Smile 2

A while back I reviewed Smile and found the movie to be frustrating, due in large part to the way it squandered some effective low-key horror ideas with annoying jump-scares. Now there’s a sequel, and it… does the exact same thing. No really, the exact same thing; this could almost be a remake of the first movie, employing an identical structure and falling face-first into all of the same pitfalls, despite in many ways actually improving on its predecessor.

(Warning: major spoilers for Smile 1 follow)

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Trash TV: Reacher Season 2

Recently I was on a plane, and I found myself in that liminal phase where there was enough of the flight left that I wanted something to kill time, but not enough left to the point that starting a movie was viable. As such, I scrolled through the in-flight entertainment offerings and decided to throw on a few episodes of the second season of Reacher, a TV series I knew absolutely nothing about. In fact, prior to watching it I thought Jack Reacher and Jack Ryan were the same character.

Based on a long-running (26 entries and counting) series of novels about a guy who wanders around America punching and shooting people to death, Reacher is the second time this character has been adapted to live action, the first time being two Tom Cruise movies that don’t seem to have made much of an impact. Although they don’t really count, because as usual Tom Cruise is playing himself in those and not Jack Reacher.

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Silent Hill 2 (the new one)

My reposts of my old Silent Hill reviews took a lot longer to complete than I had anticipated due to health issues, but finally they’ve been slapped up onto the internet and I’m free to talk about the main event: Bloober Team’s remake of Silent Hill 2.

I’m actually kind of glad it took me this long to get to it, because it allowed two things to fully crystallise: first, the game’s status as a critical and (from all publicly-available signs) commercial success, and second, my own thoughts on it. I often find that my reaction to something I’ve been either looking forward to or dreading is like a free-standing tower of jelly, prone to changing shape in the immediate aftermath as gravity and time pull on it. This is more pronounced for things I had a negative initial reaction to—I actually feel quite a bit more positive about The Last of Us Part II than I did when I reviewed it shortly after its release—but it’s definitely also a factor when it comes to things I like, the well-known “Phantom Menace effect” tending to cause an afterglow that can obscure substantial issues.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that my initial reaction to Silent Hill 2(024) was very positive. My sober, more carefully-considered long-term reaction is…also very positive, actually. Turns out, it wasn’t just fan enthusiasm: it’s 2024, and Silent Hill is officially back.

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Repost: Silent Hill Shattered Memories

In 2009 rumours of a Silent Hill 1 remake finally came true, with Climax once again at the helm and the Wii as the lead platform. Oddly, the game’s announcement came on April Fool’s Day, which led to some dithering about whether it was actually an elaborate joke.

It was fairly obvious right off the bat that Shattered Memories was going to be quite different from its predecessor- the screenshots showing a snow-covered town and a frozen Otherworld made that obvious enough- but I don’t think anyone was prepared for quite how sharply this game would diverge from the norm…..

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Repost: Silent Hill

More than ten years ago, on my previous blog, I made a series of incredibly long posts reviewing and discussing the entire Silent Hill franchise. In honour of the release of the Silent Hill 2 remake, I’ve decided to port them over here. I’ll be reposting them throughout the rest of the month, with broken links and the like fixed and some tweaks to remove things that I now consider cringe, culminating in a review of the Silent Hill 2 remake for the end of October (or maybe early November, if my health prevents me from doing it sooner). Oh also, I might finally watch Silent Hill: Revalation 3D and review that.

These posts were originally written with full spoilers for some of the games’ stories, but in light of the franchise’s revival and a surge of interest from newcomers, I’ve excised a lot of the heaviest spoilers.

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Fool Night

For the last few months, I’ve been having trouble reading books due to migraine. This happens for stretches of time, and I need to just wait for my brain patterns to shift. In the meantime, I’ve been checking out some comics and manga instead.

Fool Night is an ongoing seinen manga (i.e. aimed at adult men, as opposed to shounen manga for boys, which gets a lot more attention in the west) that’s available to read on the Viz manga app…although, annoyingly, a huge chunk of the middle chapters aren’t online for some reason, meaning you’ll need to seek out fan translations for them.

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Books I Didn't Finish: Throne of Glass

I decided to take a look at Sarah J Maas’s Throne of Glass after it came up in a Kindle sale. This, alongside A Court of Thorns and Roses, is Maas’s major contribution to shaping the modern YA landscape and its romantasy off-shoot, so I figured it would behoove me as a blogger to familiarise myself with it. Maybe it’s better than A Court of Thorns and Roses!

No, unfortunately it’s even worse. Let’s go through the opening chapters and figure out why.

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Empire Of The Vampire

Empire of the Vampire.

Empire…of the Vampire.

It’s not just me, right? That title is really awkward, isn’t it? I think I’m going to call this book Vempire for the rest of this review.

(Note: The first half of this post will be spoiler-free, but the rest will contain major spoilers for Vempire, The Last of Us, and the first season of The Last of Us TV series)

Jay Kristoff is an Australian author and portmanteau enthusiast who has written quite a lot of novels, both adult and YA. Vempire is the first entry in an ongoing adult dark fantasy trilogy. Strangely, the book is illustrated, in a style that looks much more at home in a story aimed at teenagers. No, don’t worry, this isn’t another Secret YA novel. It’s for adults, and it feels like it…except for the illustrations. Kind of odd.

The trilogy’s premise is kind of unique. It’s set in a fairly standard fantasy setting, roughly 18th-century equivalent technology level, with regions that are clearly based on various European and Northern African countries in the real world. So far, so standard. However, rather than presenting us with this setting at a time when the status quo is firmly in place, the story picks up after a cataclysmic event has massively transformed the world.

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Books I Didn't Finish: You Like It Darker

My roughly once-a-year desire to read a Stephen King book has returned, and luckily he has a new short story collection out just in time. I’ve always thought that King excelled at shorter fiction much more than his gigantic 900-page epics, and the title seemed to promise spooks a-plenty, in contrast to the bulk of King’s recent work, which has been more in the crime and thriller genres. So I went into this not as a hater, but genuinely quite excited to read it.

Turns out, I got my hopes up for nothing. Based on the roughly half of it I could stand to read, You Like It Darker is at best rushed and underbaked, at worst severely phoned in. Let’s see how many Stephen King tropes we can spot while we go through the stories I read! Will there be autobiographical elements, do you think?

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Silent Hill Good: A Journalistic Investigation

The Silent Hill 2 remake is coming out this October (assuming it doesn’t get delayed), which means that Hillposting will be a regular feature of this blog going forward. I’m also working on a book review, I swear.

A few days ago Konami held their second Silent Hill transmission event, something I’ve been anticipating for a while now. We sadly didn’t get any updates at all on Townfall or Silent Hill f, but we did, finally, get to see a big chunk of gameplay for Bloober Team’s Silent Hill 2 remake. If you’ll recall, this is a project I viewed with some trepidation due to Bloober’s proven track record of making absolutely terrible garbage, and the short snippets of footage that have trickled out since have done nothing to change my cautious stance. But I reserved judgement, wanting to get a good look at how the game would play and feel, and now that we have that…

I think it looks great. I think it looks really good.

But before I get into specifics, let me lay out my mindset on remakes in general, and this project in particular.

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Adventures In Tie-In Fiction: Ciaphas Cain

I am not, strictly speaking, a fan of Warhammer 40,000. I got into it for a few years when I was a kid, along with every other nerdy boy I knew, but I was always much more interested in assembling and painting the miniatures than actually playing the wargame, and since that’s an expensive hobby to sustain when you’re a child, it didn’t last long.

My dormant interest in the hobby was rekindled by reading Arthur B’s reviews of the extensive tie-in fiction range, which reminded me that the setting is absolutely batshit insane in a way that I remember finding kind of stupid and off-putting as a child, but which I can appreciate now as an adult since I’ve realised that said stupidity is fully intentional, and indeed a big part of the charm for many people. Thus, over the years I have spent an amount of time scrolling the labyrinthine Warhammer 40k wiki that’s frankly embarrassing for someone who doesn’t play the game or collect the models, or even play any of the many, many video game adaptations. But I’ve never actually taken the plunge into the tie-in novels—until today.

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Books I Didn't Finish: Shogun

So recently a TV adaptation of James Clavell’s 1975 doorstopper Shogun came out and was extremely well-received by critics and audiences. I tried watching it and didn’t like it for reasons that I might get to another day, but it reminded me that I had the novel sitting on my Kindle. Why not give it a whirl?

The books turned out to be more compelling than I had expected, but its crushing length eventually wore down my enthusiasm to finish (this is a criticism I have often received myself) and I gave up halfway through. Let’s dig into the specifics and ask the question, are some books just too damn long? Why didn’t you edit this, James Clavell’s publisher?

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