Drama, 104 Minutes, 2013
The purpose of some films is to make the audience think; to provide discussion topics. They lay out rules, set up pressures and obstacles then examine the reactions of their ridiculously verbose characters. Success might be measured by the time the audience spends discussing the problems posed. It might also result in a violent argument with dear friends!
Sony just emailed me a congratulations for getting the platinum trophy for “Infamous: Second Son“; which I earned in March of 2014. The email subject was, “You just dominated inFAMOUS Second Son“. Hooray for past accomplishments!
Oddly enough, I actually earned two Platinum trophies – for “Dishonored 2” and “The Order: 1886” in the past couple of days. I guess I should expect a couple emails in, say, 2021!
“The Autopsy of Jane Doe” on IMDB
Horror, 86 Minutes, 2016
Tommy Tilden (Brian Cox [IMDB]) is thrilled that his son, Austin (Emile Hirsch [IMDB]) is following in his footsteps. He’s been the county coroner for many years and has earned his reputation as a perfectionist. When the local sheriff finds a perfectly preserved corpse with no outward signs of trauma lying serenely among the tattered victims of a multiple… homocide? Suicide? Accident? – he goes to Tommy for answers.
“Kubo and the Two Strings” on IMDB
Fantasy/Adventure/Family, 91 Minutes, 2016
This is the fourth feature from the stop-motion geniuses at LAIKA. Following “Coraline” [IMDB] in 2009, the small studio has fallen into a comfortable two-year release schedule with “ParaNorman” [My Review at MoreBrains.com] in 2012 and “The Boxtrolls” [My Review] in 2014 and now this in 2016. Each and every film is a modern classic and “Kubo” is no different.
“Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” on IMDB
Fantasy/Adventure/Family, 127 Minutes, 2016
Ransom Riggs’ best-selling debut novel seems tailor made for Tim Burton’s [IMDB] off-kilter sensibilities. Most children are normal, some are odd, some are gifted and some very few are peculiar. Peculiar children might be as strong as a dozen men, be lighter than air or able to start fires with their hands. Such children are cared for by the Ymbrynes, magical women who create isolated loops in time to protect their wards.
Horror, 93 Minutes, 2014
Some children – let’s face it – truly deserve to be devoured by whatever monsters can be coaxed under their beds. Samuel (Noah Wiseman [IMDB]) may be one of these. He drives his poor mother, Amelia (Essie Davis [IMDB]), to the brink with his paranoia and the contraptions he concocts to defend himself. Alone, and never truly recovered from the tragic death of her husband, his mother simply cannot cope.
Still playing and, until now, thoroughly enjoying Dishonored 2. It may have been an error in judgement, but I decided to do my first play-through as a no-kill, no-spot, collect all the runes and bonecharms run. Unfortunately I, and many others, have hit something of a wall in Chapter 5: The Royal Conservatory.
[Minor Spoilers Ahead] The Conservatory has been overrun with witches. To beat the area without deaths, you must activate a machine that eliminates the witches powers. This can incorrectly result in some of the unconscious witches dying.
Apparently this can sometimes be rectified by determining exactly which witches won’t walk again and putting sleep darts in them before activating the device. Unfortunately this did not work for me as can be seen in the following video:
In my case, activating the machine results in four dead witches. After a significant, time-consuming search, I determined which four were dying and collected them in the burglars apartment. In my case this group included the two would-be bushwhackers encountered outside of the Conservatory.
All four are resting comfortably on the floor and alive. Pull the switch and all four are dead. Reload and sleep dart the lot of them, then pull the switch. Now the statistics only show a single death, however examining the bodies directly show them all as dead.
Frustrating!
You can read more about this on this Steam Discussion. Harvey Smith of Arcane Studios has also acknowledged the bug in this Twitter thread. Here’s hoping for a quick and stable patch!
I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Dishonored 2. I’ll likely be writing more about it at some point, but for now, here’s a brief word on one of the trophies, “Heartbeat Reaper”. This requires you to eliminate six enemies within 1.5 seconds. I’ve seen several methods for obtaining this – attracting crowds into grenades or leveraging the new Domino ability. The key that I feel some may have missed is that your victims don’t actually need to be conscious.
Yup, that’s it. Collect a pile of unconscious dinks and toss in a grenade; one and done.
Comprising four films since 2002, including the 2016 remake of the original, Cabin Fever is one of the lesser known horror franchises. One of the purest examples of the “body horror” genre, the stories revolve around a mysterious, never explained virus that slowly, grotesquely liquefies the flesh of its victims.
Eli Roth’s [IMDB] inspiration for the original film, his first, came after suffering a severe skin infection while on vacation. Unfortunately, Hollywood had lost confidence in the horror genre and the script was roundly rejected for several years. After a resurgence of interest in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, the film was completed on a shoestring budget of $1.5 million. Picked up for distribution by Lion’s Gate, it became their highest grossing property, and the highest grossing horror film overall, of the year, with nearly $22 million in domestic sales.
Sci-fi/Horror, 110 Minutes, 2015
In the future nearly everybody on Earth lives below the poverty level, forcing people to take dangerous work. Mankind has implemented faster-than-light travel via a technology called “slipstreaming”. Matter is broadcast, somehow, to a specific point in the universe, where it’s reconstituted. It can then be called back at any time. This process is rife with danger and is extraordinarily error-prone, often leading to “data corruption”.
