Quite an international effort! AKA Capcom’s other survival horror series, Clock Tower was never quite the big deal here as it was in Japan, where the franchise is a million-seller. There, the twin market crackers— brutal slasher violence and girls in school uniforms— overcome the dense and twisty trial-and-error, multiple-ending gameplay. Here, we care even less than the translators and voice actors that did the localizations.

But maybe that’s being a little harsh. The cutscenes do frequently pull off some good horror. Despite that, a movie isn’t really going to feel a whole lot like playing Clock Tower. It’s supposed to be about you finding hiding places to escape the killers, whose only weakness is thinking that there’s no way you’d be hiding in a closet in the room they just saw you go into. If you can ignore the gameplay contrivance, though, it can pull you in and be suspenseful. The music cues help a lot. Watching a person on a movie screen doing the same thing, however, will just encourage you to point out how dumb it is and the music will come off as hammy.

Regardless of what I think though, good luck to this Jorge Olguin fellow directing the movie, as I’ve never met a Jorge I didn’t like. You’ve got until production begins this fall to find a way to make it work.

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