Hatchet - Review

Spring Approacheth! Actually the bugs bunny quote is, the king approacheth, but I always use it for spring because, well, there's not too many kings around here. I mean, there's Stephen, but he's like, 4 states away or something (i'd have to check a map to be sure). SO yea, the weather here has been like 20 degrees above normal for like, months now, and this month, we've gone and hit 30+ degrees above normal for this time of year. What does that mean to you?

It means I am sweating my balls off as i write this.

Yes, that's right. I am a large man and we sweat a lot on the most average of days. Put the temp at around 85 (yes it is 85 degrees in my house right now, and that's in the cooler rooms), and buckets of sweat pour from my man-flesh at incredible rates. In my steam bath of a bedroom, it's probably around 95. I hope you guys appreciate the sacrifices I make to bring you entertainment. But enough about my sweaty arse.

So I figure... what to do on a dark and steamy night when it's around 100 degrees in my thong underwear and it's deathly quiet in my house? If you said "HORROR MOVIE!" you are the big winner. Give yourself a pat on the ass, no, go right ahead, I'll wait. What, you can't feel that? You've been sitting on your ass too long. Yea, I know, me too.

So I fired up old Netflix. Yes, I have like 400+ movies in my instant queue now. It's weird how it works. I go into netflix to watch something in my instant queue, and end up adding like 5 movies. So for every movie or two I watch, I add 5 or 10 new ones. I'll never catch up. On the plus side, 300 of those 400+ movies are horror. The rest are lesbian porn (and yes, the chick in england is hot, brando. Although I've never seen her and I don't know who she might be, I always picture Saffron Burrows when I think of her, the hot english-accented chick from Deep Blue Sea). So I think "Tonight's a good night for a slasher flick!" and i remember Danielle Harris, the lead actress from Halloween 4 and 5, and one of the supporting actresses from Halloween (the remake). I know she'd enjoy a good horror movie! So i tried to pick something she starred in (since I just saw her in The Last Boy Scout a couple nights ago playing Bruce Willis' daughter), and came upon Hatchet.

Now, a little background on the movie. Danielle Harris, who actually stars in hatchet 2, and the now-filming hatchet 3, is NOT actually in Hatchet. Yea, I thought she was, too. But no, apparently they recast the character of "marybeth" in the second movie as the heroine, and needed Danielle Harris to fill in. I did not realize this until way into the movie, but oh well. By that time, the movie had me laughing hysterically. I mean seriously, for a goddamn B horror movie, that is some funny shit right there, so I had to finish watching it.

Basically, there's some guys in New Orleans for Mardi Gras, and a couple of them decide to go on a haunted boat ride in the bayou. So they end up getting stranded in the swamp and hunted down by Victor Crowley, who is the local boogeyman. Old Vic used to be just a horribly deformed little boy (much like jason voorhees from the friday the 13th movies), but his dad, who had been taking care of Vic, accidentally took a hatchet to Vic's forehead while trying to free him from a burning house. VIc's dad (played by Kane Hodder, the guy who actually PLAYED jason voorhees in a couple of the friday the 13th films) just sort of died of a broken heart after that, but years later, Vic came back from the dead to go around killing people in the swamp.

Now a couple things about this movie. One, it's rather well done. Oh I'm not talking big budget. No, I mean just plain well done. There's some killing at the beginning to let you know what kind of movie it is, and then we cut straight to the boobies. And there are boobies. It's mardi gras in new orleans! And one of the chicks looked like someone I knew back in college. Her name was Vic too, come to think of it. She used to wear these transparent white pants so you could see her thong underneath. But this was back in the late 80's, when wearing transparent white pants was in style... Riiiight. Then right after the boobage, we come to the comedy part. Freakin genius, the comedy in this movie. Whoever wrote it needs to write for david letterman or something, cuz the boy's got talent. I don't often laugh out loud at movies, especially horror movies, but this one had me cackling like a rabid hyena all through the transition between the boobs and the actual horror. The interaction between the characters is just so goddamn spot on, I can't even tell you how hilarious that shit is. I will start giggling again just thinking about it. And then BAM we're into the horror part and there's still some humor popping up, but at this point it's pretty much back to your basic horror slasher type flick. But still funny! And gory and almost scary for a B-horror flick. So, all in all, pretty damn good.

I don't have a star-rating system, but I basically rate by whether I'd watch it again or not, and oh yea. I think definitely rewatchable here. Just for the boobage and the comedy parts alone. AND, you get to see what Kane Hodder really looks like under all that makeup. Yes, not only did he play the part of Victor (the growed up version), but he played Jason Voorhees and some other big ugly slasher villains, too! None of which come to mind right now. Oh, er, the Swamp thing, he played that too, i think. Anyway, he looks just like a normal guy playing Vic's dad! I was surprised! And no, I mean, I wasn't expecting Kane Hodder to be a big ugly misshapen mass of humanity under all that makeup, but... uh... come to think of it, yes. Yes, I was. But no! I was wrong, he's actually a big chubby hairy guy, pretty average looking, sort of reminds me of my brother in law in a backwoodsy way. Only, with more hair. Or like me. Only, less sweaty.

So yea, great movie, I hear the second one was even better, and they are making a third one! A whole goddamn series of movies! I love series! And boobs. I love boobs. And cookies.

Oh, and a quick note, I am not getting Diablo 3. Blizzard decided to not only charge $60 for the game itself, but they are charging for access to the in-game auction of items and stuff. Yea, from what I heard, they charge you a small amount to post an item for auction (charging real-world money, if only a small amount), AND they also skim a percentage of the sale price. SO blizzard gets paid for the game, you pay them every time you want to auction an in-game item (whether it sells or not), and IF it sells, they also get a percentage of the profit YOU made selling your IN-GAME item. So since every tom, dick and asshole just HAS to have the next Diablo 3 (because they buy blizzard's hype, not the game), they are going to make a fucking KILLING off this game. They will literally have so much money coming in that bill gates' eyes will pop out of his goddamn head. And it's going to do so well that EVERY company will then do the same goddamn thing, and in 10 years I'm going to have to pay out of my real-life pocket to buy myself an in-game sword and commit in-game seppuku just to protest this nonsense. And I can't afford that. So I'm stopping the madness NOW by not purchasing Diablo 3. Sure, I won't stop anyone else from buying into it. Because Blizzard's ads are MUCH better at convincing you that you NEED Diablo 3 than I am at convincing you that yet ANOTHER iteration of the "walk through yet another darkly-lit area fighting off millions of monsters in scripted wave after wave" is not going to be GREAT FUN! I mean, what, the first two games didn't clue you in? Christ, I played the demo for the FIRST game and got bored by it. I only bought the second because my buddy Rich wanted to see me play a half-naked amazon chick and run around in front of him with my spear so my amazon-kilt would fly up and he might see my 2d-pixellated ass. Apparently because doing it in real life just wasn't as much fun. So, uh, I sure as hell am NOT getting the third one, with all the strings attached. It's like having sex with a hooker you KNOW has herpes, crabs and syphilis, only to find out she also gave you aids and you have to spend the rest of your short sorry life paying for meds just to live out a miserable, lonely existence. But nobody realizes it! No, Blizzard just flops their big advertising boobies in the face of the public at large and everyone goes all googly-eyed and that's it! Then everyone's got STDs and your daughter's knocked up. I've seen it a hundred times. So go on! Buy Diablo 3. Enjoy the itching, scratching, pustulating sores and deadly fungal infections until you bleed out in a hospital bed, alone and untouchable. Just don't say I didn't warn you.

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

And please, Scrolls of Wisdom is such a long sobriquet, even abbreviated to SoW. Call me scribe. But maybe "sow" is technically more descriptive, with the man-boobs and all. Hmmm. Put me out in the sun for too long and I do smell like bacon. :-/

What I Learned from Skyrim

So apparently I have lurking fans! I would say I was shocked, but come on... When you're this incredibly hot, you get used to that sort of thing. I can't even tell you how many times a week i get stalked, because let's face it, when you're this chubby, you can't see past the moobs.

As for Xbox vs Playstation, let me clear that up right now. I'm a PC purist! I had a Sega Genesis up until I got my first computer, and then I gave away my Sega and never looked back. This was back in the early 90's. The mouse on a PC gives you pinpoint accuracy, and the keyboard gives you a huge variety of options for buttons, macros, strategies, and whatever else you need. Sure, you could plug a keyboard and mouse into a console, but you can't browse the web, install new software, upgrade your components, and generally futz around any way you want to, like you can with your own PC. Plus, anyone can learn how to troubleshoot and repair their own PC. I work in tech support, so if I break my own shit, I can always repair it, or replace the parts myself. Once your Xbox or Playstation goes, you're screwed. You need to buy a whole new unit. I've heard some of the games for consoles are better than PC games. I say that's a bunch of BS. When you have to design a game to handle only a few buttons and a limited amount of control from a directional button, you really have to dumb down the amount of strategies you have to work with. And that's how they have to design the games, because despite being ABLE to plug a keyboard and mouse into a console, most aren't shipped standard with a keyboard and mouse, only controllers, which are limited in scope. Not even mentioning the fact that the age range for consoles is younger than PCs, so you're almost guaranteed a simpler style of play on ANY console, as compared to a PC, which not only opens the field for a variety of strategies because of the range of the standard input devices, BUT it also has to work on a variety of systems. Sure, this may hurt the graphics some in the long run, but honestly, fun and gameplay is so much more important than graphics, and I've never noticed a big difference between console game graphics and PC graphics anyway. PC gaming for teh win!

But, my opinion may be biased... as I said, I am a PC purist. :-) To me, having a console is like only being able to use your cell phone to make phone calls, not surf the web, play games, or anything else. It would severely limit the usefulness of the device, as well as the fun.

As for John Carter... I haven't seen it yet. I don't go to the movies much. From the previews, it looks like a Superman scenario. Instead of an alien coming to earth and having super strength, etc because of his denser body, we've just got a human being go to a slightly lighter planet and having greater strength because of earth's relative density and gravity. Nothing new there. Same concept, just reversed.

Now, on to skyrim! So, there's this one scenario in skyrim. There's a woman from hammerfell working in a tavern, and during the course of your early adventures, you find out there's some mercenaries from hammerfell who are searching for her. So when you mention this to her, she asks you for help. Now, here's where things get tough. You go find the guys who are after her, and they tell you that she's lying, and they are only there to peacefully return her to Hammerfell for trial for betraying hammerfell to the aldmeri dominion (the bad guys). So you're basically forced to make a decision on which one to trust, based on very little conflicting information.

Now, like any good gamer nowadays, I can't make a decision on my own. So I checked the forums. Apparently, most people sided with the mercenaries, led by some guy named Kematu. Mostly because, he offered them a set some of money up front, and he had a good story as to why they were searching for her. The woman, Sadira, I think her name was? Her name escapes me. Anyway, I sided with the girl. I didn't expect anything out of it, but I had plenty of good reasons, and I did try it both ways to see if one was better than the other. So here's my list of reasons.

(1) She was one woman against a band of highly trained mercenaries. If nothing else, the XP for killing a bunch of mercenaries has to be better than turning a woman in. Not to mention the satisfaction of slaughtering a bunch of heavily armed men is MUCH more emotionally satisfying. Then, there's that nagging guilt for agreeing to help sadira and then betraying her. What can I say, I have morals.

(2) The guy in jail. Supposedly a member of the mercenaries gets caught by the whiterun guards, and the rest of his buddies abandon him because he got jailed. This doesn't sound like the actions of very nice people. Also, if you look at things from a purely mathematical point of view, and assign the letter A to sadira's story, and B to the jailed mercenary, and then C to Kematu's story, you basically have an equation where A and C cancel each other out, since they are opposing tales. The only thing you're left with is B, which is the jailed mercenary's tale. The way he told it, you'd be slaughtered if you went after kematu, and that doesn't sound like the actions of a friendly group of mercenaries just here to collect a woman peacefully for trial. That sounds like assassins. Which tends to support sadira's side of the story.

(3) The "Big Picture." Let's face it, Kematu's story just doesn't add up. he says that Sadira went and betrayed an entire city to the aldmeri dominion, and the mercenaries were hired by the hammerfell resistance to track down sadira and bring her back for justice. Now, you honestly think a band of hunted fugitives, rebels in their own land, are going to hire the "best of the best" mercenaries to go to another country and capture some woman who betrayed them? Let's face it, if you have an entire dominion trying to take over your country, there's better uses for your gold than to hunt down a traitor. That sounds more like the actions of the aldmeri dominion, since tracking down an escaped rebel for public trial back in her homeland would be a stern warning to anyone in hammerfell looking to aid the rebels against the aldmeri. What good does it do rebels to track down a traitor? Save it til after the rebellion, when your lands are back in your own control. THEN hunt down those who betrayed your people. In fact, Sadira would have little reason to leave the country at all unless she did, in fact, speak out against the aldmeri, since they would now be grateful to her for supporting them, if kematu was telling the truth. Why leave a country where the aldmeri are mostly in control, for the province of skyrim, where the aldmeri basically have no presence whatsoever? She'd be throwing herself out of a safe haven into an entire country of people who hate the dominion, and that's just idiotic if you buy what kematu is shoveling. Also, he tells you Sadira's been using her sob story to get people like you to help her all along. If no one knows who she really is, then why are they helping her against trained soldiers?

(4) The hammerfell mercs are hiding in a cave with a bunch of bandits. There's basically only one reason for this. They aren't welcome in Whiterun/skyrim. Supposedly there was some vague "incident" in whiterun that led to them being shoved out of the city, but since there's no reference to what exactly the incident was, all you can assume is that the hammerfell mercs are actually agents of the aldmeri, and as such, would be hated by anyone in skyrim. Which is why they aren't welcome in town.

(5) Curved. Swords. As the guards in whiterun will tell you, the Hammerfell mercs have CURVED SWORDS. What's cooler than that? If you turn in Sadira, you don't get a curved sword. You have to kill the mercenaries to get that! Sure, I never used them myself (more a dagger in the back or spell in the face kind of guy), but they did look pretty awesome.

So let's sum up. Basically, I sided with sadira because, in my opinion, she was just more believable. Sure, she didn't have all the answers. She didn't really know why the mercs were after her, and she didn't know where they were. But Kematu's answers had the practiced ease of someone who was used to lying to people in such a way that they'd believe him, and despite everything he was saying seemed to make sense, it didn't if you gave it much thought. He reminded me of a politician, and as we all know, those guys make a living by lying their asses off, so they know how to make it sound like they are telling the truth, especially when they aren't. Unlike a person who actually IS telling the truth, because such a person isn't going to expect the lies to be more believable. They just tell the truth and assume the person listening is going to be able to recognize the difference. And most of the time, they can't. Which is probably why most people sided with kematu, and betrayed a helpless woman to a bunch of ruthless cutthroats... because kematu was a better liar. So sad. How do such people sleep at night, turning a poor serving wench over to a bunch of armed men for a few hundred gold?

So if anyone ever tells you you don't learn anything from video games, tell them they are LYING SONS OF BITCHES! You learned that liars are better at selling the lies they tell than the truthful people are at getting you to believe the truth! Who'd have thought there was such deep insight in an RPG, of all things? :-o