2023 – Page 7 – PopCult Reviews

Solo Tabletop RPG Review & Actual Play – Frontier Scum: Lonesome Drifter Part Two

The story of Hamsor Pang comes to a tragic ending, however we continues things a little further by shifting our perspective to a new protagonist.

(Oracle question: Is the upside-down silver cross worn by the bounty hunter in the cabin? Likely odds. Nat 20. Yes)

Pang takes a breath of the fresh, snowy air outside the mountain cabin. He turns back and looks at the dark mouth of the doorway. He remembers the necklace the bounty hunter wore, the upside cross. Something itches in his brain, that this could be useful to have in his possession. Taking a deep breath, Pang steps back into the abattoir and after a few minutes of searching finds the necklace still hanging from the butchered corpse’s neck. He takes it.

(Luck check DR14 vs. 6, 5. Failure)

Comic Book Review – DC vs. Vampires

DC vs. Vampires Volume One (2022)
Reprints DC vs. Vampires #1-6
Written by James Tynion IV and Matthew Rosenberg
Art by Otto Schmidt, Simone Di Meo, and Daniele Di Meo

DC vs. Vampires Volume Two (2023)
Reprints DC vs. Vampires #7-12
Written by James Tynion IV and Matthew Rosenberg
Art by Otto Schmidt, Francesco Mortarino, and Daniele Di Nuculo

Try as I might, I have never really enjoyed vampires as a horror concept. I’ve watched many vampire films of varying quality; some I have liked, but the vampire aspect isn’t scary. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a wonderfully made film, and Dracula is certainly creepy at moments, but I never felt scared of him. Vampires typically seemed to be used to explore ideas of titillating sexuality, which is fine if you’re into that. I don’t really think most of the classic monsters are all that scary, to be honest. Overexposure has demystified them to the point where they are cartoon characters. So when I picked up this Elseworlds comic series, my expectations were relatively low despite the creative talent behind it.

Movie Review – Insidious: The Red Door

Insidious: The Red Door (2023)
Written by Leigh Whannell and Scott Teems
Directed by Patrick Wilson

At one point (maybe still), we could have had an Insidious/Sinister crossover. I saw Sinister around the time it was initially released on DVD, and I remember really liking the vibe of the film, especially the bizarre films within the film. However, I can’t imagine a crossover would be any good. Insidious has really failed to live up to my already low expectations. Blumhouse got the old gang back together for a film that would serve as a direct sequel to Insidious: Chapter 2. This makes the Insidious chronology as follows: Insidious: Chapter 3, Insidious: The Last Key, Insidious, Insidious: Chapter 2, Insidious: The Red Door. It’s not as confusing as the Fast & Furious chronology, but it’s definitely up there.

PopCult Podcast – Phantasm/Phantasm II

It’s spooky season. This episode Ariana & Seth watched the first two installments of a cult horror franchise that delivers a lot of unexpected & unique terrors.

Solo Tabletop RPG Review & Actual Play – Frontier Scum: Lonesome Drifter Part One

Frontier Scum: Lonesome Drifter (Chacolypse)

Download Lonesome Drifter for free here.

Purchase the base game Frontier Scum here.

Read Part Two here.

Directly based on the rules-lite Mork Borg system and its bold graphic design sensibilities, Frontier Scum is a wild, psychedelic take on a classic genre. Like with Mork Borg, the world is painted with broad strokes, just enough detail to evoke your imagination into filling in the rest of the details. Almost immediately, the book explains that it has no interest in bringing up the racist tropes that have been long interwoven in American Westerns, so this takes place in a fictional reality where none of that exists. This makes it much more like Red Dead Redemption, where you can have wildly different environments close together to capture every flavor of Western. There’s a blasted wasteland where prospectors dig for gold, a bustling city run by the Incorporation, a swamp where the dead rise, and a desert where horrors hunger.

PopCult Podcast – The 100th Episode

We get creative in this one.

TV Review – The Bear Season Two

The Bear Season Two (FX)
Written by Christopher Storer, Joanna Calo, Karen Joseph Adcock, Catherine Schetina, Stacy Osei-Kuffour, Alex Russell, Rene Gube, and Kelly Galuska
Directed by Christopher Storer, Joanna Calo, and Ramy Youssef

Ultimately, people don’t want to be in a state of conflict & antagonism. They want to learn, grow, and find ways to work together with others. So much of our world is informed by a media landscape that projects contrived, unnatural division. Reality television, so poorly named, delivers manufactured arguments & clashes intended for us to believe they are the truth. Even scripted narrative content is always about wars or personal contentions that go on and on and on. When do we get to see people heal genuinely or move past petty grievances in an authentic manner that isn’t cloying & artificial? The Bear is not a light show; its themes are weighty & dark. Yet, its characters are brilliantly full of life. They are capable of not living in the same rut their whole lives. Watching them struggle and grow is an absolute delight.

PopCult Podcast – The Blue Caftan/Rotting in the Sun

A beautiful & intensely intimate Moroccan drama & an intensely funny satirical Chilean comedy make up our two picks for this week.

Patron Pick – Gran Turismo

This special reward is available to Patreon patrons who pledge at the $10 or $20 monthly levels. Each month, those patrons will pick a film for me to review. If they choose, they also get to include some of their thoughts about the movie. This Pick comes from Matt Harris.

Gran Turismo (2023)
Written by Jason Hall, Alex Tse, and Zach Baylin
Directed by Neill Blomkamp

2023 feels like an apocalyptic year for Hollywood. The labor strikes, which the studio execs refuse to approach in good faith, stretch into the future. Rumblings of AI-generated films & television abound. The content coming out often feels like it was already written by AI anyway. The mainstream has never been such a void of humanity, and that’s saying a lot. The brand movie and video game adaptations have been hot commodities as trends shift in a disturbing direction. These two horrible new late-stage capitalism genres come together in the mire that is Gran Turismo. “Based on a true story” but clearly embellished and overly dramatized, which doesn’t help the picture to become more compelling. Not since Black Adam have I felt such a sinking sense of doom watching a movie that this medium I love so much is being strangled in the States, everything that made it worth engaging with melting away (thank god for world cinema!).

Solo Tabletop RPG Review & Actual Play – Lisergia

Lisergia
Designed & Written by Cezar Capacle

You can purchase this game here

When someone hears about a tabletop rpg, they typically think of character/class-based systems where adventures are had, treasure of some sort is discovered, and a story is told. You would be right in almost every circumstance except this one. Lisergia goes in a direction I’ve never seen a ttrpg go before. In some ways, you could argue it’s not a ttrpg but a freewriting tool. I would push back that this limits what a ttrpg can be, and I think it’s much broader than people contemplate. One of my favorite things with ttrpgs, whether I play solo or with a group, is the spontaneous emergence of ideas. I’ve always loved David Lynch’s take on this: thoughts emerging from a massive pool, and we are just receivers. Lisergia is a game that plays to that idea.