It is time once again for the end of year lists. When people share the best in film, television, games, comics, and basically all things. I am still terrible at this. So I offer instead an unranked, alphabetical list of some of the things I liked and a few things I loved in 2023. Things I (mostly) didn’t write about here during the last year. There are video games! There are movies! Comics! TV series! Old things! New Things! And there is at least one human being / demonic entity / possible gremlin. It was a good year for things I liked this year, too many really to list here. So let’s go things I liked in 2023!

Baldur’s Gate 3 (Larian, 2023)

Baldur’s Gate 3 is a lot of what I wanted from a dungeons and dragons style video game for a long, long time. Maybe from the time that dungeon games were basically like blotches of color moving around on a black screen. The voice acting is excellent. And the game includes way more cosmic horror elements than I would expect from an official Dungeons & Dragons game. And I very much enjoy that. But I think the best thing about Baldur’s Gate 3 is that it’s a game that truly supports multiple play styles. From talking your way out of situations to sneaking through them to dropping flammable objects on enemies from heights or ruining their day by casting Wintry Mix, aka, “Sleet Storm.” Or you can run in there Leroy Jenkins style and take on all comers. The turn-based system allows you to plan more elaborate or hilarious tactics for dealing with situations. But the most important thing is that if you are a druid, you can turn into a saber toothed tiger, which is the obvious selling feature of the game.

Birds Of Prey (DC, 2023) Kelly Thompson, writing; Leonardo Romero, art; Jordie Bellaire, colors.

Birds of Prey! Kelly Thompson! Yay! Birds of Prey is back and it’s what I’ve wanted for the comic since Gail Simone stopped writing it. Fisticuffs! Femmes (and Butches)! Fun! Thompson is one of my favorite writers and I always enjoy her dialogue, characterization and clear plotting. And Romero’s art has a feel reminiscent of Silver Age superhero comics plus Darwyn Cooke when he is feeling his Silver Age influences. His action scenes are vital and play with the panels excellently. This time Oracle is out of the picture and Dinah Lance, aka, Black Canary, has put together a team of the toughest heroes and part time heroes she can: Batgirl Cassandra Cain, Big Barda, Zealot, Meridian Mia Mizoguchi and Harley Quinn. Dinah is putting the team together to rescue her sister, Sin, and probably save the world as a side-effect. Faces will be punched and asses will be kicked as the team tries to infiltrate Themiscyra, aka, Paradise Island, aka, Amazon stomping grounds, without drawing the attention of Wonder Woman. It’s heroes—and one part time hero—planning a heist/extraction and 4 issues in, the action is terrific.

Danhausen

Danhausen is professional wrestler in AEW and probable demon with facial markings suspiciously similar to The Exorcist‘s Pazuzu. He has appeared twice on The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs and Darcy the Mail Girl. He consistently and entertainingly ruins AEW presenter R. J. City’s interviews (and social media). And he is a constant delight to me. I love his entrance music. I love when he wrestles. I love when he doesn’t wrestle and stands ringside, cursing people and reacting to the action with the facial expressions of a silent horror movie monster or somnambulist. (He’s got that Max Schreck and Conrad Veidt appeal). I loved when he revealed he is from Lower Thuringia in one of his appearances on The Last Drive-In. I bought my first action figure in maybe a decade and my first wrestling action figure since a friend gave me a Kane one well before that. And it was Danhausen with interchangeable heads and cursing hands. I love that Danhausen.

Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores (Guerrilla, 2023)

If you didn’t know, I love the Horizon games. The Burning Shores expansion for Horizon Forbidden West is almost a new game. Set 3000 years in the future, our hero Aloy, is dealing with the fall out of the decisions tech bros made in our time. The earth is now covered in machines manufactured in the image of animals past and present. Some are benign, helping repair the earth, others are malevolent and focused on destroying humanity. The boss Walter Londra doesn’t really compete the villains of Horizon Zero Dawn* and Horizon Forbidden West and the final boss fight is not one of the better fights in the game. But I am not much for boss fights in general and good ol’ Walter Londra is mostly an excuse to open up a new region for exploration (California!), introduce new machines, new gear, introduce tweaks to game play that make Horizon Forbidden West more fun, provide more side quests, and set up the next full Horizon game. All of which are more rewarding than the boss fight itself. Burning Shores also does a fine job of continuing Aloy’s story and her personal growth from the awkward and overwhelmed outcast who didn’t really know how to people in Horizon Zero Dawn, to the Aloy who starts to accept help and friendship in Horizon Forbidden West. I don’t usually pay much attention to character development in games. It is often truncated in video games—and often necessarily to allow for player choice or due to technical constraints—so it is a delight to see Guerrilla stick a landing with Aloy’s development that feels organic and right.

Hundreds of Beavers (USA, 2023) directed by Mike Cheslik

I was asked recently what my best cinematic experience of the year was, and it was probably Barbie (USA, 2023) or the re-release of The Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense (USA, 1984). But my favorite movie of the year? Well, that’s easy: Hundreds of Beavers. I wish I had seen it on the big screen. Hundreds of Beavers digs deep into a cinematic tradition we could use more of—silent film, Looney Tunes, kung fu comedies, stories about the Great Lakes Region, and people playing animals while wearing mascot suits. In the film, a hooch-related disaster leaves Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews) lost in the frozen woods of what was then New France—not far from what would become Green Bay, Wisconsin. He has only his boots and comically patched long underwear, but with some help, Jean becomes a fur trapper. He hassles and harrows all the critters in the area as he tries to win the hand of a fair furrier (Olivia Graves). And all the animals are either people in mascot suits (the rabbits, the raccoons, and the beavers) or puppets, which is plain delightful and hilarious. Hundreds Of Beavers is fun, funny and gorgeous. I loved it from the moment I watched the trailer and saw a pair of rabbits–again, played by actors in suits–turn and look back at the camera. Hundreds of Beavers is cinema, pure cinema. (I interviewed stunt choreographer Jon Truei and you can read it here).

Lavender’s Blue (Cool Gus, 2023) written by Jennifer Crusie & Bob Mayer

Jennifer Crusie is back and she brought Bob Mayer back with her for another romance with mystery and action in small town Ohio. It’s Back in the day, we here at the Gutter liked Crusie and Mayer’s Agnes & The Hitman (St. Martin’s Press, 2008) enough that we thought about having all of us write about it. It was Crusie and Mayer’s first collaboration. It’s the book that made me get over my personal prejudices about romance novels. In Lavender’s Blue, Liz Danger (Yes!) drives home to Burney, Ohio because she has been guilted by her aunt. On the way in, which she also decides is on her way out, she is stopped by Officer Vince Cooper for a safety issue with her lug nuts and ends up with her car in a ditch and stuck in the morass of her old life. This time, though, she’s not having any of her old town and family’s crap. It’s light, fast-moving and funny, but there is a murder as well as some fights, a lot of food, discussions of vehicles and tactics, and a dog. It is, after all, a Crusie and Mayer joint.

Lego: Fortnite (Epic Games, 2023)

While ostensibly a Fortnite game, this is not really a Fortnite game. And if, like me, you are not all that interested in Fortnite—and more power to people who are—well, it’s more of an open world survival game where you collect resources to build things, create your own town, and make friends with creatures and people you meet. You can play online with friends and they can build in your world and you can build in theirs. You can adjust setting for survival modes—where there are wolves and skeletons and random dudes who will fight you—or sandbox mode—where you can just chill and build with infinite resources and an ability to fly that makes some of the fussy building mechanics less fussy. And I suppose you can invite friends in if you want to do a battle royale. But I’ve found its mix of kind of Minecraft and kind of Animal Crossing relaxing in the long year that has been December 2023,** even when I get exploded by skeletons or brutes. And it is tremendous fun to play online with a friend or friends. Just make sure you remember where the exit is when you explore caves.

Lured (USA, 1947) directed by Douglas Sirk

Okay, so this is an old classic Hollywood film, but it’s a Douglas Sirk movie and one I had never seen until about a month ago. I had to see it, though, because it is a Sirk movie and it stars both Lucille Ball and Boris Karloff. Karloff’s screen time is brief but spectacular as he portrays a Mad Fashion Designer. Sirk is best known for his extravagantly stylized gloriously technicolor melodramas from the 1950s. Movies that starred Rock Hudson and were queer enough that Hudson enjoyed showing them to his friends. Lured is not a melodrama in the vein of All That Heaven Allows (1955), Written on the Wind (1956) or Magnificent Obsession (1954). Lured is, however, just as wonderful. It’s a crime film set in the then current day, but it feels oh so Gothicly noir or noirly Gothic—what Farran Nehme might call “Noir by Gaslight.” Ball plays a woman recruited by the police to catch a serial killer preying on women in London. It is as extravagantly stylized in glorious black and white as Sirk’s melodramas. And it’s just as subtextually queer and revealing of the seedy underside of the world of powerful people as the melodramas are, too. It’s delightful filmmaking with a wonderful cast.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (USA, 2023) directed by Jeff Rowe

I thought a lot about what movie I could put here, Godzilla Minus Zero (Japan, 2023) or Spider-Man: Into The Spider-verse (USA, 2023). God knows, I love Godzilla, Spider-Gwen and Spider-Punk. But they’re all doing well and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem was such a surprise for me. I know about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I can sing the theme song from the 1980s cartoon, though I rarely watched it. And I had other indie hero comics I read. So I saw it almost on accident when I went to see a movie during an extended power outage. It’s a movie that the Spider-verse movies made possible. I believe the filmmakers would always have wanted to make this movie, but without Spider-verse breaking some boundaries on what kind of animation can get a wide theatrical release outside of film festivals, who knows where Mutant Mayhem would be? It’s part of an impeding wave, I hope, of films that embrace the look of the handmade in animation after decades of attempts to make digital animation looks seamless, perfect and immersive. I love the rough edges and the saturated neon colors of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. And that aesthetic, which is rough, colorful and amazing, is a nice fit with heroes who are mutant outcasts living in the sewer with their mutant rat father/ sifu / sensei, Splinter, voiced by Jackie Chan in a role that feels like it fits him a little better than The Karate Kid. Mutant Mayhem an origin story, but doesn’t feel like one. Movies like Godzilla Minus Zero and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse are rightfully doing fine, but a movie like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem could definitely deserve more love. Its the kind of film that is in danger of disappearing.

Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea (ABC, 1964-1968)

Irwin Allen’s Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea was a series I encountered as a kid when I was searching for shows with monsters or aliens—creatures of any kind. I believed it was a show about the nautical adventures of the quasi-military crew of a submarine, that it lacked what I was searching for. That it’s monsters, aliens and creatures were mostly live action footage of octopuses and sharks. How wrong I was. VttBotS does concern the nautical adventures of a quasi-military submarine crew, but from season 2 on it also has monsters, aliens, and creatures—excellently entertaining ones! And VttBotS is a show that rightly believes that more is more. In one episode, it is not enough that a mad scientist is an ancient alchemist. No, he is also able to maintain his long life through the power of exploding volcanoes and he has turned a Nineteenth Century sailor into a man of gold to do his will. The series’ ostensible hero, Admiral Harriman Nelson (Richard Basehart) is difficult, secretive, ornery, and usually makes things more difficult than they need to be for our actual heroes, Captain Lee Crane (David Hedison), Lt. Commander Chip Morton (Robert Dodwell) and Kowalski (Del Monroe). Our contemporary rules about story and plot and concision mean NOTHING to Voyage of the Bottom of the Sea. It does not care about helping you suspend your disbelief. You do the hard work yourself and you reap the rewards of Lobster Men, a telepathically controlled white gorilla (reusing the Mugato suit from Star Trek: TOS), and, of course, Mr. Vincent Price and his diabolical muppets.

*Still hate Horizon’s Ted Faro. He’s the worst. He’s up there with Tamiya Iemon.

**Thanks to friend of the Gutter Mark D. White for the observation that December has been a long year.

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Carol Borden also enjoyed 1950s Mexican noir, Zoe Tunnell & Valentine M. Smith’s web comic Blade Maidens; Reservation Dogs; Dark Winds, though it was mind-twisting watching Zahn McClarnon in Rez Dogs after an episode of Dark Winds; most of Justified: City Primeval; Asteroid City; Kenichi Ugana’s Visitors (Japan, 2023); Neil Ferron’s Fishmonger (USA/Ireland, 2023); Junta Yamaguchi’s River (Japan, 2023); AEW’s Timeless Toni Storm, and the Adams Family’s Where the Devil Roams (USA, 20203). Carol is also generally optimistic about Fargo season 5, but is curious how they’ll work in the folk horror thing that is happening. Like I said, it’s been a good year for things I like.