I’ve filled another sketchbook, so the Sketch of the Day is back on Instagram and Twitter!
Movies Seen Recently: Thirst, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, Beyond the Reach
Thirst (2015) – An alien space capsule bearing a ravenous beastie crash-lands right where one of those wilderness survival hikes for wayward youth is trekking. Munching ensues. I started out with high(ish) hopes for this one as, despite the hokey B-movie premise, the acting and general production values seemed higher than the SyFy Original/The Asylum…
Movies Seen Recently: Trench 11, Tombstone, Freddy vs. Jason
Trench 11 (2017) – I don’t know if anyone expected “bunker horror” to be a full-on horror subgenre, but here we are. At least this one moves a little from the peak of the bell curve by having it set in World War I rather than II. (So the German bad guys are not Nazis!…
Movies Seen Recently: Freddy’s Dead, New Nightmare, War-Gods of the Deep
Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991) – If Elm Street 5 was the last attempt to photocopy Elm Street 3, Freddy’s Dead is full-scale bad fanfic put on screen. In a full break from any other character we’ve seen (except Freddy himself, of course), we begin with an amnesiac teenager — the last child in…
Movies Seen Recently: Father Christmas is Back, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4, A Nightmare on Elm Street 5
Father Christmas is Back (2021)- The story of the Christmas family — four grown daughters and a mother — who’ve been trying to have a proper British Christmas for decades since their father, James Christmas, walked out on Christmas long ago. Now, suddenly, he shows up at the ancestral manse one daughter has married into…
Movies Seen Recently: The Haunted Palace, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3
The Haunted Palace (1963) – The cuckoo in Roger Corman’s nest of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, this one is named for a Poe poem, but draws most of its inspiration from H.P. Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, transplanted into a vaguely pre-now semi-European, semi-New England milieu. Vincent Price is the old sorcerer Joseph…
Passed on in 2022.
Of course, millions of people left this world in this year, and the names which aren’t famous (or at least familiar to me) are, to other people in their direct circle, much more impactful. And there were at least as many born during the same year — but there’s no way to tell at present…
There’s wrong, and then there’s impressively wrong.
Having been a studious member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for my entire life, I thought that I had encountered at least one version of every “anti-Mormon” distortion (or fabrication) of Latter-day Saint belief in circulation. But, impressively, I recently discovered some hitherto unknown little-known “facts” about “Mormon” doctrines that, stunned,…
Movies Seen Recently: Gentlemen Broncos, Samaritan, A Nightmare on Elm Street
Gentlemen Broncos (2009) – From the mind behind Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre comes a movie guaranteed from the beginning not to be nearly as popular as either of those two, because it’s aimed at a very small target demographic — namely, me. The protagonist is a home-schooled teen with a yen to be a…
Hollywood Monster
[cross-posted to GoodReads] There’s a definite appeal to this kind of in-the-trenches memoir, explaining how a familiar franchise looked to the working stiff involved from the other side. Englund spins yarns about how he ended up in acting (because of the girls), through theatre snobbery, to working character actorhood, to the random chance that sent…