Konami Code

Films: Silent Hill
Format: DVD from Earlville Public Library through interlibrary loan on rockin’ flatscreen

Movie adaptations of video games have a pretty sorry reputation, and with good reason. They are generally terrible. Even the best of them either aren’t that good or approach decency by being more tangentially related to the game in question. Because I don’t tend to watch this end of the movie spectrum, I don’t get to talk about my past that much. I worked in the game industry for about a dozen years. I edited a PC gaming magazine for a while and I wrote about three dozen strategy guides, mostly for Prima, and none after 2003 (think original Xbox days). I should be (or should have been) more or less the target audience for these, and a film like Silent Hill would seem to be a natural.

Well, for what it’s worth, after 1996 I didn’t really play much that I wasn’t specifically paid to play. I didn’t do the book for Silent Hill (the closest I got thematically was probably Clive Barker’s Undying), so I went into the movie more or less cold. I specialized in PC games, so Silent Hill was never really on my radar. Anyway, I knew little more than “survival horror,” so it is in my wheelhouse both in terms of games I played/wrote about and movies I like. I went into this cautiously optimistic.

Le Loup des Baskervilles

Film: Brotherhood of the Wolf (Le Pacte des Loups)
Format: DVD from personal collection on basement television.

Silly me thought Brotherhood of the Wolf was going to be a werewolf movie. It’s not; as the title of this review would suggest, it’s a great deal closer to the old Sherlock Holmes story of the Hound of the Baskervilles. Our story is going to be told in the past tense, as a sort of reminiscence of a noble named Marquis Thomas d’Apcher (Jacques Perrin as an old man, Jeremie Renier through the bulk of the movie). The reflection he’s going to give us is of this event in his past, when the province of Gevaudan was held in the grip of terror by a marauding monster that killed more than 100 people.

Enter Gregoire de Fronsac (Samuel Le Bihan), a naturalist and taxidermist, who is exploring the flora and fauna of the area. He is intrigued by the stories of the creature and comes to investigate along with his Iroquois companion Mani (Mark Dacascos!). What he learns is that the creature is evidently wolf-like, but much, much larger. He also meets a number of the locals who are properly noble and stuffy. This is particularly true of weasel-faced Jean-Francois (Vincent Cassel), and decidedly untrue of Jean-Francois’s sister Marianne (Emilie Dequenne).

Ten Days of Terror!: Necronomicon:The Book of the Dead

Film: Necronomicon: The Book of the Dead
Format: Internet video on laptop.

One problem with one of my horror lists is that it goes for the obscure. Actually, that’s sort of the point of that list—it’s worthwhile horror movies that most people have managed to miss. What this means is that some of these are a bitch to find, so when I locate one online, it’s generally a good thing, because that’s the only way I get to see it. With Necronomicon: The Book of the Dead (sometimes known as just Necronomicon), finding a copy online was exciting; this is a film I’ve been looking for since I added that list to my site.

I didn’t realize, but should have based on the name, that Necronomicon is an anthology. There’s naturally a framing story and three other shorts that combine into a film just a touch longer than 90 minutes. The framing story consists of H.P. Lovecraft (Jeffrey Combs, who is sporting a fake chin a la Bruce Campbell) entering an ancient library and sneaking off to a forbidden room to read through the Necronomicon. Each of the three stories all take place in more or less the present despite Lovecraft’s story being in the past. Evidently, this means that the stories in the book are either predestined or somehow prescient. Anyway, the framing story appears briefly between the stories as well and then comes up at the end to close the film.