The Week In A Bad Education Towers #50

Hello you! Didn’t realise until I started doing this that this is the 50th issue of the newsletter which has been back hitting your inboxes weekly since the start of the year. And thats good, right? Thats consistency, other than when I forgot and had to do a one paragraph saying sorry, but thats still something right? Well done me and all that, and lets see if we can keep it going till the end of the year.

The second best this week after hitting the big five-oh newsletters was the eldest passing his A-Levels, which was nice. Thats him fully done with school now, with Uni a month or so away. I am so very old.

The plan was going to be to go and see the new Blue Beetle film and then maybe Strays as a double bill but that didn’t happen. What did happen was that we had a family trip to go see Haunted Mansion.

And it was good! Well, alright.

I’ve not seen the original Eddie Murphy The Haunted Mansion so I can’t do a proper side by side comparison. I feel like thats for the best given that the film is out in not exactly a great period for Muprhy’s filmography.

But anyway; spooky mansion, people go into the mansion, oh lord there’s a ghost, lets hope we can resolve this without too many deaths. Its a fairly straightforward story, in that weird genre of family spooky film. Which is a weird place to be, as if a film is properly scary then you don’t want a kid to watch it so you have to aim towards spooky instead. By why should you watch this over the pinnacle of the genre, Ernest Scared Stupid? Not many reasons to be honest.

The cast is good though, you can’t argue that. LaKeith Standfield in the lead gives his role a surprising amount of emotion for what is at heart a caper film. Rosario Dawson gives plenty as well, anchoring the film around grief and how we deal with it. Thats not to say that its anything earth changing, but you don’t expect it in a film based on a Disneyland right you know?

So its funny, not too spooky but gives it a good go when it needs to but is probably about half an hour too long.

I did also go into a bit of a rabbit hole after this looking at other films based on Disney rides. Of course, there’s Big Daddy Pirates of The Caribbean and the previously mention The Haunted Mansion but there’s a couple of other as well; Tower of Terror which is a late 90s straight to TV film with Steve Guttenberg and then something called Country Bears that I hadn’t heard of but was apparently so much of a flop they nearly pulled the plug on Pirates.

Honestly. Can you imagine how different the early 2000s would have been if that had happened?

Ordered the physical release of Tunic a few week ago for no good reason, which arrived in the week. And its a lovely edition, so made a YouTube short out of it.

I’ve heard a lot about the game; its a Zelda style action RPG, with the main conceit being that the game is in its own language with no guide on how to play. As you go along you find pages of a manual that you build up, which is also in the made up language with the odd word in English. Its trying to invoke that feeling of renting or buying an untranslated Japanese game and then trying to figure out how to play it. Which its successful in; there’s enough familiarity to how it plays (basically classic 16bit Zelda with a dash of Dark Souls) then with trying to figure out the story and how you interact with everything,

The only niggle I have is that I don’t think I should have got it for the Switch; theres a fuzziness to the graphics with some long load times that makes it feel like it was meant for something a bit more powerful. Like, if I ever see this cheap on Steam I’m very much picking it up for my Steam Deck.

This weeks video ponders the question “is Gods on the Mega Drive just Amiga shovelware”?

So keeping it topical as always.

Also recorded the latest Conquistabores this week, which will be dropping into the podcasts feeds by next week, fingers crossed.

Thats it for now, time to watch some Person of Interest and hope that work gets cancelled for everyone next week.

Anyways, bye!