Mock Man Press

When I was a little kid, someone got me John Coyne’s novel Hobgoblin for a birthday present. (It was probably 1983~1984.) Of course, the novel was pretty bad and forgettable; I don’t remember it clearly except for the beginning, the ending and a scene in-between when the game-crazed hero is running a “one-on-one role-play session” with the girl he likes, which involves getting her in his bedroom and having her roll up a “Maiden in Distress” type character so she can be kidnapped by lusty orcs or something. (Why would my 9-year-old self remember this scene? -_-;; ) “Hobgoblin” is basically “Mazes & Monsters” anti-D&D hysteria mixed with a murder-thriller plot; the one pseudo-pro-D&D element of it all is that the delusional teenage hero isn’t the killer, and ends up beating the bad guy (some kind of psycho… I forget) with his RPG-gained skills.

There’s one thing about “Hobgoblin” that stands out to me now: the D&D-esque “Hobgoblin” game that the main characters play uses cards, not dice. This was obviously because John Coyne was too stupid to understand how D&D was actually played, and/or he thought his readers wouldn’t understand it (or more charitably, he wanted to come up with something original, and he liked the iconography of Tarot Cards), but looking back on it from 30 years in the future, it totally makes me think: MAGIC THE GATHERING. (No, not Everway.) It’s just like Magic, plus a role-play element! Everyone in Coyne’s “Hobgoblin” is totally getting it on (sometimes literally) with cards at recess, getting into their gameworld, but it’s all cards, cards, cards, with nary a polyhedral die involved. A parallel universe? Or a prediction of the future 12 years after he wrote the book? Sadly, though, Magic, unlike Hobgoblin, has never had a roleplay element, which is the main reason I’ve never been very into it.

NEXT UPDATE: Friday!

I recently saw the movies “The Dead Outside” and “The Battery”, and I have to say — I’m tired of zero-budget zombie indie films. “The Battery” was especially awful, just endless padded-out scenes of two losers driving around the backroads listening to music and doing nothing — I appreciate that they gave the characters some depth but seriously, what a boring drag of a film. “The Dead Outside” had a great cover, which is the main reason I watched it, but I should’ve detected from the overall lack of reviews that it was one of those things no one cared enough to talk about — which is basically how I feel about it too. Again, it managed to muster up a bit of a character drama, but it was just. SO. SLOW.

Essentially, when I seek out a movie with zombies in it, I want to watch a horror film. I don’t want to watch character studies masquerading as horror films, especially when they’re such stretched-out, thin-soup studies. It’s possible to tell interesting character studies while also having some terror or action. I recognize that this isn’t a requirement of drama, but if you want to appeal to horror fans, it is.

NEXT UPDATE: Wednesday!

As I’ve mentioned now and then, lately I’ve been watching so many zombie movies the mind boggles. Often I’m only half-watching these, keeping them on in the background while I draw or cut out cards, but I’ve absorbed quite a few new ones lately.

Firstly: nearly every free streaming zombie movie available on Netflix is awful. Dear lord, they are terrible. “State of Emergency” and “Extinction” — both the absolute pits, just as bad as Uwe Boll’s “Zombie Massacre,” but less funny. Their would-be serious tone, when coupled with their empty scripts and micro-budget (apparently every zombie disaster must be filmed from within a ruined warehouse, an abandoned factory or some other conveniently empty rundown building where no one on Earth would ever go — filming in the suburbs or apartment buildings where people actually live would be too expensive), is somehow even more aggravating than the SyFy-channel bad-CG bombast of something like “Rise of the Zombies.” And the half-assed plots, like they were stories written by someone who’d heard of the existence of “28 Days Later” but never watched it, and besides they only had $50 to make the entire movie… I just want to kick the filmmakers in the back of the knees.

“The Battery” and “The Dead Outside,” by contrast, were boring, but needless to say, way better than films like the ones I just mentioned. They’re unapologetic character studies that just happen to be set in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. They’re both just so incredibly slow-paced. I suppose I like “The Dead Outside” better partly because there’s a female character in the cast and everyone has Scottish accents. -_-;; OTOH, “The Battery” is probably the slightly deeper of the two. Also, it does have the scene where a man masturbates while watching a zombie writhe around trying to get to him, so that’s original.

Then there’s all the ’80s garbage buried around on youtube — “The Video Dead” (like a home movie I could’ve made back then), “Toxic Zombies” (completely inept)… I’m sure I’ve glanced at several others but I can’t remember them offhand. Obviously I’m being masochistic here and have no one to blame but myself. “Dawn of the Mummy” (one of the only Egyptian horror films!) is a real classic in comparison.

Whew! So much complaining! It’s like I’m on the Internet or something! I’ll try to write some good things about some zombie movies (or books) in my next post.

NEXT UPDATE: Monday!

So what zombie movies have I been watching lately that are actually *good*? Here’s two random selections…

I’d have to say that MUTANT (1983), while not exactly a good movie, was better than I expected. After watching all those lame Netflix zombie movies, just seeing a movie with basic filmmaking competence was a nice surprise. The film has a lot of buildup time, but it’s handled well, leading up to the appearance of the monster(s) in the final 30 minutes. There’s a few good lines of dialogue as well. Perhaps I’m just being nostalgic because I remember seeing “Mutant” in the video store when I was a kid (with that deceptive “space aliens” artwork on the cover, since there aren’t any space aliens in the movie, or indeed any monsters that look like that), and perhaps it’s easier to make a good-looking cheap movie on ’80s VHS than 2000s HD digital video, but it managed to keep my attention throughout the entire run of the film. And now I know about the existence of this dude named Wings Hauser.

RAMMBOCK: BERLIN UNDEAD (in which the creatures aren’t really ‘undead’, but anyway), as I’ve mentioned earlier on this blog, is one of the best of the recent rage-zombie movies. It can hardly be called a movie since it’s only about 60 minutes long, but it’s just long enough and it has a lot of interesting twists and genuinely well-portrayed emotional moments. And the action scenes are solid.

NEXT UPDATE: Friday!

I’m traveling in Washington, DC and Virginia right now, so I set this post to update while I’m away. When I get back, I’ve got to get right to work on:

* a RPG map
* a new poster
* revising/fixing up the Dreamlands Map poster (the original files were damaged, unfortunately)
* the basic design of the cover for the game I’m working on

Hope you all had a good Thanksgiving weekend, if you’re in America, or just a good weekend, if you’re elsewhere!

NEXT UPDATE: Wednesday!