Blade Squad (1998) AKA: Inline Cops - Full Movie & Review!

This just writes it's self.

     I've been on a tear with Rollerblading again, even bought a pair recently to skate at work around the brewery. I've mentioned how I skated in the past, even got myself in a couple of magazines in the 90's.. so discovering more inline cinema cheese is going to be right up my alley. Science fiction? Check. Bad effects? Check. D List celebs? Super check. This is 100% something I would have watched as a 15 year old with nothing to do on a Friday and a 12 pack of Surge.

My backpack's got jets

    This movie is either the leftovers from Prayer of the Rollerboys pitch meeting (which I covered here), or a poor re-write. I see a lot of inspiration from that movie, Robocop 2, and the movie Hackers.  All movies that are guilty pleasures of mine, and really know how to channel the 90's energy. This is an obvious TV movie to series launchpad for the network, and just never really worked out, was believable in anyway, and didn't have enough star power to keep it moving. This is a piece of TV was locked in time, at the end of  decade when the popularity of something started to fade away, but alas it was too late, and the money was spent and script was written.

Channeling Bladerunner?

     The movie opens up to the busy streets of New York city, the smog and pollution in the distance- highly populated, congested, and fraught with overwhelming amounts of TV PG petty crime. The only solution for this distressed city is to police it with a crack team of inline skating 20-somethings with jetpacks on. David Bowie's "I'm Afraid of Americans" plays over the crime montage, which in this version, has been removed due to copywrite issues. I love this song and it the whole Nine-inch Nails thing he was going through at time. I remember seeing Howard Stern's birthday party on the E-channel, and watching him perform live thinking how cool he was, and questioned what time period he belonged in. I know now, that time is obviously the mid-to-late 90's,. Duh.

High Tech.

     They are being monitored back at home base with cameras that are not attached to the suits they are wearing, and are just moving around randomly, and makes no sense. They were trying to go for an Aliens thing with how that worked, and really just missed the mask. We get a really good example of what the team can do, jumping over trash cans and on to the backs of small time crooks. Ironically the city does not look that overwhelmed with people/cars in these scenes and montages, so a motorcycle would be more appropriate in 90% of these situations. I'm sure I'm going to mention this a few times, but I'm having a hard time wondering why we need to have rollerblades on for most of the movie. Speaking of...

24:40 is when this goes down.

     You really have to suspend disbelief here. This huge chase culminates in an abandoned warehouse that has super long stretches of open area. After a quick unnecessary grind down some stairs, and a wrist activated pulse of the jet-pack, our Blade Squad was easily able to overtake a sport bike on full throttle, and stop it just in time from hitting a wall. This is pretty much the theme for the rest of the movie. Really outlandish jump takes, jet-pack pulsing, and very little of the severe congestion and highly populated streets to navigate, which was kind of the reason this team was put together in the first place. I like the off-camera executions from the villain who looks like 1 part bully from Christmas Story, two parts Budnick.

I can't believe it's over.

    Wow. Really strange how this did not make it into a TV series. (cough) I see what they were going for, I really do. However, the show set up the premise and the rules right at the beginning, and violated them. It was explained very early on why the team was deemed necessary from the jump, then broke the mold and made exceptions right away. Shannon Elizabeth was a good casting choice for obvious reasons, and the main cast was not.. horrible. If they went a more sci-fi route, doubled down on the tech part, it may have had a chance to be a 90's cheese cult classic. This whole last paragraph was me trying my best to write a serious review about Rollerblading Cops... I appreciate you hanging in there with me on this one.

 

I created a blog and got 500k views.

Look at all those views.. but who cares?

      I think this should be some kind of milestone that most blogs strive to accomplish. I've done some research on this subject, with people asking other successful bloggers.. "How do I get to X point and make money on my blog?" In my case, it cost me zero dollars, has me me very little money, and took over 10 years. It should be noted that in the last two years I've earned the lion's share of the unique views with my new posting schedule; who knew that when you post, people would read it!

Some Blog Stats

• #1 SFW post - Col. Sanders is the best twitch streamer at 7390 views
• Fastest to 4k views - Employment, beer and other things
• Hottest Topic - Movies
• Average post views - 4183
• Number of posts total - 417
• Dollars earned - $94
• Dollars spent - 0
• Number of posts about the movie Legend - 4
• Average views per month - 21834
• Number of redesigns - 1
• Number of times I said I like tits - 9

     I suppose we could ask ourselves.. who cares? I've found myself checking views here and there, but for the most part, I never look. I do get excited when I get a comment or email adding to the conversation. I have another blog that gets much higher engagement, so that fills the need for the interaction that I crave. The blog is just my outlet for whatever I'm reading about or what I'm interested about at that moment in time. Beers get consumed, I want to vent to someone and talk to a friend, and because I've moved so much, I don't really have any of those. The blog has helped me on more than one occasion feel better about my situation, and myself. A peak under the hood- I spend about 15 minutes per post, I don't research what I want to write about, and I just keep a few windows open so I can google things and copy links.. it's about as low effort as it can be without looking actually low effort. Writing blogs is kinda my thing and I've been doing it since the mid-90's before it even had a name. 

Thank you.

    Thank you to all the repeat visitors and new visitors who have supported me and read the blog over the years. Seriously, I fucking mean it. This is your blog and I made it for both of us. I wish I had some more interesting things to say that does not have anything to do with beer, work and robot tits, but hey, thems the brakes. My hobby is collecting books, so if you want to hear/read about me actually put time and money into posts, you can head down that way, to First Edition Fantasy. I don't post frequently, but when I do, there is typically a lot of time and effort, custom pictures and going out into the market to find books to talk about. Buying books, driving, and taking pictures as well as researching values and topics all take multiple hours. Anyways! Thanks again for listening to my rants, and keep coming back to see what will randomly pop into my head next. 

"Unlisted Cheats" is the Unsung Hero of the Retro Gaming Community.

 

@new_cheat_news  is breaking retro ground.

    It's rare, but sometimes new cheats are discovered for very old games, and when it happens, it's always a buzz on the internet. Remember when Narpas Sword was discovered in Metroid? Insanity. Most games have hard coded passwords not seen by conventional password checks or Hex editors. Well, that was true until Unlisted Cheats blew up on twitter. 

Popular game, new game modes? What?

    All it took was an insane discovery in Super Punch-Out!! for SNES to blow the retro gaming community open, and transform what we know about cheat, hints and secrets in general. Skip to any one fight, new two player mode, debug mode, warp to chosen ending, sound test, and a few more. Any one of these codes would be a crazy discovery, but to find so many and all at once is just absurd. Is he done? Oh no. 

Top Gear 3000 - Only SNES game to use the DSP-4 Chip.

Previously, only two passwords were known to have any kind of advantage, and no one had found any more. How many did Unlisted Cheats find? If you guessed 17, you would be correct. Check out the links above, give the guy a follow as he breaks open a series of Game Boy games, finding 20+ year old easter eggs and hidden modes.

Long before Interstella 5555 by Daft Punk.. there was La Serenissima.

 

La Serenissima - Rondo Veneziano

         Twenty years before Daft Punk ever considered releasing Interstella 5555, an Italian Orchestra called Rondo Veneziano released an album that was a surrealist mix of bass, synth, drums and violins, written and orchestrated by Maestro Gian Piero Reverberi. This was matched with an animated short drawn and animated in a Japanese style and influenced by the pulp magazines and comic books of the late 70's and early 80s by Walter Cavazzuti & Giovanni Ferrari. The result was what you see above in all its pulpy Heavy Metal glory. 

      

You think Heavy Metal was some kind of influence here?

     You can clearly see the inspiration of the music video, art and album covers is based on the covers of Heavy Metal and Omni magazine. Raising Venice is an obvious choice for the Italian creators, and the mix of the rock-opera-roller-boogie vibe is strangely a pretty good marriage for the animation. Rondo Veneziano made several other animated shorts to pair with his music over the years, all based in science fiction and high fantasy. Quite the reality check when you compare the quality and music of this animation and some of the other things we find beautiful and different today. If you dig around enough, you may find out what you think is unique has already been done, and occasionally.. in some ways better. 

Enjoy some HQ animation cells below:

Robot Carnival (1987) Full Movie!

 

Robot Carnival.. it fucks

     Robot Carnival is an OVA anime-anthology style movie made in 1987, that saw some limited release in the US in 1991. Bootlegs were circulated, and you could find some unauthorized copies in shopping malls across the country with the segments mixed up.

     Made in nine parts by nine animators with vastly different styles and vibes. The music is pure 80's chillwave cheese, and is as good today as it was then. Other anthology OVA's like this came later after Carnival's success: Neo Tokyo, Memories, Genius Party, and Short Peace to name a few.

    This movie is absolutely stunning in every way. The themes range from serious and dramatic to sincere comedy. The high level of detail for its time, and the number of drawn frames is really a testament to the animators who put this together trying to show off their best stuff. Do yourself a favor and watch this classic before YouTube removes it for some reason. 

Enjoy the show.

William Hjortsberg posted some Legend behind the scenes photos

 

Click here to go to Hjortsberg's website that has the pictures and descriptions. 

       I've mentioned on several other occasions how much I like the movie Legend, starring Tom Cruise and Mia Sara. Any time something comes up Legend related, I have to report on it and share my excitement. This post may have been up for years on Hjortsberg's website, but I just stumbled upon it today. I found some other behind the scenes pictures on the Tim Curry Facebook, as well as Robert Picardo's Facebook. It's a really good to time to be a fan; you can just put in like 30 minutes of effort and really have some exiting stuff to look at. Older actors and actresses are reminiscing about old times as they age through the industry, so they are sharing on social media more than ever. 

    Anyways, click the link above, and enjoy some of the other pictures I found below:

My favorite, Tim pounding a 40 of High Life.

Prayer of the Rollerboys (1990) Full Movie!

 

Corey Haim and Rollerblades!

   In the not-so-far-away future, after "The Great Crash", gangs and drugs reign supreme. The great grandson of Adolf Hitler's rollerblade gang, dressed in white trench coats and black gloves, control the ebb and flow of a drug called Heaven's Mist. Naturally being a relative of Hitler, they are going to put something in the drugs to kill junkies and minorities. Checkmate fuckers!

These are bad dudes and they mean business. 

    Everyone settle down, because we have Corey Haim, and he is an accomplished rollerblader and can infiltrate this gang and counter corrupt it from the inside. At the middle point of the movie, I started to wonder if this was a prequel for the movie Solarbabies. It hit all the key points: Postapocalyptic, in the future, rollerblades, cast members from the Lost Boys. This movie inspired Corey Haim to pick up rollerblading full time, and often talked about it in interviews.

Skating in this way allows for perfect accuracy.

     My brother and I would wear one of my dad's trenchcoats and put skates on, and pretended we were part of the Rollerboys. Later on in life, after watching some more terrible rollerblade movies, I would end up trying to make a mini-career out of inline skating. So in a way.. I guess this terrible movie influenced me in some way? I guess I should write about that in some kind of future article.

Watch this movie, suspend your disbelief, and drink in the majesty that is Prayer of the Rollerboys.

    

Flying Luna Clipper (1987) Full Movie & Thoughts

 

Flying Luna Clipper is a DOS demo scene fever dream.

    I don't know why this movie exists to be honest. Did the world need a 55 minute movie made in 8 Bit PC art? Don't get me wrong, this is worth a watch. As people get more nostalgic for their DOS games, this film is going to resonate with more and more fans of the genre. If you just submit a little and watch this without asking for too much, it is actually a pretty soothing 55 minutes. Does the intro to Space Quest IV give you the warm fuzzies? Then this is 100% for you.

Half fruit, half person, this sums up the movie perfectly.

    Created by Ikko Ono on a MSX 8 bit computer, the video plays like a slideshow, and less like a movie. One piece of surreal art moves to the next, thinly animated at it's core. You have to really use your imagination at times. About 10 minutes in I was asking myself.. Why did Sony fund this? They had to obviously know this was not going to go over well. God, they even considered a sequel at some point. I don't want to shit on this too much, because It's super interesting, and I think it's important in many ways. Matt Repetski rediscovered this gem on Laserdisc at a thrift store, and uploaded this to his youtube channel, which makes you wonder; how many other things like this got made and we forgot about them in the stream of time?

More info on this oddity here. 

Dragon's Heaven OVA (1988) 4K Full Movie!

 

Dragon's Heaven - Upscaled to 4K!

    Dragon's Heaven was way ahead of it's time in 1988. High frame rate and unique gritty art style really set it apart from it's competition. Like Mechs and beautiful anime girls? Sprawling hell-blasted landscapes and futuristic dystopian cities your thing? Then this one is for you. The only downside is the duration of the OVA is pretty short, and we don't get to explore this world more than just this little movie.

Thunder Run (1985) Full movie!

 

You may be wondering, why 1985's Thunder Run? I'll tell you fucking why:

1. Nitro square body Chevy race truck
2. Shotgun proof 1975 Kenworth Semi with flame throwers
3. Radioactive secret payloads
4. Sweet death scenes
5. Lasers
6. Extreme amounts of Technobabble
7. Missiles mounted on a VW bug
8. 80's level nudity

If that's not enough reason to watch this often overlooked 80's classic, then you are in the wrong place. 

Laptop Testdrive - MSI GS76 Stealth

 

I thought I would post a quick review of this laptop, since it's been my daily driver for work, for about the last 2 months. Some light gaming, multi-monitor workloads, and a little bit of benchmarking have been done in that period of time.

I bought the computer here. 

Specs:

• 99.99wh battery
• 32gb 3600hz ddr4
• 1tb m.2 drive
• 2tb back up solid state drive
• i9 11900K
• RTX 3070 (full desktop version)
• 360hz refresh IPS panel

Summary:

     It's a lot overkill for what I needed at work, and it was never intended for such a purpose. I have a nice work laptop- i7 11700, 16gb ram, touch screen, fingerprint scanner. Basic, but much better than average for spreadsheets and email. The screen cracked, and in the process of repair, the shop damaged the laptop so it's being replaced. I had to use this new laptop that I ordered from Bestbuy as my new work replacement in the interim. I ordered this particular laptop with the idea that I would be gaming out in the world a little more being that I travel so much. This is by far the most expensive and most powerful laptop I've ever had. I spec'ed it out with the only option not checked being the 64gb of ram; 32 should be enough for any game or anything really. 

Pros:

• It's just lightning fast in all desktop processes. As good or better than my overclocked i7 10700k desktop in a compact package.
• The refresh rate is insane. I could not tell that much of a different between 240 and 360, but there was a difference. I felt like I needed to get a new mouse for some reason it was so good. Colors are bright and blacks are inky black in any situation. When compared to other laptops around the office, the screen is far and away better.
• Lots of airflow that I can see both on the top and the bottom of the case. I'm using a laptop cooler, but I don't think it's doing much more actual cooling.
• The battery when using the desktop graphics and not the RTX 3070 lasts a very long time, almost the whole day. When the graphic card is activated and when playing a game, it lasts about an hour and a half which is not bad at all.
• The case is metal and feels insanely sturdy with no flex at all. It's heavy, beautifully machined, and feels like you are a bad bitch. it's thin for it's weight as well. 
• The keyboard has decent travel and is a pleasure to type on.
• Trackpad is a great size, large and the multi-touch control panel works great.
• Hinges for the monitor are not made of plastic.

Cons:

• The sound, although full and bright, is very low volume. My other MSI laptop that is half the price is 3 times as loud. I've tried drivers, settings, any little trick to get it higher to no avail.
• The fans are screaming loud during gaming or anything that uses the video card. You can adjust this, but only between a few pre-determined settings to get a somewhat quieter fan curve. It's a hot little machine. 
• Speaking of hot, this PC unless on the highest fan settings, teeters on the dangerous side of thermal throttling all the time. Just let those fans scream and get use to it.
• Switching to using the video card instead of on-board graphics is a really painful process that you will not know if you got right or not, and even then, will only work on the applications you designate. The only way to ensure it uses the video card all the time is to deactivate internal graphics in the device manager.
• 2 USB ports does not seem like enough to me. There are a ton of other IO options so you can break out your dongles and get to work, but I'm use to at least 3-4 USB ports.
• I like that it's a heavy machine, but it's heavy, so that's a con.
• Won't fit in a normal 17-17.3 laptop bag. It has a little extra meat on it, so in most cases will not fit in your budget minded laptop bag. 

In Games:

• It runs overwatch at the full 360hz, full ultra everything with not so much as a drop of sweat. The fans turn on and off during play like a jet taking off and I like it.
• Playing Control was awesome. Full RTX DLSS at a high FPS, no issues. Video card temps got pretty high. Having the full RTX 3070 and not the laptop version has it's benefits and it shows.

Conclusion:

      I played a few various other games and there was no stopping this machine. I have the luxury of having a really nice desktop that plays everything on full settings the same way, but I have never experienced this in a laptop before without all kinds of issues.. even with the same or better specs. I feel like this is a true desktop replacement hooked up to a second monitor, keyboard and mouse. Something durable enough to throw in the car and head out without worry. 

Legend of the Red Dragon (LORD) Tournament!

 

Click here for more information!

Connect to the BBS Directly with this link

Brainscan (1994) Full Movie!

 

Let's watch some Brainscan together!

This classic movie from 1994 stars Edward Furlong in his first outing after Terminator 2. Awesome villain standout "The Trickster" steals the show. Has a good mix of horror, teen movie and some twists. +1 for random A List talent that pops in and out.  

Hypercard Stacks - Macintosh Mainstay and Homebrew Oddity

Who wouldn't want a black and white pixelated Samantha Fox? (Link)

    Time and time again I have expressed my love for early 80's and 90's Macintosh gaming and computers. The classic beige boxes and tiny screens fascinated me, and rules the roost both at home and school when I was but a wee lad. For more on my experience with Macs, read here and here, oh and here and here as well. Of course now-a-days you can emulate a classic Mac in a browser window, download all the files you need in seconds automatically; This is the future after all. 

Welcome! Look at all this cool shit you can do in the 80's.

      What is Hypercard you ask? It's one of the very first hypermedia systems that gained any kind of traction before the adoption of the World Wide Web. Links, audio, video, and text- all presented as an easy to use development kit free of charge to the lucky people who bought an early Macintosh or Apple IIGS. Think of Hypercard as a primitive Microsoft Powerpoint, but with a more simple front end and without any kind of database engine. You could essentially code something without the knowledge of coding, redirect and link different media types, and add controls, links and text in the "Stack". A Stack is terminology for a bunch of documents, individual documents are called 'Cards'. Basically it's just how the documents and data are stored, and how you link to them. Compare this to how Powerpoint has slides and how they link and interact. Using this subsystem, Hypercard users could make presentations, educational software, or even games. What is a good example of a game with Hypercard you ask?

Ahhhh Myst. The game that changed everything. Including making people buy 1x speed tray loading CD drives.

          Yes. This primitive black and white program with limited programming abilities, was just a bunch of Hypercard stacks linked together to play animation or show pictures and audio at predetermined times, was used to create this groundbreaking game that we know and love. Myst is a game that was revolutionary for it's day, had industry leading graphics and cutting edge gameplay that changed the way people thought how game should be designed and played. Unfortunately, for every one game like Myst, there was 100000 Hypercard games uploaded to Keyword: Download on AOL that defied logic and sense. Let's look at a couple shining examples below. I'll provide links to all the games, all you have to do is click the green power button on the screen, it will load the rom into the Macintosh Emulator automatically, and all you have to do is open the disk on the virtual desktop to launch the program. Let's get started.

I've been approved to post on r/cannibalism

 

     I don't remember asking to join the group, however, it does sound like something I would do when I'm drunk. This mystical subreddit is private and invite only, by application. What can someone see on this subreddit? Behold:

I guess if you want to be eaten, you are labeled as a pig. 

Correction: A long pig.

I'm so conflicted. The comments are equally disturbing.

Good god fuck.

I'm done for the day. With life.

I couldn't help but ask an innocent question.