Comic Book Review: Gammarauders, volume 1 (1989)

Just look at that cover. Everything is
happening at once MAKE IT STOP
and who is that woman in the
smiley-face mask?

This weekend I found the worst comic book I have ever seen, even worse than any art by Rob Liefeld--and that's saying a lot.  It's inconsistent, poorly proportioned, confusing, and altogether bad.  The worst part about it: the artist was trying to mimic the manga style, even going so far as to use screentones for things the artists didn't want to draw.  Unfortunately, I bought them out of the dollar bin.  The comic in question is based on an old TSR tabletop game called GAMMARAUDERS--

STOP. 

Just look at that name. GAMMA...RAUDERS. By all that's holy, this is gonna sting.

For the sake of brevity, it's a comic about dudes piloting giant cyborg mutant animals (called "Bionoids") in the post-apocalyptic future against faceless enemy combatants called "Slugoids".  That's a mouthful, and it doesn't explain why the script is so "all-over-the-place".  We have a few settings like Dodge City, Boom Town, the Big Nada (Is it a demilitarized zone? A nuclear wasteland? An uninhabited stretch of land? I've seen the comic panels and I still don't know) and the Slugoid base, and several factions roaming about these areas like Da Boyz, the Rayzors, and the Friends Of What's Left Of The Earth (F.O.W.L.O.T.E.).  Odd thing: some of these organizations are gangs of post-apocalyptic survivors, not unlike biker gangs.  These people dress in period clothing to mark their gangs: Rayzors dress like Marlon Brando in "The Wild Ones", and Da Boyz dress like 30's gangsters--in zoot suits, no less.  Our heroes, the Gammarauders, somehow are the ones that come out looking like fashion victims.

FINAL ISSUE? *yesssss*

To count the Gammarauders, we have our everyman Jok Tadsworth and his mutant cyborg mecha kangaroo named Hoag (the mecha has an Australian accent, but the pilot does not).  He is teamed up with such characters as the green-clad feminist Natasha (who pilots a poorly-drawn cyborg triceratops...moving on), the Aryan-esque all-American Ridley McMann (piloting a cyborg King Kong--that joke writes itself), Jimbo the Black guy (and his cyborg emperor penguin) and Chuck, the other Black guy who's a samurai (and pilots a giant cyborg flying monkey that speaks Japanese. Believe it or not that part actually makes sense.)  There's a plot, but Lord knows it doesn't really make for good reading--it involves a bowler hat, a snow globe, and an obvious pull from "Citizen Kane". 

So far, I've read issues 1-4, 6, 7 and 9 out of a ten-issue series.  There were some highs and lows as I read, where the lows were most of the books and the only high note was knowing that our hero Jok becomes a wanted man plotting revenge on the Gammarauders for the death of Natasha (end spoilers).  It's as if he knew what I wanted to do and acted on it. I suppose if you had a giant cyborg mutant kangaroo at your disposal, you would also take revenge on GAMMARAUDERS, one of the worst comics I've read in a long time.

GAMMARAUDERS volume 1 gets a 1 out of 10, for making sense at least once.

Movie Review - Chernobyl Diaries (2012)

The 1980s were a busy decade for major disaster events across the globe, and 1986 was no exception.  The two big stories were the Challenger Explosion above Cape Canaveral, FL, USA (an event I witnessed on television in school) and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster near Pripyat, Ukraine, USSR.  The Challenger explosion was more important to me at the time because I wanted to be an astronaut and it happened in America; what I learned about Russia came from movies like Rocky IV, Red Scorpion, and Red Heat.  While still important, I have seen what took place in Chernobyl and Pripyat and my heart goes out to the victims and their descendants.  More often, I hear of entertainment inspired by the disaster, and its aftermath--things like extreme tourism and urban exploration of abandoned Pripyat, the FPS video game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl and the horror movie Chernobyl Diaries.  These things never seem to display an understanding that a disaster happened there over 25 years ago and that one should be respectful of the victims.  Sadly, this very fact did not sell movie tickets or game units as much as "wander into a guarded radioactive exclusion zone and get scared/killed by radioactive mutant inhabitants".  If it didn't then I wouldn't have a movie to write about.

PRIPYAT EXPLORATION PARTY (from left to right):
Zoe the Norwegian, Michael the Australian,
Paul, Yuri the suspicious Russian tour guide,
Amanda, Natalie and Chris.

Chernobyl Diaries could have gone a completely different way, but for a vote and peer pressure.  Hence several stupid Americans--Chris (Jesse McCartney) and his very blonde girlfriend Natalie (Olivia Taylor Dudley), Chris' brother Paul (Jonathan Sadowski) and Natalie's friend Amanda (Devin Kelley)--a Norwegian (Ingrid Bolsø Berdal) and her Australian fiancee (Nathan Phillips) meet up in Kiev to go on an extreme tourism run to Pripyat to tour the abandoned radioactive city with their highly suspicious Russian tour guide (Dimitri Diatchenko).  The usual happens when they reach spoooOOOOky Pripyat: the vehicle is crippled somehow, cellphones don't work, nobody answers the Walkie-Talkie, and everyone jumps at shadows.  There was a point where I waited a full minute waiting for a jump scare after I called it.  Throw in mysterious humanoid things that attack from the dark that seem to have a taste for raw flesh and you have a recipe for disaster.  Especially when you realize that had Chris just stuck to his guns, he'd be still be alive to tell everyone abut his not-so-awesome European trip.

Chris was present when the vote was cast and he didn't have to go. But everyone else was going, and he had just been outvoted...by Natalie, the woman he wanted to marry.  This should have been the linchpin to let him know he shouldn't marry this girl if she wasn't going to use her head on a trip to a foreign country where blonde White women  go missing and nobody cares but the men who buy them.  Instead, he's like "Oh OK honey, we can go into the poisonous radioactive zone; I can propose marriage to you later" and never gets the chance.

"Like zoiks, Scoob, I wonder when the rest of the
gang'll be back"  "REAH! Re-hee-hee-hee..."

There were several things that made me wonder about this movie, especially the throwaway line about Chris accepting a one-way plane ticket to Kiev from his brother.  WHO THE FUCK DOES THAT? WHO ACCEPTS A ONE-WAY PLANE TICKET ANYWHERE FROM ANYONE, WITH NO WAY TO GET BACK ALREADY SET UP? 

When Amanda takes pics and sees images of faces spying from shadowy windows and doesn't tell anyone, despite constant speculation and queries about whether people still live in the abandoned city? That's like setting up your entire crew to get killed.  Also, those guards don't stand there for nothing all day: they were obviously are there to hold a line to keep people out or things in.  These tourists were more concerned about the money they spent to go on a trip to a dangerous and forbidden area than staying under the notice of the law.  Blonde-ass Natalie even made the comment, "We might end up in a Ukranian jail or something".  Bitch, you're lucky your dumb ass didn't get kidnapped by the drunk guys at the beginning of the movie and sold into sex slavery.  That would have been a lot more interesting to watch if her friends broke through hell to rescue her  instead of finding her barely molested corpse behind some machinery in Chernobyl.

OK so they know they're not supposed to be in Pripyat,
they know that Chernobyl is hella contaminated, and yet
they all go chasing an ill-prepared tour guide who
brought them to this living graveyard in the first place
through its hallways. Morons.

Which now brings me to a BIG issue I had with this movie: instead of facing down wild dogs (whom they could have intimidated with their tool-using opposing thumbs), they chose to go further into the radioactive zone, even into the site of the disaster itself--the ruined Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.  Here, nature reclaimed only so much, and a miscarriage of technology changed those left behind.  When the surviving members head deeper into the site, they had a Geiger counter with them, ticking off all the way and getting more intense as they approached certain areas.  At times their skin would blister, they would feel sick, and one guy even went blind.  It was made clear to them at the start that they would have to leave after a period of time to avoid radiation poisoning just being in Pripyat...and yet they went deeper in to...I don't know, get more poisoning. There was no one to save, no reason to go deeper.  It's like watching a murder victim in a slasher flick run upstairs to escape the killer.

IT'S A TRAP!

While the movie was bad, the ending was both good and fitting: no one survived, everyone got what they deserved, and no one bred their genes to make more stupid people. There are two down sides to this movie.  For starters, this may be the only information people may learn about Chernobyl or the issues with nuclear energy.  Second, this film was more money in the hands of Oren Peli, the man responsible for the Paranormal Activity series--now on its fifth movie. 
PLEASE STOP HIM BEFORE HE KILLS BRAIN CELLS AGAIN--DO NOT SEE THIS MOVIE, NOT EVEN ON BOOTLEG.

RATING: 2/10

Movie Review: The Lost Future (2010)

I was working on a Dungeons & Dragons campaign that involved an entire orc nation with human slaves, and looking for visual ideas to work from.  I read the manga JAPAN drawn by Berzerk's Kentaro Miura for some ideas.  I had watched the old 70's movie At The Earth's Core with Doug McClure, Peter Cushing and Caroline Munro for even more ideas.  Upon a trip to Blockbuster Video (yes, they still have those), I picked up a copy to watch, since they didn't have a copy of the sequel to Uwe Boll's In The Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale.  When I reached a certain point, I realized I had seen bits of this movie before on SyFy Channel, and hadn't watched the whole thing.  Now I had paid or it, and I would watch this joint South African-German production and review it.

Our story concerns a caveman tribe called Grey Rock, containing the very manly Savan (Corey Sevier) and the not-so-manly Kaleb (Sam Claflin).  Both live in a wild untamed wilderness with their tribesmen, hunting giant mega-sloths of the Ice Age and bring back the spoils to their mates: Savan to his yellow-haired mate Dorel (Annabelle Wallis) and Kaleb...not so much.  Kaleb pines for Dorel, and his sister Miru (Eleanor Tomlinson) makes a point to make fun of him for it.  While they live in relative safety, they are still in danger from the Mutants: a subhuman race that roams the forests and mountains.  They are savage and if they bite you, you're infected and you'll turn into one of them.
The lives of these cavemen is turned upside down by an invasion of Mutants.  Most of the tribe locks themselves away in a cave, but Kaleb, Savan and Dorel are left outside to make their way to go for help.  They are almost killed by a Mutant when they are saved by a mysterious stranger named Amal (British actor Sean Bean).  He is a member of an elite group of protectors of various other tribes and bears strange artifacts with him.  He says that no matter if they were bitten or not, if a Mutant breathed on you then infection would set in.  With that, Amal leads these cavemen into the real world -- the world AFTER the fall or mankind -- to find a cure for the disease.

Playing with the idea of cavemen in the future is not a new idea.  It has been explored in films like America 3000, Battlefield Earth, the remake of The Time Machine, and even Planet of the Apes (both original and the remake).  The thing that makes it such a fertile playground is how exciting it is to get the reveal.  When people see that the world is changed so much, save the visual landmarks that have stood the weathering of time for familiarity's sake, it can awe a person or shake them to the core.  It's one of those moments that make a passable movie great.  The same could not be said of this movie.
When the reveal comes, it's in the friggin' title: THE LOST FUTURE -- as in "the future in the past."  If you missed that on the cover of the DVD, it comes up again as the title card.  Understandably the movie was set in the future, but if they had tried to let us know that in the movie without a whole lot of exposition at the 2/3 mark, the movie would have done a lot better.