Nathan Drake Reviews

First appeared in: Uncharted: Drake's Fortune (2007)

Though he's running around the globe with a gun and a pretty journalist sidekick, somehow the Uncharted series' cocky protagonist Nathan Drake still feels like your mate. You know, the one who irregularly comes back home with a face full of bruises, a body full of bullets and a sea chest full of gold. You know, that one. The one who can climb almost anything. That guy.

Though his day job is lobbing grenades around ancient ruins, firing AK-47s from the top of Himalayan mountains and desecrating World Heritage Sites, he does it with a genuine sense of self-awareness, pointing out how ridiculous it is and dropping genuinely hilarious wisecracks - all in a pair of jeans and a t-shirt (half out, half tucked).

Simply put, Nate's a charming son of a bitch and the gaming character we'd most like to go out drinking with - an accolade we don't bestow lightly.

Is this Mario Bava’s most violent film? It seems entirely possible as it contains thirteen deaths, each a series of escalating gore and slaughter until it all culminates in a sick joke. Bava’s particular brand of giallo was built upon nihilism, but A Bay of Blood feels completely unconcerned with narrative coherence in favor of shocks, titillation and splatter.

If Psycho was the first steps of the slasher genre then A Bay of Blood went a long way towards hardening the template. It plays like a dry-run of Friday the 13^th at several moments, not only in its segue of horny teenagers in the woods getting hacked to pieces with a machete but in its several lingering shots of the shimmering, simmering body of water that becomes a repository for several secrets. Consider Bava’s film a historical curiosity with a direct line to draw to the Friday series (including two kills borrowed over for Friday the 13^th Part Two) but later day bratty imitators such as Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer.

It all starts off beautifully with a sequence that wouldn’t feel out of place in a Hitchcock film, and then it just keeps going revealing how the film will play out. There’s a disregard for spatial and narrative coherence in favor of shocks for the sake of it. Why open with one graphic and shocking murder when you can have two? Even if the second one dilutes the first and just makes you go “wait, what?” instead of the intended reaction.

The biggest frustration with Bava here was his flagrant disregard for a story. Things just happen, relationships are just thrown about with no good rhyme or reason, and supporting players appear just to up the body count. It doesn’t add up to much of anything, but it’s entertaining to watch while it unspools and bleeds out before you. It’s all red herrings to keep the plot moving along fast enough for you to never pause long enough to think about what is happening and why. It’ll appease the gore hounds the most, but I’ve seen better Bava.