Alvin and the Chipmunks meet Frankenstein is a 1999 straight-to-video cartoon film distributed by Universal Studios revising the version of the title characters from the 1983-1990 TV show. Three child-sized anthromorphic chipmunks Alvin (Ross Bagdasarian Jr) , Simon (Ross Bagdasarian Jr), and Theodore (Janice Karman), live with their adopted dad/manager Dave (Ross Bagdasarian Jr).
It is part of a short series of revival films, one of which has been previously reviewed: Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet the Wolfman. As with that one, this one focuses on the boys coming across a class pulp era movie monster, this time Frankenstein (well, and Frankenstein’s monster).
The movie starts as the chipmunks are performing at Majestic Studios theme park and they get lost and they wander into an attraction where an actual Victor Frankenstein (Michael Bell) is laboring to create an actual Frankenstein’s monster (Frank Welker). As with the original Frankenstein’s monster, the creature is actually pretty friendly and befriends the boys, and Dr. Frankenstein has other plans.
As with the previous one, the title kindof gives away any possible suspense that there might have been about what was going to happen, and though some unexpected things did happen those things seemed unrelated to the Frankenstein plot at all, and so were just kind of… baffling? It’s an okay movie with some catchy numbers, might be worth watching with the kids if you see it streaming.
Bears Vs Babies is a tabletop/card game from the makers of Exploding Kittens and The Oatmeal, wherein you build fearsome Frankensteinian monstrosities to defeat and eat armies of vicious babies.
Each turn you have several moves (how many depends on how many players) to stitch together your monstrous armies, attaching heads and limbs to bodies to build your fighting force to overpower the vicious elemental baby armies. Each additional body part adds fighting power, and certain attachments give extra moves as well–like tools that will give you an extra move per turn (at the expense of a point of fighting power) or a hat which multiplies that monsters fighting power. Then anyone can use their turn to provoke an army of babies and see who wins, at which point all the monsters who fight in that war are discarded whether they win or lose and you build up your armies again.
The game takes a bit to figure out exactly what the objective is and how to go about it, but once you get the hang of it it moves pretty quickly. If you have a game fresh out of the box I recommend following the instruction manual which starts you playing with a smaller simpler deck to get some of the basics down before adding additional types of cards to the deck.
It’s a fun game for a variety of ages, which depends some on skill and some on luck so can be a good choice kids in early grade school, who will have a chance to win. It’s fun and silly and as with Exploding Kittens much of the appeal is looking at the cool and silly illustrations.
Audience Broad appeal, most kids should be able to play this at preschool if you want (and as long as you’re not worried about them being upset at the premise of fighting vicious babies).
Challenge There is some skill trying to figure out how best to build up an army, and especially if you’re playing with people who try different strategies there is a decent challenge in trying to figure out how best to counter what you think they will do.
Session Time Once you get the hang of it, you can probably play a full round in 15 minutes or so.
Replayability A lot of the initial appeal is just seeing the silly and fun illustrations for the monster parts, so that wears off after you’ve seen them all, but it is a quick game to play and the strategies and style can shift quite a bit depending on what cards you get so there’s quite a bit of replay value.
Originality I like these game-makers in large part because they come up with silly ideas, cool illustrations, and do a great job finding a new feel and strategy so it feels like its own unique thing.
Overall Fun game for a wide range of ages, if you like Exploding Kittens you’ll probably like this. Definitely worth a play!
Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet the Wolfman is a 2000 straight-to-video cartoon film distributed by Universal Studios reviving the version of the characters from 1983-1990 TV show. Three child-sized anthromorphic chipmunks Alvin (Ross Bagdasarian Jr) , Simon (Ross Bagdasarian Jr), and Theodore (Janice Karman), live with their adopted dad/manager Dave (Ross Bagdasarian Jr).
Alvin has been having nightmares about monsters, and is constantly reading his monster facts book, having become convinced that their new neighbor Mr. Talbot (Maurice LaMarch) is a werewolf. Alvin seeks out proof of what he believes to be their neighbors dark secret while trying to navigate their everyday life, including acting in the play adapted from The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson.
This might be appealing to kids of the appropriate age, but it doesn’t have very broad appeal like the best cartoons do. Much of the mystery of the movie is kindof spoiled by the title because you know from the title that there must be a werewolf somewhere in the story and so Alvin’s crackpot theories have to be true of someone, if not the neighbor. It’s fine if you have a kid at a young enough age to enjoy it, but it’s not too likely to have broader appeal. (We happened to catch it on streaming)
Corporate Gunslinger is a science fiction action/drama novel by Doug Engstrom premiering this week with Harper Voyager. Full disclosure: Doug has been a friend for years and is a member of the same small writing group as me, this review was based on an advanced reader copy from the publisher.
Kira is deeply in debt, so deeply that she has decided to sign a contract to become a gunslinger who settles disputes for a major corporation by representing them in good-old-fashioned gun duel (albeit with science fictional tweaks to the format). The story takes place in a sadly-plausible future United States where this is the norm. She must fulfill her contract to make enough money to have a chance of paying off her debt. The alternative is worse: lifelong debt slavery enforced by a chip that makes sure she is always under their control.
Kira is not the fastest, nor the most accurate, but she is working hard to get better at both, and her background gives her an edge that others don’t have. She was a theater major hoping to make it big and she intends to use this the best she can to better understand her opponents and convey the persona she wishes to convey. If she wants to stay alive and in control of her own life she has to find a way to win matches and live with herself afterward.
This story is dark and not for the light-hearted, but I think that it is a glimpse at a future we would better avoid. Kira is a relatable protagonist though she is pressed into doing terrible things on behalf of her corporate employer to save herself. It is no lighthearted book but it is compelling and Kira is easy to root for in her seemingly impossible situation. I quite enjoyed it and am happy to recommend it.
Corporate Gunslinger’s official release date is June 16, 2020. I hope you check it out!
The House With a Clock in its Walls is a 2018 fantasy film based on a 1973 book of the same title by John Bellairs.
In 1955, after his parents die in a car crash, ten-year-old Lewis Barnavelt (Owen Vaccaro) moves in with his weird uncle Jonathan (Jack Black), and meets the neighbor Florence Zimmerman (Cate Blanchett). At night he hears a strange ticking in the walls that he can’t find the source of, and as he looks for the source he finds his crazed uncle smashing through a wall with an axe and various objects in the house have taken a life of their own. His uncle confesses he is a warlock, and Florence is a witch, and the clock in the walls is a dark and dangerous secret the previous owner of the house had left there.
This is a fun premise for a movie, and Black as the exuberant and weird uncle, and Blanchett as the kind and interesting neighbor are very good in their roles. I felt that overall it was good, but felt like the final act of the movie was its weakest so it felt like a little bit of a let-down, but it’s still a fun watch, and a good one for the kids.
Star Vs. the Forces of Evil is an action comedy cartoon about an interdimensional mage-warrior princess visiting Earth. Season 1 aired on Disney XD between January and September 2015.
Star Butterfly (Eden Sher) is a princess of Mewni, a magical parallel dimension. On her 14th birthday, her parents the king and queen give her the family heirloom magical wand. When she accidentally sets fire to the castle, they send her away to Earth for training. She ends up enrolling at Echo Creek Academy where principal assigns her to pair up with Marco Diaz (Adam McArthur), who has a reputation for being very straight-laced and by-the-book. Soon after Star is attacked for the first time by the monster Ludo (Alan Tudyk) and his gang of henchmonsters who want to steal the wand and she discovers her magical abilities and finds out that it’s also fun kicking monster butt.
Star is fun-loving, impulsive, has a low tolerance for boredom, and gives her everything to everything she decides to do. Marco, in many ways, is very different very careful, nervous, risk-averse, and more likely to talk himself out of doing something than to just dive in as Star would. But they very quickly become best friends, complimenting each other as friends, each acting as a kind of balancing force on the others extreme tendencies. Ludo and his gang of monsters are a recurring element as he continues to try to attain the wand, and Marco and Star work together to fend him off.
Most of the episodes feel largely episodic, small standalone adventures, but many of them do add elements to build backstory for larger arcs, more about Star’s family and the history of Mewni.
A lot of the appeal of the show is the fun drawing style that goes along with Star’s unique and powerful spells like “narwhal blast” and “blueberry cupcake bazooka”, and the writing and voice acting is superb.
And if you like this season, there are three more! Highly recommended, one of my favorite shows.
Patternmaster is a 1976 science fiction novel by Octavia Butler, first book in the publication order of the Patternist series, and the final book chronologically in the storyline.
The story takes place in a distant future where the two dominant groups of humanity are the Patternists (powerful networked telepaths that are the result of selective breeding for telepathic traits) and the clayarks (semi-human creatures created by mutated human DNA altered by an alien plague). The Patternists have long been the dominant group, with their powerful telepathic, telekinetic, and healing abilities (with individuals being stronger at certain abilities), and the clayarks mostly living as roving bands with stolen weapons in the wilderness between defended compounds.
But the order of everything is in jeopardy as the Patternmaster, the most powerful telepath who ties all the rest together, may not have long to live. The clayarks seem to sense the uncertainty and seem to be massing for greater attacks.
The protagonist of the novel is Teray, one of the children of Rayal. With the upcoming succession, assumptions and understanding about the existing order no longer stand and Teray finds himself just trying to find a place to stand in the world that seems to be shifting all around him.
This is the chronological conclusion that the rest of the series was backstory to. Wild Seed is still my favorite but I can see why this spawned the rest of the series–political intrigue between powerful telepaths and their powerful enemies. Well worth a read!
Clay’s Ark is a 1984 science fiction novel by Octavia Butler, in her Patternmaster series. It was the last of the four of the books to be published, but is the third in the chronological storyline. It is the next book chronologically after Mind of My Mind (reviewed here).
Chronologically it is the first to introduce the clayarks, a race of mutant humans created by an infection from outer space. Between the last book and this one, an exploration spaceship was sent out called Clay’s Ark. The expedition encountered an alien infection and one survivor brought it back.
It is a few decades in the future on Earth, and conditions in America have decline enough that most people either live in gated communities or as “car families”, militant nomadic bands that prey on anyone trying to travel. Physician Blake Maslin and his twin daughters Keira and Rane are kidnapped by Eli Doyle, the survivor from Clay’s Ark. Eli is not at all what they expect, just another car family henchman looking for theft or ransom. They’re taken back to an isolated compound with a bunch of others who are all acting very strangely. The infection is isolated for the time being, but how long until it breaks out?
If you have read Patternmaster, the final book chronologically, you already know where this ends up on a macro level, and so if you read them in the order of actual publication you would have already known, but in the collection I read them in they were ordered chronologically so I did not know. I think this added to the overall tension of my reading but I did also still care how the individual characters would survive in this tense setting caught between kidnappers and an alien disease. Tense, gripping, kept me interested until the end, worth the read (though Wild Seed is still my favorite in the series).
If you have read Wild Seed and Mind of My Mind, which both focused on a group of earthlings who over generations of selective breeding have led to increasingly powerful psychic abilities, you might wonder why this book is in the same series as those, when this seems to have nothing to do with those. The storylines have some minor ties you can discern, but the major ties come within Patternmaster book.
You are a high school student, and you have been arrested on suspicion of terrorism for being near some kind of terrorist act at the the time that it happened. Your only chance at freeing yourself is to hack into the smartphone of one of your classmates to gather evidence. Replica is a puzzle game by Somi published on Steam in July 2016 where you are tasked by Homeland Security to hack into a phone and gather evidence.
Many features of the phone are locked down before its given to you (which given that they haven’t cracked the password yet, is a little inconsistent), and other features appear to be inaccessible with only a point-and-click interface–for instance, there is a Search app but you can only view the search history and search for things in the search history, not freely typing. You are given a series of tasks to prove that you’re able to figure this information out from text history, call history, phone history, cracking social media apps. You gather evidence simply by clicking on things that fit the criteria. One of your first tasks is to find the name of the owner of the phone, so you find that somewhere in the settings and click on it.
The game seemed a lot more wide open and interesting in theory than it ended up being. The point-and-click-only interface was pretty limited in that you couldn’t even bring up a touch keyboard for the Search app, and other features were locked by Homeland Security. There just ended up not being a lot of areas to explore in the phone, and so the answers sort of had to be conveniently placed in one of these few small areas. Not only that, but the owner of the phone is in the habit of deleting everything, so there are only like 5 pictures, only a few short text conversations. You could get through the game by just clicking on everything you see and it wouldn’t take that long to complete the major tasks because there just aren’t that many options. I feel like this game could’ve been really extraordinary if it had opened up more of the space and given more area to search through and more things in each area (interesting things to read, so it would have to be interesting content certainly).
Visuals
Grainy, low resolution, if it’s supposed to be smartphone era it would’ve made more sense to up the res.
Challenge Finding all of the hidden parts in the phone is somewhat of a challenge, but the main throughline of the story you can get through without too much difficulty, or if you’re hardpressed you could just click randomly.
Story Pretty slight on story. After the premise, and the tone the game is presented in, it’s pretty clear where it’s going to go.
Session Time I couldn’t find any way to save the game, so unless you want to start completely from scratch, the session time seems to be however long it takes you to reach an ending, which took me maybe a half hour through the main throughline.
Playability It seems like it should be more playable, it should be more like a phone interface, with more things to look at. But most of the programs are locked down by security and the Search program that seems like it should be the most useful is basically useless, because you can only click and there are no keyboard controls on that app.
Replayability You could get some replayability from trying to reach the different endings, though the 3 endings that I saw were all along my expectations, so I didn’t feel driven to seek out more.
Originality The premise strikes me as original, and something very timely, but I didn’t think the execution really followed through with that.
Playtime With no particular skill, I finished 3 endings in less than 2 hours.
Overall It’s an interesting idea I haven’t seen in another game, but I feel like there might be another out there that’s executed this better. $3 on Steam.
This is the third in a new series of articles wherein I examine a music video by a well-known artist as a short film, trying to identify the story arcs and the character motivations, and consider the larger implications of things that we get glimpses of in the story.
This time we are taking a look at Bad Blood by Taylor Swift, featuring Kendrick Lamar, a 2015 blockbuster action film with an all-star cast.
The film begins with an opening shot of a city skyline at night and transitions inside to an office space that appears to be empty until a man wearing a business side and a headband-style mask slams onto the top of the frontmost desk and a security alarm blares and we see a woman (Taylor Swift) attacking another suit by locking her legs around his head and throwing him before calmly applying fresh lipstick while her character name “Catastrophe” displays next to her.
She is not alone in this infiltration as Arsyn (Selena Gomez) enters the scene, disabling yet another suit. Together they make quick work of a whole squad of… enemy agents? My first thought on this scene was they were infiltrating to steal something, but it seems unlikely that security guards in an office building would wear masks as a matter of course, even if they are security guards working for a villain.
Catastrophe lays her hands on a silver briefcase that appears to be of some importance–though it’s not clear where it comes from, flying through the air in the middle of the scene, accidentally thrown by a disabled suit? If it is so important, why does the guy run toward her while carrying it, rather than running away? When Catastrophe lets her guard down Arsyn blows powder in her face from a makeup kit and kicks Catastrophe through a nearby window where she falls a great distance and smashes into a car and Arsyn leaves her for dead. (I wouldn’t want to pay the insurance on that building if they have a high-rise with floor to ceiling windows and don’t have shatter-proof glass).
Catastrophe is badly injured but not dead, and she is mended by the futuristic machines of tech expert Welvin Da Great (Kendrick Lamar) with the assistance of a trio of women (androids?) called The Trinity (Hailee Steinfeld). This high-tech, presumably high budget suite suggests that Catastrophe works for a high-budget spy organization, or mercenary I suppose since they are probably way too noticeable to be proper spies.
About three-fourths of the film from this point is an extended training montage as Catastrophe sharpens her skills in various areas with different specialists within the organization. The cast is too large to list here, but they include Mother Chucker (Carla Delevingne) a nunchuck specialist, Cutthroat (Zendaya) throwing knife specialist, Domino (Jessica Alba) motorcycle specialist, and Destructa X (Ellie Goulding) who carries a missile launcher everywhere she goes, even indoors. Each appearance is little more than a brief cameo as Catastrophe hones her skills with each of them. Lucky Fiori (Lena Dunham) seems to be the leader of the organization–at least, it’s hard to imagine she plays any other role since she is not seen doing anything but smoking a cigar.
The organization is certainly formiddable and presumably has some deep pockets considering the weaponry and facilities, and given that Catastrophe and others appear to routinely damage the architecture and no one seems to care. The fact that Destructa X carries her missile launcher around indoors does raise some questions about the organizations friendly fire record–since they appear to be some kind of mercenary or special forces group, I imagine that everyone there is accustomed to risking their lives, but still one would think they would want to avoid one of their own accidentally wiping out a dozen or more of their own agents with a slip of the finger–I would be much more worried about that than about applying so many resources to stopping Arsyn.
Another significant feature of the organization is that it appears to be women-led and almost entirely woman-staffed–Welvin Da Great appearing to be the sole exception. Some of the wardrobe choices are a little bit perplexing for a merc or special forces group–particularly platform shoes and that sort of thing that can’t be conducive to running though they certainly look nice.
In the final scene, Catastrophe and an entourage of six other agents face off against Arsyn and a matching entourage ringed by a truly apocolayptic ring of explosions that no one seems at all worried about. Arsyn’s entourage all wear full leather face-masks–is this the uniform of a rival organization, or are these moles who are still trying to conceal their identity? Despite the heavy weaponry including missile launchers and bullet-bandoliers, the two groups don’t attack from a distance or attack undercover, but instead walk up to within arm’s reach of each other before Catastrophe and Arsyn and simultaneously attack each other with their bare hands.
This action film has an all-star cast, and certainly plenty of action. Who doesn’t love a good training montage between well-matched and imposing opponents, or a big action star face-off at the end. If you’re looking for just action, there is plenty of that. Considering the short length of the film, the size of the cast leaves little room for character development as the film breathlessly runs from one character to the next. I would be interested in watching spinoff films for any number of these characters (Cutthroat and Domino in particular, because I’ve liked Zendaya’s and Alba’s previous acting work).
The one character that has significant screen-time is our protagonist Catastrophe, and I’m not sure that I ever fully understood her either. She is excellent at what she does and was only defeated in the film by a betrayal by a trusted ally at a distracted moment. It’s understandable that she would want revenge for that betrayal, and to make sure that Arsyn can never do it again. But I would have liked to know more about why the organization thought it a worthwhile use of so many resources–why is it so important for Arsyn to be killed and to risk so many agents to do it. Is it driven primarily by Catastrophe’s vendetta or does the organization have its own purpose apart from that? What was in the briefcase? Who were they stealing the briefcase from, and why weren’t they smart enough to send the briefcase away from the attackers instead of toward them? The film does not answer any of these questions, though Lucky Fiori seems generally unconcerned with anything besides smoking her cigar, so I got the impression that Catastrophe has the free reign to direct this operation at her own directive.
(Next up in the Music Drilldown series will be Run Boy Run by Woodkid)
