Runners (art and words by Sean Wang) is the sci-fi action/comedy chronicling adventures of the freighter Khoruysa Frimia and her crew of smugglers, former pirates and rascals. I think I’m the 72,329th Guy On The Internet(TM) to make the following comparison, but I do so because it is apt: Runners is as fun as Star Wars used to be. I’m talking Episode IV fun, nerds. There’s an excitement and velocity to the story that is hard to come by. Sure, smuggling has been done before, but Sean Wang’s story of smuggling is backed by a lush and full universe full of cool technology and believable galactic politics. The characters are developed and fascinating, the action is intense, and the dialogue is superb. In most science fiction I’ll settle for dialogue that is merely not painful, but Wang uses words as deftly as he does art.
I don’t normally watch six movies in six days, so immersing myself in cinema gave me a bit more appreciation for what I like in a film and what I don’t. To be honest, I had pretty low expectations going into the Canadian films, and I saw an example of one that works (The Academy) and one that doesn’t (The Corrupted). So what were the major differences between these two films?
The Audio
“The Corrupted” has a lot less action than “The Academy,” but the short lived gun rampage in “The Corrupted” is marred by downright embarrassing gunshot sound effects. Nothing takes me out of a movie experience faster than poor audio; it’s the difference between “independent film” and “home movie.”
Continuity
The characters in “The Corrupted” only have a few scenes where they are splattered with blood or injured, and even then it’s inconsistent from scene to scene. One character is sprayed with monster barf, is writhing in pain while his arms have an chemical-burn special-effect on them, and in the next scene his arms are fine. And the blood splatters on his shirt are way off. I can understand the difficulty of reproducing a blood splatter from a take where the splatter on his shirt is randomly applied by practical effects. Simple solution? Drench him in the crap. If he’s covered in one scene, he’s covered in the next. The characters in “The Academy” get beaten worse and worse as the film progresses, and they still managed to have dried blood patterns and bruises on their faces that are both escalating and consistent.
The Energy
“The Corrupted” starts out like you typical horror movie and stays that way. There exists “using subtlety to create tension” and then there’s “boring.” You could cut half an hour out of the beginning of “The Corrupted” and not lose anything. “The Academy” has a clunky opening; it’s five minutes of exposition served on a plate, but it’s interrupted by a guy crashing through a wall and beating the snot out of another guy while bagpipe music plays. Why break through the wall? Walls are meant to be broken, obviously. Why bagpipe music? Why the hell not?
The Ending - Spoiler Alert! Highlight to reveal
Taking a brief trip to bizzaro world, I actually liked the ending to “The Corrupted” a lot more than “The Academy.” The ending of “The Corrupted” is both unsettling and ambiguous, which is fitting for a horror movie. The danger presented by the monsters is still out there, and we’re not sure if the heroes have really escaped. Meanwhile, the ending to “The Academy” should have been bittersweet, but instead feels like the directed fell in love with the characters and wanted them to have the happiest, sugariest, candy-coated, jelly-filled ending ever at the expense of all logic. I should have have got choked up at the ending. Instead I got type 2 diabetes.
And there we have it. So if you are an aspiring filmmaker looking to create a film catered exactly to my tastes, make it ridiculously violent, kill all the main characters in the end, and invest in good audio equipment. And put robots in there somewhere.
Jeff is an ordinary guy - stuck at a dead end job, with a boring life. When a strange old man gives him an Ancient relic, and tells him that he is the last bloodline of famed author H.P. Lovecraft, he and his friend Charlie embark on an adventure to protect the relic piece from falling into the hands of the ancient evil trying to release Cthulhu back into the world! - Official Synopsis
If you’re a nerd on the Internet dark fantasy enthusiast, you’re probably well versed in the lore of Cthulhu. For those that dwell outside of basements, HP Lovecraft is the father of modern fantasy-horror. His most popular legacy character is the dark god\alien\entity Cthulu, and during his life Lovecraft encouraged other writers to reference places and characters from his own work. This led to a robust community of writers working within a shared mythos. Think of it like Star Wars. It was created by George Lucas, but expanded by fans through novels and other media.
“The Last Lovecraft” is a comedy-horror that caters more to the comics ‘n’ Star Wars crowd than the Stephen King crowd. For an independent film, the effects are quite convincing, but for a movie about combating the madness that encroaches from the abyss, almost everything that happened was in broad daylight. There’s never much a feeling of menace for our heroes until the very end when they face Cthulu’s otherworldly minions directly. Gregg Lawrence gives a great performance as Captain Olaf, delivering lines like “Ya ever been fish raped before?” with dead seriousness. Kyle Davis and Deving McGinn play Jeff and Charlie, and their instances of understated humour was well done, but their acting fell short when there was a need for comically over-the-top rage or fear.
Overall, I enjoyed “The Last Lovecraft”. It has great comedic timing and a fun script. If you’re a fan of the Cthulu mythos and nerdisms in general, give it a shot. Otherwise, it’s a pass.
They are society’s flotsam, murderers, sociopaths, criminals bred for Darwinian survival. A select group of convicted youths are given a second chance by a shadowy organization: The Academy. They will be trained to become efficient weapons of death, honing into a valued asset the very thing that made them outcasts. They are divided into classes, trained as a unit for three years and isolated from everyone and everything else. The final exam? Over 100 square kilometers, classmates must track down and eliminate each other until only one remains. The rules: They cannot engage each other in public places, in front of witnesses, or harm or cause harm to innocent bystanders. Highly trained and with limited time, friend will kill friend, enemy slaughter enemy across a populated urban backdrop. This is The Academy. Let the exam begin.
Remember my review of “The Corrupted” where I said that it lacked the manic intensity that would have made it a great b-movie? “The Academy” has that energy and spades, and it’s a total riot.
Two amnesiac commandos grappling while charging through not one, but two walls? Check. A woman shooting a rapist in the crotch 14 times? Oh yeah. The line: “It’s a pity that I don’t remember why I hate you, but I know that I do”? Hells. Yes. “The Academy” is a Canadian, independent action movie that knows exactly what it is and runs with it full speed, teeth bared, guns blazing, and on fire.
The tone is set early, with each character either waking up with a fragmented memory or getting the snot being beat out of him or her. There’s a romantic sub-plot in there, but who cares? There are things getting stabbed, shot and punched all over the place accompanied by old west stand-off soundtrack. I can say that I have a completely unironic love for the “The Academy.”
If there’s one major complaint I could make about this movie, it’s the extremely overwritten ending, which comes completely out of left field. During the Q&A session after the screening, the the director Kenneth Barr revealed that the ending was rewritten 16 times; they settled on an ending that could segue into a TV series. I think the film suffers for that, but the story overall quickly breaks down after even the slightest scrutiny. Why amnesia? Why fist-fight when you have knives? Why knife-fight when you have assault rifles? The ending just makes no sense. Sorry dudes. No sense.
Convincing visuals, brisk pacing, fun characters and light mood make this Edmonton made movie and enjoyable thriller that doesn't take itself too seriously.
Edit: Oh balls. I just now noticed a fairly terrible typo in this post: "I have completely ironic love." I have completely UNironic love for "The Academy." As in "genuine love." Whoops. In case there's any doubt, I really did like this movie. Damn this sarcastic hipster culture we live in. It's corrected now. - October 29 2010
You need to have realistic expectations if you’re going into an independent, Canadian, horror movie. Those three words alone are usually synonymous with “don’t get your hopes up” and seeing all three of them in a row feels like a setup for some unholy trifecta of failure. But even if we were to mark “The Corrupted” on the curve, it’s still barely below a passing grade.
"Proudly, 100% Alberta-made (in Drayton Valley, to boot!), The Corrupted is a truly independent, deliciously entertaining sci-fi thriller shot in just 17 days last summer. And by shooting with the magnificent RED camera, The Corrupted has laid down the gauntlet – giving even the glossiest Hollywood horror flick a serious run for the money! So grab some popcorn, hang on to your seat, and support some ferociously fun local filmmaking!" - Edmonton International Film Festival Hype Machine
There’s no cell phone signal. People pair off to go make out. There’s something in the water. “The Corrupted” is quite faithful to the tropes that make-up a standard horror flick, and, to its credit, looks like a real movie. A sci-fi channel original movie, but a movie nonetheless. A group of friends meet up in a cabin by a lake. The one that was there a week early is behaving strangely, and his blank stares, aloof attitude and persistent nosebleeds arouse suspicions that he’s back on drugs. But because of dramatic irony, the audience knows that he’s hiding something much more... tentacle-ey... than a coke habit.
The first two acts are spent building suspense, but mostly has our hapless college kids walking around being irritating. Talking about life, drinking, joking, swimming. Nobody is pathetic enough to feel sorry for, and only one of the characters is obnoxious enough that you beg for his gruesome demise. But that never really happens, seeing as the monster in the movie possesses people in a manner that’s as brutal as being force fed calamari. There have been more disgusting challenges on Survivor.
“The Corrupted” also loses points on monster consistency. Every posessed (corrupted?) individual acts differently, weather it’s stumbling around like mental patient, staring into space, or crouching over and making funny “it’s the claw” shapes with their fingers. Are these corrupted individuals super strong or super resilient, or just normal people without respect for personal boundaries? Some of them can spit acid and take a beating, but some are taken out with a couple punches.
The editing needs work too. One particular scene is set up with a couple making out in bed, girl on top, when one of the corrupted grabs the girl by the hair, yanks her backward, roars/screams/hisses, pulls her off the bed and drags her away. This shot takes about seven seconds, after which we cut to the guy lying down on the bed and, after a one second beat, springing into action trying to help the girl. This gives the impression that as his lady was being manhandled he was staring blankly at the entire assault. This would actually have been hilarious in a “Huh, my girlfriend was just abducted right off of me. OH! Yeah I should do something!” sort of way.
“The Corrupted” is missing the manic intensity that makes a bad horror movie truly enjoyable, but it comes close in the third act. When the plucky college kids finally catch wind that something is afoot, the next logical step is to grab a rifle from a picnic table and start blasting away at anything that moves suspiciously. Seriously. They see a guy slumped over in a truck, assume he’s dead, and then shoot him in the chest when he jolts up and grunts at them.
To the film’s credit, it makes the most out of a low budget by working with the “less is more” school of monsterology. We never get a clear look at whatever this tentacle creature is, and the slime and gore effects are all convincing enough. This isn’t so much a point in its favor as it is a lack of demerit.
God bless ‘em for trying, but the “The Corrupted” has a combination of bad acting, slow pacing, decent effects and a passable script. If they cut out half an hour of chatting and added another fifteen minutes of monster rampage, I would recommend it. As it stands, “The Corrupted” isn’t something to go out of your way for.
Audience Grievance Level: I think I'll hang up the AGL for the rest of the week, because film festival audiences are generally a better breed than most.
It's fairly easy too find a solid humour comic online, but in print it's a scarce commodity. Most published comic books that people consider funny are usually action... with some jokes. Or drama... with some jokes. Oh comic books. Your name implies mirth but your delivery is often far from it. Rarely do you come across a book written strictly for laughs, and even rarer is the specimen actually done well.
This brings me too the brilliant Hsu and Chan: Too Much Adventure by the equally brilliant Norm Scott. Imagine if you took the imagination and cartoony fun of Steamboat Willie and merged it with a hyperviolent Michael Bay style car chase. That's about the level of intensity that can be found in the pages of the average issue of Hsu and Chan.
Hsu and Chan Tanaka are brothers, video game developers, and all around miscreants that are often accompanied by their odd sidekicks Chernobyl (a radioactive chipmunk) Gila Mobster (a short, reptilian gangster) and Arnie the Ground Squirrel (who, self admittedly, looks like a Sonic the Hedgehog knockoff).
Hsu and Chan was originally published as one or two pages comics in Electronic Gaming Monthly. In a fun twist, the comic book and the EGM strips took place in the same continuity. Hsu's hand a chopped off and replaced by a robot claw in the comic. This change carried over into the EGM strips but was never actually explained. Later the Tanaka brothers made the jump to blog format at 1up.com, but they have since retired (in September of 2009). Scott's current online domicile is located at Spookingtons, which features an archive of Hsu and Chan and other comics done for the web.
Scott's panels are fairly wordy, but there's as much comedic energy coming out of his verbose dialog as there is in his art. Whatever mundane task the Tanaka brothers are currently engaged in, they will describe their exploits in a serious of disarmingly descriptive and sardonic monologues.
The book was extraordinary long lived for its genre. It's genre being a black and white independent humor book. The first issue was printed in January of 2003, and it was released quarterly that year. And then twice the next year. And then once in 2005. And then once again in 2009. I think issue number ten is due by 2037.
If you want to follow the adventures of the Tanaka brothers but don't want to go lurking through back-issue bins in seedy comic book stores, the first five issues of the comic are collected in a handy trade paperback.
My dream is that someday a Hsu and Chan omnibus collecting the entire comic books series, EGM strips, webcomics, and various online doodles that have since vanished into the cybernethers will see print. Until then, enjoy this picture of a car crashing into a helicopter.
Scans taken from Norm Scott's Hsu and Chan: Too Much Adventure
