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: 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. 

Movie Review - Cherry 2000 (1987)

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