Twisted Metal (TV Show) Review

Twisted Metal - (10 episodes of ~30 minutes, Peacock, 2023)

This is a show about post-apocalyptic delivery men using heavily-armed vehicles to fight murderous clowns. If you are looking for more than that? You won't find it. But if you want enough gratuitous violence and profanity to delight your inner 12-year-old? It delivers.

The only thing it's lacking is nudity, but this isn't the 1980s and that sort of thing is reserved for serious adult dramas instead of B-movie material. In exchange we get the talents of Anthony Mackie (Falcon from the MCU) who brings his charm as John Doe, Thomas Haden Church (Sandman from Spider-Man 3, that guy from Wings and Sideways) as a manically subdued police officer, and an interesting team-up of Samoa Joe (multiple belts in pro-wrestling) as the body and Will Arnett (Come On!, Arrested Development) as the voice of murderous clown Sweet Tooth.

That last one deserves some extra praise. Samoa Joe does a damn good job bringing the character to life and with any luck we will be seeing more of him. Will Arnett does a great job with the voice acting, but it's a very physical role and Joe plays it beautifully.

Rounding out the cast are Stephanie Beatriz (Rosa Diaz in Brooklyn 99) who is meant to be tragic, but just comes across as sulky, Neve Campbell (Sidney Prescott in the Scream films) as the intimidating leader of New San Francisco, and Jason Mantzoukas (perfume magnate Dennis Feinstein from Parks and Recreation) who plays, as always, a psycho. There's a bunch of crazy factions besides the clown and his followers including a convoy of trucks that never stops moving, the aforementioned police officer and his mall-cop followers and your obligatory, tire-wearing raiders.

That's why as much as I'd like to, I can't call it the Car Wars show. That 1980s era wargame by Steve Jackson also featured a post-apocalyptic society with fortress cities and heavily-armed cars fighting across surprisingly well-maintained highways, but it tried to stay grounded. The most absurd organization was EDSEL, an organization that hated heavily-armed cars so much they would attack them on sight with their own, equally heavily-armed cars. I'd mention that they also hated irony, but I believe irony didn't exist in the United States in the 1980s.

Twisted Metal is actually based off the eponymous Sony videogame, and the idea of putting guns on cars was probably dreamt about shortly after the first Model-T left the lot. Most people credit the Mad Max movies (though Max's car wasn't armed) with the idea, but nerd historians trace it back to Alan Dean Foster's “Why Johnny Can't Speed” in 1971. Which is just a long roundabout way of saying anything that looks like a rip-off is probably lawsuit proof.

Plus if you are looking for autodueling? There isn't much. Mackie gives a speech at one point where he talks about balancing offense, defense, handling and speed which would ring true for any Car Wars fan. Do you install a two-space turret for $1,500 and an extra 200 pounds to get 360° firepower for your weapons, trade that in for an extra 20 points of armor, install an extra rocket launcher or ride light and not have to worry about a bad driving roll sending your car into a flip?

Instead we get a bunch of cars speeding around and it's... OK? There are some admittedly cool scenes where people throw tomahawks into the skulls of other drivers, but nothing like the multiple calculations and trade-offs that my overly sugared teenage brain would have to consider before announcing my next Car Wars move using cut-out cardboard makers in the basement rec-room.

I'd tell you about the cars, except I don't really remember any of them, except for the purple hearses driven by a particularly loathsome faction's enforcers. Instead I was kind of amazed at how great product placement works in a post-apocalyptic show. Normally I never comment on the things around me, but if I saw a Double-Frosted, Cherry Fresh Pop-Tart with Self-Toasting Package™ for the first time in decades? Yeah, I could see myself launching into a speech about them. Of course if your product is being featured in a show where people get casually murdered and have PG-rated sex in abandoned fast-food playgrounds? You may not want that as a brand manager. Unless you are Rice-A-Roni. That cameo was impeccable.

So if you like to see Anthony Mackie act like a more charming version of Will Smith, then kill a bunch of guys with CGI blood explosions, and curse while doing so with some funny bits? There are worse things to check out. Oh and one major plus, there are ten episodes but each one is only a half-hour so it fits perfectly when you need to veg out between the endless grinding responsibilities of adulthood.

Shadowrun - Fixer Levels

Came across this and it seems as relevant as ever. Feel free to use this to instruct your players on their place in the cyberpunk hierarchy.

...

You are at level D. That makes you a D-Lister. Your fixer's name is Benny.

Benny is known as a person of interest to the local law enforcement community. He himself only makes introductions and people are grateful for those introductions. That's why they give him money, otherwise they do not get further introductions

Once you move up to the C-List people start using their last names. Given names like Mr. Adams who is a lawyer or maybe just looks like a lawyer or maybe just talks like one. Instead of saying "I know a guy" Mr. Adams will say "I have a client in need of services." Anyway, the phrases change and the money gets higher, but so do the risks.

When you get to the B-List? That's when people stop using names entirely. You'll probably have a cool street-name and the person hiring you will call himself Mr. Johnson. This is obviously not his real name.

Be careful as names have power and that power is reputation. A person who you don't know? He doesn't face the consequences of his actions if he decides to screw you over. That's the B-List. The money is really good and the risks are really high

Paradoxically at the A-list everything goes back to normal. At this point you probably have a steady client list or there is a corp or other organization you work for full-time. They recognize the value of a good asset and are not going to screw you over. This is the level where real names start coming back into play including things like bank account numbers and Social Security numbers.

You will probably have a title like security consultant or executive protection services and everything will be nice and legal. You won't even have to run away from the cops anymore. That's the sort of work that you can farm out to B-Lister's.

E-listers have no fixers. They either burnt their fixers by acting like amateurs or refused to pay their bills or they're just starting out and have no idea what they're doing. Or they are just street scum. It's not good to be an E-Lister.

Gothic Genres Mood Music

Sometimes you want some mood music and thanks to music streaming sites? You can can get it in all the colors of the rainbow. If music came in colors.

But what if you wanted mood music that would fit a particular sub-genre of Gothic horror? Well normally neither I nor the streaming service of your choice would be of much help, but someone who can is Jack W. Shear. While no longer available, he did a deep dive into the Gothic in his Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque which included a detailed breakdown of Gothic sub-genres, including suggested playlists.

Entirely for my own benefit, I took those suggestions and converted them into Spotify playlists, but there's no reason I should have all the fun. Besides there's some good tracks on there so you should check them out. Also sort by title since the default is by the name of the artists as I added them.

The playlist for the Macabre Dozen, along with a short description of the environment they are trying to invoke is below.

Cold Northern Wind

The Gothic is about mood as much as anything, and nothing generates mood like the environment. Decrepit castles and windswept moors? You probably are already conjuring an image of a virtuous heroine in a nightdress. But what if the environment was further north, into the icy wasteland of the arctic where the grip of the encroaching ice is only eclipsed by the encroaching grip of madness?

Dark Medieval Times

The Gothic leans heavily on the medieval as a symbol of dark superstitions and passions that are not as forgotten as we would like to believe. Why not cut out the middleman and plunge your PCs directly into the medieval era, and not the sanitized D&D version. There's no shining armor, just dirt, blood, fear and death. It's 1183 and everyone has knives because you are all barbarians

Southern Gothic

This is practically cheating. The Gothic is all about buried secrets and here it is in 2023 and the State of Florida wants schoolkids to believe that slavery wasn't all that bad. You can't throw a goblet or elaborate candelabra in the American South without knocking over a Gothic trope.

Behind the Facade of the Seaside Town

You guessed it. This is “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” and all of Lovecraft's referencers. There's a reason for this. Not only is it a great story, and the linchpin of Delta Green? It's also about every conflict between locals and tourists (or town and gown if you prefer) dialed up to eleven.

Pilgrims in a Strange Land

Did you ever read The Crucible by Arthur Miller and think “Those poor, poor pilgrims.” No? Imagine yourself a sinner in the hand of an angry god, fleeing from the licentiousness and immorality of a continent wracked by war and strife. You and a small group of the righteous make it to a pristine, new land. Only to face a dark and implacable wilderness. And then you learn, to your dawning horror, that your own colony is rife with sin and corruption.

The Urban Gothic

I was pleased to see Dark City on this list, and if you haven't seen it you should totally watch it and fast-forward past the first minute. It's an opening monologue that tells too much. You don't need ancient crypts and lonely castles to invoke the Gothic. There are plenty of dark secrets down unlit alleyways and in dusty record halls. Help is also far away when you are just another nobody among the teeming masses. Be careful though that you don't veer into Noir territory.

Pagan Outskirts

There's been an unusual resurgence of Folk Horror lately and I'm not sure where it's coming from. I really need to see Midsommar because that's the only thing I can think of that could be causing it. The big influence here is the amazing The Wicker Man which was remade with Nicholas Cage. He was in enough good movies that we will give him a pass on this.

High Gothicism

Shear defines this as the peak of Gothic popularity in the late 18th - early 19th centuries with a focus on taking the disturbing elements of the Gothic and placing them in a conveniently backwards, European locale. This suited the prejudices of UK and American readers just fine and also played well with the dawn of Romanticism. The end result was Vincent Price hamming it up in low-budget Edgar Allan Poe flicks, so all's well that ends well.

The Gothic West

Bleak landscapes? Check. Stagecoaches carrying innocents through dangerous wilderness? Check. Fiery passions barely held in check? Double check. The Spaghetti Westerns with their intense atmospherics paved the way for a Gothic take on the Old West but the 1990s Western revival, including the release of horror RPG Deadlands really showed how flexible the setting could be.

Inside the Black House

Abandoned castles and isolated mansions feature prominently in Gothic fiction, but what if you take the entire setting and condense it down to a single building? Mike Flanagan's adaption of The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix showed that such a location can be both sprawling, claustrophobic and filled with terrible secrets just waiting to be uncovered.

The Pit Stop in Hell

Enough with the harpsichord recitals and vague feelings of dread. Let's bust out the fake blood, fire up the motorized gardening implements and fight some cannibalistic slashers. This setting is pitched as a high-action interlude in a regular campaign and is a clear homage to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and all its imitators. The idea of a seeming refuge turning into a desperate struggle for survival may not be Gothic, but it has its antecedents in The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells and The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell with obligatory SMBC comic link.

Through the Looking Glass

Like The Pit Stop In Hell, this is pitched as a way to introduce a tonal shift to give a new perspective in an ongoing game. Perhaps after defeating the Big Bad Evil Guy the PCs now discover that the world wasn't as simple as they thought. The normal becomes strange, up becomes down, and beans become peas in a surrealistic shout-out to Lewis Carroll. L. Frank Baum, and David Lynch. One influence that Shear cites is the highly underrated JAGS Wonderland which is definitely worth a read.