Author: Orrin Grey
The Stars Can’t Hurt You: Fighting the Future in Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948)
Even if you’re pretty sure you know going in – it is difficult, after all, to not have been spoiled at least a little bit on a movie that is three-quarters of a century old – the unspooling of the film does a good job of keeping you on your toes,
I Don’t Get Nightmares: Scaring Yourself with Talk to Me (2023)
Talk to Me may be the most credible supernatural teen horror movie ever made, simply by dint of the way that the kids in the film turn the medium-istic hand into a party game, heedless of the larger questions it raises, or the possible consequences of their actions.
Wacky Hijinks: Similarities and Differences in Scooby-Doo: The Board Game
It is also ironic that, in many ways, Scooby-Doo: The Board Game feels less like Scooby-Doo and more like a board game than Betrayal at Mystery Mansion, which was already repurposing the mechanics of another game and yet managed, in so doing, to create an almost perfect evocation of a Scooby-Doo episode.
Entering the Kingdom of the Supernatural: The Mexico Macabre Collection from Indicator
Mexican horror films from the ’60s feel like someone attempting to remake the classic horror films of the ‘30s and ‘40s from memory. Which, given that we were still decades ahead of the advent of home video, was probably almost literally the case.
Fleeing Fast from Freaky Fiends: Finding Fun with Fearsome Floors
Indeed, Fearsome Floors is one of those European imports, hailing from eccentric German game designer Friedemann Friese, whose fixation on the color green and massive use of alliteration of the letter F can sometimes get lost in translation but certainly helps to set his games apart.
A Maze of Twisty Little Passages, All Alike: Navigating the D&D Adventure System Board Games
Anyone who has been following along here for very long knows that dungeon tiles are one of my very favorite parts of any dungeon crawl game, and the ones for the various D&D Adventure System games have their distinctive pluses.
Not in the World: The Unlikely Precognition of No Escape (1994)
In fact, to the extent that No Escape has anything more novel to say than “prisons are bad” – which they are, and it’s great when movies say so, but like “war is hell” it may be true but it’s also a bit of a cliché in pictures like this – it’s probably something to do with its many meditations on guilt, and what guilt should cost us.
Carnage and Blood: Two Kung Fu Movies from Opposite Ends of the Genre’s Heyday, Both with Numbers in the Titles
One is a bloody Saturday morning cartoon that barely bothers to connect its interminable fight scenes with any kind of story, the other an elegiac lament about the inadequacy of heroism in the face of death.
