6WH: September 26th

After twenty years, I finally did it. Dracula has died by my hand at the end of the original Castlevania. I have no idea how anyone ever did this in the era before save states. My controller would've been through a window long before I got to the second-to-last screen in which a flock of huge bats knock you into bottomless pits over and over. As a kid renting the game, I only ever made it to Frankenstein, where I was promptly killed by that damned jumping Igor bastard. I can't imagine the gallons of tears this game must have generated from '80s children who had parents mean enough to buy it for them. As an adult, I had to make a save state after every successful hit on Dracula. Even then, it took me 30-40 minutes of work. Yeash. Well, on to playing Vampire Killer for the MSX2.

The Deaths of Ian Stone (2007) directed by Dario Piana
It started out interesting. Every day Ian Stone is killed by spooky black ghosts, only to be resurrected in a different life immediately afterward. It's kind of the horror version of Groundhog Day. Unfortunately, once the movie has to start explaining the reasons behind all of this, it gets a bit Saturday morning cartoonish. Turns out Ian is actually one of the black ghosts himself. He's actually the most powerful one ever. The other ghosts are killing him in his human form to ensure he doesn't remember that he knows how to permanently kill them, which is supposedly impossible. The ghosts also feed on fear, and are particularly addicted to the fear a human emits before dying. Ian's a friendly ghost, however, and eats the love coming out of his human girlfriend, instead. Ah, the power of love... By the time one of the bad ghosts utters "but it has only just begun" in response to Ian's "it ends here," I'd just about checked out. A disappointing waste of a promising idea. (6/10)




Fear Itself: "Spooked" (2008) directed by Brad Anderson
I like Eric Roberts, and he does a stand-up job in this episode, but everything else wasn't terribly good. There's lot of armchair psychoanalyzing going on, courtesy of a haunted house that makes you see your greatest regret in life. Eric Roberts' character had a tragedy in his childhood and that's why he was an abusive cop, etc. It's bit like an out-of-tune Tales from the Crypt story. It just never works. (5/10)