Forums > Contributor Zone > RotW: May 10-16, 2021 -- Only needing to deal with three reviews when swamped at work is like Xmas!

Looks like a pretty easy week this time, with only three reviews and no holdovers. I'm not complaining, as I've been busy with work and doing lots of reading and commenting would not help matters. I could be doing a review for a game I recently finished, but, man, time is not my friend right now.

First, the usual movie stuff, which is all giallo, all the time.

So Sweet, So Dead (1972): An entertainingly sleazy film where, in a rich-person area, everyone is cheating on their spouses and the women are all being murdered. Works out good for the guys involved, though, as the killer leaves pictures of the women having their liaisons with the bodies, but takes the time to scratch out the guys' faces whom they're hooking up with. Film mainly follows the detective who is lucky enough to have to get to the bottom of this, despite no real cooperation from anyone due to how everyone has their own skeletons in their closets to deal with. One of those films where I wouldn't say anything is super-great in it, but I was looking for something enjoyably sleazy and it delivered on that!

Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion (1969): A small-cast mystery where the wife of a currently-struggling businessman gets accosted by a random dude who tells her that her husband is a murderer and uses that info to blackmail her into being his sex slave. A bit slow and dull, as no real action happens in the movie until the very end, but for a one-watch film, it was entertaining to try solving the mystery.

Puzzle (1974): Another smallish-cast mystery, but this one was more fun. Main dude has amnesia and is being encountered by people claiming to be from his past who are saying he ripped them off from some big heist they all did before the amnesia. He tries to solve the mystery while you start to wonder if he's faking the amnesia due to being a con man or if he really is suffering from it.

Iguana With a Tongue of Fire (1971): This movie was entertaining. Mostly unintentional entertainment, but still entertaining. The plot involves a dead woman in the back of an ambassador's car and more people connected to that dude dying while a disgraced detective tries to get to the bottom of things. There's the foundation of something good here, but it's hard to not get the idea the director had seen giallos and decided to make one, but wasn't quite sure how to do things, leading to a lot of "what did I just see" moments.

And that's that for the non-review portion of this thing.

THIRD PLACE

Brian's The Fall Part 2: Unbound (PC)

It was going to be a daunting task to move out of third, because I really loved the other two reviews, but you gave it a good try. This review seemed more focused than usual. Maybe it was the lack of sub-heads, as you've often used those to abruptly shift topics, so without them, the flow felt more natural. I do understand Jason's comments on my Darksiders II review a bit better now, though. His main complaint (or one of them -- it wasn't my best-received review!) was that it basically assumed a lot of knowledge of the first Darksiders and glossed over a lot of stuff instead of explaining them to any degree. And I got that from here. I know this is an improved effort over the first game and the puzzles are better and it's a puzzle-laden adventure game. But most of your review is more on the technical side of things, as opposed to delving more into the plot, what all you do and so on. I think this review would have been helped by an example or two of those puzzles, as opposed to a more vague description -- if for no other reason than for non-veterans of this series to understand what you're writing about a bit better.

SECOND PLACE

EmP's 8Doors (PC)

This game, the way you wrote about it, made me think of Hollow Knight and thinking about Hollow Knight makes me happy and feeling like openly sobbing at the same time, so good job on that! I dug the progression in this review. Talking about a boss and how you have to learn its tells, to how you were into the game enough to not overly mind having to try repeatedly to do stuff, to the metroidvania nature of the game, to a basic overview of the game to the conclusion which ended with the same boss you described early. Everything flowed well and this wound up being a really fun review to read, especially since the title made me think I was gonna get another of your reviews for some weird-ass visual novel where the only saving grace would be likely getting to see anime boobs in a screenshot or two. This, on the other hand, resides firmly in the "stuff Rob likes" zone and you did a great job of keeping me interested in it.

REVIEW OF THE WEEK (aka: Overdrive Place)

Flobknocker's The Evil Within (XBox One)

To nitpick, there were areas with unnecessarily capitalized words and wonky punctuation that a bit of a proofing could help. But I loved this review overall because it was both descriptive and witty. The writing was top-notch as you described this game and how it does have some cool stuff and good execution, but is crappy from a technical standpoint and simply doesn't offer anything that a person can't find in superior games of the survival horror genre. This was just a fun review to read with high points including your riff on the game's title and how easily it connects to Resident Evil and, of course, your spoof of The Raven to open things. This is the sort of review I'd recommend to anyone who likes to enjoy themselves while also learning about the game they're reading about.


Probably will be a good bit less busy by the time I'm doing my next one of these things. At least I hope so!

I'm not afraid to die because I am invincible
Viva la muerte, that's my goddamn principle

I had to look up "giallo," which told me that the term is described about like I expected based on your summaries and the Italian-sounding-ness (I'm pretty sure that's a real word). A lot of the descriptions sound good, but I can only imagine I would be rather bored watching such efforts made in the 70s if there is no major talent attached. I also tend to not appreciate noir, which seems like it could be sort of related.

Also, thanks for the topic even though I didn't have anything in the running this time around.

"Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." - John F. Kennedy on reality

"What if everything you see is more than what you see--the person next to you is a warrior and the space that appears empty is a secret door to another world? What if something appears that shouldn't? You either dismiss it, or you accept that there is much more to the world than you think. Perhaps it really is a doorway, and if you choose to go inside, you'll find many unexpected things." - Shigeru Miyamoto on secret doors to another world2

While a couple that I've watched (only really just begun diving into them) have been pretty slow, they've been at least interesting to watch for a couple reasons. First, the mystery angle, which often gets accentuated by how Italian filmmakers don't necessarily care about minor details like "coherent plots", which essentially means anything can go. Second, a lot of these movies have skilled directors combined with small budgets, so there is a lot of really inventive camera work that makes them a treat to watch from a visual standpoint. Some, like Mario Bava and Dario Argento in particular became name guys mainly due to their giallos. Others, like Lucio Fulci and Umberto Lenzi, I had known due to their zombie films, but had originally worked with these.

Yeah, for the most part, the actors aren't big names in the American industry. There are a number of them I recognize, though. Main guy in Iguana with a Tongue of Fire had been in 2/3 of Clint Eastwood's "Man with no Name" spaghetti westerns. Certain amount of James Bond crossover with George Lazenby (Bond in one movie) in at least one, Adolfo Celi (villain in Thunderball) in a few, Bond girls Claudine Auger (Thunderball) and Barbara Bach (The Spy Who Loved Me) being in a few, as well as Barbara Bouchet (the old non-canon Casino Royale). But, for the most part, these are people who might have been big in Euro-Cinema, but weren't name actors over here.

But the combination of mystery, slasher and sleaze combined with the total lack of logic often on display makes them entertaining, even if the movie itself isn't always good. And at least the more name films were influential. My intro to the genre was Bava's Bay of Blood/Twitch of the Death Nerve, which was a direct influence on Friday the 13th (a couple kills were near-directly lifted for Friday the 13th 2).

I'm not afraid to die because I am invincible
Viva la muerte, that's my goddamn principle

Not sure how I missed this topic. I guess I'm not used to Rob putting these things out on a decent timescale!

Thanks for the topic; I really had a lot of fun with 8Doors and am maybe starting to get an appetite for Metroidvania games, which often fail to connect with me. Flob will probably never see this topic, hbut on the off chance he does, props to him. His review was great; I've often played with the idea of jumping into that game so finding excuse pleases me.

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