Double Review: Prototype and The Room Rifftrax

Prototype

If this game were a man, I'd marry him and bear him at least 3 children. He's only mildly attractive but when you get into him you're like OH HOLY SHIT.

What I mean by that is, the graphics aren't that great, but the gameplay makes up for it and more. You play as Alex Mercer, who wakes up on a morgue slab just as he's about to get autopsied. He has no memory of who he is or what happened to him, so you're figuring this out as the game goes on. Also, Manhattan is being overrun with a virus that is turning people into zombies. FUCK YES ZOMBIES. Also you have a shitton of kickass powers. You can shoot a blade tipped tendril out of your arm (or shoot a whole bunch out and destroy everything within radius of you), run up fucking buildings, glide through the air like a sugarglider, consume people and become them whilst gaining their knowledge and energy, and TURN YOUR WHOLE FUCKING ARM INTO A GIANT DOUBLE-EDGED BLADE. HOW CAN YOU NOT LOVE THIS?!

I'm only about halfway through right now, because A) I like having a life, and B) shit is fucking hard at some parts. Seriously, there have been times when I just have to turn off the Ecks Bawks and meditate so I don't explode. Even though you have all these kickass powers, each enemy has a different weakness, so you're constantly changing which power/move to use depending on what you're fighting. Also, you're often fighting both the (virus) infected and the military, sometimes simultaneously. Because of this I normally use a hit and run tactic like the chickenshit I am. Jump from a high area, kill some dudes, then run away and let my health regen/consume bitches. It's how I roll.

Seriously, a kickass game. There are some people who bawl about it not looking great or being too similar to other games or not having a deep storyline, but they can go fuck themselves. I game to fuckin' destroy shit, not to get Schindler's List in high-quality game format.


The Room (2003) + the Rifftrax of it

Oh hi, Danny. I'd heard someone mention The Room about a year ago, but I never thought to look it up until about 2 months ago. Sweet Jesus. This movie may be worse than Manos: The Hands of Fate and Plan 9 From Outer Space. Seriously. The writing is atrocious, the acting is stroke-inducing, and you can FEEL the incompetence surging through your screen as you watch it. It garnered MST3K + Rocky Horror midnight viewings in which people throw spoons whenever the mindboggling framed picture of a spoon appears on screen, shout "FOCUS" when the film goes out of focus (and this happens quite frequently), reenact scenes at the front of the theater in costume, and fake walking out of the movie. I really need to attend one of these.

The plot...is nonsensical. The main plot appears to be a San Francisico-set love triangle between Johnny (Tommy Wiseau), a banker of indeterminate foreign origin (I think it's Latin Amerifrenchkoreansomalian), his future wife (NOT FIANCE) Lisa (Juliette Danielle), who is BEAUTIFUL (not), and Mark (Greg Sestero), who we know through at least 3000 lines of dialogue is Johnny's best friend. Then we have Lisa's mother, who comes in for 3 minute visits, introduces a whole slew of possible subplots that never get mentioned again (Lisa's mom: "I got the test results back today. I DEFINITELY have breast cancer." Lisa: "Don't worry about it. They're curing stuff like that every day.") There is also Johnny and Lisa's college-aged neighbor/surrogate son Danny, who seems like he's supposed to be slightly mentally challenged but no one ever says so, and who for five minutes is a drug dealer. Oh, and he has a crush on Lisa for the first half of the movie then just gets over it, I guess. There are also some other characters who do absolutely nothing and do not further the plot at all. Other than the main characters, I mean.

There are so many notable, shitastic things in this movie I don't even know where to begin. It's clearly not much more than Wiseau (who, as well as starring, directed and wrote this shit) masturbating over himself. The way he protrays his character as an innocent victim leads me and pretty much everyone else to believe that this is autobiographical. I'd love to know what this real life woman thinks now, if she does exist. The best part of it all is that he clearly made it to be a completely serious drama. When he found out that people were laughing at it, he did a 180 and claimed that it was intentional, and that the film was meant to be a black comedy. And thus thousands of Bullshit Detectors sounded.

From the games of football, which consist of tossing a football back and forth whilst standing 3 feet from each other, the laughable dialogue including "YOU AH TEARING ME APAAAAAHT, LISAAA" and "It feels like I'm sitting on an atom bomb that is going to explode," and the characters that come from fucking nowhere, this film is unintentionally a masterpiece. I'd heard that you should first watch this movie with others, but I watched it by myself when I was sick and STILL had a blast. I laughed so hard I vomitted.

The worst thing about this movie are the sex scenes. There are 3 in the first half hour. Now you may be thinking, "FUCK YES, SEX!" but I assure you, watching these scenes will make you wish your genitalia would cease to function. There is NOTHING remotely sexy about any of it. And the shitty softcore R&B music just makes it all even more vomit inducing. I don't want to think about it anymore.

So, the Rifftrax. I was super stoked when I saw on Bill Corbett's facebook that they were doing this movie. And in my very biased opinion, they did a fucking superb job. The movie makes me laugh just by itself, but there were moments when I was literally crying with laughter with the Rifftrax. They completely nail Johnny's ridiculous accent and the constant "Oh hi, *insert character's name*" greetings. When Bill compares Lisa to "the bloated corpse of Britney Spears" I was immediately sold. The one thing I wasn't very fond of was that they do little sketches during the sex scenes so that they didn't have to try to riff that shit. I completely understand that, but the sketches aren't that great. The rest of the riffing is so good that this becomes a mootpoint, however.

So if you want to buy The Room, guess what! It's only $8.99 on Amazon (or free if you're a pirate)! Then buy the accompanying Rifftrax for $3.99. If you're not convinced of the sheer greatest of this shit, here is some YouTubage.