Editorials
Hands-on with ‘Evil Within 2’, First-look at Gameplay!
When The Evil Within was announced back in 2013 with a live action trailer, I knew it was something special. A spiritual successor to Resident Evil 4 from Shinji Mikami – the series’ creator himself? I was instantly sold. While the game we got wasn’t genre-defining, I thought it was a pretty great survival horror game that did more than enough to stand out from Resident Evil. Needless to say, when The Evil Within 2 was announced during Bethesda’s E3 press conference this year, I was excited. After months of waiting, I got a chance to play the game last week, and I’m happy to report that what I got to play was a great follow-up to one of 2014’s best horror experiences.
The demo I got to play featured most of the game’s fifth chapter. Most of the psychological story had been set up and Sebastian Castellanos had already met the game’s Joker-esque antagonist, Stephano. The important thing to note is that while this game will feature more open-ended environments, the chapter I was playing is meant to highlight the improvements made on the first game’s tight corridors and overall combat.
I was dropped into Sebastian’s office, the sort of mental waypoint where you can take a breath, save your game and give Sebastian some much-needed upgrades. My Sebastian was a clean slate, and I was given a modest amount of upgrade materials to beef him up how I saw fit. After applying some weapon, speed and health upgrades, I traveled through the infamous cracked mirror into the game’s twisted world.
Immediately I was struck with strong Resident Evil 2 vibes. The level was set in a small town – just outside its town hall in fact – and it was gorgeously haunting. The entire set piece was full of deep shadows and washed in cool blues, with chunks of reality floating around in the sky above me. I took my first steps forward and stumbled straight into the demo’s first boss fight.
It shouldn’t come at any surprise, but the boss design in this game is stellar. The first one I fought was called The Guardian, and it was a hulking being made up of human corpses. It had a table saw for one hand, and it used a collection of heads that looked eerily like Samara from The Ring to see. The creepiest part was that the dominant head was constantly smiling.
The guy helping with the demo explained before I started that boxes held valuable crafting materials and ammo (sound familiar?) and that The Guardian just so happened to hate boxes. I laughed at the time, but once I started playing the first thing I did was lure The Guardian into an area of the tight combat arena full of wooden crates. Lo and behold, the boss stopped chasing me just to beat the boxes to pieces giving me some precious time to reload all my guns and circle behind it to get some cheap shots in.
That encounter highlighted a major theme of The Evil Within 2, the idea of giving you more options to survive during the game’s toughest fights. It’s hard to keep your cool when you’re being chased by a giant monster, but if you can manage to lure it into a gas puddle you can light it on fire. Or if you lead it through the trip wires scattered around, it’ll get stopped in a time warp for a generous thirty seconds. Basically what I’m saying is that these moments brought some innovation to a genre that’s been driven into the ground, and I loved it.
Fortunately, The Guardian wasn’t too tough to kill on Survival difficulty (the next notch up is Nightmare and the one below it is Casual), and I moved into the town hall where I was given the task of finding an emitter and activating it to stop the town of Union from collapsing. This was a crucial moment for me because even though I was jumping in at the fifth chapter, I knew exactly what was going on in the story which leads me to believe that hiring Deadgirl writer Trent Haaga to pen the game’s story paid off. The incapacitated character who gave me the task tossed me a walkie-talkie and sent me on my way.
The following ten-minute section was one that reminded me a lot of the first game despite some major improvements. The town hall was dark creepy and full of long corridors. These sections employed scare tactics that reminded me a lot of Layers of Fear. I would walk to the end of a hallway only to find the door locked and once I turned back around the world around me had shifted, sometimes slightly, making me wonder whether or not I was crazy. Other times the changes would be drastic. The hallways would stretch on for an eternity, blood would drip form paintings that would them slam to the ground. It was pretty cool and kept these sections interesting. Also, I really liked that when I went off the beaten path and creeped down the scarier hallways, I was usually rewarded with some good materials if it wasn’t part of the critical path.
After some exploring, I came across Stephano. He froze time just as I found the emitter and in an extremely tense moment used a giant blade to ever so slightly cut Sebastian’s face while he sat there unable to move. Texture-wise the face held up really well and the cut looked realistic enough to make me queasy. A little of the tension was lost thanks to shoddy lip syncing, but this moment really got to me so I was willing to forgive the animations’ shortcomings.
After the cutscene ended, I was introduced to the game’s second and final boss – Obscura. Imagine a lanky, creepy man with an extremely old camera for a head. Despite already being impressed by my fight with The Guardian, this fight showed the innovation that game director John Johanas’ two DLC chapters for the first game made a name for himself with. See, the emitter needed 90 seconds to activate but Obscura’s power was to stop time with its camera head. I figured out pretty quickly that this was a boss I wasn’t going to kill and that I was just trying to distract it long enough to activate the emitter. I wasn’t exactly out of ammo from my previous fight, but I wasn’t rich with it either so I equipped the crossbow and flung as many shock arrows as I could at the monster. It took a couple tries, but once I was able to beat it I let out my breath and got ready to move on. Unfortunately, the guy showing me the game tapped me on the shoulder and let me know I was done.
Even though I was already excited for The Evil Within 2, I wasn’t sure whether or not I would wait to play it since so many games are coming out around that time. This demo completely sold me on it, and I hope that the refinements on the first game’s problems on display in my demo are as apparent throughout the entire game. If you want to play The Evil Within 2 for yourself, you won’t have to wait long since it’s out this Friday the 13th of October on PS4, Xbox One and PC. Here’s hoping it makes its way to the Nintendo Switch sometime next year.
Horror was thriving so well in the 1980s that movies like Pen Densham’s The Kiss (1988) would understandably get lost in the shuffle, only to then gain their fans later on in life. Even still, this one Canadian-American curio has had a more challenging time than others, as far as contemporary reevaluations go, which is very likely due to the movie’s limited availability—at least as of this write-up.
However, the scarceness of The Kiss, while a bit annoying, makes it like catnip for ‘80s horror completists everywhere. Hopefully, a lot of them will walk away satisfied after watching this hidden gem.
Even though The Kiss was intended as the first of several horror collaborations between Astral Pictures and TriStar, as well as the first feature produced by Densham, Richard B. Lewis and John Watson’s Trilogy Entertainment Group, it ended up being the only one produced from that former union. Once the movie was released, TriStar’s distribution jitters—they opted for a regional rollout—did the $6-million flick no favors. TriStar’s cold feet toward horror releases have been well noted, but The Kiss still did a tad better than Night of the Creeps (1986), another genre outing that flopped due to its regional opening.
Shot in Montreal, but set in Albany, New York, The Kiss—which was still called The Host just a few months before its October premiere—concerns an average middle-class family and their forthcoming situation. The uncanny problem in store for them was, in fact, set in motion some years earlier. As that hot and dusty flashback to the Belgian Congo shows, a familial curse was set upon the two Dunbar sisters well before Meredith Salenger’s teenage character was born.
Meredith Salenger, Nicholas Kilbertus and Mimi Kuzyk in The Kiss
The Kiss, which was based on a story by co-writer Stephen Volk (Ghostwatch) and penned by both Volk and Tom Ropelewski, has the outward appearance of The Stepfather (1987). This movie, though, is anything but a gender-flipped retread of that classic domestic disturber. For starters, The Kiss is far less grounded in reality—that much is clear from its unsettling opening scene. There, a trusting girl (Priscilla Mouzakiotis) is the victim of her own deceptive aunt (Céline Lomez); the movie’s titular act, and the story’s first shock, becomes the means of transferring an ancient evil from one host to another.
In the present day, Salenger’s role of Amy Halloran, a religious schoolgirl, is dealt a harsh blow in life once her mother, Hilary Halloran née Dunbar (Pamela Collyer), suddenly dies in a freak accident. But rather than a complete stranger sweeping the Halloran widower (Nicholas Kilbertus) off his feet some months later, Joanna Pacula’s character is that chosen temptress. Here, Pacula plays the grown-up version of the afflicted girl last seen in the movie’s opener. Since Amy’s mother is insistent about there being no reunion between estranged sisters, and she even contemplates buying a gun shortly before her tragic demise, it’s presumable that Aunt Felice poses a threat to her family.
The Kiss isn’t a movie ever too concerned about its own predictability. The audience is indeed often one step ahead of the story here, but also keep in mind how every one of those steps is loud. Take, for instance, the death of Amy’s mother; the Halloran matriarch goes out in garish, gruesome fashion, as a supernaturally commandeered truck sends Collyer’s character through a store window first, then leaves her one leg short. The directorial enthusiasm truly comes out in horrific moments such as these.
The Kiss is always sure to revel in its characters’ ills and misfortunes. So if the plot doesn’t impress, then its lurid parts should. Amy’s mother’s exit scene was proof of an eager, first-time horror director proving his worth. Then, bestie Heather (Sabrina Boudot) survives to tell the tale of a bizarre escalator mishap that, despite showing relatively less gore, spikes viewers’ empathy meter. The wilder bits of this movie, however, commence with that inevitable hookup between Felice and Amy’s bewitched father; their kitchen coitus is paralleled by Amy’s feverish classroom terror. The outcome there is a disquieting cross-cut of sex magic and a young woman’s menstrual onset plus hallucinations.
Sabrina Boudot in The Kiss
From foam appliances to bladders, that parade of special effects in The Kiss casts its own spell on the audience. Felice’s familiar, a visibly malevolent cat, was realized here with several models, some more articulate than others. Admittedly, the demon cat’s not as convincing as most of the effects here, but accepting that artifice, as opposed to fighting it, will make the whole experience way more enjoyable. As for the makeup used to manifest Felice’s inner villainy, it is more minimal and subtle than one might like; yet the work done to turn Pacula into an antithesis of herself is nonetheless compelling.
The otherworldly perils and dreadful goings-on wouldn’t work half as well as they do in The Kiss without the story’s contrast effect. Finding frights in picturesque, extremely ordinary settings was something that took off in the ‘80s, thanks to that sweeping shift to locales like the suburbs. And Amy’s home, a replica of a real Montreal suburban house, is the ideal battleground for any proper good-versus-evil story. It’s also prime real estate for this movie’s satanic panic-inspired horrors.
Because of their ostensibly similar plots, The Kiss has been compared to The Exorcist (1973). Except in Densham’s movie, the sinister, non-Christian entity targeting a teen girl lies within something less apparent and, perhaps, more devastating upon its exposure. To an outsider, Pacula’s Aunt Felice is too beautiful and unobjectionable to ever suspect of being a monster. More suspicious is how quickly she rips into the fabric of the Halloran home. Felice’s mere presence upsets the “texture of family life,” according to the director.
The demon cat in The Kiss
Taking out Amy’s mother and best friend, and distracting her father, would suggest The Kiss is playing by a different set of rules. It is initially leaving its adolescent target unsupported in a rather grim scenario. In contrast, though, this story offers up a surrogate parent who does her best to fill in the holes of Amy’s eroding home life. Mimi Kuzyk does good work as that family friend and doctor, Brenda, who guides the lost child without also steering her in any one direction; she is naturally skeptical of Amy’s accusations until it’s almost too late to do anything about them. So although The Kiss does an admirable job of undoing the main character’s support system, it never leaves her without a lifeline. This dark movie, in spite of everything that’s transpired, doesn’t deprive itself of light and hope.
The Kiss is a potent mélange of familiar ideas. If not for the director’s surprise flair for horror, though, the movie would have been less effective. What a shame that Pen Densham didn’t continue with the genre. As for Joanna Pacula, she is, too, owed credit as the wicked vixen opposite Meredith Salenger’s pitiable Amy; she never fails to be unsettling in her role. Pacula makes Aunt Felice a sexy yet intimidating character.
For horror that steadily doles out madness and menace, while also delivering a flashy and ghastly conclusion, The Kiss is certain to please. Yes, it’s cheesy all the way, but most favorably, everyone involved plays everything straight. That kind of commitment goes a long way with this movie.
The Kiss
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