Review | Daymare: 1994 Operation Sandcastle - We Live In A Society
DAYMARE: 1994 OPERATION SANDCASTLE like its progenitor, DAYMARE: 1998 is a harsh-reality throwback and whole-cloth reference to Resident Evil and Resident Evil 2. Developed by a team that would go on to be featured as a special thanks in Capcom’s very own RESIDENT EVIL 2 (remake) is a sequel to a videogame that has me wishing I had rented a different movie from the video store.
A good video store, back in the day (in 94’ or 98’) would sometimes have this much too sweaty, spectacled-wearing guy who was just...cool, man. A guy like that could direct your teenage brain over to a wall of mouldering VHS tapes with cardboard sleeves that seemed to be disintegrating from all of the hands that touched them, like they were infected with some sort of wet-virus that came for any card stock in contact with it. Some of them could be real straight old-school video-nasties, others were resplendent horror fair with mystery images on the front like THE THING, You might, as I had, been lulled into staring too deeply at the cover of a Brian Yuzna movie called SOCIETY.
SOCIETY is a movie not worth talking about here because what I do want to talk about here is a guy by the name of Screaming Mad George a 1970s punk rocker and transfer student to the US from Japan who embedded himself in early music-video culture with a string of outrageously gory and scum-puppet filled blaring gutrock guitar tracks cut with George’s own paranoid, incoherent ramblings. These short features landed Screaming Mad George a role in Hollywood on movies like Predator and Big Trouble in Little China. George had an affection for monsters of all kinds.
But George, god bless him, is most famous in the creep-crowd for that final scene of SOCIETY that’s filled with so much liquid latex, slime and gloss makeup to dictate what exactly happens when the upper crust of the world turns inside out the way we know they’re just desperately holding themselves together. There’s something to a Screaming Mad George’s work captured on celluloid that traces a lineage all the way up through Resident Evil and its Tyrant biological weapons, or the skinned-alive worm-headed dogs of Silent Hill. An affinity for body horror that’s gross-out juvenile and terrifying all at once. Screaming Mad George made monsters - like that old era of Hollywood.
I haven’t actually played Daymare: 1998 the first in the series of what will, at the time of writing, hopefully, be a series in the words of the developer. That’s not the comment that caught me the most interest: somewhere out there in the hallowed halls of the internet one of the staff members connected to the game mentioned that players will love Daymare’s monsters: skinned walking corpses that zap-teleport and are animated by strange alien light. Sometimes they will die, and one of the other crackling electric bodies will turn red or something.
It was around the twentieth of these I had gunned down when my brain started going Screaming Mad George and thinking about all of the Hollywood monsters brought to life with only a little latex, gloss paint and animatronics. The blood-filled sausages of a Tom Savini gore cut, the splatter fest with hulking betrothed animatronic puppets both loveable and horrifying. That the best we can get with video games is another warehouse or military base, thousands of dollars and man hours spent to serve shooting at our-zombies-are-different, a H.A.D.E.S. logo staring from the back of our protagonist into the camera in a way that says.
“Well, I guess there really is only one Resident Evil.”
