Alright, so, as I mentioned in the games thread, I recently picked up a copy of Dead Island.



It became apparent to me very quickly that this game was a bit too over-the-top to take seriously, so I decided to pretend that I was watching the whole thing as a movie, and see what would happen. It might suck. It might be interesting. Who knows!



The first thing I had to do was pick the main character. My options were:



She might be undercover, but her body sure isn't. I might be interested in her, if she didn't look frighteningly like Lisa Rinna.

She's also retarded. She's a gun expert or something, but apparently her special move is pulling a gun that she always has on her out of nowhere and using it, which means that she has a gun literally the entire time and decides to spend the first chapter of the game using a paddle with visible shark bites out of it instead.





Well, apparently this guy is like an ex-football star or something, who ruined his knee in an illegal street race or something. He seems like an expy of Left 4 Dead 2's Ellis, except without all of the things that make him interesting.





Apparently he's really good with blunt weapons, and he's a rapper. As awesome as it would probably be to see him give zombies a beatdown while busting some mad freestyle, this guy just looked so ridiculous that I couldn't help but imagine that he was a younger Crusher, and that he'd run around the island yelling "YAW YAW YAW" all game.

That left...



Apparently she's a secret member of the Hong Kong secret police, which makes a decent degree of sense. After all, why wouldn't the Hong Kong police send operatives into the middle of freakin' nowhere to spy on rich American tourists? She currently works as a receptionist at the hotel. Easily the best character to center a movie around.

Now, the character's name is Xian. I don't speak Chinese, so I have no idea how that's pronounced.



After a few hours of deliberation, I decided I didn't care any more. Shawn sounds right. For the rest of this story (and so I don't have to take any more forays into the dark, frightening world that is deviantart), Shawn will be played by Brenda Lowe.



SOON TO COME: EPISODE ONE

In which Shawn commits several felonies, meets Mike Tyson, and then dies.

What makes Dead Island such a compelling movie is that the main character, Shawn, manages to avoid being just a stock action girl.



Shawn has an awful lot of depth and complexity to her, and every horrific situation serves to peel back a bit of her elaborately-constructed facade and reveal the complicated soul which lies beneath.

At her introduction, Shawn introduces herself as a member of Hong Kong’s secret police, whose only wish in life is to make her dead father proud by following in his footsteps.



Sadly for Shawn, she’s been marginalized by the chauvinistic, male-dominated police force, and shipped off to Banoi to work undercover as a receptionist, and spy on all of the wealthy, hedonistic American clientele. This profound exploration of gender bias, patriarchal dogma, and socio-political commentary is somewhat ironic, since the fact that Shawn hasn’t been given any real cases to work on probably has less to do with her X chromosomes and more to do with the fact that by telling all of this to us, she’s pretty much openly admitting to being an undercover secret police officer and stating her exact secret job function out loud to someone who’s only just met her. I mean, who the hell taught her how to be stealthy?



I’m actually anticipating a twist ending wherein instead of the stereotypical “brilliant girl with so much wasted potential finally gets a chance to prove herself, and everybody ultimately admits just how wrong and prejudiced they were” plotline that Shawn’s backstory sets up, it turns out that Shawn was an incompetent, completely incapable waste of space that the Hong Kong higher ups only kept around out of a begrudging respect for her late father, until her bumbling finally caused them to ship her off to Banoi. This interpretation would explain a hell of a lot of Shawn’s actions.

The movie starts off in a hotel room. Apparently something awful has happened. There's no real indication of what, mind you, but it's probably pretty terrible. There can be no other excuse for why Shawn’s hotel room is so dark.



Come to think of it, why is Shawn even in a hotel room anyway? She’s an employee, not a guest. But before the audience can fully ponder this continuity error, Shawn starts hallucinating, and sees the words "GO TO THE EMERGENCY EXIT STAIRCASE" floating in the air in front of her.

Either Shawn is an athiest, or she doesn't read English very well, because she completely ignores the advice, and heads into the bathroom. She’s unable to get any of the taps or the toilet working, but grabs a medical kit that was lying on the counter, in case of emergencies. There might be other things there, but the zombie darkness had completely overcast the room, and Shawn has no idea whether she owns a flashlight. While trying to figure this out, Shawn jumps, ducks, runs in circles, and throws a few air punches.



Giving up, Shawn wanders out into the next room, wondering if a flashlight might perhaps be there. There are a few guests lying strewn about the room. Despite having literally just acquired a medkit, Shawn makes no attempt to administer first aid, which probably means that those guests were total dicks when they were checking in.



Instead of taking their pulses, freaking out, or having any kind of normal human reaction, Shawn instead elects to take their wallets, and rifle through all of their luggage. Again, we literally have no idea what the crisis is at this point, so evidently Shawn’s first instinct in an emergency is to start stealing everything that isn’t nailed down. Actually, now that I think about it, maybe that’s what Shawn was doing in the hotel room. She probably realized that the police thing was a dead end, and decided to adopt an exciting new career as a petty thief, and the whole zombie thing just put a cramp in her plans.



After having looted several rooms, Shawn apparently remembers that she’s supposed to be vacating the premises, and heads for the staircase. This leads to another floor, with several baggage carts, from which Shawn loots approximately $13 each. What’s troubling about this is that these are supposed to be rich tourists. $13 will buy you approximately one daiquiri in a place like Banoi. But maybe it’s an all-inclusive resort or something.

Her hopes of a thievery career dashed, Shawn decides to take the elevator. There really aren’t enough words to explain just how bad of a decision this is.



After plunging several stories down the elevator shaft, Shawn proceeds to get bitten to death by zombies. Surprisingly, this doesn’t prevent her from getting up a few minutes later and shocking the hell out of the guy who was about to bash her head with a stick. There’s no good explanation for why Shawn survived that, and one of the characters makes a point of mentioning just how improbable her survival was. After all, those weren’t love bites!



Then suddenly everybody’s standing around screaming about how some guy named Cinnamon is stuck out there on the beach, and needs to be saved. For whatever reason, despite the fact that there are like six muscular young men in the room, everybody decides that the skinny Asian chick really ought to be the one to save the day here. The rationale for this is that Shawn survived being bitten, so she's the chosen one who can save everybody or something like that, but that's kind of a stupid reason, if you think about it. How do we know that it wasn't a one time thing? Besides, it's not like the zombies aren't straight-up trying to murder her even without the biting, so it's not actually much smarter to have her go instead of them. In fact, in the opening chapters of the game Shawn's status as "the only person who can go outside" was mentioned so often as a flimsy excuse for asking Shawn to do things that she clearly had no qualifications for that I’m actually wondering if the whole thing isn’t just a series of elaborate attempts to kill Shawn off.



Bizarrely, despite the fact that they were practically shoving her out the door, Shawn wasn’t actually allowed to go and save the guy without a weapon. She eventually found a battered boat paddle near the door, and apparently this qualified. I later found out that one of the guys who was standing around yelling at her to go save Cinnamon was hoarding a massive selection of weapons, including a Morningstar and a mace. Seriously, what the hell were they doing letting her go outside with a paddle? More importantly, where did those weapons come from? It makes sense that things like kitchen knives, machetes, and hammers would be lying around, but I kind of doubt that Morningstars are high on the list of standard vacation equipment.



Anyway, clutching her trusty paddle, Shawn went outside, attempted to whack a zombie with it, and promptly got her face bitten off.

To my complete shock, that didn't mark the end of the movie, nor did it feature Shawn getting up, lurching over to Cinnamon, and devouring him. Instead, she just kind of lay there for a few seconds and got back up, having somehow lost a lot of money. Presumably this means that you can buy your way back from the afterlife, but since Heaven's streets are reputedly paid with gold, currency would be pretty worthless, so the relatively cheap price of reincarnation means that it's probably safe to say that Shawn's repeatedly coming back from the bowels of Hell.

Anyway, on the second go round Shawn made mincemeat of the shambling hordes, and saved Cinnamon, who turned out to be a rather dopey-looking guy with a Maori facial tattoo.



Naturally, Cinnamon had no time for pleasantries. The building that the survivors were hiding in was obviously completely unsafe, so the only option was to send out Shawn the chosen one to go clear out the lifeguard station so that they could hide out there instead.

Heaving a sigh, and her trusty paddle, Shawn set off.


SOON TO COME: EPISODE TWO

In which Shawn stumbles into an episode of Lost, has a barbecue, and shamefully validates an age-old Asian stereotype.

Episode Two will be up shortly - imageshack appears to be down right now, and if I can't get it working I'll switch to another service.

EPISODE TWO:: SIDEQUESTS

Shawn marches into the lifeguard station, armed with her trusty paddle, and slaughters all of its undead inhabitants. As she storms onto the roof, a radio blares out a distress call from an Oceanic jet liner that's busily engaged in crashing. Shawn attempts to radio back and tell the pilot where he could land safely, such as all of the miles and miles of beaches surrounding the island, but no such luck. After radioing approximately thirteen thousand times, the plane eventually flies overhead and crashes into the jungle somewhere. Shawn tries to radio back and tell them to look out for smoke monsters, but no such luck. Guess they’re boned.



Afterwards, all of the cowards from the beach hut move in and start making demands of poor Shawn. These are largely uninteresting requests to fetch one thing from one place and bring it to another. Memorable among these is the woman wearing a tragically small bikini, who appears to be shivering. As I predicted, she begs Shawn to retrieve an item of clothing for her.



But instead of asking Shawn to bring her a coat, or a pair of pants, this woman asks for a necklace. I'm personally awaiting her inevitable death of hypothermia in act III. There's also some dick in a loud Hawaiian shirt who asks her to repair the lifeguard station's antenna using a signal amplifier that he'd left at the lighthouse.



She climbs to the roof to investigate, on the off chance that her awesome Hong Kong policing skills had included a course in radio repair. Nope, no dice, so guess she'll have to go steal the amplifier from the lighthouse, completely boning any survivors there who might have had the same idea. After this, Shawn climbed down from the roof, at which point Randy started yelling at her that she was going the wrong way. This was an awfully dickish thing to say. Demonstrating the age-old adage that you can either ask someone to risk their life by going out and singlehandedly slaughtering a lighthouse full of zombies OR you can bitch at them for not immediately going out to do your bidding, Shawn pulled out a machete. Several choppy seconds later, Shawn stared, amazed, as Randy stood there completely unharmed.



This was actually incredibly disconcerting, for a number of reasons. First of all, if these guys are all impervious to being stabbed in the throat with a machete, why on earth are they sending 98-pound Shawn out to do all of their dirty work? She gets punched and beaten around to the point where she should be missing more teeth than Dawn. But then it occurred to me that perhaps I was looking at this film in entirely the wrong way. What if the reason why Randy is unkillable is that Randy never actually existed in the first place?



In fact, if you look at things this way, it explains almost every single WTF aspect of the game. Let's pretend for just a second that literally everybody else on Banoi is dead, and Shawn is the only person who's managed to survive. That explains why all of the "real" people in the game are completely unkillable, why you can't talk to or interact with any of them unless they're asking you to do a quest, why certain NPCs will request literally infinite bottles of water or cans of food, and why none of the five or six different people who've promised Shawn that they'll be off the island in a matter of minutes have been able to actually do so. It also explains why Shawn is the only person that anybody can trust to run any errand, no matter how small. Hell, if you factor in that Shawn is already borderline retarded, then it even explains why they repeat the same two lines of dialogue over and over - she's just filling in the blank space with meaningless chatter to keep herself from realizing that she's all alone.



It'd probably also explain what's probably the creepiest part of the show so far. After the zombies had been cleared out, whenever Shawn approached the building, the gate opened all by itself. This was a pretty... interesting security feature, to say the least. I mean, having a lifeguard station that's inaccessible enough to be used as a fortified bunker probably countermands the whole guarding of life, but having gates which open automatically whenever someone gets near them could be considered something of a drawback in a zombie apocalypse scenario. Of course, the other possible option is that there’s someone inside who has a remote gate-opening device.



That would mean that someone has to be existing and opening the gate, though. But if they can operate that kind of tech, I can’t help but wonder why they can't figure out that two cans of food isn't enough to feed eight people. Perhaps they attended the Matt Quinlan school of arithmetic.



Another guy asked her to grab a can of gas to burn a bunch of zombie corpses, the rationale being that the zombies would be attracted to the smell. Exactly why the zombies would be attracted to the scent of themselves is beyond me, since they'd be smelling that particular stench literally all the frickin time. Not to mention, you’d think roasting flesh would probably be pretty freakin' distinctive, along with the smokestack a zombie pyre would create.



Now, on the off chance that there's someone who read this thread for any reason other than to look at Brenda pictures, this is probably the part where they'd go, "Wait, didn't the preview for this episode say something about Asian stereotypes," to which I'd respond, "You're right, but this episode took a crapton of time to put together, and I didn't get to it, so it'll show up next time, I promise." In the meantime, here's another Brenda picture, you lustful cads, you.



SOON TO COME: EPISODE THREE

In which Shawn totals a pickup truck, puts in a day at the office, and has a bad acid trip.