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[SPEAKER_01]: or joy, fresh cuts, immediate reactions to your newest favorite movie.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Moranians, it is Jeff here with I guess a Brian did a horror joy fresh cut.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This might be what we could call a horror joy stale slice.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Doesn't have quite the same ring to it although burning toast.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Something we have to concern ourselves with with the age of post 40.
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[SPEAKER_00]: What is actually happening when I smell burning toast?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Is it just burning toast?
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[SPEAKER_00]: I digress.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Anywho, I'm here to talk about Resident Evil.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I had a chance to see it after Brian did.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I wanted to go with Brian to see it on Thursday night.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Unfortunately, I was little under the weather because I just got back from BlizzCon last Monday.
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[SPEAKER_00]: and boy, BlizzCon, amazing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So lots of waiting and lines, lots of queuing, but lots of good news on the horizon for video game fans, particularly if you're video game fans of any of the Blizzard entertainment franchises.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Regarding horror, just a few quick notes, maybe a preview, a teaser, if you will have some future horror joy episodes to come.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We had an announcement about the Obla Five.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I won't spoil what that is.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Go to YouTube to find the teaser trailer to see for yourself, but there's definitely some horror to be discussed with that Diablo franchise.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And maybe it's a long time that I dive into that to discuss how we see horror and joy happening in Diablo.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So stay tuned for that.
01:35.474 --> 01:41.098
[SPEAKER_00]: Also, Starcraft finally getting a new game only 30 years, 20 years later.
01:41.138 --> 01:43.300
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know how long it's been since Starcraft 2 Hins.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I remember playing Starcraft back in the 90s on actual dial-up internet, where if one of your parents picked up the telephone to make a phone call, you lost because you lost your internet connection.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Fun times with dial-up modems in America online and all of that.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It seems this could be a first person shooter that would have some elements of sci-fi or hard to say, maybe like aliens, we'll come back to that at some point, it's not coming until 2030, which is a ways out.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But finally, coming soon, this spooky season, in fact, World of Warcraft's 12.1.5 patch, we'll be getting tailbound.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And you get to play out some spooky tales that are set in Drustvar, which is from Battle for Azeroth, or Reven Dreath, which is from Shadowlands.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe we get some big daddy's anathrius there to do some spooky vampire venteer type stuff.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We'll see where that takes us.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe I'll be able to get someone from Blizzard on the talk to us.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That would be great.
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[SPEAKER_00]: If anyone out there from Blizzard is listening, hey, shoot us an email.
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[SPEAKER_00]: horror joy pod at gmail.com and let us know if you are willing to talk because we would like to talk to you.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But, to the stale slice in the toaster, as it were, resident evil.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm sure all of you got to listen to Brian's take.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I agree with most of what Brian said.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Obviously we're going to have some differences because we're different people.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That's the beauty of this whole thing called reading texts, reading movies, interpreting movies, finding horror and joy all of it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But I want to start first with something Brian addressed and that I noticed immediately in this film and it's the video game quality of the way this entire thing is shot.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The first person shots, especially following the Flashlight and Gun, took me back to playing Resident Evil to playing a lot of these first person shooters that would have been on the PlayStation or the Sega Saturn or eventually the Xbox, right, and PC gaming as well.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There is something about that first person perspective that video games have been bringing to us for 30 years at this point.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Brian and I think have talked on the show before about how after 9-11 we see this increase in first person shooters in general with your call of duty type games.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That is what we then see also in these Resident Evil games and these games where you're shooting zombies where you're hunting the undead.
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[SPEAKER_00]: borderlands is another series like this.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So there's something really claustrophobic about that.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This is what some filmmakers or film critics refer to as the cinematic closet.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You're so deliberately restricted within this space that you can't see anything that's going on and that really helps build the horror of A, not knowing which is one of the greatest fears of humans.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Not the philosopher on this podcast but see also
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[SPEAKER_00]: But beyond that, it leads to jumpscares, and that is something that Brian wrote up on, I want to talk about jumpscares here, and more deliberately and specifically in a second, but just to finish some thoughts on how Krieger really frames this movie as a video game.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I kept thinking throughout, particularly by the end of it, if this is a commentary on how video games have altered our reality.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I know the part of our job here at Horror Joy is to seek joy, even in horror.
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[SPEAKER_00]: However, I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge some of the real atrocities and horrors that are ongoing in the world.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And how honestly we all seem...
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[SPEAKER_00]: unfortunately numb to those atrocities.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm thinking about the violence that's happening in Gaza.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm thinking about the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
05:36.653 --> 05:41.936
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm thinking about the decades at this point of genocide in Rwanda.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But we've seen him Yemen.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The news doesn't cover it, or maybe the news does cover it, and it just covers it so often that we've become numb to it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I wonder in some way if video games have contributed to this numbness, and I'm not about to go full right-wing parent here and claim that video games are the cause of mass shootings and school shootings and violence.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But I do think there's an effect where as video games get more and more hyperrealistic that we begin to
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[SPEAKER_00]: dissociate or maybe that's not the right word.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We begin to just see violence as common place.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We are the perpetrators of violence in these video games.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We're also sometimes the recipients of violence in these video games if you're playing something like another Blizzard title over watch or Call of Duty or
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[SPEAKER_00]: Going way back to my days and the 90s with the Nintendo 64-Golden Eye Shoutout to all my high school friends junior high school friends playing gold nine to the wee hours of the morning drinking more mountain Do then a human should but I think you know we are decades into playing these video games and as they become more and more realistic There is a legitimate question about where we draw the line between what is fantasy and what is reality?
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not necessarily saying that Krieger is making that commentary here with Resident Evil, but I can make the argument myself as a critic.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That Resident Evil is a massively great example of how we've seen those lines blur, and how we have troubled distinguishing now.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Fact from fiction, fantasy from reality, because of a culture that has been saturated in video games.
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[SPEAKER_00]: not saying this is like the cause of violence, but I do think it does change or alter our way of navigating life, of experiencing life.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In addition to that blurring of lines of what's real and what's not, I want to talk a little bit about how this movie,
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[SPEAKER_00]: as it's framed like a video game, get something right about many of us in 21st century life.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And that's what some cultural critics, some sociologists, to prefer to as main characters syndrome.
07:54.321 --> 07:59.085
[SPEAKER_00]: Typically, this is used as a way to punch down on like Gen Z in Gen Alpha.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I think fellow millennials, geriatric millennials especially, work guilty of this too.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Genectors and boomers, yeah, you're guilty as well.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Sorry, I can think humans in general are guilty of main character syndrome.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Video games, though, really set that in sharp belief.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They show us how when we become the main character, what happens around us?
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[SPEAKER_00]: What happens when we don't consider what's going on with others?
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I think you see this really clearly with our main character in the film.
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[SPEAKER_00]: and we're gonna come back to Austin Abrams performance too.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Okay moving on for video game quality and is that actually shifting our ability to perceive reality something worth considering.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Jump scares.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Brian talked about jump scares.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He has on the pod.
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[SPEAKER_00]: talked about before how he thinks they're cheap and they're not always good or like think of the none or the James Wand franchises, sorry James, it's true though.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I think Brian's right.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I think the jump scares in Resident Evil are used really efficiently and productively,
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[SPEAKER_00]: And they're not cheap.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And this is something we saw too in weapons.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I think Krieger is very good at using a jumpscare productively Without making it seem like you didn't know it was coming, but be it's not this like cheap way of horror It's actually humorous because it does cause that break
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[SPEAKER_00]: in the suspension of disbelief to realize that, you know, you're surrounded by other people and it evokes laughter.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's great.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Again, we saw that throughout weapons.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I think we see this again in Resident Evil.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Even the Resident Evil I would argue is a slightly darker film than weapons for obvious reasons.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This film, to that end, had a lot more humor than I expected when I was going in.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I think we're beginning to see this is a hallmark of Krieger's filmmaking.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He has films that are deeply horrific in ways.
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[SPEAKER_00]: but they are balanced with humor.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I wonder if that might be because we are living on a timeline that does have so many active horrors, active real horrors going on, that to present a film like Resident Evil in its truest form as this post-apocalyptic shooter, this post-apocalyptic bio-hazard zombie-type film,
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[SPEAKER_00]: would be too dark at this moment.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so we need some of that levity that humor brings to keep pulling us back from the precipice, less we jump, right?
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[SPEAKER_00]: With that, some of the horror that we get to see in this film that is balanced with humor, Brian talked about this in regards to class relations and I think that's true, but I wonder if this is the horror of modern medicine, where our delivery guy
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[SPEAKER_00]: these hospitals and no one's paying attention to him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There are all these people who hip-a violations left and right because you can see everything going on in some of these rooms.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There's just an in-attention and just a, almost a automaton nature for some of the people who are working in health care.
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[SPEAKER_00]: could that be a commentary on what it's like to work in health care post-COVID?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Could that be a commentary on what it's like to work in health care during a Trump administration that continues to cut funding to rural hospitals, which raccoon city is not a rural hospital, but it seems that the hospital that that we were at before is, in fact, rural ish.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe that's the beauty of being able to read attacks in so many ways.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Finally, the horror of genetic meddling.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not someone that is particularly anti-science or anti-like playing with genetics and maybe ways that could be helpful, but I do think that there are ways that can be actively harmful.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not about to wrap on my conspiracy theory tinfoil helmet, like most of the right in this
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[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know if COVID was made in the lab, I assume it wasn't.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But this virus, this whatever got out in Resident Evil, was made in a lab.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And it was in the pursuit of making a perfect human.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Is this an allegory for artificial intelligence?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Is this an allegory for just genetic modification in general?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Who knows?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Could be.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It seems like we might have a sequel in the store, given the ending of the film.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There's spoilers, but it does end with a bit of a red alert.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There's a sequel coming.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I think they made so much money on this.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They'd be silly not to.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I want to turn now in the last few minutes here to Joy.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I mentioned the humor in this film.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's hilarious at times.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The F word is dropped so many times.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Even, I mean, I say the F word, I just muttered this to myself.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I very much felt.
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[SPEAKER_00]: a kin to our main character, just saying fuck.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I do this literally walking around the hallway at work because everything is awful and that is just a way to motivate yourself to keep going just by recognizing it and just yelling or whispering fuck to yourself over and over again.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Austin Abrams amazing job in this role.
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[SPEAKER_00]: really great actor, you know, this is quote unquote according to a lot of the film critics is breakout role.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Sure, I hope so.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I imagine we'll see more of Austin Abrams.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He's shrieking at times, which is so realistic, while also comical.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So again, there's that clash of horror and humor throughout.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We get some fun cameos in this film.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We get Paul Walter Houser, who shows up as one of the guys from whatever corporation has developed his virus, and he shows up in the SUV to try to get our career to for
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[SPEAKER_00]: the antidote or with whatever special specimen they need to create the antidote.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And then once we get to the actual lab at self, we get a cameo by Zach Cherry.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And Zach Cherry, just such an understated actor, he's not playing himself exactly from severance, but it's very similar.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So look out for those.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And then this is the constant refrain of I'm bad at guns.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Given that there's just such irony there.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Given this game is a shooting game.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Shooting a gun in a game is not the same as shooting a gun in real life, and that's good.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe we should not be shooting guns at people in real life I think that's a joyful message even that might seem a little counterintuitive the way I phrase it there.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Sorry about that Well, I have you all here listening just a couple of shoutouts to some of our local businesses again next chapter book shop in Holidaysburg, Keystone heating and cooling
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'll give a little shout out as well to cartridge world, given the video game discussion that I had at the start of this stale slice.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Finally, as always, we have our ongoing collaboration with Hainson Holler's Apothecary.
14:37.470 --> 14:42.974
[SPEAKER_00]: That T has proven really great being a little under the weather, so thank you, Sage, for that.
14:43.915 --> 14:57.864
[SPEAKER_00]: Also, it is really gray and rainy and suddenly turned cold here in Central Pennsylvania because it is the first day of fall, as I record this September 22nd, and it seems that it is going to only continue to get colder, but hopefully not any more wet.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It is incredibly wet here right now.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We could use a dry spell and maybe some sun.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That would be lovely.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But that's all for me.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Listeners, remember, see joy, even in horror.
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[SPEAKER_02]: This has been an episode of Warjoy.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Produced in conjunction with Axis Mundi Media.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Thanks for joining us.
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[SPEAKER_02]: We want to hear from you.
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[SPEAKER_02]: You can find us at WarjoyPod on Instagram or at horrorjoypod on YouTube.
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[SPEAKER_02]: You can also email us at horrorjoypod at gmail.com all one word and you can of course find us wherever you get your podcasts.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Give us a like, subscribe, leave a review.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Until next time, remember,