Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory Review: Groove is in the Heart

"Just one more level.", is what I keep telling myself. "One more" is one of Data Riku's taunts in Kingdom Hearts III's DLC. After he says it, he attacks you dozens of times with savage ferocity. "One more" is just as false when I say it to myself. "One" easily becomes "five" or "ten" more. Until eventually it means "lose entire days and nights to level after level". While sketching out this review, I wrote that first sentence, then figured I should take another look at the game. Before I knew it, two hours had passed. Then three days. So if my review of Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory is late, it is because of Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory.

Melody of Memory came out just a few days after the launch of the glorious new Xbox and PlayStation consoles. If you are looking for a game to prove the value of your expensive hyper-modern hardware, this is not it. It is a small rhythm game dressed up in the skin and assets of the Kingdom Hearts series. You won't need 4K or HDR or Ray Tracing. 

In fact, I would not buy this game on a home console at all. Melody of Memory is a game built for mobile. It would have been great on phones. If any genre is perfect for a relaxing ten-minute shit break at the office, rhythm games are it. Luckily, Melody of Memory is on the Nintendo Switch. You will not find here the next revolution in gaming. But you may find an unhealthy addiction that somehow justifies the game's slightness.

Melody of Memory has to be the least impressive Kingdom Hearts game that Square Enix has ever charged a full price for. At $60 - plus tax - the value is hard to justify. You get a ten hour campaign with about a half hour of new story content. Digging deeper to unlock your mastery of these melodies might grant you as much as 30 hours of playtime. In terms of pure consumer advise, you can spend that same money and get ten thousand hours of Ubisoft content instead. And that stuff might look a lot better on the new gargantuan TV your gaming hobby now demands of you. Ten years ago, Birth by Sleep was half this game's price and was a full Kingdom Hearts experience, not just a vague impression of one. Games are more expensive now. Even smaller filler titles like Melody of Memory are investments I suggest you make in caution.

My critic brain keeps finding any number of issues with this product. My hands, however, cannot put it down. In fact, literally after writing that last sentence, I walked over to my Switch and played another level. I just unlocked "Don't Think Twice", the Kingdom Hearts III theme song and really need to try that out. Give me a second... I'll get back to you... Just hold on...

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 31: Night of the Demons

Adieu. Adieu. Parting is such sweet spooky. Day 31 (FINAL): Night of the Demons (1988), directed by Kevin S. Tenney.

To be clear, this is not a review of Night of the Demon (singular). That's a 1957 British horror movie. Neither are we discussing Night of the Living Dead, Night of the Creeps, Night of the Lepus, Rats: Night of Terror, or Fright Night. Nope, Night of the Demons, for better or worse.

Night of the Demons is definitely not the best Halloween movie. If I am picking a horror movie set on Halloween I would rather watch Trick 'r Treat, The Guest, or the obvious: Halloween. I am definitely not picking C.H.U.D. II: Bud the Chud, that movie actually was the worst one I reviewed this month. We are not lacking for Halloween movies. But we might be lacking for Halloween party movies. Michael Myers is more about babysitters and trick'r'treaters, not really shindigs. If say, the year is 2020 and you can't really have a Halloween party, maybe Night of the Demons can scratch an itch.

I will not call Night of the Demons a great movie. Actually, even as a dumb horror B-movie, it is disappointing in a few ways. However, it certainly is not an un-fun movie.

From the start the movie lets you know the primary thing on its mind: sex. Send this movie straight to Horny Jail because we open with our protagonist, Judy (Cathy Podewell), topless in a bra and mocked for her big tits by her baby brother. "Wow, bodacious boobies' sis! If you keep on growing you'll have to hire someone just to tie your shoes." Except this kind of prose all throughout Night of the Demons' script. We meet Scream Queen Linnea Quigley's character, Suzanne, ass-first as she leans over to present her panties to some store clerks while playing Pac-Man. "Do you guys have sour balls? Too bad, I bet you don't get many blow jobs!" That kind of talk never stops.

We have a cast of about ten teenagers all traveling to an abandoned mortuary called Hull House. (Presumably not related to Jane Addams or late 19th century feminist social reform movements.) Angela (Amelia Kinkade) is considered something of a "weird girl" at school, but she's putting on this party along with her slutty friend, Suzanne, whose ass you've already met. Judy is coming with her boyfriend Jay (Lance Fenton), who did not even bother putting on a costume. Angela decides it would be fun to perform a seance and summon some demons. Evil Dead shit thus begins.

Angela and Suzanne end up possessed immediately. First Suzanne, then Angela after a very long lesbian kiss. This is really where Night of the Demons can make or break itself. You have a comic script, a few memorable characters, Linnea Quigley is bound to take her top off at some point, one guy Sal (William Gallo) talks like he's Tony Soprano opening up some gabagool. All you need is some great gore and creative kills. Sadly, that does not happen. Nothing happens that is all that scary.

One guy gets his eyes gouged out. A naked couple fucking in a casket gets smashed, but you never see anything. Those are the best kills and they're pretty basic. Even the "Deadite" designs are not that impressive. They get decent monster make-up, Angela especially, but not a unique visual. The demons do not get very good "crazy" moments. Angela talks like Dr. Claw from Inspector Gadget. Her actress was a professional dancer, so they had her character dance for awhile, which really spooks the other characters for some reason. Suzanne shoves lipstick up her nipple in an impressive magic effect. That wasn't gore, the lipstick just disappears in slight of hand, seemingly into her tit. Linnea Quigley is stealing this show, but they barely have her talk in the second half of the movie.

Here's my problem with Night of the Demons. I love that you have Linnea Quigley topless and doing weird stuff. That lipstick idea is really twisted and bizarre. It creeps me out. However, nothing comes of it. Her tits are not some like cartoon Hammer Space. Later she seduces a dude, and I was thinking, "okay, let's build on this boob idea". Maybe the guy is fondling her and his hands get stuck inside. Or like the boobs grow mouths with razor-sharp teeth and devour his hands. Nope. Nothing like that. She just kills him while fucking him. Later she suggests that his corpse might be able to get hard again. That's gross, I wish there was more of that.

I mean, one character dies off-camera! That's a waste of a kill. We lose all the expendable characters in the span of ten minutes, leaving a final half hour where Judy and the Final Boy, Rodger (Alvin Alexis) have to hide from the Deadites. The gore is not just there. Nor are the scares.

Rodger at least is the one guy smart enough to try to escape. He's the Black guy, and decides early-on that all this demon shit is White People Problems. I bring up Rodger because watching this movie reminded me of that old saying "Black dude dies first". Is that ever true? I'm totally off-topic here, but having seen a lot of horror movies from a lot of eras, the Black character almost never dies first. Scream 2 kills the Black characters first but just to mock the idea. I've seen more subversions of the trope than the trope.

Anyway, Rodger isn't very good as a hero and neither is Judy. They're both boring.

To conclude, Night of the Demons is not a great horror film. However, at least it ends on one of the best brick jokes in the history of horror. The whole movie might be redeemed by that single choice.

Night of the Demons was not the grand finale I was hoping for. I couldn't have rewatched Night of the Comet? Night of the Comet rules! Night of the Demons has a good reputation as a horror movie, which I don't think it has earned. If you want a dumb horror comedy about horny teenagers, Chopping Mall is a way better pick. Spookies, a much cheaper and much more incompetent movie from 1986 with roughly the same plot, has better scares than Night of the Demons. I guess it is essential viewing if you're a huge Linnea Quigley fan. Oh well.

And that, my dear Space Monkeys, concludes Spooky Month. Happy Halloween. And remember, don't eat any apples with razor blades hidden inside them.

THE END?

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 30: Deep Rising

Now what? (But Spooky.) Day 30: Deep Rising (1998), directed by Stephen Sommers.

The year before he directed The Mummy, Stephen Sommers made another action blockbuster inspired by old horror movies. Only this one was far less successful and made much less money at the box office. Roger Ebert hated it. Wikipedia lists it as a "cult movie", but I don't see any cult. If there was a cult, trust me, I would be going to every meeting. Put me first in line for the human sacrifices in honor of this underrated should-have-been-classic.

The movie in question is Deep Rising, one of my all-time favorites. I've seen a few modern reviews call Deep Rising "so bad its good", which is really unfair. "So bad its good" is what you say for a movie like Cats, a disaster so confounding that it never ceases to fascinate. Deep Rising is a plain old good movie. If you're entertained, it is because the movie was made to be entertaining. This is effective movie-making. It isn't incompetent, it isn't cheap. Deep Rising doesn't need a cult, it needs a whole religion complete with a pope, pilgrimages, and flying buttresses.

The movie has a great script, the characters are all memorable, and the monster designs are fantastic. Deep Rising mixes together action, comedy, and horror as effectively as The Mummy. If you love that, you'll probably really like this.

The plot is an action thriller that gets abruptly hijacked by a monster movie. The cruise ship Argonautica is sailing the South China Sea when somebody on board disables its communications. The ship is paralyzed just minutes before some unknown force surging from below ("deep rising", if you will) attacks. 

Meanwhile, our hero, Finnegan (Treat Williams) is transporting a group of wacky mercenaries to some mysterious undisclosed location. "If the cash is there, we do not care" is Finnegan's motto, which he and his crew quickly come to regret. The mercenaries force Finnegan on board the cruise ship, only to discover everybody is already gone. And the ship is infested with tentacle monsters with very big teeth.

Right from the start, Deep Rising sets up a lot of mystery in its plot. Beyond the usual question of "what are these monsters and how do they eat you?" the movie also has you wondering who these bad guys are, who disabled the cruise ship, and if anybody's plan involved Finnegan or his crew going home alive. It's a good set-up. The movie adds in a sexy thief, Trillian (Famke Janssen), who fits right into this gang of low-lives, con artists, and killers. Finnegan as close as we have to a moral center, and he's a sarcastic sea asshole who really doesn't need this shit right now.

It helps a lot that most of Deep Rising's cast can bring comic chops. Joey (Kevin J. O'Connor) is Finnegan's dweeby side-kick and the movie's main comic relief. He was funny enough that he got himself a role in The Mummy a year later. But everybody has their comedy moments. The entire mercenary crew is made up of character actors like Djimon Hounsou, Cliff Curtis, Clifton Powell, and Jason Flemyng. If you need slimy, Anthony Heald as the ship's owner is a great source of scumbaggery. The script is so good and so consistently funny, Deep Rising reminds me of a Shane Black movie. Treat Williams is certainly not an A-lister movie star, but he pulls off sarcastic well-enough. "Now what??" is the man's catch-phrase. He never fails to hit that note with just the right tone of tired irritation.

My one cast issue is that Treat Williams is about ten years too old for Famke Janssen. They don't lack chemistry, but I dunno. This is one of those movie romances that probably won't last long beyond the end credits.

There are quite a few dumb B-movie details to Deep Rising. The bad guys carry around machine guns that have seemingly infinite ammo. Nobody bothers to reload to the point its hilarious. Towards the end Finnegan and Trillian have a jet ski escape sequence through the ship. Finnegan has to shoot the door buttons to get them to open with his shotgun. I've never seen a movie so lovingly turn itself into a video game level. Speaking of video games, there's a big monster at the end for no reason other than to have a Final Boss.

However B-movie dumb it gets, the script is stays smart. There's a lot of details that keep the characters clever and intelligent even during a horror movie. Trillian starts the movie in a red evening gown, then changes into sensible clothes in the background while the men are screaming at each other. Finnegan catches the evil plan before the audience does. These characters are fodder for the tentacle monsters, but they're wholesome meals, not junk food.

As for the monsters themselves, mostly they're good. Deep Rising does not show the monsters at all for the first third of the movie, leaving them to kill people in well-crafted suspense deaths. (That poor lady on the toilet got it the worst of anybody.) They are a solid design, at least at first. Eventually you see that Final Boss monster that is much less scary than the regular creatures. This is 1998 so the CG effects have aged. The individual monsters look okay. The Final Boss monster looks like shit. Its death looks even worse.

However, don't think these effects are all bad. The most amazing effect is this legendary gore gag where one of the mercs falls out of the ceiling with his face half-digested. This was made in CG, with only 1998 technology, and it still looks incredible. You would almost believe it was practical effects.

Another big thing that helps Deep Rising immensely is Jerry Goldsmith's score. Maybe this would be just an above-average B-movie without it. Instead that score turns Deep Rising into a legit blockbuster.

While I'm dropping random unstructured thoughts in my giddy glee about this movie, here's another side note: Deep Rising has a random lesbian kiss during a montage. Neither women are named or ever appear again. But those few frames turn Deep Rising into a better vehicle of LGBT acceptance than the entire MCU.

So if it isn't clear, I love Deep Rising. No, it is not better than The Mummy, but I still love everything about this movie. I'm still laughing at the jokes and I've seen this movie probably twenty times. The action is thrilling. The suspense holds up. There's one crazy good gore gag. It has everything a movie should have, everything that should be thrilling audiences decades later. Just there is no audience. If there is no cult or organized religion, I'll be the Pope of nobody in the Deep Rising faith. I could gush for hours, even if it is to nobody.

By the way, that is definitely King Kong at the end, right?

Next Time and Final Time: Night of the Demons (1988). We're having a Halloween Party, Jason and Freddy are too scared to come.

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 29: Final Destination 5

Spooky has a plan for us all. Day 29: Final Destination 5 (2011), directed by Steven Quale.

Final Destination 4 kinda sucked. Can the fifth movie improve things? Yes. Yes it can.

The final Final Destination movie opens like all these movies do: with a big absurd disaster that kills everybody. Perhaps what is really happening in this universe is not that Death is a Calvinist force of predestination hunting down our heroes. Maybe this is just an alternate reality where screws don't work? That neatly explains everything in these five movies.

Anyway, This time it's a big wonderfully silly bridge collapse with plenty of creative deaths. When a girl falls off the bridge to get impaled on a passing sailboat, who could not help but laugh with the movie? This is what you're here for: gore slapstick. One guy gets his face destroyed, fall off the bridge, and just for extra punishment lands on the concrete supports so he goes splat like that poor motherfucker who hit the rudder in Titanic. If that disgusts you, Final Destination 5 is not your movie. If you're applauding, you're in for a good time.

Luckily, Final Destination 5 is not so stupid it becomes purely about the gore, like Final Destination 4. The opening scenes actually establishes characters. Imagine that, you are watching people with personalities and interesting relationships. Our hero this time is Sam (Nicholas D'Agosto) who is torn between his girlfriend Molly (Emma Bell) and his dream to be a chef in Paris. Sam and Molly are pretty boring characters, but at least they have something. The dude cooks a mean breakfast.

The rest of the cast is where most of the color lies. Peter (Miles Fisher) is Sam's best friend and boss at the office they both work at. He's easily the best part of the movie and the one given the most acting to do. Peter loses his girlfriend Candice (Ellen Wroe) early on, and then breaks down during the movie. By the climax, Peter is certain that the only way to stop Death is to kill somebody else and "take their years". I should mention that Miles Fisher looks shockingly like Tom Cruise, so his final villain turn is all the more exciting. He's crazy killer Tom Cruise! That's fun, right?

I should also mention that the filler side characters have something to them. There's the sexist (and unfortunately really racist) nerdy guy (P.J. Byrne). I don't think the performance is bad but we really didn't need Jack Nicholson in The Departed-levels of rapid fire anti-Chinese bigotry. A better character is the party girl, Olivia (Jacqueline MacInnes Wood), who opens the movie showing her underwear to her coworkers and inexplicably has her own Wikipedia page. She's not relevant to the plot besides dying horribly, so I don't know why she was given her own article. She wins best death, at least. I suspect a wiki editor couldn't forget the sight of her tits and had a crush. Finally, good actors who you'd recognize like David Koechner, Courtney B. Vance, and of course, Tony Todd are in this movie.

Most of the people on Death's revenge list make his job easy for him in Final Destination 5. Olivia gets laser eye surgery. The racist guy gets acupuncture. Death has to be thinking, "there is no sport in this" when they throw him such softballs. Our hero is a chef and surrounds himself with blades. That leads me to comment on how great the suspense in Final Destination 5 is. Yeah, it certainly is scary to have your head ripped open by a falling construction crane. But also, just as scary is a screw on a balance beam, daring Candice, a gymnast, to stab her naked foot right through it. You don't cringe at the big deaths, you cringe at the small wounds you can actually imagine.

I do wish that one of the side characters had ended up the lead instead of boring Sam. Imagine if Olivia was our lead? You set up a vanilla "Final Boy" in Sam, and an obvious victim in Olivia, the slutty one. Then you twist us up by killing Sam off and leaving Olivia our heroine. Final Destination 5 does not do that, but it does have its own clever twist. There is a final reveal at the end of this movie that brings this whole franchise full circle.

I won't say that Final Destination 5 ever transcends being "just another one of those". But it is at least a good one of those. It's the best movie in the series since Final Destination 2, maybe even since the first one. The kills are great and the movie is not boring between those deaths like Final Destination 4. Plus the ending is so deliciously nasty you cannot help but love it. If you're not cheering, you're the wrong audience for this kind of schlock.

Plus, Tony Todd is back! Final Destination 3 and 4 were missing him dearly. If you're looking to improve your horror movie by a whole point, add Candyman in.

Now What?: Deep Rising (1998). I was going to watch The Craft: Legacy but that movie looks like boring dogshit. Deep Rising, however, is an underrated classic.

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 28: The Final Destination (2009)

You can't cheat spooky. Day 28: The Final Destination (2009), directed by David R. Ellis.

The Final Destination is actually Final Destination 4. I can only imagine the studio dropped the numbering scheme because they were embarrassed. Calling it "*THE* Final Destination" maybe is a bit classier. They stopped caring about classiness after the title.

Why did I pick Final Destination 4? Just because I have not seen this one or Final Destination 5. This will is a two-part two-day death fest towards the end of our October celebrations. I think the original Final Destination is one of the best horror movies of the early 2000s. Final Destination 2 and 3 were both diminishing returns. By 4 I was pretty bored of the franchise. A lot of the reason I'm doing this horror series is to give second chances movies I skipped. I thought Final Destination 4 was too stupid to be good. Was I wrong?

No.

Final Destination 4 is actually far dumber than I thought. This was the movie shot in 3D riding that brief Avatar fad. But instead of any pretense of realism, this 3D is pure carnival gimmick. It reminds me of 3D horror flicks from twenty years earlier. It is in the vein of movies like Friday the 13th Part 3 or Jaws 3D, which are mostly about gore flying at the screen over and over. Since the 3D era is now all but dead, I couldn't watch Final Destination 4 in any more than two dimensions. Yet still that dumbass "look at that dude's head flying at me" atmosphere survives.

This movie opens at a race track to the sound of screaming late-2000s buttrock. (2009 was not that long ago but somehow this low-rent Nickelback music sounds more dated than disco in 2020.) Our heroes are openly contemptuous of the "rednecks" all around them, and admit outright that they are only watching to see wrecks. They're immediately awful people. But they get their wish - there's a huge pile-up. Then everybody dies in graphic and hilarious gore gags. The first eight minutes of Final Destination 4 are a delight. Beyond that well...

Then our hero, Nick (Bobby Campo) in typical series fashion, realizes that was all a premonition. He pushes his friends and some strangers out of the disaster before it happens. However, because the unseen force of Death in this franchise is very anal about his schedule, he kills them all one by one in increasingly preposterous ways. Death really has no subtlety this time. He'll have an air tank push you through a fence so your body can slice off in chucks into the audience's face. Abstract concepts of predestination can have fun with their jobs too, as it turns out.

The best part of Final Destination 4 is the utterly shameless gore. But the second best part is the sometimes decent suspense. It is not really suspense of "will these people die?" - they all will die. But more "how will these people die?" Take the dead of the "MILF" character (I never caught her name besides "MILF"), played by Krista Allen. She is getting her hair done in a salon. The movie sets up a broken barber's chair that might collapse, some hair spray getting slowly heated by a hot straightener, a loose ceiling fan, and her head is in one of those dome perm things. Which one of these Looney Tunes Rube Goldberg nonsense contraptions will kill her? I'll bet five bucks it's the ceiling fan, you in?

The worst part about this movie, however, is the cast. Final Destination 1 was not exactly an Oscarbait drama, but it had solid actors. Devon Sawa, Ali Lartner, Stifler!, those guys could get you a movie. Final Destination 3 at least had Mary Elizabeth Winstead. This movie has a cast of nobodies who are mostly terrible. These people have no personality or even an attempt at personality. I could not tell you a single defining trait about our lead, Nick. I could not tell you anything about his girlfriend, Lori (Shantel VanSanten).

Then when Final Destination 4 gives its character's personality, its terrible. Nick Zano plays Hunt, Nick's friend. They call him "Hunt" but clearly this guy was born to be a "Chet". The actor plays the role of Hunt/Chet as a horny dumbass, the kind of guy who if he wasn't in a Final Destination movie would probably be chilling with a machete through is torso around Crystal Lake. Hutn/Chet gets the best death in the movie when he recreates Chuck Palahniuk's short story, "Guts".

Another memorable character is the racist dude (Justin Welborn) who drops N-bombs. He dies while trying to leave a burning cross on the lawn of the one Black guy. That was a bad idea, Final Destination 4. Even in 2009, that was the wrong kind of tasteless.

In conclusion, Final Destination 4 is "another one of those". Most fourth entries in horror franchises end up being just "one of those", so do not get too surprised. Final Destination 4 is stupid to the point of self-parody. You'd really be better off just watching a kill compilations on Youtube than the entire movie. It is not atrociously terrible. It is watchable. But... eh.

Next Time: Final Destination 5 (2011), which to the shock of all, got very good reviews. Maybe that's the "good one".