Psychopath's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[Monkey Vampire]

Gross, hilarious, unadulterated and deranged, just like always. Good ol' Noiserover, you're like the gritty, underground Brad Neely. One of the things I've always appreciated about your work is that you always release the SWF with the MP4, a feature that's becoming more scarce going forward these days. I'm sorry I missed out on this during October. This felt like a nice throwback to that premium shit from the 2000s. Here's to looking forward to the next episode of Frank & Perry.

noiserover responds:

I've been off newgrounds for a couple years so I never saw this. Thanks for the great comment!

[Ever Been On The Smiler?]

I never like it when someone just repurposes a video from their Youtube account to here. How lazy do you have to be to not splice out the "please subscribe!" segment of your video? It's a splash page of social media links that don't work because Newgrounds doesn't have annotations and of course you'd be too lazy to throw together a SWF file and god forbid you have to do two lines of programming to make your social media links actually work.

I was going to vote five on your movie until I saw that.

FoxyHazarDar responds:

Jesus christ. Does it really matter?

[It's A Mad World, Charlie Brown (2017)]

I thought this was going to be the sequel, why bother with a remake? Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the obvious bump in quality, the backgrounds are immaculate & beautiful, the scene with Schroeder was massively enhanced from the original, & the scene where Charlie actually kills Lucy is much better, it was more fitting than the cleaver & better animated too. I know what it's like to feel dissatisfied with the quality of an animation you worked one a few years ago & wanting to perfect it, but some aspects are actually worse than in the original.

Take for example the panned shot of the moon when Lucy is murdered, in the original it was a crescent moon surrounded by clouds & it was very well done & tastefully arranged. In this new version, you used a full moon, but it looks horrible. You didn't even draft craters into it like you did in Charlie Brown Murders, you took the Brush tool, set the alpha to a low percentage and covered a yellow circle in transparent brown smears focused near the center. Sometimes recycling some of your older assets isn't the worst choice.

Other changes also felt unnecessary. In the remade scene with Schroeder, you added a fireplace, catalog-tier furniture and it's all excellently designed, but it feels like it's overdone. One of the more important nuances of Peanuts was that it was largely down to earth, pedestrian even, & you captured that quite well, I thought. It feels like you lost sight of that aspect for the sake of technical superiority, which you achieved but it just feels a bit hollow by comparison. That center shot of the Beethoven bust had a poignancy to it, everything felt balanced and just right from a tonal perspective. More practically speaking, Schroeder lives in a house in the suburbs, not an eighteenth century mansion, you feel me?

Speaking of tone, I will admit that I do miss the Necro soundtrack, and I know you can't use it anymore but it did keep in with the unadulterated vengeful tone from Charlie Brown Murders, but now it's a purely classical soundtrack. The horrorcore soundtrack verses the classical helped put a divide between Charlie's worldview and how the world is seen and felt by others, it really put it into perspective that Lucy, Schroeder & Linus live in a whole other world from Charlie, it framed his resolve & his outlook. I'm sure there are some royalty free horrorcore tracks out there somewhere, maybe even some here on NG.

The satanic undertones in the original IAMW Charlie Brown were interesting, but now it doesn't feel like he has genuine hate for Lucy at all & is driven just by insanity. You included the opening to Dance With The Devil at the end but made no references to Charlie's ties with the devil, the scene where he's scolded by a demon to murder Lucy was replaced by a nightmare of him being chased away by a tentacle version of himself. The imagery in that scene was so original and interesting, & I liked the puppet strings aspect of it, it added a layer of intrigue.

I don't get the change in direction to be honest, trying to make it more true to life without any of the occult themes feels like a letdown. I was really looking forward to a follow up to it, I felt like Dance With The Devil was very cleverly written & had lots of potential. I guess what I'm getting at is this; are there any plans to follow through on the Dance With The Devil plot thread or is that over?

I think it would've been better if you made the conclusion episode and packaged it with the remake as one video, because as it stands, it's like a Duke Nukem Forever situation where the follow up is promised for years and what we got is a re-imagined take of the original.

In a way, writing this all out and looking over it, remembering other people in similar boats like SqueakyToad & his Spirit of Halloween series and how that concluded, all has lit a fire under my own ass with my own unfinished business. I hope you read this and consider some of what I said.

Yours SINcerely
~Psychopath.

[Mexicoke]

Why depict a female character if you're gonna use a male actor & not even attempt to sound female? We do have female actors on Newgrounds you know.

[Emo Fudd]

That was actually pretty decent. However, I can't help but feel it would've been better if it were someone else, like Yosemite Sam, Sylvester or Pepe. The emo scene doesn't really click with Elmer Fudd, but it's obvious why you chose Elmer; it's because "Emo" makes for a fitting replacement, but only on the verbal level. At the very least, a reference to the Loony Tunes opera skit would've been a nice touch, since that's about the only time Elmer shows lament for trying to kill Bugs Bunny.

I wish I could like this more, but something just feels missing. Something about the two concepts just don't make a connection, sadly.

thisisaok responds:

Nothing makes a joke funnier than over explaining it. Thanks!

[Super Mario - After the Game]

Eh, this deadbeat Mario schtick is not really funny. What's the joke? Where's the humor? This is just an unfunny, dramatic downward spiral. This is so dull. Surprise is part of what makes comedy what it is & I can't even count the billions of times I've seen Mario go on a downward spiral just like this.

[The OMNIS© Powerglove]

That was legit a breath of fresh air compared to a lot of things that tend to end up on the front page. It's really nice to see a cartoon that isn't completely fucking obnoxious for once, even better when the author actually appears to care about being entertaining, rather than soapboxing, lazily sputtering gibberish for a cheap laugh or edgelording as hard as possible.

It's great to see dark humor that isn't pushing for the greatest logical grimderp extreme and shows a bit of personality.

The only drawbacks I can remark on are the technical ones. The animation is storyboard tier & the lip syncing doesn't match the dialog half the time. The other half, the character's mouths don't move at all. It looks like way too much effort was centered on the filter effects & not on what really matters in an animation, which is the animation itself. The specific way the lip syncing is delivered really reminds me of the days when I used MS Paint because I didn't own a copy of Flash, how it's just an alternation of two frames; one with the mouth open, the other with the mouth shut.

I'll have to admit that it's not at all surprising that something this authentic came from an outside presence and not from anybody who has their roots in Newgrounds nomenclature or even the internet at large. If the otherwise were true, the people you credited in the description would be listed as authors with their own NG accounts, or at the very least the description would've been littered with social media links.

The pale color palette, the art style & the psychotic robot dog mascot are very reminiscent of early Flash movies & 90's cartoons. If I had to pick from each category, I'd say it's like Neurotically Yours blended up with Sam & Max.

Scrappo responds:

Hey Psychopath, thanks for your response! Your languemic systemic variables have been noted for future reference. We are inexplicably happy that you didn't find us "fucking obnoxious". It's true, we do care about entertainment. Entertainment to subvert the masses to bend to our will, teehee.

Tis true indeed that from Newgrounds venture forth not did we! I did post one film on here, ages ago, on a different account named after a villain from The Great Morano comics. It was about a cat, that fires lazers from its face.

But alas I'm rambling, let me address some of the animation notes. I honestly view this more as a detailed animatic, or something more akin to Neely comics where the focus is much more on the story and characters than the fluid animation. Plus everything looks shiny so you can almost look past it. Well at least some of us can, you psychopath! Boy is it fun calling you that.

You see the reason the animation is so incredibly limited, is because the truth is I made this on a 3 day sleepless binge as an assignment for a science class, and I also ended up using it as my final animated film for the year. Sometimes I do wish to go back and edit the movie, add more animation, but I have far too many current things to do to George Lucas myself.

I am definitely inspired by early Flash movies and 90's cartoons, so that would make sense. I'd say for this short in particular I was mostly inspired by Mickey Mouse himself, and perhaps some simpsons and invader zim.

Thanks for commenting on the film, we're really glad you liked it and it makes me especially happy to see people actually thinking critically about the work. Thanks!

[REBIDENT EBIL]

It makes me glad to see that people are finally realizing that this style of parody is completely unfunny garbage. There is nothing funny about giving characters retarded facial expressions & reducing every syllable in a sentence down to gibberish. What moron came up with "REBIDENT EBIL" for the title?

I can bet dollars to donuts that the only reason you took this key jingling approach is because you saw other hacks like Oney, Spazkid & Screwits do it with unwarranted success. It's like the olden days of fanmade Awesome parodies, only those were made in earnest fandom & not a calculated measure of coattail riding.

That would explain why instead of making jokes about things that happen in the game, you invent all new non-canonical shit that never happens. Why is Jill wheelchair bound? Why is Chris an oblivious spastic? In my day, parodies were written to satirize something that was true to the property in question. At no point do you satirize anything that's exclusive or even relevant to Resident Evil. You could've taken the same script and replaced the Resident Evil cast with wholly original characters and it would've made absolutely no fucking difference. You could've even kept the same character names & I still wouldn't have any way of inferring it ever had anything to do with Resident Evil.

What point is there in making a parody when the content is so utterly divorced from the source material?

PhantomArcade responds:

Definitely a warranted observation! Though I've also never been huge on parodies that feel exclusive to only fans. If I'm going to take the time to make a cartoon, I'd like for anyone to be able to have fun with it while also tickling fans. I would have liked to think that RE fans could enjoy it even with friends who don't know the source material.

Definitely something to consider going forward, thanks anyway!

[Cutest Thing of All Time]

♫This song gave me diabe-be-be-be-be-betes♪

["ClayRevolution"]

Way better animation than Knox, it's much smoother and the use of your hands in frame to reveal the opening title was very impressive. Bravo.