I’ve written before about how I’m not the biggest fan of James Wan’s movies. For some reason a lot of people in the horror movie fandom insisted on holding contrary views, but now, with the release of Malignant, even the hardcore Wanheads are coming around to the correct opinion. What about this movie caused such a shift in mindset? Let’s put on a backwards trenchcoat and scurry through some holes to find out.
Read MoreLast time on blog, we thoroughly dissected Sinister. Now it’s time to look at the sequel, Sinister II.
The 2010s was a decade when snappily-titled horror franchises were all the rage. You had your Conjurings, your Insidiouses, and of course your Paranormal Activities. Cheap to make compared to the big-budget superhero fare, studios could slap a new installment in cinemas every Halloween with little risk. So why did the budding Sinister franchise stop with the second entry?
Probably because it sucks prodigiously.
Read MoreSinister is a movie that combines three of my great passions: horror films, true crime, and hate-watching terrible media so I can complain about it at length for the enjoyment of my many fans. It’s time to enter the Bughuuliverse!
Read MoreI’m a pretty big fan of the first V/H/S movie. Horror anthologies have really taken off in the last ten years, and I think V/H/S is one of the best. Unfortunately the two sequels rapidly went downhill; in fact, V/H/S Viral got such poor reviews that I didn’t even bother watching it.
But now along comes Shudder, releasing a revival in the form of V/H/S/94 in order to tap even more heavily into that pre-millenial nostalgia that we all crave. Can this collection rekindle the magic of the original, or is it a movie that only 90s kids will love?
Read MoreIn the small but crowded realm of Youtube horror projects, nothing compares to Marble Hornets.
A brief history lesson: once upon a time there was a thread on the Something Awful forums that gave rise to internet creepypasta sensation Slenderman (maybe you’ve heard of him). For a while old slendie positively gripped the internet, and then the whole thing got played out and two girls stabbed their friend as part of a Slenderman-inspired delusion, signalling the final death knell of the phenomenon.
Of the many Slenderman creative projects that popped up during his reign of terror, Marble Hornets is probably the most famous. It set the standard and the tone for the initial wave of Slenderman creations, codified several long-standing tropes and ideas regarding how the character operates and interacts with his victims, and arguably did more to propel the whole thing into the mainstream than Slenderman’s actual creator.
Marble Hornets was created by a trio of young friends, whose creative endeavours fell apart in 2016 amidst hilarious drama. But before that they put out three seasons of the show on Youtube, bringing the story to a definitive conclusion--something of a rarity among Slenderman projects, which overwhelmingly tended to fizzle out as its college-aged creators graduated and got too busy to maintain them.
But how good is it, really? And does it still hold up in a post-Slenderman world? Let’s find out.
Read MoreRecently I have, for some reason, been thinking that it would be fun to get into a huge multi-volume fantasy series. I’m not entirely sure why; for most of my life I’ve had this idea that I should enjoy these kinds of books, even though I never actually have.
Anyway, I eschewed your Games Of Thrones and your Wheels Of Times and instead settled on Empire In Black And Gold, the first volume of incredibly prolific SF/F author Adrian Tchaikovscky’s 10-book(!) Shadows Of The Apt series. I made it more than halfway before giving up. Let’s see what went wrong.
Read MoreShortly after our last exciting round-up I started on a new migraine medication, which has allowed me to consistently read books more often without getting headaches. I have since gone mad with power, becoming as like unto a god. Here are the terrifying results.
Read MoreHey everyone, Amazon is putting out an adaptation of a beloved fantasy novel series!
No, not that one. The other one. The bad one.
Let’s watch the first Wheel Of Time trailer!
Read MoreWe’re navigating new frontiers of not finishing books with this one. Soon I’ll be writing posts about not reading books at all, and then my blog will spontaneously merge with r/books.
As an experiment, I recently walked into my local library and picked out the chunkiest, heftiest fantasy tome that I could find, without bothering to look at the synopsis or even the title. That book turned out to be Tad Williams’ The Witchwood Crown.
This was an inauspicious choice for a few reasons. Firstly, my only previous exposure to Tad Williams is The War Of The Flowers, which is to this day one of the dullest books I’ve ever tried to read. Second, The Witchwood Crown is actually the first book in a sequel trilogy to Williams' Memory, Sorrow And Thorn series from way back in the 80s, although the author forward states that it was intended to stand alone so I didn’t let that stop me.
I girded my loins, cleared my busy social calendar, opened the book...and made it four chapters in before I gave up and swapped it out for something more interesting.
I just...I can’t. I can’t even, with this shit.
The first chapter opens with a woman named Tanahaya, part of a race called the Zida’ya, musing to herself about how humans are as mayflies compared to her people, who live for centuries in their serene forest homes and they’re elves, they’re just Tolkien elves with a different name and a vaguely Japanese cultural aesthetic for some reason, Jesus Christ what is it with the fucking elves
I honestly don’t understand how people can write this stuff without falling into a coma. Reading it is excruciating enough, God knows what it would be like to have to live with Shan’anda’landa’land’alar, First Zephyr of the Elv’en people or whatever in your head for several years.
Granted, this is a sequel to a fantasy trilogy that started in 1988; maybe these tropes didn’t feel quite as played-out 33 years ago as they do now. Maybe, after years of gritty grimdark fantasy, people are hungry for wispy elves giving thanks to Mother Sun and riding horses named Spider-Silk. I guess it’s possible.
After the elf chapter we get a wise kingly king and his rambunctious princely prince son, and this is the stuff that made me drop the book. The elf shit is at least entertainingly bad, but sombre kings being all wise and sombre and kingly is perhaps the least interesting subject in the world to me. I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to see eye to eye with the epic fantasy genre until it gets over its fawning attitude towards monarchy, and there’s absolutely no sign of that happening any time soon.
For all that I mock grimdark fantasy (like I did two paragraphs ago), it at least tends to be a lot richer and more interesting than this hokey nonsense.
When it comes to books, I’m extremely basic. I have bought many books based solely on their nice cover designs, and I will likely continue to do this until the moment of my death. I wouldn’t say the actual contents of the book are completely irrelevant, but there’s a lot of leeway.
Mordew by Alex Pheby seemed like the best of both worlds: style and substance. Firstly, it’s got a really nice cover illustration, and it’s one of those ones that goes all the way to the edge of the cover, which I like. The book itself is pleasingly chunky and yet also compact, with a great hand-feel. A+ so far.
Read MoreIt’s time for one of my roughly annual attempts at reading a big hefty fantasy brick. This time we’re looking at The Rage Of Dragons, a self-published(!) novel turned normally-published novel. Can it overcome my well-known antipathy towards dragon-based literature?
Read MoreEarlier in the summer the stars aligned, the ancient prophecy came true, and my malfunctioning brain neurology settled down enough to let me read several entire books in a short time space. That blissful era has now ended, but I thought I’d write up some quick reviews and recommendeccies of what I got through.
Read MoreNote: Blog content will be sparse for a while, as the summer heat is cooking my already-fragile brain
Last time on the extremely popular and long-running series where I review internet spooky stories, we looked at a beloved nosleep yarn that actually holds up, mostly. Today let’s talk about one that doesn’t.
Read MoreI’m not sure exactly when this happened, but at some point we all, as a culture, decided that serial killers are not only superhuman murder-geniuses, but also that they’re extremely sexy. I’m honestly not sure what this says about us.
Anyway here’s a review of the first season of The Following, a Kevin Bacon-starring TV series about a serial killer cult.
Read MoreWelcome to the first installment of a new series (unless I decide not to do any more, in which case it will be the only installment) where I review spooky stories from the internet, starting off with stories posted on the Reddit r/nosleep sub.
Read MoreHere’s a very quick Books I Didn’t Finish post, explaining why I stopped reading something a few chapters in. I guess “Books I Barely Started” would be a more appropriate title.
I have read precisely one (1) William Gibson novel in my time, which is Neuromancer. Maybe it’s because I don’t really like the “punk” part of cyberpunk all that much, or maybe I just came to it too late, but it didn’t do anything for me at all and I pretty much didn’t think of old Willie Gibbs again for years, until I saw Agency on the shelves of my local library and was reminded that he’s still alive.
Read MoreRecently, while hospitalized for ten days, I decided to check out some thematically-appropriate medical dramas. This is a stratum of TV junk food that I don’t have a lot of familiarity with. While I have been known to watch a police procedural, hospital shows are outside my usual interest zone.
As we all know, the best way to tackle unfamiliar genres is to pick two completely random examples from the various streaming platforms. In that vein, here are reviews of the first episode of Night Shift and the first season of The Resident (guess which one I liked more).
Read MoreAfter I played the demos, I was left wondering what direction Resident Evil Village (aka Resident Evil 8 or RE8) would take the series in: a revival of Resident Evil 4’s frenetic “action survival”? A continuation of Resident Evil 7’s horror emphasis? A retread of the over the top Hollywood nonsense that got the franchise into trouble with Resident Evil 5 and 6? Or something entirely new?
As it turns out, the answer is: “Yes.” RE8 isn’t so much the next Resident Evil as it is all of Resident Evil, past, present, and future, offered up in a selection box of bite-size chunks that taste great separately but don’t always sit well together.
Read MoreNote: I’m going dark for the entire month of May while I undergo some fairly heavy treatment for my migraines. Blogging will resume some time in June.
This is going to need a bit of explanation for my non-gamer readers.
In 2017 Resident Evil VII: Biohazard (which I’m going to refer to from this point on as simply Resident Evil 7 or RE7) came out and restored the venerable Resident Evil franchise to something approaching its former glory. Having established the modern survival horror genre back on the Playstation 1 and then reaching a second apotheosis with the “action survival” reinvention of Resident Evil 4, the series started to go downhill with Resident Evil 5, which took things even further in the action direction; while a fun romp, especially in co-op, it pretty much completely abandoned all pretense of horror. Then the series went totally off the rails with Resident Evil 6, a ridiculous Micheal Bay-esque spectacle that’s more or less universally reviled. Throw in a glut of spin-offs that received mixed-to-negative reception, and you’ve got a franchise in trouble.
Capcom needed to do something drastic to right the ship, and that something was RE7, a return to the series’ horror roots that was critically acclaimed in general and won over most of the hardcore fans after some initial skepticism. It also, helpfully, sold like gangbusters. Resident Evil is back, baby! It’s good again!
I am primarily a fan of Resident Evil 7, not of the franchise as a whole. I played RE3, 4 and 5 when they came out, as well as some of the beloved Gamecube remake of the first game, and while I liked them well enough, I never got infected with the Resident Evil virus the way a lot of people did. Silent Hill was always my horror gaming jam.
Until RE7. I absolutely love RE7. I think it’s the best horror game of the modern era. That’s why I’ve been a bit nervous about the upcoming sequel.
Read MoreThat’s right, it’s time once again to revisit the Fountain Of Easy Blog Content, AKA the bibliography of America’s spookiest grandpa.
11/22/63 is apparently a polarizing novel, with some calling it King’s best modern work and others despising it. Based on the title of this post, you can probably guess how I reacted to it. King is usually very readable even at his worst, so why did I give up on 11/22/63 so quickly when I tried to read it last year?
Mainly because it’s boring as shit, but read on for the specifics.
Read More