Editorials
In Defense of ‘DOOM’ (2005)
I’m about to try really hard to convince you that there is actual value to the universally panned Doom movie you probably only remember for those five minutes of first person carnage in the final act that are still objectively awesome to this day. There’s substance here that’s gone overlooked for too long, so I’m going to do exactly what Dwayne Johnson told me to do when he visited me last night in a dream I had after watching too much “Ballers”.
I’m going to open your eyes to just how entertaining this movie really is.
When I’m through, you’ll wonder why it wasn’t showered with awards. Forget them, we can remedy that right now. As Bloody Disgusting’s games editor — or the guy you non-gaming types might refer to as the guy who should really stick to writing about games because his taste in movies sucks — I’m awarding Doom our first ever BFG Award for Being Fucking Great.
All right, let’s do this.
For those keeping count, this is the third video game adaptation I’ve defended in our In Defense of… series. Each time I’ve assumed there’s nothing but hate for these films I like, but a majority of you seemed to enjoy Resident Evil and Silent Hill, so it’ll be interesting to see what reactions I get with this one.
Not enough people appreciate this quirky amalgam of 90’s space marine goodness and delicious B-movie cheese, or the filmmakers’ comical attempts to get us to take what’s going on on-screen seriously enough for it to be frightening. Much like watching a Michael Bay production, the secret to enjoying this movie is that you can never think about what’s going on.
Doom makes no effort to explain really anything. Its shameless abuse of scientific and military jargon gets delivered by dead-eyed actors who very clearly already received their paycheck. It wants you to leave your brain outside the Hellgate so it won’t get embarrassed when you spend more time thinking about what’s happening than the screenwriter did when they wrote it, possibly after being inspired by a SyFy movie marathon.
If any of that sounds like criticism, you haven’t been paying attention.
This is a movie that’s based on a game made in 1993, before developers discovered they could put stories in their games. Doom has had a monumental impact on video games, and specifically the genre of first person shooters. This series did for the FPS genre what Resident Evil did for survival horror or what Call of Duty did for the universally hated concept of annual releases, and it accomplished that while relying exclusively on its gameplay mechanics.
Doom, as a franchise, has never been known for its thoughtful characters or for particularly rich storytelling. It might’ve been capable of that, had id Software not prioritized making an addictive and rewarding gameplay experience over everything else. That’s partly why the original game has retained much of its charm to this day, because it’s still fun to play two decades (and change) after its release.
This is why I don’t understand some of the complaints about the movie. This movie is Doom, plain and simple. It’s unapologetic in its stubborn adherence to video game staples. It even goes so far as to end with a boss fight.
Doom is the video game equivalent of a run-on sentence where the words have been replaced with a labyrinthine network of rooms filled with demons and everything you could ever want to use against them. It’s a seemingly endless barrage of action with very little filler, because there’s no time for crap like character development when the legions of Hell are pouring into our world so they can cut down our brightest minds only to reanimate them as mindless ghouls.
Demons are assholes, and Doom treats them as such by turning their surprisingly tender monster bodies into a receptacle for lead, or whatever ammunition is made out of in 2046.
That essence is front and center here. It’s obvious the filmmakers wanted to make something that more closely resembled the games, but that would’ve required the sacrificing of roughly 90% of the dialogue to make room for soldier stuff, and Dwayne Johnson might not have been able to memorize all those complicated hand gestures military types use to issue orders.
Getting rid of the script would’ve been a tough sell anyway, and non-gamers wouldn’t know enough to appreciate how much closer that would’ve brought the film to the games. See, the games are like the stream of consciousness of a 12 year-old who’s just powered through The Avengers and all the candy that’s ever been or ever will be. They’re loud and obnoxious, but undeniably entertaining.
This movie tried to appeal to non-gamers and in doing so, it had to find a way to form a recognizable movie structure around a premise that might literally be impossible to take seriously. It tries to get us to care about the fates of its cast of unlikable characters, the majority of whom are introduced just so they can be torn apart later on by whatever the fuck this thing is supposed to be.
A team of professionally trained artists were told to design a frightening demon face, and that is what they came up with. That creature looks like something you might expect to find growing inside a haunted Easy-Bake Oven.
There’s no excuse for dull monster designs, so I won’t even bother.
That’s the one thing that really can’t be forgiven here. The characters are awful so as to maximize the feeling of satisfaction you’ll get when it’s their turn to die horribly. The dialogue is paced so it ties the scenes together and carries us quickly between them, unburdened by filler. This movie is an accurate depiction of the games, even if we’d rather not admit it.
And then there’s the glorious scene I mentioned earlier.
That scene is silly, gory, bombastic and very, very fun. It’s our reward for enduring the crap they had to cram in there in order to call it a movie. This is one of the most accurate live-action adaptations of a game ever, and aside from Silent Hill, it’s the closest Hollywood has ever come to bringing the magic of the games to the big screen, and I love it.
What do you think of the Doom movie?
Editorials
Five Serial Killer Horror Movies to Watch Before ‘Longlegs’
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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