#sentditreviews

This is a brand new series where I’m going to be going back to a show I watched in my childhood, taking off the nostalgia glasses, and analyzing it as a show. I hope you guys enjoy what will end up probably being the length of a book analyzing each of the 200 episodes of Sailor Moon that I watched when I was 13.

So a bit of background with me and Sailor Moon. I used to watch this when I was a kid. When it aired her in Canada I was five years old and I fell in love with it. I’m a guy but I grew up not giving a shit if people judged me, i looked at gender roles or gender specific entertainment and basically said “fuck that” and watched it anyway. But then my mother banned me from watching the show, but not for the whole “it’s a girl’s show” reasoning.

It was during the episode where Zoisite incapacitates Tuxedo mask with a shard of something that I started crying. i had a very sheltered childhood when I was a kid, my mom tried to cut any deadly violence out of my television watching (I know, my mom didn’t want her five year old watching people kill each other, she was actually a good parent). I was at my grandparents watching the show, my grandmother was sewing upstairs and my grandfather was at work (both worked, my grandmother probably just had the day off, she wouldn’t remember if I asked her anyway). I remember thinking, “Oh my God, he’s dead.” I knew what death was at the time I’d just never really seen it in fiction before this point. So little, very emotional, five year old me held myself together until I was shopping with my mom but I suddenly broke into tears in the store. I told my Mom about the episode and she banned me from watching the show, as it was my favorite show at the time I cried even more. You have to understand, this is the mind of a five year old having witnessed what he thought was the death of a fictional character he liked. Now I cry during Clannad.

So because of that my new favorite show, or the one I would go out of my way to watch the most was Yugioh, then crappy teen sitcoms. Until much later I came across this AMV (240p warning, it’s from 2006):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWxs8jGJPww

Watching the beginning of this I remember literally thinking “Holy Fuck, Sailor Moon”. So I looked it up and found the English dub by DIC. Now I loved rewatching this. It brought back nostalgia and allowed me to relive a small part of my earlier childhood. Over the next two years I watched the entire series in both English and Japanese. I watched this on Vimeo, I mean youtube was around but it wasn’t at that point where you could post that stuff, it was something about time restrictions of the era of youtube and it was long before people would sue you for uploading episodes or even make money off of youtube. I could find full 21 minute episodes there and this guy had posted the entirity of the DIC and Ocean dubs onto Vimeo with no water marks and in good quality (which at the time was 480p). But I didn’t just watch the anime. Became obsessed with the franchise though I couldn’t get a hold of the manga (which now now own all 12 glorious volumes of, it’s really a great manga and I’ll cover it at another time). I watched the live action Japanese TV show that’s extremely reminiscent of Power Rangers, but shittier. I followed the fandom which was no where near as large as it is now (due to the manga’s re-release and it reaching #1 best seller with the first volume). I remember following a series by a creator called xkaosu called Sailor Moon Sacrifice.

And then it came out... two years later... I had pretty high expectations but I was pretty new to the whole, fan created thing. I was that aggressive fanboy that would yell at anybody who would go against it saying it didn’t look good because I desperately wanted it to be and it wasn’t I felt betrayed and I know know how stupid I was to both feel betrayed and expect a lot out of a person on the internet, well back in 2008 at least.

But then I found SMA and I thought it was the funniest fucking thing ever. Looking back on it now it’s actually pretty poorly made and a lot of other abridged series including Yugioh Abridged at the time had much better production quality under a similar if not identical time and money budget. I guess if I have to give them credit for anything it’s that they didn’t continue with the series when they lost their passion for it, and they were the first team to create an abridged series as opposed to being a single person, which lead to groups like Team Four Star forming to make some of the best abridged series youtube has to offer.

Sailor Moon is also what got me into anime. After two years of watching Sailor Moon or Sailor Moon related products exclusively I branched off.

From here I found shows like Azumanga Diaoh and Lucky Star. After Sailor Moon I actually mostly watched Moe Slice of Life but the only two that I remember in a good amount of detail were Azumanga Diaoh and Lucky Star, both of which I will eventually cover on this series as they are much, much shorter than Sailor Moon.

Then in 2012 the manga came out. I had this awesome librarian who bought like 100 something volumes of manga from many different series including Sailor Moon for the School Library so I read most of my manga from her. She proceeded to do the same at a school called Centre High that I went to for post secondary upgrading.

And I didn’t like Crystal. The art style of the manga was not drawn to be animated and Toei animation, the original animators were in the right to adapt the characters to their own design.

So that’s my background with Sailor Moon.

So I’m not going to hate on this movie, I actually really like it and I don’t think it’s boring in the slightest. Though this is more of a mini review as compared to some of my others.

Blair witch does a lot that most found footage films and even horror films haven’t done since. It creates this sense of tension while using completely natural ambient sound in an attempt to show how the human mind can perceive different aspects of nature and turn them into something frightening given the right pretext. This is more of a theme of the movie, how being lost can be scary and how fear can cloud your judgement, while at the same time allowing a supernatural entity to live in this, abiding by the real world’s rules.

So I want to talk about the aspects that this does very well that most horror films don’t do.

1. The Blair Witch Project was released as actual found footage that had been pieced together into a documentary. At the film festival it was released in people weren’t told that it was fake, in fact it was advertised as actually having had happened. The actors in the film didn’t show their faces until the Oscars for the year it came out, that was when it was fully revealed that it was completely fake. And this movie had people scared out of their wits because they thought it had actually happened. And why not? Forests are terrifying and extremely ominous at night time. Even staying out in the country for a few nights at a time there’s something very scary about the idea of not being heard if you’re being attacked, forests feel like they do in the film and getting lost in them is even scarier, this is speaking from experience.

2. The main characters of the film where real people and their conversations sounded real. What I mean by this is that you can either heavily relate to somebody in this film or you know somebody that could. It makes it feel like this could happen to anybody going on a few days hike through the woods because just like normal humans these people have their own virtues and vices that they showcase throughout the film. Another aspect of these characters is that they’re all likable for some reason or another. It legitimately feels like they’re people on this trek, unlike the kids from “The Visit” or any of the people in “Paranormal Activity” who are filming for no reason other than paranoia, unless home made security camera systems are more of a thing in the states than in Canada (where I’m from). This is something I never see in a horror film. It makes horror a lot more frightening when you feel like it could happen to you.

3. They never show the Blair Witch in the movie. You see piles of rocks set up around the tents and in the middle of the forest. Their tent is attacked while they’re filming some time at night, You hear her laughter around the tent.You even see her attack the main characters but you never actually see the being. You can throw your defining characters at me but nothing is nearly as frightening as the Blair Witch to me because her entire appearance is left up to your interpretation. Just remember that human mind will create the most frightening thing they could have, their for making a movie monster that could scary anybody given the right mood.

For those three reasons “The Blair Witch Project” is my all time favorite horror film.

Age Rating - 14+ (PG-13 in the States) for vulgar language and body horror (you see a tongue and teeth outside of it’s body for about a minute)

Overall Rating -  9/10

Well. I no longer have a favorite character. though my two least favorites now are Mel and Elisabeth. That backstory was awesome to say the least and now we’re starting to get how they got their Holy Knight names. I mean this is one of those series that I’m going to have to own at some point just because of some of the characters. It makes a more tragic villain driven to insanity from Post Traumatic Stress and ends giving us a reason as to why Dianne doesn’t remember Harlequin for who he was, as well as giving a reason to his fatter form. It wouldn’t bring back her memories.

So this is where Anita Sarkeesian would start screaming about a damsel in distress plot. Well the damsel isn’t helpless in this situation, like at all. She getting out with only the help of Hawk, whom himself has been shown to be very useless in the series himself, having his crowning achievement being his taking out a sentry guard and, well the amount of things he’s survived, up to and including being cooked alive. But notice how the other female character in the team helped them by getting them to the gates of the city before the teleportation could even go through, with one of the most physically powerful characters in the series being Dianne. And having Mel being picked on whenever he acts perverted towards Elisabeth is a good step away from misogynistic views.

Spoilers