Movie Reviews #10 - Hellraiser: Hellworld (2005)

Plot: (from imdb.com) Gamers playing a MMORPG based on the "Hellraiser" franchise find their lives endangered after being invited to a rave whose host intends to show them the truth behind the Cenobite mythos.

Review: Here we are at the 8^th Hellraiser movie I’ve reviewed so far. There have been some good times (very few) and some bad times (a lot of them). In part 8, they try to take advantage of the whole online gaming craze going on at the time. World of Warcraft had recently started up and there were all these reports of people staying locked in their rooms for days playing online. For some reason someone thought this related to Hellraiser. So does it work? In all honesty, it ended up kind of working out. This is one of the better Hellraiser movies and no one is more surprised than me.

                The story revolves around a group of friends obsessed with the Hellraiser MMORPG. One of them takes it too far and ends up dying. A couple of years later the other friends get invited to a Hellraiser related party where bad shit starts happening. Let’s get one thing out of the way, the Hellraiser “game” is not a game at all. It’s a flash animation with text that they try to pass off as a game. I don’t know why they couldn’t have made a little something that looked decent. It’s really lame and anyone who has ever played a videogame more than 3 seconds would call them on their bullshit. 

                Now on to the party. Lance Henriksen is the host and shows everybody around the house. Weird stuff starts happening afterwards and people are dying. At first it doesn’t make any sense. What does Pinhead have to with this? No one ever opened the box? As the movie goes along things start being explained. And to my great surprise, it was a good twist. It both a Hellraiser movie and not a Hellraiser movie. It is best not explain and to let you watch the movie should you be interested. Hellworld turns out to be one of the better entries in the series because in the end they made sense in the world they are in, which is a problem most Hellraiser movies have. If you wait to the end it will make sense.

Score: 6.5/10

Babality

I've gone on a bit of a game spending spree. There's been some good deals online for arcade games and I couldn't help myself. FarCry Classic, Assassin's Creed Liberation, Mortal Kombat Arcade and Batman Arkham Origins Blackgate Deluxe Edition. Lots of games, so little time. Only went through Mortal Kombat so far. Got a good amount of cheevos in that but god damn, it's tough to finish these games. They seem to think very easy means very hard. I just did a playthrough and was getting my ass my kicked by the first person in the ladder. Games really were tougher back then.

Metro Redux

Who goes there? - 10G - Wiped the Gas Mask 20 times

Battlefield Bad Company 2

 It's bad for my karma man - 15G - Campaign: finish Heart of Darkness

 Destruction - 15G - Campaign: destroy 100 objects

 They got all our intel? - 15G - Campaign: finish Upriver



 Mortal Kombat Arcade

 PERFECT STRANGERS - 15G - Win a flawless victory in a ranked kombat

 KONNECTED KILL - 10G - Win your 1st online 1v1

 FINISH HIM! - 10G - Perform your first fatality

 ARCADE KOMPETITOR - 25G - Finish Mortal Kombat




FLAWLESS X2 - 10G - Win your first double flawless victory against CPU

Movie Reviews #9 - Volcano (1997)

Plot: (from imdb.com) A volcano erupts in downtown L.A., threatening to destroy the city.

Review: In the 90s there was a resurgence of disaster movies. They were never really good but for the most part they were entertaining. In this movie, as the above synopsis says, a volcano erupts in Los Angeles and only Tommy Lee Jones and Anne Heche can stop it. The movie is effective in creating a tense situation. The danger feels real and it engages the viewer. The scenes with lava, ash and all the other related occurrence look good for the time. The lava especially is convincing. It feels like it does really flow in the street and destroys everything it touches. On another plus side, Keith David is in this. He only shows up halfway through the movie but I can’t go on without mentioning he’s in this. He’s always one cool guy.

           

            Not everything is good though. There are some very cheesy and terrible scenes. They often have parts where it shows people with differences working together. One particularly terrible scenes involves a kid looking for his mom saying everyone looks the same as they are covered in ash, showing that race is not important in these matters. Almost barfed in my mouth a bit. Worse of all they suffer from annoying children syndrome. There’s a brat that runs around in the middle of the street in front of an exploding building like an idiot and Tommy Lee Jones’s daughter is annoying as fuck, thinking she’s more important than a city being destroyed. They are also somehow able to do this at ridiculous speed, like collapse an entire building within 20 minutes.

            It’s a decent movie that has holes in it but is entertaining. The actors involved make it watchable and it would have been a chore if worse people were involved.

Score : 7/10

Love is a battlefield

Free games are great. Sure, sometimes they're shit but if that's the case then you just don't play them. That's why I love Games with Gold. If gives you stuff you may have never paid money for but it's free so you'll give it a whirl. Case in point, the first Xbox 360 game this month is Battlefield Bad Company 2. It's not really a game that was ever on my radar so getting it for free allowed me to try it out. So far it's going well. It's relatively fun, though generic. I'll definitely finish the campaign, may try the multiplayer but won't go super crazy on it.

Battlefield Bad Company 2

I knew we'd make it - 15G - Campaign : finish Operation Aurora

Retirement just got postponed - 15G - Campaign : finish Cold War 

 New Shiny Gun - 15G - Campaign : find 5 collectable weapons




Assault Rifle Aggression - 15G - Campaign : 50 kills with assault rifles

 Link to the Past - 15G - Campaign : destroy 1 satellite uplink

Movie Reviews #8 - Strange Days (1995)

Plot: (from imdb.com) A former cop turned street-hustler accidentally uncovers a police conspiracy in 1999 Los Angeles.

Review: Remember New Year’s Eve 1999? When we had devices that allowed us to relive people’s experiences and crime was so rampant random fires were blazing everywhere all the time? Oh wait, that didn’t happen. But that’s why I love going back and seeing how movies thought the future would be. The mid 90s were an interesting time for what they though the future would be like. The Internet was a fairly new product and people thought it could do all kinds of crazy things. In Strange Days, there is a black market for a device that allows you to relive someone’s recorded experiences. Of course most people would use it for sex and other depraved things. Our main character Lenny (played by Ralph Fiennes) deals in this black market. But he ends up uncovering some crazy things including a police murder of a major personality.

            The film is fairly interesting. It shows a future that was close to what the time period was like but just a little futuristic. At nearly 2 and a half hours the movie is overly long though, there are moments when things seem to drag. It’s worth taking a look at if you like the 90s “Internet” movies as I like to call them but it won’t revolutionized your life.

Score: 7/10