The Conjuring 2

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I guess it’s time to review The Conjuring 2, the second movie in the James Wan/Warner Bros franchise that’s turned into the MCU of horror movies. In case you’re not familiar with them, the Conjuring movies are about proven frauds Ed and Lorraine Warren, but in the movies they’re actual ghost hunters instead of con artists who scammed mentally ill people. The Conjuring 2 opens with them investigating the Amitville haunting, which was a hoax, and then moves onto the Enfield haunting, which was also a hoax.

Hang on, I need to drink some water. Things got a little spicy there.

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I'm Thinking Of Ending Things by Iain Reid

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Note that I deviated from my usual review title format for this one, so as not to alarm my many loyal fans

You could sum up Iain Reed’s I’m Thinking Of Ending Things in two sentences: a woman goes to visit her boyfriend’s parents. Things start out kind of weird, and then they gradually get extremely weird. But detailed plot synopses lasting at least two paragraphs is how we roll here in the content venue, so let’s dig into this some more.

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Guest Post: Borrasca

It’s another guest post, please experience and enjoy it in that order.

For a few years now I’ve been aware of the burgeoning genre of narrative horror podcasts. Probably the best-known example is Welcome to Nightvale, the long-running podcast/media empire that centres around a town stuffed to the gills with supernatural phenomena.

I’m going to admit something scandalous here and reveal that I could never quite get into Nightvale. The writing and presentation was solid in the few episodes I sampled, but the tongue-in-cheek tone and the setting never really did much for me.

Lately I’ve also seen a lot of people recommend The Magnus Archives, a long-form narrative podcast which has apparently developed a very rich and well-constructed mythos over its four year (and counting) run. Unfortunately it also has over 170 episodes. I don’t have quite that much time on my hands, even taking the lockdown into account, so I decided to look for something a bit more manageable in terms of length.

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The Haunting Of Hill House

You know what there isn’t enough of? Good horror.

You know what there especially isn’t enough of? Good horror TV shows. This is a shame, because the format would seem to solve a lot of the issues that plague horror movies, the slower pace and much longer run-time of a series allowing for more subtlety and a lighter touch with the scares. And yet, most supposedly scary TV shows are either not scary at all, or only sporadically scary.

So when Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House arrived in 2018, cries of joy were heard o’er the land and the series was turned into an anthology whose second season, The Haunting Of Bly Manor, is coming out soon (and will be reviewed on this very blog, so watch out for that). Does it live up to its reputation? Let’s see.

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Spooky Repost: James Wan and How To Not Ruin Your Horror Movie

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‘Tis the season for horror, so I recently decided to check out The Conjuring, a movie that got a lot of praise from horror fans when it came out and was ludicrously slapped with an “R” rating solely for being scary. The movie isn’t worth writing a full review on- it’s an overlong convoluted mess with way too many poorly fleshed out characters (although whoever designed that poster should win an award)- but I thought I’d use it as a springboard to talk about horror in general and how often people fuck it up.

The Conjuring was directed by James Wan, who also made Insidious, which was also hyped up by horror fans despite being largely terrible. Wan as a director of horror specifically infuriates me intensely because he has moments of incredible originality despite seeming to have no idea what he’s doing most of the time, and it’s all the more frustrating because the mistakes he makes are largely the same mistakes everyone else makes when they fuck up horror. Let’s take a look at a few of them!

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Spooky Repost: Paranormal Activity 1-3

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Spooky blog season is right around the corner, and to prepare I’ve decided to repost some horror reviews from my old blog

Back in 2009 Paranormal Activity came out, and everyone thought it was awesome.

Actually wait, back in 1999 The Blair Witch Project came out and everyone thought it was awesome (well, if you want to go back even further The Last Broadcast came out the year before (and there was also Cannibal Holocaust) but no one really noticed). The found-footage genre laid low for a while, The Blair Witch Project existing mostly as a unique novelty, but the financial legacy of the film couldn’t be ignored forever. Anything that makes literally ten times its minuscule budget is going to cause studio executive’s eyes to light up, even taking the film’s expensive marketing blitz into account.

But why make a shit-load of money on one cheap movie when you can repeatedly make a shit-load of money on a whole series of cheap movies? There was already a precedent for this, with the relatively inexpensive Saw franchise becoming a yearly Halloween staple, so it made sense for Paramount to drive Paranormal Activity into the ground with a whole boatload of sequels. We’re going to look at two of them today!

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Games I Didn't Finish: Days Gone

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There are many ways one could describe Days Gone, the open world survival game from developer Bend that came out for the PS4 last year. “The video game equivalent of a Nickelback song” would be one way. “The direct to DVD knock off of The Last Of Us” would be another. Both of these are completely accurate, but I prefer to compare the game not to music or other video games, but to food. Days Gone is a big cake that looks delicious on the outside, but is severely underbaked on the inside. With each bite the problem becomes more and more apparent, until eventually you take another look at that fabulously-decorated exterior and see the dead cockroach that you somehow failed to notice at first glance.

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The Wych Elm

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Prologue: Into The Tana-verse

If you’re outside Ireland or the UK, you may not recognize Tana French’s name. She’s a big deal here in her home country and well-known in the UK, but I don’t think she’s reached the same status in the US or elsewhere. Before I talk about her latest novel, The Wych Elm, I want to briefly look back at her past career and explain why I’ve avoided her books like the plague up until now.

The bulk of Tana French’s work has consisted of the Dublin Murder Squad novels, a series of loosely-connected crime stories about...well, guess. The novels reached a level of mainstream success as somewhat literary works that most pulpier detective yarns don’t tend to achieve, and the series’ stature was increased further by the BBC TV series adaptation Dublin Murders, which gave the first two books that modern True Detective treatment and garnered a fair bit of critical acclaim (it says a lot about the state of Irish media that the BBC were the ones behind the show).

I read the first Dublin Murder Squad book, In The Woods, after it came out in 2007 and to this day it’s one of the most frustrating reading experiences I’ve ever had. The book’s premise is immediately arresting: when the main character was a child he and two of his friends went missing in a local forest, and he was found that night traumatized into amnesia and covered in weird scratch marks while the other two kids were never found; now all grown up and a homicide detective, the protagonist takes on the murder of a young girl on the outskirts of the same forest when clues pop up suggesting her death might be related somehow to what happened to him all those years ago.

Let me tell you, I was all about this premise. The first half of the book kept me hooked with a series of tantalizing twists and clues: the main character starts to remember something creepy and possibly supernatural happening before the disappearance, other people come forward with stories of encountering a spooky giant bird in the woods, the present-day murder seems like it has ritualistic elements, there’s all sorts of local political intrigue involved…

And then it turns out the murder has nothing at all to do with what happened to the main character, which he never comes any closer to understanding except for someone finding a sharp metal thing in the woods that might explain the odd scratches.

At the time I was so annoyed by this that I seriously considered tearing the book up or setting it on fire or something. As I’ve gotten older, read more and taken up writing myself I’ve started to understand more what French was going for, especially in light of later entries in the series which apparently make a habit of dancing around supernatural elements to various degrees. But the one flaw I still can’t forgive is that the resolution of the present-day mystery, the thing that actually takes up the bulk of the novel, is incredibly uninteresting, the sort of bog-standard murder tale that would be underwhelming in an episode of CSI or Criminal Minds instead of a fairly chunky novel that takes multiple hours to get through. Long-time blog readers of mine will remember me saying that it’s okay for an author to promise one kind of story and then give their readers a different one as long as the story the reader actually gets is at least as interesting as the one they thought the were going to get; In The Woods is the source of that little adage.

So I avoided the later Dublin Murder Squad books even as their critical reception grew. But then French wrote a stand-alone novel, The Wych Elm, and in addition to having a really excellent cover design (I’m shallow, what can I say) the book ticked off several boxes for me: cool premise, similarities to my current real life circumstances, and it takes inspiration from a topic of interest. So I decided to take the plunge. Did The Wych Elm disappoint me again?

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Scheduling note

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Hey all, just dropping a quick post to say that updates to the blog will probably be infrequent over the next month. Nothing wrong, I’m just working on a few posts that are going to take a while. Also, the leaves are going to be turning to crunchy season soon and this year I want to stockpile a few horror posts for October, so look forward to that.

Books I Didn’t Finish: American Dirt

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American Dirt came out in January and attracted a lot of attention. Some of that attention was no doubt the kind that author Jeanine Cummings was hoping for, taking the form of rave reviews, weeks spent on top of bestseller lists and a lucrative advance and movie deal. Other reactions weren’t so kind, focusing instead on inaccuracies and cultural stereotypes, and the validity of Cummings as an author of Irish and Puerto Rican descent telling the story of a Mexican mother and her son fleeing across the border to escape cartel violence.

I was vaguely aware at the time that there was a lot of hubbub around American Dirt, but being in the grip of migraines and not reading a huge amount, not what the content of that hubbub was. When it appeared on the Kindle daily deals a few weeks ago I remembered that it had been highly praised and smashed that Buy Now button without any further thought. So abrupt was my YOLO-purchase that I didn’t even bother to look at the author’s name.

This is how I ended up going into American Dirt assuming that the author must herself be Mexican or the child of Mexican immigrants, thinking that surely such literary powerhouses as Oprah and our friend Stephen King wouldn’t shower high praise on a writer using the experiences of an oppressed minority as fodder for a pulpy thriller.

In hindsight, I really have no idea what possessed me to think this.



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Trash TV: The Equalizer & The Equalizer 2

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Yes, I know it says trash TV and this is a movie and not a TV series. But I watched it on Netflix, and new movies are just getting slapped up onto streaming services now. What even is a movie? The film/telvision membrane has dissolved, people! Nothing means anything anymore!

So anyway, I recently found myself with very low amounts of brain juice, due to migraines. I was “low on spoons”, as the kids like to say. I needed something to pass the time, something that would involve absolutely no mental effort or concentration whatsoever.

And that’s how I ended up watching both Equalizer movies back to back.

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The Last Of Us Part II

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Note: This was going to be longer and more in-depth, but unfortunately migraines

The Last Of Us Part II (it’s called “Part II” instead of “2” because this is a Serious game) arrived with a lot of baggage. The first game was a beloved classic that many people--myself included--were deeply skeptical about the idea of a direct sequel to. The game’s developer, Naughty Dog, had its abusive working environment laid bare earlier this year in a devastating expose by Kotaku, leading many to question not just whether the game is good but whether it’s worth the human toll of its development. And finally, some of the game’s cut-scenes leaked in April, and while some of the story conclusions people jumped to on the basis of that turned out to be incorrect, the content revealed in the leaks turned a lot of potential players off.

I think the final product would have been divisive either way, but maybe these circumstances contributed to the polarized response it’s received since release. Some people truly hate this game, while others are proclaiming it as a masterpiece. Personally, I’m floating somewhere between those two extremes. TLOU2 is astonishingly, masterfully good at most of the things it tries to do; I’m just not always sure if the things it tries to do were worth doing to begin with.

Spoiler warning: This game was released under a ridiculous veil of secrecy, wherein reviewers were forbidden under pain of being fed to clickers from talking about core elements of the story, like the inciting incident of the plot or the game’s basic structure. I’m going to “spoil” those things because it’s impossible to talk about the game meaningfully otherwise, so if you want to experience the story like the developers intended then don’t read any further.

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Books I Didn't Finish: Devolution

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Max Brooks is back, baby!

Following the success of The Zombie Survival Guide, World War Z and a book about how if you find yourself in a world of mines and crafting the most important thing you can craft is you, we now have Devolution, which is jumping on board the increasingly-hot bigfoot scene that’s inexplicably growing in America. Will it kick start a sasquatchenaissance in the same way that The Zombie Survival Guide helped to revive zombie mania in the early 2000s? Maybe, but it probably doesn’t deserve to.

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The Last Of Us Remastered and Revisited

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The Last Of Us Part II (henceforth referred to as TLOU 2) came out recently, and the internet has been positively abuzz with chatter about Naughty Dog’s latest fungal zombie adventure. Everyone, relax: I’m going to play the game soon and review it, and then the matter will be settled for all time.

But before I do that I decided to replay the first game, which I haven’t revisited since it came out in 2013, via the PS4 remastered version. This isn’t going to be a full review since I already did one of those ages ago on the old blog, but rather a look at whether the game still holds up today.

Spoiler warning for the entire first game. Also please note that I haven’t looked at any of the leaked plot details of TLOU 2, so don’t talk about them in the comments.

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The Return Of The Stephen King Double Bill: Salem's Lot and Bag Of Bones

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Well, it happened again.

There I was, confined to bed with severe migraines and unable to do anything to pass the time. I needed something easy to read, something breezy and light. Then, just when all hope seemed lost, Stephen King floated spookily through my window and said “WoooOOOoooh read this book about vampires and also this book about ghosts or something WoooOOOoooh.”

Today I’m continuing my inexplicable love-hate relationship with America’s favourite creepy grandpa by looking at Salem’s Lot and Bag Of Bones.

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Viral Content (02/06/2020): Black Lives Matter

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So, uh…stuff’s happening.

I’m going to avoid commenting on the wider issue so as not to drown out more important voices, except to encourage anyone who’s able to do so to donate to protester bail funds. Instead I want to focus on one specific topic: the way the protests currently spreading across the US have the potential to impact the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

Of the many negative responses towards the protests I’ve seen, one stands out: the claim that the protesters are going to worsen the COVID-19 situation in America, which remains one of the worst-hit countries in the world. To be honest, this is something that occurred to me the moment this all started and as far as I’m concerned it’s the only legitimate criticism of the protests I’m willing to consider. People are currently congregating in large numbers in urban centers, sometimes having travelled long distances, and it goes without saying that social distancing in a protest is not really feasible. The frequent use of tear gas by the police is going to leave anyone infected with a compromised respiratory system, lowering their chances of fighting off the virus.

However, the situation is a lot more complicated than “the protesters are making the pandemic worse”, which is probably the line we’re going to be getting when the second wave hits. Remember, the US dropped most of its quarantine measures (which I assume the government is now regretting) long before the inciting incident of George Floyd’s death occurred. This is not a situation where everyone else is sitting at home observing social distancing measures while the silly protesters take to the streets; if that’s what was happening then we’d be having a different discussion. Instead, employees are forcing their workers back to work and people are flocking to the beaches. Outside of some snarky news stories, this background radiation of exposure isn’t getting put in the spotlight the same way that the protests are.

When the second wave comes, if America is particularly badly affected by it then the fault will lie chiefly with the government’s incredibly poor handling of the pandemic up to this point. Will the protests result in infections and deaths that wouldn’t have happened otherwise? Yes, in all likelihood. But Karen and Aiydyn Smith from Suburbiaville taking their 2.5 children to the beach will have far more of a negative impact in the long run.

Lastly, some people have tried to be clever dicks by pointing out that some of the people (such as myself) criticising the “reopen America” protests are now siding with the Black Lives Matter protests. Again, if America was still in quarantine mode then maybe this would hold some water, but as it is we’re left to consider the moral validity of protesting because you want a haircut versus protesting because the police keep murdering people in your community. Real head scratcher we’ve got on our hands there.