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Review: Pet Sematary

                                  6.5 Sometimes the original is better

I went into Pet Sematary with reasonable expectations and expectations that there would be a few effective jumpscares and maybe a scene or two that I’d want to turn away from. I was accompanied by a friend of mine who was equally excited to see some ghouls and freights with her Twizzlers in hand and a fond memory of the original film. My first impression surprise that anyone felt this remake was close to the book. I had hoped this allowed the remake to be free of both the book and the original film and might allow this remake to do some exciting and original things. A fresh canvas to make an unsuspecting audience toss their popcorn in freight. We sat in the very back of the theater and the seats in front of us had a few different groups who were all discussing how easily they were scared and which of them would be the first to scream or shield their eyes. “Luckily?” for them this was never the case and no one so much as jumped or raised their hands. Pet Sematary starts with great visuals and it’s one of the best looking horror films I have seen. The first gored body on screen is incredibly detailed and his ghostly appearances might be the best part. Each scene has an almost horror-fantasy feel. When things are intense there is a creeping fog and ominous lightning. When things are calm there are tight or sweeping shots that hint at what’s to come. The score is fantastic and every actor/actress managed to deliver a solid performance. The love placed into certain scenes makes it all the more concerning how uninspired the horror aspects felt when they were finally delivered. Ellie being the new Gage and recipient of the brutal truck scene did a wonderful job of being a believable kid. For being such a young actress She really made me like her as a character and excited for the dark descent to come. Pet Sematary set her death up perfectly, but this scene is where things start to become disappointing. A camera sweeps over the accident and we see Ellie's mother soaked in blood and if the camera had ended there and focused on her grief the score of this film would have gone up a solid point. Instead, the camera continues on to a fully intact corpse with not a single drop of blood on it laying in some nearby grass a few feet from the accident.  If Pet Sematary had just left the results a mystery my mind would have imagined some pretty gruesome results and it would have been great. Instead, I was wondering how a crash that would have obliterated a person left the girl looking like a fully intact doll. While I can appreciate that both the child and the animal deaths were extremely minimal, it never gets made up for anywhere else and just makes the whole film feel too safe. Pet Sematary is a film without any nude scenes or even much physical love is shown. I don’t even remember seeing the wife and husband share as much as a long kiss. There is next to no profanity to the point the dialogue for this movie will never have to be censored for a tv premiere regardless of the rating. Also, expect to see much blood or gore because you could fill a medium-sized cup with all of the blood spilled throughout the entire film. Is a scene about to become gruesome? No worries, it will cut away before it ever shows anything you’re expecting or hoping for. I don’t feel like this is the way the film was originally intended to be. There are multiple scenes that setup for some truly gnarly visuals that just never happen but firmly make me believe they existed at some point. One example being anytime one of the “returned” have their hair brushed, you could almost hear flesh being pulled away but instead, it’s a stick or a leaf. There are close to a dozen elements and plot points that Pet Sematary set up and later ignored or overlooked. By the end, I was left with the impression this first film was just a long teaser trailer for a second film that had to be much more interesting than the one I was watching. I’m glad I saw the film for its beautiful scenery and the fantastic acting, but I probably would have been happier if I had just seen it at home where I might have been just a bit more afraid with trees surrounding me and a Cemetary less than two miles from my bedroom. If you’re in the mood for horror and your theater offers a 5 dollar Tuesday deal, see it with friends that you know you’ll have fun with and who can laugh about it later.

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Review: Catherine

                                            8.5/10 Devilishly Good Catherine is a game that released in 2012 for U.S. Audiences. The game comes from Studio Atlas who make other titles such as Persona and Odin Sphere. Catherine is a blend of slice-of-life and supernatural themes that is somewhere between a platformer and a dating simulator. You play as Vincent who hasn’t been faithful and finds himself cursed alongside his other mischievous patrons of The Stray Sheep; a bar that will be your main hub when you aren’t in a nightmarish hellscape of an evil witches design. You are told the men who cheat are cursed and enter a nightmare where if they die, their physical bodies die as well. The game passed over my radar when it originally released as I wasn’t a fan of Atlus at the time and the idea of a puzzle-platformer didn’t appeal to me. A friend on discord encouraged me to give it a try and I found myself awake at 5am trying to finish a puzzle I had lost a good 20+ lives on. To say Catherine is addictive doesn’t quite cover it. On PC the graphics look fresh and nearly modern. The audio is the one place I found myself wishing for improvements as the rest of the game played smoothly and had great support for both keyboard and mouse. Rarely in the game did I find myself blaming the controls and it made each try show progress as I climbed a bit higher every time. I enjoyed that the characters are older and more mature. The majority of them are much older than me but their problems are closer to mine rather than your typical 13-year-old protagonist who is struggling with high school bullying and early in life love issues. There was a lot that I could relate to from the female and male characters because they were all so dynamic in personality which is something Atlus does an amazing job of. I want to delve deeper into the aspects of the game I haven’t covered yet, but this is a game where doing so could ruin plot points for those like myself who never jumped into the game at the height of its popularity. If anything I have said resonates with you, play Catherine and immerse yourself in its psychotic world and lore.  The places where Catherine falls short for me will surely be fixed in the Full Body release which will come to the U.S. in September of this year. There are several instances where the mouth movements and audio don’t quite sync right and facial animations just look awkward. The Audio outside of cinematics is hollow and even an untrained ear could tell the bitrate has to be extremely low. This may not be a negative for others but I found the inability to save when I wanted to hurt my experience. The cinematics and character arcs can be long between mazes and to get to save points takes a fair amount of time, especially in later levels. This meant I had to choose between cutting into time I didn’t have to spare or some major backtracking for me once I started replaying the game. Overall I loved Catherine enough I will be buying the Full Body release when it comes State-Side in September.

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After all the anime edits I wanted to do something different

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Who is Gaijin Moon

Seeing as how I am brand new to Tumblr I figured I should do some form of an introduction post. I am awful at these however so please excuse any awkwardness that will occur as I stumble through my thoughts and reasoning behind this page, Thank you. I have always loved reviewing content for my friends and family. Reviews are the only way I can share in my enjoyment with many of them because they simply aren't interested in the same content I am. People who don’t watch anime or films with subtitles miss out on a great deal of entertainment they might otherwise enjoy. My hope is that through reviews, they can stay informed and appease their weeb friends who are drooling over the latest slivers of content we can get our hands on.

I don’t want to cover just anime or films though, I want to cover all of the things I find interesting that come over to us from the East. I hope to provide a perspective that isn’t awash in fanfare and lingo that would lose the average reader but will still keep the rabid fans engaged. If that all sounds like it is going to be a difficult task, it probably is. If any of this resonates with I would love if you took the time to give my page a follow and my articles a review. I want all of your opinions both positive and negative so that I can grow as a writer and a person. This content is as much for me as it is for those who are reading and learning from it. I Hope to post regularly but I am an active college student and that means I run on a blend of coffee and sleep deprivation. Thank you all for taking the time to read through this and I hope to see you soon!

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Devotion Review:                  9/10 Amazing

Warning: Potential Light Spoilers Devotion is set mainly in a 1980s Taiwanese apartment complex. The store relies on the players understanding of Eastern culture and lore that as a westerner was confusing at first glance. Despite that fact, I was engaged in the world and the unfamiliar setting only increased the anxiety I felt as I tried to navigate the haunts and horrors of the protagonist's reality. The entire plot of Devotions revolves around the mythology of Cigu Guanyin whom I had never heard of before this game. Unlike the rooms and commercials in Devotion that I was able to confirm were extremely accurate, I never found much about Cigu Guanyin that seemed to match the story the game was telling. My inability to find much about Cigu Guanyin made it feel even more creepy as it became something akin to a creepypasta story for me. This is a game where I expected the jump scares to be what really terrified me and I was completely wrong. There were a few jumps scares, but what really made my heart race were the familiar concepts of a family falling apart and the misunderstanding of mental illness in relation to religion.  We know that this is a family that is struggling financially very early on. We are shown glimpses of a young girl who was pushed into stardom to fill the shoes of a famous mother who left the limelight. The father is not spared any sympathy as we are given constant examples of how he feels inadequate as a provider and a parent throughout the story. It's a very real reality for many kids all over the world. The families daughter begins having misunderstood breathing issues which doctors can't find a reason for. She is perfectly healthy but in times of stress begins wheezing and gasping for breath. It is clear as someone who suffers from anxiety that she is having panic attacks due to her father's rage and her various other heavy burdens placed on her from a young age. Though, much like in the west this is seen to be simply a spiritual issue rather than something treatable through therapy. This all leads to the heart of the story where the Father seeks spiritual advice from what seemed to be a witch-doctor of sorts who sells him on a truly bone-chilling cure for his daughter. The game spares very little in way of making us feel exactly what she felt and to understand how powerless she felt as her world unfolded and she was left defenseless in an extremely dark reality. I wanted to save this poor girl because I have experienced her pain. A parent walking out, people telling me to pray my illness away, struggling with expectations beyond what a child can meet. By the end of Devotion, I felt empty. I began researching everything I could because I wanted to know more. I wanted to understand what life was like during this time period and how many often events like this took place. The answers kept adding to the depth of the game and the love and care that crafted the world and its characters. Devotion is truly a game no one should miss, even if they aren't fans of the horror genre.

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Battle Angel Alita: Review

                                      2/10 Dumpster Fire

  Anime films have struggled both in the East and the West as fans have had to wade through the muck of messy storylines and under-developed lead and side characters. These characters often rely on the viewer already knowing the source material, much to the dismay of casual audiences. The shared enemy of these live-adaptations is the directors and studios don't capture on screen what makes the stories and their characters matter to fans.

  Battle Angel Alita does little in the way of fixing this. The film begins with Dr. Dyson Ido (Played by actor Christoph Waltz) digging through a large dump site full of antique and cast away electronics. This scene is beautifully rendered and creates a clear understanding that we as an audience are inside a dystopian cyber-punk styled world.  It is here Dr. Ido finds the remains of a cyborg that eventually become our protagonist, Alita.   The "I lost my memory" trope tries to humanize our cyborg-heroine by allowing Dr. Ido to become a father figure. He begins teaching her about basic things such as tasting food and crying. A comment made by Dr. Ido at this point in the film I found particularly unsettling was "At least your tear ducts are functioning." This line foreshadows an issue I found perplexing as Alita's crying seems to be a constant and confusing tool of the film. By the end, you are left wondering if her tear ducts might actually be malfunctioning, contrary to Dr. Ido's words.   World building takes a backseat so that the film can instead introduce its main love interest in the form of Hugo(played by Keean Johnson). His entire character felt hamfisted and generic from start to finish. The Actor did a wonderful job with the material he was given, but the material just wasn't good. Every scene with Hugo made me question if I was watching a teen romance film that didn't expect above a young teen audience.   Alita not only falls in love with Hugo for reasons we never understand but there is even a scene where she expresses the depth of her love in a way that I had initially thought was a dream sequence. The scene is out of place and unrealistic in a way that is uncomfortable. Her manic speech ends with a "That was intense" as if the audience was supposed to laugh or sympathize with the awkward outburst.   I had been hoping the action sequences would at least make the ticket price worth the awful dialogue and awkward romance but the various villains might as well not have had names. The major villains were treated like fodder and never got any development or depth beyond the fact they were evil for the sake of being evil.  The audience is just supposed to believe that was the state of the world and play along no matter how outlandish the setup became.   Once you just accept Alita is beating up Generic Villain 1 & 2 you are still left with a sour taste as much of the violence and action takes place off screen as the film takes every opportunity to cut away just before something major happens.  It would not have taken much for this film to be rated PG instead of its PG-13 rating which seemed to only exist so she could use one instance of the "F-word."   The amount of Dues Machina used is probably the bravest thing Director James Cameron did with the entire film. How many extremely short redemption scenes can you fit into a film before it starts to become laughable? Battle Angel Alita will surely answer that question for you in the most unsatisfying way possible. I'm convinced every villain needed another five minutes of screen time before they'd have said the line "I only came to say I quit."   As the filmed wrapped up I waited for the audience, including my own friends to show any sign of emotion beyond the audible laughs from the terrible dialogue, but there were only shaking heads and shoulder shrugs. No one seemed to understand who the film was for as it lacked much of anything for the adult viewers but didn't even appeal to the young teens just looking for some fun CGI battles. Battle Angel Alita is not the saving grace for anime adaptions many had hoped for and that alone is sad. The fact that the film also did everything it could to be worse than the fairly recent Ghost in the Shell adaptation, just hurts. My best advice on if you are debating seeing this film is only go if you are hungry for popcorn and looking for a film you can nap through and not feel bad about having missed.