Stalk This Way

I'm a fan of the 'Eastern European Apocalypse' settings of video games such as S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl and Metro 2033 (not to mention the Pripyat level in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare - perhaps the single finest game level ever made!), and the original inspirations for them - Boris and Arkady Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic (set in Canada, mind you) and Dimitry Glukhovsky's Metro 2033 novels.

I do love the Lead Adventure minis designed for these kinds of settings, but I much prefer to work with plastic than with metal. So, when I was mucking around with some spare sprues recently, enjoying a bit of kitbashing for kitbashing's sake, I started slotting together some Warlord Bolt Action WWII and modern plastics (from their zombie range) to make some modern-ish figures. Pleased with the fit of the pieces, I decided to take a little break from Fantasy and indulge my interest by building some Stalkers.

There is a clip in that AK... honest!

I started off with what I had lying around - Warlord USMC and Airborne (acquired as part of a half-arsed attempt to build a Crimson Skies-style 'fractured USA in the 30s' force. Unfortunately, these guys didn't have the cold-weather feel that I really wanted, so I bought some Winter Soviets, giving me a ready supply of greatcoats and fur hats.I also grabbed some modern special forces as a source for weapons and less old-fashioned-looking kit.

This guy, then, is my first completed Stalker, and incorporates parts from pretty much all of my source kits: greatcoated body, satchel, and spade from the Soviet infantry, rifle arm from the special forces, head and backpack from the USMC, and left arm from the Airborne. All goes together nicely, though my one real gripe is that the neck joint is a bit on the tight side for the USMC heads. The special forces arms are a little more slender than the WWII stuff, but not so much that it's glaringly obvious.

Painting was a doddle - my wash-heavy style isn't going anywhere anytime soon, and it suits post-apocalyptic figures more than it would some (F&IW French, for example...). I wanted something civilian, but vaguely military (military surplus, really!) with the kitbash, and carried this through to the painting - mismatched gear, a military-looking green poncho on top of the rucksack, civilian cap etc.

Just noticed the mote of dust on top of his hat... Curses!

The only real bugbear was weathering the boots and the bottom of the greatcoat to look grubby - easy enough to apply, but it took a couple of attempts to stop it looking as though he'd been wading through a river of mud!

All told, I'm really happy with him. The mix of modern and WWII parts worked out to give the overall effect I was after and I'm pleased that I trusted to my gut and added a few more pouches (much like a Rob Liefield character design, you can never go wrong with more pouches) to lend a feel of being seriously prepared. Mixed in with the other couple of Stalkers I have under way, he's going to look like a real grizzled survivor of the Zone.

I'm now starting to doubt that there is actually a clip in that rifle...

*** 
Disclaimer: All links to third-party sites are solely for the purposes of sourcing the models/components I have used or discussed, if anyone is so inclined. I have simply linked to the original manufacturer (but feel free to shop around!) and make no money from people clicking through.

LuchaScores: Off the Beaten Path

I have a soft spot for movies that take established genres and transplant them to a different setting, preferably a quirky or unusual one. This is probably why I like Bruce Willis' Last Man Standing as much as I do - a transplant of Kurosawa's Yojimbo from feudal Japan to Prohibition-era Texas, by way of Clint Eastwood's Spaghetti Westerns. So, when I saw news on Jesse V. Johnson's Savage Dog, a revenge movie set in Vietnam between the French Indochina and Vietnam wars, my spidey sense started tingling...

Savage Dog

Directed by: Jesse V. Johnson
Starring: Scott Adkins, Marko Zaror, Cung Le, Juju Chan, Vladimir Kulich & Keith David 

Savage Dog is the story of Martin Tillman (Scott Adkins), an Irish boxer, ex-Legionnaire, and ex-IRA man. We first meet him in the jail of a rural police outpost where he fights in bare-knuckle boxing matches for the benefit of the prison's overlords, a corrupt group of ex-Legionnaires ruled with an iron fist by The 13th Warrior's Vladimir Kulich, and including Chilean martial artist Marko Zaror, and a Vietnamese Army officer played by former MMA fighter Cung Le. Thereafter, chaos ensues, with Tillman going from bare-knuckle prison fighter to one-man-army.

SPOILERS.

What can I say? I really enjoyed this film. Sure, the acting wasn't always great, and some of the CGI used during the fights was a little shonky, but it was great fun! The villains were villainous, the hero was... effective, if not heroic, and the setting lent it something that set it apart from most B-Movies of this type.

Looking for a moment at the villains, I can't remember the last time a movie like this did such a good job making them stand out. You expect a certain 'levelling up' in movies like this - with the hero progressing from low-level mooks to sub-bosses, and thence to the big bad - and we get it to a degree, but each of the 'sub-bosses' are distinct characters. There's the cowardly older Petain supporter who acts as the cabal's accountant, a former Spanish Blue Division killer (Zaror), an ex-SS man in hiding (Kulich), and a Vietnamese paratroop officer (Cung Le). I appreciated the variety of backgrounds, and the Foreign Legion offered a logic for why such a disparate group would be all together (something often missing in movies like this). Vive la Légion, says I! There's also a surprising complexity to them - Kulich's SS man has a difficult relationship with his daughter (Juju Chan), who is, almost inevitably, Tillman's love interest and motivation for going on a revenge spree; Cung Le's officer is just doing it to get money for his family, and even though Tillman gives him the chance to walk away (which would have deprived us of one of the best fight scenes in the whole film), he still throws down. Marko Zaror's Rastignac is the most irredeemably villainous of the bunch, a knife-fighter known as "the executioner", and represents the sternest test for Tillman. Surprisingly, as the Big Bad, he's a little bland - a generic psycho, really. Cracking fighter, though!

"Don't smile... don't smile..."

Scott Adkins as the hero is good enough. The real hero, for me, though, is the setting. The entire plot of this movie could have been transferred to a classic Wild West or present-day setting (man goes on rampage against corrupt cattlemen/rogue special forces unit/crime syndicate/PMC outfit etc.) and it'd have been OK. Post-French, pre-Vietnam War Vietnam is great, though - the lawlessness and presence of huge amounts of firepower (any film that has an MG-42 being fired from the hip gets an additional half-star in my book!) make sense! It's also much prettier than New York's mean streets, the cowtowns of the Southwest, or the nameless Eastern European countries where a lot of equivalent movies take place. I really want to watch it again in a double-header with The Rebel, a Vietnamese movie set during the French colonial days in Vietnam (also highly recommended).

Still, it's a B-Movie. It's never going to win awards for acting or storytelling. What it is, however, is a standard story elevated by its villains and its setting. It's got flaws - the pacing is a little off at times, and Tillman is a fairly unlikable protagonist. I won't ruin it, but the conclusion of his feud with Zaror seems... excessive. Fitting, given the title, but I'm not sure how necessary it was. Speaking of the conclusion, there's the vague hint of a sequel, as the MI6 man who has been hunting Tillman (long story short, his sniffing around is what drives Kulich and the gang to release him from prison) recruits him for devastation and hijinks in the conflicts to come. I, for one, welcome more hijinks.

3.5 Luchas

While browsing for more films like Savage Dog, I stumbled across Buffalo Boys which, while a little sparse on information, looks to be an Indonesian western featuring two brothers taking on the VOC in the 1800s. The initial art releases are right up my street, and I'm looking forward to seeing more about it...