My Land of the Dead Unrated DVD arrived yesterday a during the week, almost a week ahead of the official release and I’ve had a chance to watch it as a huge fan of the original Dead trilogy. The genre seemed to be on the way back in with 28 Days Later (good, but not great) and the remake of Romero’s own seminal Dawn of the Dead (also good, but not great), but the only way to truly make one is to put the megaphone back in the hand of the man himself. He practically created the genre with Night of the Living Dead and so deserves to represent it, without running zombies and rawk soundtracks but with some old school “ban this filth” gore.

LOTD certainly doesn’t disappoint on the gore front. I don’t know how much of this made it into the 15-rated UK theatrical version but this unrated version has bodies being torn apart, faces torn off, heads ripped off, limbs eaten, countless chunks bitten out of people, and that’s just off the top of my head. Nothing quite as creative as the helicopter blades in Dawn or funny as the “choke on ’em” from Day, but it does a decent job. Those who saw the hardcore online only trailer with the tongue eating should know that there’s even more graphic goodness than that.

I guess even Romero has to make some attempt to evolve the concept without making corpses that run like Linford fucking Christie, and he makes zombies that are more than idiots by taking the idea of Bub from Day and running with it, making the whole zombie population start to become more intelligent. There’s only really one that does the thinking, but the rest are still able to understand and follow him while he concentrates on feeling remorse over zombies that are killed (again?), firing a gun randomly, teaching others to fire guns, and not being mesmerised by fireworks. It’s not badly done and he does, to his credit, have Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright in his entourage, but I kind of like the brainless zombies that overpower us purely by weight of numbers and the fact that they’re tough to kill. There are plenty of other intelligent enemies in other genres and sub-genres, so do we need to evolve the zombie?

As a film, LOTD isn’t bad. Once you get past the fast and furious beginning it slows rapidly, before taking you into a third act which just assaults you on several fronts and reminds you why zombies are cool. It’s the slow middle section which is the weakest, not just for being slow (Dawn was hardly action-packed, after all) but because the story just isn’t that strong. It’s not bad but it’s very much secondary to the action and blood, which makes it a weaker movie than Dawn. Perhaps falling short of Dawn was inevitable, but the action was fun enough that I prefer it to Day of the Dead.

In short: Dawn > Night > Land > Day. Worth watching but don’t expect something as classic as the first two instalments of the series.

The whole Firefly/Serenity thing is an odd beast to say the least: Fox hands Joss Whedon, fresh from the monumental success and moderate success of Buffy and Angel respectively, some money to make his space opera opus, Firefly; he makes it as an idiosyncratic mix of sci-fi and western, complete with occasional deviations into Chinese; it flops and is promptly cancelled, but the DVD sales allow Whedon to convince Universal to let him turn the failed television series into a movie. Despite what has so far been a lukewarm but consistent box office reception, the fan response seems to be that the little TV show that could pisses all over the $100 million plus Star Wars prequels. Admittedly not a high watermark, but still…

I really enjoyed Serenity. It, perhaps unsurprisingly, has the slight whiff of an esoteric television adaption with some characters and references left unexplained, but still does a fine job of standing alone as an entertaining sci-fi adventure. It was funny when it was meant to be funny, exciting when it tried to be, and all of the characters hit all of the buttons they were supposed to. A certain other person known for their last few botched attempts at sci-fi should watch Serenity to see how a good script works.

Something that really blew me away is that this movie cost a paltry (for a modern sci-fi movie, at least) $39 million, and it looked better than most $100 million movies that get crammed into the multiplexes every summer. Through selective but effective use of CGI to do what wasn’t possible to do practically and to enhance actual sets, Whedon got more bang for his buck than any virtual stuntman or blue screen set that I’ve ever seen. At one point there’s a brief but intense space battle which, without trying to turn this into a Star Wars bash again, looks at least as good as the opening battle of Revenge of the Sith, which itself probably cost as much as the whole of Serenity.

So this one gets my hearty recommendation, and I’m sure anyone with a passing interest in sci-fi is planning to see it anyway. The theatre that I saw it in was disappointingly empty for a Friday night showing of a new film but since those that were there had good things to say at the end and seemed to be very into it, I’m hoping that the loyal fanbase and some positive word of mouth can carry this onto bigger things (a second series would be nice, for a start). Now I just want my Firefly DVDs to hurry up and get delivered.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen any really new films so naturally when I do get around to it two come along at once. Like with the games when I went on a mini-binge, with all the saving I did for the best part of a year I hardly went to the cinema or bought any DVDs so I’m making up for lost time, having ordered three new DVDs from Play and bought one at work yesterday.

The DVD that I bought was Ong-Bak, a recent Thai martial arts flick. The story is typical martial arts fare, which has the young man with no parents raised by a monk at the local temple, who happens to be a master of Muy Thai (Thai Boxing), tasked with rescuing the stolen head of the village’s Ong-Bak (Buddha statue) from some Bangkok gang members and bring good fortune back to the village. What makes this film an absolute blast is probably its main gimmick – that the star, Tony Jaa, is the man and fights almost full contact and does all his own stunts, some of which are spectacular. You can actually see his elbows, fists, and feet connecting with the people and sendig them flying, and at one point he sets his legs on fire and kicks someone in the head with them. It’s not particularly big or clever, but it’s excellent entertainment and really got me interested in what other cinema Thailand might have to offer.

The other new film that I saw was particularly exciting for me because it was my first chance to see a Ghibli film on the big screen. I went up to Southampton to a little independent cinema (voted best independent cinema in the country by the readers of Empire, apparently) to see Howl’s Moving Castle on its very limited UK theatrical release. I felt that it was the weakest of Miyazaki’s films that I’ve seen but was still a nice spectacle and great fun to see with an appreciative audience. As with Spirited Away the translation was done very decently with a good cast (I assume that John Lasseter was involved again, and there aren’t many with such an appreciation for animation) and I was surprised at how daring it was in what was essentially a kids’ film to have a war subplot complete with bombing raids on civilian cities – very much an undercurrent of anti-war sentiment in there. Miyazaki really gives his young audience more credit than any western animators that I can think of.

Anyway, both of those are worth checking out. If you want Ong-Bak on DVD the UK release is excellent – it’s the uncut international version (the subplot about Muay’s sister and a couple of limb-breaking shots are restored), it doesn’t have the subtitling issues of the R1 version, and it has the Thai track in both DD5.1 and DTS.

I just picked up a US import of Nintendogs for the DS and have spent the last few hours playing around with it. It’s been a huge hit in Japan with a lot of hype behind it and I couldn’t see why so I mainly blind bought it out of pure curiosity, not really having played with a virtual pet in years.

So anyway, I grabbed Dachshund & Friends because I have a shih tzu and I’m also partial to dachshunds and golden retrievers, and started off with the shih tzu. Since the markings are freakishly similar to my real dog, Poppy, I gave it the same name. One of these two is the real deal, one is from the game, and both are frightened of big sticks:

Since then I’ve been fiddling with the game, playing with all the functions and admiring the absolutely fantastic (not to mention impossibly cute) animation. I haven’t used a virtual pet since the whole Tamagotchi thing in 1996 when I queued outside Toys R Us at 7am but Nintendogs, beyond being one of the most graphically impressive, is actually fairly entertaining.

It’s not the kind of thing that you’re going to be playing for hours on end since you’re pretty limited in what you can do in a day without your puppy getting “tired”, but it’s a nice little time waster than I can see myself wasting a few minutes a day on for a while yet, as I’d imagine that once you get over the initial hurdles there’s a lot more that you can do – dog shows, for example. For those who aren’t convinced about the unique interface of the DS it’s also an interesting showcase; as much designed for and around the system (or even vice versa?) as Super Mario 64 was for the N64.

I’m a fairly recent convert to the Winning Eleven/Pro Evolution Soccer series, but there are people, some of whom I know personally, who are absolutely fanatical about this series and will buy every version regardless of how minor the tweaks and improvements are. What should be noted it that these tweaks for WE9 are minor, and I know that this is something that EA are endlessly criticised for in their annually updated games, but the difference is that here they’re refining what is already the closest thing to real football in game form, not fixing a broken game. Nobody objects to annual updates on principle (I don’t, at least), but people do object when the game doesn’t actually get any better.

Token EA bash out of the way, this is everything you love about the series. The flow of the game is still impeccable and has been improved with a slightly more liberal implementation of the advantage rule – now a borderline foul will be allowed to slide (ROFL) if the victim’s team retains possession. It’s a tiny detail, but it means fewer interruptions to play which is always a good thing when you want to play instead of waiting for the set play to be set up.

That’s the single biggest change that I noticed, but I’m only someone who came into the series with PES3 and all but skipped PES4. I’m sure that someone who put in hundreds of hours could reel off lists of tweaks (I’ve been told that the goalkeepers are less inept, but I’ve still seen some pretty nasty blunders). All I can tell you is that it’s a fantastic game and just brilliant if you have some friends to play against in the same room. It has network play for Japanese players but you can’t beat the feeling of being next to the person you just slipped a shot past.

Something that’s definitely intriguing but will have to wait until I can get my hands on Ubiquitous Edition, the PSP version, is that one of the options in the main options menu is a PSP linkup, and going into it prompts you to connect your PSP with its version of WE9 in PS2 connection mode. Chances are it won’t be anything more interesting than the ability to share data between console and portable versions, but as far as I know this marks the first time that a PSP game will be able to connect to the PS2 by USB, and the ability to continue the league that you’ve been working through at home when you go on holiday is undeniably very cool.

Well worth getting then, and I’ll hopefully put together a full review when I get the English version.