OUTGUNNED ADVENTURES: A Player's Perspective

The Tuesday Knights tackle our second Outgunned Adventures session

Hopefully you've already read the write-up of what went down in this week's Outgunned Adventures session for the Tuesday Knights, but I thought I'd give you a little perspective on the game from my point-of-view, as a player.

First things first, I have to say that despite my deep-rooted dislike of "dice pool" mechanics there's something about the system at the heart of Outgunned that really appeals to me.

It takes the common "ability + skill" approach to decide the size of your available d6 dice pool, but then once you roll you're not totalling the dice or looking for specific numbers over a certain value, instead you want collections of identical numbers (such as 4,4,4 on three of the six dice you rolled). The larger that collective the better.

It's a bit like Yahtzee.

However, if you don't get a big enough set (usually three identical numbers are required for a typical, heroic action), you can elect to reroll the dice from your pool that weren't counted in the matching set, to try and get more duplicates.

Unfortunately, if this reroll doesn't add to your original total you actually forfeit one of the dice already counted towards your success total. That means if you only had two matches to start with, you automatically fail.

I loved this risk/reward gambling element. There was a definite air of tension around the table when people chose to reroll - followed by elation if they succeeded and despair if they failed.

The Outgunned game engine is a seemingly simple system at first glance, but there are definite nuances and complications that we're not totally savvy with yet.

For instance, there are issues around the rerolls - and "free" rerolls that our characters' Feats/Abilities granted them - that need to be ironed out.

And, as much as I enjoy an exciting skill challenge, I couldn't help but feel that there was a LOT of dice rolls called for in our opening scenario. Surely some of these multiple checks to advance through a certain task (such as climbing a cliff wall) could have been bundled together?

That said, I already rate these mechanics way ahead of the Ubiquity dice pool system used in our previous Hollow Earth Expedition segment of Pete's on-going weird science/pulp adventure campaign.

Having championed Ubiquity for so long in theory, it was quite sad to discover what a mess it often turned out to be in actual play whenever we tried anything beyond a straight-forward test of our skills.

It should be noted, of course, that this first two-part Outgunned adventure (Frozen Legacy) only involved our heroes facing the elements, rugged terrain, and a tricky set-piece to retrieve the "mysterious artefact".

We have yet to discover how the mechanics handle combat (usually such a key part of our games) and damage.

While we lost "Grit" (the game's version of stamina and 'hit points') through failing crucial challenges (such as keeping our balance on the violently rocking Viking longship), we have no clue how this translates to gunbattles and fisticuffs.

Pete started the evening by presenting us with nicely filled in character sheets as well as small file of papers explaining both the basic rules mechanics of Outgunned and personal explanations of our character's skills, Feats (special abilities), and equipment. This was all very handy.

It was a shame Mark couldn't make last night's session. However, on the bright side it means we'll get another refresher course on the core rules again next month, which will hopefully fill in a few of the gaps in our knowledge of the system.

I think between us - as we have some pretty smart cookies around the table - we should be able to get to grips with the subtleties of Outgunned Adventures. This will let the rules slip into the background and we can be free to carve Indiana Jones-inspired roles for our characters in this brave, new world of 1936.

If Adventure Has A Name, It Must Be The Tuesday Knights

On and off, the Tuesday Knights (my gaming group) has been playing Pete's period pulp action campaign for 32 sessions over three years. He likes to keep things fresh by switching the rules system for every story arc.

We started in the 1950's, fighting zombies and giant monsters - even travelling to an alien world at one point - using GURPS Atomic Horror, then we slipped through a portal to the 1930's for an extended Hollow Earth Expedition-fuelled hike from New York to Antarctica, punching villains in the face along the way, and finally being drawn into some Lovecraftian cosmic horror shenanigans that were a delicious blend of John Carpenter's The Thing and old HPL's At The Mountains of Madness.

That adventure culminated with my character Buck Hansen, a world-weary big game hunter and explorer, managing to blow up - rather impressively - a newly-risen ancient god.

The other members of the team are Kevin as former G-man Dick Tate, Mark as daredevil aviatrix Onyx Jones (he took over Erica's character when she left the group), and Clare as photojournalist Freya Larson.

For the next stage of the campaign - which is scheduled to begin in December (all being well) - Pete is turning to Outgunned Adventures, a standalone spin-off of the popular Outgunned system from Two Little Mice.

I think we're staying in the 1930's for the moment, but hopefully there will be an in-game explanation for the subtle changes in our characters (and the new rules mechanics).

The other night Pete came round to talk through the new game with me and seek my assistance in roughing out conversions of the characters from HEX to Outgunned.

I was extremely flattered by this, especially given that my recent attempts to get a campaign going (a Shadowdark game that lasted one session and a Villains & Vigilantes one that lasted three sessions) both fizzled out in most depressing manners.

The Outgunned Adventures rules book is gorgeous, both in its layout and art, and full of homages to the Indiana Jones movies (particularly Raiders of The Lost Ark).

The game's core system seems elegantly straight-forward (but then again so did HEX - in theory - which turned into a confusing mess in play).

Tests in Outgunned are made with small dice pools of two to nine six-sided dice and you are looking to match numbers to score successes (e.g. roll 5d6 and threes come up on four of the dice, then that's four successes).

Although I'm still not a massive fan of dice pool mechanics, as I grow older and more befuddled I've come to really appreciate simplicity at the heart of my games (which was one of ways I went wrong with Villains & Vigilantes game).

Outgunned's dice pool mechanics are rather different than the HEX approach to generating successes, but hopefully the Tuesday Knights will latch on quickly.

Pete and I were able to find pre-generated templates that matched the characters in our little group, and then went through the personalisation process of picking out various traits and abilities that matched those that our characters had used in the earlier adventures.

Flicking through the book, I couldn't help but keep catching myself thinking "this looks really nice, perhaps I could use Outgunned to run something in a different setting".

Well, in the cold light of day, I don't know about that, but - while I'm taking a break from sitting behind the GM's screen - it's certainly got me thinking more positively about running a game again... at some point in the future. 

Indiana Jones much?

Howard The Duck (1986)

When I discovered the allure of DVDs in the 1990's, I made a short list of films I just had to own in that format.

One was a definitive cut of Blade Runner and the other was Howard The Duck which, to be honest, I thought might never see the light of day.

I'm a massive fan of the late Steve Gerber's original Howard The Duck comic book run - which I discovered as an impressionable youngster through black and white reprints in the back of some humour magazine in the style of Mad - but not so much of the newer stuff (where he looks more like an emaciated human in a duck mask rather than an anthropomorphic duck).

Many a duck appeared in my early games of Dungeons & Dragons (including more than a few "masters of quack-fu"), although normally as non-player characters, and so imagine my excitement as I turned 20 and a film was made about Howard... by the guy who did Star Wars!

I saw it at the cinema, loved it, read the novelization, bought the soundtrack and... and... nothing. It just seemed to vanish, buried under an avalanche of unfair criticism (much fuelled, I am sure, by a backlash against Lucas for his Star Wars success).

I eagerly snatched up the VHS release when it came out, but as the years went on and technologies changed it looked as though Howard The Duck would not be making an appearance in the 21st Century.

Then in February, 2008, I caught sight of a briefly snarky preview in some film magazine and I realised my wait was over.

Viewed from a contemporary perspective, I reckon the film stands the test of time; the only elements that really look dated are the horrendous 1980s street fashions which appear to be wardrobe rejects from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.

ILM's special effects - particularly those surrounding Jeffrey Jones' Dr Jenning and his gradual transformation into the Dark Overlord of The Universe are still pretty neat (although the Dark Overlord himself looks like he wouldn't have been out of place on the set of Men In Black... but then again I said that about the monster in Cloverfield!).

The script is genuinely quite chucklesome, Lea Thompson is as yummy as 'love interest' Beverly as I remember her and I still enjoy Chip Zien's voice for Howard himself, although Tim Robbins is more than a bit annoying as nerdy lab assistant Phil.

Where the film has issues is its inability to judge its target audience, the script has the leaps of logic you'd expect from a kids' film, but throws in some distinctly adult themes and ideas (from Howard's part-time job in a bath house/brothel to his cross-species relationship with Beverly; funny in the comics, but slightly uncomfortable in live action!).

There's also the rather preposterous and overlong microlite chase that segues the second act into the third, and just smacks of the kind of silliness that George Lucas seems to love (see the Ewok movies, various 'comedy' moments in the Star Wars Prequels, the mine cart chase in Temple of Doom etc for further evidence of this). 

But the '80s music in Howard The Duck still rocks!

PULP PICTURE OF THE MONTH: The Phantom (1996)

The Phantom has all the ingredients of a true pulp classic: Oriental pirates, mysterious native tribes, a plucky heroine, a quest for supernatural artifacts, feckless treasure hunters, sexy sky pirates (led by Catherine Zeta Jones), lost islands, corrupt city officials and a costumed comic book hero.

The year is 1938 and evil American business tycoon Xander Drax (Treat Williams) will do anything he can to lay his hands on the three Skulls of Touganda, which when brought together can generate an unstoppable energy force, and it's up to "the Ghost That Walks" aka The Phantom (Billy Zane) to ride out of his cave lair on the island of Bengalla and stop him.

Stylistically heavily influenced by the Indiana Jones movies of the '80s, The Phantom is harmless hokum but not without some moments of extreme silliness - such as why Kit Walker (Zane) can enter an otherwise empty room and then The Phantom appears and no one realises they are one and the same person?

And what would have happened if the first two magical skulls had been brought together in a room without a convenient giant map on the wall? How would they have indicated the location of final skull then?

Some of the film's special effects (for instance, the view out of Drax's office window is clearly a painting and not a very good one), and stunts, are rather dated and let's be honest: The Phantom's purple body suit and domino mask may work in the comics, but look rather suspect in the flesh.

The climatic duel between The Phantom's magic ring and the power of the skulls, as wielded by Drax, pushes the corny cheese factor just a bit too far and the whole story is probably too simplistic for modern audiences, but the film still manages to evoke the feeling of the pulp era Saturday morning serials.

SAW WEEK: Saw - The Final Chapter (2010)

The ironically named Saw; The Final Chapter (there are already further movies and possibly more, I guess) was full of surprises.

The biggest being that I came away from this gory offering with great admiration for the tight plotting of the whole franchise to date.

This episode had ties to numerous events - but possibly not explained - in previous chapters, and I like to think was all planned from a very early stage.

Of course, this also further compounds the feeling I mentioned the other day that the on-going saga - which is seven parts of a single story - as much like a blood-spattered  HBO series as a horror movie franchise.

While occasionally looking like a cheap '80s cop show, and sometimes hampered by some hilarious overacting from key players in the story, Saw: The Final Chapter (aka Saw 3D aka Saw VII) manages to cram so much into the first hour that you think the credits are about to roll, and then a whole new development unfolds.

The film also brought back Cary Elwes as Dr Gordon, from the original (and best) Saw flick, which I wasn't expecting 

The first big Jigsaw trap takes place in broad daylight in a storefront window, which seems too public for a classic Jigsaw trap and appears to serve only to later reintroduce the survivors as members of a support group.

The main trap-driven plotline of the movie, which was presumably all set up before John Kramer (Tobin Bell) died (he appears in a telling flashback scene), centres around testing Bobby Dagen (Sean Patrick Flanery, of Young Indiana Jones fame).

Bobby has made a name for himself on the self-help circuit (which is where he crosses paths for the blokes from the storefront trap) after publishing a book documenting his supposed survival in one of Jigaw's games. Only it's all bullshit.

So Jigsaw has Bobby kidnapped and then runs him through a series of tests, with the life of one of his friends and confidantes in the balance each time.

Let's just say Bobby isn't very good at these games.

Meanwhile, the police are closing in on Jigsaw's surviving accomplice, Mark Hoffman (Costas Manylor), who escaped the "reverse bear-trap" that Kramer's ex-wife Jill Tuck (Betsy Russell) put him in at the end of the last movie.

Hoffman is now on the hunt for Jill, who turns herself over to the authorities seeking protection and immunity.

I have to say, while it eventually all comes together very satisfactorily, I haven't been impressed for a while about how the franchise got hijacked by Hoffman's story.

As becomes increasingly clear in this chapter, he's just a deranged mass murdering serial killer, without the code of ethics (and superhuman engineering skills and limitless resources) of the more charismatic - but deceased - John Kramer.

I keep coming back to the conclusion, even though killing off the main villain and then continuing his deeds posthumously is a brilliant twist, that John Kramer's Jigsaw would have made an archetypal Batman villain... and I'd have loved to have seen a gritty crossover with the Christopher Nolan era Batman movies. 

While the planned sequel to Saw VII never got made, as box office interest in the franchise was waning, I'm looking forward to finding out how this all ties in to 2017's Jigsaw... and then Spiral: From The Book of Saw.

A Tale of Two Exorcists

After Paul Schrader had filmed Dominion: Prequel To The Exorcist, the studio took it away from him - because his psychological horror was not the gore-fest they'd wanted - and handed over the reins to Cliffhanger's Renny Harlin.

The film underwent a major rewrite, some recasting and an almost total reshoot and emerged on the silver screen as Exorcist: The Beginning in 2004.

Schrader's version - although highly anticipated (this was the man who wrote Taxi Driver after all) went unseen until all the Exorcist films were released together on DVD in the early 2000s.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure if the wait was worth it. Dominion is very rough round the edges, and while it builds slowly (like the original Exorcist - but totally devoid of the genuine fear that film still invokes after all these years) and the threat level is allowed to gradually develop as the madness of the demon Pazazu spreads out from its hiding place, nothing very substantial actually ever materialises.

And the "suddenly everything is better" ending is shameful.

Both films follow a young Father Merrin (Stellan Skarsgaard), who has left the church to pursue his passion for archaeology after a crisis of faith during the Second World War.

In 1947 East Africa he investigates a mysterious, perfectly preserved, buried church... and what lies beneath.

But where Dominion goes for discreet imagery and symbolism, Exorcist: The Beginning relies on in-your-face shocks and a gruesome body count. Merrin in this film is more a shotgun-wielding, babe-snogging, tomb-robbing Indiana Jones than the conflicted priest of the earlier iteration.

The film's main female character - a doctor - changes from the 'average/normal' looking woman of Dominion into the Swedish beauty of the second (as Harlin says in the 'making of' doc: "You don't go to the cinema to see everyday people").

The African natives, who play a smaller role in the The Beginning, have also learned to speak perfect English. The language-barrier was something that Schrader had used in his version to emphasise the differences and rising tensions between the locals and the British Army occupiers.

Pazuzu itself, once it appears, has also been transformed from a floating baldy guy into a gravely-voiced, Buffyesque, butt-kicking monster with direct visual lifts from the original (something sorely lacking in Schrader's version).

Harlin's film also cherrypicks from other horror classics, for instance we get the flys from The Amityville Horror and mad priests and menacing dogs (in this case, hyenas) from The Omen.

This is The Exorcist for the Nightmare on Elm Street/Friday 13th generation, who don't like their horror to test their brains too much; but 'sadly' it's still a more exciting movie than Schrader's insubstantial meditation on the nature of evil.

The Tuesday Knights May Be On An Extended Hiatus, But The Gaming Wheels Are Still Turning

Today is the 17th anniversary of the first gathering of our gaming group, The Tuesday Knights.

However, we are currently on an extended hiatus - for various reasons we haven't gamed since May and now, of course, I'm rather entangled in a medical "mystery" as science tries to figure out why my legs aren't working properly!

I've thus pulled the plug on my supers' game, as Pete has stepped up with a new system he has invested in, to continue his long-running time travel/alternate reality campaign, which has so far bounced from GURPS Atomic Horror to Hollow Earth Expedition.

Next up will be Outgunned, which I'm very excited about as it's a game I was seriously considering picking up when it was launched through some crowdfunding programme or another. It's "cinematic action" vibe really appeals to me, so I'm looking forward to playing this.

I think we might still be playing in the same Indiana Jones-inspired inter-war setting in which our HEX game was set, presumably using the Outgunned Adventure supplement, although, to be honest, I wouldn't mind our characters sliding into contemporary bodies for a bit of John Wick/James Bond action.

In the meantime, I've superficially been kicking around some alternate systems for me to try out on the gang once I'm feeling better and Pete takes his next break from his long-running game (currently 32 sessions over 36 months).

Top contenders for further investigation on my behalf are:

GO FER YER GUN! But rather than a straight Western, I'd be looking to "Dark Tower it up" by easily blending some magic and monsters into the mix. This would be very easy to do with the simple d20 rules of Go Fer Yer Gun! 

ALIEN RPG (EVOLVED): I haven't read enough of the original edition to really get my head round the system, but there's a new edition out later this year (I didn't back the Kickstarter) and I really love the setting.

STAR TREK ADVENTURES (2nd Edition): I've never really grokked the 2d20 system that Modiphius uses to power most of its RPGs, but I know a lot of online buddies talk of playing in ongoing, long-running campaigns with this game. And who doesn't love Star Trek, right? I have the starter set for the new edition, just need to get round to reading the books.

PLANET OF THE APES: Another setting I adore. I can't help imagining the team as crashed astronauts on a post-apocalyptic Earth being pursued by trumpet-blowing gorillas.

The rules are variation on the old West End Games d6 system, which many, many people speak highly of although I've never played it. I didn't back the Planet of The Apes Kickstarter in the end, but the rule books are due out early next year.

BEYOND THE VEIL: While my previous possibilities are essentially variations on a theme, just with different settings, Beyond The Veil is nothing like any of those.

It's a roleplaying game about ghost-hunters in contemporary times. Not superheroes or trained astronauts, but members of the public - both believers and non-believers - brought together to scientifically investigate claims of the supernatural. It's The X-Files, Uncanny podcast and Stephen King horror, mingled with UFOs, cryptids and ghost stories, as read about through the pages of The Fortean Times.

Beyond The Veil is due to hit Kickstarter in a couple of months, but I already have the introductory Prologue booklet, which I'm halfway through reading.

Deadwax (2018)

To celebrate the resumption of my Shudder subscription I wanted to remind all you horror fans out there about the streaming service's selection of rare grooves and highlight one of its finest exclusive tracks that I unearthed several years ago: Deadwax.

From Indiana Jones's quest to find the Ark of The Covenant in Raiders of The Lost Ark to Norman Reedus tracking down the sole print of La Fin Absolue du Monde in Cigarette Burns, I have always had a particular penchant for stories about the hunt for cursed artifacts, sources of forbidden knowledge. 

Treading similar ground to the Constantine episode The Devil's Vinyl, Deadwax is an eight-part Shudder serial about Etta Pryce (Hannah Gross), a professional "vinyl hunter", who is tasked by one of her rich clients to track down the only pressing of a legendary record, that is said to drive those who hear it insane... or worse.

Etta doesn't always operate 100 per cent within the law, and so turns to her 'mentor', gadget-builder Ian Ullman (Xena's Ted Raimi), who also has contacts within the vinyl collecting world that can help our heroine.

Initially parallel to the main story, then intertwined, we also meet a police forensics officer, Len Perry (Evan Gamble), who accidently hears part of the 'cursed record' while at the scene of bizarre murder.

The mummified husk of the victim has had all the moisture drained from its body, while apparently listening to this particular record on headphones.

Even just listening for a second, Perry is touched by the effects of the mysterious sounds on the recording and his life quickly spirals out of control.

As each episode is only about quarter of an hour long, I'm not sure why Deadwax wasn't edited into a single movie. Unless the creators were trying to emulate the tracks of an LP, in which case they missed a trick in not naming each chapter a "track" rather than a "part".

That said, the strongest of all the episodes, which is almost a stand-alone horror story in its own right, is Part Four, which is a flashback tale about college radio DJ, Tuck Weston (Chester Rushing), and his encounter with the fabled record the whole series revolves around.

This chapter not only delivers some incredible backstory material for the story, but also amps up the strangeness that undercuts everything in Deadwax.

At the quality end of low-budget, while there's some weak rear projection moments on some of the car journey scenes in Deadwax, necessity definitely proves to be the mother of invention for the more surreal and weird effects that really bring home the Lovecraftian horror later on.

I know I bang on about "Lovecraftian" horror a lot, but while the recent Empty Man played to the cosmic horror of this sub-genre, Deadwax leans way more into Lovecraft's fondness for the dangers of weird science, with this story echoing several of his original stories in its ideas.

Written and directed by Graham Reznick, whose CV includes extensive work as a sound designer for numerous films, the unnerving creepiness factor of Deadwax helps gloss over the few cracks in the narrative.

Rather than resorting to cheap jump scares, this is smart horror that relies heavily on its viewer actually projecting themselves into the story and accepting that this could be happening to them.

Game For A Laugh

Looney Tunes Monopoly, which we played earlier this month, was one of the best

What some of you may not realise about me is that my gaming interests aren't limited to just roleplaying games and skirmish wargames. Rachel and I also host an (almost) monthly Monopoly Club.

Joining us at the table are Clare and Pete, making this a kind of spin-off from the Tuesday Knights (our roleplaying group).

Pete is a collector of the many, many themed-Monopoly sets and so every time we get together we play a different iteration of Monopoly.

In the two-and-a-half years we've been going, we've traded property and bankrupted each other in the worlds of Dungeons & Dragons to Harry Potter, James Bond to The Simpsons, and Indiana Jones to Scooby-Doo.

Our little group not only keeps a running league table of our various victories but also a table of our gradings of how well produced and how innovative these reskins of the classic game are. 

If you want to learn more about our adventures in board gaming (or just check out some of the eccentric hacks of the classic original board game), then please visit Don't Talk About Monopoly Club (it's the first rule of Monopoly Club).

All this talk of board gaming, reminds me of the recently announced documentary: The Hobby - Tales From The Tabletop.

This fascinating dive into the culture of board gamers "explores the passionate world of modern board gaming, following enthusiasts who find community and meaning through games".

PULP PICTURE OF THE MONTH: The Legend Of Tarzan (2016)

To cut a long story short, The Legend Of Tarzan wasn't just the best action movie of the year it was released, but also found a place as one of my all-time favourites.

Director David Yates' period piece is as near perfect a Tarzan tale as I could have hoped for, drawing on Edgar Rice Burroughs' source material (as well as the popular pulp era movies) to serve up a true edge-of-the-seat, straight-forward, non-stop, roller coaster of an old school, ripping yarns adventure.

Simply put, they don't make films like this any more... more's the pity.

It's Africa in the late 19th Century and Belgium emissary Leon Rom (Spectre's Christoph Waltz) is the sole survivor of a diamond-hunting raid on the mythical city of Opar. Captured by Chief Mbonga (Guardians Of The Galaxy's Djimon Hounsou), Rom is offered a deal for access to the city's diamond supply: he must bring the chief's arch-enemy to him. This being Tarzan!

Tarzan aka Lord John Clayton III (True Blood's Alexander Skarsgård) has returned to England and is living the life of a lord with his lovely wife, Jane (Suicide Squad's Margot Robbie).

He receives an invitation from King Leopold of Belgium to visit the Congo and is reluctantly persuaded by American George Washington Williams (Samuel L. Jackson) to take up the offer, as George wants to follow up rumours of illegal slavery in the country.

Along with Jane, the two men head to Africa, and the pretence of John Clayton's invitation being a diplomatic issue is quickly torn asunder when Rom and his mercenaries attack the village where our heroes are staying, kidnapping Jane in the process.

The Legend Of Tarzan then becomes a race against time, not only to rescue Jane, but then to prevent Rom getting the diamonds to the coast to pay off a huge mercenary army that will soon be landing to enslave the country's entire native population to work for King Leopold.

As well as drawing on the traditional source material, both Burroughs' novels and the early films (there's a couple of Weissmuller yodels - but given a more bestial remix - as well as visual nods to my favourite Johnny Weissmuller outing as Tarzan: 1946's Tarzan And The Leopard Woman), The Legend Of Tarzan also draws heavily in tone and style from another of my all-time favourite pulp action films: Raiders Of The Lost Ark.

Waltz, while playing a variation of his usual deadpan arrogance, is essentially a different take on Paul Freeman's Belloq. The dinner scene between Rom and Jane is a clear homage - down to the knife-stealing - of the similar scene in Raiders, between Belloq and Marion.

The Raiders' tone is also reflected in the moments of levity that slip seamlessly between the darker, more violent, episodes (I'd cite the fight between Tarzan and a train carriage full of soldiers as a particularly strong example of the balance of action and humour).

The CGI effects are slick, dynamic, and beautiful, sucking you into the film rather than shattering any suspension of belief you may require for Tarzan's magnificent, superhuman, displays of strength, endurance, and agility, or his - and others- interactions with the fearsome wild life of Africa.

Kudos also to scriptwriters Adam Cozad and Craig Brewer for a screenplay that continually escalates to a monumental showdown, while cleverly weaving in Tarzan's origin story - in flashbacks - without reducing The Legend Of Tarzan to being simply yet another retelling of the 'birth' of Tarzan Of The Apes.

If you like old school adventure movies, particularly those that inspired, or were inspired by, Raiders Of The Lost Ark, then this is the film for you. It's exciting, inventive, and thrilling, modern-yet-retro, and a must see for Tarzan fans new and old.

THROWBACK THURSDAY: My First VHS

The first film I saw on home video was Battle Beyond The Stars, which my parents rented for me on the way home from purchasing our first (top-loading) VHS player.

However, the first tape I actually owned (and still do) was Raiders Of The Lost Ark, which my parents gave me as a Christmas present when I was 15.

In the early days of VHS, when we were just renting the cassettes, I had a policy of watching every film five times before we had to return it.

You have to remember, back in the olden days, films came on TV (or at the cinema) and if you didn't watch them when they were shown, you had to wait until they were shown again (which could be years later... or never).

Until 1982 (when the creatively named Channel 4 began broadcasting), we only had three channels of television to chose from in the UK.

So, to a budding cinephile and storyteller, the invention of home video was a game-changer.

Imagine, one day not being able to watch a film you wanted to, and the next day you could watch it as many times as you liked, whenever you liked.

For months, I even kept a log of every film I'd watched on tape (until I missed one, and that threw my system completely out of whack and I gave up on that exercise... See, I had control issues even back then!).

One of my few remaining vivid memories of my childhood is - rather bizarrely - crawling under my parents' bed to see what they'd got me for Christmas and finding the Raiders tape.

I was so excited! Even though it wasn't going to be a surprise now, I knew I would soon be able to watch this amazing movie as often as I wanted.

And I suspect, although I lost count, I watched that tape of Raiders Of The Lost Ark (which remains the film I've seen most often in the cinema) way more than my mandatory 'five times minimum'.

THROWBACK THURSDAY: One Post Isn't Enough To Celebrate The Eternal Beauty Of Karen Allen

After last week's celebration of my most enduring childhood crush, Karen Allen (particularly in her role as Marion Ravenwood), I just couldn't get her out of my mind.

So, I sat down to watch Raiders Of The Lost Ark again.

What a great film. It really is non-stop, gliding from set-piece to set-piece thanks to Spielberg's glorious pulp alchemy.

And Karen... oh, Karen, such screen presence and such a strong character.

As one of the few people on the planet who seems to actually enjoys both Indiana  Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull and Dial of Destiny, I guess I should roll them out again for some more Marion magic, but, really, I can get all the fix I need from continued revisitations of Raiders.

It never gets old.

THROWBACK THURSDAY: Karen Allen - My Most Enduring Childhood Crush

I watched Raiders Of The Lost Ark again the other day, as it's one of my "comfort films" that help centre me in this crazy world in which we're living.

It is also the film I've seen most times and the most times in the cinema.

Part of the appeal, on top of its pulpy majesty, is the presence of the stunning Karen Allen as Marion Ravenwood, the plucky two-fisted bar owner who doesn't take crap from either Indiana Jones or the Nazis.

Unlike most young boys of my generation I was never the big Princess Leia fan (that would come later as I grew to admire Carrie Fisher the person), it was all about the tough cookie Marion with her lovely freckles.

I clearly recall that the second time I watched Raiders on the silver screen, I spent the whole duration of the movie transfixed by the sight of Marion (ie Karen Allen), rather than watching the film as a whole.

From her iconic first appearance in her bar to her final moments with Indy, I was hypnotised.

After the second or third viewing at the cinema, 15-year-old me even wrote to the movie's production company, trying to get an autographed photo of her. Instead I got back a simple head shot, that I still have framed and on display in the office.

In more recent times, I acquired a signed photo of her from Raiders, through eBay, but the provenance is a bit iffy, so I'll never know for sure if it was really signed by her hand. But, to me, it's the real deal!

MONSTER MAYHEM: Tarot (2024)

A clichéd group of generic college students have AirBnB-ed a spooky mansion in the Catskills for a drunken (yet, admittedly, rather tame) birthday party for one of their number: Elise (Larsen Thompson).

Low on drink, the group search the house and discover - behind a "keep out" sign - a basement reminiscent of the Warren's 'storeroom of evil' from The Conjuring franchise.

Of course, the kids poke around. Of course, they find a deck of creepy, hand-drawn tarot cards in a wooden box. Of course, one of the students - Haley (Harriet Slater, aka Fran from Indiana Jones and The Dial of Destiny) - knows how to do readings.

Breaking the 'golden rule' of tarot (that you don't use someone else's deck), Haley does tarot readings - tied to the subject's horoscope - for all her friends and herself.

They all have a good chuckle, except Haley's ex-boyfriend Grant (Wrong Turn's Adain Bradley), and then settle down for the night.

After a long drive back to the university, the gang all go their separate ways... and that's when the killing starts.

Elise is the first to die, then Lucas (Wolfgang Novogratz).

Only then do the survivors realise that their friends are being bumped off in ways that are literal interpretations of Haley's vague, metaphorical tarot card readings.

Searching for answers online, the first name their Google search throws up is a discredited - and kooky - expert called Alma Astrom (Olwen Fouéré, the most recent Texas Chainsaw Massacre's Sally Hardesty).

Alma, of course, knows all about this cursed deck of tarot cards and their origin, and even has a personal connection to the cards - as a survivor of a similar murder spree to the one our protagonists are caught up in.

In a nutshell, the cards were cursed by a Hungarian peasant - known only as The Astrologer - who transferred her essence into the cards so she could kill any who receive a reading from them.

Now, our heroes have to find a way to remove the curse before too many of them are brutally slaughtered by The Astrologer's manifestations of the demonic forms she drew on the Major Arcana.

Written and directed by Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg - based on the 1992 novel Horrorscope by Nicholas Adams - Tarot feels like an '80s throwback, direct-to-VHS, monster flick.

However, as the film is really on-the-nose with its unsubtle, supposedly spinetingling, goings-on it also comes across as a parody of the genre for the most part.

The characters are so two-dimensional that we can't really get invested in their fates beyond a surface level, yet - for some reason - all the kills (essentially the 'selling point' for this kind of teen flick) are either off-camera or overly shy about showing anything resembling gore.

The script oscillates between wanting to be the foundation of a serious horror franchise, stylistically suggesting Final Destination and Nightmare on Elm Street during its 92-minute runtime, and being a tongue-in-cheek send-up of the same.

As the plot gets increasingly silly, characters are forced to exposit about how these unconvincing twists could actually have happened, which compounds the suggestion that this really could be a parody.

To be fair, Tarot isn't awful (we've all seen a lot worse), but the most terrifying thing about this would-be horror movie is its mediocrity.

Apollo 18 (2011)

As we all know 1972's Apollo 17 was NASA's last manned mission to the Moon (to date).

Or so we were led to believe.

My latest bargain Blu-Ray purchase, Apollo 18, posits a top secret mission in December 1973 to plant Cold War listening devices on The Moon, but something went wrong and that's why the Americans have never been back.

Then apparently in 2011, a whistleblower dumped 80 hours of video footage from the mission online, from which this 'found footage' style, faux documentary, was assembled.

Now, I thought I was over the 'found footage' craze shortly after the market was saturated with ill-conceived Blair Witch Project knock-offs, but recently I've stumbled upon a couple (this and the superb As Above, So Below) that have made me reconsider my prejudices.

One thing Apollo 18 gets right straight off the bat is that it doesn't hang around. Within minutes of introducing the three astronauts we're going to be following they're in space and then on The Moon.

And the speeding train doesn't slow down. It's not long after they've landed that the weird shit starts happening and, given the speed with which events unfold, you find yourself wondering how director Gonzalo López-Gallego is going to keep Brian Miller's script running for the film's 75-minute duration (it's listed as 86-minutes, but the balance is just the closing credits).

But fear not. The pacing is superb throughout, and, barring a couple of lukewarm jump scares (one's played for laughs anyway), the story is somewhere between a modern Doctor Who and Event Horizon in its atmosphere.

In fact, I would make an argument for Apollo 18's possible inclusion in an unofficial headcanon of the Alien film franchise timeline.

After all, it manages to keep the incident (except for the 2011 'leak') under wraps, with only the Department of Defence being in the know, and takes a very measured approach to the possibility of an extraterrestrial lifeform.

Already plagued by communications interference, the astronauts of Apollo 18 discover evidence of a heretofore unknown Soviet mission to The Moon, but then begin to suspect that there's also something 'inhuman' up there with them as well.

The film's footage looks, for the most part, as though it's aged, period stock, encapsulating López-Gallego's eye for authenticity that - to an untrained, unscientific eye like my own - feels as though the 'found footage' could have been genuine.

Except for the unfortunate fact that - and this is no reflection at all on the actors, who are all wholly convincing - I recognised the men playing the three lead characters: Capt. Ben Anderson (Warren Christie, from Alphas, Batwoman etc), Lt Col John Grey (Ryan Robbins, from Riverdale, Arrow etc) and Commander Nathan Walker (Lloyd Owen, from The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones).

But, let's be honest, the story is ultimately so far into tinfoil hat conspiracy theory land that no one is really going to believe it's real.

That said, it appears to have been convincing enough that NASA felt the need to put out a disclaimer.

Apollo 18 does a smashing job of maintaining its verisimilitude, right up to the denouement where we get the "official" explanation of what happened to the three men.

Within the context of the story, I bought the reason for NASA never returning to The Moon one hundred percent.

If you can accept the movie's premise, of being 'lost footage' from a classified American space mission, then you should love this.

As Above, So Below (2014)

A reckless treasure hunter (Perdita Weeks) leads a team of explorers into parts of the Paris Catacombs where tourists aren't allowed, in pursuit of Nicolas Flamel's legendary Philosopher's Stone.

As Above, So Below is a bit disorientating to start, with a segment of illicit Indiana Jonesing by Weeks' Scarlett Marlowe in the Middle East to get a glimpse of a hidden effigy that works as a Rosetta Stone for translating the clues to the Philosopher's Stone.

However, things settle down once Scarlett arrives in Paris with cameraman Benji (Edwin Hodge), who is shooting a documentary about her quest (which ties in to her father's tragic suicide).

Very quickly the subterranean expedition descends into a seemingly doomed old school D&D-style dungeoncrawl, as the team battle their way through environmental hazards, traps, and obstructions that seem to take on increasingly mystical aspects.

I'd avoided this film for years, knowing it was shot all POV, with hand-held shaky cameras, an annoying style of film-making that should have died out years before.

However, I was very pleasantly surprised by As Above, So Below, written and directed by John Erick Dowdle, as, once the action shifts into the catacombs, it's actually quite easy to accept this style of cinematography in this tight and oppressive setting.

There's a sequence reasonably early on where one of the party gets stuck in a narrow tunnel full of human bones, and it is genuinely terrifying and intense.

The hand-held camera actually brings you into the moment, and you will feel claustrophobic watching it.

For me, this film was a contemporary Dungeons & Dragons expedition, with a large, well-equipped party that manages to get out of its depth, and gradually sees its numbers whittled down in gruesome ways.

Without a score, the movie's atmosphere hinges largely on diegetic sound, which gets suitably funky in places, as the protagonists blunder from encounter to encounter trying to find their way back out.

However, the deeper they are forced to go into the underworld, the more mythic and surreal events become.

The smart script blends real beliefs about magic and Hell, with a hefty dollop of movie-making license to create a genuinely memorable horror flick.

While As Above, So Below doesn't quite reach Baskin levels of madness, the movie skirts very close to that style of Lovecraftian insanity in places, and there are some very clever visual tricks along the way.

Would I have preferred it if it had been shot "properly"? Of course. But as shaky-cam films go, this is one of the best.

The Good, The Bad, The Weird (2008)

A self-styled "Oriental Western", The Good, The Bad, The Weird has to be required viewing for anyone interested in high adventure pulp action in the "Back Of Beyond".

A Korean movie set in 1930's Manchuria with three larger-than-life characters and one massive MacGuffin - a treasure map - leading to an epic chase across the desert, with some spectacular set-pieces and grand scale shoot-outs.

Lucky thief Tae-goo (Song Kang-ho) stumbles across the map while robbing a train, but psychopathic sadist Chang-yi (Lee Byung-hun), and his posse, is already after the map and ice cool bounty hunter Do-Won (Jung Woo-sung) is after Chang-yi - who he believes is a famous killer known as The Finger Chopper.

The rest of the film is pretty much one long chase, peppered with gunfights, martial arts, vehicle stunts etc

Two set-pieces stand out in particular, the fight around the "ghost market" (a town's black market area, which is patrolled by its own gang of thugs), which marks the half-way point of the film, and then the monumental "everybody chases Tae-goo" sequence which leads into the third act. This latter segment throws in a large detachment of the Japanese army and a gang of marauding bandits - each faction keen to get ahold of the map and find the treasure.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of these set-pieces, unlike many Hollywood blockbusters (e.g. the later Indiana Jones films, the Star Wars Prequels and The Pirates of The Caribbean sequels) is they don't look like video game levels, but genuine, old school, thrilling action with real actors, real props, real horses etc - not CGI!

As you may have guessed from the title, the film lifts a lot of ideas - and visuals - from classic Spaghetti Westerns - with the final three-way confrontation between our protagonists being the most obvious - but serves them up in a distinctly Oriental style.

Two hours is perhaps a bit too long for a movie with such a simple plot, but the constant action and subtle wit of the script make it thoroughly engrossing, so you don't notice the time.

The DVD comes with an alternate (Korean), extended ending which opens the doors to a possible sequel, although I actually found the ending as shown to be just as satisfying.