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31 Nights of Horror: The Aftermath

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Four nights after my last post and I finally feel like writing again. I will say, overall, I found it easier to write the reviews this time compared to back in 2019 and I thought it would be good to do a wrap-up. Why did I do it, what was my goal, did I learn anything?

First, I wanted to challenge myself. With NaNoWriMo being NoMo, I still wanted a set of goals to force myself to write more and this seemed like a good idea. It didn’t require me to create stories whole cloth from my own brain, just give my half baked opinions on other peoples work, which is way, way easier. Also, I just like talking about things that interest me (compulsion is probably a better description) and hoped some of the articles would spark conversations. It also gave me an excuse to watch old movies, although, I didn’t really need one, as I do it all the time anyway.

Did I learn anything from this challenge? Yeah, a lot I think. First, my grammar is still atrocious, I use commas in places I’m probably not supposed to and I love using parentheses (which probably annoys some people).

I also found it was sometimes harder to get myself to watch a movie than it was to write about it after. Not because I knew a movies was going to be bad before I put it on, I’m not getting paid to do this, so I only ever chose to watch things I genuinely thought I might like. It was more the time it took up and the fact that sometimes I was more in the mood to do something else, like mining spice in the Deep Desert or trying to get caught up on One Piece (only 920 episodes to go!) I set up what I feel was a pretty good routine. Start watching a movie around 9pm, begin writing the article afterwards. Finish the article and edit it while eating breakfast before work the next morning. It went well most of the time, but some nights I got a late start or I just didn’t feel like watching a horror movie and my mood may have caused me to be overly harsh.

Would I do this again? Yes, absolutely. I enjoyed the process overall and don’t want to stop, I just won’t do it as frequently as every night. I’m tempted to do the same thing for Christmas , but maybe only every 2nd night, calling it the 12 days of Christmas Movies or something. I’m not sure how useful that would be though. I have a bunch of movies I already watch every Christmas season, and feel it would just be me gushing about why I love Scrooged, An American Christmas Carol and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation… but… as I’m writing this, I’m thinking it doesn’t have to be feel good Christmas movies I watch. Maybe I watch Christmas themed horror movies, like Black Christmas, Krampas, does Chopping Mall take place at Christmas? How about that Billy Bob Thornton movie, Bad Santa, not a horror, but not a traditional Christmas movie, right? I’ve got all of November to think about it.

Would I do 31 Nights of Horror again specifically? Yes, I think so. Maybe not thirty-one consecutive nights though. Maybe get a list of movies I want to watch and watch them throughout the year, but place the reviews in a folder to be released once a night next October. It would be less stressful, and I can devote more time to making the reviews better… but it isn’t as much of a challenge if I do that. Maybe a hybrid, write and watch most of them in “real-time” as it were, but have some I had watched earlier in the year as backups for the nights I need a break. The night before I wrote the article about Halloween board games, I was playing some of those games with friends up until about 11:30pm and still needed to watch a movie after they went home. That was a long night.

So, I’m going to try and keep writing these. Maybe only once a week, hopefully more often, but I make no promises. It may only be a recipe, those might be better as videos, though that’s something I haven’t tried before. We’ll see. I’m also going to talk to my doctor about increasing the dosage on my medication. I think it helped, but was inconsistent.

I also want to thank everyone who read this and the other articles, and those who would click “like” here and on the social media platforms I posted the links on. It means a lot to me knowing I’m not just talking to myself.

The Prophecy (1993)

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Night 5 of 31 Nights of Horror

The Prophecy (1993)

This is one of my favorite movies. Wanna know how good it is? My wife told me she was going to bed, so I started the movie playing. She was putting away her laptop as the opening voice-over started and asked me what it was about, then stayed to watch until the end.

It’s weird. I was twenty when this film came out, but I don’t recall it coming to the theatre, or any advertising for it. It must have, but the first time I remember seeing it was at the video store, which is kind of shocking given how absolutely stacked the cast is. Elias Koteas, Virginia Madsen, Eric Stoltz, Viggo Mortensen and Chrisopher freaking Walken. Even the periphery characters are memorable. Steve Hytner, Amda Plummer, and Adam Goldberg may not be names you can place immediately, but you’ll recognize their faces when you see them.

The plot is about one angel’s plan to end the stalemate of a millennia old war in heaven. You don’t need to know a lot about the bible or Christianity to follow the story, it’s all explained very well and done organically as the movie unfolds instead of in big exposition dumps.

It’s not a heavy special effects or action driven film, although the makeup and what effects there are are very well done, but it’s the performances that really sell it. Thomas’ pain and hurt when he describes no longer hearing God’s voice, the utter disdain and hatred Gabriel has for humanity and whenever I do see people talking about the movie, it’s usually when they’re listing best portrayals of the devil in film, and putting Viggo’s near the top.

My wife asked today at lunch what other movie like that we could watch and I’m wondering the same thing myself. Constantine she’s already seen and Legion is probably more action oriented that she would like. Maybe Ninth Gate or Seventh Sign? Lords of Illusion isn’t very biblical, but I’ve always felt it had a similar feel. Any other suggestions I might have missed?

Sleepaway Camp (1983)

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Night 1 of 31 Nights of Horror

When I worked at the video store (after walking 40 miles uphill in the snow to get there, fighting off dinosaurs all the way) I remember passing by the box for this movie in the horror section a lot. I dismissed it as a cheap knock off trying to cash in on the success of Friday the 13th. I shouldn’t have. It’s better than I thought it would be.

Like the first movie in the franchise that made Jason more famous than a Golden Fleece could, Sleepaway Camp is a mystery/horror. The antagonist is not known, the murders are all shown in shadow, off camera or from the killers point of view, so you don’t find out who’s doing it until the end and there is more suspense than gore. Unlike Friday the 13th, this felt like a real camp. There are a lot of extras of all ages giving the camp itself a life that Crystal Lake didn’t have.

The acting is a little uneven, some performers are great, others over the top. Side note, Felissa Rose’s blank stare is fantastic. Given that their budget was $200,000 LESS than Friday’s, It’s a surprisingly well made film and the handful of makeup shots were excellent, except for that cops moustache, it looks super fake in high definition. Hats off to Ed French who eventually went on to get an Oscar nomination for his work on Star Trek VI.

If you want to watch the movie yourself before being spoiled, it is (at the moment) streaming for free (in Canada at least) on Tubi, or commercial free if you subscribe to Amazon Prime

SPOILERS BELOW

I watched an excellent documentary a few years ago about the history and representation of trans people in film and television called Disclosure. One of the things that stuck with me was when they pointed out how often being trans was used as a twist when exposing the villain, like in Ace Ventura or Soap Dish, so with the reveal at the end of Angela being the killer and actually a boy… it seems like another example of a trans character being used as a “shocking twist!”, except Angela isn’t trans, he’s Peter, forced to live as “Angela” by a batshit crazy aunt. You could say that being forced to present as a gender that is not who you really are is unfortunately a too common experience for trans people, but it doesn’t turn them into serial killers.

I guess you can tell, I’m not a fan of the ending and not just for the villain-is-a-trans-person-shock-twist but what was with that weird banshee scream at the end? And did they rip that kids head off? I didn’t see any weapons, so that’s what it looked like. All the other kills were done with mundane items, but suddenly the killer (a young teen) is strong enough to decapitate someone with their bare hands? And then it just ends?

Maybe the sequel explains things a little better. I’ll find out tomorrow.

A Mental Health story

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When I was studying computer science in CEGEP, one of the required classes we had to take was a psychology course. Unlike a lot of our other classes this one was not just Comp. Sci. students, but pupils from other programs as well. A lot of the work we did in this class was group activities, and it was through this class that I met a young man named Mark.

Mark was not like me. Mark was tall, outgoing, good looking and made friends easily, but we did have a few things in common. Even though he was not in the Computer Science program, he was a giant nerd like me and even ran a private BBS (Bulletin Board Systems were like online forums, before the Internet was a thing)

Shortly after meeting him Mark informed me he was going to make it his mission to find me a date. He made a few quick phone calls and just like that, we had a group of about ten people going to the movies.

Mark failed in his mission, but I never really took his statement seriously. It was fun just chatting with him when I was logged into his bulletin board, and he was always planning get togethers (GTs as we called them back then). I attended one in his tiny one room basement apartment. A vampire movie marathon, with people dropping in and out all day and into the night. We tried making Jello shots, but they didn’t set and an attempt use the freezer to speed up the process just made a weird vodka infused slush. Mark was a lot of fun and everyone like being around him. He was the first person I knew who had his own place, and he had this VCR with a remote that had this awesome wheel on it for fast forward, reverse or frame by frame advance. I wanted one exactly like it. Truth be told, I wanted to be more like Mark. He had an awesome place, he had loads of friends and an easy self confidence that I envied.

I chatted with him as the Christmas break started and asked him what his plans were. He was going to New York to visit friends for New Years eve (which sounded amazing) but had no plans for Christmas. I told him to have fun and said we’d talk again in the new year. After our conversation I thought about inviting him over for Christmas diner. My parents would not have minded, my mother would have been thrilled. The more people the better they would have thought.

When school started back up in January, a friend who had been in the Psychology class with us asked if I had heard about Mark. He had been killed when he stepped in front of a train.

At the funeral I found out that there was no dispute it had been a suicide. Mark had been struggling with sever depression for years. He lived on his own because he did not get along with his family. All the friends I thought he had, the majority were like me, not actually very close to him.

No matter how together someone appears to be, we don’t really know what is going on inside their head unless we talk to them. I wish I had invited him to Christmas dinner. Realistically, I know now that when someone is in so much pain that they see suicide as their only way to end it, one diner with a strange family most likely would not have changed anything… but it might have.

It’s important to talk to the people we care about. It’s not all on them to reach out, because sometimes they can’t. Their illness just won’t let them. That’s something I’ve learned as I got older. You need to make sure people know they can talk to you. Not just about the things we have in common, or to complain about politics, but to let each other know they have someone they can turn to for help. Someone who won’t judge, and although they may not have the answers, will give them the support they need to help find them.

Every year Bell sponsors “Let’s Talk” day to raise awareness of mental health issues, promote resources that are available and to raise money for mental health initiatives.

If you are in crisis, please reach out to someone who can help.

You can even contact me. Even if we’ve drifted apart, talk every day or are complete strangers. Sometimes it helps just to have a friendly person to unload on.

Back from a long hiatus

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I had problems with a few different hosting options, I also had a serious lack of motivation, all of which meant I have not posted any articles here since… (checks dates) Wow, 2015. More than three years.

Well, it’s back now, should be much more stable and I have plans to publish content on a much more regular and frequent basis. The bad news is all the images embedded in older articles were lost. I’m going to try and re-create them but until I do, the formatting may look a little odd.

Spider-Man : Into the Spider-Verse

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I really enjoyed the two Toby Maguire movies (I like to pretend the third was a bad dream I had), disliked the first Andrew Garfield film so much I never bothered to watch the second and loved all three of Tom Holland’s outings as the infamous wallcrawler. I loved Spider-Man: Homecoming so much I told anyone who would listen it was my favorite Spider-Man movie… until I saw Into the Spider-Verse last week. Continue reading “Spider-Man : Into the Spider-Verse” →