s presented as the scripted, linear path that we must follow. The lethal puzzle culminates with a task that requires the victim to uncork a barrel of oil, leading to the explosion that ultimately kills the victim in the tape. But the action that springs this trap just yields a password. If one were to go into the trap with some prior knowledge of that password, one would be fine. And that’s exactly the position the tape leaves Ethan in. Since he, by way of the player and the tape, already knows the password, he’s able to escape Lucas’s trap unharmed.

This means the tape isn’t necessary for success. If the player somehow fails to find the tape, they just have to play the death trap twice. Once they continue the game and run through the puzzle a second time, they’ll realize they can just skip over the deathtrap, since they already know the password. It’s a puzzle that is proofed against stumping a stumbling player.

It also extends the horror movie motif pulsing at the heart of Resident Evil VII. It’s an attempt at creating something that the series has sometimes dabbled with, but never fully explored–the idea of elaborate, claustrophobic death traps. You’ll see spiked walls and bottomless pits in other Resi games, but never something quite so sinister and unique, not to mention devoid of enemies or threats beyond the traps themselves. It is a quiet, challenging horror, one that pits the player against themselves, and I think it’s more than strong enough to stand on its own as a full game.

The video tapes in Resident Evil VII stand hand-in-hand with the tape recorder save points and evoke a certain era of technology, a halted progress that crystallizes the Baker mansion at a moment in time, and suggests that they’ve paused their evolution. It also subtly reminds players of a time and a place, the same crucible of factors that led to the creation of the horror films that inspired Resident Evil VII. It’s a horror born out of grime and dust rather than shadows and moonlight.

Jack

Jack is the first member of the family you encounter; you catch a glimpse of his form plodding through the woods, and he eventually kidnaps you and brings you to the centerpiece of REVII’s introduction, the family dinner, where he makes himself known as an intimidating and controlling presence.

After Jack’s pulled away by the arrival of a deputy, you escape from your binds and start to move through the mansion, but of course he quickly catches on to your plan. What follows is the most compelling, proof-of-concept sequence in all of RE7; a game of cat-and-mouse through a tightly wound series of narrow corridors, with the slow-moving but ultra-powerful Jack following you close behind.

The wing of the house that Jack chases you through is a well-thought out arena, with a few hidden escape hatches and multiple ways to double-back. It makes movement and navigation feel clever and fun, while still keeping a sense of looming dread. You’ll double-back multiple times, and you’ll always have the plan b of escaping back into the safe room on the opposite end of the hallway, as far from your objective as possible.

This scene is marked, most notably, by a few scripted scenarios designed to catch the player off-guard; one, Jack can burst through a wall and surprise the player, but only if both characters are positioned just right—some players will never even see this sequence.

It takes courage to develop entire sequences that some players will never see. It’s difficult and resource-intensive to design and place such moments in a game. But it pays off in REVII; these moments are some of the most memorable in the entire game, and you can tell a lot of care and time went into making Jack’s sequence pitch-perfect. It’s truly the highlight of the game and a Capcom more willing to take a huge gamble might have used it as the entire framework for the game. As it is, it’s the stand-out chapter in the game.

After a bit of exploration and a few confrontations, you’ll encounter the now most certainly undead Jack Baker, during an otherwise slow-paced hunt for a few statues. He catches you off-guard and the game challenges you to once again play cat-and-mouse. As a result, the entire Jack encounter sort of plays like a three-act structure in its own right; you encounter him once, run away, quiet exploration, encounter him again, more puzzles and exploration, and a final, bombastic, Evil-Dead-as-hell encounter in an enclosed space.

The fight challenges how well players have learned to navigate tight corners and small spaces while evading a slow-moving Jack. Perhaps it would have been more appropriate to present them with a cat-and-mouse challenge, one that added new wrinkles in order to act as a sort of final exam for the Jack chapter. But it’s hard to argue that this fight isn’t a trippy power fantasy for the player, and the way it flips the player’s relationship with Jack works.

Ethan has now escaped the mansion, but finds himself in the Baker grounds writ-large. The game doesn’t open up or become less linear, but it does explore some novel new locations. Unfortunately, that variance comes at the cost of some consistency. Before moving on to the next location, the player encounters a trailer belonging to Zoe, who ostensibly sets herself up as a mysterious ally. We first encountered Zoe through a phone call in the Baker house, where she warned us we were in grave danger. Zoe is not that interesting as a character, and mainly serves to complicate the game’s narrative, which starts out simply and becomes more and more complicated, to its weakness. Zoe is an element of that. She’s not well fleshed-out in the main game, and she’ll later be part of an arbitrary and superfluous player choice that feels tacked on. Here, however, she’ll play the role of mysterious sherpa for a while.

After a short break to resupply and catch their bearings, the player will soon enter the second house, the old house, and the domain of Mrs. Marguerite Baker.

Marguerite

Pacing-wise, Marguerite’s domain is when RE7 really starts to slip in its footing. It’s not exactly bad gameplay, but it does sag a bit, and a few fetch-quests lead to the previously mentioned flamethrower and a pretty frightening if rhetorically uninteresting tape starring Mia.

Marguerite’s gimmick is insects, cockroach-like bugs that swarm Ethan, fly around the damp wooden shack, and build nests that the player must flush out using the burner. The bugs create some variance in the enemies that RE7 will throw at the player, but they aren’t terribly fun to fight. What’s more, the old house doesn’t feel quite as well-thought-out as the larger Baker Mansion, and though it also follows a somewhat circular layout, its hallways and doors are less distinct, and its rooms are less geometrically interesting.

Jack is horrifying because he feels threatening and powerful. Marguerite is horrifying because she’s unpleasant to see or hear. It’s a skin-deep horror that relies on physical reactions rather than mental ones. Marguerite is repulsive, not necessarily terrifying.

Perhaps most disappointingly, we don’t learn very much about Marguerite at all, before or after her infection. Jack gets a moment of redemption later in the game, and Lucas and Zoe are fleshed out in conversation and flavor text around the Baker estate. Marguerite, on the other hand, only gets bits and pieces of story—she’s really more about an image than a fleshed-out idea. The DLC supposedly characterizes her out a little better, and gives hints to what she was like pre-infection. There are glimpses here and there that suggest she had an affinity for religious iconography; she has a habit of creating small shrines to Eve’s “gift.” This was a potentially rich vein that Capcom could have explored in more detail to make Marguerite feel like more than just a wife and mother.

The highlight of Marguerite’s section, by far, is her boss encounter. Set in a small two-story greenhouse, the boss fight begins when she startles you by popping through a window and grabbing your legs. At this point, she has mutated into a Junji Ito-style horror, with long arms mimicking spider limbs.

Her boss arena is a work of art. While Jack’s pit is somewhat simplistic, Marguerite’s stage has a layout simple enough to grok but complicated enough to provide ambush points and blind spots. There are doors that are blocked from one side, but give the player a route to double-back. There are ceilings and walls and windows for Marguerite to crawl on and climb through. There’s ammo hidden in cabinets, but there’s a risk-reward of wasting burner ammo to open these cabinets—though the burner is the most effective weapon against the matriarch. And, echoing the gameplay in her larger domain, the boss fight is dampened by moments of quiet stalking, though here the line is blurred between cat and mouse; you’re fighting back, and if you can control the tempo of the fight you’re frequently on the offense.

There is some sexual imagery to Marguerite’s final transformation, as her weak point is a hive-womb, and she crawls around on all fours while stalking you. It’s RE taking a page out of Silent Hill’s book, and it might feel a little cheap and grotesque if it wasn’t executed with the grimy style of a western grindhouse horror flick. No, REVII has little reservations about what it is by this point; it fully accepts that it is campy gross-out horror, but never to the level of shtick. It still takes its scares seriously, and this level of sincerity lends it a lot of heart. It makes no apologies for being disgusting, and in that way it’s lovable, just like the shlock it’s based on.

After a grueling fight, Marguerite calcifies and crumbles to dust, leaving behind a lantern for Ethan, who is free to move on to the next chapter of the game.

Eveline (Part 1)

But before Ethan moves on, he makes a detour to the attic and the kid’s bedroom.. Demonic children are nothing new, horror-wise, but REVII sows the seeds of its main antagonist achingly slowly, placing her quite literally right under the player’s nose while still breadcrumbing morbid story details to keep the hook. It’s not a deep story, or even all that unpredictable, but it is compelling enough to push Ethan forward.

You’ll notice I’m not paying much mind to the grand details of the plot, and that’s precisely because the story is secondary to a mood. This is why so many of its characters are so tropey. They don’t need to be real people, they need to serve a purpose.

If this is all sounding a bit harsh, let me assure you; I fully believe anything other than REVII’s broad strokes narrative would probably feel a little too fiddly and intrusive to serve what the game is trying to be. There’s just enough dressings of a compelling story to keep players interested in what’s going on, and that’s exactly the way it should be.

The Baker’s son, Lucas, plans to make you work hard to reach his lair, and as a result there’s a quick and gruesome return to the main mansion to fetch a key out of a corpse and battle some extra molded. This largely feels like filler and fluff, but it goes a long way to building Lucas up as a bit different from his parents. He’s more sinister, more cunning, more self-aware and human. You’ll also encounter Grandma a few more times, placed within the critical path, always watching and always silent.

RE has always been noteworthy for its clockwork puzzles, and the series has frequently lampshaded these puzzles in cute if unbelievable and ultimately unnecessary ways. The police station in RE2, for example, was supposedly a decommissioned art museum, as if that makes any sense.

In REVII, though, it’s the machinations of a character, the inventive, sociopathic Lucas, who, as it turns out, is a major antagonistic force behind the game’s entire plot. His reveal as the true antagonist of the game is brought on with little fanfare. It’s mostly revealed in DLC and notes. But it’s similar to Wesker’s heel-turn in RE1. It doesn’t purporte him to be the main villain of the game, but it sets him up as a possible series-wide antagonist.

Your mileage may vary out of this twist. Some might like having a face to the horror, and the stories of Lucas as a child, spying on his sister and setting traps for neighborhood bullies, are chilling in a lasting way. But the game doesn’t do a great job of selling Lucas as a planner, and the whole thing feels a bit contrived in the face of REVII’s greater narrative.

Lucas

In the Videotape section, I discussed the happy birthday tape and how it uses the conventions and structure of a video game to set up REVII’s most interesting puzzle. I briefly glossed over how the tape and Lucas as a character invokes the found footage aesthetic so important to Resident Evil VII’s style, but in the Happy Birthday puzzle—and through the rest of Lucas’s death traps—we see another piece of horror movie inspiration come to life; the complicated, convoluted deathtraps of films like Saw and Cube.

This sort of claustrophobic psycho-horror came about out of budget constraints. The first Saw was hugely influential because it allowed for an inexpensive yet wholly effective reworking of the slasher flick. It was successful commercially, and it was appealing to producers because it had the built-in simplicity of a few simple sets and some inexpensive practical effects. It was a streamlined reworking of the genre for the 21st century.

If Jack stands in for the ‘70s-era slash-fests like Texas Chainsaw, and Marguerite is a melding of ‘80s and ‘90s body horror from the West and the East, then it’s temporally appropriate that Lucas is the representative for 21st century gore flicks. In a way, REVII is a tour of the genre’s modern history, an exploration of its tropes as they evolved. It’s a love letter to three eras of horror.

Mechanically, Lucas challenges the player to stop, move slowly and deliberately, and fully assess the environment. There are tripwire bombs and spike traps littering the hallways of his home, and though you will still fight standard molded, they’re sort of a trivial threat by this point. No, Lucas demands that you think about the game’s environment as hostile and unforgiving. This is something of a change when compared to the circular, narrow hallways in the Baker Mansion and the Old house, where the game’s architecture and hidden pathways were one of your only weapons against your pursers. Here, Lucas isn’t following you, but he’s attempting to anticipate your movement. You’re not being chased, you’re being funneled.

Lucas leads you into the Baker barn, which he’s set up like a gladiatorial arena. If you needed any further evidence that the game is now fully banking on Saw homages, the hanging pig-corpses should be proof enough. This environment is incredibly quiet at first, but its architecture betrays its true nature; the intersecting, stacked hallways are layed out too perfectly for it to not be some sort of combat arena. In most games, this discord can be laughable; in Resi VII, it builds tension and suspense, and therefore works a little better than it might in, say, a pure action game or a shooter.

Depending on your difficulty, you’ll face some number of a new type of enemy, the fat Molded. These are bulky, powerful enemies who spew bile, one of the few projectile attacks in the game. Overall, they’re more intimidating than actually threatening. By this point, you’re armed to the teeth, and the barn’s layout gives you plenty of ways to obscure line of sight and take cover. But this boss encounter most vitally introduces the fat molded into the ranks of foes you’ll encounter. Resident Evil has a history of introducing powerful minions with such fanfare; they bring around a new, tough enemy type, build them up as an intimidating, powerful force, and then later seed them into the ranks once the player is more capable. It’s a way of ramping up combat challenges and creating an interesting endgame.

Next up is the happy birthday puzzle. Once you beat Lucas’s escape room, he gets angry and tosses a bomb into the room, which you can use to blast the wall and escape. By the time you make it to his control room, Lucas has already fled. There’s a short trek to the boathouse, and a fully-loaded safe room is a pretty good indicator that a big fight is about to go down. There’s a sense of finality to the proceedings, considering that you’ve now worked your way through the main Baker family. Still, there’s something like a quarter of the game left, and it’s when most people say REVII really goes off the rails. The pace and mood of the game is about to undergo a major shift. But first, it’s the final battle with Jack.

Jack’s Return

Ethan’s final encounter in the Baker residence brings his time with the family full-circle. Jack has come back from the dead yet again, and he’s mutated beyond any recognition. This is the beginning of REVII’s slide fully into the conventions of the series, away from the new-age slasher flick pastiche and into the gamey, japanese bio-horror that defines the series.

The fight with Jack is a fairly standard boss battle that asks you to shoot the glowy parts when they start getting glowy. There’s a smart sense of player-enemy placement and blocking and a clever use of levels that keep the fight from feeling dull.

The barn burns over the course of the fight, and eventually it’s all but completely destroyed. Once the fight wraps up, Jack will grab you as a final deathrattle, and you’ll be forced to inject him with one of the two cures you’ve cooked up. This means you only have enough serum to cure one other person, and the game is going to make you choose—do you fulfill your promise to Zoe, or do you stay loyal to your original mission, and rescue Mia? It’s a dull, binary, choice that simply determines the ending of the game, as well as what amounts to an optional boss fight. It’s set up to either reward or punish the player, rather than challenging their conceptions of the game’s world and Ethan’s place in it. Put simply, there’s a right answer and a wrong answer, which makes it fundamentally uninteresting.

Whoever the player chooses, the pair will then make their escape down the river.

Mia and the Tanker

The boat crashes, and REVII plays its final third-act twist; a shift in perspective, moving the action behind the eyes of Mia, who is all-too-familiar with the washed-up tanker. The twist is that Mia is much more than she seemed and was hiding a few secrets from Ethan. She’s a mercenary, hired to escort a bioweapon on a commercial tanker in a covert operation. That weapon is Eveline, the main antagonist and the driving force behind the sentient Molded force that both corrupted the Bakers and created the monsters the player has battled this entire game.

This twist is nothing short of baffling. It is unexpected, but it is not a subversion of any player expectations; it’s a twist that devalues the previous rising action rather than usurping it, and it inflates the scale of the game’s conflict beyond ‘creepy house’ and into ‘international high-stakes bioterrorism.’ It’s disingenuous and exhausting, as Ethan is now relegated to a bit player in a bigger conspiracy.

All that being said—it’s Resident Evil sinking back into its traditional mold. Wesker’s heel-turn and the Umbrella conspiracy elevated the first game’s spooky mansion into a secret megascience lab. That twist set the pace for the series as a whole; a convoluted narrative rooted in a distinctly Japanese anxiety over superweapons.

Here’s the thing; I don’t think the twist is all bad, actually. I think there’s something charming about how RE feels it is so vital to create a wide, entangling conspiracy to tell such a tight and quick narrative. It’s an impulse that the series truly cannot escape, for whatever reason. It is never content to tell a story about horror on a small-scale. It needs to dip into some kind of worldwide threat in order to tie all its narrative strings together. Would REVII be stronger without the tanker chapters and the larger ramifications of its effect on the narrative? Probably. Would it really be Resident Evil without such a grand mega-conspiracy at its heart? I’m not so sure.

It’s a complicated issue, because it begs the question; how much can you mess with a series’ DNA before you have an entirely new product? Is a mood enough to connect a series, or does there need to be an underlying thread that connects all the titles to its past? Is there simply too much baggage attached to such a massive beast of a franchise for it to ever escape its own legacy?

Ostensibly, the theme of Resident Evil VII is family. It’s the driving force that causes Eveline to throw off her controllers and drive the game’s plot forward. It’s the bond that causes Ethan to go after Mia, and it's the question that Zoe struggles with as she turns against her mutated clan.

Conversely, then, it is appropriate that Resident Evil VII struggles against its predecessors and the legacy they have created. Like Zoe, it is fighting for its own identity while still maintaining a certain loyalty to its origins.

Eveline (Part 2)

The last location in the game is the salt mines, which act as a sort of final combat dungeon, overrun with Molded. Unlike the tanker, however, the salt mines afford the player a ton of firepower and ammunition. It’s all about player empowerment now, as the scales have been tipped in Ethan’s favor. Fighting the molded is now trivial.

The mine is also set up as a sort of ground zero for the Molded. There are secret labs and documents filled with research on the molded dotting offshoots and chambers.

There’s a thrilling race up a spiraling column and a few more fights with the fat Molded between Ethan and Eveline. She’s in the guest house, and this final confrontation acts as more of a cathartic emotional highpoint than a final gameplay challenge. The mines were the real final test, and though there are some small challenges to the encounter with Eveline, it’s more in position to wrap up REVII’s mood and story.

The player is now up against Eveline’s psychic powers, and it’s about as hokey as it sounds. However, the audiovisual presentation is strong enough to suck the player in, and it still feels emotionally resonant and threatening, even when dipping into the absurd.

After the player figures out how to guard against Eve’s blasts, they reach her decaying body. Like Lisa trevor in REmake, Eve is positioned as a victim of larger, sinister forces, a capitalist war machine that took a little girl and turned her into a weapon. This sympathy for the devil ultimately induces genuine pity for Eveline, and it, again, shifts the focus of the story onto a more worldwide conspiracy and less on its play actors.

Eve’s final form is massive and grotesque, but most poignantly, it is part of the house itself. The Baker estate has been Ethan’s sometimes-ally, sometimes-enemy, and it’s only appropriate that it takes a leading role for the final moments of REVII. The final set piece is one of a massive scale, and it brings attention to the sky above, where dawn is beginning to break through what has been a seemingly endless night. Evenline mutilates Ethan one more time as choppers begin to fly in overhead, and finally, a deus ex machina in the form of a massive handcannon lands next to Ethan’s head. He fires a few rounds and Eve crumbles to dust with a final deathknell.

Ethan is rescued by a man introducing himself as Redfield and working for the series’ signature villians, the Umbrella corporation, and REVII, despite itself, insists on teasing its place in the series’ overarching, complicated mythology. A brief epilogue showcases some more lovely, True detective-esque air shots of Louisiana over narration from an exhausted Ethan, before fading to credits.

Resident Evil 7 is a revisioning of the series that coined the term survival horror. It’s an invocation of a mood and aesthetic, brought into interactivity. It is a product of its technology and time, as such a detailed and intimate horror wasn’t possible even in the last console generation.

At the same time, it’s also a troubling return to form. Resident Evil can’t seem to escape the baggage of its prequels or the conventions of massive conspiracy that provides the framework for its otherwise small-scale horror. It is an antithesis to itself, as it attempts to invoke personal intimate horror through large-scale conflicts between massive capitalistic and militaristic conglomerates. A Resident Evil game will inevitably go off the rails at some point, but its mood and method determines if the player will be along for the ride. RE4 went from moody creepout to action-packed campfest, and it never missed a step. REVII stumbles a bit more, but it promises a strong return to what made RE great, especially after a few strange forays into action in RE5 and 6.

Yet REVII didn’t enjoy the commercial success of those two titles, though it did see a fair bit more critical acclaim. It’s a bold move to shift a tentpole franchise as dramatically as capcom did between RE6 and REVII, but the game is clearly a love letter to its inspirations. REVII is a celebration of Western conventions seen through a Japanese lens, It is a product of dissonance, and that’s what makes it so compelling.

Despite its flaws, Resident Evil VII is one of the best horror games of the latest generation. It provides genuine moments of horror and a piercing, inescapable atmosphere of tension and horror. It is cathartic and wild, moody and visionary, and awe-inspiring in its execution.

Maybe the next entry will lean further into the horror aspect of survival horror, and will have the courage to shake off a messy legacy of legions of the undead.

#resident evil #resident evil vii #criticism #games writing #games criticism #capcom #horror #horror games #survival horror

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optimistictaletimemachine · 3 years

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“Why me? Why us?” - Paper 1 & Slaughterhouse Five

Dec. 10th, 2021

Slaughterhouse Five Thoughts

Despite that we briefly looked at the shape of (Vonnegut’s) stories in our context presentations and saw how complex and convoluted the storytelling in his novels were, I was still not prepared for what Slaughterhouse Five was.

Initially, I remember my reluctance to read the book because when I had tried reading it before, I was really young so the non-linear narrative just confused me and I didn’t really understand what was going on or if it was “real”. However, despite having all these prefaces of how non-linear the story would be, I was still caught off guard by how rapidly Billy switched talking about events and how disjointed the connections between the events were. One moment, Billy would be in his living room “present” with his family, but then all of a sudden, he’s back in the middle of the war. Reading this now with more insight and more patience than when I was young, I’m now able to see this non-linear narrative where he’s spastic in time and has no control over where he will go next as a commentary on the effects of war instead of being confused. Billy is being unstuck in time and forced to relive different parts of his life without real control, which is merely just a representation of him constantly re-experiencing certain events due to the PTSD from the war. His mind has created a temporality because of the horrors that he experienced, and these memories hold the power over his conscious thought, to move him through time. Thus, he never lives in the present reality because he is just re-experiencing what he has suffered during the war. Even when he is not consciously in the headspace of the war, he is still unable to enjoy his life because of the suffering and mental trauma. (that is to assume that he enjoyed his life even before the war, which...is debatable). This time-traveling is not “real”, but a psychological effect of the war, which can also be seen as a coping mechanism, such as when he travels to Tralfamadore.

Although I feel sad for Billy because he is damaged and unable to convey or recognize that, while the others around him only deem him as crazy, at the same time, I feel that this detachment from both his life and from the audience to Billy is what makes this interesting as an “anti-war” novel. It doesn’t unnecessarily force the audience to feel bad for the protagonist or over-exaggerate the events that we already know. Instead, it detaches from showing emotion from its characters and sticks to what Vonnegut says at the beginning that, “There’s nothing much to be said about war because it’s senseless”. This way, when we come across events in the book that seem to be so absurd and irrelevant to being war, we’re forced to then come back to the idea that war itself, the people that are unjustified committing war crimes, the hatred and violence separating people, none of it makes sense either. For me, one of the parts that stood out the most was at the end of the novel, when it ends with “Poo-tee-weet” because ?!?!?!?!?!??? You wouldn’t expect such a classic and highly-acclaimed book to end on a made-up onomatopoeia word. But then when I thought about it, I think it was a very fitting way to end the book because what else can you say? All the people are dead after such a massacre and trying to put the horror of war into words seems to be doing it an injustice because it will never be able to describe the extent of the suffering and horror.

Personally, I found it really interesting to read about it from this distant perspective because usual war books go in depth about the atrocities and destruction of the war, however, I think that this book, along with Vonnegut’s documentary shows a more realistic and personal view of what soldiers go through. What’s interesting is that, even for a lot of his own family, they were not aware of the trauma he carried, and had to find out for themselves, similar to how Billy did not and was not able to articulate his trauma to his own family. For Billy, this manifested in his inability to express emotions to his family, which furthered the brokenness of his home and children. For Vonnegut, at least he was able to process this trauma by writing this book, but for a lot of veterans, they do not have the support systems in place to help them, so they just fall into a hole of alcohol or drugs.

Reading Journal

For the reading journal, I read the book all in one or two sittings, which I found out was probably not the best way to approach it for class discussions, because I had forgotten a lot of the book by the time we got to the discussions, so I had to re-read some parts before class to make up for it. However, I think that by reading it all at once, it helped me to make sense of the book because it’s easier to see the connections between the events, especially because the book formatted in such a non-linear way that there almost seems to by no rhyme or reason as to why the events in the book are placed in the positions they are.

Also when taking the notes for the reading journal, I unexpected found a lot of imagery to contrast life and destruction. Due to Vonnegut’s short and direct writing style, I didn’t expect there to be much use of literary devices, or imagery for that matter, because it didn’t feel like he emphasized the tragedy of it. However, because of the journal, I was forced to consider a lot of the actual literary techniques used and their effects, which happened to not just be the imagery, but also things like repetition, irony, metaphors, etc.

Chapter Extract Annotations and Analysis

- Link to Chapter 8 Extract Annotation and Structure

I felt that doing the chapter extract annotations and analysis, although it was a bit time-consuming to have to look over the whole passage, annotate it thoroughly, and having to come up with the structure for it. I think the main difficulty I had was with contemplating whether all the extract structure essay writing practices I’ve had so far were too repetitive, since the theme of war, violence, and the perpetuation of the cycle has been prevalent not just throughout this book, but also since Amichai’s poetry.

This was good practice for us to combine the two things we learned, both the content from the book/our ability to analyze the book, and what we learned already about structuring our essays.

But doing the practice also made me realize that if I get a passage to analyze on the exam, there’s going to be absolutely no time to be able to synthesize, annotate, structure/outline, and write everything during the time span, so I have to really be able to time manage effectively. So...a little bit scared for what’s to come, but at least I feel more comfortable with the idea since we did extract practices in class.

(Some) Socratic Seminar Preparation Notes

I would attach the whole thing (all of my notes) but I can’t resize images, so it would make this post very long, if it’s not already. It was interesting to hear my classmate’s ideas though, because I feel like they took a different stance on a lot of the book’s themes, which provided a different perspective for me. Such as the purpose of the time-traveling. I had mainly read it as a commentary on how Billy and Vonnegut experience their trauma from war, but hearing other people’s ideas on how it should also be read from a “realistic” point of view instead of just disregarding it as something that’s only in his head. I didn’t even consider trying to read about it from this kind of standpoint, and didn’t give too much thought into the fact that maybe the whole thing with the Tralfamadorians and absurdism is more about the fact that we should not take things seriously, and enjoy life as it is in the moment. But before the discussion, I read it more as Billy’s mental trauma.

Although I am not looking forward to writing my Paper 1, because of all the uncertainty that surrounds it, I supposed I have to do so anyways because I am a bug trapped in the amber that is IB Diploma.

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fandomimagines-andsoforth · 7 years

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Stay with me (Enjolras x Reader)

(A/N): This imagine will be one of the goriest and depressing fan-fictions I have written. But, I have put all my heart into this one-shot, and I hope you enjoy it. If you really enjoyed it, please like and comment down below. Feel free to contact and DM me for requests on imagines, head-canons, and one shots. (THAT GIF THO)

Enjolras is a little OOC, That’s because, In the books and movie, he had no interest in women. In this imagine, he is courting one. So that goes against the character a smidge. But He's still the passionate and intense Enjolras we all know and love.

When You’re fatality injured, Enjolras struggles to save your life. Will you survive? Or could your death be the reason he’s never had any interest another woman? Find out in the next chapter.

Word Count: 2,000

Warnings: Gore, Blood, Violence, Police brutality, Angst, Serious feels.

(I do not own any of the named characters, as I am not Victor Hugo. But damn it I wish I was.)

It was just supposed to be a small Les Amis de l'ABC rally. You were just supposed to support your fiancé. The French government wasn't supposed to impose. And You weren't supposed to be shot.

You don't remember much of anything clearly. You do recall a loud crash, the stumble of hooves on cobblestone, the screams of the crowd as they were shoved and trampled. And fired shots ringing out.

One particular scream caught your attention as you were looking for a way out of the panic, a little girl no older than 7 was standing alone, crying. Just ahead of her a soldier was storming forward on horseback, relentlessly tearing through the crowd, firing bullets at the peasants. He was going to ram right into her or shoot her first.

Little ways in front of you, a frantic Enjolras was shouting your name over the gunfire, desperate to find you among the hysteria. You wanted to go to him, but You couldn't just stand there and do nothing, you had to save her. So, you gathered your courage and bolted to the little girl in an attempt to save her life.

You shoved and pushed your way through the madness. Breathlessly sprinting, you were almost there. The little girl was almost safe in your arms. You were so close.

BANG...

A scream...

Then silence...

The scream was not of your own but of your fiance, Enjolras. Despite the panic, he saw your innocence be shot down and his heart stopped. Everything seemed to slow around him as his whole world collapsed. Enjolras froze and let out a cry of anguish and horror, before barreling towards you.

He skidded across the sharp cobblestone, bloodying his knees. Enjolras shielded your body with his own from the damn soldier's horses. He delicately lifted your head onto his lap and applied pressure to your abdomen. His hands were blood-soaked and his vest was stained, but none of that mattered in the moment.

You were unconscious, but still breathing, thank the Lord. But you were not out of danger yet, Enjolras knew this. You were losing blood fast and he had to get you out of the massacre. He scooped you up in his arms and weaved his way out of the streets.

Everything was blurry and distorted Enjolras felt a wave uneasiness within him. He just watched the love of his life be shot. How could he not be in despair? He knew he had to focus, and he knew he had to get you to Joly. He did not know if you were going to be alive if he didn't get you there in time.

He banged on Joly's flat door with his shoulder, his arms occupied with cradling you.

"Hello, Enjolra- Oh dear," Joly's eyes widened at the bloody sight.

"Please, say you can help her," Enjolras pleaded, his eyes begging and his teeth biting back tears. Enjolras never cried, he was truly desperate.

"Follow me," Joly wasted no time and guided Enjolras through the small flat to a narrow guest room.

The room was small, shabby with a twin bed in one corner and not much surrounding. One single window lets natural light in. Besides the bed, stood a rickety, uneven desk. Methodically placed on top, were shiny, metal needles, scalpels, and jagged instruments, all precisely fixed on a tray. Some looked like torture devices. It was a terrible sight to see. One could only imagine the horrors they could be used for. These were only Joly's tools. He was a bit peculiar in his own way.

Often, Joly was a light-hearted and cheerful person, but he did have a more eccentric, dark side. He was a hypochondriac who studied the morbid and gruesome side of medicine. But admittedly, Joly was indeed skilled in his field of practice. Ever since he went to college with Enjolras and joined the revolution, Enjolras trusted him, even with your life. The most precious thing.

“Set her here,” Joly motioned to the bed. “What happened?” he inspected the wound when Enjolras set you down.

"(Y/n), she..." Enjolras paused to catch his breath. "They s-shot her... There was an attack at the rally. The Français soldiers slaughtered the streets, it was a genocide. They wanted to silence the revolution. Sending soldiers to kill the peasants-" his breath hitched.

"And my (Y/n)- I should have been there, I should have protected her. Damn it, why wasn't I there?" He mentally beat himself and blinked back tears.

"Enjolras," Joly placed a hand on his shoulder. "There's nothing you could have done."

Despite Joly's words of comfort, Enjolras knew that he should have kept you safe. He thought he failed you. It could possibly cost him your life. Joly immediately assessed your wounds.

"A Bullet shell is still lodged in the lower abdomen, it seems it entered a blood vessel that's why she's bleeding out so much." He started to cut your corset open with scissors.

"Judging from the location that the bullet pierced, blood is most likely flooding the lungs. The bullet needs to be extracted immediately or else the blood with clot her lungs and (Y/n) will choke," He finished.

At that moment Enjolras wanted to pass out. Everything was hazy and ill-defined. But he needed to keep going, clear his mind and focus on saving you. Joly hesitated and his expression darkened, “There is... um, a slight grievance.”

“Yes? Tell me. What is it?” Enjolras urged. Why is he tarrying?

"You won't like it and she'll suffer, but I need to keep her conscious for this.”

"No!" Enjolras shuddered at the thought. Was he mad?

"I can't make her suffer through that, there has to be another way."

"(Y/n) needs to be responsive or she’ll go into cardiac arrest, she's losing time," Joly countered.

Enjolras sighed and gave in, "Fine, do what must be done... Just- help her.”

Joly nodded, "Thank you," He pulled out a long syringe of clear liquid. "A shot of naloxone hydrochloride should jump start (Y/n)'s heart enough for her to wake." Joly tapped the needle and some clear liquid squirted out at the tip. He positioned the syringe above her heart. "Hold her shoulders down please.”

Enjolras slipped off his jacket and did what he was told. At least (Y/n) wouldn't feel this pain, he thought.

Joly plunged the needle into your chest. Enjolras cringed.

"It should only take a few moments now." Joly massaged the area where the needle had just been injected. A moment of silence passed as he used more gauze to stop your wound bleeding. While Enjolras nervously anticipated what was to come.

…

You jumped awake, gasping for air and coughing up blood. Your lungs burned for oxygen and your eyes stung with tears that clouded your vision. There was a searing pain in your waist. You couldn't see or hear what was happening around you. Everything was disjointed and confusing. Enjolras held your shoulders down. His heart racing and his palms sweating. This was indeed a nightmare.

"I need you to hold her head up so the blood doesn’t clog her airways," Joly said, about to start.

Hovering, Enjolras positioned your head between his forearms and cradled your head in his hands. "(Y/n)! Can you hear me?"

Panting, you nodded. He let out a sigh of relief “(Y/n), love, look at me."

You recognized your lover's voice immediately, and your tired eyes searched for him. You started to fade out.

“I need you to stay awake,” Enjolras knitted his eyebrows in concern. You felt Joly slice your skin with a scalpel. You moaned and squeezed your eyes shut. The intense agony of your flesh being torn was too much for you to handle.

“It hurts,” you winced.

“I know, I know. Keep your eyes on me," Enjolras coaxed. He cupped your face and stroked your hair to calm and relief some of the pain. He hated every second of this torment. Seeing your suffering is agonizing to him.

"Keep her going just a bit more. I'm nearly done," Joly called from his workspace. He almost had the bullet.

“I'm so tired” the words barely got past your mouth. Your brain hurt and your mouth tasted like rust from the blood.

“Fight it, my love. Don’t give up” He wipes your tear with his thumb. Don't give up, Enjolras repeated to himself. She needs you, don't give up.

You wanted to scream from pain due to Joly's digging at your flesh. Why are you in so much pain? Why won't Enjolras make it stop?

Enjolras saw your fatigue, “Stay with me, (Y/n).” He knew that you could make it, he knew that you were strong.

There was a fiery agony going through your body and you cried out for it to stop. The pain was ceaseless and your head pounded. You thought that your torments would never end and that it was hopeless. You were about to give out when suddenly the misery lessened. Your nerves relaxed and your heart rate slowed.

“It's Finished,” Joly sighed and wiped beads of sweat from his brow.

Your chest rose and fell with exhaustion. Only traces of the searing pain lingered. You wanted so badly to sleep, and return to the comfortable darkness. If Enjolras would allow it, you weakly glanced up at him.

"Sleep, my love." he brushed the stray hairs away from your face, "I'm here.”

You leant into his hand and closed your eyes. Enjolras took comfort in your shallow breathing and turned to Joly in gratitude "How can I ever thank you?"

Joly finished stitching and wiped your blood off his hands, "No thanks necessary," he placed his hand on Enjolras' shoulder "Brother.”

Joly stood and dusted his trousers, "I’ll leave you be with her. You may use the guest room as long as you need.”

Enjolras shook his head, "I appreciate your hospitality but you've done enough. Besides, I wouldn't want to trouble the mistress, Musichetta."

He then gazed at you, "I need to take (Y/n) back to our flat, and care for her there. She'll be safe."

"I understand," Joly nodded. "Let me give you some dressings before you go," He slid open a drawer and handed Enjolras a white bundle of gauze and cloth. "Change them out twice daily and come to me should you need more. However, I think this should suffice."

"Again, thank you." Enjolras slipped the bundle of dressings in his coat pocket. "Is there anything I should know?" He asked.

"Just complete bed rest and she should be awake within the next few hours. But there is a possibility (Y/n) will not remember- uhh," Joly hesitated, "The... events, so to speak, of today."

“Understandable,” Enjolras nodded. It might be better that way he thought, He didn’t want you to remember any trauma of today and you could live a normal life with him, the life you always wanted. Enjolras wanted to give you a life of plenty, where you didn’t have to work so much. You could spend the rest of your days together with a home in the country as a family. But he had to make you safe first.

He delicately lifted you up into his arms, careful not to press into your side as not to harm you further. And made the journey home.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Part Two Coming Soon.

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joeyvintage · 4 years

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https://www.videoreligion.net/2019/01/violent-shit-2-mother-hold-my-hand-1992.html?m=1

-rev terry

I think if I were a badass, I would need a metal mask or full covering helmet of some kind. Not for the armor aspect, although head protection is always good, I'm just a fan of the look. I would wear one in my daily life now, but they are probably expensive, and people would expect me to do something cool (as I too would expect of a dude with a metal head). All my favorite villains had one in my youth. Both Magneto and Dr. Doom from the comics commanded respect and fucked shit up while wearing some metal on their heads. They were probably my earliest examples, but honestly, that's enough to have secured my love for the style. Their helmets were both semi utilitarian but mostly just looked really awesome with their cape combo. In cartoons, GI Joe took the effects of mirrored sunglasses to the next level with Cobra Commander, as he sometimes just had a smooth piece of chrome covering his face. I can get down with that--the blank and shiny look. It’s stylish features even distracted from his shrill sounding voice. I would probably go with something a little more personalized myself, but would definitely want something metal. It just completes the whole look for me. Something about a good sturdy helmet just fits with murder and mayhem. Karl the Butcher gets it. That's why, when he died, along with his love for over-the-top murder, he passed his fancy medieval headwear down to his son, so he would be properly dressed for his own adventure in Violent Shit II (1992).

Long after the events of the first film, two makeshift drug distributing gangs meet up in an open field to engage in something nefarious with a briefcase. For whatever reason, the deal sours, and the two groups go at eliminating each other in various gusher inducing ways. The battle whittles the congregation of assorted backyard wrestles down to a one on one duel between the leaders who both happen to practice kung fu and enjoy white button-up t-shirts. After some fancy moves, one of them slays the other in combat and begins to leave the scene (sans all his dead homies, I guess) but is stopped in his tracks by the sight of a large masked man yelling at him on the horizon. Turns out Karl Butcher Jr, son of the legendary mass murderer, was out for a stroll, spotted the dealers killing each other, and, not to be left out, had rushed to join. Very quickly, Karl (Andreas Schnaas) is on top of the would-be lone brawl survivor and promptly fucks him up with a machete just before the screen goes black. Following its intro and sparse opening credits, the film takes the form of a true crime documentary in development by reporter Paul Glas. Paul believes a string of recent murders can be linked back to The Butcher massacre from twenty years before (and also, the whole thing has something to do with real-life serial killer Fritz Honka...I think?). After divulging the history of Karl senior for a bit over panning random footage of Germany, the reporter follows a tip leading to an interview with some dude in a bar who confirms his suspicions. The Deepthroat-esque “DR. X” then tells him a few stories about the original culprit’s son who, mad about a face rash or something (honestly between the bad subs and silly plot I'm still dim on some details, but it doesn't really matter), had also already done some minor rampaging of his own in the last few years . Switching formats once again, we catch up with Karl II and his (adoptive?) mother (Anke Prothmann in a lot of make-up). Turns out, Momma Butcher has been priming her young progeny to follow in her late husband's footsteps, and now that he has grown to be the spitting image of his father (complete with the heirloom medieval helmet), he is ready to do some eccentric butchery of his own. In fact, this time will be extra special, because mom is coming along too. As one could probably guess, Karl's old lady has some very peculiar parenting ideas, specifically cannibalism and incest. Also at some point, a naturally occurring body hole gets closed up with a stapler, and I think someone eats poop, so watch out for that.

The title is about as far from the old-fashioned B-movie bait and switch as you can get. Like the first film, Violent Shit is wall to wall grotesque violence, only now (in true sequel fashion), it's been turned up a few ridiculous levels. There is an increased story to it compared to the first film, that is to say, there is more than nothing tieing the insane moments of torture and dismemberment together. For the first few acts, a disjointed, random, and confusing series of events form some semblance of a point, but the film forgets about the majority of this as it moves on into plasma soaked sadism. Mostly, the additional fluff just makes room for things the series was truly missing-- like a training montage, cliche fauxumentary tropes, and Kung Fu. Karl Jr's maternal relationship adds fucked up frosting to an already disturbing cake of sinister shit. The weird sexual thing that's going on there, combined with mom's encouraging cheers, was enough to make me glad the subtitles are wonky and that I don't speak German. At around the same runtime, it might be a little lighter on the fake entrails than the first to make room for the added story, but it wouldn't be considered lacking in most circles. The Butcher-minor is more creative than his father but also seemingly obsessed with genitals (of all genders), which is weird and takes a lot of screen time. There are a few classic machete whacks to the face for some victims. However, as the body count grows, most of the slaughter comes with long, drawn out, silly torture and bloodletting. A bare-bones opposite to the Saw-style mouse trap, instead of providing intricate setups for the deaths, the act of execution itself is long, complicated, and involves several steps. It's all sure to offend anyone who watches but is too extreme to take seriously. Even if you are of the squeamish type, by the fifteenth minute of growling testicle torture and six similar acts, the action loses any real shock and becomes either just gross or hilarious (and gross). It goes for broke, eventually just dissolving into increasing levels of carnage, capturing the essence of a drunken night between friends trying to top each other's morbid imagination. Along with its spastic rampage, the film makes several references to classic American horror films and even borrows a few plot points from the Friday the 13th series unambiguously. To its credit, it's moved forward quite a bit from the first writing-wise, although it’s not like it is casting a bigger net for an audience. It's still just random gore because that's fun sometimes, and hopefully, no one who pops in a film titled Violent Shit 2 will be worried about the level of drama involved.

Shot on tape and seemingly dumping the entirety of its finite resources into gore, Violent Shit 2 is, again, what it says on the tin. The whole thing looks like it was shot in different sections of the same public park, which it refers to as a “forest” at one point. The John Woo tribute, in the beginning, is the film’s most developed moment as far as framing and choreography go, displaying some above average movie brawling for its budget. For the film’s meat and potatoes (Karl the second, killing people), it's a lot more of the same backyard style camera work that kind of hangs around watching the action from any accessible angle. Shots seem almost placed at random, and it jumps between them with meaningless cuts. The film’s biggest draw is an overabundance of practical gore, which comes out as a step above the rest of the film quality- wise. For the lack of resources, the film utilizes some pretty gnarly effects when it comes to flesh mangling, and it doesn't skimp or pull away. I think I counted four different consistencies of blood, and each horrible scenario is trying to top the last. Without spoiling anything, there is a range of squirtastic stabbings and stringy limb removals that, despite their amateur surrounding conditions, would give a lot of larger budget splatter flicks a run for their money. Some of the more ambitious (for lack of a better word) moments spend a little too much time on screen and give themselves away, but all together it should more than slate any grimy blood-seekers thirst or send anyone else running. When it isn't mumbling at random volumes, the dubbing is just screaming, grunting and giggle-worthy squishing sounds with no attachment to what's on screen. Music-wise, the film is laced with an out of place, unbalanced soundtrack that sounds straight out of an RPG fantasy video game. Besides the Dungeons & Dragons mood tunes, it does have a German death metal/butt rock theme song (Violent Shit by Vice Versa) bookending it that captures the spirit nicely and almost feels critically necessary. Stick around afterward for some bonus scenes and marquee of credits that look like they are trying to sell you knock off sunglasses.

German director Andreas Schnaas has made an international name for himself with a torrent of ultra-low budget, ultra-violent gross-out splatter flicks that continues today. In 1989, he and some homies secured a tiny bit of funding to form the company Reel Gore Productions and produce their first full-length picture titled Violent Shit. Filmed over four weekends and with a rented tape recorder, the project amounted to a series of violent acts committed by a large masked man named Karl the Butcher, crafted with homemade practical effects (and little else). By the grace of the trash-gods, it saw a single midnight theater showing but received mostly negative reviews on its initial video release due to its lack of production values. However, with a little help from a to-the-point naming strategy and its unrefined grimy gusto, it found an audience worldwide over the following years in less discerning gore hounds who don't mind the homemade feel (a bunch of fucking weirdos probably). Succeeding their second feature Zombie '90: Extreme Pestilence in 1991, Andreas & Co would return to the world of Violent Shit and brewing cult following. To date, the character Karl the Butcher has appeared in six flicks, that I know of, including a reboot of sorts (Violent Shit: The Movie 2015) by Italian director Luigi Pastore, without Andreas Schnaas involvement. Schnaas himself would play the role in most outings, taking over for Karl Inger (allegedly) after the first film.

Violent Shit II: Mother Hold My Hand (aka Violent Shit 2) is a composition sketchbook of demented cartoon executions forged during an in-school suspension and realized in full-color low fidelity magnetic tape. For the right crowd, it's an awesomely inelegant, generously proportioned helping of sloppy sleaze, possibly best devoured while intoxicated. It advances from the first movie to some degree in almost every way, but it's still one for the same exclusive and fucked-up crowd. If you want tasteless acts of dismemberment, childish boundary-pushing, and obscene special effects, it's got you covered. Those seeking damn near anything outside of that, better look for their kicks elsewhere. In a way, it has the same MO as a Gallagher show, in that there are small bits of gibberish in between gags, but ultimately everyone watching is just waiting for red shit to spray, and a majority of possible viewers are not going to get the joke. I enjoy the fuck out of the unseemly mess, although I don't know what that says about me. I also really dig Karl the Butcher’s fashion sense. If only I too had been lucky enough to have inherited some cool metal headgear along with the destructive predispositions.

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