News

A new videogame art gallery will consume you

Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. These Monsters (PC, Mac, Linux) BY STRANGETHINK Monsters with a psychedelic Rorschach test for a face. There are loads of them, sitting in framed portraits all around the walls of Strangethink’s latest procedurally generated galleries. Though motionless, these faces seem inescapable. Each black door you see generates another island of maze-like architecture (all ramps and stacks of oblong rooms), offering a chance—you might think—to warp you to a place with different scenery. But the only end here is happening upon a badly generated world…

News

The King of the Monsters is f*cking back

Remember all the times America has tried to remake and refashion Godzilla (1954)? Cool! Neither do I, because this teaser for the upcoming Godzilla Resurgence (or Shin Gojira, which delightfully could mean anything from True Godzilla to God Godzilla) is so much better than any of those movies or cartoons in their entirety. I would trade a hundred Hank Azaria cabbies, a thousand sobbing Bryan Cranstons, for what we’re being gifted with here. Take a look: I don’t need to belabor the point, do I? True: the early trailers for Gareth Edwards’s 2014 Godzilla promised a similar level of gravitas and awe, but the final product didn’t deliver…

Feature

What the hell is Cloverfield, anyway?

It all stands out to me as clear as yesterday. A scrawny, bright-eyed teenager circa ‘07, sat across the aisle with his friends, popcorn gripped between thighs, the SMS touchpads of flip-phones being thumbed impatiently. It’s the opening weekend of Michael Bay’s Transformers and we are ready to see some gigantic robots. Our excited chatter is quickly hushed with the operant cue of the dimming house-lights and the sound of a worn projector sputtering to life. Images of an upscale house party fill the screen—a scene so far removed from our expectations that the question as to whether we were…

Review

The Deadly Tower of Monsters revels in the schlock of B-movies

Bad movies can be a laugh to watch. It’s best done with a certain camaraderie, a group of buddies getting together to voluntarily partake in schlock, probably with alcohol and snacks to push them through it.Hell, Mystery Science Theater 3000’s (1988-99) Joel Hodgson has made an entire career out of that idea alone. But stripped of the jokes, there’s only so many rubber-masked martians and tin foil spaceships held aloft by fishing wire that your average viewer can tolerate. Let’s be real: no one is earnestly watching 1950s camp like This Island Earth (1955) for its cinematic merits. The cornball…

Article

John Carpenter’s The Thing refuses to change shape

The Thing is one of the most peculiar media series to try and wrap your head around. For starters, as far as series go, it struggles to qualify, mostly orbiting John Carpenter’s 1982 film, with a small and loose assemblage of multimedia offshoots (a comic series, a prequel film) dancing at the edges of its gravity. You could argue that the series itself resembles its titular namesake: an amorphous entity that devours and impersonates the characteristics of its predecessor; each incarnation a diminishing return of success. Part of the difficulty in capitalizing on The Thing’s clout through serialization is the…

News

The transgressive politics of a monster dress-up game

You know who I’ve always admired? Divine. She was only a stage persona, a high-camp drag queen and music act, but one that challenged notions of beauty and decency while entertaining the hell out of you. I first came across Divine in John Waters’s cult classic midnight movie Pink Flamingos (you may know her from Hairspray). In it, she is called “the filthiest person alive” by the newspapers, and it’s a title that she desperately tries to uphold with her “filth politics.” In the film, she’s considered to be a monster, or at least a criminal, but you can’t help but be…

News

Sea of Solitude finds beauty in depicting loneliness

“The vision, in a nutshell, is to let players experience different types of loneliness. But all in a playful way,” says Cornelia Geppert of Jo-Mei Games. And that’s about all I could get out of her at this point. It’s not a lot, but it hardly matters once you’ve seen what Geppert and her team have done with that concept. Somehow only in the conceptual stage, it’s called Sea of Solitude, and the images released so far sell themselves. We see a young girl called Kay, who has been turned into a black and blobby monster, as she journeys through a sunken city to find…