More Demotivational Posters

Vampire Rant Addendum

So I was perusing Youtube when I came across this.

In a way, Daybreakers seems to represent everything I've been talking about when it comes to vampires. It's a grim depiction of the future where the vampire has become commonplace and mundane. As several of the characters in the trailer point out, this is also a very stupid future (for logistical reasons alone: a society of vampires would obviously need to enact strict measures to ensure that the ratio of human to vampire is enough to sustain a renewable food source, which it appears the vampires in this film are not doing). This could be interpreted as an allegory for the state of vampire fiction and its followers in the modern world: growing at an exponential rate to the point where it becomes like a plague (any guesses as to what created the vampires in this film? Anyone?) and leaves the world a bleaker, hollowed-out place.

Of course, the irony of this is that this film is yet again presenting a "new" spin on the vampire that will surely create copycats or at the very least continue the trend we've been seeing for the past few years. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't, it seems.

On a marginally related note, who do you think would win in a fight between Count Chocula and the Count from Sesame Street? Wouldn't that be awesome?

God, now even I'm doing it.

Just Call Me the Poster Child

Demotivational posters. God, how I love these things. I've been making them for about a year now. I've made over 1,000. I think I have a problem. And because I spend far too much time on the Intertube, I thought I'd share a fraction of them with my adoring nonexistent public. Don't say I didn't warn you...

The Vampire Rant (or: I May or May Not be Entertaining the Suggestion to Suck Your Blahd)

It's high time I unleashed some pent-up nerd rage on the citizenry of the Internet. I feel that this issue needs to be addressed, so I'll put this as delicately as possible:

STOP SCREWING UP VAMPIRES!!!!!!!!!!

Seriously, though. I don't claim to be a psychic, but I'm starting to notice a disturbing trend that's been going on for a few years now. Now back when I was a kid, there was some halfway-decent vampire fiction out there. From the Eastern front we had Vampire Hunter D and Hellsing and all that good stuff, and from the West...well, admittedly it wasn't always so great. But we had the old classics to look back on, Lugosi and Lee and the like. We had Blade, bitches. And let's not forget I Am Legend (the book, not the movie). Hell, even Lifeforce was OK in a sort of mid-80's kind of way. My point is, vampires used to have some dignity. They used to be symbols of fear, intrigue, and the dark side of the human spirit. They were demonic yet sympathetic, and they were a powerful literary tool; in short, they were legends.

But it's all gone down the drain now, hasn't it? What happened, you may ask? What could have possibly driven the final wooden stake into the heart of vampire fiction? I'll tell you what happened: Twilight happened.

Oh sure, it started innocently enough. I thought it was another fad at first. "Vampire romance novels? Big deal. Anne Rice has been doing it for years, and you don't see me complaining." Oh, how young and naive I was then. I'm an older, more cynical bastard now, and I can see Twilight for what it really is: a sick joke with no punch line.

Now, I don't have a huge problem with teenage romance novels. I just let them have their space and they don't bother me. But when they muscle in on the vampire territory, that's when I bust out my katana and carry on about how there can be only one. The scenario of Twilight has been played out endless times before, and more competently at that. But now this new generation of genre-blind teenage yahoos is getting sucked into this latest maelstrom of mediocrity, and C'thulu help them if they fall in.

Oh, and it gets worse. Now that Twilight has spread throughout popular culture like a skin deformation, imitative vampire fiction seems to have popped up, as if this were some insidious game of Whack-A-Mole. HBO brings us True Blood. The recent remake of Blood: the Last Vampire just came out. Even the Underworld series has fallen victim to the curse of Twilight. It's only going to get worse from here. This influx of vampiric entertainment is overexposing the vampire, like exposure to the sun. Only vampires aren't just going to sparkle like Ed Cullen. They're going to burn, and we'll never be able to reconstitute their ashes. They'll be gone from the face of the earth. And it'll be all our fault, too. Because we eat this up. Like any other phenomenon, Twilight has a vocal fanbase. And, well:


Exactly. It's a sad day when we begin to humanize our monsters to the point where they essentially become us. Don't get me wrong, the humanization of the vampire, the werewolf, etc., is all well and good, but too much of a good thing is blasphemy. It's madness! (Madness? THIS! IS! TWILIGHT! *boot to the head*) Now if you'll excuse me, I'll just mosey on out of here. But before I go:

The Guyver Review

Long time, no see. I've been busy.

Let's face it: we all love Mark Hamill. C'mon, you know it. It's like the man said: "don't f*** with the Jedi Master, son." Whether we were watching him beat James Earl Jones's ass with a rotoscoped laser sword or hearing him murder our inner child, Mark Hamill helped define an entire genre and lent his talent to films, television shows, and video games everywhere. Try very hard to remember that when watching The Guyver, a 1991 motion picture mutation that leaves the viewer with sympathy for Mr. Hamill and ridicule for just about everything else.

Based on a long-running Japanese manga series, The Guyver's plot concerns the eponymous Guyver, a semi-biological suit of advanced power armor created by aliens, who also created humans as some sort of "perfect killing machine" thousands of years ago. I think. Frankly, the whole thing comes off as more than a little ridiculous, although this may have more to do with its origins as a manga than anything else. Regardless, our story begins as a scientist hides the Guyver from some thugs who transform into rejected monsters from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II. The Guyver is found by a young man named Sean (Jack Armstrong), whereupon it bonds with him (symbiote-style) and he is hunted down by a megacorporation led by one of the aliens who seeks to harness the power of the Guyver for himself. Along the way, Sean runs into a cop played by a mustache-sporting Mark Hamill (easily the best performer in the whole film) investigating the disappearance of the scientist, but his importance to the story is suspect. The same goes for the scientists' daughter Mizky (Vivian Wu), who happens to be Sean's girlfriend. She and Hamill spend most of the film running around while Sean dons the Guyver suit and does battle against the aforementioned alien monsters, all of whom would probably be laughed off the set of Power Rangers.

In fact, laughing is what I was doing for most of the film. Not that the film is intentionally funny; I've seen better humor out of Family Circus. No, The Guyver is entrenched firmly in the soil of the Mystery Science Theater brand of comedy, the kind where one is inclined to add the word "pilgrim" at the end of every one of Mark Hamill's lines as he spouts out a terrible John Wayne-esque dialect. Looking back, it's almost as if the movie was trying to achieve this exact variety of B-movie status, not good enough to be a film, but not bad enough to be unwatchable. The kind which induced both a cringe and a spasm of guffaws when I noticed Jeffrey Combs in a cameo as a scientist named "Dr. East." And that's only the tip of the iceberg: the Three Stooges-style special effects, the rapping lizardman, the Russian monster with some sort of wiggling proboscis, a scene near the beginning where the alien overlord mind-controls his hapless minion into punching himself in the face (from which we recieve the immortal line: "I'll make you slap yourself into OBLIVION!"), watching Mark Hamill get transformed into a low-budget animatronic giant cockroach (oooh, big spoiler), and let's not forget the obvious and over-the-top "whoosh" sound effects that play whenever the Guyver hurls someone across the room.

But don't be so quick to dismiss The Guyver as nothing more than a cinematic toilet drain. Despite being a 90's film, the film always has one foot in the good old 80's, and I suppose I'll watch anything with a little blue lightning thrown in there. It's cheesier than the Cheesecake Factory, but it's a good kind of cheese, the kind you can enjoy with friends, or if there aren't any reruns of Quantum Leap on to satisfy your 80's mania. Well, that's all for now. Peace out.