Reviews
[Review] ‘Alien: Blackout’ Delivers Pocket Horror With Some Small Issues
Amanda Ripley returns in an even more claustrophobic slice of sci-fi horror. Read our Alien Blackout review to see if it continues the good work of Isolation on a new platform.
There’s no denying that Alien: Blackout arrives under a bit of a cloud. Rumors, hints, and teases for the first Alien game after 2014’s superb Alien Isolation led to a certain level of expectation. That level was lowered somewhat when it was found that while Blackout does continue the story of Amanda Ripley, daughter of the legendary Ellen Ripley, it’s not exactly a direct sequel to Isolation, rather, it’s a mobile game. That in itself is perfectly fine, and Blackout does the important thing in making this feel like an Alien game should, but that doesn’t help it shake the looming shadow of the game that preceded it.
What Alien: Blackout brings in terms of gameplay is quite the departure. Taking the framework of kid’s horror fave Five Nights at Freddy’s, a light dusting of puzzling, and draping the Alien aesthetic over it, Alien: Blackout sees you back in the sneakers of Amanda Ripley, who fresh from the hell she encountered aboard Sevastopol station, finds herself in another Xenomorph-shaped mess, and ends up hiding in an air duct, guiding other survivors to safety and leading them to key cards and items important to their continued existence.
This is done via two methods. Watching through the cameras Amanda has hacked into, and checking with the interactive security floor plan. The floor plan is the most useful part as it allows you to see where exactly the survivors are, and you can easily activate doors to block the Xenomorph off or trigger sensors to keep an eye on where it’s coming from.. The downside is you can’t see where the Xeno itself is bar a vague red flicker in the general direction it is coming from. Flicking to the security cameras can give you a horrifying glimpse at the beast stalking the crew, and you can in some instances shut a door in the nick of time.
Naturally, there’s a slight catch to these murder avoidance puzzles. You only have a limited amount of power to play with, meaning you have to open and close doors to juggle the power, and it usually means it’ll leave an easy opening for the Xeno to come through. This is relatively easy to manage early on and you should be able to rescue everyone on a level with minimal stress, but the juggling gets increasingly more hectic and you soon learn a sacrifice needs to be made if you’re going to progress.
It’s wickedly macabre that you can essentially lure a poor crew member to their death just to save another, but wholly necessary at times. Perhaps a little too necessary, as there doesn’t appear to be any design or story choice behind this, it seems more like an oversight that allows you to cheese it through tougher stages. Not a bad thing, but having an easy way out belittles the puzzles challenge to some degree.
The alien can also find your hiding spot, so you have to occasionally look up from your work to check it isn’t barrelling down the ductwork to eviscerate you. You can shut yourself in if it does come calling, but that acts almost as an EMP for the systems on the level the survivors are on, meaning the doors are temporarily all unlocked, leaving them vulnerable to a sticky end.
As you can imagine, things can get intense and panicky. The formula is tried and trusted, and in its own small way, Alien: Blackout captures the fear factor of Alien Isolation, albeit in a more stationary form. The highly expendable nature of the survivors take an edge off that tension, diluting the horror that the game is trying so hard to maintain.
There’s also not enough background on the space station and its history. That was a big part of what made Alien Isolation‘s Sevastopol a part of the atmosphere. It had such a rich background to be discovered, and its internal issues being explained made the pressure-cooker hostility of the place really bubble over with the introduction of the Xenomorph. There’s still some background here, just not as much as I’d have liked.
Alien: Blackout is still a pretty good game though. For a reasonable price you get a competent, occasionally scary (headphones really help) Alien game, and while it’s natural to feel disappointment at it not being Alien Isolation 2, it’s not Colonial Marines 2 either. If anything, it’s one of the better Alien efforts from the past few decades.
Alien Blackout review code provided by the publisher
Alien Blackout is out now on the App Store, Google Play and the Amazon Appstore.
There’s something really insidious, in a great way, about setting a horror story in a movie theater. It’s something filmmakers have known for decades, going back to The Blob and beyond, but it never fails to strike a chord because, in a way, it hits us exactly where we feel safest. Seeing a horror movie on the big screen, surrounded by like-minded moviegoers, is a communal experience, one in which everyone screams and laughs together. We are together, and therefore we are much less vulnerable, so when someone punctures that bubble of safety, it’s all the more frightening.
Matinee (also released as Midnight Matinee in some territories) is a movie that understands this from the jump, setting up a stunning opening kill that predates a similar sequence in Scream 2 by almost a full decade. A smart, layered, very stylish Canadian slasher released at the tail end of the 1980s, it’s one of those films that’s spent a lot of time in the dark even among the horror faithful (I’m willing to admit that I hadn’t seen it until recently). Now, a new Kino Cult Blu-ray release is out to change that, and it reveals a slasher essential that, while not perfect, has charm and style to spare.
Two years ago, the Paramount Theater in the small town of Halston closed its doors when, during the theater’s annual horror festival, a young moviegoer was murdered in his seat, mid-movie. Leads in the murder quickly dried up, and the case is cold enough now that the town barely talks about it anymore. Fortunately for local horror fans, that means the Paramount can open again in time for its Halloween horror festival, and they’ve got a hotshot producer (William B. Davis) in town for just such an occasion.
As the festival draws closer, the film introduces us to a variety of characters, including rebellious teenager Sherri (Beatrice Boepple), her boyfriend Lawrence (Jeff Schultz), her overbearing mother Marilyn (Gillian Barber), and the theater’s kindly owner, Earle (Don S. Davis), who’s just hoping he can run a business without more bloodshed. But someone clearly remembers what happened two years ago, and their violent streak is on a collision course with opening night.
Matinee has quite a few things going for it, but what stands out right away, and maintains a consistent grip right up through a wonderful crescendo in the third act, is the film’s visual style. Writer/Director Richard Martin, cinematographer Cyrus Block, and special effects wizard Bob Comer make great use of the film’s limited locations, giving the movie a charming small-town feel reminiscent of Halloween or The Blob while building a self-contained little world inside the theater itself that’ll remind you of films like Popcorn and Demons.
The colors are striking, the framing is clever, and the film clearly has a ball making references to all kinds of other horror cinema moments ranging from The Phantom of the Opera to Friday the 13th. The kills, while relatively sparing with gore, are delivered with style and appropriate tension, creating that sense of unease right in the middle of a place where we as movie fans should be comfortable: The movie theater. Along the way, the Paramount itself becomes a character, and this release definitely dials up its retro splendor.
The Blu-ray upgrade preserves the film’s attention to detail and ambitious cinematography, helping the colors to pop while never letting go of the texture and feel of a relatively low-budget horror film made in Canada in the 1980s. There’s a certain gauziness to many exploitation films of this era, that haloed light you get when the scene is perhaps overexposed just a little too much. It makes the film dreamlike even when it reaches for realism, and Kino Cult’s upgrade preserves that feeling. Throw in a smart script and a whodunit plot that leans heavily into the psychological details of each character, and you’ve got a winner.
There are a couple of things that stick out as slight issues here, including the lack of special features beyond an excellent commentary from film historians and Kino regulars Jason Pichonsky and Paul Corupe. The disc is quite reasonably priced, so it’s not a letdown economically speaking, but I’d love a deeper dive into the film and the Canadian slasher boom in general, particularly for a movie like this that seems to have faded from so many memories, including mine. The sound mix also has some issues, probably left over from previous releases, that might have you playing with your volume settings a little more than you’d like over the course of a 90-minute film, particularly when lines of ADR dialogue crop up.
These are minor concerns, though, and they do nothing to diminish the impact of Matinee, or the joy that’ll come from watching this film for the first time if you’re a slasher devotee in search of something new, or even someone who saw this movie way back when hoping to relive its glories. This is one of those slashers I’ll be talking about with fellow horrorphiles for a long time, and it’s because of this disc.
Matinee is now available on Blu-ray from Kino Cult.
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