2016 Movie Madness Marathon

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Phulish
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Re: 2016 Movie Madness Marathon

Post by Phulish »

ReHerakhte wrote::D
I'm a member of a net forum called Quora. It's a place where people can ask questions and generally get them answered without all the crap that occurs on many other forums.
One of the most memorable questions I have seen on Quora was someone asking (paraphrasing) "How do people in Australia cope with all the dangerous animals and insects?" There's a strong perception that we are surrounded by lethal wildlife and to be fair, we have played up on that a bit... okay, a lot!
We really do have a large collection of harmful wildlife and are listed as the country with more species of venomous snakes than any other place in the world but it's no more dangerous than living in Africa.

Having said that, I have personally encountered venomous snakes many times and in cities, not simply out in the bushland. At my last workplace we had venomous snakes come into the building during breeding season, specifically Tiger Snakes and Dugites both of which can be lethal. The last one I saw was in 2013, it was a Dugite about 1.5 metres long (almost 5 foot) that decided to slither under one of the cars in the carpark and go to sleep. There was a decent stretch of undeveloped land on the left side of my former workplace, lots of tall grass, ideal place for animals to avoid people and thus a great place for those same animals to breed.
The company closed down in mid-2014 so whoever has that particular piece of real estate now will be having the normal Australian summer breeding season problem with snakes. We always knew when the snake numbers had increased because we'd see a lot fewer small animals (i.e. rabbits, bandicoots and so on) in that stretch of land.

One of the family cats was killed by a Brown Snake, another one of our venomous snakes that can prove dangerous to humans. And to be clear, I live in the suburbs, not on the outskirts of the city.
When I was still in the Army Reserve my unit was shadowed by some feral pigs one night (maybe not as large and ferocious as Razorback from the movie but still dangerous, as dangerous as alligators and crocodiles particularly as they are a lot more curious). In some areas, when on training, some NCOs are authorized to carry live ammunition to deal with feral pigs, water buffalo, feral camels, crocodiles and so on (depending on where in Australia they are training).

My father was in the Aussie Army and told me that when he was a junior officer (back in the 1960s), he had to co-write a report on a young soldier from his unit who had died as a result of a snake crawling into his sleeping bag when they were training out bush. Apparently he moved and disturbed the snake which bit him several times. He was dead before anyone knew what had happened and they only found out when they tried to remove him from his sleeping bag and the snake crawled out.

There's a good list on the Australian Geographic site of our top 30 most dangerous animals
http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/ ... he-top-30/

A bigger threat in Australia is the environment. Many tourists do not appreciate how large the country is, how small the population is in relation to that and how bare of resources the land is (both natural and manmade resources).
For example, the city I live in, Perth, is the capital city of the state of Western Australia. Perth is just over 2000km (1240 miles) from the nearest capital city, Adelaide in the neighbouring state of South Australia. 2691km (1672 miles) if you stay on the roads.
And in all seriousness, you might travel through maybe 20 to 25 towns in all that distance.
Dark Conspiracy adventures in this part of the world are as much about surviving the environment as they are about surviving the ministrations of the Dark Ones.

Australia is almost as large as the United States in terms of landmass but has a population of 23 million (as of 2013). The US state of Texas has a larger population than Australia but in a landmass that is nearly 3.6 times smaller than my home state of Western Australia. Western Australia has a population of around 2.6 million giving us a population density of about 1 person per square kilometre - so if you do go out into the "outback" make sure you are properly prepared. You can't walk to the nearest farm, road, river or railway like you can in Europe, the distances are too great.

If you do get into the shit in the outback, then to quote a song, "If you go out to the woods today, you're sure of a big surprise." The lack of population means it could be days and sometimes weeks before you're found. You will be found... eventually. Whether you're still alive is a matter of how well prepared you were and whether you tried to play any games with the wildlife.
I'm in Kansas City, MO and see copperheads and the occasional timber rattler. I actually knew from watching a mystery show that some critters in Australia are regional, they had a spider as a murder weapon that was not found there, like Black Widows are a southern U.S. spider. You guys have half the population of Canada! And a lot of room for Minions to roam free in a DC campaign! Sorry to derail the thread.
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ReHerakhte
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Re: 2016 Movie Madness Marathon

Post by ReHerakhte »

Hey Phulish, don't feel too bad for derailing, I have to accept responsibility for some (most) of that with my excessively large last post! :shock:
So, my apologies to everyone for derailing the thread :oops:

But yes, the continent of Australia has most of the population on the coasts so there's quite literally thousands of miles of land devoid of humans where the Dark Ones could be doing whatever they like.

If I can ever get the creative juices flowing to write up adventure scenarios, I really should get off my arse and put together something along the lines of that portion of the Hearts Of Darkness adventure set in Australia.
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Phulish
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Re: 2016 Movie Madness Marathon

Post by Phulish »

That would be cool. I might need to find "Day of the Animals".
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Morthrai
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Re: 2016 Movie Madness Marathon

Post by Morthrai »

Let's not worry about derailing this thread - it's just a list of movies after all :D What's impressive is that it's causing discussion about things that we haven't talked about before, and I for one would LOVE to see some authentic Australian adventures and seeds for DC.

Staying in the Wide Brown Land, Movie #7 was another nature-vs-human contest. I remember "The Long Weekend" scared the heck out of me when I first saw it as a teenager, and it still retains a lot of power.
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ReHerakhte
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Re: 2016 Movie Madness Marathon

Post by ReHerakhte »

Thanks for the kind words Lee :D
There is perhaps one bad thing in all of this though, new readers of the forum might not realize that this discussion took place because it's not in its own thread. Can it be copied into a separate thread or perhaps we need to build a thread map so people can locate various topics? I wonder if the forum engine allows attaching tags to threads so that various discussions can be searched for via catchwords?

But... back on track.
Sad to say, of all the Aussie movies that are useful for DC (or gaming in general), Long Weekend is one that I haven't actually seen.
I'll have to remedy that as soon as I can.

As for writing some Aussie themed DC material, I've really stumbled when trying to create game scenarios during the last few years. If I focus on other aspects of gaming, I can get the creative juices flowing long enough to come up with something but I'm having some sort of writer's block in regards to adventures. Anything I've tried writing lately leaves me quite dissatisfied.

Fortunately there's a lot of other avenues to explore, from Aussie mega-fauna (to use as Beasties/Critters) to mysterious phenomenon (e.g. Min Min lights) to Aboriginal mythic creatures and I don't just mean the Bunyip and the Yowie (for instance, they have a version of the vampire myth, a toothless - yeah, toothless! - creature that sucks the blood from its victims via suckers on its fingers and toes) to the challenges of the outback itself.

Going away for the weekend might involve a car trip of 300km (186 miles) one way - I used to travel from Kalgoorlie to Perth once a month to spend a weekend with friends, the distance one way is 600km (372 miles). Here that sort of travel distance is not seen as anything extraordinary but for newcomers it can seem quite unusual. It has supposedly caused some psychological discomfort for some tourists who are not used to the wide open spaces, an anxiety of getting lost and never being found or an anxiety of being hemmed in by the uncontrolled wilderness - hence why movies like Long Weekend work so well as a man vs nature theme.

Perhaps what needs to be written is "the Dark Conspiracy Traveller's Guide to Australia" :D
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Morthrai
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Re: 2016 Movie Madness Marathon

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ReHerakhte wrote: Perhaps what needs to be written is "the Dark Conspiracy Traveller's Guide to Australia" :D
Hmm, sounds good ;)
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Re: 2016 Movie Madness Marathon

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ReHerakhte wrote: Sad to say, of all the Aussie movies that are useful for DC (or gaming in general), Long Weekend is one that I haven't actually seen.
I'll have to remedy that as soon as I can.
Always a favourite of mine, remember seeing it on BBC2 in the 1980s and being fascinated by it. Kicked off an in interest in Aussie cinema so that I'd usually try and catch any films that'd be showing late at night on the telly over here. Or video them. I remember one called Summersby featuring Nick "Space 1999" Tate, more of a dark family drama than a horror film but had a very creepy atmosphere. I liked Razorback so much I actually hunted down the novel by one Peter Brennan - thought it was pretty crass compared to the film which is done with real style, as you'd expect from director Russell Mulcahy (he even made dour Michael Caine espionage drama Blue Ice look good).

Wouldn't mind seeing the 2008 remake of Long Weekend although I'm told it's virtually a shot for shot remake with the same dialogue so possibly redundant. Now I think about it, high time I watched the original again....
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Re: 2016 Movie Madness Marathon

Post by Morthrai »

Marathon Movie #8 was another of the old monochrome classics, the 1931 version of "Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde". For the time, the transformation effects combined with Fredric March's performance are pretty much spot-on. :twisted:
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Re: 2016 Movie Madness Marathon

Post by Phulish »

Just found "Snowbeast" on Amazon prime! Time to watch bigfoot munch on skiers.
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Re: 2016 Movie Madness Marathon

Post by ReHerakhte »

Well I started work on a Dark Conspiracy Traveller's Guide to Australia.
It obviously won't be anywhere near ready for the Halloween issue but it will be ready for the one after.
The biggest hurdle I can see is trying to convey the sense of space coupled with the lack of population so if you gentlemen are agreeable, I might throw some paragraphs at you over the next month to read and see if what I've written makes sense - I understand what I'm trying to say but that doesn't mean I'm explaining it well enough for anybody else to understand! :lol:

And as for movies, if you can find a copy, another Aussie movie worth collecting for DC is the 1977 Peter Weir movie The Last Wave (released in the US as Black Rain apparently) starring Richard Chamberlain.
It's one of those movies that informed my ideas of the mystical potential of Australia for games like DC.
It's been sadly neglected in terms of re-release with I think only Criterion having released a DVD of it but it can be rented on Hulu and iTunes and somebody uploaded a copy onto YouTube for those of us who can't get Hulu (like say, everybody in Australia).
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Re: 2016 Movie Madness Marathon

Post by Linden »

Watched the original Long Weekend again last night. Still a very fine, understated piece of work. Overt Dark Conspiracy elements are the lead man's enthusiasm for shooting at everything that moves or squawks, and the possibility that the beach is a hardened/sticky/circular Protodimenion. Being from the 1970s it's got a slightly retro feel: Big landrovers, flares and er...wife swapping. Also check out the orange and brown tent which is pure seventies. My mum and dad have got one just like it. :shock:
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Re: 2016 Movie Madness Marathon

Post by ReHerakhte »

I'm definitely going to have to watch Long Weekend before writing up more of DC Traveller's Guide to Australia. Naturally enough I wanted to include sources of inspiration and it sounds as Long Weekend is a must have.
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Re: 2016 Movie Madness Marathon

Post by ReHerakhte »

So...
I watched Long Weekend (the original not the 2008 remake) a short time after I posted the above.
There's an interesting incongruity that tips off the viewer that something is amiss... but only if you know about Australian fauna!
The movie is set on the northern coast of Victoria and yet Tasmanian Devils make an appearance. This is unusual because, surprise surprise, they're only found in Tasmania, an island to the south of Victoria.

I would hazard a guess that all the animal sounds were recordings of real animals and not special effects audio. The strange screaming growl sound is the normal sound of the Tasmanian Devil and has scared the crap out of many Aussies let alone visitors!
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