Cleared: Priest

Well, tonight I was in the mood for a cheesy action movie, so I swung by a redbox on the way home and rented Priest. And what I got was indeed a cheesy action movie. That said, it's not terrible as cheesy action movies go. The fights are fairly decent (if completely physics-defying), the story is passing fair (if utterly formulaic), the actors aren't awful. It's not a horrific, painful thing to watch, at least not if you do so at home on your PC while doing other stuff like I did. One thing I really did like about the movie is that the vampires weren't all beautiful and sexy. In fact, they were nothing of the sort. They were eyeless, gruesome, leech-like things and that was really cool. (In fact, they were a completely separate species, rather than cursed or infected humans and that was cooler still.) The filmmakers also did a nice job of stirring some varying genres together in a way that actually felt far more seamless than it normally does; depending on where the characters were, you got either Dystopian, Post-Apocalyptic, or Western feel, but it still felt like the same world. That was cool.

RPG notes: Aside from the movie's new take on vampires, this was about the most formulaic thing I've seen in over a year, which sadly means there really isn't too much else to glean from it as far as game ideas go. But let's linger on the re-imagining for a moment, shall we? There's a lot of value in the idea of taking something and making it look different in a game. In fact, that was one of the things I really liked about how Paizo did Pathfinder monsters - yeah, they're the same critters with the same capabilities and usually a pretty similar role. But the flavor and appearance are changed just enough to feel different. That can be really valuable and can let you get more mileage out of familiar elements than you otherwise could. Beyond that, you have a really smooth genre-mash, but that's hardly new, if a lot of fun.