Ranking the PSM Video Game Girls Swimsuit Issues

When I was a teen (back around 2005), I really got into video game magazines. EGM, Game Informer, Official PlayStation Magazine, Edge… I would sneak over to the corner store before church and get any issue I could find. In retrospect, I really should have subscribed to all of these, because I would have saved a ton of money in the process, but there was such a magical feeling in checking the magazine rack every week and seeing a new treasure on sale waiting to be poured over. This was before we got high speed internet at home (our dial-up connection was limited to only a couple hours per month), and before I could even buy video games in my home town. Suffice to say that these magazines were my Bible of video game culture.

One of my favourite gaming magazines from this time was PSM, the unofficial PlayStation magazine. As much as I enjoyed Game Informer and the Official PlayStation Magazine, those two publications were borderline advertisements that you paid money for: exaggerated/hyped previews, soft review scoring, every hyped game would get very high scores, and very little critical to say. PSM, on the other hand, was unofficial, so they just said whatever the hell they wanted to. This gave it a much edgier tone and significantly more personality to its reporting and articles, which made it much more appealing to me.

Part of PSM’s charm in the early days was that they would commission comic book artists to do the front cover illustrations for whatever game they were featuring that month. This was opposed to every other gaming magazine at the time, which would just use official advertising art approved by the game’s marketing team. As you can imagine, I find their two Dead or Alive covers to be so fucking cool. This practice would fade out over time, which I get: the comic book covers don’t really communicate that these are gaming magazines unless you recognize the cover character, and it would cost more money than using marketing materials. However, it definitely demonstrates the magazine’s gradual loss of personality as the years went on. By the time of the PS3’s launch, the magazine underwent a big, “serious” rebrand, which heralded their unfortunate shuttering a year and a half later.

Perhaps the most notorious distillation of PSM’s personality was their annual swimsuit issue. PSM would dedicate nearly a dozen pages showing off their comic book artist pals’ illustrations of various female video game characters in skimpy swimwear… yeah, the early 2000s were a wild time in gaming compared to today. Six swimsuit issues were published between July 2000 to September 2005 (which, I think, was right before I started reading PSM regularly). These sort of low-key offensive ploys to gain market attention are completely lost in today’s sanitized, corporate media landscape… that’s not to say that we should necessarily bring the 90s/2000s era of “edge” back, but there is a certain charm to it in retrospect.

The entire concept of a PSM swimsuit issue was fucking hilarious, so it made me want to track down each issue to see what sort of comedy I could mine out of them. So, here we are: I’m going to go through every swimsuit issue and then ranking each art piece from best to worst. Surprisingly, I seem to be the first person to actually try to do this, because I could not for the life of me find compiled information on which issues had a swimsuit special, what characters appeared in it, and how many years PSM ran it for. I had to find all this info myself while combing through the magazine’s back catalogue.

Speaking of which, credit goes to Retromags for archiving the magazine’s print run. Websites like that are a fucking godsend!

Jump to:

The Scoring System

Each art piece will be scored 0-10 on the following Certified Scientificâ„¢ criteria:

  • How HOT is the image (aka, the HOTNESS score)? These articles all promise me art of HOT video game girls in BIKINIS, so how well does the image deliver on that central premise?
  • Is the art off-putting (aka, the Liefeld score)? Comic book artists are notorious for having a terrible understanding of human anatomy, so I’m expecting to see some abominations as we go through this. To be clear, terrible anatomy will result in a low score, whereas an appealing image without any obvious deformities will earn a high score.
  • Does the character selection make sense (aka, the Character selection score)? There weren’t a whole lot of notable female video game characters in the early 2000s, and this will be worse for PSM since they were limited to PlayStation game characters only. Because of this, I’m genuinely curious to see how PSM are going to manage to fill out these issues on an annual basis, and whether they’re going to have to resort to some really weird selections in hindsight. High scores for the no-brainer picks and low scores for the most baffling character selections.
  • Does the character’s personality shine through (aka, the Personality score)? It’s easy to draw a sexy woman, but it’s another thing entirely to capture that character’s personality in the image. I really love when fan art is able to communicate who that character is, so I will be giving major bonus points to any images that can pull that off.
  • Is their swimwear design interesting (aka, the Swimwear design score)? These are swimsuit issues, after all! How does each piece of swimwear look? Is its design interesting? Does it tell us something about this character, or does it just take their in-game outfit and make it more revealing?
  • Intangibles. Any positives or negatives that don’t fall into the previous categories will get mentioned here and potentially provide some bonus points as merited.

PSM Issue 35 (July 2000)

This inaugural issue of the swimsuit special (featuring Regina from Dino Crisis!) promises HOT art of your favourite Game Girls! Can they deliver…?

(Seriously, can they? I’m literally writing this before I’ve even looked at the issue. This is the sort of stream-of-conscious shit I write when I’m high.)

Yeah, this is the over-exaggerated macho writing I was expecting, but at least it acknowledges that this is intended to be tongue-in-cheek… wait a minute, what’s that last part…?

…my God.

Turtlenecks.

Okay, this article is now gonna detour as I try to find some of these uncensored images. I have to know if PSM were just edging their audience, or if they were actually hosting hentai on their website at one point…

Holy shit, guys, so I actually found the page archived on the Wayback Machine! It has all the illustrations there in fairly high quality (for image files from the year 2000 anyway). As expected, they did not post hentai on their website: the “uncensored content” amounts to a bit more sideboob on three of the images. Open them up in another tab here and then check them out after you read this article (no spoilers!).

Anyway, let’s get onto this issue’s images…

HOTNESS:
5/10
PSM sure seemed to like this one, making it their cover image and the first image in the entire article. The style’s a bit too exaggerated for my taste, but there’s one glaring flaw that spoils this for me…
Liefeld:
4/10
My God, look at her left leg. It single-handedly ruins the image for me. On top of that, her legs are twice the length of her entire upper body. Damn, right out of the gate we’re getting the deformed anatomy: not a good look, PSM!
Character selection:
7/10
Regina from Dino Crisis is a really cool pick! While the series didn’t last particularly long, she’s still remembered today and fans have been begging Capcom to resurrect the series for ages. At the time of publication, she still would have been a fairly popular character, so this gets a solid grade from me.
Personality: 4/10It’s been a long time since I played Dino Crisis, but I recall Regina being a fairly no-nonsense character. This image just looks like “generic hot girl” to me.
Swimwear design:
3/10
This “bikini” is just Regina’s in-game costume, but they snipped away portions of it so they could show more skin. That’s a pretty boring way to design a character’s swimwear in my opinion. It looks more like a superhero costume than it does a swimsuit.
Intangibles: 0/10I really hate how the T-Rex is licking its lips and giving me the “come hither” look.
HOTNESS: 9/10HOLD THE FUCKING PHONE, DEAD OR ALIVE GIRLS SPOTTED!!! Yeah, that by itself was enough for me to get excited, but… I mean, just look at it! This is the level of quality that you’d want to get from a PSM swimsuit issue!
Liefeld:
7/10
I really had to look closely to nitpick this one. Kasumi’s shoulders are a bit weird, Leifang’s left leg might be a bit too long, and I have no idea what’s going on under Tina’s boobs, but I really had to pull out the magnifying glass to even notice. I’m fine with some exaggeration and stylization for this category, it’s when it comes at the detriment of the image that I start docking points.
Character selection: 10/10I see DOA girls, I immediately upvote. Also totally justified selection for the time, as Dead or Alive was fairly popular and known for its sex appeal. Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball wasn’t even a thing yet, so this particular image ended up becoming prophetic in retrospect.
Personality: 5/10Here is by far the biggest issue with the image: the mischievous looks from all three of the girls really don’t convey their personalities at all. That said, this can maybe be chalked up to there only being one Dead or Alive game released at that point, which had pretty limited story and character presentation.
Swimwear design:
8/10
In contrast to Regina’s entry, this is exactly what I’m looking for for this category. They’ve taken the colours associated with each of the girls’ main costumes and then reworked those into a unique swimsuit that feels appropriate for them.
Intangibles: 10/10I see DOA girls, I immediately upvote. You may feel that this is just my bias showing, but these categories are, as I have established previously, scientific, so therefore reality is biased in my favour. Sorry, I don’t make the rules, take it up with God.
HOTNESS: 6/10While I’m not sure I’d say that this is a particularly “hot” image, it’s certainly appealing to look at. I quite like it overall!
Liefeld:
5/10
This one is not too bad overall, but its score is cratered due to one blatant flaw: the girls’ waists are INSANELY thin, which looks very off-putting attached to their gigantic hips. If not for that, this could have been a perfect score, but it’s so obvious that it really hurts the image.
Character selection: 2/10Maybe I’m just ignorant, but I had no idea Ridge Racer even had characters, let alone ones who people would want to see in swimwear. Then again, the people who love these characters really love them. Apparently Reiko Nagase is so popular amongst fans that her replacement, Ai Fukami, only appeared in one game before going back to Reiko, because fans threw a complete tantrum over the change.
Personality: 5/10Granted, I know nothing about these characters, but they look like they’re having fun, so… 5/10?
Swimwear design:
7/10
Again, I know nothing about these characters, but I get the impression they usually just wear plainclothes, so their swimsuits here seem to be original designs. They’re cute outfits, I like them overall.
Intangibles: 5/10Having the racing girls be riding jet skis is a pretty clever idea and also adds a bit of variety to the images. That’s worth some points as far as I’m concerned.
HOTNESS: 8/10Ahh, the video game queen herself, Lara Croft was practically designed for this kind of article and looks as good as you would have hoped. The sun-drenched Egyptian skyline really sells this one. A solid enough contender, befitting The Queen.
Liefeld:
5/10
I’m a bit mixed on this image. Lara’s left boob has an odd shape to it, but my biggest issue is the skewed perspective, which makes Lara look exponentially thinner the further down her body you go. It’s distracting and makes me like this image a lot less than I would like to.
Character selection: 10/10There was no way that PSM could do a swimsuit issue in the year 2000 without Lara Croft.
Personality: 10/10They’ve really captured Lara’s personality in this image. The sass, confidence, and classiness are there. Sex appeal was baked into her character from the start, so this is an easy 10/10.
Swimwear design:
8/10
It doesn’t take a whole lot to get a decent score from me in this category. This is a very simple bikini, but it’s in Lara’s colour and feels like something I actually could see her choosing to wear.
Intangibles: 5/10I don’t know what is up with the guy with the eyepatch and gun (it appears that they’re pirates trying to board Lara’s yacht, but why does he look so weird?), but between him and Winston’s runny nose, there’s lots to look at here when you’ve gotten your eyeful of Lara.
HOTNESS: 2/10There is a lot going on with this image. On the one hand, we’ve got Jill Valentine, Claire Redfield, and Leon Kennedy representing Resident Evil! On the other hand, this image is clearly intended to be more comedic than hot. That’s fine, but it definitely costs this entry in the HOTNESS score.
Liefeld:
10/10
The first entry thus far where I’ve got no nitpicks or glaring flaws to point out – Leon, Claire, and Jill look like human beings, good job.
Character selection: 6/10While Jill and Claire were pretty much video game royalty by the year 2000, I’m not sure how much sense they make for a swimsuit issue. They’re meant to look like regular people. As a result, if you took out the zombie and the RPD logo, you probably wouldn’t even realize who these characters are supposed to be. I’ll still give a decent score since they kind of had to show up in an article about PlayStation women, but their indistinct designs lose them some points.
Personality: 8/10Leon being a sad sap, Claire being feisty, Jill being the professional voice of reason… yeah, I’d say they’re tapping into these characters’ personalities here.
Swimwear design:
3/10
The girls are just wearing more revealing versions of their official outfits… boring. It feels kind of necessary though, because without Jill’s tube top and Claire’s red shorts, there would be even less here to identify them.
Intangibles: 1/10It’s pretty funny that there’s a rotting zombie in the back, but the entire premise of the image is so weird for a swimsuit article: Claire smells the zombie and then assumes that the smell is because Leon farted. That’s… a decision, I’ll give them that.
HOTNESS:
6/10
This one is like a tale of two images. On the one hand, we’ve got a fairly generic, cutesy anime image of Rinoa, Quistis, Cloud, and Squall having fun at the beach. It’s not particularly “hot”… but then we have Tifa pasted into the foreground and, poor girl, she looks like she’s cold. If this image was just Tifa, this would be up there, but so much of the image is just plain dull and generic.
Liefeld:
7/10
So I’m not really noticing any egregious issues with this one, so that means that it’s time to nitpick. The perspective seems to be off once again, and the shadows make no sense at all, but overall this picture benefits from its simpler art style.
Character selection:
6/10
Tifa and Rinoa are timeless Final Fantasy characters, but Quistis…? I haven’t played Final Fantasy VIII, and don’t think I’ve ever even heard of her, is she that popular a character? I honestly thought that she was Aerith with her hair died blonde at first.
Personality:
2/10
I’m not really seeing anything of these characters’ personalities conveyed here, it’s just generic hot anime girl art.
Swimwear design:
4/10
Rinoa and Quistis’ outfits are kind of cute, but understated. Is Tifa even wearing swimwear? She’s basically in her official, in-game outfit.
Intangibles:
3/10
The Chocobos in the background are cute.
HOTNESS:
1/10
This image, featuring the Street Fighter girls, really falls flat when you remember the premise of the PSM swimsuit issue. Street Fighter has a lot of things that you’d expect them to hone in on (particularly Chun Li’s massive thighs and Cammy’s ass). We can’t even see Cammy’s ass at all! And Chun Li’s thighs: they’re pencil thin! On top of that, there are more Street Fighter guys than girls here! Yeah, the more I look at this image, the worse it gets.
Liefeld:
8/10
This one’s a good demonstration of the difference between an exaggerated art style and bad anatomy. There’s a lot of exaggeration here (particularly with Zangief and E. Honda), but I’m not seeing anything that looks like an outright mistake… other than Chun Li’s pencil thighs. Seriously, what the fuck were they thinking with that?
Character selection:
10/10
The girls (and guys!) of Street Fighter are iconic, so it’s a no-brainer that they’d get a spot in this issue.
Personality:
2/10
This image seems to be intended to be a more comedic take on these characters, but as a result it doesn’t really give us much to glean of their actual personalities.
Swimwear design:
2/10
This is a weird one, not because the swimsuits are necessarily bad, but because I can barely even see them. They can’t make much of an impression if you aren’t even going to show them.
Intangibles:
3/10
I’ve got to give some bonus points for including Blanka, Dhalsim, and Zangief in a swimsuit special.
HOTNESS:
6/10
This one’s clearly alluding to Baywatch and the fantasy of being rescued by a hot lifeguard. While that’s fairly hot in its own right, Meryl’s ass is doing some heavy lifting.
Liefeld:
7/10
About the only direct criticism I have of the art is that weird fold under Meryl’s boobs… but, honestly, it took me a while for my eyes to get there. Ahem.
Character selection:
7/10
This entry is literally just a grab-bag of PlayStation girls picked seemingly at random. At least we’ve got some pretty big names here: Meryl Silverburgh from Metal Gear Solid (who Snake literally remarked “had a great butt”), Aya Brea from Parasite Eve, Lian Xing from Syphon Filter (which was a huge franchise at the time), and Hana Tsu-Vachel from Fear Effect. I don’t really get why they grouped these particular girls together, but I ain’t going to complain.
Personality:
3/10
Once again, this is just generic “hot girl strikes sexy pose” art that says nothing about these characters or their personalities. Aya Brea as a hot lifeguard seems particularly weird. However… I have to give points for Meryl’s ass, not just because it’s distractingly rendered, but because it’s a pretty big plot point in Metal Gear Solid that Meryl has a great ass. That’s dedication to character right there!
Swimwear design:
5/10
I’m not really sure what they were going for with these swimsuits. On the one hand, they aren’t just “in-game costume, but more skin”. On the other hand, they don’t really seem to be particularly interesting or true to the character. I dunno, they’re fine, but I’m lukewarm on this swimwear.
Intangibles:
0/10
The big selling points of this one are the interesting character selection and Meryl’s ass… other than that, there’s not a whole lot I can say about this image.
HOTNESS:
8/10
This is about as risqué as a magazine for teen boys could get in the year 2000. The entire image is meant to be an over the top juvenile fantasy… which actually kind of hurts it for me somewhat. It’s trying too hard to turn you on with the excessively-cutesy art style.
Liefeld:
10/10
I can’t really complain about this illustration being “off”. There’s no navel, which makes it a bit less hot, but this is clearly a stylistic choice rather than a mistake. Valkyrie’s face and particularly her doe-eyes feel make it feel like they’re trying a bit too hard to arouse you… but that’s not really an issue with anatomy, so top scores it is.
Character selection:
3/10
Okay, so this is where we pull back the curtain on what makes this particular entry special: Valkyrie Wilde was the subject of an April Fools joke PSM had done that same year. What was that joke, you may ask? It was a fake preview for a video game where the entire premise is that you play as… a naked woman with guns. Yeah, so this is basically just PSM’s editorial team making up their super hot fantasy OC and plastering her wherever they could. I’ll give them some credit for keeping the bit going, but man, that’s just a masturbatory uroboros.
Personality:
10/10
Valkyrie Wilde is a hot naked girl with guns. This image is of a hot naked girl with guns. They encapsulated her entire personality here flawlessly.
Swimwear design:
0/10
She’s not even wearing swimwear! I was promised HOT video game girls in BIKINIS!
Intangibles:
0/10
I already gave her bonus points for being a callback to an April Fools joke, so I don’t think she deserves even more points for the exact same thing.

All-in-all, that was a fairly interesting first issue! Quite the grab-bag of styles, characters, and quality, covering most of the major game series known for their sex appeal at the time. I’m very curious to see if PSM would push the envelope even harder next time around.

PSM Issue 47 (July 2001)

No spoilers on the cover this time, just Spider-man slinging webs and a promise of BIKINI GAME GIRLS inside. No more “uncensored” versions of the images that I can find from this point onwards. Alright, let’s see what they have in store for us…

HOTNESS:
6/10
There’s a really understated hotness to this image that I really enjoy! The girls here aren’t posing suggestively, and their swimwear is downright modest, but their enthusiasm, general attractiveness, and appealing art style make this an image I do like to look at!
Liefeld:
10/10
I don’t really have any complaints about this one. If I really want to nitpick, Elise (the blonde)’s feet don’t even look like they would be on her surfboard, but it doesn’t really hurt the image’s quality overall.
Character selection:
2/10
While SSX was a pretty big extreme sports franchise at the time, were its characters particularly notable? If the article didn’t specify that these characters were named Elise, Zoe, and Kaori, it would have been a nightmare for me to try to figure that out for myself.
Personality:
6/10
I’m running into the same problem I did with Ridge Racer where I have no idea if this is captures the characters’ personalities or not. I guess SSX is a snowboarding game, so that would naturally provide some overlap with surfing…?
Swimwear design:
6/10
Elise’s black and pink bikini top is cute, but otherwise these outfits aren’t particularly notable… that said, they do look like practical swimwear for extreme sports enthusiasts and they are also wholly original outfits. Even thought they aren’t particularly “hot” swimsuits, I’ve really got to reward that dedication to character… and all that to represent some random characters from SSX!
Intangibles:
5/10
Again, like Ridge Racer, bonus points for finding a way to incorporate SSX‘s gameplay into the image.
HOTNESS:
6/10
I think somebody at PSM has a fetish for Asian women… Even if that is the case, the large robes concealing some skin and the self-conscious expression do make this kind of hot.
Liefeld:
5/10
I didn’t really see any major issues with the anatomy here… until I noticed Samanosuke’s head. Either he has a massive head, or Kaede’s head is tiny… neither option is particularly good and kind of ruins the image for me. On further inspection, Yuki’s eyeline is also kind of weird, but that’s definitely more of a nitpick than the giant fucking head in the background.
Character selection:
3/10
A couple minor characters from Onimusha get a whole page in this year’s swimsuit special? Really? While Onimusha has never been a juggernaut franchise, this would have been around its peak in popularity, so I can kind of see why they would consider it. Still, what a weird selection in retrospect.
Personality:
3/10
Once again, I do not know these characters very well, but based on a couple long-form analyses of Onimusha I’ve watched over the years, I don’t think that this really captures the characterization of Yuki, Kaede, or Samanosuke. Someone correct me if I’m wrong.
Swimwear design:
3/10
While I do rather like the design of Yuki’s swimsuit, Kaede is literally just wearing her in-game costume. For a “sexy” swimsuit article, that’s pretty egregious, especially considering that Kaede is the more important character of the two to the narrative.
Intangibles:
0/10
The image would honestly be better if it was just Yuki, the inconsistent head sizes are an own-goal that could have easily been avoided.
HOTNESS:
6/10
Oh hey, it’s a mash-up between two of the images from last year: Lara Croft and the comedic Resident Evil illustration. Once again, this one is leaning heavy on the comedy, so while Lara and Claire’s outfits are certainly nice, sexiness isn’t really the intent here.
Liefeld:
6/10
Lara’s right hand is weirdly undefined, and her right leg looks REALLY long, but otherwise this isn’t too bad on the Liefield scale.
Character selection:
10/10
I’ve already covered these two characters, so I’ll keep this brief: yeah, they’re both PlayStation royalty. They’ve made Claire look a bit more distinctly “Claire Redfield”, so that’s also a positive.
Personality:
5/10
I had to think about this one a little bit, but does reacting with disgust at the sight of a zombie really fit Lara Croft or Claire Redfield? They’d both whip out a gun and deal with the problem I think.
Swimwear design:
8/10
Lara’s in her near-perfect bikini from last year, so she gets a passing grade for just doing what already worked. Claire’s a bit more interesting, since they actually went to some effort to give her a unique design. It uses her red and black colour motif, and I like how this one-piece suit turned out on her.
Intangibles:
0/10
As a call-back to last year’s images, I feel like this one’s a bit of a disappointment. Better than the previous Resident Evil one, but clearly inferior to the Tomb Raider image.
HOTNESS:
0/10
Man, this picture sucks, and that’s largely down to the terrible colours that make everything look like brown shit. I don’t think that the image is unsalvageable, but it needs to be completely re-coloured. Even then… it’s not a very “hot” image, now is it?
Liefeld:
8/10
As far as the Liefeld scale goes, this doesn’t look terrible… but there is some weird composition stuff here where Kaldea (the raven-haired one) has her knee poking out past Dominique (the blonde one)’s boob, which makes it look like she’s got a deformed elbow or a boob poking out. They should have differentiated the characters better or just cut that small detail out entirely.
Character selection:
0/10
So this issue, unhelpfully, does not tell you what games the characters are from, which really presents problems when PSM are commissioning drawings of characters from games like The fucking Bouncer. This was a Squaresoft JRP-beat-’em-up that released in the early PS2 lifestyle. The game had some hype behind it, but sold extremely poorly and was not received well. Sure, I’ve got the benefit of a quarter century of hindsight, but this is a baffling selection for the annual swimsuit issue.
Personality:
5/10
I haven’t played this game. Barely anybody has played this game, and many who did don’t even remember it. I had to look up some information to try to figure out if this in any way accurate. In every picture I saw of her, Echidna (the redhead) looked pissed-off, so… accurate, I guess? That said, Dominique was usually pretty happy, so… a middling score is probably right? I dunno, you’ve never played this game, so you will not be able to contradict my score.
Swimwear design:
3/10
Bleh, the swimwear here is dull. Again, the colours do not help matters at all.
Intangibles:
0/10
I’m kind of glad that this image is of The Bouncer, because if I got art like this for a series I actually cared about, I’d probably start awarding negative points.
HOTNESS:
3/10
Good God, they really fucked up Viola’s face. She’s supposed to have a pretty standard 80s anime-style adult woman look to her, but instead they’ve given her the face of a dude. Olga also does not look a thing like her Metal Gear Solid 2 counterpart and I would never guess that was supposed to be her. This image is kind of mediocre overall, but these issues really sour the image for me.
Liefeld:
5/10
Again… it’s Viola fucking this one up. Her shoulders to her neck are like a fucking stretched triangle, it just makes my issues with her face even more pronounced. If you can ignore her though, the rest of the image is pretty good.
Character selection:
5/10
Some interesting selections here for the random character grab-bag. Zone of the Enders‘ Viola makes sense: the series had a lot of hype, because it was produced by Hideo Kojima at the height of Metal Gear fever. That’s also why it makes sense that Metal Gear Solid 2‘s Olga Gurlukovich is here as well. Vikki Grimm from Army Men is a bit more of an odd pick, but when you think about it more it totally makes sense for her to show up in a swimsuit issue. She only exists in the Army Men games to add a bit of sex appeal! Konoko from Oni is the most interesting selection, not least of which being that Oni was a game developed by Bungie and published by Rockstar! A pretty obscure title here, but a really interesting inclusion!
Personality:
4/10
Where the fuck is Olga’s armpit hair, you cowards??? That’s legitimately a personality complaint, by the way, because… fuck me, I can’t believe I’m about to explain why Olga’s armpit hair tells us about her as a character… Anyway, it’s a weird, unexpected character detail that communicates that immediately communicates to the audience that she’s not just a sex doll like so many other female video game characters of the time. She’s a professional soldier who isn’t concerned with conventional beauty standards. Here, they’ve not-so-subtly danced around that and just made her “generic hot girl”.

As for the other girls, I’m not really familiar with them, but that said: Konoko’s serious expression appears to be accurate to her character, and Vikki Grimm has always been the Army Men eye candy so I guess that one works. But yeah, again, they completely fucked up Viola.
Swimwear design:
4/10
Vikki and Konoko’s swimsuits are pretty interesting, but Viola and Olga’s are much more dull… on a whole, I’d say this is a wash.
Intangibles:
0/10
I cannot really convey how badly Viola and Olga fucked over this otherwise-mediocre image’s score for me.
HOTNESS:
1/10
Oh great, the terrible colouring is back and… I mean, just look at it, this picture looks awful. Again, I’m sure this looks better as a sketch, because the piss they painted this with completely ruins the image.
Liefeld:
5/10
Hana’s proportions look like they might be off, but my main complaint is that the hands just look weird… Oh God, and Hana’s bikini disappearing behind her neck just reveals that she was born on Kamino, because that neck is LONG and SKINNY.
Character selection:
8/10
Fear Effect is one of those series that wasn’t super popular, but was still known for its sexiness, so Hana and Rain are actually pretty cool selections.
Personality:
1/10
The characters’ expressions here tell us nothing of their personalities. They look downright bored.
Swimwear design:
1/10
God, this whole image sucks.
Intangibles:
0/10
All I can think while looking at this image is that it looks like a B-grade high school art submission.
HOTNESS:
4/10
Once again, I’m not a fan of the colouring, but for once this is for stylistic reasons rather than looking like utter ass. I’m just not a fan of the harsh shadows and highlights, it makes the image look unpleasant (which isn’t what you want from an image aiming to look hot).
Liefeld:
5/10
Man, this particular image feels like something Rob Liefeld would draw. That said, this doesn’t look too bad, except that Sarah Bryant’s spine is broken and so is… whoever the purple-haired lady is. I legitimately do not know who that’s supposed to be. I checked the Virtua Fighter character roster and couldn’t find her, so I think that it’s just the artist’s OC.
Character selection:
5/10
Virtua Fighter has never really been the most popular fighter on consoles, but I think that its characters would have been just relevant enough to earn its place in this issue.
Personality:
6/10
So I don’t know a whole lot about Virtua Fighter, but the differing expressions and poses do give you some insight into the girls’ different personalities, so I think that deserves some points.
Swimwear design:
4/10
Pai’s pink bikini is very cute, but there’s not a whole lot we can glean from the others’. Dural’s black bikini is a tad uninteresting, and Sarah and Aoi’s are hidden enough that they don’t leave an impression on me.
Intangibles:
0/10
I legitimately don’t understand why the illustrator threw in a dancing alien and what I can only assume is somebody’s OC making a cameo.
HOTNESS:
1/10
I’m not even sure if this is meant to be a part of the swimsuit collection or not (there’s a full-page ad for a goddamn Gundam game separating it from everything else). Suffice to say, this is a comedy image, so unless you’re into blue beast men, there’s nothing arousing about it.
Liefeld:
9/10
Tidus’ arm musculature is a bit weird looking, but otherwise this is very solid artwork.
Character selection:
0/10
So this one actually gets a 0/10 from me for two reasons:
1) Yuna’s 17 years old… She’s not being sexualized in this image, but it sure is sus…
2) They got a Final Fantasy X swimsuit issue commission and didn’t even include Lulu in it! Travesty!
Personality:
7/10
Tidus is laughing.
Swimwear design:
3/10
Oh, is there swimwear in this picture? It’s so far away that I couldn’t see it.
Intangibles:
7/10
While this picture is just terrible for a series about HOT girls in BIKINIS, it is a pretty solid piece in its own right that’s full of personality, so I’ll throw it some bonus points.

Man… this was a really underwhelming issue. Were PSM intentionally trying to tone things down after going about as hard as they could get away with in the inaugural swimsuit issue? I’m not sure, but here’s hoping that the next year’s images improve matters…

PSM Issue 61 (August 2002)

Oof, it’s always interesting when you see a gaming magazine hyping up a game that’s going to go on to be a notorious disaster (in this case, Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness, generally considered the nadir of the franchise). Oh and what’s this?

You’re promising A LOT here, PSM, and I doubt you can follow-through on that…

HOTNESS:
10/10
PSM are actually bringing their A-game out of the gate this time. I think that most of us can agree that this is pretty damn hot.
Liefeld:
9/10
Lara’s head and body seem to have a slightly different skin tone, but that’s me nitpicking so much that it’s not even an anatomy issue, it’s a colouration one.
Character selection:
10/10
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s Lara Croft. You’d be asking where she was if she wasn’t in the annual swimsuit issue.
Personality:
7/10
While Lara’s personality doesn’t shine through quite as much as it did in her first iteration, the location and props really go a long way to selling the idea of Lara as an adventuresome noblewoman.
Swimwear design:
10/10
As much as I liked Lara’s bikini in the first swimsuit issue, I’m glad they tried something new this time around, and they absolutely knocked it out of the park. This gem-studded number just radiates the classy opulence of Lara Croft.
Intangibles:
10/10
I don’t really have much else to say about this one. If you are committed to making a video game girls swimsuit issue, then this is the level of quality that you are wanting all your commissions to meet (and probably costs a lot to commission, which would be why we don’t have many of this quality).
HOTNESS:
0/10
OH FOR FUCK SAKES! Not only is 17-year-old Yuna in this pic, but so is 15-year-old Rikku. I ain’t risking a visit from the Feds, so 0/10 HOTNESS, officer.
Liefeld:
5/10
I ain’t studying these minors’ anatomy enough to identify whether there’s an issue with them so… middling score?
Character selection:
1/10
Look, I’ll give one point here entirely down to them including Lulu this time, but… for fuck sakes, I can see them not realizing that Yuna is 17, but Rikku looks underage. What the fuck were they thinking?
Personality:
1/10
Based on my brief glance of the image, this just looks like generic hot girl pose stuff.
Swimwear design:
1/10
They’re all just wearing a more revealing version of their in-game costumes…
Intangibles:
10/10
Look, I’ve got to give this image some credit because, again, they actually included Lulu this time. Crop the rest of the image out and she could carry this entry on her own – she looks that good!
HOTNESS:
3/10
So the bodies and poses in this image are actually pretty hot, but fucking hell the faces are derpy, which ruins the entire image. It’s clearly a conscious, stylistic choice by illustrator Ryan Kinnaird, but I can’t stand how it looks.
Liefeld:
6/10
Ignoring the faces (since they’re not a mistake), Pellegri (the blonde)’s shoulders are hunched forward in a way that looks really awkward to maintain.
Character selection:
2/10
KOS-MOS, Shion, and Pellegri from Xenosaga are such a weird selection – it was a brand IP whose first game hadn’t even been localized yet, so most PSM readers would have no idea who these characters were. Between this, The Bouncer, Zone of the Enders, and Onimusha, I really get the sense that there was someone high-up at PSM obsessed with relatively obscure Japanese franchises and forcing them to appear in each year’s swimsuit commissions.
Personality:
4/10
I know nothing about Xenosaga, but as far as I can tell, this just looks like generic hot girl poses.
Swimwear design:
6/10
While I don’t know much about these characters, their swimwear at least lives up to the goal of looking alluring. Maybe not the smallest bikinis, but they’re a bit more revealing than what we’ve seen in the past from PSM.
Intangibles:
0/10
I can’t get over those faces.
HOTNESS:
4/10
While this image suffers from a lack of detail, I do really like how it captures the look of an underwater photograph. That at least makes this image really enjoyable to pour over.
Liefeld:
10/10
Any potential issues can be chalked up to the intentionally-skewed perspective of the “camera”. As a result, I have zero complaints to level.
Character selection:
3/10
Like the previous Onimusha swimsuit commission, it seems really weird to me that they would choose a character like Oyu for an entire entry in this year’s issue.
Personality:
0/10
Look… you can’t even tell this is supposed to be Oyu from Onimusha 2. She could be literally any dark-haired woman in fiction.
Swimwear design:
3/10
This outfit is… fine, I guess? Not particularly interesting or something that feels fitting on this character.
Intangibles:
5/10
I do think that this image deserves some extra points for the unique perspective it brings. This is a pretty mediocre image overall, but the pose and lighting really bring it to life.
HOTNESS:
10/10
So many of these swimsuit commissions have been safe, conventional, submissive, hot girl fantasies. Trish doesn’t deviate too hard from that, but there are hints of a “bad girl” here: the motorcycle, the black leather, the way she looks down on you… Yeah, this one is legitimately enticing.
Liefeld:
10/10
I’ve got no complaints. If anything, her anatomy is more realistic here than it is in some of her official arts.
Character selection:
10/10
Trish showing up in the 2002 swimsuit issue is a no-brainer: the game was massive, and she was such an iconic sex symbol that she appears in silhouette in the game’s logo.
Personality:
5/10
I actually do think that the outfit, motorcycle, pose, etc in this image do capture some of Trish’s personality. It’s too bad that they drew her in a generic anime art style though, it makes it nearly impossible to tell that it’s supposed to be her. You could tell me that this image could be literally any blonde, buxom video game girl and I’d probably believe you.
Swimwear design:
5/10
I’m mixed on this one. Black is obviously Trish’s colour, but the actual swimwear doesn’t work for me. However, the accessories she’s decked out in make her outfit so much more interesting than the actual bikini.
Intangibles:
3/10
I don’t really have a whole lot more to say about this particular picture: it’s really good, and I like that it’s hitting some different notes than most of the other illustrations in these articles. Most of that’s covered in the other categories though, so I can’t really justify many bonus points.
HOTNESS:
6/10
Oh hey, the main girls of Virtua Fighter are back, and this time they’ve brought some friends from Tekken. Sure, this is mostly just “generic hot girl” art, but having them posed on beach towels does give the image some interesting novelty.
Liefeld:
5/10
Most of my complaints here relate to Pai Chan. Her pose causes her torso to look compressed, her head is twisted in a way that makes her look like she has no neck, and she has no butt whatsoever. The others are mostly fine, although their lower-halves seem to be a bit too small compared to their upper halves.
Character selection:
4/10
Were the girls of Virtua Fighter ever popular enough to warrant back-to-back appearances in the PSM swimsuit issue? It’s nice to see them give some Tekken representation at least.
Personality:
0/10
This is just generic hot girl art. Making matters worse, Sarah looks absolutely nothing like she’s supposed to.
Swimwear design:
5/10
I quite like Christie and Julia’s unique and personalized outfits, but Sarah and Pai’s are just generic bikinis. This one’s a wash for me.
Intangibles:
4/10
I’ll give some bonus points for this image being the first two-page spread, so we get more room to pour over the finer details.
HOTNESS:
4/10
I know I keep saying this, but this image is just generic anime hot girl stuff, with a bit of comedy thrown in. It’s not terrible, not not particularly arousing. Apparently I’m just a snobby wanker.
Liefeld:
10/10
No real concerns, my only complaints are all stylistic rather than mistakes.
Character selection:
0/10
Fucking Maximo??? The game was fairly well received at the time and sold well enough to be a Greatest Hits title… but still, fucking Maximo??? I had no idea that there even were women in the damn game.
Personality:
0/10
This image is so generic that it legitimately looks like they pasted the girls’ heads onto stock “sexy” bodies.
Swimwear design:
2/10
I was going to give some points for Mamba Marie’s costume at least getting across that she’s a Conan-style fighter… but then I found out that she’s literally just wearing her in-game outfit (so is Sephonie, the generic brunette on the right side of the image). Sophia and Aurora Lee are both wearing more revealing versions of their in-game costumes, and I can’t even see Lenore’s outfit. All-in-all, very uninspired stuff.
Intangibles:
5/10
I’ll give some bonus points for the comedy of Maximo getting his armour knocked off and his underwear stolen.
HOTNESS:
3/10
This is another one of those cases where the original sketch was probably pretty good, but the end result is absolutely botched by the colouring. While there are parts that I like (Tracey, the brunette at the top, looks pretty cute), everything just feels a bit too indistinct.
Liefeld:
2/10
Oh my God, look at Leeann (the middle one)’s head: it’s so lopsided. Elise (the blonde) also has a couple issues. Her sexy pose makes it look like she’s gonna fall into the water at any moment, her bikini top strap goes over her left shoulder really awkwardly, and she has literally no neck.
Character selection:
0/10
Man, PSM were really scraping the bottom of the barrel for this issue. I’ve at least heard of every game thus far and could understand why someone would include them in this list, but Tracey from SledStorm? Leeann from Freestyle? I’ve literally never heard of these games. Elise from SSX Tricky makes a bit more sense, but she was also in last year’s issue! Are SSX‘s characters so good as to warrant back-to-back swimsuit special appearances???
Personality:
5/10
Sports girls like doing sports, I guess?
Swimwear design:
6/10
For what it’s worth, at least all the swimwear in this image are really cute!
Intangibles:
0/10
Everything about this commission feels kind of half-assed. I think even PSM were just trying to fill some page space with this one.

This issue came out swinging with Lara Croft, but every subsequent art piece (aside from Trish) was quite disappointing. I was promised the SMALLEST bikinis, but they failed to deliver! I don’t think I can ever trust again! I’m starting to think that the whole “HOT video game girls in BIKINIS” promise is just a joke to sell magazines to 13-year-old nerds…

PSM Issue 72 (June 2003)

…mother of God. I’ve been burned before, but it looks like PSM might be swinging for the fences with this swimsuit issue. I’m promised 11 pages of “our HOTTEST pictures EVER”, and if this cover is any indication, they might be able to pull that off (ahem).

HOTNESS:
4/10
Holy shit. Look, Dead or Alive has the reputation for being the titty fighter, but I’ve always considered Soulcalibur to be low-key the fighting game with the most egregious fan service (at least amongst the mainstream publishers). That’s right on display here (just like Ivy’s ass). Yeah, this is exactly the sort of piece that you’d want to see out of a video game girls swimsuit issue.

That said, Talim (the girl on the left) is also in this image and she’s only 15… Her inclusion here is very questionable… but she’s also presented the most tastefully? I dunno, you can draw a picture of a 15 year old in a swimsuit as long as you’re not fucking them with the camera, but this is so sus that I’m halving the points that I would have given otherwise.
Liefeld:
8/10
About my only complaint here is that the faces look like they were done separately from the bodies, and Ivy’s left shoulder looks a little off. Let’s be honest though, you’re staring at Ivy and Taki’s assets, there’s no way you’re even noticing that. Oh and Ivy’s bikini appears to be lopsided too for no discernable reason.
Character selection:
7/10
See my previous comment about Soulcalibur‘s fan service. Soulcalibur II was a 100% guaranteed inclusion in this year’s swimsuit special (and, for what it’s worth, Ivy and Taki’s outfits are actually less egregious than the stuff they wear in official art). Again though… gotta shave some points off for including Talim at all, because seriously: what the fuck, PSM? Seong Mi-na and Sophitia were right fucking there waiting to be used!
Personality:
2/10
Soulcalibur goes a long way to fleshing out its story and characters, to the point where they all have fairly distinctive personalities and goals… none of that comes across here, this is just a boyhood sexy harem fantasy. I guess I’ll give a couple points for Ivy being mostly-naked like she is in-game?
Swimwear design:
6/10
They’ve got each girls’ signature colours down pat, so that’s a plus. Talim’s swimwear is basically just a more revealing version of her in-game outfit, but the other three are more distinctive. Ivy’s in particular takes inspiration from her Soulcalibur II outfit without outright repeating it, so that earns some points for sure. There’s a spread on these ones, but I think that they’re pretty good overall.
Intangibles:
6/10
Crop out Talim and this is easily one of the best entries in the history of PSM’s swimsuit specials. A great crossroads of iconic characters and appropriately alluring, high-quality art, all set to a unique and exotic backdrop!
HOTNESS:
5/10
While this isn’t the most exciting image in the world, it sure is HOT video game girls in BIKINIS… so I guess that’s the bare minimum we can expect?
Liefeld:
5/10
Sun Shang Xiang (the one in orange) has a humpback it seems. Ayame, on the other hand, has something weird going on where her leg connects to her ass cheek… did they think that a realistic thigh would make her look too fat or some bullshit?
Character selection:
4/10
If you had to pick a Dynasty Warriors girl for a video game swimsuit issue in 2003, then Sun Shang Xiang is the obvious choice… but the fact that she’s here at all is still an odd choice. This would have been the height of Dynasty Warriors‘ popularity, but even then the series wasn’t really known for its sexy ladies. Ditto with Ayame, Tenchu: Wrath of Heaven had a mixed reception and was a pretty niche title.
Personality:
10/10
I haven’t played Tenchu, so I don’t know exactly what Ayame’s personality is like, but this image really gets across a fearsome and competitive personality, which the Tenchu Wiki describes for her. Sun Shang Xiang, on the other side, has always been more of a playful and cheerful character, so I’d say that the image captures their contrasting personalities well!
Swimwear design:
5/10
While these two swimsuits do match the characters’ signature colours, their designs are just not that interesting to me. Definitely a your-mileage-may-vary situation though.
Intangibles:
1/10
This might just be the most “average” image in the entire series.
HOTNESS:
4/10
Oh for fuck sakes, more art by Ryan Kinnaird… I’m sorry, I just do not find this art style appealing, especially with the way that he does their faces. In spite of that, Trish is still kind of hot through sheer force of sex appeal.
Liefeld:
10/10
I don’t notice any egregious anatomy issues, but I also don’t want to look at this goddamn picture any more than I have to.
Character selection:
6/10
So Trish was a no-brainer for the 2002 issue, but I’m kind of surprised to see her return in 2003 as well. I guess there was just a lot of lingering hype for Devil May Cry 2 at the time? If that’s the case, then Lucia also makes sense here.
Personality:
4/10
I… guess…? It resembles their personalities, but I can barely even tell that these characters are supposed to be Trish and Lucia at all.
Swimwear design:
4/10
Kinky, b-movie alien bikinis wasn’t something I was expecting to see in this article, but here we are. Two of the more overtly revealing bikinis in this entire series, but wasted on an image I don’t even want to look at.
Intangibles:
0/10
I’m sorry Ryan, you’re probably a chill dude, but I just do not like your art.
HOTNESS:
5/10
Lara’s back once again and, despite appearing here in a wet t-shirt, this image feels underwhelming. This time, it’s because they made the stylistic choice to not outline her arms, so they seem to disappear into her body. It makes her look like a fleshy blob abomination until you take a closer look. A few more black lines, and this would be significantly better.
Liefeld:
6/10
wait a minute, is that supposed to be fucking camel toe!??!!!?
Character selection:
10/10
Lara Croft was still a video game goddess in 2003, it would be weird if she didn’t appear for the third consecutive year.
Personality:
10/10
Yeah, that sure looks like Lara Croft. Even having her slaughtering wildlife is totally in-character, even if it’s a baffling thing to include in a swimsuit issue.
Swimwear design:
7/10
This looks like an outfit you might expect to see Lara Croft wear in-game during the Core Design era. The wet t-shirt is a nice touch too.
Intangibles:
0/10
This is a weird one, but definitely feels worse due to being a poor showing from the Queen.
HOTNESS:
4/10
This image is trying so fucking hard to be sexy and provocative. Unfortunately, reeking of desperation makes this image so much less appealing.
Liefeld:
3/10
Zoom in on Kitana (the brunette on the right)’s right boob. What the actual fuck is going on with it!? Her face appears to be lop-sided as well. Also, take a look at Frost (the blue-haired on the left)’s left leg: it’s fucking gigantic.
Character selection:
2/10
Look, let’s be honest with ourselves here: for all its popularity, Mortal Kombat isn’t really known for its sexy girls (and this is in spite of them having some ridiculously revealing outfits. Sonya Blade and Kitana would have been the franchise’s most notable sex symbols in 2003, but they are well below other female fighters in terms of popularity and attractiveness. Add on top of that that Mortal Kombat was at its nadier after Mythologies: Sub Zero, MK4, Special Forces, and Advance and it seems really weird that they’d get a two-page spread after all that. Granted, Mortal Kombat has enough general popularity that it makes sense that they’d get some representation, but still, there are far more deserving games in 2003 that could have gotten a look in.
Personality:
0/10
This is generic sexy girl poses and nothing else. If you made me guess which franchise these characters were from, I would not in a million years have guessed Mortal Kombat. This looks like a magical girl manga, not Mortal Kombat.
Swimwear design:
5/10
While I appreciate that there was clearly thought put into each of these outfits, none of them are particularly interesting at the end of the day.
Intangibles:
0/10
For a two-page spread, this one’s pretty underwhelming.
HOTNESS:
2/10
Oh my fucking God, AGAIN Ryan!?! Let me re-iterate: I am looking at these images one at a time. I didn’t know that I was going to be seeing so much Ryan Kinnaird art when I started writing this. Was the guy just cheaper to commission? Was he easy for PSM to work with? Why does he show up this often?
Liefeld:
10/10
I hate the faces, obviously, but at least I don’t see any notable issues with her anatomy.
Character selection:
5/10
After the first game bombed, Zone of the Enders was already a damn-near forgotten franchise at this point. Still, there was some lingering cult popularity back in 2003, so it’s not a terrible choice. Maybe PSM were trying to drum up some interest in the franchise?
Personality:
5/10
I know nothing about Ken so… a 5/10?
Swimwear design:
7/10
While the other two schlock sci-fi bikinis Ryan did this same issue were a bit too silly for my tastes, I actually like how he’s gone about designing Ken’s bikini. The red chrome evokes imagery of expensive sports cars, which actually makes the image more alluring. Too bad it’s wasted on a Ryan Kinnaird art, but it certainly bumps the score up at least.
Intangibles:
0/10
This image is improved ten-fold if you just crop it off at Ken’s chin.
HOTNESS:
10/10
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but my fighting game of choice before Dead or Alive was Soulcalibur. While Sophitia has always been my favourite, her sister, Cassandra, is exceptionally attractive too. For an art piece of HOT video game girls in BIKINIS, this is a fucking masterpiece.
Liefeld:
7/10
My only complaint is that Cassandra’s spine looks like it’s detached from her neck, but you have to be actively looking at something other than her ass to notice that.
Character selection:
10/10
While not the most obvious choice in the world, Cassandra is one of those characters where you see them in a swimsuit issue and go “man, what a great inclusion!” Giving her an entire page to herself is also fantastic, too many of these commissions end up feeling crowded.
Personality:
7/10
Cassandra is a committed, fierce, courageous, and confident character, which I feel is communicated here with this pose and expression. Then again, this could also be seen as “generic sexy pose” and it’s a happy accident that they’ve executed that in a way that seems like something you could see Cassandra doing. I think it’s worth points regardless.
Swimwear design:
10/10
It’s perfect, I don’t know what else to say.
Intangibles:
10/10
This is a great piece, full-stop, and deserves every point I throw at it.
HOTNESS:
5/10
Okay, is PSM just trolling me at this point? Not only is this another piece featuring Ryan Kinnaird, but it’s of the exact same Xenosaga girls we got last year?
Liefeld:
9/10
There’s a little weirdness going on here, but nothing particularly noteworthy.
Character selection:
0/10
No. Having Xenosaga in 2002 was already a questionable selection, but having them be in back-to-back swimsuit issues when Dead or Alive was one-and-done despite being at the height of its popularity is just fucking bullshit. Another Ridge Racer image would have made more sense than this.
Personality:
5/10
I have no idea, so 5/10.
Swimwear design:
4/10
More sci-fi bikinis… ehh, having them be held together with arcing energy just seems silly.
Intangibles:
0/10
Credit where it’s due, at least I can stand looking at this Xenosaga image. And Shion’s pose is pretty cute.
HOTNESS:
5/10
Oh hey, at least we can see the Street Fighter girls this time… too bad it’s on a pretty mediocre image.
Liefeld:
10/10
I’m not noticing any obvious anatomical issues.
Character selection:
9/10
I’ll be honest, I have never even heard of Sakura. However, that’s kind of irrelevant, because Street Fighter‘s Chun Li and Cammy are video game goddesses who could show up in every PSM swimsuit issue like Lara Croft and no one would question it.
Personality:
0/10
This is just generic sexy girl poses.
Swimwear design:
4/10
While the swimsuits do seem like something each character would wear, they’re not particularly interesting.
Intangibles:
0/10
The fact that I barely prefer this to the previous Street Fighter image (where you couldn’t even see the girls) is a damning praise.

Okay, yeah, that issue was definitely a big step up from the last couple years, even with the Ryan Kinnaird overload. Let’s see if PSM can keep the quality up in the final two swimsuit specials…

PSM Issue 86 (July 2004)

Oh… PSM were really playing down this year’s swimsuit special, eh? A small, undescriptive headline, and muted promises of “fun in the sun” rather than “HOT video game women in BIKINIS!” Were PSM’s editors starting to grow embarrassed with the tradition, or are they just trying to set expectations to a more reasonable level? Let’s find out…

HOTNESS:
7/10
Honestly, after all the trolling Ryan Kinnaird has done to me thus far, I was not expecting to see him put out a piece that’s actually pretty good. Amazing what you can do when you actually put some effort into the face!
Liefeld:
7/10
Chun Li’s left eyebrow is very skewed and lop-sided. She’s also got no belly-button, but that’s clearly a stylistic choice. Nothing too severe I’d say.
Character selection:
10/10
It’s Chun Li, we’ve gone over this: girl’s up there with Lara Croft amongst video game girl royalty.
Personality:
0/10
This is just generic sexy girl posing.
Swimwear design:
7/10
This is actually a pretty interesting one for me. I love the design of the swimsuit: it really fits the visual language you’d expect from Chun Li. However, she usually is associated with blue, not red, but I like how this has turned out regardless. Pretty damn solid, I’d say. (Note: there actually is a blue version of this image that I’ve seen floating around, but I like that they chose to go with red; it’s definitely the bolder choice!)
Intangibles:
6/10
I think Ryan deserves some “BRAVO!” bonus points after all the shit I’ve given him up to this point.
HOTNESS:
6/10
I’ve never played a Jak & Daxter game, so I’m not really familiar with these characters. That said, this is image is suggestive in all the right ways, which makes it hotter than the images that are trying way too hard to be appealing.
Liefeld:
5/10
Ashelin’s face is shaped like a goddamn comma. Keira’s better, but good God that thigh gap. Her hips are wider than her shoulders too!
Character selection:
6/10
I mean… sure, I guess? Jak & Daxter was one of the biggest PS2-exclusive franchises in 2004, so I guess it makes sense that some characters from it would show up here? That said, it also was never really known for sex appeal, so still kind of weird at the end of the day.
Personality:
5/10
I know nothing about these characters… so 5/10.
Swimwear design:
6/10
Keira’s swimsuit is pretty cute, and the button-up shirt she’s wearing makes it even cuter.
Intangibles:
0/10
I famously hate elves (don’t tell me they’re humans, Jak Wiki, they’re fucking elves).
HOTNESS:
4/10
Oh Ryan, just when I was starting to warm up to you, you reminded me why I disliked your art style in the first place. This is actually extra insulting to me, because Bloodrayne is a franchise all about sex appeal, so it feels like it’s getting squandered with this image.
Liefeld:
5/10
Oh my fucking God, what is wrong with her right foot??? I’m trying to imagine the contortion she would have to subject herself to to wear that boot.
Character selection:
9/10
Majesco were on a hard marketing push in 2004 to make Bloodrayne 2 a success. The first game was a disaster, but Rayne’s eye-catching design had won her some fans, so having her appear here in the 2004 swimsuit issue is a very obvious decision.
Personality:
8/10
Rayne is not a very complicated character: she’s an sexy vampire killer for edgy boys, and I’d say that this image gets that across quite well.
Swimwear design:
5/10
This is just Rayne’s in-game outfit, but more revealing. That said… still a pretty hot outfit, not gonna lie.
Intangibles:
0/10
Fun fact, only three months later, Rayne would bare her boobs in the pages of Playboy, rendering this mediocre art of a HOT video game girl in a BIKINI completely redundant for titillation.
HOTNESS:
5/10
This sure is an image of HOT video game girls in BIKINIS frolicking at the beach.
Liefeld:
10/10
I’m not seeing any obvious issues with the anatomy this time.
Character selection:
5/10
Okay, so Chun Li and Cammy are video game royalty, but are the girls of Street Fighter so iconic that they deserved four whole pages to themselves in the 2004 PSM swimsuit issue…? Sure, Soulcalibur had three pages last year, but those were all of different girls, and the release of Soulcalibur II was arguably the peak of the franchise’s popularity. Meanwhile, this image has Chun Li again… I think even Lara Croft would be pushing it to appear twice in one swimsuit issue.
Personality:
3/10
I actually thought that this was a Final Fantasy image at first glance… I guess Chun Li and Ibuki are identifiable, but Cammy is unrecognizable for such an iconic character.
Swimwear design:
3/10
Ehh, that is some pretty generic swimwear.
Intangibles:
0/10
Another one of those “perfectly acceptable” swimsuit issue commissions, but nothing more than that.
HOTNESS:
1/10
Holy fucking shit, do I really need to explain why I hate this one? This Slenderman-esque take on Nina Williams is exaggerated to the point of looking idiotic.
Liefeld:
0/10
This legitimately looks like what you’d expect to see from a 13 year old boy’s create-a-character wank-material: maxed out the boob and hip sliders and as little clothing as possible.
Character selection:
8/10
If you are going to put a Tekken girl in your swimsuit special, then Nina is the obvious choice. It especially makes sense here since her solo spin-off game, the notorious Death By Degrees, was due out the next year. As a result, there would have actually been some hype around her in particular in 2004.
Personality:
8/10
While there’s basically nothing to identify that this is THE Nina Williams, the image at least gets across her cold and ruthless personality.
Swimwear design:
2/10
That’s about the most generic bikini I’ve ever seen.
Intangibles:
0/10
This is easily one of my least favourite commissions in this entire series.
HOTNESS:
3/10
Oh hey, it’s another Adam Warren/Ryan Kinnaird collaboration (we’ve even got another sci-fi bikini!). GOD they are trying so hard to make Nova look sexy, to the image’s detriment.
Liefeld:
7/10
My main complaint here is Nova’s arm placement in the top-left picture. Try posing the way that Nova is posed there. Her left arm must be scrunched really awkwardly (maybe even painfully) behind her to make that kind of pose.
Character selection:
6/10
There’s an interesting story behind this one. The magazine does not tell you who the hell Nova is or what game she comes from, so I was wracking my brain trying to figure it out. After doing some digging, I eventually realized that this is the main character from StarCraft: Ghost, the notorious StarCraft console shooter spin-off that went into prolonged development hell before finally being cancelled. So, on the one hand, I can see why she’d be included here, since hype would have been through the roof for this game. On the other hand, it’s a pretty poor choice in retrospect.
Personality:
0/10
Something tells me that Nova was not going to spend StarCraft: Ghost making “fuck me now” faces.
Swimwear design:
2/10
I don’t get this obsession with sci-fi bikinis, much less one that’s “tacti-cool”.
Intangibles:
1/10
They were trying so hard to make Nova look attractive, so the fact that she ghosted us all makes this funny in retrospect.
HOTNESS:
5/10
I said it before and I’ll say it again: someone at PSM clearly had a thing for Asian women. As far as these HOT images of video game girls in BIKINIS go, this is fairly middle of the road.
Liefeld:
6/10
What the hell is going on with Ayame’s left arm and shoulder!?
Character selection:
3/10
Ayame from Tenchu was in last year’s special, and the series was already on its decline in popularity by 2004, so this is a very questionable choice (that I can only quantify with my previous thoughts about an editor forcing their favourites into every issue). As for Kurenai from Red Ninja and Hibana from Nightshade, I’ve never even heard of these games. A Red Ninja selection actually makes some sense to appear here though: the entire gimmick of that game was that you played a kunoichi who could get a “seduction kill” on enemies. This was done by flirting with them suggestively to lure them in for an instant execution. That’s fucking bonkers; too bad the game was a janky mess by most accounts.
Personality:
3/10
I’m not gleaning much personality from this picture, it just looks like generic sexy poses.
Swimwear design:
3/10
So the swimwear here is pretty uninteresting to me, with one exception: why the hell does every girl have a rope-tied bikini bottom…? Is that just a stereotypical kunoichi thing? Is it some typical Asian-women fetish thing? They had the exact same type of bikini bottom of Ayame last year, so it clearly means something. Seriously, someone explain this to me, because it’s starting to concern me!
Intangibles:
5/10
I’ll give some bonus points for having this be set in a sauna, it gives the image some thematic flair. The peeking ninjas are also kind of funny.

Wait… that’s it? Yeah, there are only seven images in this year’s swimsuit issue (the previous three issues had nine, eight, eight, and nine, respectively). Granted, this is because there are more two-page spreads and all the others are full-page images, but still… this was a really underwhelming issue. When a Ryan Kinnaird commission is your highlight for the year, you know that the bar for quality got lowered. The character choices were pretty poor (Lara didn’t even show up this year!), there were no show-stopper images… was PSM’s heart not in it anymore? Or was their budget getting stretched thin…?

I’ve got a bad feeling about the final issue of the swimsuit special…

PSM Issue 101 (September 2005)

How the times change in only a few years. This was by far the hardest swimsuit issue to find, because not only was it released after the summer was over, but they don’t even advertise it on the cover. It seems pretty clear by this point that somebody in charge was either ashamed of the whole affair, or they were doing it entirely out of obligation by 2005. They claim in the editor’s blurb that “this is our best ever” swimsuit issue. I’m sitting here writing this having not seen any of these images yet: I don’t believe them. I’m fully expecting to end this series on a dull note. Let’s see if my instincts are on-point…

HOTNESS:
8/10
As we have come to expect, the near-anual Lara Croft image is pretty damn hot (the gun holster tan-line is pretty damn funny too)!
Liefeld:
7/10
Lara’s body is borderline contorted and her right boob is notably larger than her left one, but those are pretty nit-picky complaints.
Character selection:
10/10
It’s Lara Croft: if anything it’s weird that she didn’t appear in the 2004 swimsuit special. It seems that year off was due to Angel of Darkness bombing, but that hasn’t stopped PSM from including much more questionable characters in these pages…
Personality:
6/10
While this is a pretty funny image, it doesn’t really capture Lara Croft’s confident and sassy personality, does it?
Swimwear design:
8/10
The simple but perfect Lara bikini is back. Complaining that they aren’t even trying to top perfection seems petty.
Intangibles:
8/10
Man, people were really sour on Lara Croft after Angel of Darkness, eh? Glad to see her back again for the finale.
HOTNESS:
3/10
Oh look… it’s our old friend… I actually don’t mind the Ada half of this image: his art has improved and it’s the most outright, over-the-top sexualized any Ryan Kinnaird image has gotten to this point. However, the Leon/Ashley half just kills it, because… I mean, just look at them. Leon looks like a fucking human-coloured crocodile and Ashley looks like she stepped out of a pulp serial novel.
Liefeld:
0/10
This is textbook Rob Liefeld stuff.
Character selection:
6/10
Resident Evil 4 would have already been a year old when this came out, but I guess that the release of the PS2 port would be reason enough to earn it a spot (especially considering how massive this game was on release).
Personality:
3/10
Ashley is scared throughout Resident Evil 4, has to rely on Leon to protect her, AND tries to fuck Leon… in spite of that, I think this image is terrible at communicating what Ashley is like. Here she looks like his vapid, seductive sex doll, but that’s not the case at all. Ada, as a femme fatale, should be pretty easy to do right, but even she comes across as generic. Really poor showing here.
Swimwear design:
4/10
Okay, I’ll admit that the “4” on Ada’s bikini is kind of a cool touch… that’s about the only thing I find notable here though.
Intangibles:
0/10
Leon’s abs have more layers than an ogre.
HOTNESS:
8/10
While I usually do not find Adam Warren’s cutesy art style to be particularly alluring, he’s giving 110% here to accomplish it anyway. This is definitely one of the most suggestive swimsuit images in the entire run of PSM, but the cutesy art style keeps it from feeling tacky or excessive.
Liefeld:
10/10
The art style is so minimalist that I don’t think Adam could screw up Rayne’s anatomy if he tried.
Character selection:
5/10
Rayne was fresh off of two poorly received video games, that embarrassing Playboy article, and the upcoming film was coming out when Uwe Boll was already known for making terrible movies, so it was clearly going to bomb as well. By this point it was obviously Rayne was never going to be the next big female video game star, so it does feel a little odd that they’d commission art of her two years in a row.
Personality:
7/10
While this does look like something that Majesco themselves would release to advertise Bloodrayne, I do feel like it’s notably missing her sarcastic and aggressive attitude. Still, it captures enough of Rayne’s characterization that I can’t be that harsh on it.
Swimwear design:
6/10
This swimwear looks very fitting for a character like Rayne.
Intangibles:
10/10
Major bonus points for making this work with the limited colour palette!
HOTNESS:
7/10
Oh hey Ryan. You did a pretty good job this time, this is almost on-par with your Chun Li piece!
Liefeld:
7/10
Her upper-right thigh looks a bit strange…
Character selection:
5/10
Oh my God they did it again! Apparently they were already concerned that StarCraft: Ghost might get canceled, but they were putting this commission out there to will it into existence.
Personality:
5/10
The game never came out, how am I supposed to know Nova’s personality in StarCraft: Ghost?
Swimwear design:
7/10
Congrats Ryan, you got to make a sci-fi bikini that looks interesting.
Intangibles:
5/10
The dramatic irony of PSM stating that “we were worried for a bit, but it looks like StarCraft: Ghost is guaranteed to come out now!”
HOTNESS:
0/10
From what I can find, Rin from Tenchu is 14 years old (and looks it). What the actual fuck PSM? This opens up a whole can of worms for how you assess this image: is Rin being sexualized here? Maybe, but I don’t think it matters anyway: this image is part of a sexy swimsuit collection, there’s a baseline assumption that you’re supposed to oogle every character in a swimsuit. Like, if they just put a random photo of a little girl in the middle of a Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, that would be really fucking weird.
Liefeld:
10/10
I do not notice any anatomical issues (other than one of the characters’ bodies being four-plus years undeveloped).
Character selection:
0/10
No. Just fucking no. Two years of Tenchu was insane enough. How they hell do we have Ayame three consecutive years!? She was clearly one of the bosses’ favourite characters (definitely the guy who has the Asian fetish), because it’s absolutely insane to imagine this being a popularity selection. Plus… y’know, including a minor, but I would have given this a 0/10 for Ayame alone at this point.
Personality:
5/10
I don’t know these characters… you know the drill.
Swimwear design:
2/10
THE FUCKING ROPE BIKINI-BOTTOMS ARE BACK, WHAT IS THIS GODDAMN OBSESSION!??!!
Intangibles:
5/10
Everything else aside, the Kitsune-head bikini top is legitimately funny.
HOTNESS:
10/10
So this particular image is interesting, because it’s meant to be appealing primarily to the women readers of PSM… and I think they succeeded! Making this even more impressive is that this image is still appealing for the men, because we have Lady looking smoking hot!
Liefeld:
10/10
I’m not noticing any glaring issues, which is extremely impressive for an image like this with a big muscly man front and center. Bravo, Jo Chen!
Character selection:
10/10
If you have to pick a male video game character that the women readers of PSM would find attractive, you couldn’t do much better than Dante. The fact that the extremely appealing Lady is here too is just an incredible bonus.
Personality:
10/10
You know you could see Dante doing this exact scene in-game and it would be perfectly natural.
Swimwear design:
6/10
This is the one area where this image falters, and that’s because I can barely see what anyone is wearing! Nothing looks bad… but I’d like to have a better look at both to give their swimwear full points.
Intangibles:
10/10
No notes, this is easily one of the best images in the entire series and I’m glad to see the swimsuit special going down swinging for the fences.
HOTNESS:
3/10
Oh my God: these are official images created by EA. They used their Marvel license for Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects to commission sexy swimsuit images of Storm and Elektra. That means one of two things:
1) They had multiple back-and-forths with Marvel to get these images approved by them, or
2) They just went ahead and did it and could have gotten into hot water with Marvel if they found out.
The funniest part about all this though? The images kind of suck.
Liefeld:
3/10
It should come as no surprise that the actual comic book superheroes end up having some of the worst anatomy in the entire series. From the waist-up, Elektra is just a contortionist’s nightmare. At least Storm looks good though.
Character selection:
2/10
I do not understand the decision-making that went into selecting Storm and Elektra for this swimsuit issue. Elektra was really unpopular due to the fresh memories of the Daredevil and Elektra movies bombing. Storm was reasonably popular I guess, but I can’t help but feel that Marvel wasn’t willing to let EA use their more popular characters for this swimsuit ad.
Post-script: turns out that the reason they picked Elektra and Storm is because they were the only established female characters in Marvel Nemesis. There were multiple original characters in that game which were designed for sex appeal, which makes me wonder why they didn’t include one or more of their original characters here to specifically advertise the game?
Personality:
4/10
Storm looks like a valley girl, which couldn’t be further from her character. As for Elektra… I guess that looks like a pose she’d do?
Swimwear design:
0/10
Storm isn’t even wearing a swimsuit! And I think that Elektra is literally just wearing one of her costumes from the comics.
Intangibles:
5/10
The fact that these are official images of licensed characters provided by EA is just so goddamn funny.
HOTNESS:
4/10
Oh my God they did it again. EA wants you to think that the girls of SSX are hot, but these in-engine PS2 renders aren’t particularly impressive.
Liefeld:
10/10
I guess the benefit of using renders is that you avoid most of the anatomy pitfalls that drawing everything from scratch brings with it.
Character selection:
1/10
It’s so funny that these are officially-created renders provided by EA themselves. It just reeks of desperation to drum up interest for SSX on Tour, which was launching the month after this issue released. After three games, it was clear that nobody cared about the characters in SSX, especially after a two year gap between releases. On top of that, this is the third time SSX characters were appearing in the swimsuit special. Might I remind you that Dead or Alive and Soulcalibur both only appeared once (and this is despite Soulcalibur III‘s hyped release later in 2005).
Personality:
5/10
Something, something, don’t know this character…
Swimwear design:
3/10
Kaori’s outfit looks more like sleepwear than swimwear… Elise’s outfit is just mediocre.
Intangibles:
4/10
Again, it’s so funny and reeking of desperation that EA would provide these images themselves to PSM for their swimsuit special. What a wild marketing move. This is something that legitimately would not be done today by a major publisher.

Credit where it’s due, this was a great final issue for the PSM swimsuit special. You had some of the best art in the entire series, some weird swings, and hilarious editorial choices. Certainly better than what I was expecting!

Final Rankings

What a wild journey that was. It was legitimately interesting to see how the PSM swimsuit special evolved from issue-to-issue: starting out as a legitimate attempt to get attention through sex appeal, and then slowly feeling more and more like an obligation. That said, I imagine that the budget for the special was higher in the first issue, and then got tighter and tighter with each subsequent one. I also think this is probably why Ryan Kinnaird was all over these issues: he was probably able to do commissions fast and inexpensively, hence why he was soon doing two or three images per year. That said, when PSM wanted a particular image to make a splash, you can tell that they put the money into it, hence how we got the stunning images of Cassandra, Dante & Lady, and Lara Croft sharing space with art of notably worse quality.

Then there’s the next thing I want to address: I expect that a common response to these swimsuit articles would be “boy, they couldn’t do this today!” I honestly think that that is patently false. Could, say, IGN or Eurogamer suddenly decide to release an annual swimsuit special? Yeah, I think that they could do so with little controversy surrounding the decision. As long as they treated it with a bit more tact than PSM did, and had a bit more balance between the girls and guys, I think that there would be minimal criticism. That said, would they do this? No, probably not, but that’s not so much due to “wokeness”. Unlike the 90s and early 2000s, game’s journalism is now directed at a general audience rather than teenage boys (a shift in audience that we can track through PSM’s own gradual loss of personality over the years).

Wanna know how I know that you could make a video game swimsuit issue today without it being a problem? Well, I was looking into Ryan Kinnaird’s career after I finished the last issue and it turns out that the guy has been contributing to UDON magazine, which releases its own video game girl swimsuit specials to this day. They’re actually pretty damn good! All that said, as much as I’ve complained about Ryan Kinnaird through this article, the guy’s art style has improved significantly since these articles were published, so I want to give him some kudos: nothing against you, I just did not like most of your swimsuit illustrations in PSM! Congrats on finding a way to make a career for the last quarter century drawing HOT video game girls in BIKINIS!

With all that said, lets get to the final rankings based on the sum total of their scores. In the case of a tie, I’ve ranked images based on personal preference:

RankCharacter(s)SeriesIssueArtistTotal Score
1Lady, DanteDevil May CrySept 2005Jo Chen56
2Lara CroftTomb RaiderAug 2002Greg Horn56
3Cassandra AlexandraSoulcaliburJune 2003Greg Horn54
4Kasumi, Leifang, Tina ArmstrongDead or AliveJuly 2000Sam Liu49
5Lara CroftTomb RaiderSept 2005Frank Cho47
6RayneBloodrayneSept 2005Adam Warren46
7Lara CroftTomb RaiderJuly 2000Adam Hughes46
8TrishDevil May CryAug 2002Kevin Lau43
9Lara CroftTomb RaiderJune 2003Adam Hughes38
10Chun LiStreet FighterJuly 2004Ryan Kinnaird37
11NovaStarCraftSept 2005Ryan Kinnaird36
12Elisa, Zoe, KaoriSSXJuly 2001Andy Park35
13Talim, Ivy Valentine, Xianghua, TakiSoulcaliburJune 2003Greg Horn34
14Lara Croft, Claire RedfieldTomb Raider & Resident EvilJune 2003Randy Green32
15Valkyrie WildePSM April FoolsJuly 2000Adam Warren31
16RayneBloodrayneJuly 2004Ryan Kinnaird31
17Ai Fukami, Reiko NagaseRidge RacerJuly 2000Tommy Yune30
18Jill Valentine, Claire Redfield, Leon KennedyResident EvilJuly 2000Andy Park, Jon Sibal30
19Sun Shang Xiang, AyameDynasty Warriors & TenchuJune 2003Jo Chen30
20KenZone of the EndersJune 2003Ryan Kinnaird29
21Lian Xing, Aya Brea, Meryl Silverburgh, Hana Tsu-VachelVariousJuly 2000Joyce Chin, Arthur Adams28
22Tifa, Quistis, Rinoa, Cloud, SquallFinal FantasyJuly 2000Naska28
23Sakura, Chun Li, CammyStreet FighterJune 2003Rick Mays28
24Ashelin, KeiraJak & DaxterJuly 2004Kevin Lau28
25Trish, LuciaDevil May CryJune 2003Ryan Kinnaird28
26Yuna, Tidus, KimariFinal FantasyJuly 2001Roger Cruz27
27Elise, KaoriSSXSept 2005EA Studios27
28Yuki, Kaede, SamanosukeOnimushaJuly 2001Ken Lashley26
29Chun Li, Sakura, CammyStreet FighterJuly 2000Ale Garza26
30Ibuki, Sakura, Elena, Chun Li, CammyStreet FighterJuly 2004Arnold Tsang26
31Ayame, Kurenai, HibanaVariousJuly 2004Rick Mays25
32OyuOnimushaAug 2002Keron Grant25
33Sarah Bryant, Pai Chan, Christie, JuliaVirtua Fighter & TekkenAug 2002Rick Mays24
34Sarah Bryant, Pai Chan, Aoi, DuralVirtua FighterJuly 2001Mike S. Miller24
35KOS-MOS, ShionXenosagaJune 2003Adam Warren23
36ReginaDino CrisisJuly 2000Arthur Adams23
37Rin, AyameTenchuSept 2005Adam Warren22
38Viola, Vikki Grimm, Olga Gurlukovich, KonokoVariousJuly 2001Tone Rodriguez21
39Mamba Marie, Sephonie, Lenore, Aurora Lee, SophiaMaximoAug 2002Adam Warren21
40KOS-MOS, Shion, PellegriXenosagaAug 2002Ryan Kinnaird21
41NovaStarCraftJuly 2004Adam Warren19
42Nina WilliamsTekkenJuly 2004Jason Pearson19
43Rikku, Yuna, LuluFinal FantasyAug 2002Terry Dodson18
44Storm, ElektraMarvel comicsSept 2005EA Studios17
45Tracey, Leeann, EliseEA Sports BIG franchisesAug 2002Joe Chiodo16
46Dominique, Kaldea, Echidna, SionThe BouncerJuly 2001RV Valdez16
47Ada Wong, Leon Kennedy, Ashley GrahamResident EvilSept 2005Ryan Kinnaird16
48Hana Tsu-Vachel, RainFear EffectJuly 2001Matt Broome16
49Frost, Sonya Blade, Nitara, Kitana, Lei MeiMortal KombatJune 2003Kevin Lau14

And here’s how I would rank the images based entirely on personal, subjective appeal:

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Video Game Review: Venus Vacation Prism – Dead or Alive Xtreme (400th Blog Post Celebration!)

Man, when I started this blog thirteen years ago, I never would have expected that I’d manage to reach four hundred posts! I had started a couple blogs prior to this one and those struggled to continue after the first couple posts, so having this monument to my writing, thoughts, and their evolution over time is just… well, it’s difficult to quantify, really.

Knowing that I was approaching this milestone, I knew that I had to do something special to celebrate. Given that my two hundredth post was about Dead or Alive Xtreme 3, and my three hundredth post was about the DOA movie, I obviously had to find a way to dive back into the Dead or Alive well once more! And, wouldn’t you know it, the timing for this milestone would be reached in fairly close proximity with Venus Vacation Prism: Dead or Alive Xtreme, a brand new spin-off entry in the franchise. Given my previous commentary about this game during preview season, I also knew that there was the potential for some really spicy opinions, and those kinds of articles are always the most fun to write. Suffice to say, I knew that I was going to need to write a review of it for the occasion. So strap in for my thoughts on Venus Vacation Prism: Dead or Alive Xtreme!

While the Dead or Alive Xtreme games had some very basic dating sim elements stapled on, Venus Vacation is a full-on dating sim, presented through a visual novel format. The game has a robust photography system, and much of the game’s “content” revolves around watching the girls and waiting to take the perfect shot. Much like Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 and Venus Vacation, you play as the “Owner”, hired by Zack to oversee the Venus Islands and manage the upcoming Venus Festival. In order to prepare for the festival, you go around recruiting alluring women you meet to be a “Venus” to do promos for the festival. The game doesn’t really elaborate on what being a “Venus” entails, but I understood it to mean “a supermodel who embodies the essence of ‘beauty'”. Each of the Venuses is vying for your affection, so you have to decide who to show preference to. Most of the game involves you watching the Venuses interact and making occasional dialogue choices. You also can take photos throughout each level to increase the pictured Venus’ interest in you and earn them more fans. On rare occasions, you may be asked to do a QTE sequence. If that sounds dull to you… well, I don’t think you’re cut out for visual novels, sorry.

So Who Are Our Cast of Venuses?

Venus Vacation Prism has brought over six of the girls from Dead or Alive Xtreme: Venus Vacation for you to photograph and woo:

Misaki is the first girl you meet in the game. She’s the stereotypical Japanese “trad-GF” archetype: constantly working, polite, sweet, modest, and innocent. She takes a long time to get out of her shell and feel comfortable with herself. She is far too insecure to make the first move, so you need to do it for her. Romancing Misaki is all about making her feel comfortable enough to show off her voluptuous body to you… which just gives me the ick. As a grown man experiencing this game, trying to romance this shy and innocent girl makes me feel like I’m grooming her, ugh! I was legitimately uncomfortable pursuing her romance, so I just romanced the other characters instead. This left Misaki visibly disappointed and saddened throughout the entire game, but since she didn’t make the first move, I just roleplayed that I didn’t even notice this as I cucked her with the rest of the cast.

Disappointingly, the only girl from the mainline Dead or Alive series in this game is Honoka… but, like, she’s Honoka. She feels out of place in the mainline Dead or Alive games, but she’s right at home in Dead or Alive Xtreme.

Honoka’s the second girl you meet in Venus Vacation Prism. True to her portrayal in Dead or Alive 6, she’s a simple sort: not particularly smart, but sweet and fun-loving. She doesn’t have much of a personality to speak of… which is why I’d say that Honoka is literally just this game’s “teenage boy’s fantasy” archetype: she’s got ridiculously massive tits, and a personality so dull that it couldn’t possibly intimidate the lowest common denominator (y’know, those sorts of cowards who get angry if the object of their affection has any sort of self agency). Romancing her is all about having fun and staring at boobs as much as possible. That’s… fine, really, but so shallow that it couldn’t hold my interest.

The third Venus you’ll meet is Tamaki. She is very open, has few boundaries, and greatly appreciates honesty and forthrightness. She’s heavily bi-coded, fawning over the Venuses just as much as she flirts with you. She’s also a bit of a goblin, flirting with you to see how you’ll react, teasing people, groping the other Venuses, and she’s a borderline alcoholic. She immediately begins flirting with you the moment she lays eyes on you, and is not shy about trying to seduce you.

And I love this.

I’m just going to say this up-front: Tamaki was my ride-or-die in this game. I’ve complained in the past about how Dead or Alive girls are almost all portrayed as innocent, untouchable angels, which makes the voyeuristic aspects of these games more uncomfortable. However, here we have a character who is aware of, and in control of, her sexuality, and she expresses her interest in you outright. That is a thousand times more arousing than preying on someone’s inexperience! The franchise legitimately needs more characters like this. Suffice to say, I prioritized Tamaki every chance I got. Romancing Tamaki is all about being honest with your feelings, and having a (relatively) realistic, adult relationship with someone.

Fiona is fucking insane. She’s a yandere, a character who is extremely obsessed with you. That would be weird enough on its own, but Fiona is also a literal princess who has spent her entire life in a castle. Like a week or two before you meet her, Fiona saw an advertisement for the Venus Festival with Misaki, Honoka, Tamaki, and yourself in it and she decided that she needed to throw her entire life away to be with you. Why is she so devoted to you? Well, she liked the way that you looked at the other Venuses and wanted you to look at her that way…

Fucking what???

Personality-wise, Fiona is clearly has social anxiety. She’s soft-spoken and sweet, but her obsession with you makes every interaction awkward. She was also clearly only educated in etiquette and politics, so she needs help from others to understand the ways of the world… ugh, here comes that uncomfortable groomer feeling again…

Quite frankly, I did not like Fiona. I can’t really tell you what romancing her entails, because I didn’t fuel her delusions. She seems fairly sweet, but I’m not into these yandere types, other than Monika.

Just Monika.

Nanami is uncanny. She seems to be intended to be a relatively normal, modern city girl: she’s soft-spoken, sociable, interested in photography, gets bored, and she’s uncertain what her future holds. I actually found this concept moderately interesting, but the more time you spend with Nanami, the less “normal” she feels. She’s excessively soft-spoken and chill, to the point where you become sharply aware that it defines her entire personality. I can’t even imagine her being angry, losing her cool, or even expressing excitement. As a result, she ends up being kind of a bland dating sim character, lacking much of a personality to latch on to. Maybe she has a more engaging personality as you get to know her, but I didn’t have much interest in getting to that point when there were much more compelling choices available. Romancing her is equally chill – just don’t be an asshole, real-life rules apply here too.

But hey, at least she doesn’t give me the ick, so that put her above a couple other characters in my books.

M-mommy!?! Elise is the harsh teacher/boss archetype: she’s stern, strict, and disappointed in you. You need to earn her approval, which makes it feel all the more satisfying when you do. She’s a workaholic and needs someone to show her how to loosen up and have fun. She doesn’t even become a Venus until after several chapters with her, so you get a lot of time to get to know her compared to some of the other girls.

Hoo boy, Elise was waking something in me and, at times, even managed to take some of my attention from Tamaki. Elise may be intimidating and cold to some people, but she’s totally my type, looks very cute, has a great storyline, and feels particularly suited for a dating sim narrative! That said, going for Elise is playing this game on hard mode, because she is particularly difficult to impress and, as the last Venus recruited, you get less opportunities to prioritize her.

“Gameplay”

Given that the dating sim elements of Dead or Alive Xtreme are my least-favourite part about those games, I was not expecting much from a Team Ninja dating sim game. However, this really is a case where going all-in on a concept made for a better end product, because I actually rather enjoyed the dating sim elements in Venus Vacation Prism. Instead of having to memorize the specific colours of wrapping paper that each girl likes to get them to arbitrarily accept a gift from you, Venus Vacation Prism‘s dating sim elements revolve entirely around getting to know the girls’ personalities through your interactions with them and then making dialogue choices which correspond to their interests. You’ll also often be forced to choose which girls to spend your time with, so you can’t just woo them all at once – someone has to end up disappointed. Granted, this is just bog-standard modern dating sim gameplay, but it’s certainly a step up from Dead or Alive Xtreme‘s half-assed approach.

The other big gameplay system in Venus Vacation Prism is the photography suite. You can choose to just take a quick screenshot with a press of a button, but those who really want to indulge can get full 360 degree control of the scene so you can line up that perfect shot, in addition to being able to control the lighting, add filters, etc. The game requires you to get at least six photos by the end of a chapter, but you will likely take several dozen instead, because taking pictures is fun! To make that point clear, every screenshot in this review was taken by me, because I had no shortage of photos to choose from during my playthrough!

In addition, you are graded one-to-three stars per photo at the end of each chapter. This certainly incentivizes you to take more photos, but the game is really unclear about the criteria to get a higher score. As a result, it can be a bit frustrating when one of your favourite photos gets a one star rating, while some random shot gets two or even three stars.

Lastly in the gameplay department, Venus Vacation Prism will occasionally ask you to partake in a micro-game to earn some affection from a chosen Venus. There are a handful of these, but they are generally just a QTE sequence that’s over faster than your mom. As you’d expect, they kind of suck.

But how else are Team Ninja going to get you a face-full of Honoka’s sweaty cleavage while she does sit-ups?

“Story”

Venus Vacation Prism is a visual novel, so that means that there’s more of an emphasis on story compared to other Dead or Alive games, right? Well, about that…

The narrative of Venus Vacation Prism is very shallow and low-stakes. I was not skimping on details earlier when I described what this game’s premise is: you really are just recruiting Venuses and preparing for the festival for this entire game’s runtime. Sure, there are a couple developments (you get caught on a date by the person who you rejected, the head office is threatening to fire you if your performance doesn’t improve, etc), but the whole thing is lacking in any real stakes, twists, or tension. For the most part, you’re just having normal conversations with the girls and hanging out.

That said, I’m not sure that this lack of narrative tension is actually a problem. The Xtreme games carved a niche due to being relaxing vacation simulators, and Venus Vacation Prism‘s breezy “story” achieves the same sort of feel. This game does, at times, really feel like being away a tropical vacation. Like, sure, you’re technically working throughout the game, but your job is so ridiculously easy that it doesn’t get in the way. Despite the extremely mundane narrative, I was still interested to see where things would go. It also helps that I am hopelessly obsessed with seeing new corners of the world of Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden, so there’s that too…

Despite the very laid-back narrative, there is some thrust which keeps things from getting boring. In the first half of the game, a new Venus will get introduced every couple chapters. This provides some novelty as you get to meet them, learn about their personality, and then recruit them. While this approach keeps things fresh, it takes a long time to introduce all the girls, which can really suck if you don’t care for the early Venuses. Elise in particular is really difficult to romance, due to her strict personality and having much less time to try to blitz her approval rating high enough before the game ends. The game also heavily foreshadows the Venus Festival that corresponds with a romantic prismatic meteor shower as the grand finale, so you’ve always got it in the back of your mind that you’re working towards that final goal. It’s simple stuff, as I’ve said, but it works well enough.

As for the chapters themselves, most will only have a couple of the girls available to be interacted with at any one time, so you can often go multiple chapters without seeing your preferred Venus. Furthermore, there are plenty of mandatory interactions which are not particularly balanced between the girls: Misaki and Elise get lots of one-on-one time with the Owner in which to make an impression on you, but fans of Honoka and Nanami are going to be absolutely starved if they don’t specifically pursue those characters every chance they get (which, combined with their boring personalities, didn’t help my perception of either character any). Each chapter has some branching paths that you can take (usually picking between one of two girls, but late-game chapters will allow you to choose between any of the Venuses). These choices are shown in a handy flowchart in the between-chapter menu, so you can see all the scenes you found and the ones still available. This is much appreciated for those looking to experience everything the game has to provide, but it also shows that your choices, and their consequences, are pretty limited outside of affecting your overall relationship score with the girls.

Much of this lack of consequence is down to the Venuses all immediately falling in love with you as soon as you meet them (other than Elise, who takes a few chapters to get to that point). Even if you consistently reject their advances, they’ll still pine after you as if nothing happened. This was displayed most egregiously for me during Fiona’s introduction. As I stated, I did not like her character’s obsession with me, so I gave her the cold shoulder and immediately stood her up for Tamaki. However, at the end of her introductory chapter, the game railroads you into going on a date to recruit her as a Venus, and acts like it’s a romantic occasion no matter what you’ve said up to that point. While this is the most egregious example I found, you can feel it elsewhere as well. For example, I wasn’t kidding about Misaki when I said I was cucking her at every opportunity: the poor girl was consistently dropping hints that she liked me and hoped that I would reciprocate, but then I’d go and spend my time off with literally anyone else, to her constant disappointment. Like, girl, at this point you’re delusional if you think that I’m going to pick you to be my date to the prismatic meteor shower!

That said, this is a dating sim, so most of the game’s consequence boils down to romancing your chosen Venus. There are certain scenes and dialogue options which are only unlocked if you have a high (or low!) enough interest score with a particular girl. The thresholds to unlock these scenes are pretty high, so these are typically only going to be available if you’re actively wooing one or two of the girls above all else. Again, this is pretty standard dating sim stuff, but it would have been nice if you actually had to work a bit to get the girls to like you in the first place.

The game also has a smartphone where the girls will send you texts to chat and flirt. On the one hand, this is a very easy way to get in more interactions and choices without having to go to the effort of animating and voicing an entire scene. It also offers an different feel to conversations, especially with the shyer girls who are clearly more comfortable speaking to you via text. On the other hand, these text conversations feel disconnected from the rest of the game. For example, you’ll get a text and agree to go on a date with your chosen Venus, but then you don’t get a new scene or anything, the game just gives your affection score a bump and moves on. You’ll also be in the middle of a scene with another character when the smartphone will pop up and you’ll start texting one of the other girls randomly before going back to the scene at hand. Hell, you can be in the middle of the scene and then get texts from the girl who is in the scene right in front of you and go off on an entirely unrelated conversation before going back to the scene at hand. I love the concept of the smartphone in this game, but the implementation is immersion-breaking far too often.

Looks That Could Kill

As is usual for a Team Ninja game, Venus Vacation Prism looks fantastic. When this game was originally previewed, the character models felt a bit too realistic and uncanny, but having played the actual game now, this was not a problem at all. Like Dead or Alive 5/6/Xtreme 3, the characters are more realistic-looking, but still stylized enough to avoid the uncanny valley (especially Elise, who I feel deserves special shout-out for her ridiculously gorgeous character design).

Visual novels and dating sims aren’t usually my thing, but from my understanding, Venus Vacation Prism has insane production values for the genre. Most of these sorts of games are low-budget indie affairs with 2D sprites and little to no animation, just due to the economics of such a niche genre. In comparison, Venus Vacation Prism, with its AAA-level graphics, animation, full voice acting, and photography suite is a technological behemoth (to the point where I am legitimately curious if it has sold well enough to be worthwhile for Koei-Tecmo). This certainly helps the game stand out, even if its mechanics are pretty bog-standard otherwise.

Like the Xtreme games, Venus Vacation Prism allows you to dress your Venuses in various outfits and swimsuits and also change their hair style. I like that most of the outfits have additional customization options (for example, the you can choose whether or not you want to wear a zip-up hoodie over a particular style of bikini). However, there are a couple issues with the dress-up system which are hard to ignore. First of all, the number of available outfits per Venus is tied to their number of fans (which is influenced by the star rating of photos of the Venus submitted at the end of each chapter). It takes quite a while to unlock new outfits for each Venus because of this system. Despite giving Tamaki most of my attention during my playthrough, I hadn’t even unlocked half of her outfits by the time I reached the finale, so several playthroughs are going to be necessary if you want to unlock everything (I’ll leave that up to you to decide whether that’s good or bad).

I think that the bigger issue with the dress-up system though is that there just are not enough options available. The game has about thirty-seven outfits per girl, which doesn’t sound too bad, until you realize that the vast majority of these are reskins. Most outfits have three-to-five recoloured variants (some have even more), so these recolours are padding the total massively: discounting all the recolours, there’s only seven outfits available to dress up your Venuses, plus their one unique outfit and two pre-order bonus ones that you may not even have access to. That’s extremely limited, especially since you won’t unlock most of them in a single playthrough, so expect to have a bunch of Venuses all wearing the same outfit around the mid-point of the game…

Core Values

This is a Dead or Alive Xtreme game, so naturally that begs the question: just how lewd does this game get? Well, to put it simply…

…the game’s weirdly kind of chaste and restrained (at least by Dead or Alive‘s standards)?

Like, don’t get me wrong, the game’s still horny – the camera will linger on the girls’ boobs, most of said boobs are massive, and there are plenty of revealing bikinis to dress them up in. Compared to the Dead or Alive Xtreme games though (and especially Venus Vacation, which this game is directly spun-off of), the game’s downright modest. Sure, the bikinis are revealing, but they’re just fairly normal bikinis, as opposed to, say, the downright insane Venus swimsuit from Dead or Alive Xtreme. And sure, this game will occasionally have scenes which are egregiously fetish bait (most notably involving Misaki: in one scene, she nervously tries on a bikini in front of you, and in a later scene she’s bent over for no real reason and you’re clearly being invited to upskirt her), but that’s nothing compared to the literal pole dance sequences in the Xtreme games. And don’t even get me started on the ability to sexually harass the girls whenever you want to in Venus Vacation

Conversely, Venus Vacation Prism takes the opposite approach, where acting like a creep and fixating on the girls’ assets above all else will leave them unimpressed, unless they actively invite that kind of attention from you. As I’ve said in the past, a big reason why the Xtreme games feel creepy is because the girls don’t seem to have any agency and are completely innocent angels, so all the voyeurism you engage in explicitly happens without their consent (as their reactions to you poking and peeking on them make clear). Venus Vacation Prism, on the other hand, wants you to form a connection with your chosen Venuses, make them want to open up to you, and will straight-up punish you for disrespecting the girls’ boundaries. Again, having Tamaki openly flirting with you and taking notes about the things that turn you on is orders of magnitude more sexy than the ham-fisted sexuality we get in the Xtreme games.

That said, this is still an Xtreme game: you’ll have plenty of opportunities to ogle the girls, but I really cannot understate how relatively restrained this game is. You can dress the girls in the most revealing outfits you can unlock, you can take their shoes off to get the best look at their toes (you know that someone on Team Ninja was begging them to implement this feature), and you can make all your photos zoomed on their girls’ cleavage, but that’s entirely up to you and the game doesn’t really incentivize it one way or another. Hell, despite having the series’ vaunted boob physics and ass physics (they move like gelatin this time!), you will almost never notice any jiggling outside of the costume selection screen.

It also really needs to be said, that Venus Vacation Prism feels restrained, not only in comparison to the Xtreme games, but to visual novels in general at this point. We’re living in an era where pornographic visual novels appear on the front page of Steam. Mobile app stores and Youtube ads are infested with a plethora of generic, anime, gooner gacha games. While the ending I got with Tamaki slyly implied that sex was had off-screen, a lot of this game’s contemporaries would be revolving entirely around showing the act rather than implying it. Dead or Alive Xtreme was salacious in the 2000s, but in 2025, a game like Venus Vacation Prism is downright modest compared to the competition. Am I suggesting that they should go all the way and release a Dead or Alive game with full nudity and sex? No, I think that would stray too far from the series’ identity, but it’s just something worth thinking about when putting this series’ sexual themes into a wider context.

Further to that point, there’s absolutely no reason why this game could not get a Western release, aside from Koei-Tecmo being a bunch of cowards. The biggest criticism you could level at the game is that it might give you unrealistic expectations regarding dating, but a) it’s a fantasy, and b) that’s something you could say about any dating sim; it’s just inherent to the genre. Sorry, butthurt culture warrior Dead or Alive fans, but there’s nothing particularly objectionable about this game that would draw any protest or negative attention (other than, y’know, some fucksticks loudly gooning over the game on social media and drawing derision over that; aka the Stellar Blade effect). This Asia-exclusive release strategy is honestly just Koei-Tecmo being idiots, with the absolute most charitable reading being that they want to preserve the Dead or Alive series’ reputation as a fighting game in the West and not dilute that with spin-offs that historically have sold poorly here. It sucks, but at least it’s easy to use a VPN or import the game if you really want to try it.

Bottom-Line

I enjoyed Venus Vacation Prism a lot more than I was expecting to. While I would have certainly preferred a new, mainline Dead or Alive entry, I think it’s extremely unfair to judge this game based on what it isn’t rather than what it is. For what it is, it’s a pretty bog-standard, low-stakes visual novel with some well-integrated dating sim and photography systems. As a result, it’s definitely a pretty niche experience, but I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t enjoy my time with it. Frankly, it’s a considerably more engaging and enjoyable game than any of the Xtreme spin-offs, so I certainly wouldn’t be opposed to getting more spin-offs of this nature in future… just a long as we get Dead or Alive 7 sooner or later!

5/10

(5/10 means the game is pretty average and has some niche appeal – that doesn’t mean it sucks, gamers!)

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Franchises With the Most Games in One Console Generation

While writing my recent Love/Hate posts about the Halo franchise, I was stunned when I realized the amount of effort that had to be put in for the developers to release four mainline Halo games during the Xbox 360 era. Like… these are Halo games, even a smaller title like ODST would have take a ton of work and creativity to complete. This achievement was even more impressive to me compared to today, where most AAA video game developers struggle to release even two games this generation. It got me wondering what other game franchises had a ton of releases over the span of a single console’s lifecycle. Well, it turns out that Halo‘s Xbox 360 run barely even warrants mention next to the titans we’re about to look at.

Some quick notes though about how we’re going to determine our criteria for what counts for this top eight list:

  • The games here will include the original game (if applicable), and any sequels which are treated as a direct follow-up to its predecessor. So, for example, Super Mario Bros 2 would be a sequel to Super Mario Bros, but Mario Tennis or Mario Party would not (they would, instead, be considered their own separate series). This would include some side-games and spin-offs if they were intended to be a major release (for example, Dead Island: Riptide is a sequel, even though it is not a numbered entry like Dead Island 2). This does not apply to follow-ups which are expansions or DLC (such as Half Life: Blue Shift). This also doesn’t include clear, direct spin-off series within a wider franchise (such as Resident Evil: Survivor). It ultimately comes down to a judgment call from me, but I will mention my reasoning as needed.
  • If a game received an official release on the console, then it will be eligible to be counted. However, I am not counting re-releases and remasters which are then released on a later console generation (so, for example, Halo: Combat Evolved would count towards the Xbox’s total, but I would not count Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary towards the Xbox 360’s total since it was a re-release. I will count ports, but only if they are within the same console generation and a short timeframe of the original release (such as Twisted Metal: Head-On, which I would count towards both PSP and PS2).
  • I am not including sports video game franchises. Seeing the entire list clogged up with decades of annualized sports games is just boring – we know that they will dominate the list if we let them compete… the bastards. That said, I did look at all of the major sports games franchises and FIFA comes out on top with a whopping fourteen games releasing on both the PS2 and the Xbox 360!!! (NBA 2K was the second most-prolific, and then Madden.)
  • Also, for simplicity’s sake, if a game has a different number of releases on different consoles across one console generation, I’m only going to count the console with the most releases. This is actually pretty relevant for the Xbox 360, which was getting exclusives and annualized games released on PS2 and Game Cube for a whole year before the PS3 and Wii released, which inflates its numbers somewhat.
  • As I specifically mentioned “console generation” here, it should not surprise you that the PC and mobile are not in consideration for this list, and by extension, PC and mobile-exclusive games do not count.
  • Finally, I have researched as best as I could for this topic, but it’s definitely possible that some obscure series exists with a ton of entries on a single console that I missed. I also don’t doubt that some shovelware publisher has released a threadbare game and several “sequels” in quick succession, but I don’t even think it’s worth anyone’s while for me to even mention those kinds of games anyway.

Honourable Mentions

  • Dynasty Warriors had an impressive five mainline games release on the PS2. However, if I had chosen to include the Xtreme Legends and Empires expansions, then it would have been at ten games released on PS2 instead! It technically doesn’t count under my own rules, but I thought it was notable enough to mention!
  • The Tony Hawk was notorious for pumping out a ton of sequels, but surprisingly, the franchise capped out at five games released on both the PS2 and the Xbox 360. I mean… that’s a lot of games, but it’s barely a blip on the radar for this list.
  • Similarly, the other two franchises I always associated with a flurry of sequels during the PS1 era were Tomb Raider and Twisted Metal. However, these franchises both capped at a total of five games, which just goes to show how many games you had to pump out to even warrant a mention on this list.

Mega Man: 6 Games (Nintendo Entertainment System)

Games: Mega Man (1987), Mega Man 2 (1988), Mega Man 3 (1990), Mega Man 4 (1991), Mega Man 5 (1992), Mega Man 6 (1993)

The Mega Man games were well-known for how many of them were pumped out in the 80s and early 90s, so it was not too surprising to see them make the list. I have never played any of them myself, but even I knew that there were just loads and loads of these games released before I ever held a controller in my hands. They released nearly-annually, which is pretty impressive, but it does explain why the franchise didn’t innovate much at the time.

Rock Band: 6 Games (PlayStation 3/Xbox 360)

Games: Rock Band (2007), Rock Band 2 (2008), The Beatles: Rock Band (2009), Lego Rock Band (2009), Green Day: Rock Band (2010), Rock Band 3 (2010)

Oh my God, the over-saturation of the rhythm game market was absolutely bonkers in the late 2000s. Multiple entries on this list released within a couple months of each other! How could you sustain your audience’s interest with that many releases!

Note: I did not include Rock Band Blitz into this list, because it is meant to be a spiritual successor to Amplitude and Frequency, and therefore is a spin-off. However, I did include Lego Rock Band, because it is a full-on Rock Band game with a Lego skin applied.

Ratchet & Clank: 6 Games (PlayStation 2)

Games: Ratchet & Clank (2002), Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando (2003), Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal (2004), Ratchet: Deadlocked (2005), Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters (2007), Secret Agent Clank (2008)

Wow, I had no idea that the Ratchet & Clank games were so prolific during the PS2 era! They were creative and innovative games, so it never really felt like we were getting over-saturated with Ratchet & Clank games.

Perhaps controversially, I’m counting Secret Agent Clank on this list. I considered cutting it, but it’s meant to be the narrative follow-up to Size Matters and plays similarly to all the other games… I mean, I can’t really justify it as anything but a proper sequel.

Need For Speed: 7 Games (Playstation 2)

Games: Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit 2 (2002), Need For Speed: Underground (2003), Need For Speed: Underground 2 (2004), Need For Speed: Most Wanted (2005), Need For Speed: Carbon (2006), Need For Speed: ProStreet (2007), Need For Speed: Undercover (2008)

It’s wild how Need For Speed was a full-on annualized series on PS2, whereas today the “serious”, AAA racing market is a desert of variety. I appreciated how they would try out different designs in each year’s installment, it always kept the series fresh and exciting.

Assassin’s Creed: 7 Games (Playstation 4/Xbox One)

Games: Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (2013), Assassin’s Creed Unity (2014), Assassin’s Creed Syndicate (2015), Assassin’s Creed Origins (2017), Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (2018), Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (2020), Assassin’s Creed Mirage (2023)

Assassin’s Creed just does not stop, even when it definitely should have. These are such difficult games to pump out annually, with such detailed environments and animations, I do not know how they manage it. That said, when we get seven games on one console, is it any wonder that audiences have gotten burnt out on this franchise on multiple occasions?

Note, I did not count Assassin’s Creed Freedom Cry, since it was intended to be a standalone DLC for Assassin’s Creed IV.

Assassin’s Creed: 8 Games (PlayStation 3/Xbox 360)

Games: Assassin’s Creed (2007), Assassin’s Creed II (2009), Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood (2010), Assassin’s Creed: Revelations (2011), Assassin’s Creed III (2012), Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (2013), Assassin’s Creed Liberation (2014), Assassin’s Creed Rogue (2014)

You got that right, Assassin’s Creed has had so many games release that it managed to beat itself on this list! I did not expect the PS3/Xbox 360 era of Assassin’s Creed to be its most prolific, but I suppose it managed to avoid any of the fatigue-related cooling of the brakes for the release cadence.

Note, I chose to count Assassin’s Creed Liberation‘s port to PS3/Xbox 360 for this list since it released about a year and a half after the PS Vita version and retains the series’ traditional gameplay, so it’s more-or-less a proper sequel in its own right.

Armored Core: 8 Games (PlayStation 2)

Games: Armored Core 2 (2000), Armored Core 2: Another Age (2001), Armored Core 3 (2002), Silent Line: Armored Core (2003), Armored Core: Nexus (2004), Armored Core: Nine Breaker (2004), Armored Core: Formula Front (2004), Armored Core: Last Raven (2005)

Good God, I had no idea there were so many Armored Core games on PS2! FromSoftware were working their asses off in the 2000s, and all for a fairly niche market! I mean, we have three games released in 2004, that should tell you the rate at which this series was being cranked out.

The series’ naming conventions were so weird to parse through, but it seems like the non-numbered entries are not expansions or spin-offs, but full-on games in most cases. I agonized about whether to count Armored Core: Nine Breaker since it was meant to be a stand-alone multiplayer game, back before multiplayer was included as an optional mode in a primarily single-player game. I decided I would count it since it’s technically its own entry in the series, but it’s pushing the limits of what I’d accept…

Traveller’s Tales Lego Franchise: 9 Games (PS4)

Games: Lego Marvel Super Heroes (2013), Lego The Hobbit (2014), Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham (2014), Lego Dimensions (2015), Lego Marvel’s Avengers (2016), Lego Marvel Super Heroes 2 (2017), Lego DC Super-Villains (2018), The Lego Movie 2 Video Game (2019), Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga (2022)

This might be a controversial inclusion here, since I’m counting all the various “franchises” of Lego games under the banner of Traveller’s Tales’ overall Lego game brand, but I don’t think it’s unwarranted. These games all play virtually identically, with some minor changes made to fit the theme of the franchise it’s riffing on. There’s actually been less of them released in the past decade than I realized, with a pretty long wait between 2019 and 2022 for a new release. Hopefully the slower release cadence is a sign of better games to come!

Some notes on what I would consider to qualify for this lst. I would not consider, say, Lego Racers or Lego Rock Band part of this franchise – just being a Lego game does not qualify, the game has to be following the Traveller’s Tales formula for me to consider it here. By that token, I did not include Lego Worlds, which is more like a Lego take on the Minecraft formula. However, I did include Lego Dimensions, since it’s basically just a toys-to-life take on the traditional formula, and The Lego Movie 2 Video Game is basically a Lego game with the Lego IP as its theme, which is kind of funny to think about.

Guitar Hero: 10 Games (Xbox 360)

Games: Guitar Hero II (2006), Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (2007), Guitar Hero: Aerosmith (2008), Guitar Hero World Tour (2008), Guitar Hero: Metallica (2009), Guitar Hero Smash Hits (2009), Guitar Hero 5 (2009), Band Hero (2009), Guitar Hero: Van Halen (2009), Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock (2009)

The rhythm game genre would have been oversaturated by Rock Band‘s releases alone, but Guitar Hero absolutely took the piss with ten games released on the Xbox 360! They released five fucking games in 2009!!! Seriously, the rhythm genre did not die due to disinterest, Activision actively killed the damn thing.

Note, I waffled on whether to include Guitar Hero Smash Hits on this list. Like, I would not consider a band’s greatest hits album to be a proper entry in their discography, right? But ultimately I did decide to include it, because it includes new recordings of many of the older songs, adds in support for other instruments, has new venues, etc, meaning that more-or-less has new content which justifies its existence. I also chose to include Band Hero, since it is identical to Guitar Hero, but with slightly different branding due to being full of pop songs rather than rock/metal.

Need For Speed: 10 Games (Xbox 360)

Games: Need For Speed: Most Wanted (2005), Need For Speed: Carbon (2006), Need For Speed: ProStreet (2007), Need For Speed: Undercover (2008), Need For Speed: Shift (2009), Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit (2010), Shift 2: Unleashed (2011), Need For Speed: The Run (2011), Need For Speed: Most Wanted (2012), Need For Speed: Rivals (2013)

As impressed as I was with the release cadence for Need For Speed on PS2, it is wild how many of these games released on Xbox 360. However, you can really see how much flailing EA were doing during this console generation, as they went from arcade action with Most Wanted, to failed attempts at more serious games with ProStreet and Shift, and then back to a Most Wanted reboot to try to recapture what previously worked. Despite that, the series still put out a new game every single year (and two of them in 2011!), which is pretty wild for a franchise which was struggling with an identity crisis, and I imagine the breakneck release schedule didn’t help any with that.

Call of Duty: 11 Games (Xbox 360)

Games: Call of Duty 2 (2005), Call of Duty 3 (2006), Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007), Call of Duty: World at War (2008), Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009), Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010), Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2011), Call of Duty: Black Ops II (2012), Call of Duty: Ghosts (2013), Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (2014), Call of Duty: Black Ops III (2015)

We all knew that Call of Duty was going to make this list. A new Call of Duty game each year is one of the universe’s constants; we are all truly fucked when Activision finally decides to take a year off. Looking back, this series was absolute fire during this era, as the run from Modern Warfare to Black Ops II gave us some of the best first person shooters of all-time.

Note, the Xbox 360 port of the original Call of Duty does not count for this list, as it was ported six years after it originally released.

Call of Duty: 12 Games (PlayStation 4)

Games: Call of Duty: Ghosts (2013), Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (2014), Call of Duty: Black Ops III (2015), Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare (2016), Call of Duty: WWII (2017), Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 (2018), Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019), Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War (2020), Call of Duty: Vanguard (2021), Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (2022), Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III (2023), Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 (2024)

Yeah, that’s right, like Assassin’s Creed, Call of Duty is so prolific that it manages to smash its own, absolutely insane records, despite multiple revolts from their hardcore fans during this console generation. The craziest part is that there very well could be more games releasing on PS4 in future, so this number may end up getting higher in the next couple years!

Note, I am not counting Call of Duty: Warzone as a separate game, as it is a stand-alone multiplayer mode that is included in the mainline releases.

Traveller’s Tales Lego Franchise: 15 Games (Xbox 360)

Games: Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy (2006), Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures (2008), Lego Batman: The Video Game (2008), Lego Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues (2009), Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4 (2010), Lego Star Wars III: The Clone Wars (2011), Lego Pirates of the Caribbean: The Video Game (2011), Lego Harry Potter: Years 5-7 (2011), Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes (2012), Lego The Lord of the Rings (2012), Lego Marvel Super Heroes (2013), Lego The Hobbit (2014), Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham (2014), Lego Dimensions (2015), Lego Marvel’s Avengers (2016)

Okay, I knew that the number of Lego games on PS4 felt kind of low, but fifteen games on Xbox 360 is absolutely nuts. The different franchises helped to break things up and allow you to engage with the properties you cared about, but it’s no wonder this game formula became so over-saturated when we had this many games in eight years!

Note, Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga does not count for this list, since it is a re-release of the first two Lego Star Wars games. Bionicle Heroes also does not count, since it is not following the “Traveller’s Tales Lego game formula” that binds this disparate franchise together.

Just Dance: 18 Games (Wii)

Games: Just Dance (2009), Just Dance 2 (2010), Just Dance Kids (2010), Just Dance 3 (2011), Just Dance Wii (2011), Just Dance Kids 2 (2011), Just Dance Wii 2 (2012), Just Dance 4 (2012), Just Dance: Disney Party (2012), Just Dance 2014 (2013), Just Dance Kids 2014 (2013), Just Dance 2015 (2014), Just Dance 2016 (2015), Just Dance: Disney Party 2 (2015), Just Dance 2017 (2016), Just Dance 2018 (2017), Just Dance 2019 (2018), Just Dance 2020 (2019)

GOOD GOD, eighteen games in a ten year period!?!! Some of these games literally released within less than a week of the previous entry! I knew that the Just Dance games had a bunch of releases, but I never would have imagined that it was that prolific. To me, the wildest part about this is that Just Dance didn’t start releasing games until three years into the Wii’s lifecycle… can you imagine how many more games there would have been if we had gotten three more years of releases?

Note, I am not including Just Dance Summer Party, as it is basically a re-release of Just Dance 2. Likewise, Just Dance: Best Of is straight-up a greatest hits compilation with minimal changes made to the formula. I chose to include the Kids and Disney Party games on this list, as they are fundamentally identical to a mainline entry, just with kid-centric soundtracks. Also, Just Dance Wii and Wii 2 were Japan-exclusive, but that counts as far as I’m concerned!

Singstar: At Least 39 Games (PS2)

Games: SingStar (2004), SingStar Party (2004), SingStar Anthems (2006), SingStar Rocks! (2006), SingStar Norske Hits (2007), SingStar Pop (2007), SingStar Popworld (2007), SingStar Pop Hits (2007), SingStar: Die Toten Hosen (2007), SingStar Svenska Hits (2007), SingStar Svenska Hits Schlager (2007), SingStar ’80s (2007), SingStar Amped (2007), SingStar Rock Ballads (2007), SingStar Deutsch Rock-Pop Vol. 2 (2007), SingStar Bollywood (2007), SingStar R&B (2007), SingStar: Morangos com Açúcar (2008), SingStar ’90s (2008), SingStar Summer Party (2008), SingStar Pop Vol. 2 (2008), SingStar Hottest Hits (2008), SingStar Boy Bands vs Girl Bands (2008), SingStar Country (2008), SingStar Legends (2008), SingStar Singalong With Disney (2008), SingStar ABBA (2008), SingStar Queen (2009), SingStar Motown (2009), SingStar Take That (2009), SingStar Vasco (2009), SingStar Latino (2009), SingStar Kent (2010), SingStar The Wiggles (2010), SingStar: Fussballhits (2010), SingStar Portugal Hits (2010), SingStar SuomiHitit (2010), SingStar Studio 100 (2010), SingStar Chart Hits (2010)

WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK!?!?!!! I knew that there were a bunch of SingStar games, but I had no idea the franchise was this fucking unhinged. By the way: 39 games is an estimate based on what I could find, there very well could be nearly double that number!

It’s worth mentioning that this particular list was a massive pain in the ass to collate. No one can seem to agree which SingStar game was released when, or how many of these games there even are. Some games were region-exclusive, and even international releases will often have different tracks in different territories. Wikipedia doesn’t even have a complete list, and everywhere I looked for lists of what games had been released, I would find new entries I’d never heard of, while others were missing from their lists… what the fuck is going on here???

Honestly, I throw my hands up to this one, SingStar has defeated me. Backloggd says that there were 61 games released on PS2 in a six year period, and I’m just going to take their word for it. God help us if there is a video game franchise with even more entries in one console generation…

My 100 Worst Movies of All-Time (100-51)

Rounding out this new series of favourite and least favourite media, we have my list of the one hundred worst movies of all-time. Films here have earned their placement based on how badly-made they are, if I’d ever want to watch it again, and how much I personally despise the film in question. There are actually quite a few movies on here that I think are extremely entertaining, and I will mention this when it’s relevant, but I have put more weight on their general quality than how enjoyable they are. And, again, these are all very subjective opinions and can only really be based on the movies I personally have seen. Got it? Let’s get into it.

100. Big, Bad Wolf (2006)

Werewolves are my favourite movie monsters, so I will admit that some of my distaste for this film stems from how they handled the central monster. There are two really big negatives here. First of all, the werewolf talks a lot. He is a joker who gives Freddy Krueger a run for his money in terms of all the bad jokes he spouts. Secondly, this werewolf likes to rape women. This film’s pretty notorious for being the one where the werewolf rapes people, and you know that they lean into the exploitation aspect of that. There are a couple pretty prominent scenes of rape and sexual assault, which just makes the film all that more unpleasant to watch, especially when it’s also trying to be comedic.

99. Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker (2019)

I don’t think there’s ever been a movie I watched more out of obligation than The Rise of Skywalker. By the time it released, I was already sick of Star Wars due to the fanboy discourse around The Last Jedi. Then, when I found out that The Rise of Skywalker was undoing all the “unpopular” elements of The Last Jedi, it made me even more hostile going in. The main thing that I liked about The Last Jedi was that it was setting up a future for Star Wars to tell new stories, instead of just rehashing the greatest hits, so it seemed like The Rise of Skywalker was just going to be more half-assed original trilogy homages. I walked into that theater, but I didn’t do so with any excitement – it was Star Wars, so I had to see it. I could have been watching Knives Out, Jumanji, or goddamn Cats instead!

While this obviously coloured my opinion on the film, there were plenty of other things that really fell flat: an insultingly-dumb narrative, breaking the rules of the Star Wars universe constantly, twists that feel completely unearned, emotionally manipulative attempts to tug at your nostalgia strings… the list goes on.

This movie just makes me feel empty. It’s by far the worst Star Wars movie ever made. I don’t even consider it canon, I’ve basically deleted it from my mind, to the point where I get genuinely surprised when I’m reminded of its existence.

98. The Babysitter: Killer Queen (2020)

I had extremely low expectations for the original Babysitter film, but the premise sounded funny enough that I gave it a shot. I was actually pleasantly surprised by how fun it was, largely thanks to the fantastic lead performance by Samara Weaving. When I found out that they were going to make a sequel without her, I was hesitant, but figured I’d give it a shot again. Unfortunately, Killer Queen is a half-baked, self-referencing rehash of the original. I’ll give Emily Alyn Lind credit for trying to be a fierce villain, but she’s no Samara Weaving.

97. Battlefield Earth (2000)

One of the most notoriously bad movies ever made, Battlefield Earth is largely remembered for being terrible due to its ties to Scientology. If you’ve actually seen the film, you will know that it is extremely campy. It also just looks and feels weird, being shot near-entirely in Dutch angles. That said, I feel like Battlefield Earth‘s notoriety is more due to its prominence and political leanings than its actual qualities. The movie is pretty terrible (hence its placement on the list), but it is also bad in an entertaining, expensive, professionally-made way. You could certainly do a whole lot worse, as you will soon see…

96. An American Werewolf in Paris (1997)

An American Werewolf in London‘s most hailed aspect was its amazing practical effects, so why the fuck did they think that a fully-CGI werewolf would be acceptable for its sequel? Bear in mind that this was done using 1997 CGI (that is to say, it looks worse than most modern made-for-TV movies). The film also seems to have misunderstood the comedic elements of its predecessor, attempting to go for a much more over-the-top tone, which is just grating.

95. Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 (2011)

This first Atlas Shrugged adaptation fails, not so much due to its deluded politics (the most offensive of which are toned down quite a bit), but due to being incredibly boring, cheap, and poorly-made. The film is all “tell, don’t show” and my God does it want nothing more than to go on didactic rants. There’s not even a payoff, since this is very much a “part one” movie, making it an even more inessential watch if you’re not prepared to strap in and watch its even worse sequels…

94. Ouija (2014)

Few horror movies are as limp as Ouija. It features dull characters, terrible attempts at scaring the audience, a toothless PG-13 rating, and is just plain boring to top it off. It’s a bad movie, and not even in a fun way, which makes it all the more shocking how good its prequel turned out (and makes this movie’s quality all the more offensive).

93. The Happytime Murders (2018)

I wanted to like The Happytime Murders. A goofy, raunchy, puppet-based cop comedy sounds like a good time. Furthermore, Melissa McCarthy gets too much hate; this seems like the sort of project she could do well in. Unfortunately, The Happytime Murders is just… stupid. It’s the most cliched cop movie premise you could ask for, with the only original thing being its puppet gimmick that it assumes will let it get by. Instead, it quickly turns into a one-note joke in a film which is direly short on laughs (we get it, it’s another puppet having sex and doing drugs, do you have any other jokes?). Hell, Melissa McCarthy barely even makes an impression, good or bad. She’s just “here” filling a role literally anyone else could have. Like a puppet without a master, the film is nowhere near good enough to hold itself up when its only gimmick is running this thin.

92. A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

A Nightmare on Elm Street seems like it should be a decent remake. Jackie Earl Haley is great casting for the new Freddy, it’s got an early performance from Rooney Mara, and it explores new ground with sleep deprivation and how that could bring nightmares into the waking realm, making Freddy even more unavoidable. Unfortunately, A Nightmare on Elm Street does one of my least favourite 80s tropes: “what if Satanic Panic, but real?” Considering that the Satanic Panic ruined several lives over a moral panic that was entirely fictional (not to mention that it made nerds and metalheads social pariahs for more than a decade), I hate seeing this concept get legitimized… and that’s not even getting into how they explicitly made Freddy a pedophile here. It works for the character, but my God, when they make it an overt part of the plot, it does not make him enjoyable to watch. Really though, the worst part of A Nightmare on Elm Street is how dull and formulaic it is, which is a real shame, because the original films are some of the most creative slashers in the entire industry.

91. Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004)

I often hear people saying that the only good Resident Evil movies are the first one and Apocalypse. These people are dead wrong. I can only imagine that they watched them once when they were young and haven’t seen them in at least fifteen years, because Apocalypse suuuuuucks (and so does the first Resident Evil movie, but it’s good enough at least to not end up on this list). This was the start of the “Alice is a Mary Sue” trope in these movies, and every other character ends up being upstaged by her, or they are just worthless to the narrative. The action isn’t even all that good either, thanks to the weak direction.

90. Friday the 13th: Part III (1982)

Friday the 13th: Part III is close to being enjoyable thanks to its cast of memorable weirdos (Shelly, the biker gang, the annoying hillbillies, fuckin’ Chili), some gnarly kills, and Chris is probably my favourite final girl in the entire franchise. However, the film really falls flat due to being a really dull rehash of the previous two films (which also weren’t that great for that matter). The directors of these films seem to think that tension is built by having characters dick around for several minutes until something happens, but in this movie they forgot that they probably should have these characters, y’know, actually do something. Instead, we get scenes like the bikers frolicking aimlessly in a barn for minutes on end when they’re supposed to be prepping for a vengeful arson. The film also was shot in 80s 3D, so it looks pretty embarrassing today. This is the sort of film that’s more enjoyable as a series of highlight clips on Youtube than it is as an actual viewing experience.

89. Fantastic 4 (2015)

Josh Trank’s much-maligned superhero reboot feels like it has executive meddling all over it. It’s interesting, with ambitions to be a gritty, morally grey, body-horror-inspired take on the material. Unfortunately, what we get here is half-baked, messy, and fails to capitalize on any potential in the premise, ultimately making the whole affair feel pointless.

88. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016)

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies should have been so simple: take the, er, skeleton of Pride and Prejudice and then add some over-the-top zombie action between the romantic drama. Instead, the film opts for an excessively-serious take on Pride and Prejudice with some scenes and lines changed to add in zombies, which makes them feel perfunctory rather than a key part of the story (imagine that). Oh and then add in that this is a wannabe-gory zombie film that’s being neutered by a PG-13 rating, so you can’t even get any visceral thrills to stave off the boredom. Add it all up and you’ve got a boring, one-note slog that it should have been a slam-dunk fun time at the movies.

87. Assassin’s Creed (2016)

Assassin’s Creed had all of the potential in the world, from its cast, to its production values, to the unusually strong narrative of its video game source material. Unfortunately, it’s all completely wasted on a script which strips out all of the mystery and intrigue of the games, spends 90% of its dialogue reiterating the exact same dialogue about free will over and over again, and is just plain dull. I would love to find out where exactly this project was screwed up, because there was so much potential for a great movie here that the fact that they missed by so much is a crying shame.

86. A Good Day to Die Hard (2013)

A Good Day to Die Hard is, frankly, a really sad end for this storied franchise. Say what you will about some of the other Die Hard sequels, but this is the only one that is outright bad, with weak action sequences, a script by Skip Woods (that is to say: full of complicated political intrigue that does not translate well to a fast-paced action movie, making the whole thing seem dumb as all hell), and poor chemistry between Bruce Willis and Jai Courtney. Hell, even John McClane is annoying in this movie, which is a sentence that should never have to be written, but here we are.

85. Hellraiser: Hellseeker (2002)

I’ve been watching the Hellraiser sequels this year and, thus far, they haven’t been nearly as bad as I had heard. I legitimately kind of like the wild ambition of Bloodlines, and Inferno and Deader are way better and more interesting than they have any right to be. However, that cannot be said of Hellseeker, which is an absolute slog of a film. The film commits multiple deadly cinematic sins, most notably that it brings back original final girl Kirsty Cotton, only to kill her off in the opening minutes. Instead, we spend the rest of the runtime with her boring-ass husband, Trevor, who just looks constantly confused. The next hour and a half are spent in explicit dream logic, with no way to tell what is really happening and what is not, or when scenes shift from reality to fiction. This might sound like it could be spooky or leaves the film up for interpretation, but it’s not that deep. Instead, it just gets fucking annoying, causing me to stop caring about what is happening, because the film sure as hell doesn’t want me to invest in any of it. It doesn’t help that this movie came after the much better-executed Inferno and is clearly drawing inspiration from it, meaning that the reason for all this dream logic is pretty obvious if you had seen that film already.

84. Hellraiser: Hell on Earth (1992)

As bad as Hellseeker is, Hell on Earth definitely takes the cake as the worst Hellraiser I’ve seen (so far). You can feel the Weinsteins’ fingers all over this movie, forcing bigger body counts for Pinhead and the Cenobites to turn them into more traditional slasher villains. Those Cenobites, by the way, are just embarrassing this time around, with some of the ugliest designs in the entire franchise. All this results in a film which just does not work. The characters suck, the attempts to expand the mythology suck, the script sucks… everything just sucks here.

83. Wrath of the Titans (2012)

Despite its success, the Clash of the Titans remake was pretty bad, getting by from Liam Neeson saying “Release the kraken!” and being the first big 3D movie released after Avatar. I figured they’d try harder to justify a sequel, but somehow they managed to make a film which was even dumber and more generic than its predecessor (which is a feat in itself).

82. Resident Evil: Retribution (2012)

Retribution is by far the dumbest Resident Evil movie. There’s shockingly little plot here: Alice is trapped in an Umbrella facility and needs to escape… that’s it. Meanwhile, a bunch of characters from the games (who are terribly brought to life on the big screen) are trying to break her out. Oh, and Milla Jovovich had just had kids, so now Alice is a mother, despite it never being an aspect of her character until now. How do they force this in? Well, she meets a kid who thinks she’s her mom, because Alice is stuck in a real-life simulation where Alice clones have been trying to survive a zombie apocalypse… life I said, it’s fucking dumb. We then get a bunch of admittedly decent action scenes, but there’s basically no substance to grab onto here. You can do better, trust me.

Oh, and that kid? Dead by the time the credits roll. Boy, being a mom sure was important to Alice!

81. Hitman (2007)

It’s bad when you’re watching a story that is so convoluted and nonsensical that you think “this must be a Skip Woods film”, and then check IMDb to confirm your suspicious are correct. I dunno if the guy just writes elaborate scripts which then get butchered on their way to screen, but he legitimately is one of the worst screenwriters in all of Hollywood.

80. Saw 3D (2010)

Saw 3D opens with a trap which has two guys strapped to a table saw. A woman, who is cheating on them both, is suspended above them. They are instructed by Jigsaw to take a life in order to free themselves. Oh, and this trap takes place in a public storefront, so they quickly draw a crowd of onlookers who just stand there and gawk rather than, y’know, trying to stop this attempted murder. It’s so bonkers that I legitimately thought that this was supposed to be a public theater satire of the Jigsaw killings, but no… it’s a real Jigsaw trap and they actually want us to take this whole thing seriously. It was at this point that I realized that Saw 3D was going to suck.

Saw 3D is a cartoonish embarrassment, easily the worst Saw film ever made. There are some pretty nasty traps here, but they’re undermined by significantly more traps which are just idiotic> The colour grading is awful due to being shot in 3D, which makes the copious amounts of blood look hot pink. It also features an infuriating finale, with perhaps the most unjustified death of the entire franchise. It’s absolutely no wonder the franchise took a seven year hiatus to try to wash the stink of this movie off.

79. Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)

Most of the Friday the 13th movies are consistently mediocre, rarely deviating from a pretty simple formula. However, around the time of Part VII, the producers started feeling like they needed to bring in some gimmicks, and Jason Takes Manhattan seemed like it could be the most exciting of these. The promise of having Jason head into the big city to carve up teens sounded like it could shake up the formula just enough to be a big, blockbuster event. Unfortunately, Jason Takes Manhattan is notorious for being one of the most disappointing films in the entire franchise. Pretty much everyone knows that the New York section of the film only last about twenty minutes and the rest of the film is spent on a cruise ship, where Jason somehow manages to go unnoticed as he kills tons of irritating kids who give us no reason to actually care about them. The film also introduces an idiotic “kid Jason” subplot which is one of the most embarrassing ideas in the entire franchise (which is saying something, considering some of the bullshit they added in the latter-day sequels).

78. Survival of the Dead (2009)

I’ll give George A. Romero credit for continuing to make films and try to push the zombie genre forward as he was approaching his seventieth year. Unfortunately, Survival of the Dead was an embarrassing note to end that career on. You can see glimmers of the social commentary which helped make his original Dead trilogy so good. The film takes place on an island where a bunch of ranchers are attempting to cure their undead relatives. Cowboy and Hatfield/McCoy shenanigans ensue from there. Unfortunately, the film is just fucking stupid, cheap, and poorly-shot, with dull characters. About the only thing that actually stood out to me was that the film answers the question “What happens if you bite a zombie?” That’s… pretty dire if it’s the only thing that really stands out about the film (the answer is “You become a zombie”, by the way).

77. Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016)

I fucking hate this movie. Paul W.S. Anderson pulls a bunch of shit from his ass to try to make sense of this franchise he’s cobbled together and try to give it some sort of satisfying send-off. As you’d probably expect, the results are really dumb and not satisfying in the least. What you may not expect is that the actions scenes kind of suck here as well, negating the one defense that people will try to use to justify liking these movies. Worst of all though is that a man died and a stuntwoman got maimed making this piece of shit movie, all because Paul W.S. Anderson and the other producers cheaped out on the production and put their crew at risk. Imagine dying or having to get your arm amputated, all for goddamn Resident Evil: The Final Chapter. Fuck this movie, it deserves to rot in hell.

76. Superman III (1983)

This movie is just so embarrassing. Superman becomes a secondary character in his own film, while Richard Pryor performs a bunch of cartoon antics that take up way too much screen time. The plot is incredibly dumb, full of the childish jokes that people complained about in the theatrical cut of Superman II since Richard Lester has taken over full directing duties this time around. It’s kind of a shame too, because the cast are generally great. There’s also a cool subplot where Superman is turned evil, but then Clark Kent splits from him and the two sides of Superman have to fight for control. It’s a genuinely good concept, which is entirely out of place in a film where a woman gets pushed into a computer and is instantly turned into an android…

75. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)

Michael Bay’s original Transformers film was actually pretty well-regarded when it released. It wasn’t until this movie, Revenge of the Fallen, that people really came to realize that these movies were not good. The action was incoherent, the narrative was dumb, and the film was incredibly lowbrow (to the point of having two racist caricature robots and a transformer with a set of testicles), and the film was overloaded with CGI.

74. Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014)

Honestly though, I think Age of Extinction is even worse than its more notorious older sibling. This is the Transformers film with a character who carries a card on him to justify statutory rape. We’ve got Mark Wahlberg taking over as the leading man… which I guess is an upgrade? He’s incredibly dull, but at least he doesn’t annoy me like Shia LaBeouf’s Sam did. We also get a healthy dose of Stanley Tucci, which is a highlight, but even watching him doing cartoonish antics gets grating the longer it goes on. For the most part, Age of Extinction is every bit as loud and dumb as any other Transformers movie, but what puts it over the edge for me is my experience when I watched it in theaters. The movie had dragged on to what felt like a climactic action sequence and the story seemed to be wrapping up. I legitimately thought the movie was about to end, and if it did, then this wouldn’t have been my least-favourite Transformers movie. But no, then suddenly the film goes to China, and I check my watch: we’re only halfway through this movie, what the fuck!? Suffice to say, the back half of this movie was worse than the front, making this drawn out experience feel even more torturous.

73. The Wicker Man (2006)

The quintessential “Youtube highlight reel” movie, The Wicker Man isn’t really worth watching. The clips you see online are weird, but in-context they do make some sense. However, this movie is a pure, bad 2000s horror remake (glossy production, big budget, weak horror elements). It’s only differentiator is that Cage’s performance is absolutely bonkers, but you really should just stick with the highlight reels.

72. Death Note (2017)

I have the perhaps notorious opinion that the Death Note anime is kind of trash. In what world is a show, where 70% of its episodes are bad and then 30% are great, “one of the greatest anime of all-time”? So, believe me, I was not coming into this Death Note adaptation expecting it to suck. Hell, I was actually kind of excited, because I already liked Adam Wingard for You’re Next and Willem Dafoe as Ryuk was awesome. I love the premise of Death Note, so I was eager to see if a different interpretation could do better. Unfortunately, this Death Note movie squanders basically everything that actually was good about the manga and anime in favour of a by-the-numbers supernatural crime drama. Gone are all the philosophical musings about morality and justice which were the main reason the series was so compelling to begin with. Instead, it’s just generic cop plots and high school killer clichés.

71. The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009)

In high school, my friends and I would do these really amateur rifftrax of movies we didn’t like. We got through most of the Twilight movies, but I feel like we gave them a fair shake (we all felt that Eclipse was not bad). I get that these movies are not for me, and I don’t want to yuck anyone’s yum… but, my God, this movie was a torturous experience. It is so slow and dull, stretching a thin plot over more than two hours of runtime. The main characters make this feel even worse, because I didn’t give a shit about any of them (I will say that the background characters have much more interesting personalities though).

70. Independence Day: Resurgence (2016)

When I was ordering this list, Transformers: Age of Extinction became a bit of a barometer for me. I’d think of bad blockbusters and ask “Is this movie worse than Age of Extinction?” to help rank them. For Independence Day: Resurgence, that was a very quick and definitive “YES”, which should give you an idea of how bad it is. This long-belated sequel is even louder and dumber than the worst Transformers film. For a movie that was in development for twenty years, it’s almost shocking how half-baked Resurgence feels. There are lots of pointless subplots, the “escalated” threat feels no where near as potent as it did in the original, and the characters have basically no development and give us no reason to actually care about them. In fact, the only characters I felt anything for were the gay scientist couple, but that was mainly because of their charming performances rather than the script. If you want mindless action, then the movie will deliver that, but it’s not even particularly noteworthy in that regard. Just rewatch the original if you need some stupid fun, it did that far more competently.

69. The Purge (2013)

The Purge was the biggest disappointment I have had in theaters. The premise is incredible: crime becomes legal for twelve hours once a year! However, they clearly had no budget to work with, so they set the entire film inside a single house. The entire premise just gets used as an excuse for why their home is getting invaded, why their power has been cut, and why they can’t just leave. Making matters worse, most of the film revolves around the Sandin family somehow managing to get lost in their own goddamn house as they try to find a homeless veteran who snuck in to try to escape the purgers. I didn’t expect The Purge to be anywhere near amazing, but it failed to be even entertaining.

68. The Angry Birds Movie (2016)

If you are, like, the youngest of kids, then Angry Birds probably passes for you, but just barely… Unless you are amongst the most easily entertained of people, Angry Birds is just a collection of dull “comedy” scenes stitched together haphazardly, which are anchored by a bunch of irritating pastiche characters, all in an effort to try to turn this shitty mobile game into a proper multi-media franchise. Yeah… good luck with that, Rovio.

67. Don’t Breathe 2 (2021)

Don’t Breathe 2 is one of those sequels that is fundamentally flawed in its conception and therefore doomed to failure, no matter how it was handled. The Blind Man is a relentless monster and trying to humanize him for this sequel is an idiotic move. This would just be a boring, run-of-the-mill father revenge movie, but it’s a sequel to Don’t Breathe. There’s certain expectations that come with that, and this film does not meet them! There’s barely any tension to be had. Worse though, the film doesn’t even acknowledge that The Blind Man is a psycho rapist, we’re just supposed to accept his own justification that he “technically didn’t rape anyone”, forget about it, and accept that he’s changed. It’s so fundamentally stupid that it brings the rest of the film down around it.

66. Red Dawn (2012)

I will never forget how hard I laughed when I was watching Red Dawn, and then it suddenly turned into an ad for Subway. I’m not even joking, it was the most blatant product placement I had ever seen in my life. Josh Hutcherson even called the employee a sandwich artist and made sure they used his favourite warm and flaky bread!

I thought that the original Red Dawn was kind of crappy, so I wasn’t even going into this expecting it to not live up to the original. However, this film can’t even reach those modest heights. The film gets let down by its characters (who, if they aren’t just bland, are straight-up unlikeable), mediocre action sequences, and a script which is insulting to the audience’s intelligence at times. Also, the fact that North Korea are the ones conquering America is fucking hilarious (and then it’s frustrating when you realize this is because they shot the film to be about a Chinese invasion, but then edited it so that they could try to sell the film in China… like, have some integrity to something other than the almighty dollar).

65. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (2011)

Look, as bad as New Moon was, it doesn’t hold a candle to Breaking Dawn – Part 1. The previous Twilight films barely had enough plot to fill one movie. The thought that you could get two movies out of Breaking Dawn is laughable, and the film suffers due to Lionsgate’s desire to double-dip their audience. The film is every bit as boring as New Moon and is just as long as the other movies, but there’s less plot to work with than ever before, making this an even more torturous viewing.

64. Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021)

I have so much I want to complain about with this movie, but I’ll keep it relatively brief. An adaptation that’s more faithful to the source material makes sense for Resident Evil, but there are so many bone-headed decisions made here and half-baked ideas. The film is loaded with Easter eggs and callbacks to the games, but these end up serving no purpose to the actual narrative, which makes them feel cheap and insulting to the audience’s intelligence. This movie’s girl-boss version of Claire is somehow less interesting than than her “she’s just a normal tomboy” persona from the games. Leon being portrayed as a washed-up failure of a cop is an interesting idea, but he is given absolutely nothing to do in the entire movie, so it just feels like someone had a personal vendetta against his character. The idea of having Raccoon City as a ghost town feels like it was done to make filming during COVID restrictions easier, but it ruins the entire premise of a mass outbreak that makes the games’ version of these events so compelling. Resident Evil games don’t exactly have great stories, but the first and second games have very different tones and plot structures. You don’t have to be a fucking genius to realize that, if you mash the plots of the first two games together, it doesn’t make any sense and ends up creating a narrative that is so much worse than either by itself. Oh, and don’t even get me started on what are the stealthiest zombies I’ve ever seen in a movie, dear God. The one positive I can say is that the cast are all really good, I just wish they had been given some proper material to work with. As is, Welcome to Raccoon City is as bad as the worst Paul W.S. Anderson Resident Evil movies, which is something I never expected to have to say.

63. Taken 3 (2014)

Look, we were already burnt out on the Liam Neeson action movie after Taken 2, but Taken 3 still felt like one of Bryan Mills’ signature nut punches. The film has two major issues which leave it hamstrung. First of all, the action just plain sucks, due in large part to the haphazard, rapid-fire editing (not to mention that there is a distinct lack of actual action this time around during basically the entire second act). Secondly, the writing is abysmal. Idiotic plot conveniences abound. I literally slapped myself in the face at least five times during the movie in frustration at how stupid everyone was for the sake of the plot. Not to go on a tangent, but I noticed the freaking bagels the second he found Lenore dead: he had an ironclad alibi and could have been released in a couple hours if the police just checked a fucking security camera. Instead, Bryan Mills decides to get into gun fights and car chases with the police every five minutes, presumably because he’s an idiot. Beyond even that though, I’m kind of insulted that they fridged Lenore to begin with. For one thing, it is such an overused and sexist trope that it demonstrates just how lazy the writers are. For another, it retroactively makes Taken 2 even worse by making its third act pointless, since we now know she’s going to die anyway.

62. R.I.P.D. (2013)

R.I.P.D. is what happens when a movie exec decides to cater to all the things that people like. It combines Men in Black, Ghostbusters, Jeff Bridges’ Rooster Cogburn, and Ryan Reynolds (before people were getting annoyed with him). However, the resulting movie ends up feeling way too juvenile for its own good.

The film has some funny moments, but more often than not you’re left groaning at the bafflingly stupid, juvenile jokes which were thrown in for no good reason. Like… there’s a scene where they’re chasing the bad guys, and these bad guys are just farting constantly as they run away… it’s so funny that I forgot to laugh. The plot was very formulaic as well, which could have been fine if the rest of the film was enjoyable, but seeing that it wasn’t, it just ends up making the whole thing feel worse.

61. Catwoman (2004)

Catwoman is one of those films where I cannot believe that they actually released this in theaters. It is such a baffling movie, with unhinged performances from Sharon Stone and Halle Berry. I’d love to say that this movie is a misunderstood masterpiece, as it does have a great look for Berry and some style, it’s just so, so dumb. We got a lot of really bad comic book movies in the 2000s, and Catwoman is undoubtedly the worst of them.

60. Terminator Genisys (2015)

The only nice thing I can say about Terminator Genisys is that it retroactively made people fonder of Salvation. The entire premise of having John Connor turn evil feels downright blasphemous to the series’ legacy. Emilia Clarke and Jai Courtney are about the two worst actors you could have picked to lead a major film like this, which is even worse when you compare them to Linda Hamilton and Michael Biehn. The film is also basically a “greatest hits”, remixing scenes from significantly better Terminator movies to lesser effect. Predictably, this makes the film feel like it has no identity of its own, other than being really fucking dumb.

59. Alien: Resurrection (1997)

God I hate this movie. I get that they wanted to go for a different tone, but… guys, it sucks so bad. The Whedon-isms are grating and clash with the off-beat style of Jean-Pierre Jeunet. The aliens also stop being the real threat about two thirds of the way through, leaving us with an abomination of a replacement. Oh, and Ripley fucking suuuuucks in this film.

58. Jurassic World: Dominion (2022)

I HATED Fallen Kingdom, so when I find myself thinking back on it with some fondness after watching Dominion, you know that Trevorrow has screwed up big-time. There are so many things I could complain about in this movie, but here’s just a handful of them:

  • The legacy characters are blatantly shoehorned into this movie. You could cut them out of the film entirely with basically no effect to the main plot.
  • The movie has stripped out the horror elements of the series entirely. It’s now just straight-up action, which is far less interesting.
  • The bad guys are all a bunch of unthreatening weenies. I don’t even mean just the human characters either: Giganotosaurus, which is only in this movie to give the T-rex something to fight, has absolutely no bearing on the greater plot and can barely muster a threat to our characters (compare that to the Spinosaur in Jurassic Park III to really understand how dire this film is at everything).
  • The film is incredibly bloated. At one point it felt like it was going to end and then I realized there were (somehow) still fourty-five more minutes left.
  • The film commits to some incredibly stupid retcons. These retcons obviously were put in place to try to respond to criticism of Fallen Kingdom, but in their cowardice, they just made it worse.
  • The stupidest thing about this movie though is that it ends with the message “hey, genetic manipulation is cool actually and will solve all our problems with it!” How much further from Jurassic Park could you get than that?

Dominion is just further evidence that Jurassic Park should never have had sequels, or at the very least, the franchise should have not been brought back from extinction after Crichton’s death. I’m probably going to do another round of Retrospective catch-ups eventually, so expect more expanded thoughts on this movie in the future.

57. Left Behind: Rise of the Antichrist (2023)

GOD, this movie is just fucking exhausting. It’s like spending all your time on Twitter reading what the grifters and outrage merchants are saying; it makes you want to scratch your face off in frustration. That said, complain all you want about the in-your-face politics: the real, crippling issue it faces is that it is criminally dull. For reference, the original Left Behind adapted all the material in this movie into a fairly brisk hour. This movie stretches that out to two hours and it absolutely drags as a result. Add in some very lethargic performances (especially from ol’ Sorbo himself) and the aforementioned ham-fisted politics, and this is a film that struggles to maintain interest.

56. Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li (2009)

Oh good, finally we get a movie that is just really badly made rather than one that actively pisses me off just thinking about it. Put simply, The Legend of Chun-Li is crap on basically every level. It’s pretty embarrassing when you make a Street Fighter film which gets completely outclassed in all regards by the notorious Jean Claude van Damme film, but they somehow managed that here. The Legend of Chun-Li is not even all that entertaining either, with some very limp fight scenes. It also features a couple shockingly violent (for PG-13) scenes which are jarring against the overall light tone, further making you wonder what the hell anyone was thinking while making this movie.

55. The Escape Plan 2: Hades (2018)

I legitimately really enjoyed the original Escape Plan movie, it was a good 80s throwback film with a fun cast and premise. I didn’t expect much from a sequel, but if it could capture even a fraction of the previous film’s quality, it would still be decent. Unbelievably, Escape Plan 2: Hades is so ineptly put together that I can’t believe that Stallone and Dave Bautista signed on to be in it. There might have been a decent movie in here somewhere, but it’s totally wasted on a poorly shot and horrendous, incoherently edited film.

54. Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Meyers (1989)

Halloween 5 is a pretty terrible film, even by slasher sequel standards. The film was shot without a completed script, and it totally shows, because there is no way that someone could sit down and intentionally write out the events of this film before it was filmed. The film throws in a bunch of dumb mythology about ill-defined bloodlines and curses, and Tina is one of the dumbest final girls in slasher history, making for a movie where you can feel your brain cells dying as you watch it.

53. Halloween Kills (2021)

My God, Halloween truly is the worst major horror franchise, because so many of its entries fucking suck. Halloween Kills is the most recent of these abominations (I… mostly liked Halloween Ends?). In a lot of ways, it’s a high-production value version of an 80s slasher sequel: a terrible plot and characters, but lots of brutal, gory kills. However, this feels so much worse for two reasons: 1) Halloween (2018) was so good and Kills comes nowhere close to it, and 2) The movie drags like mad. It feels positively aimless, wasting lengthy scenes on mostly-dull characters and half-baked plots with unearned resolutions. The ending also just straight-up pisses me off. About the only thing this movie does right is making Michael Meyers a terrifying, unstoppable monster, so I can understand why some hardcore Halloween fans would enjoy this. For my part, I was bored from start to finish of this wheel-spinning, poorly-edited, frustrating mess.

52. Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)

I have to give Jason Goes to Hell some credit for at least attempting to do something completely different with the Friday the 13th formula, but they absolutely failed and the results are baffling to witness. Suddenly adding a bunch of mystical lore nine movies in to try to explain some of the weirder aspects of the previous films was a fool’s errand, and having Jason be this body-hopping spirit is way less interesting than if he’s just an unstoppable, undead killing machine. This fundamental issue makes the film borderline unwatchable, even if it does have some fun characters and really gnarly kills that get lost in the shuffle. Oh, and do I need to mention that the movie ends with Jason climbing up a dead woman’s vagina so that he can be reborn from her corpse? Yeah… this is quite the film.

51. Howling III (1987)

Howling III is one of the most unhinged movies I’ve ever seen. I’ll give them some credit, they were swinging for the fences with this movie: it is brimming with ambition and a sincerity; you can tell that this was a passion project for Philippe Mora. Unfortunately, this film is absolutely deranged, featuring terrible werewolf designs, awful special effects (the scenes with the werewolf baby puppet make me want to pour bleach in my eyes), some of the worst acting I’ve ever seen, and a certifiably insane script with too many superfluous characters. This is a film which packs a whole five or six acts into an hour and a half runtime (for reference, your average movie tells its story over three acts in the same timeframe), meaning that it has no time to actually linger on any ideas, but also just wastes a bunch of time on pointless bullshit. Criminally, it’s not even all that entertaining either.

And that’s it for part one. If you’re reading this the day it comes out, then part two will be out tomorrow!

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Geek Hierarchy

Back in the mid-2000s, I came across a somewhat-famous flowchart which purported to illustrate the hierarchy by which geeks look down on each other:

Geeks live in a pecking order. Every geek is going to be hit with a level of societal shame for having interests outside what is considered “normal”. The common response to this is to minimize that shame: “Oh sure, I may be a geek, but at least I’m not as bad as (insert geekier kind of person here).” I thought that the chart was pretty accurate when I read it. Sci-fi/fantasy literature were easily the most “acceptable” geeky pursuits, to the point that your parents and grand-parents are doing it. And furries… well, they were the punching bags of all geekdom when this was written. Seems pretty legit for 2002, all things said.

However, I was reminded of this hierarchy chart after a conversation with my son, which led me to tracking it down again. While I think the concept of this chart is fantastic, it really has not aged well. You can feel that this was written in 2002 with snippets like:

  • “Pokemon Fans Over the Age of Six”: If this was written in 2002, then it would have been right at the start of the third generation of Pokemon games. This was the time when most of the original Pokemon-obsessed kids grew out of it, moved on, and Pokemania had finally ended… I can see someone at that time looking at a Pokemon fan their age and thinking “Why are you still interested in that kids thing?!” Now though? Open adoration of this franchise by people of all ages is basically mainstream culture since Pokemon Go released.
  • Roleplayers are placed fairly low in the hierarchy, alongside fanfic writers. This doesn’t feel quite equivalent anymore though, not since DND5e exploded in popularity. Being into roleplaying games is also basically mainstream now.
  • Furries at the bottom of the list is also very much a reflection of the time. Furries as an active subculture were still fairly new, and I imagine that the internet caused people to become more aware of the subculture. As a result, this would have been at the time when people were still reacting viscerally to anything furry-related. Even in 2008, I can recall how annoyed I’d get when a forum poster would have a furry avatar and then would submit art where a fandom’s characters had been turned into furries. Hell, a friend of mine once chatted with the guy who managed the website “God Hates Furries”, which we would frequent often for a laugh. It was the furries who would have the last laugh though (fun fact: the guy who managed God Hates Furries and my friend both ended up becoming furries years later). Eventually, the world just kind of moved on from hating furries, to the point where they’re just accepted now. If you walked into a room of geeks and started talking about how you want to use a flamethrower on all the furries, if it was the year 2002, they would have agreed and died laughing. However, in 2024, most people will look at you and wonder “why you are so weird and out of touch?” and “oh, you’re a homophobe, aren’t you?”
  • It’s also worth noting that this was clearly written in a pre-GamerGate world. As I said in my 2013 review of Noobz, the racist, basement-dwelling geek was progressively seen as an outdated stereotype, up until GamerGate happened and showed the world that there really was an ugly side to geek culture and it was not going away. This has only gotten worse since then, with geek media outrage merchants grifting entire fandoms and making any kind of discourse exhausting.

Suffice to say, I had opinions on the old chart. I wanted to see what an updated version might look like in an era where geek culture has become the culture. How does that affect what is considered “normal” and what is aberrant? And how has backlash to this culture change caused certain geeks to be perceived as worse than others?

Well… here’s my take on it:

The chart pretty much speaks for itself, but I do want to provide some commentary regarding the entries. Please note, ranking in the hierarchy is not intended as a value judgement – I’ll clarify my thoughts on the rankings below, but just keep in mind that this is entirely a measurement of how geeks would classify themselves on the spectrum of geekiness.

The Mainstream

  • Firstly, “Celebrity Geeks”. This ranges from your Henry Cavills, Robin Williamses, and Vin Diesels, to your Wil Wheatons, Felicia Days, or Hideo Kojimas. They may be bigger nerds than you are in some ways, but they ultimately transcend above all due to the sheer power of fame.
  • “Mainstream Geek Media Fans” is pretty much a catch-all for most popular media: film, tv, and books, specifically. This would cover all the famous geek properties that are so ubiquitous that you might not even identify them as geeky at all (such as the MCU, Star Wars, A Song of Ice and Fire, The Lord of the Rings, Pokemon, etc).
  • Next up is “Video Gamers”. Suffice to say, gaming is currently the world’s most popular entertainment medium, to the point of being entirely normal to engage with. In spite of this, gaming still has a bit of a lingering stink which causes it be perceived as inherently more geeky than more traditional media. Not a big deal, but enough to knock it down one spot on the hierarchy.
  • And then we come to our first big branch of the hierarchy. Some of these are pretty obvious: anime and Dungeons & Dragons have become straight-up mainstream in the past decade, which has pushed them way up the hierarchy. “Erotic Cosplayers” probably deserves a clarification though: erotic cosplayers may be geeks in their own right, but there’s definitely a perception that they’re “faking” it in order to be a thirst trap for a geek audience. That’s why erotic cosplayers are actually above regular cosplayers, since they are likely to not even be seen as “real” geeks.

Pretty Geeky

  • All the layers we’ve been through so far are geeky, but entirely mainstream. The next couple layers of the branch is where things start getting identifiably geeky. MMOs, by their complexities and life-eating nature, feel like they deserve to be a couple layers down from video games as a whole. This is also where we start to differentiate between the popularity of geek properties. If you asked a random, middle-age co-worker which Star Wars movie is their favourite, you’ll probably be able to have a full conversation. Now, ask that same co-worker which Doctor is their favourite, and the odds of them even knowing what you’re talking about is going to drop pretty significantly. Comic book readers should also be pretty obvious: the MCU is the biggest media franchise in the world right now, but the majority of viewers do not engage with the comics at all.
  • Next up we have “Fans Who Engage with EU Content”. Going off our previous example, you ask your co-worker what their favourite Star Wars is. They say “The Empire Strikes Back” and then you respond with “the Timothy Zahn Thrawn trilogy” and then suddenly the entire conversation comes to an awkward end as they realize how much of a nerd you are. Star Wars is particularly egregious for this, as there is so much EU content that the fans who engage with it are basically an entirely separate fandom from those who just watch the movies. As a result, I think it’s entirely fair for this kind of geek to get placed lower down on the hierarchy.

Fuckin’ NEEEEEEERD

  • And then we come to “Redditors” and the next branch of associated concepts. Tumblr probably would have also had a place here at one time, but it has been largely usurped over the past several years by Reddit as the popular gathering place online for geeks. Reddit, by its nature, fosters insular communities and specialized interests, which can push a geek to the next level of obsession. The branches coming off of it are directly related: “oh, sure, I may be a Redditor, but at least I am not posting erotic fan art/arguing about who would win in a fight/showing off my Funko Pops/etc”. Oh, and of course, every Redditor thinks that Reddit mods are the biggest geeks there.

Out-and-Proud Stereotypical Geeks

  • Then we get to the low-mid layer, where things get undeniably geeky. “Coders” really speaks for itself – if you’re making your own programs and video games, you’re definitely going to be seen as very geeky, even if it’s in a professional capacity. Bronies, LARPers, ren faire folks and furries are all the biggest geek stereotypes, but that’s the funny thing about how things have changed since 2002 – there’s not only way more acceptance for these groups, but they own their geekiness moreso than anyone else on the hierarchy. So, while furries are still somewhat low on the hierarchy, there’s no longer the scorn you could feel for them in the original chart, which is a nice change. No, that scorn has now gone to…

The Basement-Dwellers

  • Aaaand that takes us out of the “socially acceptable” geeks and the looooong drop down to the bottom rungs of the hierarchy. “The Basement-Dwelling Mountain Dew & Doritos Racist Gamer Stereotype” is what it sounds like – the sort of dickhead who emerged during GamerGate to announce that they actually were proud to be the shit stains that everyone thought that gamers had moved beyond a decade earlier. They’re definitely a lot rarer now adays, but when you come across one, you can’t help but cringe.
  • If you’ve been to any kind of geek convention, then you definitely have cringed at a “Geek Who Openly Display Hentai/NSFW Anime Merch”. Say what you will about how acceptable this is, but you can’t deny that most people are going to see this and think “At least I’m not that much of a geek”.
  • Next up is “Geeks Who Whine About Politics/Fandom Purity”, arguably the most annoying people in modern geek culture. Some of this comes from general culture war brain rot, some of this comes from too much exposure to outrage grifters, and some of this comes from geniune concerns about changes to the fandom over time. Whatever the source, they manifest this concern by being insufferable and toxic, polluting fandom discourse and making engaging in the community exhausting. As a result, any fandoms where these kinds of geeks are accepted ends up pushing the less-geeky folks out, leading to an endless spiral where those communities become more and more geeky and more and more toxic at the same time.
  • The next level is, of course, 4chan, notorious for all manner of geeky degeneracy (and home to many of the aforementioned “unacceptable” geeks). This is largely down to how much 4channers have embraced their worst stereotypes as NEETs and degenerates. 4channers may not be so bad individually, but 4chan itself acts as a rallying point for less-extreme geeks: “Hey, I may be a basement-dwelling Mountain Dew and Doritos racist gamer, but at least I’m not a 4channer”.
  • Finally, we have the punching bags of the internet, the incels. These feel like the most obvious omission from the original chart to me, to the point where “incel” has become a mainstream insult. Do incels deserve this scorn? Certainly not all of them, but considering the hateful environments incel forums become and the prevalence of incel mass shooters and the subsequent praise of these shooters within incel communities, it’s no wonder that these kinds of geeks get absolutely shit upon.

And that’s my modern take on the hierarchy. You could definitely argue that there’s room for refinement and I’m sure I’ve missed some pretty big types of nerds, but I’m fairly happy with the result. Not bad, considering that I put this chart together and wrote most of this article while high on edibles.

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Retrospective: Left Behind – Rise of the Antichrist (2023)

Welcome back to the Left Behind retrospective! We have finally reached the most recent entry in the franchise, Left Behind: Rise of the Antichrist. After the critical and financial failure of the Left Behind reboot and the embarrassing, putrid mess that was Vanished, surely Left Behind couldn’t get any worse, right? Well… Kevin Sorbo’s here and he’s gonna do his damnest to make sure this Retrospective ends with a long, wet fart sound. Will I be able to keep my sanity if I watch one more Left Behind movie? Read on to find out…

Side-note: I would find it funny if some evangelical boomer tried to watch this movie and accidentally exposed themselves to Lars von Trier’s Antichrist instead. If anyone has any stories about this happening, please share in the comments.

Once again we have another “trendy for its release date, but extremely-overdone” kind of poster. Not awful, but extremely boring. (Although, that said, what the fuck is wrong with Chloe’s hair/head…?)

Production

Despite the financial failure of the Left Behind reboot, Cloud Ten were undaunted in wanting to move forward with a sequel. However, due to not making back their money on that movie when it was in theaters, they had to resort to an Indiegogo campaign to try to raise funds. The goal for this campaign was set at $500,000, but they only ended up raising $80,699… however, because this campaign was set with a flexible funding goal, they ended up keeping all the money anyway! Backers were then left with a very, very long wait for any news on the movie. After nearly three years of nothing, they surely must have felt that they had gotten swindled.

However, the silence would eventually be broken in 2017 when Paul Lalonde announced that he had officially acquired the rights to adapt all the Left Behind books – as mentioned previously, until now they had only had the rights to the first two books. This would now mean that they could adapt the entire series going forward, and planned to do so over the course of at least five more movies. During this time, a script for a sequel to Left Behind had been written, once again by Paul Lalonde and John Patus (although this time they would also share writing credits with newcomer Jessica Parker). Kevin Sorbo was approached for a role in the movie at this time. Given this information, it seems likely that, even at this time, Nicolas Cage was out of the movie. Either Cloud Ten had not secured his commitment to potential sequels, or they could no longer afford him (reportedly, his salary for Left Behind was $3.5 million, which would end up being the entire budget for this second film). According to Kevin Sorbo, due to the close proximity of Left Behind and God’s Not Dead, Cloud Ten became inundated with questions about why Nic Cage was cast a Rayford Steele rather than Kevin Sorbo, which may have also contributed to the attempt to recast. Whatever the case may be, Sorbo actually passed on the sequel initially, leaving the film without a lead.

Despite having a script ready to go in 2017, Rise of the Antichrist wouldn’t actually enter production for several more years. I wasn’t able to find confirmation about why exactly it took so long to actually enter the pipeline (I searched through years of Facebook updates from the official page and the sort of shit they were posting there not only didn’t clarify things, it actively made my brain want to melt out of my ears), but if I have to speculate, I would imagine that they had difficulty finding funding. However, this may have been a blessing in disguise for Cloud Ten, because 2020 brought with it the COVID-19 pandemic and a massive wave of conservatives rallying against public safety measures. In the midst of this environment, Paul Lalonde and John Patus updated their script to better reflect “current events” and, as the film finally went into full production, Kevin Sorbo accepted roles as the star and director of Rise of the Antichrist.

If you are unfamiliar with him, Sorbo is definitely worth exploring a bit to understand what sort of energy he was bringing to Left Behind. The man was in a career resurgence (of sorts) off the back of God’s Not Dead, which had type-cast him as the “recognizable has-been who will star in any Capital-C Christian movie” guy. He would soon appear regularly in these sorts of films, including Joseph & Mary, Let There Be Light, and The Girl Who Believes in Miracles. Sorbo would claim that Hollywood “blacklisted” him for being a Christian, but it seems like he was getting steady work, just no “massive” roles. That said, we’d be remiss to not mention the real reason he wasn’t getting big roles starting in the early 2010s, and that is because he is a massive, outspoken, conservative dickhead. Like, don’t take that wrong – I don’t mean that people hated him because he was conservative, but more the way which social conservative beliefs made him into an insufferable prick and social media troll (with such highlights as saying that The Passion of the Christ wasn’t anti-Semitic, because the Jews did kill Jesus, or calling black people “animals” during the Ferguson riots).

Sorbo’s entry into the Christian media landscape marked a change in how these movies tend to be made. As I mentioned in my reviews of the God’s Not Dead movies, God is almost entirely absent in these movies – their actual focus is clearly on conservative politics and culture war bullshit. They aren’t trying to change minds, they’re made to rile up a conservative audience and disparage their ideological enemies. That’s why I expressed surprise in my reviews of Left Behind and Vanished that these two movies weren’t leaning into these contemporary trends, but instead were focused on a more traditional Christian movie approach of trying to actually appeal to non-Christian audiences. Sorbo’s post-God’s Not Dead films tend to be moreso conservative than they are Christian, so his involvement in this film definitely painted the picture that this new Left Behind might hew more in that direction for the first time in the franchise’s history.

Chad Michael Murray, Cassi Thomson and Nicky Whelen were originally contracted to reprise their roles as Buck, Chloe, and Hattie, respectively, but given how much time had passed since the last film, they were unable to fit the film into their schedules. As a result, Rise of the Antichrist had to be fully-recast (like some other crowd-funded sequels I can think of). Sorbo aside, the new cast included Greg Parrow (of… nothing fame) as Buck Williams, Sarah Fisher (of Degrassi: The Next Generation fame) as Chloe Steele, Sam Sorbo (Kevin’s wife) as Amanda White, Charles Andrew Payne (also not particularly famous despite being in lots of small roles over the years) as Bruce Barnes, Corbin Bernsen (known for lots of things, among them the Major League movies) as Steve Plank, and Bailey Chase (who has an extensive history of pretty prominent TV credits) as Nicolae Carpathia. The other big name in the cast was Neal McDonough. It’s worth noting that, by this time, Neal McDonough has kind of earned a reputation for being the best, lowest-rent villain actor available, after turns in garbage such as Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, and Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2. I definitely thought that he was going to be cast as Nicolae Carpathia, which would have legitimately been pretty spot-on casting, but instead they cast him as… Jonathan Stonagal!? This is baffling enough, but it makes me realize that they absolutely missed an opportunity by casting Nicolas Cage as Rayford Steele – can you imagine if they had cast him as Nicolae Carpathia instead!? That sort of move could single-handedly buoy any Left Behind movie to greatness if they had the balls to do it.

Filming would get underway in Calgary in late 2021 and wrap up after 19 days of shooting. Kevin Sorbo and Paul Lalonde would go on press tours to promote the film, which only furthered my concerns about a potential new direction for Left Behind. Sorbo and Lalonde both said in interviews that they truly believed that the Rapture is imminent (funny side-note: in the aforementioned Facebook page posts, Lalonde would get very angry at people who suggested that the Rapture might occur after the Tribulation; for the record, this is the same sort of nerd energy you’d get watching someone getting frothing mad about a fanfic shipping two characters they don’t like). Lalonde would confirm that the 2014 Left Behind reboot was top-down intended to preach to a broad audience, whereas this film was intended to “wake up” Christians about the state of the world. He also added that “I think it may be our last real opportunity to ride a wave before [end times prophecy] all comes to pass”. On a completely unrelated note, those people who were saying the same thing in the midst of truly apocalyptic events like World War II, World War I, and the Black Death must have been a bunch of self-centered losers, eh?

Anyway… Rise of the Antichrist would release in theaters January 26, 2023 and grossed at least $3.6 million. It was successful enough that Kevin Sorbo has confirmed that a sequel has been greenlit and that he will be returning to direct it. He had claimed that it was going to start filming by the end of 2023, but I have seen no updates since then, so we’ll see when, and if, that happens…

Plot Synopsis

Rise of the Antichrist picks up six months after Left Behind. Buck is skeptical about the “official” stats about the vanishings and causes a stir at GWN when he grills a UN representative who suggests that a second wave of vanishings is imminent. When this predicted event does occur, Buck becomes suspicious that this latest event is being faked in order to keep people scared and compliant, since no one seems to actually know anyone who has disappeared this time. Despite threats from his boss, Steve Plank, Buck begins looking into this theory with his hacker friend, Dirk Burton.

Meanwhile, the Steele household is still reeling from the events of the vanishings. Chloe is traumatized about her mother and brother’s disappearance, is lacking direction, and is unconvinced that the Rapture was the cause of the disappearances. Rayford, on the other hand, is seeking answers, which brings him to the vandalized remnants of New Hope Village Church, where he finds Bruce Barnes. Rayford’s earnest searching is enough to pull Bruce out of his depression and they endeavour to begin preaching the word to the lost.

Jonathan Stonagal announces that the world financial system is on the brink of collapse in the face of the most recent wave of vanishings, and moves to complete the consolidation of all currencies into a single, unified currency through his social media platform, Eden. In response to this, an anonymous contact provides Dirk Burton with access to Eden’s servers, where he discovers that Stonagal is going to use Eden to enforce unprecedented control over all people and all nations. He informs Buck about this and the pair begin preparing to gather more evidence to expose the truth. Steve gets wind of this and fires Buck on the spot. However, Buck still has some access to the building and tries to make one last broadcast with Dirk, but before he can, Dirk is killed in a car bombing. Buck manages to escape and then sneaks into Dirk’s apartment to steal his laptop, and the evidence on it, before the assassins can discover its location.

While this has been happening, Rayford and Bruce manage to convince Chloe that the Rapture is the cause of the vanishings. She tries to share this with Buck and warn him about prophecies associated with the Antichrist, but Buck is dismissive. He needs to get the evidence to Nicolae Carpathia, the UN Secretary General, to help him Stonagal before it’s too late. When he gets there, he hears about plans which line up with the prophecies Chloe had just been telling him and realizes that she was right. He converts right before the UN delegates meet with Nicolae, Stonagal, and Todd-Cothran. Nicolae shoots Stonagal and Todd-Cothran to usurp their power and then mind-controls everyone (except for Buck) into believing that the pair were killed by assassins instead. However, Buck leaves the room and immediately hacks into GWN’s broadcast to declare that Nicolae is a liar and that Jesus is Lord. He is pursued by the assassins, but manages to escape on a private plane with Rayford, Chloe, and Bruce, and they fly over the city to drop leaflets about the Rapture.

Review

I really hoped that I’d get to use the Kevin Sorbo “DIS-AP-POINTED!” meme in this review… but, honestly, I can’t really justify it being used organically. I watched a Kevin Sorbo Left Behind movie, and I got a Kevin Sorbo Left Behind movie. Don’t take that as me going into this biased and looking for reasons to hate it. I had heard that this movie actually wasn’t bad, so I was legitimately going into this with an open mind to see if that was true. Plus, I had just watched Vanished, so I was absolutely primed to be far nicer to this movie than I might otherwise have been. However, after years of dealing with culture war bullshit on social media, I’m just so exhausted when I encounter that kind of content. That’s what the experience of watching Rise of the Antichrist is like – like reading some fuckin’ conservative grifter’s post on X and just feeling all the energy drain out of you at the thought of having to make a response to this shit yet again. Rise of the Antichrist makes me want to not waste time thinking or writing about it, but… well, here we are. I did this to myself, after all…

We’ll get the good stuff out of the way first: Rise of the Antichrist is easily the second-best looking Left Behind movie, second only to the 2014 reboot. However, that movie also had a budget that was almost five times greater than this one, so the fact that it looks comparable is pretty impressive. It also absolutely puts the reported budgets of Left Behind: The Movie and Tribulation Force to shame (again, if you assume that those reported budgets were accurate, which I absolutely do not). Sorbo’s direction is very workman-like, but it’s still miles ahead of what we’ve seen from most movies in this series. In fact, after this entry I’d be willing to bestow upon the Left Behind franchise the prestigious distinction that they have now achieved the quality level of “theatrically-released evangelical movie”. That doesn’t sound impressive, but hey, it took them 22 years to get to that point.

And, uh, that’s about the nicest thing I can say about this movie. Suit up, we’re about to wade into the sewage…

Predictably, the big differentiation between Rise of the Antichrist and all the Left Behind projects that came before it is that this movie’s political message is overwhelming. If you agree with the fundamentally American, Republican party politics that this movie presents, then you’re probably going to have an easier time enjoying it, as it incessantly jerks you off from start to finish. If you do not agree with these politics, then they’re going to be a constant annoyance that makes engaging with the film on any other level an exhausting affair. This becomes apparent right off the bat, as the film opens with Buck interviewing a psychologist from the UN who claims that there is data to suggest that another wave of vanishings are coming. Buck spends this whole scene incredulous, asking her where she got her data from, and then where the people who got her the data got it from. Like, I get that he’s a reporter doing an interview, but what is he actually doing here? Dunking on this woman for not being able to personally verify the source of the information she has on live TV? She’s reporting the data that experts have apparently vetted. He has no actual reason to be skeptical of this data, he just is immediately hostile to the whole thing. It’s clearly intended to be a dig at “Trust the science” types, but there’s a certain point where you kind of have to accept what the majority of accredited experts are saying. You simply can’t look into everything yourself and can’t be educated enough for every important topic, so at a certain point you have to put trust in the community or you’ll drive yourself nuts. I’m not even saying to just blindly accept everything, or even to kowtow to what news media says. If there’s legitimate dissent, then there will be a sizeable counter-narrative which can be examined to see if it is accurate. However, if the vast majority of the people with knowledge on a subject are saying one thing, then there’s a pretty good chance that they’re right. Goddammit, the movie’s barely started and I’m already getting exhausted.

Anyway, this scene ends with Buck telling the audience “Don’t accept what the so-called experts tell you” and “Don’t sign up for a vanishings vaccine”…

Of course, we soon find that, “Oh my God!”, there has indeed been a second wave of vanishings! People’s phones start alerting them and they all head home in a panic. However, Buck soon discovers that this “second wave” was entirely fabricated and all of the people who were reported to have vanished never existed. I don’t even need to state explicitly that there’s a COVID-19 allegory here, do I? Hell, I have personally met people who believed that the pandemic was “fake”. Again, this is exhausting to even talk about – what good even is it for me to say that I personally knew a guy who died from the disease, that a lady at my church died of it, that several public figures were confirmed to have died of it, that the OG Rayford Steele freaking died of it? They can just go “Oh, those ones may or may not be legitimate, but the numbers are exaggerated.” Or they can pivot to the direction this film goes, that they’re manipulating the stats to control the public. Todd-Cothran’s role in this film is to manipulate the UN’s data to say whatever they want it to. Stonagal, on the other hand, has bought up media conglomerates and social media to push whatever narrative he wants, which will be backed up by Todd-Cothran’s data to seem convincing. Steve Plank, as head of GWN, goes along with this, saying that scared people will stay in their homes and be easier to control as a result. Hell, they call out “The Great Reset” in the movie by name multiple times as this sinister initiative to allow Stonagal to control the world. The funniest part about all of this is that Stonagal’s closest analogue in real life, the richest man alive who bought up a social media app with the intent of making an “everything app”, is goddamn Elon Musk – a man whose dick could not be further down Kevin Sorbo’s throat. Of course, this is because there is no principled stand going on here, it’s just Kevin’s political grift in action. Who would have thought that the man famous for celebrating January 6 while it was happening and then immediately saying that Antifa did it when it failed would be a man who just kowtows to whatever the popular conservative narrative is right now?

As you can expect, Rise of the Antichrist continues like this throughout its entire runtime. I don’t have the energy to try to address every single point, nor would it really be worth anyone’s time for me to do so. The important thing to note is that this movie does to Left Behind exactly what you’d fear a Kevin Sorbo Left Behind movie would do. Gone are the sincere attempts to change hearts and minds, instead replaced with masturbatory screeds of “Wow, can you believe how stupid those other people are?!”

In a lot of ways, the religious aspects of Rise of the Antichrist are comparable to previous Left Behind films – there’s still lots of altar calls, attempts to convince people that this was actually the Rapture and Jesus loves them, etc. For most of these prior films, it’s an element I barely feel the need to address (unless there’s some particular noteworthy fuck-up, like Ray Comfort’s awful evangelism tactics in Tribulation Force); usually, you either agree with what they’re saying, or you don’t and it completely falls flat. However, the confrontational tone that Rise of the Antichrist takes riles me up enough that it compels me to be more critical of the religious aspects than I otherwise would be: both for this film, and for Left Behind as a media franchise.

We’ll start with this film’s not-so-subtle message that real, true Christians (and the conservative Republican sorts who fall into that category) are the moral fabric of society. Buck’s opening monologue goes on about how, six months after the Rapture, the rates of murder, suicide, rape, robbery, vandalism, etc have skyrocketed by hundreds of percent each. This is supplemented by the assertion that America’s law enforcement and military have been “decimated” due to the Rapture (sorry, I can hear the intended audience making that wanking sound again). Nevermind that civilian vanishings should proportionately lessen the number of people to deal with for the police and military left behind – realistic speculation isn’t the point. The point, obviously, is to assert the common belief amongst fundamentalist types that you can’t be moral without being religious, a belief which has (unsurprisingly) been found to be false. When you remember that this film is intended to be turning its attention inward to preach to Christians, it’s really hard to deny that this film is doing anything other than fellating its audience. Like, I know I keep repeating this in such graphic terms, but it’s so annoying to me how, since God’s Not Dead, we’ve gotten this same routine over and over again, where so-called “faith-based” movies reinforce Christian prejudices in such a fawning, ham-fisted manner and encourage scorn of non-Christians.

So what is the actual sermon that this particular Left Behind movie is preaching to its audience? Basically, it boils down to “You can’t trust science and government to be arbiters of the truth. You can only trust The Bible for truth.” Kind of a standard evangelical sermon, but it’s particularly sinister in Rise of the Antichrist. Why, you may ask? Because this movie inadvertently shows the flaws in this lesson through the very premise they’re preaching. Let me explain: there are multiple scenes in this movie where some character will say “Oh yeah these events are terrible, but they were predicted right here in the Bible. And here’s what’s going to happen next, the Bible laid it all out for us!”

Here’s the thing: the Rapture isn’t real. The “Biblical prophecy” that these people claim is “right there in The Bible” is cobbled together from hundreds of verses across dozens of books of the Bible, stripped of their context and recontextualized into a new, unified narrative. Like, at one point in Rise of the Antichrist, Bruce Barnes saysThe Bible told us a one-world currency and government were coming.” Okay, but did it though? The “one world currency” idea comes from Revelation 13:16-17, where the Mark of the Beast is described: “It also forced all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name.” That’s it, that’s the entire basis of this inevitable one-world currency that they say is clearly stated in The Bible. As for the one-world government, there are lots of verses about figures who will conquer the world, but Daniel 7 is one of the main ones. Go ahead, read it and then tell me how clearly it is telling you about a coming one-world government. Now, tell me which of these readings makes more sense:

  • That the Book of Daniel is intended to be a story to the Jewish people, who had been conquered and subjugated by multiple empires at the time, and remind them that, in the end, God would deliver them to freedom.
  • That the Book of Daniel is of no value to the places and times in which it was written. It’s actually a story for future people about the end of the world, an event so well-laid out by God that we didn’t even interpret it this way until the 1800s.

Shit like this is prevalent through Rise of the Antichrist. At one point, Rayford is trying to search his Bible app for information about “The Rapture” and “vanishings” and gets frustrated because they’ve been censored so he can’t find this information! How awful! Oh, what’s this? The Rapture isn’t even in The Bible, so he wouldn’t have been able to find it anyway? The movie even directly addresses this, when Chloe asks Bruce “What about all the people who claim the Rapture isn’t even in the Bible. Can you show me where it is?” Bruce responds with 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17: “For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.” Again, this is ignoring the context around the verses – this is describing the final return of Christ, not some event where the unrighteous get left behind. It’s not the irrefutable “proof” of the Rapture that they seem to think it is and it only really exists so Chloe and Buck can go dig up grandma to find that her corpse also got Raptured, WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK!?!!!?! I actually find this theologically offensive – are you telling me that her corpse is the vessel for her soul and she couldn’t go to heaven until Jesus took her body? Has grandma’s soul just been chilling down here all this time waiting for Jesus to get his ass in gear and return? I’m serious, this scene legitimately offended me and it’s about as Biblical as any other shit they spew in this movie.

This brings us to my issues with Left Behind and the prophecy industry as a whole. It’s founded upon beliefs which didn’t even exist until a couple hundred years ago. Hell, most denominations and sects of Christianity don’t even believe in The Rapture or the codified end-times theology Left Behind spews. However, because evangelicals have a virtual monopoly on the popular Christian media industry, it has become something which simply gets described as “Biblical prophecy” with zero pushback. Let me be clear – Left Behind is no more Biblical than Dante’s Inferno. You know what this sort of attitude actually is? Trusting the opinions of “experts”. End-times theology as we know it isn’t “right there” in the Bible for us all to see, we only believe it because people who subscribe to it have been preaching it for decades, to the point where evangelicals just kind of assume that it’s true now by default.

Furthermore, every single one of these movies has a big “She was right!” revelation, which causes the characters to turn to God. However, these moments always ring hollow for me. Tim LaHaye, Jerry B. Jenkins, Peter & Paul Lalonde, etc act like “She was right!” proves God’s love for the characters, to the point where they are always left crying at the revelation. Simply put: it doesn’t. I’ve said plenty of times throughout this Retrospective that, in the face of the Rapture, you could quickly accept that this was God’s doing. People aren’t so stubborn that seeing literal, unexplainable miracles wouldn’t cause them to second-guess their position as an atheist. I just went on a tirade against end-times theology, but if the Rapture happened tomorrow and I got left behind, I’d reconsider my position on these beliefs and try to convince others to do the same. However, I wouldn’t be trying to save people because I’ve been convinced of God’s love and mercy. I’d be doing it because I now know that He’s real and that He’s about to go on a seven-year tantrum where He’s going to send people to hell for eternity. Legitimately, the world of Left Behind paints a reality where I am more righteous than God and His followers are a bunch of cultists suckered into believing He is good, in spite of all evidence to the contrary. And people wonder why some people absolutely hate Left Behind

Also, there’s a scene in this movie with white boy dream-Jesus where it looks like he’s about to announce that “IT’S MORBIN’ TIME!”

That’s a whole lot of words dedicated to politics and theology in this movie. You could look at all that and go “Oh, you didn’t like this movie because you’re biased against it!”, but I wrote all of that because the politics and theology are easily the most interesting aspects of the movie to dig into. For the most part, Rise of the Antichrist is a rather dull movie where little of consequence actually happens. The cast are mostly wasted here. Kevin Sorbo himself could maybe be an alright Rayford Steele, but he’s sleepwalking through this movie, even moreso than Nic Cage was. Neal McDonough could make for an entertaining villain, if he had more than like two minutes of screentime. His higher-profile within the cast is not even an effective red-herring either, since Nicolae is such an iconic villain in his own right, and because Nicolae’s presence in the narrative is completely superfluous unless he is the “twist” villain. For that matter, Bailey Chase gets barely any time to make an impression as Nicolae, isn’t even trying to sound Romanian, and is very dry in the role. Worst of all though is Greg Parrow’s Buck Williams. It’s not a bad performance per se, but it is insufferable. Parrow plays Buck as relentlessly smug, constantly talking down to people, combative, and dismissive of those he disagrees with. He comes across less like a relentless truth-seeker and more as a massive, know-it-all tool.

While Sorbo’s direction here is fairly competent for the most part, there are still some weird and downright bad decisions which drag the film down. First of all, why the hell is this movie two hours long!? This movie is the exact same content which formed the last hour of Left Behind: The Movie, which means that they’ve effectively stretched it out to double the runtime. Remember how I said that Left Behind: The Movie largely succeeded because it was really well-paced, which kept the conspiracy plotline interesting? Well, now imagine what happens to that pacing when you double the time in which it has to be told. Suffice to say, Rise of the Antichrist absolutely drags and is a far more boring adaptation for it. The most illustrative comparison would be the titular “rise of the Antichrist” scene, where Nicolae reveals his powers to the UN. In Left Behind: The Movie, this scene was easily the best in the entire movie: it was tense, surprising, and it effectively established just how sinister and threatening Nicolae was. In Rise of the Antichrist, we’ve barely even seen Nicolae before. There is no threat to his words or actions. I don’t give a shit about Buck, because he’s a tool. There is no sense that he’s in any danger. It is such a limp version of this scene that it single-handedly begs the question of why we even got this movie to begin with when it is so inferior to what came before.

In terms of bad filmmaking choices though, there is absolutely nothing that holds a candle to this film’s goddamn voiceover. For some ungodly reason, they decided that this movie needed to have Bruce Barnes narrating everything. On the one hand, they probably felt like they needed to find an efficient way to get the audience up to speed, since it had been seven years since the last movie was released and they had recast everyone. On the other hand, does it make any sense for the narrator to introduce us to Jonathan Stonagal and describe his motivations and character in the opening speech of the movie? Every time a major new character gets introduced, Bruce has to give us some sort of description of them. It also intrudes into scenes that should be tense and completely ruins them. The most egregious example would be when Buck is trying to sneak into Dirk’s apartment to get his laptop. For some reason Bruce has to chime in about how Buck couldn’t mourn his friend’s death. WHY THE HELL DO WE NEED YOUR OPINION ON THIS, BRUCE?! It’s the very definition of the unwritten rule that you’re supposed to avoid in film: “tell, don’t show”.

This movie also has a funny hallmark of any bad movie, and that’s that no one knows how to pronounce the name “Stonagal”. I’m not kidding in the slightest, Bruce’s opening narration pronounces it like “Stona-gall”, and then, not even five seconds later, Todd-Cothran calls him “Ston-a-gal”. And then Buck, Haim, and several other characters call him “Stone-a-gal”… and then, at the end, Nicolae starts calling him “Stone-a-gall”! It’s kind of hilarious that no one had any fucking clue how to pronounce this guy’s name and the director didn’t even seem to care either, because if he did he would have made sure everyone was on the same page.

In addition, there are some narrative choices which are pretty questionable. For one thing, this movie (conveniently) forgets that Rayford, Buck, Chloe, and Bruce had all ended the first Left Behind movie accepting that the Rapture had occurred. Here, they’re having to completely relearn this, which adds probably an hour of bloat to the runtime. Another choice which really rubs me the wrong way is that Kevin Sorbo has made his own character, Rayford Steele, more “important”. In the books and all the other adaptations, Bruce Barnes immediately realizes what happened when he was left behind and immediately sets about preaching the gospel. He’s the spiritual center and leader of the Tribulation Force, which makes his death in Tribulation Force so impactful. However, in Rise of the Antichrist, he has apparently just been fucking around for six months, until Rayford Steele comes around and, in Bruce’s own words, saves him. Like, you could argue that he’s depressed about losing his whole congregation and being wrong for not believing, but having Rayford be the one to motivate and lead Bruce back to Christ fundamentally alters these two characters. This feeling really got cemented for me towards the end of the film. When the group are speculating that Jonathan Stonagal could be the Antichrist, Rayford pipes up “What about Nicolae?” Despite having absolutely no reason to even suggest Nicolae as an option, of course you’re going to make your character be the one who was right, Kevin. Bloody hell…

All this said, there is one really big narrative change which is… bold, to say the least. As we saw in Left Behind: The Movie, when Nicolae reveals himself as the Antichrist, Buck keeps his head down out of fear that Nicolae might realize that he was unaffected by his mind-control and therefore knows that Nicolae is the Antichrist. In subsequent books, he then takes advantage of his relationship to Nicolae to gather intelligence and undermine the Antichrist’s efforts against Christians. In Rise of the Antichrist, Buck immediately makes a broadcast announcing to the world that Nicolae is a liar and the Antichrist. I’m of two minds about this. On the plus side, making this announcement actually makes Buck look like a better journalist since his response to this event is to make the most important breaking news story of all time. On the more mixed side of things, this completely fucks up the narrative trajectory of the next several Left Behind books. Considering how bad these books can be, this may not be that bad of a thing, but I’m also not convinced that Cloud Ten will do them any better either. On the more negative side of things though, this change just isn’t worth it in my opinion. For one thing, I prefer the more subtle, intrigue-filled storyline where Buck has to be careful not to blow his cover while getting close to the Antichrist, while also constantly wondering whether Nicolae has any suspicions about Buck. It’s a much richer narrative territory than immediately having him be on the run and pursued by Nicolae’s forces. Secondly, this undermines everything they had tried to establish with Nicolae, immediately clowning on him the moment he’s introduced. He’s a lot less sinister and terrifying if you can just openly defy him without facing any consequences. Thirdly, it’s not like Buck keeps this information to himself, it gets spread throughout the Christian community and becomes common knowledge pretty quickly.

I complained a lot about the politics of this movie, but ultimately Rise of the Antichrist isn’t very good, whether you agree with the politics or not. Very little of interest actually happens in it across its painfully-long runtime. You are far better off just watching Left Behind: The Movie, which is a considerably more watchable and better-executed version of this story overall.

3/10

So what’s next for Left Behind? Well, like I said, Kevin Sorbo has threatened to direct another sequel, so if that is on-schedule we should be hearing about that any time now. Given how demoralizing this movie was for me, I can’t say I’m looking forward to it, and it just makes me even sadder that the Kirk Cameron movies didn’t get the opportunity to continue. Like, as bad as those movies could be, there was at least an earnestness to them which shines through when you compare them to the last three “efforts” we’ve gotten.

Here’s how I’d rank the series overall:

  1. Left Behind: The Movie – 5/10
  2. Left Behind (2014) – 3.5/10
  3. Left Behind III: World at War – 3/10
  4. Left Behind: Rise of the Antichrist – 3/10
  5. Left Behind II: Tribulation Force – 2.5/10
  6. Vanished: Left Behind – The Next Generation – 2/10

Thanks for sticking with me for another Retrospective! This was a lot of work for the past month, taking up a lot of my free time during the week. I’m not sure when/if I’ll do another one of these, but I am intending on starting a new Love/Hate series and resuming the looks at the Resident Evil games soon. Stay tuned for these in the near future!

Resident Evil 6 Has a Chapter That’s So Bad That It’s Amazing

I played Resident Evil 2 Remake back in October and since then I’ve been making my way through this franchise for a future Love/Hate series. I’m on Resident Evil 6 at this point and was dreading and looking forward to it in equal measure. I went in well aware of the reputation that this game has, but was more than willing to give it a shot. While I think the game is a mess (which I will go into with plenty of detail when that Love/Hate series comes out), there was one chapter in particular that went so far off the rails that it went from being awful to a transcendental masterpiece.

A big caveat here before we begin: I took edibles before playing this chapter and they kicked in about halfway through, making this experience even more baffling and surreal for me as I struggled to make sense of any of this nonsense. It was so baffling that I rewatched this whole chapter on a Youtube let’s play just to make sure it was as incomprehensible as my drug-addled mind believed. I was not disappointed and neither will you if you check it out.

The chapter in question is Chapter 4 in Chris’ campaign. Context is everything in this story, so let me set the stage for you so you understand what has happened in this game up to this point. Chris’ campaign opens with him as a drunk amnesiac who gets pulled back into duty by his second in command, Piers Nevan. They investigate a bioterrorism incident in Lanshiang involving mutant soldiers known as J’avo. This chapter ends with the building getting bombed and Chris and his men barely making it out alive. Chapter 2 then flashes back to an earlier bioterror incident in Eastern Europe where J’avo had turned a city into a warzone. Chris leads his men through the city til they encounter someone calling themselves Ada Wong. However, she betrays them and infects all of Chris’ men with a virus that mutates them into monsters. Chris and Piers barely escape, but Chris couldn’t handle the loss of his men and so became the drunken, amnesiac, PTSD-ridden soldier we met at the start of the game. The story then returns to the present, where Chris discovers that Ada Wong has been spotted in Lanshiang and he goes on a revenge quest to kill her, which once again results in the death of all of his men (except Piers). When he finally catches up to her, Chris discovers he’s not the only one after Ada Wong, because Leon Kennedy shows up and stops him from killing her. After a brief pep talk, Chris decides he doesn’t want revenge anymore… it’s seriously that sudden. Anyway, Ada escapes and Leon and Chris split up, with Chris and Piers pursuing Ada. There’s a ridiculous car chase before Ada escapes to an aircraft carrier, where you and Piers pursue her.

So, with that all said, Chapter 4 opens in about the most boring way possible. Chris’ campaign has clearly been trying to ape the gameplay and tone of Call of Duty and Chapter 4 opens with the most generic, low-quality Call of Duty map you could ask for. You’re in the hangar of an aircraft carrier and have to fight your way from one side of the hangar to the other, using shipping containers as cover against the snipers raining fire down on you and the J’avo (who suddenly look like Metal Gear Solid 2 tengu soldiers) swarming you relentlessly. It’s a particularly tedious and annoying fight, especially because the J’avo weren’t dropping much ammo for me. This is also a very large, wide-open area and I completely missed picking up a sniper rifle hidden away in a random room at the start of this mission which would have helped a lot. As a result, I was constantly struggling to actually deal with all the enemies that were getting thrown at me and eventually I had to just rush for the objective. There was a bulkhead on the far side of the hangar that we had to break through and when we get to it I discovered that I had to head up some stairs onto a gangplank over the hangar and then turn around back to where I started and launch a missile that was hanging over the starting area. Then you get the privilege of fighting through the shipping containers all over again, oh joy! So you move up the hangar again and then find that a set of stairs was retracted, so when you get to the far end you have to go through a side-door and reactivate the stairs… which places you back at the starting area and you have to fight through the containers AGAIN (but this time there’s a jet on a turn table shooting at you). Having to fight through the hangar twice felt like padding, having to fight through a third time feels like a joke. This whole section of the game was awful and tedious but it inadvertently lulled me into a sense of boredom that was about to get shattered.

Anyway, you finally get out of the goddamn hangar and get this weird cutscene where Ada has a private conversation with the bad guy in Leon’s campaign, except for some reason she’s having this conversation over a loudspeaker which broadcasts it to the entire ship. Wow, Ada sure is a great super-spy isn’t she? This is literally the sort of material you’d expect out of a spy comedy film and here it’s played totally straight. I’m not really sure why they needed to have Chris and Piers listen in on this conversation anyway. It’s about as stupid and pointless an exposition dump as you could imagine.

From here, you get into a few quick fights in corridors and rooms as you make your way to the ship’s bridge to catch up to Ada Wong. This part is actually reasonably enjoyable in its own right – not only is there a sense of urgency because you keep catching glimpses of Ada just ahead of you, but there’s progression and some actual craft behind the gunfights you get into with the J’avo here. Soon enough, you catch up to Ada and Chris decides that this whole revenge quest he’s been on is no longer about revenge, it’s about “Justice” and so he tries to take her into custody instead of killing her. Ada reveals that she’s about to launch missiles to create zombie outbreaks around the world when suddenly a freaking helicopter appears behind her and shoots her to death. Wait, what the fuck!? Just like that, the whole narrative drive of this campaign is gone halfway through the fourth chapter, now we’ve just got to clean up the mess she left behind.

Chris decides that the best way to deal with these missiles is to get to the hangar so you run off to do that, urgently. You’re immediately faced with a really annoying road-block – a locked door that requires three passcodes to enter. Wow, this imminent missile launch definitely seems like the right time to make the player go on a ten-to-fifteen minute side quest! Jesus Christ. Not only is the area that these three passcodes have been hidden in an absolute maze that easy to get lost in, this is also where the developers decided to confine their Regenerator-wannabes who only show up here and never again in this campaign. While they are clearly modeled after the Regenerators, complete with their own breathing problems (which sound more annoying than creepy), they’re kinda pushovers in comparison because you can kill them with a bit of firepower… so, in other words, like any other enemy in this game.

Anyway, I was slogging through this side quest and this was around the point where the edibles really started kicking in and I realized I had long forgotten what it even was that I was supposed to be doing or why. This whole segment of the game is clearly padding out the chapter, at the cost of bringing the game’s pacing to a screeching halt. My drug-addled mind was having a really difficult time remembering what the fuck was going on in the game, but by the time I got those three passcodes and was able to advance I was not prepared for what came next.

That hangar bay Chris was trying to get to? It never really clued in to me that he wanted to go fly a jet. Not only that, but for once this isn’t going to get confined to a QTE-sequence, the game literally expects me to fly the jet. So imagine me, already confused and high out of my mind when suddenly the game turns into a fucking Steam Early Access-quality arcade flight game! Let me explain just how insane this is: this gameplay segment lasts, like, two minutes, tops. The devs went to the effort of designing an entire arcade-style jet fighter minigame and give you no time to get used to it. It would almost be impressive, except for the part where it controls horridly. Like I said, not only did they have to design this within the engine they’re already using for the rest of this game, but they have to make it as simple as possible so players can understand how to play it immediately. Now, I’m no stranger to arcade flight games – I’ve played a couple Ace Combat games, Rogue Squadron, Battlefield, etc. However, because this flight sequence is using Resident Evil 6‘s control scheme as its base, it’s not using traditional flight controls (eg, left/right control roll, up/down control pitch) to treat this jet like it’s an airplane. Instead, it’s using Resident Evil 6‘s normal movement controls to treat the jet like a human that can’t stop moving forward (eg, left/right on the left stick make the jet yaw hard in that direction and up/down on the right analog stick controls the pitch). Suffice to say, I was all out of sorts with this control scheme and it probably wasn’t (only) the drugs that were making it so difficult to understand. The way this whole sequence is put together reminds me of the Fallout 3 train hat, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was all sorts of sorcery involved behind-the-scenes to make this sequence actually work in-engine. It’s glorious and by this point I was laughing my ass off at the absurdity unfolding on my screen.

It only gets better though. Piers jumps out of the plane and runs over to deactivate the missile, instead of, y’know, landing right beside it or shooting the fucking missile with the goddamn jet. Since I was playing Chris, the game then turns into a sequence where you hover in mid-air and provide air support to Piers (which, being honest, sounds really boring for the person who gets stuck playing Piers in this scenario). Oh and to make things even better, suddenly a giant fucking mutant J’avo appears from under a tarp and starts chasing after Piers. By this point I had completely lost it, I was laughing my ass off at how absurd this level had gotten. To make things even better, my wife happened to call at this time (she was away seeing family that evening) to say good night and in my drug-induced delirium I tried to explain just how batfuck crazy this level was. That went about as well as you could expect.

Anyway, despite all your efforts one of the missiles gets away “because plot” and Chris and Piers feel bad. While this is technically the end of the chapter right here, the lead-in to Chapter 5 is just as ridiculous and bears mentioning. Chris and Piers are just chilling in their airplane when they get a radio call from Leon telling them to go rescue Jake and Sherry Birkin at an underwater lab. Oh, also, Jake is Albert Wesker’s son, which Chris clearly holds against him. They do what Leon said and head down an underwater elevator, where Chris tells Piers that he’s going to retire when this is all over and that Piers will be his successor. Like, recall what I said earlier – the whole point of this campaign was Chris wanting to get revenge on Ada Wong for killing his men and that got resolved halfway through the last chapter. By having a whole other chapter after that point, the game suddenly has to come up with entirely new directions to take the characters and story which ring hollow given how rushed they are. This is the problem with the way Resident Evil 6 structures its four campaigns – they aren’t four self-contained narratives that, combined, tell a wider story. Instead, they’re three four that weave in and out of each other inextricably. As a result, you’ve got the actual story of Chris’ campaign told by the end of Chapter 4, but then we need Chris and Piers to provide co-op in Jake’s campaign so suddenly they’re given a whole other chapter to go resolve things for someone else’s story. The result is four campaigns that are trying to tell one epic narrative but instead tell four unsatisfying narratives.

Resident Evil 6 has been a ridiculous, insane trainwreck and I have to say that Chapter 4 was undoubtedly the best experience I’ve had in the whole game. The way that it goes from boring tedium to full-on batshit lunacy with a straight face the entire time is just baffling when you sit down and think about what the game is actually making you do. I’ll have a full Love/Hate out for Resident Evil 6 when I’ve gotten through a couple more games in the franchise, so hopefully that will be done before the end of the year. In the meantime, I had to give this chapter its own entire write-up because holy shit did it ever leave me in hysterics.

DOA Is The Best Video Game Movie (300th Blog Post Celebration!)

This review has been a long time coming. Like, to put it into perspective, I tend to start drafts on my blog so that I remember ideas and am able to come back to them later. Sometimes they even get completed and get published here! Well, it was around seven years ago when I thought “hey, I love DOA: Dead or Alive and would love to write a review explaining why!” For whatever reason, that idea kept getting shoved back in favour of other ideas, but that draft has been sitting in here for literally years in various iterations, including two serious attempts to complete it that got shelved and the whole blog migration to WordPress. This also means that I have had to rewatch the film on several occasions whenever I planned on sitting down to work on this review.

Well, a few months ago I realized that I was rapidly closing in on my 300th blog post. Considering that I celebrated my 200th blog post with a review of DOAX3, what better time to finally get off my ass and review this movie? DOA: Dead or Alive is the best video game movie of all time and I’m going to explain why (yes, better than Detective Pikachu – no one is more shocked by that statement than me).

I remember seeing this film’s DVD cover in the local movie rental place when I was in high school… it looked identical to the covers of the porn DVDs nearby. That was obviously an intentional choice.

Production

After the box office success of the first two Resident Evil films, the producers of the first film, Paul W.S. Anderson, Jeremy Bolt and Bernd Eichinger, were eager to tap into the burgeoning video game adaptation gold rush and searched for the next big hit (funnily enough, of all the video game adaptations listed in production on that link, the only ones that would actually come out were DOA and Resident Evil: Extinction). Perhaps owing to Anderson’s success with the 1995 fighting game adaptation Mortal Kombat, the producers decided to give Dead or Alive a shot – after all, it was all about action sequences and sexy women, so it would surely draw out all the teenage boys, right? Also being brought on to help produce the film was Mark A. Altman, who had previously produced freaking House of the Dead (fighting The Howling 2 for the championship title of most insane film to ever make it into theatres).

Corey Yuen was brought on as the film’s director. Yuen was well-known for his impressive Hong Kong action films and fight choreography, and had just found success with Western audiences with The Transporter. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the lead actresses were all models: Devon Aoki (of Sin City and 2 Fast 2 Furious fame) was cast as Kasumi, Holly Valance (known for the soap opera Neighbours, Prison Break and… what, she was in Taken!? Oh shit, she was the pop singer Liam Neeson has to protect, of course!) was cast as Christie and Jaime Pressly (probably the biggest name in the main cast, best known for My Name is Earl) was cast as Tina Armstrong. The supporting cast are also filled with plenty of interesting actors. By far the most notable is professional wrestler Kevin Nash as Bass Armstrong. This was an absolutely perfect casting, he steals the show whenever he’s on screen. The film also has several notable character actors and B-movie stars, such as Matthew Marsen (who has been in many films, but was last seen on IC2S in Atlas Shrugged) as Max, Eric Roberts (here playing a discount John Carradine) as Donovan, and Natassia Malthe (a kick-ass Uwe Boll regular) as Ayane. Some relative unknowns were also cast in major roles, such as Sarah Carter as Helena Douglas, Steve Howey as Weatherby and Brian J. White as Zack (who plays the role to perfection). Rounding out the cast were a pair of martial artists, Collin Chou as Hayate and Kane Kosugi as Ryu Hayabusa (he’s fine for the role they wrote for him, but good God do not expect this Ryu to be anything like the demon-slaying badass from Ninja Gaiden or you are going to be disappointed).

Filming took place in various locations in China. Most of the cast had never played a Dead or Alive game before, although most checked it out during production (Matthew Marsden specifically acknowledged that he sucked at it). According to the “Making Of” featurette (which really sucks by the way, nearly half of it is uninterrupted footage from the movie), the cast trained for 3 months with US marines and martial arts experts in order to learn their characters’ fighting styles. According to Sarah Carter, the entire cast performed most of their own stunts and some fight sequences could take up to 7 days to film (such as the impressive Helena vs Christie fight at the mid-point). The film also features a volleyball scene which was 100% pure fan service and which went through a staggering forty pairs of bikinis to complete.

Unfortunately for the producers, DOA: Dead or Alive didn’t light up the box anywhere near as much as Resident Evil had. In fact, while those films had wracked up grosses over $100 million worldwide, DOA brought in a paltry $7.7 million on a $30 million budget. Ouch.

Plot Summary

The film opens at a ninja palace in the mountains where princess Kasumi resolves to find her brother, Hayate, who went missing after being invited to the Dead or Alive martial arts tournament and is presumed dead. However, she is warned by Hayate’s friend, Ryu Hayabusa, that if she abandons the castle then she will be condemned to death by the laws of their people. Unperturbed, Kasumi escapes, pursued by her vengeful half-sister, Ayane, and is invited to participate in Dead of Alive. The film then cuts to Tina Armstrong, a professional wrestler who is trying to prove that her talents aren’t all just showmanship (which she quickly proves to us by beating up a group of pirates who board her boat, securing her invite to Dead or Alive). Finally, we’re introduced to Christie, a criminal who uses her femme fatale wiles to fight her way through a group of Interpol agents who have cornered her in her hotel room, earning herself an invitation to Dead or Alive in the process. With our main cast assembled, the group is flown to the island where Dead or Alive is held, alongside fellow competitors including Zack, Hayabusa (who has entered the tournament to watch over and protect Kasumi), Helena Douglas (daughter of the tournament’s recently-deceased co-founder), Bass Armstrong (Tina’s enthusiastic and laid-back father) and Max Marsh (Christie’s partner in crime, who is joining her to try to steal the company’s fortune). After parachuting to the island and traversing the rugged terrain to reach the tournament grounds, the group is introduced to Dead or Alive’s organizer, Victor Donovan, who explains the rules of the tournament – fighters will be tracked with nano-bots, fights can be called at any time and any place with single-round eliminations determining who will move on to the next round of competition.

As the first rounds of the tournament slowly get underway, the characters begin getting to know each other. Zack spends all his time hitting on a very unreceptive Tina, while a computer technician for the tournament named Weatherby tries to work up the courage to ask out Helena (who, surprisingly, decides to give him a chance). Meanwhile, Kasumi continues her search for Hayate, avoiding attacks from Ayane and the other competitors. She is eventually joined by Hayabusa, but he goes missing while infiltrating Donovan’s headquarters, making Kasumi even more suspicious about what’s going on. Finally, Christie and Max discover the location of Dead or Alive’s vault and try to figure out the password to get inside. Max eventually realizes that the code is tattooed on Helena, a fact which adds additional tension when Helena and Christie are paired off against one another in a quarter finals match. After an intense fight, Christie manages to come out on top while also discovering the tattooed code.

Concerned about Hayabusa, Kasumi convinces Tina and Christie to join her in infiltrating Donovan’s headquarters. They discover Hayabusa unconscious, but are incapacitated and captured by Donovan. Meanwhile, saddened by Helena’s defeat to Christie, Weatherby confesses to Helena that Donovan is working on some sort of secret project and that he believes that her father was murdered to cover it up. Helena decides to stop Donovan, but they are attacked by his cronies. They manage to defeat the mob and then head into the complex to get to the bottom of Donovan’s scheme. Donovan monologues to the captured heroes about his plan – he has been using the nanobots in their bloodstream to collect data on the worlds greatest fighters, which will be fed directly into a pair of computer-enhanced glasses he has developed, allowing him to instantly learn their techniques and counter them all. He plans to sell these glasses to several international criminals to rake in millions of dollars. Donovan then reveals that Hayate is still alive and uses him as a demonstration of the glasses’ power, defeating him in one-on-one combat easily and throwing him through a wall. He is left to die but Ayane saves him, which causes her to finally realize that Kasumi was right all along.

Before Donovan can send the data to his buyers, he is interrupted by Weatherby, who cuts off the upload and alerts the CIA of Donovan’s dealings. Donovan and Helena fight while Weatherby frees Hayabusa, Tina, Kasumi and Christie just before Donovan actives a self-destruct sequence. The fighters all converge on Donovan, with Helena, Kasumi, Ayane, Hayate, Tina and Christie all beating on the old man at once while Weatherby and Hayabusa try to find an escape route. They encounter Max, who has been trying to break into the vault, and help him escape (despite his protestations). Overwhelmed by the sheer number of people attacking him, Donovan’s glasses are knocked off and he is left in a paralytic state by Hayate and Kasumi and watches helplessly as the heroes all escape the island before the base explodes, consuming Donovan in the inferno. The group quickly come across the pirates who Tina had fought earlier and steal their boat as they ride off into the sunset… to a final stinger where our heroines all face off against an army of ninjas at Kasumi’s palace.

Review

The opening of DOA is a perfect encapsulation of what makes this movie work. It starts with a terrible CGI tracking shot through a palace in the sky and then assaults us with stilted acting, bad dialogue and melodrama… and then suddenly Kasumi’s escapes by throwing a sword into the wall, leaps the cross the backs of an entire army, uses the sword as a springboard to launch herself over the walls of the palace and then reveals that she has a freaking hang glider hidden under her clothes to sail away as a robot ninja star just comes out of nowhere and invites her to DOA.

Holy shit, what did I just watch?!

The movie just gets better from there and makes it unmistakable that Corey Yuen and his cast know exactly what kind of film they’re making and then wring every ounce of fun out of the premise that they can with tongue planted firmly in cheek. That’s the thing, DOA has several elements that would tank any other film – paper-thin story, bad acting, a stupid and cheap third act, etc. However, Yuen executes this all in such a manner that they either don’t matter or they even enhance the experience. For example, how many times have I criticized Resident Evil for its crappy stories? The difference here is that the story serves DOA‘s actual strengths – fantastic action sequences and fun characters (and for the record, these are the exact elements that made the two Resident Evil movies I actually like work). There’s very little time wasted on pointless exposition or worldbuilding, the film knows what you’re here for and it will give you enough to make that function and create some stakes in an efficient manner. Again, this would usually sound like a bad thing, but how many action movies have we seen where they put in a forced romance, or set up a long-winded relationship in order to give our character motivation when it’s taken away, or just spent time trying to prove that this is not “just some b-movie”? There’s a reason movies like Mad Max: Fury Road, Taken and John Wick are so beloved and that’s because they cut the fat… and it just occurred to me while typing this sentence that I’m unironically going to argue that DOA: Dead or Alive is at least in the same ballpark as those movies.

First off, DOA has some fantastic fight sequences. This should be expected, but you’d be surprised how many video game movies (let alone lower-budget movies in general) that are all about their action sequences fail to even surpass this simple hurdle. Films like The Legend of Chun-Li are supposed to be all about the action but fail to even succeed there. Again, look no further than the most recent Resident Evil, which was basically just an excuse to string together action setpieces but which had the worst directed and edited action sequences in the franchise so far in the process. In this regard, DOA scored a homerun right off the bat by hiring Corey Yuen, whose expertise is clearly reflected in the plethora of fun and exciting fights peppered throughout this film’s runtime.

There are two particular sequences I want to highlight – the showdown between Kasumi and Ayane in the bamboo forest and the rain-soaked, bare-knuckle beatdown between Christie and Helena. The bamboo forest fight is a clear riff on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as a sword-wielding Ayane tries to kill an unarmed Kasumi and features all sorts of acrobatics, wire stunts and creative use of the environment to allow Kasumi to survive her half-sister’s furious onslaught. I highlight this particular fight because it’s basically just thrown there for the sake of an action sequence, but it’s so damn cool that it doesn’t matter that it halts the actual story for a couple minutes. On the other hand, the fight between Christie and Helena is not only really cool (shot in slow-motion close-ups during a pouring rain storm), but is also tense because we have no idea who is going to win. We like both characters by this point and don’t want to see either of them lose. Some of the best acting in the film is demonstrated in this sequence, you can really feel that these characters are fighting a desperate battle against one another and doing whatever they can to come out on top. In a movie with tons of great fight sequences, this one really stands out because it makes you realize just how effectively it has gotten you to like these characters.

That’s another big strength of DOA – the characters are all really fun (well, mostly, but we’ll get to that). It helps their personalities and motivations are conveyed perfectly through the action sequences… again, just like Fury Road. I mean, just look at the character introductions for an example. Tina gets introduced complaining that, as a wrestler, she’s not taken seriously before her boat gets boarded by pirates. She takes the opportunity to then beat the crap out of them, proving to the audience that she is indeed a formidable fighter (and even kind-hearted as she allows the last pirate to throw himself off the ship to spare himself a beating). Meanwhile, Christie’s introduction establishes that she’s a charming femme fatale, using her sexuality in order to get the upper hand when she’s ambushed and seemingly cornered by Interpol. Hayate gets one of these introductions in a flashback as well. Need to prove that he’s the best fighter in the world? How about have him chuck a bunch of needles at a group of bandits, snatch these needles out of the air and prick the bandits in their pressure points to paralyze them all? Holy shit, this guy’s amazing! It makes Kasumi’s unrelenting search and Donovan’s later beatdown of Hayate all the more effective.

It’s not just about the fights though, DOA‘s characters are also just fun to watch interacting with each other and have great chemistry. The most obvious example of this is Kevin Nash’s Bass Armstrong and his interactions with Tina. He’s like the ultimate goofy, macho dad and Tina is constantly embarrassed by his inability to take anything seriously. This comes to a head when Tina and Bass get matched against each other and he bursts into her room, only to sheepishly back out when he realizes that he might have just walked in on Tina and Christie in bed together (in reality she was just sharing a bed because Christie’s room got trashed). It’s adorable how supportive he is of his daughter and is obvious that there’s a lot of love between them, even if there appears to be friction most of the time. Weatherby and Helena’s relationship is also quite cute. While Weatherby is a dork and it strains credulity to think that Helena would find him interesting, the fact that she does is adorable and both are kept interesting enough and have enough relevance that it doesn’t feel like either is a dreaded “generic love interest”. Or how about how the film establishes that Kasumi, Christie and Tina are now friends with each other? When the group parachutes onto DOA island together, they have to reach the tournament grounds in time or be disqualified. Initially they’re all looking out for themselves while climbing the temple, but quickly realize that they’re not going to make it unless they work together and are soon a solid team. It’s simple and obvious, but effective visual character building.

Unfortunately, DOA‘s one big stumbling block in terms of its characters is in its lead, Kasumi. Devon Aoki’s performance is extremely flat and I can’t help but feel like this was intentional – Kasumi herself is a bit of a personality-void in the games and I think they were trying to capture the same sort of stoic heroine energy. It’s a shame because Aoki seems very charming and fun in the film’s “Making Of” feature and it would have been nice to see her in a role that didn’t require her to be so serious the whole time. Similarly, Ayane is also very one-note, just pissed off all the time, while Ryu Hayabusa is downgraded from a demon-slaying badass to Kasumi’s generic love interest. Whenever Kasumi’s plot is in control the film loses some of its luster, but thankfully it’s more than made up for with the subplots revolving around Christie and Tina (and eventually Helena).

Another remarkable element of DOA is that the film is one of those weird movies that manages to strike the fine balance between being sexy and empowering at the same time. This is especially surprising given Dead or Alive‘s reputation as a pervy, tit-obsessed series (this certainly wasn’t helped by the fact that Dead or Alive: Xtreme 2 released only a month after DOA hit theaters). DOA does a far better job of balancing this out, if only because the cast are real human beings and not a bunch of 36DD teenagers and so they can’t just take the easy route by going with over-the-top eye-candy. Sure, the girls are in bikinis on several occasions and there are lots of shots of cleavage and butts, but it comes across far better than in the games. The games are usually just voyeuristic but when they fetishize the girls it can get straight-up creepy, not to mention that the games try to maintain this weird sort of “innocence” to them all, like they don’t realize that they’re all stupidly-hot. In DOA, the women all own their sexuality – if they’re in bikinis it generally makes sense (it is a tropical island after all and they’re often in down-time between fights) and they’re not treated like these chaste, untouchable angels with no idea of how beautiful they are. Hell, Christie is straight-up sexually active in this movie, well-aware of her wants and desires and not afraid to use her allures to get the upper-hand on an opponent. It’s kind of like Bayonetta in this regard, where the female characters are framed by the male gaze, but they don’t allow it to trap them. Beyond the characters’ sexuality though, the female cast just kick a ton of ass throughout the film. That’s actually a strength inherent to the games themselves, where several women can go toe-to-toe with the best male fighters in the world and play out their interesting storylines, but the focus on tits always drowns this out and drowns out an otherwise empowering premise. Freed from pervy obsessions, DOA shows us just how awesome these women are as they take down an evil conspiracy with their fists. I’m not sure I’d go so far as to declare the film to be outright feminist, but it’s sure as hell a kickass girl power romp.

I also have to mention the third act, which is a potentially make-or-break part of the film. For my part, I think it’s fucking hilarious and the perfect cherry on top of an enjoyable sundae, but I can understand if someone would think that it’s terrible. Basically, as soon as Donovan’s evil plan is revealed, DOA turns into a G.I. Joe-level cartoon. The sets get really cheap looking and the plot goes off the rails because Donovan’s master plan is stupid beyond comprehension. Okay, cool, you’ve scanned all the fighting techniques from the world’s best fighters and downloaded them to a set of smart glasses which show you how to fight and beat any opponent… There’s just so much about this that’s pants-on-head stupid. First of all, how do you react quick enough to the glasses’ prompts to even fight back? Second, boy it sure would suck if your opponent decided to shoot you instead of engaging in hand-to-hand combat. Third, why make the crux of this evil plan revolve around a fashion accessory which is notoriously easy to knock off, especially when you’re doing quick actions like… oh, I don’t know, fighting people? Fourth, why then antagonize the fighters you stole the data from!? If he had just waited til the tournament was over to sell the data to international terrorists (some of which look like random incels wearing sunglasses!) you wouldn’t have gotten defeated like an idiot! It’s so dumb, but given how intentionally tongue-in-cheek the rest of the film has been I can’t help but think that this plan was made so campy on purpose, so I’m more than willing to go along with it, grinning like a madman all the while.

If we’re being entirely honest, DOA isn’t a top-tier movie by any means. The acting is fine at best, the story is clearly bare-bones and the low budget makes it look cheap at times. Films like House of the Dead or Street Fighter: The Movie may be similarly fun and hilarious, but it’s clear that they were not intended to be enjoyed so ironically. On the flip-side, recent acclaimed video game movies like Detective Pikachu and Sonic aim to be taken more seriously, but they’re just ultimately mediocre popcorn films with boring characters, unimpressive action sequences and questionably-structured stories. However, everyone involved knew exactly what sort of film this was and they did away with pretension to maximize its strengths and make it as enjoyable as possible with tongue planted firmly in cheek throughout. That puts it well above every other video game movie out there.

6.5/10

Freddy vs Jason vs Michael vs Leatherface: The Ultimate Countdown! (#39-31)

Happy Halloween everyone! This new series has been a long time coming. Since at least the Texas Chainsaw Massacre retrospective I’ve been considering ranking all of the films from the big four slasher franchises, Friday the 13th, Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Obviously, this is a mammoth undertaking – we’re talking 39 films here, about half of which I hadn’t seen before. I’ll be counting down 10 films in each post (well, 9 in this one post), releasing a new post every second day, until we reach Halloween, at which point I’ll have a special comparison of the best parts of each franchise. So, without further adieu, let’s get into the bottom of the barrel – there are some notoriously awful films in these franchises, so which ones are going to fight for the title of the worst? Read on to find out…

39) Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)
I didn’t think that any slasher movie could be worse than Texs Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation, but then along comes Freddy’s Dead to prove me wrong. It’s a super close contest between the two, since they’re awful for different reasons, but I came to the decision that the problems with Freddy’s Dead put it on top of the shit pile. The plot is contrived and derivative, the characters suck, the acting is mostly trash, the special effects are amateur-level and the film ignores all of the rules that the series had established and just hopes that no one will notice. Worst of all, they’ve turned Freddy Krueger into such a cartoon that he is just annoying. Like, on more than one occasion I wished that he’d just shut up. It feels like New Line Cinema had turned Freddy into such an icon that they defanged him to try to get mass appeal. However, like most corporate mascots in the 90s, the result is a movie which is staggeringly uncool. This all culiminates in the most embarrassing slasher movie moment ever, when Freddy kills a victim in a video game with some of the stupidest dialogue, visuals and sound effects imaginable. Seriously, it has to be seen to be believed. Oh and lest we forget, the last act of the film is in gimmicky 3D, featuring the tadpole-like “Dream Demons” which just float around and laugh a lot.

I will give it some credit though – Carlos’ death scene is very solid. There’s some actual tension and horror in the scene. Hell, even cartoon Freddy strikes a perfect, dark comedic tone here, giving us at least one kill that’s entertaining. Too bad the rest of the film is total nonsensical garbage. What really puts it at the bottom of the pile though is that this film had an $11 million budget! Considering what we got on screen, that is totally insane. This film’s quality is even worse when you also consider that this was still a major franchise for New Line Cinema, although it also calls to mind such 90s misfires as Batman & Robin. Freddy’s Dead is truly the bottom of the barrel for slasher films, which is really saying something.

38) Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1994)
Like I said under Freddy’s Dead, going into this ranking I fully expected The Next Generation to take the bottom slot on this list. This film is a dreadfully dull, incomprehensible mess which has the audacity to think that it can make a meta-commentary about bad slasher sequels, despite being one of the absolute worst itself. It’s also pretty insulting to series fans as Leatherface (or “Leather” as they’re called here) is a complete joke who spends every second of screentime shrieking incessantly. The only real saving grace which kept The Next Generation from taking the bottom of this list is Matthew McConaughey’s deranged performance as Vilmer. The character himself is nonsense but McConaughey goes so far beyond hamming up that it’s at least entertaining. I wrote a whole Retrospectives review on this film, so if you want a more detailed commentary you can read it here.

37) Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)
Imagine being a Halloween fan who had waited 6 years for the unresolved plot threads from Halloween 5 to be resolved, only to have this film shit into existence. Halloween 6 is an ignoble ending for the original continuity of Halloween sequels and an embarrassing capstone to Donald Pleasence’s career. The poor guy just looks tired in this film and can’t even muster up the deranged energy that had made him so entertaining to watch. He’s not the only one who gets done dirty by this film though – Danielle Harris didn’t even get invited back to play Jamie Lloyd one last time, and instead the character is recast and then unceremoniously killed off in the first twenty minutes, continuing the Halloween franchise’s shitty obsession with killing off all its main characters for no good reason. And then we also have a young Paul Rudd, who gets this weirdly creepy role as Tommy Doyle, the boy Laurie was babysitting in the first film. Regardless, all of the characters are half-baked with no real reason to care about any of them.

The film also has a terrible, mid-90s horror aesthetic to it. It often throws ambient screams into the soundtrack to try to make things feel scarier and will suddenly intercut split-second shots of knives or other “scary” images and loud scare sounds into a scene to try to get a cheap jump scare (sometimes even using these as transitions to other scenes). And, oh God, they also will just throw hard rock into the soundtrack when Michael’s showing up to show us that he’s not fucking around, this Michael has ‘tude. I mean, it’s not as embarrassing as the slide-whistle cops in Halloween 5, but it’s still pretty bad.

The main issue with Halloween 6 though is that it makes absolutely no sense. The whole conspiracy angle ends up being a dead-end with no explanation for what’s going on. Michael’s motivations are explicitly laid out that he’s still trying to wipe out his last living relative (this time Jamie’s newborn son), but then he spends most of the film going after the Strodes who have moved into his old house and have nothing to do with the baby. It’s also kind of implied that the man in black has some sort of control over him, but then Michael just wipes out the whole cult when they leave him loose in their sanitarium…? I just… what? The narrative also just doesn’t flow. At one point Dr. Loomis yells “Where is the baby?” and that caused me to stop and say “Yeah, that’s a very good question. Where IS the baby? Hell, where is anybody in this film? What the hell is happening!?” The last twenty minutes in particular just don’t make any sense (at least, in the theatrical version I watched – the ending was heavily reshot and there’s a producer’s cut which apparently is better, but I didn’t see it).

I will give this movie a bit of credit though. It mercifully moves pretty quickly – the first fourty minutes went by before I knew it, despite very little of substance actually happening in that time. The film also at least looks professional, with a nice production design and some decent shots. I also think that, considering what they had to work with, the curse of Thorn which is fuelling Michael Myers actually kind of makes sense. I mean, look at what they had to explain: why Michael Myers is invincible and inhuman evil, kills on Halloween, and goes after his family members. The explanation that druids would possess one person to kill their family in order to spare the demon, Thorn, from killing all of the tribe is actually kind of sensible when you look at it that way. I mean, it’s still bullshit in the end and not the sort of explanation we ever needed, but it’s not as bad as it might have seemed at first glance. That said, considering the conspiracy just gets tossed aside in the last thirty minutes, it ultimately becomes pretty pointless.

Halloween 6 is just an absolute mess from start to finish. It’s no wonder that the franchise was rebooted after this point because there was nowhere further to go from this point. The only regrettable part about it was that they didn’t pull the plug earlier. Apparently the producer’s cut was better, but since I can only go off the version I saw, they should have done better the first time.

36) Halloween: Resurrection (2002)
The Halloween franchise was given a gift with H20. After several years of horrible sequels, the public was finally excited about the prospect of another outing. So what did they do with this golden opportunity? Well, they shit out Halloween: Resurrection, which might be one of the stupidest films I’ve ever seen. After the refreshingly clever H20, Resurrection goes right back to lazy tropes and dumb characters, even managing to make Laurie Strode into an idiot before killing her off again in the first fifteen minutes. Bloody hell, Halloween get some class!

Anyway, with Laurie dead, the film then cuts to a group of dumb, horny teenagers who are cast on an Internet reality TV show, set in the Myers house. As you can imagine from the set-up, this film was trying to be very contemporary for the early 2000s, but it is painfully dated now, with ridiculous celebrity cameos from a kung-fu fighting Busta Rymes and a completely pointless Tyra Banks. The film is also ripping off its contemporaries in terrible fashion. The Blair Witch Project is popular? We’ll have low-resolution cameras mounted on everyone which they will constantly forget about! People still like Scream? We’ll make this film meta, that’s the part about Scream that was good, right? The characters also are all shitty and one-dimensional. Like, there’s a character who is introduced as a chef. Next time we see him, he’s explaining that he believes that Michael Myers became evil because he had a bad diet… um, okay… Then the next time we see him, he says that he bets that the Myers house has a big kitchen, which he promptly wanders off to find. We get it movie, he likes cooking. The rest of the cast are no better – you have your insecure final girl who doesn’t develop or learn anything, a fame obsessed girl, an academic girl who apparently doesn’t know how to be a human being, a horndog, a creepy guy music guy, etc. They all suck.

The entire set-up of this film is so bad. Invalidating the ending of H20 is just insulting to the audience’s intelligence and screws over Laurie Strode’s ending to get the Weinsteins a bit more money in the bank. There’s basically no reason for Michael to be killing people in this film, other than that they just happened to wander into his house. The movie also has very little to say about anything. You’d think that, considering the premise, maybe they’d have some commentary on reality TV, but it literally boils down to “reality TV is not real”. Wow, that’s some revelatory insight there, Resurrection. Literally, the only thing that I actually thought was clever in this movie was having the show’s audience message the final girl to let her know where Michael is and give her tips to evade him. That was a pretty cool idea, but it’s the only moment of brilliance inside of this giant turd of a film.

35) Halloween II (2009)
Holy shit… say what you will about Rob Zombie’s Halloween remake, but the sequel is utter dogshit. Like, I had to think long and hard about whether I hated it more than Halloween: Resurrection. I’ll give Rob a little bit of credit for running with his own artistic vision for a Halloween sequel, but good God were the results awful. Where do I even begin describing this movie… actually, now that I ask it, there’s really only one starting point, and it’s two words: Ghost. Mom. Rob Zombie obviously really wanted to work his wife back into the sequel so we get “treated” to numerous scenes of Michael Myers and Laurie Strode seeing visions of a white-clad Sheri Moon Zombie telling them that they need to be a family again. It’s freaking stupid and just one of several missteps. Let’s get to the narrative – Laurie has PTSD and is trying to cope with the fact that her life is crumbling around her, Dr. Loomis is on a book tour and Michael Myers is slowly walking back to Haddonfield to reunite with her. That’s basically all this movie is for the vast majority of its runtime. Seriously, this is a two hour movie and it takes about an hour and a half for Michael to even find Laurie, meaning that there is just a ton of wheel spinning in the meantime. There are also plenty of kill scenes, but they don’t really make any sense – why does Michael go after the strip club where his mom used to work and kill everyone there? I guess because Ghost Mom told him to…? That’s the only possible explanation, but then why does he go to a party and kill one of Laurie’s friends and her hookup for that night? Especially considering that he then just heads to Laurie’s house to try to ambush her there? Uhhhh… because this is a Halloween movie? Seriously, it makes absolutely no sense other than to just tick off the boxes of what people expect from this series. Oh, and speaking of which, that must be the entire motive behind Michael stalking Laurie in a hospital during the first twenty-five minutes of the film… which culminates with it all being revealed to be part of a fucking dream sequence!!!

It also doesn’t help that nearly everyone in Halloween II is an asshole. Dr. Loomis has gone from being sympathetic to just a fame-obsessed prick and even Laurie has become really unbearable. Like, I get that she’s suffering from PTSD and can sympathize with that, but she lashes out at fellow victim, Annie, when she tries to help and even admits that she wants to kill her. Laurie also has a couple of new friends, but they’re basically nobodies who only exist to fill out the bodycount. The only characters I liked at all were Sheriff Brackett (played excellently by Brad Dourif) and Annie, because at least they were trying to make the best of the situation. Halloween II is just a senseless, nasty mess from start to finish, there really isn’t much more you can say about it.

34) Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)
When I started this list, I expected Jason Goes to Hell to be ranked much lower. However, in a franchise as formulaic as Friday the 13th, Jason Goes to Hell gets at least some points for trying to shake up the formula… but holy shit, did they ever fail spectacularly. Deciding that the ninth film in a franchise is the perfect time to suddenly begin filling in the mythology of Jason was a major misstep which goes against the pure simplicity which gave this series the longevity it enjoys. Honestly, Jason Goes to Hell is pretty decent in most ways (especially by Friday standards) – the acting’s fine, the characters are interesting (Creighton Duke is fun and Steven is a one of the best protagonists in the series), the directing is slicker than usual, there are some funny moments (such as the opening, where the FBI ambushes Jason) and the kills are just brutal. However, the story is so batshit insane that it brings down everything else. So Jason can now suddenly possess people temporarily when he dies and needs to be reborn from a secret sibling of his that we never knew existed until now? What the actual hell? This, of course, also means that Jason barely even factors into the film and instead we get to see such “interesting” killers as a coroner and an asshole reporter… great, just what the franchise needed… It makes Jason Goes to Hell at least entertaining in its ridiculousness, but there’s no way to ignore that this film is a massive failure. The fact that this film got a theatrical release is just insane to me. Oh and to make matters worse, the redesigned Jason is just butt-ugly, which makes it inadvertently good that he barely shows up in the film.

33) Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989)
Halloween 5 has to be the point where the franchise really went off the rails. What started as an incredibly simple tale about the embodiment of evil deciding that he wants to stalk and kill a group of fleshed-out teens turns into a saga about family bloodlines, ill-defined psychic links, the curse of thorn and a shady conspiracy surrounding a man in black. Holy shit, what happened to this franchise? Halloween 5 somehow manages to find ways to not only get stupider but more boring as it goes on. Most of the film is just a very dull rehash of very well-trodden slasher territory as Michael kills teens that we’ve barely met.

There are just so many dumb things in this film. Jamie is suddenly mute and has some sort of psychic connection with Michael, but neither really has any purpose. There’s a shady man in black who has some sort of connection to Michael, but it was literally added without bothering to have it make sense, because the filmmakers figured they’d be able to answer it later. And why does Dr. Loomis suddenly believe that Michael Myers is fuelled by rage? He’s the one who said that he was pure evil, attributing his violence to malice goes against the entire point of the character.

Another issue is that the previous film’s co-lead, Rachel, is uncermoniously killed. She wasn’t a particularly fleshed-out character, but she was miles better than her replacement, Tina, a ditzy girl who just wants to have some fun. Don’t get me wrong, a final girl doesn’t always need to be the strong, independent type, but Tina is just straight-up dumb. Michael ends up stalking her and her friends for basically no reason – apparently Tina plans on visiting Jamie at some point that evening, but why wouldn’t Michael just go straight to Jamie then instead? It doesn’t make much sense, but then again, not much does in Halloween 5. There can’t have been a script when this film was shot, or at the very least, they can’t have followed it because there’s no way someone could put this film’s narrative down on paper and say “yeah, this sounds good!” (EDIT: I looked it up afterwards and this film did indeed begin shooting without a completed script and there were moments, such as the man in black, which were just added on the fly to fill in plot holes!) I’ll give the film some credit for clearly trying to recapture some of the suspense that had been lost in the previous film though, such as a scene where Tina stupidly gets into a car with Michael, thinking that he’s her boyfriend, and you’re left wondering if/when he’s going to kill her. For the most part though, Halloween 5 is just trying to squeeze blood out of a stone for a franchise that went in the wrong direction ages ago.

32) Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)
Perhaps due to the formulaic nature of the franchise, Friday the 13th films generally maintained a pretty consistent level of mediocrity during the 80s. However, it wasn’t until Jason Takes Manhattan that we suddenly saw that sticking to the formula could still manage to disappoint everyone – even fans who had eaten up all the previous entries. Jason Takes Manhattan is a derivative and subpar Friday film on its own, with Jason somehow managing to secretly kill sexy teenagers on a boat which is impossibly labrynthine. However, its hints at shaking up the formula are what truly make it disappointing. How cool could a film about Jason stalking people on the streets of New York have been? But no, he shows up and then just continues stalking only the people he was already chasing after. The film also has many of the most irritating and dull victims in the entire franchise, a terrible final girl with a contrived connection to Jason and an embarrassingly bad-looking unmasked Jason. Seriously, the makeup they used in this film when he loses his hockey mask looks WORSE than a Halloween mask. The only real saving grace is that a couple of the kills are decent, particularly the boxing scene where Jason takes dozens of punches to tire out his opponent and then one-punches his head off.

31) Friday the 13th Part III (1982)
It didn’t take long for Friday the 13th to begin scraping the bottom of the barrel, but they sure as hell succeeded in Part III. Some people have a fondness for Part III because it’s the entry where Jason gets his iconic hockey mask, but don’t be fooled – this film suuuuucks. What’s so bad about it? For the most part, it’s just another rehash of the first two films, but stupider and more dull. By this point, the filmmakers have realized that they like to string the audience along with fake-outs until something really scary happens, but in Part III they forgot that the characters still need to actually have something to do. Instead, we get multiple scenes where characters will wander into a dangerous place for no reason and just forget that they know what the layout of their own home is like, or just play with random things in the environment despite the fact that they’re supposed to be actually doing something. It’s obvious what the filmmakers are doing and it just feels lazy and wastes the audience’s time.

Another big issue is that the first two films in the franchise went to a lot of effort to make you at least get to know the characters before they would give picked off, but in Part III we get to meet a bunch of annoying assholes. Prime amongst these is Shelly, an irritating prankster with a self-esteem issues. However, lest you feel sorry for him, the little bastard lashes out at other people to try to compensate for his own insecurity, which just turns him into a dick. We also get a group of cartoonish, brain-dead gang members whose idea of revenge is to try to burn down a barn as unstealthily as possible. The film also opens with a pair of irritating rednecks who you just immediately want to be killed off. Other than them, nearly everyone else in the cast are your usual Friday the 13th cannon fodder, with no real personalities to speak of (especially the two stoners, who barely get any screen time before they get offed). The only exceptions are final girl Chris and her handsome hunk boyfriend, Rick, who are both at least sympathetic enough that I wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to them. The acting is also pretty bad, even by Friday standards. I wouldn’t say that any of the characters put in particularly strong performances and even characters like Chris and Rick have some line deliveries which are unconvincing.

Oh and I would be remiss to mention the 3D gimmick. Not only does it make the film always slightly blurry to watch in 2D now, but it also means that we get lots of shitty, blurry shots where something gets stuck into the foreground for no real reason. I hope you like blurry shots of yo-yos, eye balls, popcorn, rakes and a blunt getting shoved in your face and taking you out of the experience! It also highlights the pathetic special effects – since they have to get so many things thrown at the camera, they use lots of wires to get the shot right, meaning that you can clearly see these wires since they’re in the foreground of the shot! This happens on two very obvious occasions with a rattle snake and when a fake eyeball goes flying out of a very rubber-looking head.

On the plus side though, there are a couple fun kills as usual and, when she gets promoted to the final girl, Chris turns into a no-nonsense badass. Like, the moment she sees Jason, she’s right on the offensive, dropping a book case on him and then taking a knife out of her friend’s back and using it to stab him in the hand and leg. She actually causes Jason to back away from her, she’s so intimidating! She absolutely kicks his ass and makes smart decisions on the fly more often than not in the process. She’s easily one of the best final girls in the franchise, but she’s easily the only thing about this movie that makes it worthwhile.

…and that’s it for the worst of the worst. Be sure to tune in again soon as we go through #30-21!

Retrospective: Atlas Shrugged Part III – Who Is John Galt? (2014)

Welcome back to the Atlas Shrugged retrospective! Today we’ll be looking at the third and (mercifully) final entry in the franchise, Atlas Shrugged Part III – Who Is John Galt? After the dumpster fires that were the first two films in this series, Aglialoro and company were back with another entirely new cast and a smaller budget than ever! Could they see this series out on a high note? Read on to find out…

Oh, and as with the last 2 entries, be sure to check out my friend Matt’s review at his blog, The M, as we both chose to suffer through this series together!


…I’m not sure if they could have gone with a more boring, non-descript and unrelated poster for this film. After several looks at the poster it appears to be a railroad, which is fair enough, but it would actually fit the first film better as there are barely any scenes on the tracks in this one. I also love how Hank gets to cameo in it in the little airplane in the corner, which unintentionally fits well into his purpose in this film.


PRODUCTION

After Aglialoro and his production team poured even more money and effort into marketing Part II, only to be met with resounding financial and critical failure, it looked questionable whether the final chapter of Atlas Shrugged would ever get off the ground. However, the filmmakers were true believers and were not going to be dissuaded. Aglialoro, along with fellow franchise producer Harmon Kaslow, set about seeing this project through and by late March 2013 it was announced that filming would begin in the fall. They were looking for a director, cast and crew at the time and Aglialoro said that “I don’t care if I’ve got to fire five directors — that’s fine. We’re going to get it right.” So, after a declaration like that, who did they ultimately hire? The answer is James Manera, who literally had one directing credit to his name on IMDb at the time, a single episode of Nash Bridges almost 20 years earlier (although he also had directed a couple small documentaries which don’t appear there). Truly Aglialoro and company had to sort through the cream of the crop to see this film series through! Duncan Scott (who had co-written the screenplay for Part II) and Brian O’Toole (who had also written the screenplays for both previous films) were tapped to return to write the screenplay for Part III. While it was announced that both would be returning to write Part III, neither are credited in the final film. Instead, writing credits go to producers John Aglialoro and Harmon Kaslow, along with director James Manera. I wasn’t able to find an answer regarding if Scott and O’Toole’s original screenplay was heavily rewritten by the producers, or if the producers just wrote their own from scratch for (presumably) budgetary reasons, but the fact that they’re the only ones who are credited in the finished product is rather interesting. Also, a fun tidbit – back before Part I was released, Aglialoro had toyed with the idea of having Part III suddenly be a musical, but this idea never got anywhere near the final product. It’s just funny to see that Aglialoro had ideas that could have made this franchise’s continuity even more baffling.

As for the obligatory recasting, the role of Dagny was filled by Laura Regan, probably best known for a short stint on Mad Men, some minor horror movie roles and a number of guest TV appearances. The esteemed role of John Galt went to Kristoffer Polaha, who was similarly best known for a short stint on Mad Men and a number of guest TV appearances (my first thoughts on seeing him in this film were that he looked like a Hallmark channel love interest and, lo and behold, he’s been in 6 Hallmark channel movies since this film came out). Hank Rearden was played in this film by Rob Morrow, who had earned Golden Globe and Emmy nominations for his roles in Northern Exposure and then had a successful run leading Numb3rs, making him probably the biggest name in the cast. The next biggest name in the cast was veteran character actor Joaquim de Almeida, known for big roles in Clear and Present Danger, Desperado and Fast Five among many, many others. De Almeida was cast to play Francisco D’Anconia. James Taggart was played by Greg Germann, who was probably best known for Ally McBeal, but seems to have been confined to minor roles ever since. Rounding out the notable recast characters was Peter Mackenzie as Head of State Thompson, who was a pretty decent character actor in his own right, but was never going to live up to Ray Wise’s portrayal from the last film. Finally, Part III also introduces us to Ragnar Danneskjöld, played by Eric Allan Kramer, who had some big roles in Robin Hood: Men in Tights and True Romance early in his career but had been confined to character roles and guest appearances ever since. Oh and it’s also worth noting that, like Part II, Part III also features conservative celebrity cameos from the likes of Presidential candidate Ron Paul, along with Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity, all providing the “voice of reason” in the film.



While filming was intended to start in the fall of 2013, it did not actually begin until mid-January 2014. This was likely because the producers’ fundraising came up shorter than they had expected (around $10 million split evenly between the filming and marketing budgets) and so they launched a month-long Kickstarter campaign on September 23, 2013! This Kickstarter makes for a very interesting relic to pour over for a retrospective. $446,907 was raised during the campaign by 3,554 backers… but if you look closer at how the numbers break down, at least $100,000 of this was raised by the 10 highest-donating backers! Another 12 contributed a further $65,000+ and then 65 more contributed another $65,000+, meaning that more than half of the funds were supplied by 87 people – a measly 2% of the total backers! Clearly there were lots of rich people who had nothing better to do with their money than to throw it at this film… and, funnily enough, we actually know who some of these people are because 16 people who donated a staggering $7,500 or more had their names very crudely carved into a piece of wood and appear prominently on screen (it’s jarring and funny to see in the finished film though because these rough carvings are flanking carvings which were clearly done with some professional tools beforehand, so their names just look like they were done by angsty teens).


Of course, this Kickstarter ended up generating a number of justifiably snarky comments about how the filmmakers sure were relying on altruism from their libertarian audience to bring about this film after it failed so spectacularly on the free market. Anticipating this response, the Kickstarter featured not one, but two FAQs about how it was not against Ayn Rand’s philosophy to ask people for money, even going so far as to dedicate a whole other article on this topic on The Atlas Society as well. Having learned more about Objectivism from this retrospectives series, I actually do understand their argument, which is summed up pretty well by the FAQ response:

“Kickstarter is not charity and we do not seek charity. We are offering a voluntary value-for-value exchange. If you see no value in any of the reward levels, you should not back the project. Regarding the idea of charity however, Ayn Rand had no problem with someone giving money to a cause they care about. If someone deems a cause worthy and wants to donate money, they should be free to do it. What Ayn Rand had a problem with is altruism for the sake of altruism as a moral duty, or being compelled, or forced, to ‘give.'”

While I do understand their argument, it comes across as a fairly arbitrary distinction to me – whenever they ask for a handout, they’re exonerated because they will say that it’s a value exchange (although charging $7,500 to get your name crudely carved onto a piece of wood sounds closer to a “scam” to me, especially when the film had already been financed and was going to happen regardless). However, whenever anyone else asks for a handout, they’ll characterize them as moochers and looters. Add in the fact that they ignore that even when they’re “forced” to give, there’s still value being created in having a society that functions properly, which would be even more valuable if they weren’t such crusty bastards who hate the idea of other people living at a reasonable standard. So, yeah, I can see how they can justify this Kickstarter within their own philosophy, but it just feels like another convenience to allow Objectivists to do what they want while looking down on people with less means for doing the same.

Interestingly, Rand devotees and fans of the movie franchise were invited to an event at the Atlas Summit in order to help determine the final edit of the film. I wasn’t able to determine how exactly this event went, how involved it was or how it might have affected the final film, but it’s a really interesting detail which shows how the filmmakers were attempting to get directly involved with the public on this particular film. The film was released on September 12, 2014 to a much smaller opening of 242 screens, grossing a measly $851,690 against its $10 million filming and marketing budget. This means that, if you add together the marketing and production budgets of all three films (including the ~$15 million which was spent on Part I before it went into full production), the Atlas Shrugged franchise lost almost $45 million dollars!!! HOLY SHIT!!! Even if you just factor in the costs which went directly into these three films, that’s still a huge, $30 million dollar loss that could have been prevented if the filmmakers weren’t so proud or dogmatic that they insisted on pushing on, ballooning their losses with each misstep.


Start the video at 16:06, it conveys how this news makes me feel more clearly than my own words could.

PLOT SYNOPSIS

The film opens by recounting the events which caused John Galt to quit the Twentieth Century Motor Company and declare that he would “stop the engine of the world”. It then picks up where the last movie left off, with Galt rescuing Dagny from her plane crash. He then shows her around his hidden valley, where the greatest minds in the country have gone for refuge from the outside world. They have established a secret utopia here, with their own currency and a radical libertarian social structure straight out of the philosophy of Rand. Galt and the locals try to convince Dagny to stay with them, but she refuses to abandon the rest of the world. Over the course of a month, a romance begins to spark between Galt and Dagny, but they are forced to part as he takes her back to the outside world.


When she returns, Dagny finds that James has mismanaged Taggart Transcontinental even worse than before, having negotiated deals which would nationalize the railroad and cut off food supplies to the east coast. The government has also gotten increasingly militaristic, building lethal sonic weapons to enforce martial law. Dagny manages to prevent a disaster on the railroad due to her ingenuity and, when she realizes that John Galt has been watching her do this, the pair’s passion finally boils over into a railroad closet bang-session. Shortly thereafter, the head of state arranges a televised speech, but it is interrupted when Galt intercepts the signal and relays his own speech instead, laying out his philosophy and urging the people to join him in his strike. This act of defiance finally causes the government to go looking for Galt to recruit or eliminate him, and he is found when Dagny inadvertently leads agents to his location. Dagny pretends to have done this intentionally and Galt is brought before Head of State Thompson. Thompson offers Galt the highest position he can, with the ability to set his economic ideals how he sees fit, but Galt refuses, saying that no man should have that kind of power. In response, the government decides to torture him for his defiance. Dagny, along with a few supporters from Galt’s refuge, break in and rescue him and the group fly away as the power grid across America shuts down, signalling the collapse of Thompson’s ineffective rule.


REVIEW

Watching Part III is an experience, to the point where I wasn’t more than 2 seconds in when I had to pause the movie to make my first note. The first frame of the film opens with a title sequence that says “The day after tomorrow…”, which just caused a cascade of thoughts. First of all, it shows that the filmmakers really do believe that everything that happens in this film could happen – the cartoonish characters and insane politics on display in these films aren’t just done for illustrative purposes, they really do think that this is what non-libertarians think, believe and behave like. Secondly, this title inadvertently causes confusion, because it immediately got me thinking about the equally-preposterous Roland Emmerich disaster film The Day After Tomorrow. Both films share similar flaws. Both are just fundamentally dumb – in The Day After Tomorrow‘s case, it’s like a particularly dumb environmentalist’s take on climate change, whereas Atlas Shrugged is like a particularly dumb conservative’s take on economics and politics. Again, we’re not even 10 seconds into this film and the first freaking thing we see is causing me to dunk on this film.

Honestly, actual act of watching Part III took me more than twice the film’s runtime to complete because I was pausing to take notes constantly. There were just so many unbelievably dumb things packed into this movie that I could not stop writing. Compared to the inept passion on display in Part II and even Part I, Part III is a clear step backwards because it is so embarrassingly shoddy. I feel like Aglialoro and Kaslow were devoted enough to Rand’s ideology that they felt like they had to complete the trilogy, but after losing tens of millions of dollars on the project already, it feels like this final film was half-assed it to get it over with because it definitely wasn’t going to earn them any more money back. I mean, sure, the other two films sucked, but they at least felt like the filmmakers believed in them and wanted them to transcend their limited budgets. Part III just feels like they gave up and wrapped up the ending of this trilogy as fast and as cheaply as they could. I mean, look at that plot synopsis – it’s so short! I’m not skipping over huge chunks of the plot either, because most of the shit that happens in this film doesn’t matter, it’s just about preaching to the audience and spinning the wheels until the film ends unceremoniously. I have so much to talk about with this film, so strap in, we’re going to tear this thing apart.


Here’s Francisco looking appropriately drained in response to watching this film.


First off, let’s start with how cheap this film looks. Cheapness pervades the sets throughout the film. Remember how I said that they loved showing off the bigger sets in Part II, as if they were proud of their improved production quality? Part III ignores scale and set dressing as much as possible, filling a scene with the bare minimum of props and, ideally, seems to just shoot on location as much as possible to save cash. This is immediately apparent from the very first scene. We get a flashback to the Twentieth Century Motor Corporation, in which the heads of the company call a meeting about their new salary structure and John Galt’s strike begins. This scene clearly appears to have been filmed in a worn-out high school gym, rather than a factory, complete with sports line markings on the floor and paint peeling on the walls (this can’t even be for thematic reasons either, because up until this point the company has been run under a Randian ideal so it should look pristine). Even the company’s banner isn’t wide enough to fit between a pair of support columns, so it’s awkwardly pinned at a strange angle, like they didn’t take a proper measurement before they got this thing made up and couldn’t afford a replacement. And this is just the first scene! From there we get bland corporate spaces for Taggart Transcontinental and the government’s offices, and Galt’s valley, which is just a bunch of expensive cottages (note: I’m going to call it “the valley” from here on out – no one ever refers to it as “Galt’s Gulch” or anything like that, they just say it’s “the valley” so that’s the term I’m going to go with).


To top off the cheap sets, the lighting in this film is terrible. It’s usually fine during scenes in the valley – these scenes are brightly lit and colourful, but this feels like it’s only the case because they could get natural sunlight in these scenes to avoid having to pay for a full lighting setup. However, every scene outside of the valley is lit like the inside of my ass. Everything is just so poorly lit and desaturated, made duller by colour grading which turns everything to a cold shade of blue. While this may have arisen from a need to cut down on lighting costs, it has clearly been factored in as a stylistic choice to contrast the “real world” against the vibrancy of the valley. I feel like this might have been somewhat effective if they had been more judicious in its usage and/or reined the effect in somewhat, but when half of the movie ends up looking like a bland, muddied mess, it makes it a stylistic choice which was ill-advised.



Oh and speaking of ill-advised stylistic choices, here are a couple other fantastic moments of cheapness in this film. When Dagny arrives in the valley, she’s taken to a party to meet everyone and the road is lined with paper lanterns… which would be cool, but then you notice that they are literally made of paper sandwich bags with a (probably faux) candle inside! Not exactly the sort of product you’d expect from the “greatest minds in the world”, especially considering that they have an enormous holographic dome covering the entire valley, right? Even worse, they cut to close-ups on these sandwich bag lanterns… twice!!! Oh, and take a look at the screenshot above – they couldn’t even line up these lantern bags straight! It’s such a meaningless moment, but they screw pointless shit like this up at such an alarming rate that you can surely see why I was pausing the film so much to laugh and take notes. Another such moment comes late in the film when the much-hyped, nefarious, secret government torture device, Project F, is finally revealed to the audience and… it’s a car battery parrilla device, like what you’ve seen in pretty much any dark and gritty post-9/11 action movie. This is the sort of radical ingenuity which had to be plundered from the greatest minds in the world? The filmmakers clearly just didn’t give a shit and just went with the cheapest, most boring option they possibly could have, which is especially disappointing considering that Part II leaned more into the sci-fi aspect of the story.


The cheapness of this film goes hand-in-hand with its rushed plot and contrived, heavy-handed storytelling. Let’s say you want to open your film in such a way that the audience will view John Galt as not only a revolutionary figure, but also mysterious. So they start the film at a staff meeting for the Twentieth Century Motor Corporation and show Galt’s initial declaration to “stop the engine of the world”, which makes sense… but then, to hammer home their desire to make him “mysterious”, they have some guy ham-fistedly shout “who is that guy!?”, despite the fact that Galt has been working very successfully at this factory for years now, so everyone here should know him. That’s less than 2 minutes into the film, but it’s a bit of narrative convenience so obvious that I had to stop and laugh at it. Honestly, I probably wouldn’t even mention it if this film wasn’t so ham-fisted throughout – for example, later in the film they need to have the government bad guys convey information to the audience: the government is working on something awful called Project F and they’re planning on having a national televised speech. Rather than doing so organically, they literally just have all of the bad guys have a secret meeting about Project F without going into any details and then someone says “we need to make sure the speech is on all the networks” and then the scene literally ends! No information on what Project F might be, no indication about what “the speech” even is about, just conveying the bare minimum of what they want us to know and that’s it. The film has also been setting up that the railroad has become so mismanaged that Taggart bridge will eventually collapse, a prediction that Dagny has said could never happen. Then, right before the film ends, Francisco just comes out of nowhere and then says “Did you hear? The Taggart bridge collapsed!” It’s just so uneventful and matter-of-fact and Dagny’s non-reaction just makes it a hilarious moment.



However, the strangest bit of narrative convenience definitely revolves around Cheryl Taggart. She had basically no purpose in Part II so I assumed that that meant she must do something important in Part III, but nope. We literally find out that she died when a character casually holds a newspaper up in front of the screen!!! I had to do a double-take, it was such a strange way to write a character out unceremoniously. The film then decides that they have to do a flashback to explain all of this, so with a dream filter over the screen they explain that Cheryl found out that her husband was a fraud, which causes her to apologize to Dagny at some undefined time and then… just died. They don’t say how, but the way that they don’t say how suggests that James had her offed. From what I understand of this character’s fate in the books, we’re supposed to realize that she commits suicide in shame, but that doesn’t come across in this film at all. The filmmakers clearly don’t care about her, they just check off this character’s “arc” as fast as possible and then rush to the next plot point.


Another bit of narrative convenience is that the film cuts to voice-over exposition throughout to let the audience know what is going on. These exposition dumps interrupt the film constantly and are so disconnected from the actual events going on on-screen. Even worse, they gloss over events which probably deserved to be given more importance, such as when it is announced that Hank Rearden has “disappeared” and then his factory workers who were left behind were killed by the government strike-breakers, holy shit!!! Were Hank’s workers a bunch of moochers? Why would he leave them behind to literally die!? And why was this told to the audience impassively? I kept thinking that these exposition dumps were going to tie into the ending, where it would reveal that someone would be recounting what happened in the past during these segments, but no, the whole thing gets dropped by the time the third act rolls around. Personally, I think that this awful ham-fisted writing is probably down to John Agalioro’s screenwriting “talents”. He co-wrote the screenplay for Part I, which had similarly bad writing at times, but it was tempered in by Brian Patrick O’Toole. Part II didn’t really suffer in this regard, presumably since Aglialoro didn’t write it (its writing issues were more a problem of wheel-spinning and bad philosophy). However, Part III gaves Aglialoro and Kaslow full writing credits and it’s clear from the final product that neither of them are qualified to write a screenplay. Like… there’s a part in this film where super-genius John Galt outsmarts the bad guys by getting arrested and then using his cell phone during a meeting with Head of State Thompson to call Dagny and let her in on their evil plans!!! Why the hell would they not confiscate his phone!?! That’s Tommy Wiseau-levels of screenwriting talent!



The bad screenwriting leads to all sorts of unintentional hilarity, such as how it makes Galt’s whole movement look like a dangerous cult. Like, a hidden commune in the mountains living by their own set of rules is already sounding pretty Jonestown, so you’d think that they’d do something to avoid coming across that way. Well, moments after crash landing, Dagny is informed by Galt that there are certain rules to living in the valley. He tells her that, most importantly, no one gets a free pass at someone else’s expense. The whole exchange is shot and staged in such a way that it feels like Galt is heavily implying “you’re gonna have to fuck me if you stay here”. Then there are the oaths that everyone in the valley are forced to make in order to stay, the way that this community has been isolated from differing opinions, and how all of Dagny’s old friends plead with her to throw away her life, ideals and very identity to join this lovely little movement. This is best shown in two different scenes. The first is when Dagny’s friends identify that she just wants some acknowledgement for the things she has accomplished and so they give her adulation for a job well done to try to goad her into staying. The second comes when we see that all of Dagny’s friends have carved personalized messages over her bed for her to read when she goes to sleep!!! Read this way, it ultimately turns Part III into a depressing story about how a cult tears away Dagny’s support system until she loses her will to help people and then joins the cult herself. It reminds me of The Endless, and if this film had even an ounce of self-awareness we could have gotten an awesome film about Dagny fighting back against this cult which has been leeching away the stability of the world’s economy.


Of course, Aglialoro and Kaslow can’t even hit the important parts of Atlas Shrugged well. Perhaps most tellingly, the romance between Dagny and Galt feels totally forced and unnatural. Sure, the film tries to tell us that they’re totally into each other from the first time that they lock eyes, but it never feels convincing. Considering that Ayn Rand herself said that Atlas Shrugged was ultimately nothing more than a love story, this is pretty damning criticism. Dagny’s insistence on aiding the world is totally at odds with Galt’s insistence on allowing things to get worse. Maybe if he grew and changed his opinion this could have worked, which seems to be implied when Dagny and Galt have an impromptu fuck-session after Dagny organizes a plan to prevent a rail disaster from occurring (which, by the way, is definitely the funniest scene in the film – they don’t even know if the plan worked or if there are people dying out there, they just need to get their rocks off pronto). However, it turns out that Galt’s values haven’t changed at all, and in fact it’s Dagny’s which are cast away by the end. Other than that, we’re given a bunch of boilerplate Hallmark movie moments where Dagny and Galt sight-see around the valley, which apparently is a shorthand for blossoming romance without having to do any real groundwork to convince us that they actually like each other.


Then there’s Galt’s big speech, which is ~60 pages long in the original text (or over 3 hours if spoken aloud!!!). Like d’Anconia’s “money speech” in Part II, this speech has been pared down considerably, running in at just under 5 minutes. Personally, I feel like it comes across better than d’Anconia’s speech did, but that’s for a couple of unintentional reasons. First of all, it’s significantly less nasty and confrontational than d’Anconia’s speech was. Secondly, the text has been cut down so much that you could interpret it as a call to stand up against exploitative businessmen, rather than just the government, which is probably way more communist than they were intending. It also doesn’t help that this exact same message has been hammered into the audience’s head all through the first half of the film, so by the time it comes it’s just 5 minutes of more-of-the-same rather than a revolutionary statement. The plot also just halts entirely during this 5 minute sequence, so the fact that it’s conveying information we already have been told repeatedly does it no favours. Maybe if they had cut out all the lectures when Dagny was in the valley this could have landed stronger, but coming long after them just feels like more wheel-spinning in a film filled with it.



The dialogue is also just baffling at times, to the point where I don’t know if they’re just lifting lines awkwardly from the text or if they’re using the first take from each shot, mis-remembered lines and all. Like, just look at that line above – I had to rewind the film several times to make sure I wasn’t mishearing or misunderstanding that line, because it sounds like it went through Google translate. What the hell is “It’s like I can’t believe you’re alive” even supposed to mean? I guess that Francisco was under the impression that Dagny was dead based on the news of her disappearance, but wouldn’t he say “I thought you were dead!” instead? “I can’t believe you’re alive” would even be better, if still a really awkward line. “It’s like I can’t believe you’re alive” just makes no sense whatsoever. It’s not the only line like that though. Later, John Galt takes Dagny to the power source for the valley and there is an oath emblazoned above it. He then says “Everyone has taken that oath who lives in this valley.” …what? Again, I don’t know if this is some important line from the book or Aglialoro and Kaslow’s writing, but it just sounds wrong. I had to look up active vs passive voice just to make sure I wasn’t forgetting some grammatical rule, but even that makes this seem totally wrong – the people in the valley should be the subject and the oath is the verb, so shouldn’t this be “Everyone who lives in this valley has taken that oath”? That’s way less awkward and gets the point across more succinctly, in my opinion… but what do I know, I’m not some rich super-genius now am I?


Of course, it’s not just the actual writing which is awful in this film, the editing is also terrible. This wouldn’t be an Atlas Shrugged film without an insane amount of narrative padding, and boy is there ever a lot of wasted time in this film. The first time we see this is when John Galt takes Dagny to his home after her plane crash. This sequence involves a long shot of Galt’s car driving down a road, the car driving to his house, Galt getting out of the car, walking around it to open the door and then pick up Dagny to take her into the house… hell, they even had to show him closing the car door, just so we wouldn’t be left wondering if he did. All told, this whole sequence takes 45 seconds to do something that could have been done in 10-15 by a professional editor. Sure, that’s just one 45 second sequence, but it’s emblematic of the film itself, as it is just loaded with sequences that don’t actually add anything to drive the plot or characters forward. This kind of editing is a trend throughout the film, as there are numerous pointless establishing shots of nature and people travelling to places, almost like something from the Left Behind books. It got to the point where I was laughing at every new nature montage, but by the time I was learning to expect them, they escalate into a sequence which is truly special. When Dagny chooses to leave the valley, John Galt takes her to his plane and starts it up, resulting in a flying nature montage as they leave… then, moments after they land and say their goodbyes, we get another shot of the plane starting up and then leaving, and then we get a train nature montage as Dagny returns to civilization (gotta waste another 2 minutes of this film somehow)! Now, to be fair, these nature shots are probably the best shots in the film due to the inherent beauty of mountains and wilderness, but they’re also completely pointless to the plot, so what does that tell you about the film itself… oh, and there’s also a good chance that most of them are stock footage, so double yikes! It’s like they don’t think we’ll understand how characters get from place-to-place without showing several seconds of unnecessary travel and unimportant nature footage. (EDIT: Actually, I think that the filmmakers might just think that we’re all stupid. I was going back through the film to freshen up on some of the details and noticed a scene transition which is literally a extended shot centered on a wine bottle’s label – this would be notable even if it was just bad product placement, but this was for a fictional vineyard for one of the characters. Then I realized that this shot was from some other footage from this scene, zoomed in significantly to show off the blurry bottle so we know where this scene is supposed to be taking place, and then put into slow motion as well for no discernible reason!!! They didn’t think that this wine bottle, which is present during the entire scene, wouldn’t be enough of a context clue within the scene? Holy shit this film is just a treasure trove that never stops giving back to me!)


While the constant time wasting is probably the most obvious example of bad editing in this film, there are other instances peppered throughout. The next most obvious example would have to be when a railworker calls Eddie to warn him that the rails are so mismanaged that there is going to be an imminent disaster. It’s a classic set-up for a potentially tense scene, reminding me of the train crash from Part II. Will Dagny be able to stop the disaster in time? Hah, just kidding, nothing happens after this phone call. I was really confused at first – weren’t they playing this thing up like people were literally about to die? What happened to the urgency? But then it turns out that the disaster was actually going to happen a few days later (several minutes later in the film), but it makes the urgency of this initial warning so strange. Why did they not just have this worker warn them of the disaster right before it was going to happen instead of doing nothing about it, moving the story forward, and then coming back to it later? It would have made for a much more tense sequence, but instead it just deflates the tension. There’s another editing choice near the end of the film which just left me baffled. I’m not even sure where else to put this because it’s so strange – the bad guys get mad because Project F breaks and then when they’re leaving the room there’s this completely random and pointless slow motion sequence where one of the bad guys yells “We’ll be back, you son of a bitch!” I cannot understand this editing choice at all… Like, it’s random enough that I really hope it was something that was suggested at that Atlas Society meeting I mentioned earlier though, where “the fans” got to provide input on the final cut of the film. I hope that there was just some dude there who yelled “Needs more slow motion!” and they decided that this was the only moment tense enough to work. I need an explanation because this is possibly the most baffling moment in the whole movie!



Then we come to the fact that the filmmakers once again recast all of the characters in this film. Even moreso than Part II, Part III demonstrates why it’s not a good idea to recast after every film. There are so many moments in the early parts of the film which rely on Dagny reuniting with familiar faces that had disappeared, but every time they would introduce them I would go “am I supposed to know you?” Hell, I was even getting characters mixed up because of this; early in the film I kept thinking that Akston was Quentin Daniels from Part II, because characters constantly flit in and out of this series and I didn’t have any visual reference for the character any more (it’s bad enough that I didn’t even remember who Akston was supposed to be until I went back to edit my review of Part I). It’s also a particular issue with the bad guys, because the film then has to pause and waste another 15 seconds telling us who everyone is with freeze frames and pop-up text. It also doesn’t help that characters who were important in the previous two films are shunted aside in this film. Hank Rearden is the most obvious and perplexing example of this. In the previous two films, he was the co-lead and second point-of-view character along with Dagny. He had also had some pretty big character moments in Part II, between his victory in court and being coerced into signing away his patents to Rearden Metal. Clearly they were setting him up to have some sort of big role in the third film, right? Nope, he gets about 10 seconds of screen time, leaves a voicemail and then is unceremoniously dumped from the story! What the hell!?! I can’t help but feel that he had a bigger role in the original story but they didn’t have time or budget for him and so wrote him out. All that said, he’s so absent in this film that I’ve read that he’s involved in the rescue mission to save John Galt at the end of the movie and had no idea – he’s not highlighted, nor have we seen enough of him in this film to even realize that it was him anyway. While not quite as important, Wesley Mouch is another prime example of this shunting issue. In the previous two films, he was arguably the primary antagonist, but in this one he barely shows up and his purpose is replaced almost entirely by Head of State Thompson. It doesn’t help that the actor who was cast to play him is very indistinct and looks very similar to Head of State Thompson, to the point where I cannot remember even seeing him beyond his introductory scene (and even then, only because they literally put text on the screen to say that he was Mouch).


As for the comparisons of the cast, Part III has by far the worst cast of the series. The only actor who might have put in the best performance of his character would be Greg Germann as James Taggart, but that’s just because the character is such a cartoon that I can’t really say that there was a “definitive” take on him. Greg Germann tries to take him in a somewhat more serious route, but there’s only so much you can do with James Taggart. The rest of the cast are just the bottom of the barrel. I don’t know if Laura Regan is a good actress or not, but she is just terrible as Dagny. Her line deliveries are flat and unconvincing throughout and her facial expressions don’t match the tone she’s trying to convey. It’s such a shame, especially after Samantha Mathis made me actually care somewhat about this character in Part II. Oh and speaking of which, Laura Regan is 8 years younger than Mathis, but looks even younger, providing a bit more whiplash about the recasting (especially when her former lover, Francisco, shows up looking like he’s 69 years old now). John Galt wasn’t really much of a presence in the previous films, but he always had some sort of mystery to him. Fully unmasked, Kristoffer Polaha’s Galt is just a Hallmark channel boy hunk, not the genius architect of the revolution that’s crippling society. I never found him particularly convincing, although compared to Laura Regan he was certainly the better of the two leads. In some ways, it’s probably best that Hank Rearden got written out, because the one line Rob Morrow delivers for him is so bad. I miss Grant Bowler’s more charming take on the character. And, as I alluded earlier, Joaquim de Almeida looks waaaay too old to be Francisco d’Anconia – he’s 20 years older than Laura Regan, and considering that she looks younger than she actually is, it suddenly begs the question of when exactly Dagny and Francisco were supposed to be a couple. De Almeida is a good enough actor that he’s fine in general in the role, but he’s clearly not stretching his acting muscles any. As douchey and sinister as he was, Esai Morales’ take on d’Anconia was probably the best, because at least he brought some energy to the role. Lastly, considering that Head of State Thompson only had a cameo appearance in Part II, you’d think that Peter Mackenzie would have an easier time becoming the definitive performance for the role… however, considering that that cameo appearance was portrayed by freaking Ray Wise, Mackenzie was screwed from the start. He’s fine as a scenery-chewing villain, but when you’re competing in that role against Ray Wise, you’re never going to win. The cast is bad across the board, with only a couple performances reaching the level of “fine”.


 

Whew, all of that said, we haven’t even gotten to the philosophy and politics in this film! Aglialoro and The Atlas Society had complained about people saying that John Galt’s strike was just a big temper tantrum, but the fact that they open this film by essentially confirming it feels like a big blunder to me. Seriously, the film opens with the Twentieth Century Motor Corporation announcing that they’ve adopted a wage scale, which causes Galt to freak out. Instead of just quitting, he declares that he is going to destroy the entire world economy, all because his job got restructured in a way that didn’t benefit him directly! I’m sorry, based on how you have portrayed this character, how is that not equivalent to a child throwing a temper tantrum and taking away his toys?

For a story that’s supposed to be extolling the virtue of selfishness, Part III does the worst job of trying to justify this. During what might be the most offensive moment in the entire trilogy, Hugh Akston tries to change Dagny’s view of conventional morality. He claims that believing that you have to help people is wrong because it causes unworthy people to get into positions of power. He claims that, in conventional morality, you are considered virtuous for what you do for others rather than what you achieve. This is a patently false assertion. Just look at people like Oprah, Steve Jobs, Michael Phelps, Daniel Day Lewis, or Stephen Hawking – people who are known and praised for their personal successes. Bill Gates might be the most obvious denial of this whole idea, since he’s a self-made uber-billionare in the Randian mould, except that he’s famous for his personal successes and praised for his altruism. Still, that’s not even the worst part of this scene. Akston claims that, because of this view on conventional morality, the unworthy will forcibly take from “those who have earned their money” in order to help the less fortunate if they will not comply. He then delivers this line:

“You’ve heard them say that people have a right to a living just because they’re human. And that’s not the right to earn a living, that’s the right to a living, which you are required to give to them.”

Woooooow. The filmmakers tried to explain Randian philosophy in the most reasonable-sounding way possible, but it still comes across as fucking evil. Akston straight-up admits that he doesn’t believe that people have a right to a living just because they exist. As far as he’s concerned, if you’re not doing something to “provide value” then you might as well die because you’re doing nothing to deserve your life. The serious ethical concerns of this should be obvious and numerous:

  • What about those who are injured while working? Sure, they were providing value for a time, but might as well let them and all of their dependants starve to death now! Or what about if, due to the negligence or unethical practices of a company, people are injured? Should there not be a legal right to a living for these people, considering that they were robbed of it by the actions of someone trying to enrich themselves?
  • What about the elderly who can’t work anymore, especially if they never had enough means to have any savings for retirement? Better just to set them loose in the woods during the winter.
  • What about freaking kids? When does this philosophy even come into effect anyway? Kids are not only going to be providing no “value” for several years, but they are going to be actively draining their parents’ resources as well, meaning that only those who are very well established will be able to actually afford to have children within this economic framework!
  • What about those who actually are working but still aren’t able to get by? Live in a hovel, you moochers!

Rand was very intentionally going against conventional morality here, because she viewed it as a framework which enabled the “oppression” of the great minds in society. Central to this was that religious principles were nothing more than another tool of the people in power. In order to show this, the filmmakers considered including a scene where Dagny meets a priest. I can already imagine this scene playing out in my head, but the fact that it was cut from the final film is pretty telling. Many of the libertarians who parrot Rand’s talking points are Christian, including the right-wing celebrities who cameo in this film such as Sean Hannity and Ron Paul (and Glenn Beck, who is Mormon). There’s already some significant cognitive dissonance required to call yourself a follower of Christ while also claiming that people who can’t provide value don’t deserve to live, but imagine if the filmmakers had included a scene where they explicitly stated that religion goes against their worldview. Half of this film’s meagre audience would be outraged at their audacity. This whole attempt to redefine morality just pisses me off though, and is by far the worst segment in the entire trilogy. When Akston dismissively states that “their philosophy is based how much you sacrifice to other people, not on what you achieve”, I could not help but think of Jesus’ words about how the rich donate large amounts to show off how generous they are, but the poor widow who donates gave everything she had and was therefore viewed as more generous. Contrast that to Galt and his followers, who are throwing a hissy fit because the government is forcing them to skim some of their wealth in order to help other people? Fuck you all.


Galt’s explanation to this criticism is that “We honour charity and benevolence, but it must be provided on the giver’s terms, voluntarily and not by force.” While I can see some value in the argument that they’re making here, it ignores a couple of things. First of all, Galt and his followers will staunchly refuse to give to any cause, no matter how worthwhile, if there is any force involved or implied. They could merely volunteer to give to a cause that they think is worthy, but we never see anyone actually do this (in Part I, Hank makes a donation to a cause he doesn’t agree with, but this is done out of a feeling of obligation).


Secondly, the actions of the characters contradict any notion that they might care about charity or benevolence. Seconds after Galt makes that statement, Dagny asks “What about what you left behind?”, referring to the rest of the world and all of the people who are suffering under the economic collapse Galt engineered. Galt simply says “We left nothing behind, Dagny. We took with us the only real thing of value. Dagny, this is a strike of our minds.” So clearly they don’t see anything of value in the outside world – everyone there is a moocher and it doesn’t matter to Galt if they suffer or die without them. This is barely even subtext either – it’s not like the people in the valley don’t realize what is happening in the outside world, they just don’t care. Part of the oath that everyone in the valley must take is that they will not “live for someone else”. Galt himself tells Dagny that, because there is no one competent to run the railroads, Taggart bridge will collapse imminently, showing that he doesn’t really care that innocent people are literally dying because of his strike.


Thirdly, there are several moments in the film where characters reveal that they have technology that could revolutionize the world, but have chosen not to for no discernible reason. For example, Dr. Hendricks inspects Dagny’s injuries using a handheld diagnostic device, similar to a handheld x-ray, and says “every doctor should have one”. Well, gee doc, if that’s what you think, what’s stopping you from giving one to every doctor? It’s not like he’s even going and selling them either! He has life-changing technology at his disposal and he’s choosing not to give it to anyone else. Or there’s the fact that Galt has a car in this film. It took me a little bit to realize “wait, no one drives cars in this universe, what the hell?” Considering that gasoline is extremely expensive in Atlas Shrugged and can’t really be being refined in the valley, it’s likely that they have come up with some sort of alternative fuel source… which, one again, they’re just hording here and not providing to all of the people being forced to deal with the increasingly-deadly rail lines. Perhaps the biggest “fuck you” in the whole film though comes when Galt reveals his working motor which has been hyped up in the previous two films. He reveals that it costs virtually nothing to maintain it and it’s so powerful that just one motor held in a space the size of a shed could power the entire West Coast!!! Again, this is so cheap that he could literally give it away – can you imagine unlimited, free, clean power for everyone and the sorts of changes that that would make in society? Hell, he could even sell it at an unrealistic mark-up and still change the world for the better. But, again, John Galt chooses to horde this because all he wants is appreciation and the ability to refuse people who don’t kowtow to his way of thinking. Tell me again about how you value benevolence Galt, because you sure as shit don’t demonstrate it in your actions.



Galt makes the claim that he is not imposing his values on the rest of the world, merely leaving the moochers to go about their own business, but this is also demonstrably false. Crippling the world’s economy in protest and hijacking the airwaves in order to convey your manifesto are hardly unimposing gestures, but what really contradicts this is that Galt is in league with Ragnar Danneskjöld, a literal pirate. Ragnar has been raiding shipping lines, stealing raw goods which (in his view) have been forcibly taken by governments so he’s just stealing them back. It’s one thing to, say, have Ellis Wyatt burn his oil fields and then disappear for good, but it would be another thing entirely if he kept coming back to burn down any reconstruction attempts, which is basically what Ragnar is doing here. Hell, at one point in the film, Dagny laments that there isn’t enough copper wire left to keep the trains running, which prompted me to say “hey, maybe tell your friend Ragnar to lay off then, he’s the one causing this shortage”, especially since it’s literally leading to the starvation of chunks of the population. At what point do these brainwashed Galt cultists think that goods have been acquired fairly? They are clearly trying to hasten the economic collapse, no matter how innocuous and innocent the film wants to portray them to be.


And how about these “greatest minds” that Galt has been taking to his valley? One of the first we’re introduced to is Midas Mulligan, owner of America’s largest bank. This struck me as a particularly odd choice, since isn’t banking largely the manipulation of money which d’Anconia was raging about in the previous film? Apparently it doesn’t count when private citizens do it, because Mulligan gets a whole monologue about how he’s been “wronged”. According to Mulligan, he made his fortune by lending money to people to buy homes and build businesses, saying that “I only loaned to those people I was confident could repay me” (eg, the people who were already rich and well off). However, then the government forced him to make slightly less of a profit by lending to people who couldn’t repay him, so he immediately threw a hissy fit and left for the valley. So… he couldn’t collect years of additional interest payments on the people who couldn’t pay him back? I wonder how many fans of this film also would cite It’s a Wonderful Life as their favourite Christmas movie, because Mulligan sounds exactly like that film’s villain, Mr. Potter. In that film, George Bailey bends over backwards to try to help the poor and disenfranchised in order to give them a chance at a life they otherwise may not have, and most people would indeed say he is virtuous for doing so. Can you imagine someone trying to claim that Mr. Potter was the one who was actually virtuous and that we need to be more like him? That’s basically the message Part III tries to hammer into you during its entire runtime.


One of the other notable “great minds” we get introduced to is Dr. Hendricks, who claims that he got sick of the government telling him how to treat his patients, so he ran off to the valley to treat them using “his own professional judgement”. This immediately got me thinking of Dr. Suchong from Bioshock, along with basically every other mad doctor trope. The film even unintentionally endorses this theory since Hendricks claims that his handheld diagnostic device was only made possible because there was “no red tape” to stop him… which begs the question of just how many people were killed, irradiated and/or sterilized to make this thing possible. Most doctors will tell you that regulations exist for a damn good reason and there’s also a reason why travelling to places with loose regulations is both a punchline and incredibly dangerous. But, just like in Part I, Hendricks is “worthy” so there shouldn’t be any restrictions on him, because he’s always right about everything (besides, if he did kill someone then that would mean that he wasn’t worthy after all).



This film also brushes up against so many issues which could have challenged the cartoonish take on reality that they’ve constructed, but which are just ignored. One such example is that Dagny meets a mother in the valley who is homeschooling her children. This scene feels like it was just thrown in to pander to conservatives who have a boner for homeschooling their kids, but in practice it raises so many more questions: if she’s homeschooling them, then how is she managing to pay her own way in the valley? Or how are the kids creating any value for that matter? Is wanting to homeschool your kids all that it takes to have John Galt invite you to his valley? Who knows! The film just introduces the concept in order to let all those conservative mommies know that they’re doing a Good Thingâ„¢ and then moves on without addressing any complications.


Or what about the fact that Dagny is expected to pay for her own medical treatment after the plane crash, revealing that there is (obviously) no healthcare in the valley? How many people have become ill and died in the valley because of this? Why don’t we see any of the people who have become destitute because they can’t pay their medical bills anymore? Oh, right, those don’t exist because Part III exists in a fantasy reality.


Or what about the fact that the valley seems to have a number of menial workers providing everyone with food and labour? We see restaurant workers, a farmer’s market, and a coal mine (amongst other things) while in the valley, but who is actually manning these? Did John Galt convince the greatest minds in the country to come to the valley and then make them start doing coal mining to stay alive? Or was he so comprehensive that he found the best coal miners in the world and then promised them a better life where they can mine even more coal? And if that’s the case, why didn’t they bring Hank Rearden’s factory workers with him when he left (because presumably Hank would have only retained workers who were up to his standards) instead of leaving them to be killed by strikebreakers? That’s the thing that’s being overlooked here – in order to work, the valley can’t just be a collection of the greatest minds in the world, there still has to be a much larger class of menial workers whose labour is being exploited to prop up those “great minds”. Such a reality is completely overlooked by this film though and instead Dagny spends all of her time interacting with the “important people”, much like she would have been doing back in the real world anyway. It makes you wonder why these “greatest minds” never get into positions of power in the “real world” of Rand’s fiction, and instead it’s always the unworthy. That seems to be something that people overlook.



It’s also worth noting the demographics of the people in the valley. I went in figuring that it was probably going to be mostly white men, but I was surprised to see that, in the crowded scenes in the valley, there was almost a 50-50 split between men and women. It only occurred to me during the writing of this retrospective that that might be because these women are mostly the wives of the great minds, but I’ll stick with my charitable first impression and assume that they at least gave women some consideration for their achievements. However, I can’t say that I saw anyone who wasn’t white and am not surprised about that little revelation at all. Can you imagine the filmmakers even thinking to diversify their extras to avoid troubling implications? Funnily enough though, at the very end of the film, the franchise’s only notable minority character, Eddie, is apparently rescued by Galt’s followers. His makes him not only the token black guy of the franchise, but the token black guy of Galt’s movement too, how fortunate! Even funnier is the fact that I found out that Eddie was changed into a black character for Part I and that this change was maintained in each subsequent film. Considering that characters change drastically in the franchise (including other race-swapped characters reverting to their whiteness from the book) and that Eddie’s rescue at the end changes him into someone who is deemed “worthy” to come to the valley, this suggests that Eddie was literally changed in order to make him their token black guy to avoid claims of racism. After all, they couldn’t possibly be racist for implying that only whites are the greatest minds in world and the only people worthy of success, and that therefore all other races have no right to a living unless they earn it! But who knows, maybe I just missed out on deleted scenes where there were a ton of black people in the valley who were off in Akston’s farm picking cotton or something…


 

And so finally we come to the most insane scene in the entire movie. You know how I said that Akston claiming that it’s not moral to say that people have a fundamental right to a living only might be the most offensive moment in the whole series? That’s only a might because this scene may actually be even worse, somehow. It comes when Dagny breaks into the government’s torture facility in order to free John Galt. She comes across a lone guard and corners him with a gun. The guard seems confused about the whole situation so Dagny gives him to the count of three to choose: get out of the way, or die. Instead of just running away like a normal human being, this complete fucking idiot starts going on a panicked rant about how he’s not supposed to make decisions and just stands there!!! Seriously, as Dagny is counting down, he literally says “I’m just an average guy, I’m not supposed to make decisions about my life! I haven’t said I will, I haven’t said I won’t!” And then she fucking shoots him to death!!!!!! HOLY SHIT, MOVIE!!!!!!!!! We’re clearly not meant to sympathize with this cartoonish buffoon of a character, hell we’re meant to give him our outright scorn. The line about being an “average guy” is pretty telling too – this is what the filmmakers believe that most people are like and this is the level of sympathy that “great people” should give to anyone who gets in their way. This is just offensive on so many levels, not least of all that this “character” doesn’t resemble an actual human being in the slightest and that it marks the moment where we’re supposed to congratulate Dagny for finally shedding her notion of conventional morality. Fuck. This. Movie.

Having learned more about Objectivism from watching these movies and researching Rand’s philosophy for these reviews, I must say that it’s a strange ideology to cling to. This story always lifts up the inherently superior “great minds” that apparently push our society forward, but they have little basis in reality. These great minds are always portrayed as being the heads of companies, but that’s rarely the case now is it? Modern companies are governed by complex structures which might steer the direction of the company, but they rarely are the source of innovation, not to mention that it’s questionable whether they deserve to make dozens, if not hundreds, of times more annual salary than the people who actually work on the frontlines of their business. We’ve seen just how alien the world of these three films is and how cartoonishly black and white it has to make the world if it wants Objectivism to make any sort of sense. If anything, in a modern context Galt’s strike sounds like a call for workers to rise up against the bourgeois, a notion which Rand would have considered repugnant. The only real aspect of Objectivism which seems to have any real basis is the desire to not be forced into doing anything, but that’s hardly a strong enough idea to cling a whole ideology off of. If anything, the deregulation that they have wanted so badly just seems to turn their closest analogues of “great minds” into something closer to the manipulators and moochers that they despise so much.


Part III is easily one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. The politics and philosophy are bad, with some of the most sincerely offensive messages I have ever witnessed in a film (and this is coming from someone who only slept through half of Triumph of the Will). However, for the most part, these elements aren’t significantly worse than they were in the previous two films, just more repetitive and long-winded if anything. What really makes Part III into a trainwreck is the bafflingly shoddy craftsmanship on display from start to finish. It just permeates throughout every element of the movie, turning otherwise-banal moments into comedic bits. It’s almost as if The Room was trying to be a political thriller, that’s the level of ineptitude that this film rises to. As a result, while it is a truly horrendous film, it reaches a level of badness so far beyond the previous two entries in the franchise that it becomes an experience unto itself. Like, I’ve already recommended this film to a few friends who like bad movies, just because it does manage to hit that special level of crap. So, while it fails in pretty much every intended regard, at least Aglialoro finally managed to make a film that someone might actually get some enjoyment out of.

But seriously, fuck this franchise and the people who made it.


1/10


And now that we’re through the Atlas Shrugged retrospective, it’s time to rank the films from best to worst!


1. Atlas Shrugged – Part II – 3/10 (I had a reeeeally hard time picking between this and Part I, but I ultimately gave Part II the edge because at least Dagny comes across as a good character, even if it wasn’t in the way they actually intended.)

2. Atlas Shrugged – Part I – 3/10 (Again, it’s basically a toss-up – do you like your films boring or offensive?)
3. Atlas Shrugged Part III – Who Is John Galt? – 1/10 (While it is by far the worst film in the series, it is also the only one I would actually recommend, because it’s so bad that it’s an experience.)

Retrospective BONUS: Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers (1988)

Surprise! You didn’t think that I was totally chainsawed out, did you? While working through the Texas Chainsaw retrospective, I was reminded that Gunnar Hansen appeared in another chainsaw-based film – 1988’s Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers. I’ve been aware of this film for a long time, having frequented BadMovies.org as a high schooler. Naturally, the bonkers title and some hilarious plot points (including an ancient Egyptian chainsaw cult!) have always kept this film on my radar, so I figured what better time to watch it than now, especially considering that this is my 250th blog post? After all, this is probably a Texas Chainsaw parody, so might as well append it onto this retrospective series, right? Read on to find out…

Objectively, this is a pretty bad poster, with shots from the film badly cut and pasted in, lots of wasted space and the main characters are probably the smallest part of the whole image. But, for this kind of movie, it works well enough. Also, that is a really great tagline!

PRODUCTION
(Pretty much all of the info I have on the production of this film comes from this featurette on the making of Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, I definitely recommend checking it out if you have the time!)

Fred Olen Ray had been working as director on low-budget films for a number of years in Hollywood, kind of like a cheaper, sleazier, less-successful Roger Corman. By 1985 he had begun working on several films per year, shooting as quickly and cheaply as possible. By the late 80s, Fred had struck a production deal with an adult video company called LA Video and their subsidiary, mainstream distribution company, Camp Motion Pictures. LA Video expressed interest in distributing a new film for Fred and it was here that he pitched his idea for Chainsaw Hookers. LA Video added “Hollywood” to the title to make it sound more like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Fred managed to rope Gunnar Hansen into the project. This was, of course, at the time when both Cannon Films and New Line Cinema weren’t interesting in working with Gunnar Hansen since they didn’t think he was a big enough star, so it just goes to show how much wiser Fred Olen Ray was than either company. With Hansen on board and $25,000 in hand from LA Video in exchange for the home video rights, Fred went about making his film, rewriting a script by T.L. Lankford.

In addition to snagging Gunnar Hansen to play the main villain, The Master, Fred Olen Ray managed to get Linnea Quigley to play the female lead. Qugiley is best known for being naked in a number of famous horror roles throughout the 80s, and by this point had already been in Silent Night, Deadly Night and Return of the Living Dead, so Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers was more-or-less the perfect role for her. John Henry Richardson was also cast as the male lead, Detective Jack Chandler.

Naturally, this being a Fred Olen Ray film, he made it while working on other projects. While doing pick-ups on a low-budget movie called Moon in Scorpio, Fred agreed to take a lower pay cut in exchange for the use of Trans World Entertainment’s studio space and film equipment during downtime, which he would use to film Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers. As per the agreement, he had the equipment from Friday to Sunday, filmed the pick-ups for Moon in Scorpio Monday to Thursday and then finished Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers the next Friday to Sunday. All in all, he took about 5 1/2 days to shoot the film on a measly budget in the neighbourhood of $55,000. Naturally, the filming conditions were extremely sketchy – it was shot with no permits, on leftover sets from other films, with real chainsaws and even with real hookers on occasion! Even the film stock was as cheap as possible, using short ends which were left over from other films. The audio was all shot on set as well, so considering that there are chainsaws revving loudly on a number of occasions, you can’t tell what the characters are saying at all sometimes because there was no budget for redubbing dialogue. The conditions were also potentially dangerous for the cast, particularly since they were using real chainsaws – in one notable instance, Linnea Quigley (who had already spent seven hours in makeup) was locked inside of a coffin with two running chainsaws so that she could preform the film’s iconic virgin dance of the double chainsaws. Naturally, this meant that the coffin was quickly filled with chainsaw fumes and Quigley can be visibly seen stumbling out of the coffin because she could barely breathe.

Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers ended up being one of Fred Olen Ray’s more successful films. That said, I want to just look at his career a little bit. He’s been making mockbusters, sexploitation films and, most recently, freaking Hallmark Christmas movies in order to get by (I’m pretty sure I’ve even seen at lest one of those Christmas movies too, holy shit). He’s like The Asylum before that studio cornered the mockbuster market. Most obviously, in 1994 we’ve got Dinosaur Island (riffing on Jurassic Park), in 1998, Mom Can I Keep Her? (Mighty Joe Young) and in 2011, Bikini Time Machine (Hot Tub Time Machine). Oh, and he’s been releasing sleazy, borderline-softcore porno films throughout his whole career, although they seem to have picked up and become more pornographic since the 2000s. Just trolling through his directing credits, we’ve got such fantastic titles as Bikini Airways, Attack of the 60 Foot Centerfold, Thirteen Erotic Ghosts (which must have the best IMDb description ever), Genie in a String Bikini, Super Ninja Bikini Babes (which sounds like an alternate title for Dead or Alive) and Tarzeena: Jiggle in the Jungle. Lately, he’s been slumming it with shitty Christmas movies, having released 10 since 2007 (and 9 of those have been since 2012, bloody hell), and with cheap crime films, which should probably give you an idea of the cultural zeitgeist when these are the only profitable genres left.

PLOT SYNOPSIS
The film opens with Detective Jack Chandler recounting one of his strangest cases, via voiceover in true hardboiled noir style. We follow a hooker named Mercedes as she picks up a man and then kills him with a chainsaw later in her apartment. Apparently there have been a number of chainsaw hooker murders going down in Los Angeles lately, and Jack Chandler heads to the police station to check in on a chainsaw murder suspect who might be related to a missing girl case he’s taken on. The suspect is not the missing girl, Samantha, but Jack steals a piece of evidence with a phone number on it in order to get closer to the source of the chainsaw murders. The phone number leads Jack back to Mercedes and he arranges to meet her at a local club. When he gets there, he finds Samantha dancing as a stripper at the club, but is drugged by Mercedes before he can notify the authorities.

When Jack awakens, he is tied to a bed and surrounded by killer hookers, including Mercedes and Samantha. The Master comes into the room and informs Jack that he is the leader of an ancient Egyptian chainsaw cult and that he is going to sacrifice Jack to their god. The hookers then try to kill Jack, but their chainsaw has run out of gas. They order Samantha to guard Jack while they go to get gas from the corner store, but Samantha frees him. She reveals that she’s infiltrating the chainsaw cult because they killed her friend and she wants to get revenge on them. The pair escape back to Jack’s apartment, where Samantha suddenly falls in love him and the pair have sex.

That night, they try to sneak into the cult’s temple in order to stop their plans, but it’s a trap and they are captured. Samantha’s given a mind-control drug in order to be used in the ceremony, while Jack is tied up and prepared for sacrifice. After performing a ritual dance, Jack is brought to Samantha by The Master in order to be killed, but Samantha instead kills The Master and then gets into a chainsaw duel with Mercedes. Mercedes is killed by Samantha and the police arrive and round up the rest of the cult. Jack and Samantha kiss and Samantha is hired as Jack’s new secretary.

REVIEW
Okay, so other than featuring Gunnar Hansen in a chainsaw killer movie, there’s basically nothing that connects Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It’s not even a slasher parody like I had originally expected. Instead, it’s a parody of pulp, noir detective films, very similar to The Naked Gun (which, coincidentally, came out the same year as this film). Naturally, this movie isn’t anywhere near as funny as The Naked Gun, but it is much funnier than I was expecting it would be… usually intentionally! John Henry Richardson’s Jack Chandler doesn’t have the same sort of comical ineptitude or deadpan delivery as Leslie Neilson’s Frank Drebin, instead Jack Chandler is played with more of a sarcastic, over-confident tone that often gets him into trouble. He makes for a great stereotypical detective lead, which just makes it funnier when he spouts some of the absolute best, cheesiest lines in the whole film. The delivery of lines like “If my head wasn’t hurtin’ so much, I’d have sworn I was in heaven – heaven for guys who liked big tits” was enough to have me laughing out loud throughout the film. John Henry Richardson’s acting is by far the best in the film and I definitely need to give special mention to the monologue that he turns into Jack’s best line in the whole film:

“I’d stumbled into the middle of an evil, insidious cult of chainsaw worshipping maniacs. I had to wonder if we’d let our religious freedom go too far in this country, or maybe our immigration laws were just too lax. I’ve never been much for politics, but I kept thinking about that pretty girl’s warm head on my lap, and then I wondered how many other pretty girls would never be able to put their heads on my lap because they’d been cut off by that refugee from the BTL club and his slice-happy sluts, I started to get mad.”

Holy shit, that is the funniest anti-immigration screed I’ve ever heard, I love it. Honestly, I was cringing when that monologue started, but by the middle I was in stitches I was laughing so hard.

There really are a lot of good jokes in this film and I just want to highlight a few of my favourites here. When Jack gets captured he keeps guessing The Master’s plan by throwing out the most ridiculous ideas he can think of (“What is this, some ancient chainsaw-wielding cult?” “Actually, that’s just what this is”) to the point where he just starts saying tropes and The Master ends up asking how Jack knows all of this. The idea of there being an ancient Egyptian cult with chainsaws is also lampshaded in a very tongue-in-cheek fashion which I appreciated. I also found it hilarious how the official police explanation for one of the chainsaw murders is that it was an accident and the victim “was just cleaning his chainsaw when it went off”. There’s also a chainsaw murder at the start of the film where a hooker kills some police officers during an interview and later it is explained that the policemen forgot to take the gas out of the chainsaw, paving over a pretty obvious plot hole in the funniest way possible. There are also some pretty good sight gags in the film, such as when Jack’s voice over during a scene is obviously at odds with what actually happens, just so that he can make himself look better. My favourite WTF sight gag though is when Jack enters a strip club and the camera focuses on the tough customers at the bar staring at him, which inexplicably ends with this pissed-off, twelve year old ginger kid (who, apparently, was Fred Olen Ray’s son). The film doesn’t even acknowledge it, which makes it even funnier.

Like I said, most of the jokes in this film land, although there are plenty of laughs to be had from the cheap film-making and bad acting. Most of the dialogue is on the level of a bad porno, especially during the chainsaw murder scenes. The early scene where Mercedes murders Bo Hansen has some of the funniest bad acting that I’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing. Hearing Bo, after realizing his sexy times are coming to an abrupt, gasoline-fueled end, whelps “Oh no! Oh no! GAHHHH!!!” in the funniest way possible. The murders themselves tend to be really funny too, as there’s obviously someone off-screen spraying the hookers with fake blood while someone else tosses a bucket of blood at them and someone else throws fake fingers (to top it off, someone tries to grab Mercedes’ boob with a fake severed hand, fantastic). It’s so obviously fake and amateur that it makes these scenes really funny to watch. The terrible, Value Village-quality Egyptian costumes at the end also could only work in a cheap parody movie like this.

That said, not all of the jokes land and there are some stinkers in here. Probably the most offensive joke is when Jack calls the homicide squad the “homo squad”, which came across to me like it was meant to be “funny because gay”, but just made me cringe a little. Thankfully, I didn’t notice any other homo- or transphobic jokes in the film, which is actually somewhat impressive for a film this old. The film also seems to think that it’s hilarious that a slang term for detective is “dick”. Sure, it was actually quite funny the first time the police chief complained about having “another private dick in my face”, but by the fourth or fifth “dick = detective = penis” joke, it was a bit much. Then there are a few jokes which are just stupid, like when Jack tries to get the bartender’s attention by… making shadow bunnies on the wall? Umm, okay, that feels like they were trying a little too hard for a laugh.

Of course, in addition to being a comedy, Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers is a straight-up exploitation film with tons of gratuitous nudity to satisfy its thirsty audience. The film has tons of nudity and porno-level dialogue, but I wouldn’t say it reaches the level of a softcore porn film, if only because there are no sex scenes. That said, the chainsaw killings are treated in the way that a sex scene normally would, where the killing is the… er… “big climax” that the narrative builds towards, and of course they are all shot with topless women getting coated in buckets of blood. Naturally, there is plenty of gratuitous nudity even outside of the chainsaw killings, to the point where I’d estimate that maybe half of the movie has some nudity in it… and hey, considering the type of movie this is, at least it’s delivering the goods. Funnily enough, Fred Olen Ray has stated that the film was intended to be a message about safe sex – after all, any person you pick up could turn out to be a chainsaw-wielding maniac if you’re not careful.

Unfortunately, the film loses steam towards the end after The Master appears and Jack meets Samantha. Part of the problem is that around the forty-minute mark, Jack starts turning into a misogynistic douche bag. For one thing, Samantha is introduced as a surprisingly strong woman, who infiltrated this cult in order to get revenge for her friend’s death. However, she is quickly knocked down a peg when Jack headbutts her to knock her out, and then when she wakes up she immediately forgives him and then… tries to have sex with him because she’s so impressed!?! What the hell? This is followed-up by Jack’s girlfriend walking in on them, but Jack doesn’t care when she breaks up with him because he’s found himself a younger, hotter woman now. At this point, all of Jack’s one-liners start becoming about objectifying Samantha. Oh, and if that all wasn’t bad enough, it’s definitely implied that Samantha is lying about her age and is possibly a minor. I get that this is parodying noir tropes, but it doesn’t have any sort of consequence for Jack, which really bothers me and just makes it come across like they’re just playing it straight. It certainly doesn’t sink the film, but it makes it harder for me to give a shit about the film’s hero.

However, the last fifteen minutes of the film are by far the worst. The film is barely over the hour mark and I feel like the last fifteen minutes suffer because they were padding for time to get the film a proper runtime. There’s a good eight minutes that bring the film’s pacing to a grinding halt. Picture this – we’re in the cult’s temple and watching a ceremony, wondering what is going to happen. Then, we’ve got several minutes watching a priest pour a can of oil out… and then pour another can of oil. Umm, okay, where is this going? Then a topless hooker comes out and starts fire breathing, again, for several minutes without leading to anything. Then we get the film’s virgin dance of the double chainsaws, which manages to be iconic, badly done and pointless at the same time. On the one hand, it’s Linnea Quigley dancing topless with a pair of chainsaws, so there’s an inherent level of sexiness and coolness to the scene which helps to carry it. Unfortunately, it’s also hard to ignore that the dance is not particularly sexy in itself – as I’ve mentioned, Linnea was high on gas fumes, exhausted from seven hours of makeup and wielding two real, heavy chainsaws and trying to do something to arouse the audience. Again, it works because of her inherent sexiness, but it’s extremely obvious that she’s not able to give 100%. Add in that the editing during this entire temple ritual sequence has tons of pointless cut-aways to random hookers (I swear that several of these shots are recycled during the scene as well), and it becomes obvious why the final fifteen minutes of this film are so tedious to sit through.

As for the performances in this film, they’re pretty bad on the whole. Like I said earlier, John Henry Richardson’s acting is by far the best, but nearly everyone else is pretty bad. Unfortunately, even Gunnar Hansen puts in a very bland performance as The Master, saying all of his lines in a very monotone voice. That’s just too bad, I was hoping we’d get some scenery-chewing from him. I’m also sad to say that Linnea Quigley’s acting is really poor in this film. Her line deliveries are all unconvincing and the choreography during her epic chainsaw duel with Mercedes is just pathetically awkward – like, imagine a grade-school film project sword fight and you’ll have an idea of how badly-choreographed this fight is. Thankfully, as Jack Chandler says, “The kid talked like a frosted flake, but she had the nicest set of knockers that I’d seen in a long time”.

Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers was shot for about $55,000 in five and a half days. That’s an insanely low budget and shooting time for any film. You can definitely tell that this film was done under both of those constraints, but dayum it looks really good in spite of that. I can’t exactly call this a good movie in terms of quality, but in terms of pure fun it’s a hoot, even if the last act brings it down somewhat.

4/10

Retrospective: God’s Not Dead 2 (2016)

Welcome back to the God’s Not Dead retrospective! In today’s entry, we’re going to be looking at the second film in the franchise, the succinctly-titled God’s Not Dead 2 (although I think we all know that it should have been called God’s Still Not Dead, c’mon guys!). After the commercial success of the first film, a sequel was basically guaranteed. However, would the filmmakers be able to overcome their insulting depictions of Christians and non-Christians this time? Read on to find out…

…eh, I don’t really like this poster much. I mean, it’s fine, it gets across the point of the film, but I preferred the more minimalist design of the original.

Considering that God’s Not Dead put Pure Flix on the map and raked in more than thirty times its budget in theaters alone, a sequel was a virtual certainty and was quickly announced by the studio. After the success of the first film, the studio was able to tap some higher-profile actors to fill the main parts, most-notably Melissa Joan Hart (Sabrina the Teenage Witch) as the film’s leading lady. Also filling out the main cast were Jesse Metcalfe, Ernie Hudson, Pat Boone and Ray Wise as the mustache-twirling antagonist, in addition to a few returning cast members from the first film (most notably, producer David A. R. White as Pastor Dave). The first film’s success also meant that Pure Flix was able to get some Christian public figures to appear as well, including Lee Strobel (who had been name-dropped in the first film), J. Warner Wallace and Mike Huckabee.

As for the making of God’s Not Dead 2, I’ve been having trouble finding really interesting information about the making of the film and I don’t want to speculate too much, so take the next part with a bit of salt. Unlike the first film, there isn’t as much information about what actually inspired God’s Not Dead 2. However, considering the content of this movie, I would not be surprised if Pure Flix’s association with the Alliance Defending Freedom played a major role in the creation of this film, which is further evidenced by ads for the ADF in the end credits and on the movie’s website. As Sean Paul Murphy had said previously, Pure Flix’s audience were growing more interested in films with political agendas rather than simply “Christian” films.

It’s also worth noting that the filmmakers were clearly very aware of the backlash that the first film had inspired from atheists. Responding to claims that the God’s Not Dead films misrepresent Christian persecution, David A. R. White told The Blaze “It’s an interesting thing, because, if it wasn’t real, why do they get so offended by it? […] I don’t think it would annoy people if it wasn’t true.” I… what?

David… you know that people get annoyed by lies too… right? Are you so deep into the evangelical bubble that you can’t see anything else? Sigh… I think I’m starting to understand why the “logical” arguments in these films are so unconvincing.

The story of God’s Not Dead 2 picks up a few months after the last film ended and follows a high school history teacher named Grace Wesley. One of Grace’s students, Brooke, comes to Grace for advice because her brother has recently died and she doesn’t know how to cope with the loss. Grace confides that she trusts in Jesus, which helps to prompt Brooke to explore Christianity after she discovers a Bible that her brother had kept hidden. Brooke then asks a question in class about the non-violent protests of Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr, relating them to Jesus, which Grace answers and explains. However, one of her students reports her for doing so, which prompts the school board to try to fire Grace. Grace is represented by a young, non-Christian lawyer named Tom Endler who tries to get her to stand down and concede to an apology. Grace refuses because she believes that she did nothing wrong. Brooke’s parents are then approached by Pete Kane of the American Civil Liberties Union, which wants to represent them in suing Grace with the explicit intent of stamping out Christianity in America once and for all.

Grace is then put on trial for violation of the separation of church and state, with Pastor Dave managing to end up on the jury for the case. Tom mounts a defence by arguing for the historical authenticity of Jesus with supposed “experts” Lee Strobel and J. Warner Wallace showing up to explain as much. Brooke is eventually brought in by Tom and Grace to testify, but she ends up giving further evidence to the ACLU’s case by revealing that Grace had spoken to her about Jesus outside of school. Everything’s looking grim for Grace when Tom comes up with a baffling final gambit, putting Grace on the stand as a hostile witness and badgering her to tears about her faith, saying that they’re going to silence, fine and jail all the Christians. Somehow, this causes the jury to rule in her favour, much to the embarrassment of the ACLU. After the credits, Pastor Dave is arrested for not handing over sermon transcripts earlier in the film.

As you can probably tell from the plot summary, God’s Not Dead 2 ditches the previous film’s interconnected storylines in favour of one main plot. There are still a couple subplots, but these are given far less prominence than in the first film and all tie directly into the main plot. This, honestly, is probably to the story’s overall betterment, as I did suggest previously that God’s Not Dead could have used some stronger focus overall. Honestly, in a lot of ways God’s Not Dead 2 is an improved sequel – the production values are a bit better, the performances are all good across the board, the story’s a bit more focused and the scope and stakes get raised enough that this doesn’t just feel like a straight rehash of the first film. There were also some subplots that I thought were legitimately really good – basically everything revolving around Martin (Paul Kwo, reprising his role from the first film) is great as we witness him grow from an awkward and excited young Christian to one who is resolved to preach, even when it costs him the respect of his family. I also found elements of Amy’s subplot (Trisha LaFache, also reprising her role) to be interesting, as she grapples with her faith after her cancer goes into remission. Unfortunately this intriguing aspect of her character gets dropped pretty quickly and, while Amy remains in the film for quite some time thereafter, she doesn’t really add anything interesting in the rest of her screentime.

The only problem is… well, God’s Not Dead 2 sets itself up in such a manner that an objective and detached review of it is basically impossible. Like I just said, technically this film has the pieces needed to be better than the first movie. Story-wise, I found its courtroom melodrama and proselytizing duller than the first movie’s classroom drama, despite the overall tighter focus of the sequel. I think this simply comes down to the rivalry of Josh and Radisson, which was far more interesting than Grace and Tom’s flat characterization and Pete’s scenery chewing. That’s not really the main issue though, as it’s the actual themes of the story that lets this movie down so hard and make the two hour runtime into even more of a slog. Once again, the filmmakers ideological bent is on full display, but this time they really lean into it, to the point where it straight-up ruins their movie from conception. The plot is just plain dumb and stretches credulity to the breaking point. That said, if you’re a part of the conservative evangelical bubble then you might not even notice that there is an ideological bent to this movie at all – or worse, you might even feel validated by it.

Let’s just get right into the portrayal of atheists in this film. It’s clear that the filmmakers were aware of the atheist backlash that the first film inspired, but it seems that it only inspired them to double-down, because God’s Not Dead 2 is way more offensive to atheists than the previous film was. This is evident from the very first scene of the movie through the portrayal of Brooke’s parents, Richard and Catherine. Brooke is clearly struggling and withdrawn because of the death of her brother, but her parents are totally over it and don’t seem to care anymore at all. Right off the bat this is a step beyond anything that the filmmakers had portrayed in the previous film. They imply once again that atheists are incapable of love, but now they also seem to believe that they can’t even care about their own children!? I was watching and wondering if this might just be a coping mechanism for Brooke’s parents, but no, this movie straight-up implies that atheist parents don’t give a shit about their own kids. I’ll be honest, I was floored by the very start of this film, it was unbelievable that the people behind this film would think this of atheists. I mean, as I have reiterated multiple times now, they were aware that atheists were offended by how they were portrayed in the first movie, so you’d think that the right move would be to be more careful in how you represent people going forward to make sure that there are no misunderstandings, right? Well, we’re getting the message loud and clear here, the filmmakers clearly think that atheists are heartless automatons. I had thought that the filmmakers just sucked at portraying non-Christians in the previous film, but here we get to see right off the bat that everyone involved in the production of this movie is totally incapable of empathy. Brooke’s parents never get better throughout this movie. There is no sympathy from or for them. During the trial, Richard is more worked up about his daughter getting “preached to” than the fact that his own son died. Seriously, shouldn’t atheists mourn harder when someone they know and love dies? Hell, at the end of the last movie, we were supposed to think it a good thing that Pastor Dave and Jude were celebrating the death (and last-second conversion) of Radisson. Just… how could they be so lacking in empathy for people who have different views?

Also worth pointing out is Martin’s father who shows up for one brief, but important scene. After Martin converts to Christianity, his father arrives to take him back to China because he believes that Martin is disgracing his family and that Martin is throwing away his future and the sacrifices that his family has made for him. It isn’t really explained why he believes this, but I think that the audience is supposed to understand that China persecutes Christians and implies that this is the end-result of state-sponsored atheism. When Martin refuses to recant, his father slaps him (which now means the God’s Not Dead films are two for two when portraying non-Christians of other nationalities as violent degenerates, hooray!), disowns him and then immediately returns to China. In all honesty, this scene works far better than the domestic abuse sequence in the first film and could have maybe been an affecting scene if there had been any sort of reasoning given for Martin’s father to be so vehemently anti-Christian. Instead, it just comes across as more of the same “atheists are bad and hate Christians just because” message. Give me the God’s Not Dead movie about Martin going back to China to be a minister, that could actually be incredibly interesting if it was written well (although knowing this production team, I have my doubts).

The most prominent atheist character is Pete Kane of the ACLU. For what it’s worth, Ray Wise puts in a deliciously hammy performance, turning every line from Pete into a sneering, sinister proclamation that guarantees that you’ll at least be entertained when he’s on-screen. That said, the material he’s working with is just plain stupid. I’ll get to the fact that the ACLU are the villains in this movie later, but Pete Kane is meant to represent how dastardly and hateful the organization (apparently) is. From his very first scene, Pete is seen as eagerly relishing the chance to make an example out of Grace and to “prove once and for all that God is dead”. He’s not even subtle about it when he’s around Grace and Tom, telling them straight-up that “I hate what people like your client stand for and what they’re doing to our society”. Bloody hell, I know that there are militant atheists who talk like that, but this movie acts like they’re the status quo.

Of course, the film tries to make Pete out to be a hypocrite during the trial when he claims that “Christianity is not on trial here” in his opening statement, despite it being obvious to the audience that this is not the case. To hammer that home, he also makes a big fuss about not wanting to offend any Muslims in the court, dog whistling to the audience the idea that liberals are afraid of offending Islam but hate and attack Christianity. Basically, throughout this movie Pete grins gleefully any time something happens that negatively affects Christians, while looking exasperated any time someone in the defence acknowledges that it’s pretty much a settled fact that Jesus existed. Hell, he looks downright shocked when J. Warner Wallace reveals that he was an atheist and that “I’m a Christian because it’s evidentially true” (in your opinion, sure).

As cartoonishly evil as Pete Kane is, his characterization is echoed in a number of smaller atheist authority figure roles in this film, all of whom are totally hostile to Christians. Whenever the news media gets shown in the film, the newscaster goes on a tirade about how Grace and Christians are zealots, fundamentalists and that the only extremists we need to worry about are the hardcore Christians. This portrayal of the media just felt so weird to me because it has the tenor of a Fox News segment, but with right-wing talking points swapped out for insults that get thrown at conservative evangelicals. Maybe I just don’t know the American media and how sensational their reporting style is, but I feel like this might just be the filmmakers projecting their own media’s style and assuming that that’s how everyone does it.

In addition to the media, the entire school board is immediately against Grace (her union rep even says “What were you thinking?” when asked whether Grace said the “words of Jesus” in class). Principal Kinney is particularly villainous, giving Grace these over the top evil looks and during her testimony against Grace is almost as much of a mustache-twirler as Pete Kane. Kinney is also seen shutting down a student protest led by Brooke in an effort to further silence Christians (that the audience this movie was directed at would be trying to shut down student protests that disagree with their politics less than two years later gives a contemporary viewing some delicious retrospective irony). Meanwhile, when Pastor Dave refuses to hand over sermon transcripts to the prosecutor’s office, the officer overseeing this goes from being fairly casual and routine to something resembling a body snatcher. I’m not kidding, he stands up, stares and ominously asks Dave if he really wants to refuse to comply, before stating that “a nail that sticks up gets hammered down”.

Now before I get into the next section I need to write about the only sympathetic non-Christian character in the film, Tom. We’re never really given his opinion on faith at any point in this film, other than that he’s a “non-believer” at the time when he agrees to represent Grace. Surprisingly, we don’t even get a big conversion scene by the end, although it’s probably safe to assume that he is totally convinced by the pro-Christian arguments as the film, since the movie seems to think that they “proved the existence of Jesus Christ” as the ACLU puts it at the end. The thing about Tom is that he’s just doing his job without letting personal biases get in the way, which shouldn’t be that unusual but… well, this is God’s Not Dead 2 and it’s shocking whenever this series doesn’t imply that a non-Christian eats babies for breakfast.

Anyway, one of the strangest parts about the portrayal of atheists in this film (Tom aside) is that there’s this uniformity to their actions which suggests that the filmmakers seem to think that there’s some kind of enormous atheist conspiracy unfolding in America looking to silence all the Christians. How else can you explain the uniformity of the atheist characters’ hostility to the Christians, their unspoken agreements about what is “unacceptable”, their encroachment into Christians’ freedoms and their certainty that Grace is going to be destroyed from the outset? The way that this film’s plot gets kicked into motion even suggests conspiracy, as the second Grace mentions Jesus in class, a student secretly gets his phone out and texts… somebody about it (it’s unclear who, it could have been Obama himself for all we know), as if this was a surveillance state like North Korea. At worst, a student might mention that their teacher talked about Jesus in class, but odds are that absolutely none of the students would give a shit. Hell, I live in godless, heathen Canada and when I was in high school we had a history teacher throw on a VHS tape about how the Bible was useful for archaeologists – a couple of students in the class scoffed, but that was about it. I know that’s anecdotal, but c’mon filmmakers, do they really think that students would immediately rat her out?

The whole conspiracy angle of the film gets more obvious when the ACLU become involved, as even before Pete arrives the school board discusses how the ACLU has been waiting for a case like Grace’s for years, as it provides them with the opportunity they need to silence Christians for good. The choice of the ACLU as villains for this film, especially when painting them as hypocritical and evil bastards, is truly baffling and I can only think that it’s a result of the filmmakers’ ideological leanings and their association with the Alliance Defending Freedom. The ACLU often sticks up for the rights of LGBTQ people, access to abortion and the separation of church and state, which turns them into an obvious target for conservative evangelicals, despite the fact that the ACLU defends the rights of pretty much anyone, Christians included. To put it simply, “essentially all of [the ACLU’s] positions irritate social conservatives […] the ACLU supports free speech including the free expression of religion; what they oppose is government funding or lending official (or the perception of official) support to religious activities in violation of the Establishment Clause. Furthermore, the ACLU has defended the rights of religious bigots to espouse those views, although it does not condone the contents of their speech.” Interestingly, the ADF are totally absent in this film, as is any sort of public support for Grace (up until Brooke organizes a protest for her). Does anyone remember Kim Davis, and how her refusal to issue wedding licenses landed her support from public and political figures, such as Mike Huckabee (who shows up in this film to fellate the evangelical audience for a vote)? The film instead makes it seem like no one supports Christians in order to make it look like they’re a minority class.

 
 

Anyway, when the ACLU gets involved in the film, they sway Brooke’s parents to sue Grace by promising that “there is not an Ivy League admissions board that could resist giving Brooke a spot because she was involved in a landmark separation of church and state case”. This was another one of those moments that made my jaw drop at the audacity of this film. So the entire Ivy League is populated by militant atheists who only admit similarly-atheist students? Bloody hell, is it any wonder that evangelicals are accused of being anti-intellectual? Similarly, the prosecutor’s office demanding sermon transcripts is treated like this grand next step on the road to making Christianity illegal, the sort of thing that evangelicals always say is definitely coming. This scene is actually based on something that happened… but it feels like the writers totally jumped the gun, because “Houston mayor Annise Parker subpoenaed sermons from five churches in her city in an ill-advised reading of rules about churches, tax law, and politics. The subpoenas were rescinded a few months later, after widespread outcry and several lawsuits, as well as a national campaign to mail Bibles and sermon notes en masse to the Houston mayoral offices.” Simply put, they take an event that happened, but change the outcome to make it seem like the atheist conspiracy is all-powerful and overreaching in America and that the audience’s freedoms could be snuffed out any day.

This conspiracy theorizing is borderline-hypocritical when you consider that one of this film’s defences of the historical veracity of the gospels is that there wasn’t a conspiracy involved in their authorship. Their justification for this is that since there were too many witness involved, someone would slip up. It’s actually not a particularly great argument, since conspiracy isn’t exactly the issue. I’d definitely recommend diving into the history of the gospels and early church, but in short the text of the gospels we have today were all very likely second-hand accounts, would likely have been coloured somewhat by the burgeoning schools of thought within the young religion about who Jesus was and what he represented, and weren’t even necessarily meant to be what we would now consider as “historical” accounts. Anyway, this conspiracy defence seems odd when you consider that this film is throwing in its own atheist conspiracy theory, although the filmmakers would probably say that it’s self-evident when you look at all the “persecution” in America. I’ll just let Sister Rose Pacatte of the National Catholic Reporter comment on this aspect of God’s Not Dead 2: “the premise of both films is nothing more than politicized religion as a vehicle to feed conspiracy theories.” Ouch.

 
 

All of this feeds into the fact that God’s Not Dead 2 is explicitly a more political film than the first was. In his interview with The Blaze about the film, David A. R. White said that this film was “all about making an impact” and that it was an intentional move for the story to shift to the public square. It shouldn’t be surprising that this film was released in the middle of the 2016 presidential leadership race, with the aforementioned Mike Huckabee clearly making a cameo just to appeal to the evangelical vote. By portraying government overreach and painting all authority figures as openly hostile to Christians, the filmmakers also incentivize their audience to mobilize against these institutions in order to “take back America”. After all, Tom’s opening argument in the case is that the phrase “separation of church and state” is not mentioned anywhere in the constitution or bill of rights, which seems to imply the idea that America was founded as a Christian nation that has morally eroded over time. Tom’s opening statement is a baffling argument which is only technically true, but the First Amendment makes it crystal clear that not only is separation of church and state enshrined within the law, but it was also a principle of the nation’s founders. Hell, if we’re going to be nitpicking constitutional amendments, then the Second Amendment is free game as well. This is another moment that just feels like the filmmakers won’t understand the people that they’re writing about, because arguing technicalities about church and state separation does not feel like the sort of thing that a non-Christian lawyer would engage in – rather, it sounds like the sort of weak argument an evangelical might espouse impotently to other evangelicals.

In the first film, there were plenty of characters who were atheists or hostile to Christians, but it was always framed as a personal and individual thing. In God’s Not Dead 2, this is reframed into being a political issue. The scene where Grace mentions Jesus in class does so in a manner which also correlates the message of Jesus with that of Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr. Taken by itself, this is a reasonable comparison to draw. However, the film also very explicitly wants us to see Grace and her situation throughout this film as being a parallel to Jesus (even having her echo the words of Jesus during his crucifixion, asking God if he has forsaken her), and therefore implies that the struggles Christians face in America are on the same level as the Indian independence and black civil rights movements. It should go without saying that this is unthinkably deluded and borderline insulting when you consider that they’re appropriating progressive icons to attempt to justify their conservatism – not to mention that only months after release this movie’s audience would, by and large, be voting for a man who was blatantly racist, xenophobic, authoritarian and immoral.

I also find it quite interesting that, for a movie which so blatantly proclaims the existence of God in its title, He is completely absent in this movie. Don’t get me wrong, the characters talk about God all the time, how good He is, how much of an impact He has on their lives, etc… but God doesn’t actually do anything in this movie. At least in God’s Not Dead, God was very clearly present in Dave and Jude’s storyline, even if it did end up portraying him as some sort of Final Destination murder-force. In comparison, Grace’s victory is portrayed as a surprise, but there isn’t any sense that it was some sort of miracle from God. The film also makes arguments about the historical existence of Jesus, but these are far less frequent and given less prominence within the story compared to Josh’s lectures. Furthermore, at least the first film seemed concerned about the fates of its non-Christian characters. In God’s Not Dead 2, the only people that convert are the ones who were immediately receptive to the Christians’ message, and the rest of the non-believers are nothing more than evil, unrepentant obstacles to “the truth”. As a result, God’s Not Dead 2 is arguably not really a “Christian” film in the sense that it’s not about the virtues of the faith – rather, it’s a political film about the imagined struggles of the American brand of evangelicalism.

Add it all up (the disingenuous portrayals of Christians and atheists, the conspiracy theorizing and the political rallying cries) and you have a film which puts the evangelical persecution complex on display greater than just about any other film out there. This also ties into this not really being a “Christian” film at all – after all, the conflict in the movie is entirely driven by the persecution that all of the Christian characters are subjected to by the rest of the world (Amy is the only exception, although her very minor crisis of faith is resolved the next time that we see her). Grace makes this clear in what is clearly intended to be the film’s core message: “I would rather stand with God and be judged by The World, than stand with The World and be judged by God” (“The World” in evangelical nomenclature meaning the necessarily sinful and immoral culture outside of Christianity which clashes with the “true” values of the Bible). This also applies to the numerous court cases listed in the film’s end credits, similarly to the first film. Naturally, the film’s audience takes the presentation of these cases at the filmmakers’ word, although if you look into them closer, it becomes clear that these cases revolve around Christians not understanding discrimination in business settings, Christians refusing their professional obligations as healthcare providers, or involve the filmmakers intentionally leaving out crucial details entirely to make the cases seem like persecution when they clearly aren’t (if you’re curious about all of the cases, The Friendly Atheist has a comprehensive rundown). You can see the persecution complex on full display on the God’s Not Dead website, which for years was documenting similarly one-sided accounts of Christian persecution throughout America, and had this exceptionally nasty, sneering, combative tone that it would apply to everything, even when celebrating the film’s release.

If you’ve checked out any of those links to the film’s blog, you might also have noticed how this movie constantly markets itself. God’s Not Dead 2 has more product placement than a Michael Bay or Adam Sandler movie, the only difference being that it’s exclusively advertising for products in the evangelical bubble (a bubble which, might I remind you, heavily commodifies religious adherence and expression). Just look at this list of really obvious plugs throughout this film:

  • We’ve got Lee Strobel showing up during the trial, is placed as an expert we should look up to, literally name-drops his books in a manner that doesn’t make sense within the scene, and then gives us a sales pitch about why he’s an authority on the historical existence of Jesus.
  • We’ve got J. Warner Wallace showing up in a similar manner, name dropping his books and then being poised as a credible expert with evidence that Jesus is God (which he never really gives us, so I guess you’ll have to buy his book).
  • We’ve got the Newsboys who show up to perform a new song and hope that it becomes another #1 hit after their success with the first film.
  • The end credits directly advertise for the Alliance Defending Freedom in the event that you feel persecuted for your faith.
  • In addition, the film advertises itself no less than 3 separate times during its ending, telling the audience to once again text “God’s not dead”, and even offers a handy, prebaked hashtag for everyone to send out on social media in order to generate buzz for the film. Bloody hell…
And, because this is the Christian media industry, this isn’t even the extent of this film’s monetization. In addition to the film itself, this movie has its own branded soundtrack, study guide (including a student version!), 40 day devotional, a novelization, t-shirts, audiobooks, church kits, a series of books based on the movies, even a goddamn silicon bracelet. Movies like this are their own mini-industries within the evangelical bubble, much like Star Wars is to the wider culture.

I’ve had to do a lot of thinking to give this movie a final score that I could feel secure in awarding. It’s easy for this film’s audience to say that people who hated this film merely disagreed with its message (in fact, it’s probably playing into the filmmakers’ intent doing so). On the one hand, I have to give the film some points for being fairly professionally made, and Ray Wise is always entertaining to watch. However, the film refuses to present itself in an enjoyable way to anyone outside of a very narrow political worldview – in fact, it’s openly hostile to worldviews that don’t match the filmmakers’ own. As a result, I feel more than justified in saying that this film is straight-up trash which exists only to stoke evangelicals’ persecution complex and to cynically rake in cash and political fervour in doing so. I would rather watch a freaking Bibleman video than this movie again.

2/10

Bibleman, Bibleman! Does whatever a Bible can! This isn’t a joke, it’s real guys! Can’t afford sets? Proselytise! Look out! Here comes a Bibleman!

Be sure to tune in again soon as we come to the final entry in this series: God’s Not Dead: A Light in Darkness!

Animals in Bands

I was listening to a podcast the other day and someone mentioned off-hand that there was a metal band fronted by dogs. Naturally, this revelation caused me to instantly shoot up in my seat and try to find this band, because it sounded so intriguing. It turns out that there are actually a few bands fronted by animals and the results are certainly… interesting.

Honourable Mention: No Grave But the Sea For Dogs, Alestorm
This one definitely doesn’t count, but it was my original touch-point for animal-fronted music. Basically, it’s Alestorm’s No Grave But the Sea, but with all the vocals replaced by a barking dog sound effect. It’s pretty funny if you’re familiar with the songs and the dog barking is done in the same rhythm as the actual vocal tracks, but it’s not like they had a dog in the studio just barking constantly over each track. Check out the track “Alestorm” here.

Caninus

Kicking this list off with the band which inspired it, we have Caninus, a deathgrind band headed by two pit bulls, Basil and Budgie. The band was the side project of Most Precious Blood guitarist Justin Brannan, which lent the group some musical chops to go along with the vocal gimmick. The band was actually signed to a record label, War Torn records, and had three releases – two split EPs and a full album with the absolutely amazing title of Now the Animals Have Voices. Sadly, the band is now defunct, as Basil had a brain tumour and was euthanized in 2011 and Budgie died in 2016.

As for the music itself, I’m very mixed on it. Like I said, the sound and production are quite polished and coherent than some of the other bands on this list. However, I’m not a fan of the music itself – the songs range from 30 seconds to maybe 3 minutes at most, meaning that Now the Animals Have Voices is over very quickly. I know that this is the whole point, but the music is literally just lots of snarling, growling and some barking set to music. The vocals are appropriate for the heaviness of the music, but it doesn’t amount to something that I’d actually want to listen to. They’re on Spotify though, so feel free to give them a listen for yourself.

Highlights: “Fear of Dog (Religious Myths)”, “New Yorkie Crew (Loyal Like A Stone)”

Hatebeak

After Caninus, Hatebeak is probably the second biggest animal-fronted band out there, based on the research I found for this post. Hatebeak are a death/grindcore metal band fronted by a grey parrot named Waldo. The band is signed to Reptilian Records and is still active today, having released three split EPs (including one with Caninus) and a full-length album in 2015 called The Number of the Beak. Hatebeak really pride themselves on their bird-pun titles, which are equal parts cringe and chuckle-worthy. If nothing else, I’d recommend you at least check out the titles of their songs. I mean, just look at the album art for The Number of the Beak. Hatebeak takes itself much less seriously than Caninus, really leaning into the whole joke of its premise.

Musically, Hatebeak are a mixed bag. The production on The Number of the Beak is very bad, almost demo-quality. For some of their songs, I’d say it would be appropriate to label Hatebeak “noise”, as their music is largely just distorted guitars with some squacks overlaid on it. On such tracks, the parrot vocalist feels like a gimmick. However, there are some tracks where Waldo’s vocals actually resemble grindcore “bree-brees”, such as “Beak of Putrefaction”, “God of Empty Nest” and “Seeds of Destruction”, which isn’t a musical style I’m into, but it’s familiar enough to bring a smile to my face and I can definitely see how someone could be into these tracks. “Roost in Peace” is also a pretty solid death metal track. All-in-all, I actually enjoyed bits of Hatebeak more than Caninus, even if the production is total ass and the first half of the album makes the parrot vocals feel like a gimmick. However, when Hatebeak works, it works pretty well, although it’s pretty clear that the band put more effort into their song titles than they did in the music itself. The Number of the Beak is on Spotify, I’d recommend that you give it a listen.

Highlights: “Roost in Peace”, “Seven Perches”

The Thai Elephant Orchestra

The previous two entries were bands fronted by animals, whereas The Thai Elephant Orchestra are a band made up of animals, performing their own music. The elephants are actually signed to Mulatta Records, which prides itself as “purveyors of the unique and bizarre”, where they have released 4 albums: a self-titled album, Elephonic Rhapsodies, Water Music and Smash Hits. The band’s page on Mulatta Records proudly states that the band is comprised of “Elephants in the Thai jungle playing specially designed musical instruments. The elephants improvise the music themselves. The Thai Elephant Orchestra was co-founded by Richard Lair of the Thai Elephant Conservation Center in Lampang and performer/composer Dave Soldier”.

As you would probably expect from music improvised and performed entirely by animals, The Thai Elephant Orchestra’s music is mostly just noise. There isn’t really much artistry or cohesion to it, although in this case the gimmick of having music created by animals doesn’t diminish the product itself. Elephonic Rhapsodies is on Spotify, so if you’re interested then you might want to check it out.

The Rock Cats

Aaaand here’s where we get more into the gimmicky stuff, if you can believe that after Caninus and Hatebeak. The Rock Cats are an off-shoot of The Acro-Cats, which is essentially a cat circus. Each show ends with a performance by The Rock Cats, which is dubbed “the only cat band in existence”. The sarcastic reviews on the band’s Wikipedia page are incredible:

-“An unpredictable assortment of instrument clanging, and rarely does it sound like the cats are playing the same song, let alone an actual, fully realized piece of music.”
-“Really, really fun way to spend an afternoon”
-A reviewer of a 2013 show in New Orleans was critical of the band’s musicality, and complained that the advertised “seasonal carol selections such as ‘A Cat in a Manger’ and ‘Catnip Roasting on an Open Fire'” never materialized.”
-“What they lacked in technical skill, they certainly made up for in rock ‘n’ roll catitude”.

The band also has a website which is pure 90s Geocities cheese and which apparently isn’t updated with any regularity because it has a listing of the band members, but the front-cat, Tuna, has been dead for a year now (and this despite having a listing for a show that happened a couple days ago as of this writing). The site also has a music video of the cats (and a rooster, and a gopher) playing music which seems to be 100% legit, although edited heavily to make it listenable if the band’s reviews are anything to go by. Unlike the other entries on this list, they do not have any music up on Spotify.

The Jingle Cats

…and of course there’s an entire Christmas-themed band of cats out there. Unlike The Rock Cats, The Jingle Cats merely meow over humans playing Christmas carols in a similar manner to No Grave But the Sea for Dogs. They released three albums, Meowy Christmas, Here Comes Santa Claws and a non-Christmas album, Rhythm and Mews, all three of which are available on Spotify. They also have a website which is somehow even worse than The Rock Cats’ was.

Christmas albums tend to be gimmicky enough as it is, but having cats as the vocalists just adds a whole new dimension of gimmickry to the proceedings. The music itself is very generic holiday fare, almost like something from a karaoke version of the songs, and the cat vocals grow tiresome very quickly, especially when they are arranged in a very high pitch. Also, for some reason, there’s a dog on lots of these songs as well, despite this being a supposedly cat-based band. As painful as the Christmas albums are, Rhythm and Mews is a special kind of insane, featuring cat-based covers of “Secret Agent Man“, “Home on the Range” and the freaking “The Star Spangled Banner“.

I… I’m not sure what else to say beyond that. Maybe we should just stop with these animal bands, or at least the cat-based ones, okay?

Christian Mingle – The Almighty Cockblocker

Recently my girlfriend was looking for a movie that we could watch on Netflix and, surprisingly, asked if I wanted to watch Christian Mingle. She isn’t a Christian herself, so this was particularly unexpected, but as someone who’s interested in crappy movies, this movie had been on my radar for quite some time and of course I said yes to the offer to watch it. It was basically just a reasonably well-done version of one of those low-budget W-network romantic films, with a religious spin on things to differentiate itself. I’m not really interested in a full review of the film (I’d give it a 4/10), but the film’s religious elements did get me thinking because they were implemented in some strange ways which I feel run counter to the intended message.

First off, Christian Mingle is very much an archetypal low budget romance movie. If you’ve seen one of these before, you know the drill – you’ve got your generic white couple who get drawn together, a manipulative mother, an unbearable romantic rival, a stupid conflict that draws the characters apart and which would have been easily solvable with a little communication and common sense, etc. Perhaps the weirdest thing about all of this though is how Christianity has been shoehorned into this archetype. Usually the central conflict comes because of some nefarious falsehood or because of some sort of scheme on the part of the villain, but in this story that means that the villain is… God, or at least this form of Christianity. It might have actually been interesting if this was intentional, but it definitely does not seem like that is the case here.

Much of the early conflict in Christian Mingle is driven by Gwyn feeling like she isn’t “Christian enough” (she’s a Christmas and Easter Christian, but that still makes her Christian) and Paul overestimating her devotion to God. Gwyn and Paul fall for each other, while Gwyn tries to learn how to be a better Christian. Interestingly, the film’s focus seems to be primarily directed on Christian lingo, rather than on the actions that would set someone apart and in fact seems to be the villainous mother character’s issue as well. She’s trying to set Paul up with goody-goody church girl Kelly, who’s clearly “in” the Christian group but clearly doesn’t have a connection with Paul like Gwyn does. Then, while volunteering together in Mexico*, Paul finds out that Gwyn isn’t Christian enough and decides that they can’t be together anymore, despite both of them clearly being in love. So, what this film is saying is that because Gwyn isn’t at the same faith level as Paul, they can’t be together? I mean, she basically says she wants to be better, she wants to know God the same way he does. Isn’t this every Evangelical boy’s dream, to save his girlfriend’s soul? Apparently not, according to this movie, because they split and he gets matched up with Kelly for a while.

So what does Gwyn do? She starts praying, going to church, reading her Bible, etc. And then she quits her job because she doesn’t feel honest marketing products she doesn’t believe in (as the Common Sense Media overview of the film puts it, “Why does no one ask if there are clinical trials to back up the product’s claims?”) and goes and volunteers full-time in Mexico. As a result, she apparently reaches a point where she’s “Christian enough” and Paul seeks her out on his own accord… and reveals that he loved her all along. So, wait, would he have gotten back together with her if she hadn’t completely changed her life for him? Would he have gotten over his own barriers and accept her in order to make love work? Who knows, because the movie’s story conveniently swerves to avoid having to actually answer this! Hell, it would even have been interesting to me if they had done something to suggest that this was supposed to be a metaphor for God’s love and that he seeks her whether she believes the “right” way or not, but obviously this kind of film doesn’t have any sort of ambition to it.

As I’ve probably hammered home by now, the biggest issue in Christian Mingle is that it really harps on this exclusive form of Christian belief that Gwyn fails to measure up to, although the film never really says what that involves outside of loving God. I’m not sure if this is just Evangelical dog whistling, or if the film just thinks that if it doesn’t take a stance at all then it will be able to reach a wider audience. This makes me wonder why the hell Gwyn’s faith maturity is such a big deal, because she clearly is game to grow. The aforementioned Common Sense Media’s review put it well when they said that “most followers of Jesus tout the claim that God loves everyone, which is a policy of religious inclusiveness, but this plot hangs on the exclusionary position born-again parents take when they fear their son is being wooed by a non-believer”, and not only that but the film seems to reinforce that exclusionary message. Everyone has to begin a journey of faith somewhere, not to mention that spiritual growth develops over a lifetime, so why does everyone expect Gwyn to be fully developed in order for she and Paul to have any sort of relationship? It’s just a baffling message and I can’t understand why it is treated like a given assumption throughout the film, unless it’s just pandering to the mindset of the hardcore Evangelical bubble.

Furthermore, the film really drops the ball on what a Christian life should look like. In addition to making the Christian characters the real villains of the piece and having Christianity and God become the obstacle which is preventing love from being achieved (without any sort of self-consciousness about this message, I may add), God barely seems to have any real positive effect in the lives of the characters in the film. Like, Gwyn says that the Christian characters are all so happy and different, but that doesn’t really seem to be the case. Again, Paul’s mom is uptight, Kelly is clearly a jealous schemer and most of the Christians are portrayed in a manner which I can only describe as “low budget TV romance quirky”. Again, if you’ve seen enough of these films, you’d know what I mean – characters who are supposed to be fountains of humour but whose actions make them feel inhuman. Even Paul himself is quite bland and feels tethered by his faith, rather than liberated, and he is only actually interesting when he’s breaking free of that shell to be with Gwyn. The film also doesn’t help its case when it reveals that practically every other character in Gwyn’s life is secretly Christian, most notably Gwyn’s sassy black friend, Pam. As a result, we don’t really get any unfulfilled non-Christians to compare the faithful to. The result of all of this is that God basically becomes window dressing in a film which is clearly intended to actually be about Him. Everyone’s talking about God, but He has no actual presence in the film, which doesn’t help the resulting perception that Christian Mingle is about “authenticity […] to a specific way of worship”.

Obviously the film has other issues (the fact that it’s basically a paid advertisement using faith as a springboard being most notable), but I felt like these ones here are the most central to the film’s failings. Like I said in the intro, it’s otherwise just a competent made for TV romantic film, if you’re into that kind of thing. However, the one thing that it does to differentiate itself is handled really poorly when you apply any sort of critical thought towards it… y’know, assuming that they were actually trying to make Christianity and God look appealing anyway.

*Or, well, a super cheap cowboy set doubling for Mexico. Seriously, I laughed my ass off at this part.