Editorials
I’m Excited for the New ‘Doom’ (and You Can Be Too!)
One day. A useless bundle of hours, that’s all we have standing between us and Doom. Usually, I’d be ankle-deep in demon giblets by now, striking a heroic pose atop a mountain of Mancubi while I stare off into the distance with a dramatic plume of hellfire blazing behind me. But not this time. Bethesda is withholding review copies of this lovely-looking game until the servers go live, so even us fork-tongued critics have to wait until launch day to get our greasy paws on it.
You can bet I’m going to haul ass through the campaign as soon as I have my copy. After that, I’ll probably spend a few tremendously painful hours getting my butt kicked in the multiplayer — after spending far too much time customizing my very own Doom Guy so he represents my views and opinions — then I’ll use SnapMap to make some dicks before getting to work on the review.
My job isn’t always black grapes and rainbows, but someone has to do it.
Our very own Mr. T isn’t convinced this game will live up to the hype that’s been building around it for more than a decade. I’m not either, but there are still some very specifically awesome things about what id Software is doing with the reboot that I am very excited about.
Take the multiplayer, for example. I’m rubbish at it, always have been, but I still have loads of fun even if I occasionally find myself hop-running away from player-controlled Revenants who always seem intent on blowing me to bits. It’s startling how often I’m marked for death first. I could be surrounded by a team wielding fully-charged BFGs, one point short of a victory and they’ll still find a way to tear me from this mortal coil before anyone else.
It happens often enough that I’ve had to accept it as a hidden feature of the game, a cruel inside joke id Software is playing on me for not having enough LAN parties in high school. Whenever the announcer lets me in on the fact that a demon rune is about to reveal itself, I accept my fate. The announcer probably has too. For all I know, he says it with a smirk on his face, or worse, he may be the one who’s pulling the strings.
Anyway, the point is, I’ve been forever cursed and I can still have loads of fun with the Doom multiplayer, so certainly you can too.
Maybe multiplayer isn’t your thing. That’s okay. It isn’t mine either, for the most part. That’s why our Lord and Savior, Gaben — Godking of Valve, Lord of Steam, Slayer of Threequels — invented the single-player campaign (don’t bother Googling any of this, it’s all true).
Doom caused a bit of a stir when it was revealed its story mode wouldn’t support co-op. There might’ve been rioting in the streets, but our kind prefers to stay indoors where there’s food and a strong Wi-fi signal. Knowing we could create our own custom co-op campaigns using the game’s shiny new SnapMap modding tools also helped.
But nature should still consider putting power outlets on trees.
The nifty thing about something like SnapMap is you don’t have to do anything with it to get something from it. The community-created content benefits everyone, including sad saps such as myself who can confidently erect elaborate genitalia-inspired towers with considerable girth and detail, only to choke when it comes to anything one might deem ‘playable’.
Fortunately, there’s a small percentage of the game’s player base that we can consistently rely on to carry the rest of us. These wonderful individuals are what kept me coming back to LittleBigPlanet years after its trade-in value had fallen to that of a budget bin title, just so I could see what those strange and wildly underappreciated engineers had been up to when I was busy neglecting the game.
Doom is more than capable of fostering a strong modding community around its SnapMap utility, thanks to its developer’s unique understanding of the PC Master Race, as well as the series’ already established history of being stupid fun to mod.
For me, it’s mostly about the campaign. I’ve always preferred a solid story mode to most other things in the games I play. By choosing to build the campaign sans co-op support, id Software saved precious time and resources that would’ve had a noticeable impact had they been spent on co-op friendly level design, enemy encounters, etc. That’s not to say its story mode will be good because it’s single-player — that level of witchery has been mastered by a select few game developers, like Valve and Naughty Dog.
The underlying theme with this game has been about taking something that worked twenty years ago and bedazzling it so it appeals to newcomers without startling the easily-startled old folks.
This idea can be seen everywhere, from the arena-based multiplayer where it looks like a blockbuster video game should in 2016 but it feels a lot like a 90s shooter, to the campaign, which has more or less the same thing going on. Everything is either bigger or there’s more of it — or in some cases, both. There’s a story, but the scope of it has changed and it’s brought with it a slew of “modern” enhancements like character customization, gruesome “glory kills”, and silly point-based awards to satisfy our lizard brains.
It introduces these tweaks while staying refreshingly close to its roots. Doom won’t force a regenerating health system on you, nor will it make you carry a “realistic” number of weapons or burden you with the hassle that comes with having to reload them. It’ll even have key cards, and if we’re lucky, they’ll be colored to match the door they unlock.
So will the new Doom be any good? Only our tomorrow selves know the answer to that. Until then, let’s do a bunch of push-ups so we can all be stupid ripped when it gets here. You game?
The penultimate season of Tales from the Crypt (1989–1996) aired its first three episodes on October 31, so it’s understandable that at least one of those three stories is set on Halloween.
Sandwiched between “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime” (Russell Mulcahy, Ron Finley) and “Whirlpool” (Mick Garris, A. L. Katz & Gilbert Adler) is the most severe episode of the bunch. Maybe the entire series? William Malone and Dick Beebe’s “Only Skin Deep” traded the show’s typical sense of fun for startling amounts of bleakness and kink.
“Only Skin Deep” is, apart from the Crypt Keeper’s intro and outro, noticeably unfunny. There are no considerable attempts at making the viewer laugh. Come to think of it, if those bookends had been replaced, and there was more of a sci-fi element in the story, HBO could have easily squeezed this tale into that successor anthology, Perversions of Science (1997). In Crypt, though, “Only Skin Deep” is much too grim for an audience that had become accustomed to campiness and levity.
What makes “Only Skin Deep” feel dark, among other things, is its protagonist. Showing up to a Halloween party where he’s not welcome, and where his former girlfriend (Diane DiLasco) is attending, Carl Schlag (Peter Onorati) first comes across as your standard bitter ex. You soon realize it’s much worse than that, once Carl threatens Linda (“You know, silly me, thinking I gave you what you deserved. If I’d have done that, I’d have killed you”). Now, I haven’t forgotten that Tales from the Crypt was teeming with vile men who did women harm. Yet Carl’s brand of misogynistic menace hits differently—it borders on being too realistic for this kind of series.
Mike Vosburg’s EC-style comic cover for “Only Skin Deep”, as seen in the Tales from the Crypt episode.
Despite donning a party mask for much of the episode, Carl can’t ever mask his true nature. The invitation did say “come as you are”, after all. That inability to change and be better, however, is why Carl ends up in such a karmic predicament. His outburst of anger at the party attracts the attention of one loner partygoer named Molly (Sherrie Rose, who was also in Season Four’s “On a Deadman’s Chest”). Her bone-white, featureless “mask” and body-bag costume don’t initially register as too strange, especially on a night like this. But at a party chock-full of colorful, cartoonish, and lighthearted ensembles, it does look out of place.
Darkness attracts darkness as Carl ditches the party and accompanies the mysterious Molly to her place. Which, by the way, should have been an immediate red flag. But perhaps she’s so hot, he doesn’t seem to mind the serial killer aesthetic. Resembling a warehouse that has been converted into living spaces, but never then decorated to remove the cold, industrial look, Molly’s home (or lair) is as gloomy as this whole episode feels. It’s like the set of a grungy music video, albeit a tad cleaner. The environments in a typical Crypt episode tend to be small, overfilled, and broken-in. Warm, regardless of any weird goings-on. All that empty space in Molly’s hovel, on the other hand, elicits a creepy feeling that Carl was unwise to ignore.
Tales from the Crypt featured more sex than it didn’t, but hands down, “Only Skin Deep” boasts the steamiest scene in the show’s history. Pushing it over the line, in addition to Onorati showing bare buns and the camera never turning down one of his pelvic thrusts, is the twisted dirty talk. Carl stays in the moment, whereas Molly unleashes charged lines like “the hurt, the anger, give it to me” and “take it out on my flesh like you want to”. It’s all quite kinky, as well as tied into the story’s theme of pain.
How else “Only Skin Deep” differs from other episodes is its twists. Or rather, its lack thereof. Nothing comes as a great surprise here, particularly because the deuteragonist’s ulterior motives are so obvious. By no means is Molly a wolf in sheep’s clothing; her face is a fright mask, she practically reeks of death, and she lives in what can best be described as a serial killer’s hideout. That last-act revelation of Molly’s mask really being her face is also nothing shocking. Cleverness is certainly not this episode’s strength.
A page from “…Only Skin Deep!”, as seen in EC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt.
While “Only Skin Deep” isn’t the most universally loved episode of Tales from the Crypt, it’s an interesting preview of William Malone’s future as a director. Most notably, he went on to helm House on Haunted Hill (1999) and FeardotCom (2002), the former of which was co-written by Dick Beebe, this episode’s writer. Dark Castle Entertainment, that genre house founded by Crypt producers Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis, and Gilbert Adler, was instrumental in bringing out Malone’s gruesome, over-the-top vision in House on Haunted Hill. However, FeardotCom and Malone’s Masters of Horror episode, “Fair-Haired Child”, are the most stylistically compatible with “Only Skin Deep”.
As one might guess, this episode is nothing like its source material. The “…Only Skin Deep!” found in the pages of EC Comics is set during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and save for its last couple of pages, is pretty sweet in nature. There, a man named Herbert is enamored with a woman he met five years prior to the present-day story. Every year, he has come down to Mardi Gras to see Suzanne, who’s always dressed as a hag-faced witch. Well, this time, Herbert plans on popping the question and marrying someone who is, for the most part, a total stranger. Suzanne accepts his proposal, but with one condition: they stay in costume until they’re officially hitched. You can probably see where this is going…
Once they are married, Suzanne remains incognito, even when she and Herbert have consummated their vows. A semi-predictive nightmare then rattles Herbert; he dreamt that Suzanne’s real face was as wizened as her mask. Finally, in his haste to find out the truth, Herbert winds up killing his new wife. Faceless and well on her way to bleeding out, the dying Suzanne manages to say she never wore a mask.
For more traditional EC-style ghastliness, your best bet is reading the comic. It’s wickedly sad. For something less conventional, as far as Tales from the Crypt goes, the role-reversing adaptation is worth watching. It’s not the best this show had to offer, although Malone’s visual style, plus the sexual abandon, does set the episode apart. If nothing else, “Only Skin Deep” leaves an impression that, even years later, shows no signs of fading.
Season Six of Tales from the Crypt can be streamed on Shudder, starting on June 5.
Tales from Tales from the Crypt celebrates the show’s Shudder premiere by singling out one episode from each season. So don’t even think about changing that dial, boys and ghouls. More spot-“frights” are to come.
Carl discovers Molly’s collection of human ‘masks’ in the Tales from the Crypt episode, “Only Skin Deep”.
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