#and believe me i get the general idea!! fake gore in movies is fun!! someone voluntarily posting body mods or stitches or other injuries

[twinsfawn]

i get that gore can be fun but the way some of y’all will post/reblog actual corpses on here for “aesthetic” as if that’s not someone’s loved one is fucking disgusting. the internet has rotted some of y’all’s brains so bad that you forget you’re circulating images of an actual fucking dead body, someone who had a life and people who cared about them. imagine if one of your loved ones died tragically and photos of their body were getting passed around the internet. look inward, your humanity is close to gone.

[silasmadams]

YOU SHOULD BE WATCHING...READY OR NOT 👰🏼

(Theatrical Poster, image courtesy of Ready or Not (2019 film) )

The world has gone to shit so I’m here to recommend some movies to pass the time or offer up a momentary distraction. Remember to stay safe and continue to self-isolate/social distance. If you’re able, consider the following ways to help out frontline workers. (How to Help Your Community During the Coronavirus Crisis | The Strategist ) 

Now, onto the review… 

Ready or Not is a 2019 film written by Guy Busick and Ryan Murphy and directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett. It follows the story of a young woman, played by Samara Weaving, NOT Margot Robbie as everyone seems to think, it’s ok I made that mistake too. Her character, Grace, is about to marry into the family of her boyfriend of roughly over a year and a half, Alex Le Domas (more like dumbass am I right?! I apologize for this joke…in my defense the movie makes this joke too). 

Alex comes from an affluent family that runs a board game empire and has recently stretched out into sports. Whenever someone marries into the family they are required to play a game with the family after the wedding ceremony is done and night falls. This game can be chess, checkers, OR it can be hide and seek aka the one deadly game. In hide and seek, the family must hunt the person marrying into the family until sunrise. If the family succeeds then they get to live but if they don’t they die. This is due to a deal their ancestor made with the devil to stay wealthy and powerful. I’ll keep the review relatively spoiler-free. Be warned though if you want to go watch the movie now, there is a lot of gore and violence. 

What I liked about it and why you should definitely watch it:

The special effects aren’t the CGI fake blood type effects, rather they’re practical effects that are well done. Some of them are reminiscent of another wonderful dark comedy/horror movie, The Cabin in the Woods (2011). The effects in the final scene are both hilarious and horrifying (I mean that in the best way possible), and they sent me into a fit of laughter. I’ll be honest I felt guilty for laughing but hey, it’s dark comedy for a reason.

The characters are an absolute delight. The family is full of just the worst, most selfish people, save for one character and I love them all. The dynamic of the family is clear from the moment they’re on screen. You don’t need long-winded explanations or backstories on the spouses of the other family members, rather you get tidbits and you’re able to get a general idea of what’s going in their lives. Basically, the characters of the family are a great time without having to be exposition machines or overstaying their welcome.

Grace is an interesting character in not only her relationship with Alex but her own survival tactics and her backstory. Like many of the other characters, we don’t get too much detail on her but we know she comes from a poor background and has a history with foster families. From looking at the poster one would think that Grace would go Rambo on these people and she does to an extent, but the majority of the movie involves Grace having to be stealthy because she is not some jacked-up fighter or soldier ready to take down an entire extended family. She’s one woman that thought her wedding night was going to be the best moment of her life. I like that the filmmakers went this route instead of what the poster implies which is that she has a complete handle on the situation and she is able to take them all down, because where’s the fun in that?

The setting and the set design. I’m not one to usually notice set design but some of the details here were something even a casual viewer would take notice off. The games that they showed at the start of the movie and throughout in various other scenes are all fake but they’re designed so well in their logos and their names that you could actually believe they were odd old-timey games that can be hunted down now on eBay or the like. As for the actual setting, the manor is isolated on a large plot of land with the only other neighbors being similarly rich folks. These neighbors are hinted at having made similar deals with the devil and are thus no help allowing for a tense atmosphere. The manor itself is decorated in an extravagant way allowing for it to be eccentric and creepy though not too skin crawl worthy. It captures the feel of an old-money home. 

It’s fun. It’s just a genuinely funny movie that manages to also keep you on the edge of your seat fearing for Grace’s life. Treat yourself and give it a watch, have a thrill and a laugh.

SOURCE

Ready or Not (2019 film)

BUY OR RENT IT HERE

https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/amzn1.dv.gti.6eb65015-0ac3-1f7e-1a79-659a6bbe965b?autoplay=1

https://youtu.be/FRo-T87hTKU

https://www.vudu.com/content/movies/details/Ready-or-Not/1216785

ABLE TO HELP FRONTLINE WORKERS? CHECK OUT HOW

How to Help Your Community During the Coronavirus Crisis | The Strategist

CHECK OUT MY BLOG IF YA WANT

https://silasmadams.home.blog/2020/04/18/you-should-be-watching-ready-or-not/

[katieiscunning]

MTMTE #7: More like DeciptiCAN’TS

DECEPTICONS!

We’ve already been introduced- via ominous mentions of the carnage they wreck- to the DJD, the Decepticon Justice Division. These guys are the sadists in chief: they have the job of hunting down any Decepticons who turn against the cause and torturing them to death. And now we get to meet them.

They’re currently ‘working’ on Black Shadow, a Phase Sixer (a Decepticon who’s been altered by Megatron to be world-destroying strong), whose exploits we see via an effective little montage of his past chaos, ending on how utterly the DJD have destroyed him in turn.

But while you might know what they do, you don’t yet know who the DJD are. So, without further ado:

Tarn, the leader, wears a Decepticon badge face mask to hide his real identity (all the DJD use aliases but Tarn’s is a plot point and a secret metatextually too). This is interesting to me because it implies that Transformers actually have different looking faces from each other, even if you have to be a Cybertronian to see it. I’d always just assumed they had pretty interchangeable silver vagueness going on. He can, in true scifi style, put his voice into sync with a spark and then talk it to death. He also likes music- namely a piece called the Empyrean Suite. 

Kaon, the least subtle member of the team, turns into an electric chair. He doesn’t have any eyes, but he does have a best friend, namely:

The Pet, a semi-tamed Turbofox (an animal from Cybertron) which he pretends is a Sparkeater.

Helex and Tesarus sort of go in one box together for me- they both have big horrible things in their chests that do big horrible things to robots. Helex uses a giant furnace. Tesarus has a bladed spinning hole thing. 

Vos, the scientist, speaks only in Old Cybertronian and sadly doesn’t have a torture gimmick. That we know of. 

Anyway, together, they fight crime! Or, you know, the opposite. 

After Black Shadow weakly protests that the “war’s over”, Tarn’s had enough and murders him. 

I’m mentioning this specifically because I love it. Tarn is fiercely loyal to Megatron and his ideals, and beyond that, his whole existence is tied so strongly to there being a war that he simply doesn’t understand the concept of there not being one anymore. It’s something that comes up again and again in MTMTE: that all of these characters, from Swerve to Vos, have no idea who they are now. For someone like Tarn, that means becoming worse than he was. He needs to prove to himself that the war isn’t over and he’ll do that via brutal, brutal murder. 

It also gives us what I think is the first mention of Megatron’s writing career via a title drop for his political treatise, ‘Towards Peace’.

It will not be the last.

But the DJD aren’t the only Decepticons around. You’ve seen brutally efficient, cruel and unstoppable, now it’s time to meet…

These guys are the Scavengers. They’re exactly what they sound like- robots who get by through picking over the pieces left behind by the competent. They are:

Crankcase, who is missing the part of his head which let him be happy.

Krok, a historian who’s trying to find his squad.

Flywheels, anxious and afraid.

Spinster, a surgeon who likes shooting stuff more than fixing stuff.

Misfire, who’s easily distracted and also likes to shoot stuff.

As we meet them, they’ve just discovered Fulcrum: well chinned and apparently the only survivor of a massive battle. By ‘discovered’, I mean, of course, that they were about to strip him for spare parts when he ruined their fun by waking up. The Scavengers!

Over a fire- revealed to be a still living Autobot- they talk to Fulcrum, first about the way both sides reduced their soldiers to data, and then about the war being over.

This dialogue is maaaybe the best so far? It’s skillful in dropping emotional exposition at the same time as establishing character at the same time as sounding natural. It would be so easy to turn this into an info dump: instead we get insight.

One of the best moments comes when the ‘fire’ repeats what they’ve already said and what we’ve already heard said to Tarn: that the “war’s over”. Their response is to shoot him. He’s an Autobot and, left on autopilot and without orders, all they know how to do is kill Autobots. It’s senseless and pointless and awful. Like the DJD, they can’t even admit to themselves that there’s nothing to fight for anymore.

Again, I love this. I love these idiot robots having no idea what to do now the war is done. I love that the sheer scale of the conflict is implied so well by these foot soldiers still not really knowing what happened. I love that the war isn’t over because they don’t know what else they are, because war, like any trauma, is carried long after you’ve experienced it. 

The next morning they start scavenging again. Krok annoys Fulcrum by clicking his communicator over and over, trying to get a message to his crew, but before he can completely explain that they’re both interrupted by Misfire. He’s charging across the battlefield to confront a mysterious figure he believes to be the Necrobot- a sort of post death grim reaper who supposedly shows up every time a Cybertronian dies. Of course the guy’s gone before he can get there, instead he finds what just might be a Decepticon ship.

They go on board because they’ve never heard of horror movies on Cybertron and find a few disturbing things. 1, a ceiling covered in brains. 2, half dissected cybertronians. 3, a weird wooden robot. 4, walls covered in dead, organic, bleeding tissue, and worst of all, 5, a message.

It’s not good news. 

But who’s this mystery 7th person? They find out pretty quickly.  

This is Grimlock. He’s a Dinobot, aka a massively powerful robot who can turn into a robot dinosaur because of course that’s a thing.

MEANWHILE

Back on the Lost Light, Rung is somehow not dead. His death in the last issue proper was admitted by James Roberts to be a pretty weak fake out, even if how exactly he survived a head explosion still hasn’t been revealed.

We see a couple of people visit his bedside: Swerve still horror struck at what he’s done, and, more importantly, Red Alert showing up with his recording of the hidden Overlord. 

He leaves the data with Rung, but after he’s gone a mysterious drone steals it.

I like this scene. It’s very short- only a few panels long- but it establishes Red Alert’s growing desperation without the help he needs, and continues to treat his problem as a serious one. 

Chromedome goes to visit Brainstorm, who, as he generally is, is ready to show up Perceptor. 

Domey has no time for that though: he’s brought Brainstorm a gift- Skid’s mystery gun.  He had it in his hand when he showed up, but seemed completely unable to notice it himself. Brainstorm analyses it and says, with full ominous voice in effect, that it seems to come from ‘The Institute’.

I wonder how much of a risk this issue was when it first came out. MTMTE is, after all, normally a comic about B listers and here it’s time away from them to visit the Z end of the alphabet. It feels very much like the whole focus should be on the Scavengers and the DJD- not because their parts of the narrative are rushed but because their story is so separate from the main plot of the book. Maybe it was viewed as too much to completely dump the real cast for an arc.

But plot isn’t the only way to tie a narrative together. This issue, and its conclusion next time, is all about hammering more uncertainty into the binary of Good vs Evil, as well as exposing how much the damage of our past affects us in the present. That’s clearest in the Scavengers and DJD- two very different sides to the same movement, united by their post war trauma but separated by everything else. The Lost Light gang too are revealed to have more going on than being heroes. Someone is undermining Red Alert’s search for the truth, and Brainstorm and Chromedome have a shared and ominous secret.

God, that got dark.

But then, this is a dark story. Not in terms of gore, though the DJD certainly provide that. This is a war story about what what war leaves behind, physically and mentally, and that’s summed up in one image: the abandoned battlefield being picked over by clueless losers

You can get on this fun train by buying the comics over here: https://www.comixology.co.uk/Transformers-More-Than-Meets-the-Eye-2011/comics-series/7279?ref=c2VhcmNoL2luZGV4L2Rlc2t0b3Avc2xpZGVyTGlzdC90b3BSZXN1bHRzU2xpZGVy

Written by James Roberts, Art by Alex Milne, published by IDW.