Ten Things People Do on the Internet Which Need a Reality Check and Other Follies

It's been a funny old week for me on the internet (and in real life) so I thought I'd share a few random things which have been amusing me. With this nasty, rainy weather outside, we could all do with a bit of cheering up, right? Just leave it to me to spread more mirth, merriment and downright hatred with yet another controversial blog post. Enjoy!


1. Capitalising Every Letter At The Start Of A Blog Post Even When It Doesn't Work Grammatically.

Don't you just hate that? The rule has always been that the words "and", "to", "from", "or", "nor", "the", "an", "a", etc. in the middle of a heading are supposed to begin with lower case letters not upper case ones. I suppose it's better than PeOpLe wHo TyPe lIkE tHiS but not by much.

I also loathe really long blog post titles which take up half my Blogroll. Seriously, if you want to title your post "All the things I did on holiday in Marbella where I went with my mum and dad who got sunburnt and stayed in a chalet by the beach", get a grip!

Don't even get me started on the people who think it's really clever to title their blogs as "[center]Horror Movie Reviews | Games | Books | Music | All things about zombies | Little Cakes | Wicca | Furry Things | Bronies | Horror Rules Okay![/center]" I spend ages deleting all that crap from my Blogroll and then retitling everyone's blogs with all the spelling mistakes and non-functional HTML tags fixed anyway.


2. I'll teach you a lesson, I'll unfollow you... so there!

This one has to be the funniest trend on all the social networks and even Blogger (which is just a glorified MySpace after all).

Over the years, I think I've been unfollowed by as many people as have followed me, and I've unfollowed probably four times that number myself just because I grew out of certain cliques or no longer shared the same interests as former "internet friends". I've blocked and ignored quite a few too. But, I can honestly say that I've never unfollowed someone out of a sense of "I'll show you how much I hate you by unfollowing you!"

How does that work exactly? You hate somebody so much that you unfollow them then continue to kite over their social networking profiles to see what they are saying so that you can whinge about it on your own status updates which the person in question doesn't even read?! Trust me, once I unfollow somebody, it's a case of "out of sight, out of mind". I couldn't care less if the unfollowed are calling me the next Adolf Hitler or worse on their own blogs for all the good that it will do them. I certainly don't lose any followers or sleep through it, and there have even been times when I've gained followers because of whingers whose readers got curious about who was being whinged about.

The same thing happens on message boards. Somebody gets the arse and thinks, "I'll leave the board and take my ball home with me so nobody else can play with it". It's petty, childish stuff, but the internet is full of petty childishness anyway. Fully grown adults are worse than real kids once allowed to hide behind the alleged safety of their keyboards.


3. The Django doll fiasco.

Have you seen the NECA Django dolls which are now banned from eBay for "racism" but are still being sold by greedy Amazon dealers for between $300-1700 each? How can a little plastic figure of a movie character be racist? Even given the nature of the movie, having watched it and reviewed it, I can't see how "Django" might encourage a return to slavery. Did any of the complainers even watch the film?

Who in their right mind complains about collectible dollies? Worse, who complains to the company trying to sell these things on the internet? What moron who ordered the stock would then withdraw the items and lose their investment? Give me a break! The only thing that's happened is that the price has been annoyingly jacked-up to extortionate levels, and some more popularity has been generated for Quentin Tarantino's movie.

Will six "action figures" (only two of which even look like the characters in the film) cause that much racism? It's not as if they come with branding irons and whips. My Broomhilda certainly didn't anyway, and I've had all her clothes off several times to check!

Banning toys won't make any difference to America's history, "white guilt", or the racism in America which is as bad today as it's always been. Doesn't Django end the film as a free man after having defeated slavery single-handedly? Or did I miss something?

This makes me wonder if Princess Leia slave girl dolls will be next in line for a banning? I hope not. I haven't bought one yet, but I have no desire to work like a slave just to be able to afford one in the future. B'dum tish!


4. The "Lamers of Horror" clique.

Have you noticed the different cliques (pronounced "cleeks" not "clicks", by the way) among horror bloggers? There are those of us with a mid-range number of GFC followers (350-450) who attract a certain more intellectual group of readers while there are others with well below 200 GFC followers who tend to attract those you can really only describe as "tasteless morons who would be better off hanging out with the scene kids on Tumblr". Of course, there are some new bloggers who simply haven't achieved any more followers in the short time they've been writing, but that's another story.

I've actually removed my Google Friend Connect widget because it doesn't fit in with how I want my blog to look, plus nobody has used it for the last year. It doesn't do what it was intended to, i.e. block undesirables, so it's a useless addition to anybody's blog if they aren't playing the popularity contest. If you must know, I ended up with 354 followers on it, but over half of them are now from dead Blogger accounts. Some people followed me then stopped writing a few months later but didn't remove their accounts. No, I know I get the blame for everything, but it wasn't my fault. Blogging simply isn't for everyone.

Anyway, I suppose you want to know about the "Lamers of Horror" clique. These are the horror bloggers who have been blogging on and off for the last three or four (or even five) years and still don't have over 200 followers. Some have less than half of that because, quite simply, they have no content on their blogs worth reading and spend all their time commenting other bloggers just to get follow/comment backs.

Their usual trick is to write "Great review!" on each other's blog posts even when the "review" isn't great or doesn't count as a review. Then the recipient is obliged to write something on the giver's latest hogwash containing more sycophantic nonsense. You'll see this quite often if you scan the comments sections of some of the poorer horror blogs out there. You'll also find it rife among fashion bloggers, photo bloggers, and any other "girlie" blogs. You won't see it on a blog like mine because I don't get a lot of that. I also periodically delete the old comments anyway.

The "Lamers of Horror" are mostly girls (or pretend girls) with maybe a few dozen infatuated guys in their clique. Naturally, they all follow each other. "Birds of a feather flock together" and all that jazz. The same avatars show up over and over again in their GFC widgets in almost the same order. Woe betide you if you annoy one of them because all their little buddies who share the same brain cell will instantly disappear from your GFC widget to "teach you a lesson". It's happened to me because I tend to piss off a lot of people. Do I care? Hell, no. Just be prepared for much laughter when it happens to you. Now you know what the phenomenon is, it's hilarious.

Another thing which highlights the "Lamers of Horror" is their appalling taste in horror movies. They invariably prefer "horror comedies" or "horror for kiddies" instead of anything with any grit to it. You won't find them praising the virtues of "The Human Centipede 2" or "A Serbian Film", but you will find them retreading the same tired old ground about "Beetlejuice", "Ghostbusters", "A Nightmare on Elm Street", or R.L. Stine's "Goosebumps" books. For some reason, I always imagine them all as looking like the "Ermagerd Gersebermps" girl but even less attractive.

"Lamers of Horror" also don't know how to write movie reviews. Perhaps they never learned how to do it in school or they are just lazy bloggers. Either way, what they do is retell the story in their own words then just add a couple of lines such as "It was a really great movie. I liked it a lot." Yeah, it makes you not want to live on this planet anymore, doesn't it?

If you find yourself caught up in the "Lamers of Horror" clique, just don't reply to them. It's more trouble than it's worth and will drag your own blog down. In the past, I've enjoyed pissing them off until they've left my GFC widget, but I'm sick and twisted that way.


5. Google Plus is shutting out people who like to use their screen names rather than real names.

This happened to me earlier this week when I got an email from Google+ telling me that their system didn't recognise "Dr Blood" as a valid name. I could either use my real name (which is hardly the internet's biggest secret but no longer leads to my blog since I've been writing under a pseudonym for the last ten years) or I could delete my account. I chose to delete my Google+ account. I never used it much and could barely understand it. All those circles and an interface that I couldn't make head nor tail of! Nope, not for me.

It was an absolute bugger trying to find the place to delete my Google+ account because they've hidden the link to do it so well. After (ironically) Googling to find out the answer, I got rid of the pointless thing once and for all while still keeping all the other Google goodies (such as this blog) intact. Be very careful what you choose to delete if you do the same thing because you might lose everything in one go.

This also brings me back to the GFC widget which Google have been phasing out ever since they removed it from third-party sites such as Wordpress early last year. Apparently, Google want everybody to use Google+ profiles for their blogs which lose all the information that you have on your Blogger ID profile. Don't do it! I did it and then had to put everything back. What a pain in the ass! There's a new "Google+ Followers" widget to replace the GFC, but it's never going to catch on. It does even less than the original GFC widget unless you want to broadcast all your fake friends to the world to make yourself look popular.


6. Little kids on the internet.

Why do parents let little kids around 10 or 11 years old use the internet? Do these kids really need porn at that age? What are they even doing on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and all the other social networking sites which used to demand that kids be at least 13 years old before they could sign up?

I'll tell you what they are doing: Trolling!

Have you ever seen the comments on YouTube (not on my account because I don't allow comments) full of swearing, grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, run on sentences without punctuation, and kids stupid enough to announce their age at the end of them? Typical example: "Hey biatch u cn just kill urself cos lyke ur jelly bro... and u dont lyke anytang cos your stoopid and Imma 12." Jesus wept!

Take your goddamned kids off the internet! Give them a plastic bag and tell them to go play in the traffic or something! Or, I don't know, why not do something constructive like spend some time with them instead of using the internet as a babysitter?


7. Little kids at horror conventions.

LOL WUT? I heard about this on a friend of mine's podcast where a woman phoned-in to say that she was so disgusted by the in-fighting among horror cliques that she would no longer be taking her 8 and 11 year old children to horror conventions! GOOD!

Why would you take kids who aren't legally old enough to watch horror movies to an indoor fleamarket full of wannabe "suicide girls" and sweaty comicbook nerds who are all drinking straight from the bottle and swearing at each other anyway? This is as bad as parents who take their squalling brats into R-rated movies to disrupt the enjoyment of the movie for everyone else.

Keep your kids at home! And "in-fighting cliques", keep on doing it! It's funny!


8. People who get butthurt over movie reviews.

This makes me laugh my arse off (not literally or figuratively as that would require hospitalisation) because it's so stupid!

Unless you made the movie in question, invested your own money in it and stand to lose revenue from a bad review, you have no reason to get so emotionally attached to a product. Movies are just products designed to make money. That's why the "entertainment industry" is also called "show business" with the clue being in the second word.

If I buy a DVD or pay for a ticket to a movie which doesn't satisfy me, I'm going to rip that movie to shreds on my blog. I paid for the right to do so in the same way that if I bought a meal and didn't like the taste of it, I'm going to have something to say about that as well.

Being British, I'm not actually much of a complainer in restaurants or stores (I'm a rather pleasant customer actually, full of "pleases" and "thank yous", and I always leave a tip), but if somebody makes a crappy movie, what do you think I'm going to say about it?

Unlike the big name sell-out sites, I'm not here to promote anything (except when I've been paid to do so, in which case you'll be as surprised as I am!) and all my reviews are 100% what I really think of the films I watch. Although I try to be objective, of course personal taste plays a part which is why I despise "hobby horror" or "backyard epics". That doesn't mean that big-budget theatrical movies get a free pass either. I'm even harder on them because they have the budgets and experience behind them to be better.

I get a lot of hate behind the scenes (on the other side of the comments form) from complete idiots who you would think made the films themselves. I rarely hear from the directors or actors, but in the past, the ones who have contacted me have agreed that what I had to say about their work was fair. One even apologised because I didn't like his film. Yeah, I felt a little bit bad, but his film made me feel worse so I didn't have any remorse for long. Still, it was nice of him to visit.

So when I hate a crappy movie, don't shoot the messenger! I paid to see it, I gave it a fair chance, but it didn't work for one reason or another. You hate me because I hate a movie? Well, I hate you because you're a dumbass. Tit for tat, baby! Feel free to unfollow me for hating your favourite movie because that'll really teach me a lesson!

If people want me to stop hating movies, they need to make some better ones.


9. The number of followers/friends/likes popularity contest and jealousy.

Here's the thing, you can have a million followers on the social networks or your blog, but unless each one is sending you a dollar every month, what good does it do you?

As I said, I have 354 followers on here (maybe more who follow in other ways or invisibly), around 758 on Twitter (although it keeps changing up and down), 312 on Facebook, and various numbers on other sites. Do they all send me money? Nope. One did, once, but as a rule, no. I'm not that popular, but within my little circle of people who I chat to regularly, I suppose I am. I know some actors, directors, and musicians both in real life and online, but that doesn't entitle me to any financial reward or "basking in their reflected glory" either. I'm just a blogger who writes for a bit of fun. So why all the jealousy?

Obviously, if you are a movie star or a pop star, the chances are that you will have several million followers who can't wait to give you all their money for your next product, but that doesn't happen for movie reviewing leeches. Yes, that's what movie reviewers and critics are: LEECHES! We're the worst kind of journalists. We don't contribute anything, we just take and regurgitate. Even the news sites only copy each other with a few words changed here and there. No matter how original your writing is, if you are reviewing a movie, the chances are that somebody else is saying exactly the same things somewhere else but with better sentence construction and more snarky jokes.

Should that make us all jealous of someone who has better writing skills? Maybe. If that jealousy spurs us on to improve our own style, it's a good thing. But this negative, hating jealousness has to stop. So what if someone has 10,000 GFC followers? It just means that they were in the right place at the right time and play the game a bit better than others. Why hate them for it?

In some cases, popular critics and reviewers deserve a certain amount of hate for spreading misinformation and for selling-out. That's understandable. But you really need a reality check if you hate somebody for having a bigger number of "pretend friends" on the internet than you do. That's like hating someone for having more cows on Farmville.


10. Social networking is useless for bloggers.

How long do you spend on Facebook, Twitter and all the other social networks each day rather than writing content for your blog? Hours and hours, probably. Do you realise how much more you could achieve by ignoring them and just blogging? Let me tell you as a person who spends days at a time on Farmville, Angry Birds, and all the other apps, plus bullshitting on Twitter, it's a lot of wasted time.

The other problem with Facebook, Twitter and, especially, Tumblr is that they've become the virtual gated communities that AOL once was. For a while it was MySpace, then it was Proboards and vBulletin sites, but things are always changing. Once somebody is on those sites, you aren't going to pry them loose very easily to look at your blog. You'll read all sorts of crap about how you need to use social networking to improve your audience, but it's a lie.

I have a Facebook page, and apart from five people, I don't think any of them have looked at my blog once. Yes, just five actually clicked the links placed on there by the NetworkedBlogs app. The other 307 (or whatever) just like the silly jokes and pictures that I post so they have something to share with their friends. They aren't going to leave Facebook for a second because it's too much fun to read all their friends complaining about their lives on their own "walls" than come to a horror movie review blog.

Twitter is just as bad. Sometimes somebody will take a quick look at where a link heads, but most of the time they won't. Again it's far more fun for them to list the #tenbiggestthingsIcangetinmymouth or wittily talk to themselves with whatever other topic is trending than leave the comfort zone of that environment.

Outside of Facebook and Twitter is a big, scary internet full of more things than LOLcats and memes, but some people just aren't very adventurous. The only way to get traffic to your blog from social networks is to give things away (which lasts for as long as the giveaway does) or sell a product regularly. If the only thing you have to "sell" is a free piece of writing, nobody wants to know.

So forget the social networks and just concentrate on filling your blog with good content if you want more readers. Fairweather followers and pretend friends who you'll never meet in real life won't do you any good.


If you've enjoyed or agree with anything I've said above, let me know in the comments below. If you disagree, I couldn't care less so please keep it to yourself. Yes, I do only want to surround myself by people who think the same way that I do. I'd be a bloody fool if I chose to surround myself with enemies and haters, wouldn't I?

Too many upgrades

Well, they finally did it to me. After nine months of getting away with still using the old interface even though they kept saying that it would be upgraded, Blogger updated the Dashboard against my will. I'm not happy.

I like to compose my posts with the HTML editor, and now it doesn't insert the line breaks automatically. Unless I want everything to come out as one huge paragraph, I have to use the "Compose" feature which I hate. As for the rest of it, I suppose it loads faster, but I can't find anything now. As much as I may want to, I'm not going to jump ship to Wordpress because I can't understand a damned thing on that site anyway.

Just to add insult to injury, Photobucket also joined in this madness by updating their site design (which is also still optional for a while) with a dumbed down but, paradoxically, less easy to navigate mess. Now my images all upload with an underscore and a load of random numbers and letters after them such as "underworld_zps2b76599e.jpg". That really annoys me! I tried to change the filenames, but then the images disappeared from my blog posts. Maybe it's time to look for a new image host or just not use any more pictures.

Finally, Twitter has a new official widget which is now the only one available on its site, but it doesn't work yet! I deleted the old version to put this cool-looking but useless thing in the sidebar, and was stupid enough to not keep a backup of the code. Thus, I've been forced to put the amateur-looking but still functional one from the gadgets directory at the bottom of my sidebar instead.

Why can't the developers ever leave good enough alone? This reminds me of how I used to love MySpace until they ruined it with all the streams and a load of widgets which slowed it down to a crawl. YouTube has also become even more irritating to find anything on since that all changed and they removed the labels feature. As for Facebook, why did anyone think that the timeline would be a good idea? It's made me not want to use Facebook at all anymore. What's next?

Even my current operating system, Ubuntu 12.04, is only still acceptable by using the Gnome "fallback" mode. I can't get on with Unity, Gnome 3 or KDE, and I certainly don't want any of those rough-looking lighter desktops. With a new Ubuntu only a month away, I might have to go back to using Windows. Well, unless that means Windows 8. If I have to use that crap, I might as well give up completely.

Are all these changes just to give people something to do or to satisfy the latest smartphone users? It doesn't do me any good. I loathe smartphones and only have an old Tracfone. I don't even use it all that often to make any calls and haven't got any credit on it at the moment. I couldn't imagine typing in my blog posts by pressing the same keys a hundred times over with my thumbs. Christ! What a world we live in.

For years everybody was quite happy with Firefox and all its plug-ins but, noooo, now all the kewl kids have to use Chrome (which you can't add anything to) because it's easier and they either can't think or don't have to think about it. Look at the Google search engine and how it wants to fill in everything for you (unless, like me, you've turned that infuriating "instant" nonsense off and removed the "safe" filtering). No wonder nobody ever leaves the social networking sites to look at anything else. It's like being trapped by AOL's custom interface all over again. How is any of this supposed to make using the internet more enjoyable?

Technology is conspiring against us. I never thought I'd see the day when all the changes right across the board would actually make things less usable than before, but it's happening.

Things I do on my blog which piss people off

As a kind of follow-up article to "Things movie bloggers do that piss me off", I decided to indulge in some self-criticism and point out a few things which I'm sure drive the other bloggers who read my blog absolutely mental.

1. I intentionally leave grammatical errors in my posts.

Although I have been known to occasionally go back and edit some of the more ridiculous mistakes, I don't really care if my grammar is 100% correct. If I get the point across then it doesn't matter anyway. The real reason why I do this, of course, is to prevent copyright theft. Finding reposts of my badly written reviews is a lot easier with Google search when people are that lazy to copy them without reading them properly.

2. I don't link to bigger versions of any image I use.

This really happens because I don't use the built-in image uploader which automatically links to a bigger picture. In the past, I found that using the uploader and repositioning images to the right or left made such a mess of the text that I stopped using it. Now I manually put an image right in the middle of each post to satisfy my readers who don't read anything other than the title and only visit my blog to look at the pictures and steal them for their own projects.

3. I don't always have HD trailers at the start of each post.

The thing is, since I don't make any money from this blog, I actually go out of my way to find uploaded trailers on YouTube which aren't monetised and have very few views. Why should anybody else make money from my reviews or someone else's trailer if I can't? Although I try to get the best version of each trailer possible, I'll always choose one with no or less adverts in them in preference to any other. If that trailer isn't in HD, too bad.

4. I don't always respond to comments.

Why should I? I've said what I had to say in the post. This is a blog not a forum. If you've only posted a comment to disagree with my review (even though you are wrong and have no taste) then I might reply if I can be bothered.

5. I delete the old comments.

There are no prizes here for having more comments than anyone else, and, once I've read them, I simply don't need them anymore. In a lot of cases, they are misspelled, irrelevant, or just contain links to other things which I have no interest in, so good riddance.

6. I often change my layout.

Why shouldn't I? It's my blog and I can do what I want to. It's only the main RSS post feed which counts anyway. All the stuff in the sidebar is just eyecandy on most people's blogs, but my current design is actually supposed to make navigation a bit easier. If it doesn't then you obviously have bigger problems with basic computer skills than you realise.

7. Sometimes I post things which have nothing to do with horror.

Sue me. You get all this for free and if I choose to write about something else between horror movie reviews that's my prerogative. I try to limit it, but if I'm going through "writer's block", absolutely anything could turn up. If you continue to read my blog, be prepared for a few random surprises.

8. I don't swear all over my blog like other horror bloggers.

I'm not consciously censoring myself or lame enough to write "f**k" and "s**t" as if that fools anyone. I swear enough on Twitter, my podcast and in real life to qualify as a truck driver so I simply don't feel the need to by the time I come to write my posts.

9. I hate a lot of horror movies.

Yes, I do. The point of my blog is to find good ones to put into "The Vault". If they aren't good enough and waste my time, I'm going to hate them. That doesn't necessarily mean that I hate the filmmakers or actors involved, or that I even hate the people who do like those films. It just means that I hate bad movies.

10. I even hate some of the good horror movies.

No movie is ever perfect so there will always be something to dislike in all of them. Also my taste has changed a lot over the years and, in some cases, a once objective appraisal doesn't matter any more. I'm still always completely honest in every review, and I'll let you know in the post itself when things are just my opinion.


If you are guilty of any of the same things or can think of anything else I do which really pisses you off, leave me a comment below.

How to be a successful horror blogger

Having done this for a quite a while now without ever having achieved the coveted "Blog of Note" pat on the back from Google, any kind of fame, and, apparently, no financial reward, you would think that I would be the last person who would offer advice on how to be a successful horror blogger.

Au contraire, just because I've been kicked to the kerb more times than I've been acknowledged doesn't mean that I haven't seen others appear out of nowhere over the years and become almost overnight celebrities in the horror blogging game. I've scrutinized every aspect of exactly how they did it too.

I'm not jealous of any of them. Every dog has his day, "to every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose" (to quote something far more profound out of context), and fame is fleeting. "When you get a number one, the only way is down," as Adam Ant once sang. As soon as you get any kind of success, you get haters who want to destroy you, so I'm kind of happy just doing what I'm doing as a hobby.

Anyway, based on my observations, the following are the steps necessary to becoming a successful horror blogger.


1. Never disagree or have a strong opinion about anything unless it's the most politically correct cause at the time.

The key to this is being completely wishy-washy. Some would call it running with the foxes and hunting with the hounds, but you can't even be that hypocritical. You genuinely have to believe (or at least convince others that you genuinely believe) that every horror movie is a valid work of art and not just some product designed to make a quick buck from a stupid audience.

If you want to really impress your readers, swear undying love for all things Troma and the "so bad it's good" style of backyard epics. Use the words "indie horror filmmaker" a lot. Nobody will know if any of the movies you talk about even exist, but they will still think you are uber cool for standing against the horrible "Hollywood" machine which stifles creativity, or some such happy horseshit. Never say anything bad about Hollywood yourself.


2. You have to love the remakes.

Of course, this only really works if you are under 25 years old and have only ever watched horror movies from the mid '90s onwards. If you have any knowledge of the original movies other than just their titles, just refer to them all as "Classics" whether you have actually seen those movies or not. A typical sentence will be, "Having just watched the awesome remake of the fantastic classic horror [insert name here], I was absolutely blown away by the incredible attention to detail and respect given to the original source material."

While those in the know will see through this bullshit immediately, the movie companies will love you and want to quote your generic praise on their DVD artwork, thus creating lots of traffic to your horror blog.


3. Have an awesome blog layout.

You don't have to rely on content when you can hire a professional artist to add all kinds of cartoons and Flash animations to make your blog look trendy. Who cares if your reviews are only one paragraph as long as you have a moving picture at the top of them? It makes your site look "live" and appeals to the tweenagers with ADD who will be clicking all your "Like" and "Thumbs Up" buttons like mad things.

If you can do all this yourself, you can save a ton of money, but don't take too long about it because if you are over thirty, nobody will give a damn about you anyway. Spend large amounts of cash to make up for the skills which you will never have and can't be bothered to learn so that you can reap the rewards as quickly as possible.


4. Pay for promotion on search engines, Facebook and Twitter.

Yes, even if you have the crappiest site and the worst reviews possible, you too can be top of the horror blogger food chain by paying for traffic. It costs a fortune, but, hey, now you can have a Kickstarter project, beg for money for something else, and use that income to promote your blog instead.

Don't even bother to question the moral implications of such dishonesty. You do want to be a top horror blogger and earn millions of dollars, right?


5. Be a girl.

There are far too many men blogging about horror, so even if you aren't a girl, pretend to be one. Hire a model to dress up in something slutty, gothic and sexy, take some pictures, and use her image (with permission) all over your blog.

If you are a girl and can make yourself up to be half-way attractive, create some quirky images of yourself maybe holding a horror DVD and winking. Even better, create a logo of yourself reclining on a bed of horror DVDs. The nerds will go crazy for you although be prepared to be told off by many of them for incorrectly storing those precious Blu-rays.


6. Have a gimmick.

To be a huge horror blogging success, you need to have a gimmick which you will be remembered for. Obviously, dressing up as Elvira won't help you unless you are male, but we've already established that you are going to pretend to be female anyway. Oh, and remember that you always have to refer to men as "male" and women as "female" because it's more politically correct to do so.

Suggestions for your gimmick include: being a vegan, believing in UFOs, liking Nascar, wrestling, or cosplay. In fact, just about anything which the majority of the world thinks sucks could be your quirk as long as you promote it to the hilt in every review you write. For example, "When the jump scare happened, it was such a shock that I almost choked on my tofu burger and ended up being rushed to the hospital in my Stormtrooper outfit. Oh, how embarrassing!" You get two for one there plus points for being inoffensively self-deprecating.


7. Be self-deprecating.

The worst thing about being a horror blogger is having too much knowledge. It alienates your audience who all think that they are the supreme "Horror Aficionado" in the horror universe themselves. To keep your readers coming back for more, you have to dumb yourself down, make obvious mistakes, and poke fun at yourself for being so stupid as much as possible.

Although it's really difficult to pull this off unless you are actually dumb-as-a-crate-full-of-stupid, you can still achieve the same effect by getting the names of movie characters wrong. For example, "I loved how Jason killed everybody in the classic Friday the 13th from the '70s". When corrected on all three counts, just laugh it off in your comments section by saying you meant the remake but you're a girl.

Ask lots of questions at the end of every post you write to increase the illusion that you know nothing at all about the subject you've been writing about. People love that!


8. Be vulgar.

Everybody swears, but this is where you can be at your most creative. Only use traditional curse words, but put them in every other sentence. It's not as if you even know what you are talking about anyway, and your subscribers can barely read, so just throw the expletives randomly into your text and hope for the best if all else fails. Remember not to offend anybody by changing the last "g" to an apostrophe because that missing letter makes all the difference.

Never write the word "shit" in relation to any movie or actor's performance, and you will go far. You can, however, talk about the DVD case as being "sh*t" (remember the asterisk!) unless your gimmick is being an eco-case supporter.

If you are either pretending to be a girl or you are really a girl, you can also gain more readers by announcing your faux-lesbian attraction to the hot actresses in the latest horror movie. Nerds and pubescent schoolboys love this. Just confuse matters slightly by claiming to have a very temporary but committed boyfriend who thought the same, and then describe in inoffensive detail how hot you were together later. Watch your pageviews rocket!


9. Build a forum.

Although the comments sections may provide a huge amount of social networking, having a forum allows people to feel a very tribal sense of belonging. Make the forum really exclusive, and provide content on it such as videos of yourself smothered in indie horror DVDs or seductively eating tofu.

Don't spend too much time on that forum yourself though as you can rely on the internal popularity contests and cliques which form to provide you with lots of free content. Only endorse the opinions which agree with your own, harvest the latest news or gossip from the threads, and maybe offer a completely worthless prize such as a little crown on their avatar for whoever posts the most.

Occasionally, provide the masses with a trailer to a horror movie or a link to your latest one paragraph review with lots of pictures and you will be worshipped like a living god.


10. Watch at least three (but no more than six) horror movies.

Again, working on the fact that you are more likely to be promoted for being stupid than for having any knowledge, ironically, there have to be some horror movies which you know inside out and can refer to in every post. The more obscure these movies are the better although one must be easily recognisable. For example, "I just watched [insert movie name] and it was awesome even though [insert movie actor name] was playing the same role as [he/she] did in [insert specialist knowledge movie name]." Preface everything with, "In my humble opinion..." just so you never appear objective or able to recognise formulas, tropes or clichés. Remember, you have to love everything no matter how unoriginal it is.

Suggestions for known movies include the "Halloween", "Friday the 13th" and "Nightmare on Elm Street" franchises because there are so many sequels to dip into that nobody will remember if you are right or wrong anyway.


If you are thinking of becoming a successful horror blogger, I hope these pointers will help you on your way. Also please remember to be nice to those on the way up because you don't know who will be writing sarcastic blogs about you on your way down.

I just made a few changes to the blog

I haven't done much today due to a slight illness (basically, I ate more peanuts than any human being should ever eat in one go and suffered the consequences), so I took things fairly easy, didn't do my scheduled podcast, and just played around with my blogger layout instead.

The result was that I have now not only ditched Disqus (and started afresh with the comments), but I have also temporarily removed LinkWithin (which has been annoying me for quite some time by forcing me to add pictures when I really didn't want to and showing posts which I've deleted), the "Most Popular Posts" (which haven't changed in over a year), and the completely useless "Blog Archive" (which just took up space and nobody used anyway). If you need to find something, I recommend the page links on the navigation bar under the logo, and, of course, you can use the search box.

I also deleted a lot of the monetising mainly because I'm not making anything from any of the adverts. Unfortunately, I'm not a pretty girl blogger who you all want to fall over yourselves agreeing with or supporting with donations just because you think you'll get something in return. Reality check, people, that isn't going to happen on those mediocre blogs by pretty girls who use the angles for their one good profile picture either.

More Changes

I am no longer pandering to the popularity contests (not that I ever did much) so I'm not going to play the number of GFC followers game. I'll follow who I want to if they interest me or not follow others if they don't. I'm lazy with it though so the chances are that if I'm already following your blog, I'll stay following it unless you give up writing.

As tempting as it was to remove the GFC gadget, it's there for your benefit not mine. If you have a Blogger account then it will always be the easiest way to subscribe. Of course, the RSS feed itself, Twitter and my Facebook page for this blog are just as useful for keeping up with my latest posts.

Having said all that, I have cleared a lot of dead blogs from "The Bloody Blogroll" earlier - the current total is 80 - mainly because at least 200 horror bloggers have given up. It's very sad, but there just aren't that many of us left now.

Time for a Reboot

My blog, although still definitely geared towards the horror genre, is changing to be about whatever I damn well feel like posting or reviewing whether it's an old movie from the 1940s or the latest remake. I can't compete with the teams of reviewers on the bigger sites and, truth be told, I don't really want to either. If I find something interesting then perhaps you will too.

I've written approximately 1000 horror movie reviews so far. Most of them are as crappy as the movies themselves, some are longer and more informative than others, but they are all 100% honest. I may go back and rewrite a few of them one day even though it would be more work than necessary, but I'm not going to change my mind about anything which I've already said.

Anyway, hopefully, at the very least, my blog will load a bit faster now, and I can concentrate on writing rather than trying to satisfy the requirements of the less than helpful widgets.

I have now removed Disqus

After much deliberation about the time last week when Disqus screwed up my Blogger comments, I decided to remove it completely and delete all the previous comments on this blog.

Since I'm not playing the popularity contest game with the comments, keeping something which was said on here two years ago (or even two days ago) by someone who I will never meet in real life really isn't all that important. I like to read the comments and reply to them at the time, but, after that, they have no meaning.

Also, due to now having the ability to reply directly to comments on Blogger itself without any need for a third-party plug-in, I really don't need all the bells and whistles of Disqus anyway. The one person who I never want to comment on my blog will rue the day they ever try to leave a comment here again so that's not likely to happen.

It's just as easy for me to go to the Dashboard, click "Comments", and delete anything that annoys me as it was to use Disqus. I've lost nothing but the ability to edit comments when I've made a typo. Doing so only made the synced Blogger comments not match up to Disqus so that's another nuisance which I'm happy to be free of.

I have disabled the annoying "Captcha" codes so commenting should be really easy now as long as you have a Google or Blogger account. I'm still not going to allow "Anonymous" commenters though because, quite frankly, I'm not that stupid.

Anyway, it's a clean slate. All the spam and idiotic/random comments have been deleted forever, so feel free to add some new, more intelligent ones. Oh, and try to spell things correctly this time, ok?

Two Hundred Thousand Pageviews!

Yes! I woke up this morning to find that "Dr Blood's Video Vault" has now had 200,000 pageviews!

I know this isn't as many as some blogs have, either because they've been on Blogger longer or they're about more interesting subjects such as knitting your own cakes out of pet hair, but I'm still a little bit chuffed anyway.

Back in the days of my real website, I was getting that kind of traffic each month rather than spread over two years, but I suppose I should be grateful that I get any at all now especially with the lack of any new horror movies coming out.

At least I didn't have to pay any online services to promote my blog unlike the bigger horror sites which I could mention. Yeah, you know the ones. They didn't get to where they are without spending a ton of money. You just have to look at their content to see that.

Anyway, time for a celebration. Feel free to sing along with my anthem:

Google Friend Connect Meltdown - The Aftermath. Who am I not following?

Three posts in one day? Yeah, I've done worse if you look back to June and July of 2010, but that was due to swapping an existing HTML website into the Blogger format.

If you've already read about my accidental overload of the GFC gadget then this probably won't interest you because you know the score.

The thing is, I've now lost quite a few interesting blogs from where I read them on the Dashboard and I want them back.

I also lost hundreds of completely dead or abandoned blogs too which I don't care about so much since most of them are still haunting my blogroll. Wooooh! Just like scary ghosties.

If my little red avatar isn't on your GFC (as in the example above) and you think it should be, can you please leave a comment below including the URL of your blog?

I'm having quite a difficult time matching up Disqus screen names to Blogger accounts so it will make everything a lot easier.

By the way, thank you for all the comments on my other posts recently. I was beginning to feel more neglected than a quilting blogger.

I'm nearly at 200,000 pageviews so I know a lot of you are reading but not commenting. As long as you are enjoying my writing, my hatred of the semi-colon, and my inconsistent use of commas and conjunctions, then it's all good.

Yes, I know...

Also, you all definitely need to watch "Perras". My review is below.

Last night I discovered one of the limitations of Blogger

Quite early this morning, I made a terrifying discovery... I couldn't follow any more blogs!!!

How this came to be was purely due to my own greediness in wanting to have a "Bloody Blogroll" which had every horror blog in existence on it (at least those with Google Friend Connect anyway). I'd actually beaten the system and the alleged 300 followed blogs limit several times over, but at 1103 it just stopped working.

Yes, 1103 was my following limit... and things were about to get worse than that. I couldn't even log back into the Dashboard interface without a ten minute wait. Clearly something needed to be done so I went to the Google Friend Connect box, logged in, and clicked on the "Sites you've joined" link.

It was at this point that I should have known better, but I started deleting the blogs, slowly, one at a time, and with over 2000 mouseclicks plus the pop-up window jumping all over the screen (due to the ridiculous length of some people's blog names), I cleared the lot in around three hours.

Of course, what I only discovered half-way through was that the little red avatar of my Paintshopped (not photoshopped) fizzog was disappearing from everybody else's Google Friend Connect gadget. Thus, if you are reading this after wondering why your followers' number dropped by one last night, now you know the reason why.

Fortunately, "The Bloody Blogroll" remained intact so I can still use it to go round and rejoin everybody's blogs again at my leisure. I expect a lot of people will just unfollow me now though. Such are the egos in the horror blogosphere.

Anyway, that's what happened.

Two Years on Blogger!

I've been on Blogger for two years!!! I know I had a considerable break after last year's Hallowe'en, but, I needed it. Out of all the things which I ever had an interest in, horror movies have remained a constant in my life, so, even when I wasn't blogging, you can be sure that I was still watching 2 or 3 nasties every day, learning more about them, and, generally, just enjoying them for what they were without feeling the constant pressure to write something.

I've now got 323 subscribers, 190,649 pageviews, and I'm quite amazed that people are still reading my 707 (now 708) posts. I would like to say that all the numbers have doubled since this time last year, but I can't and I only have myself to blame for it.

When I look back at some of the posts I made on here, it's embarrassing. I wanted to do too much too quickly and I whizzed through everything superficially. I'm glad that I've decided to treat this as just a journal now rather than yet another poor man's version of the IMDb. Too many other people are writing horror blogs which set out to be the definitive guide to horror and have essay length posts written about each and every film. Good luck to them but that's not how I want to do things anymore.

Since my return earlier this year, I've just been writing what I've felt like writing about the horror movies which still interest me, the ones I've watched, and the ones I've collected. I'm done with trying to change anybody's perception about what makes a good horror movie because, as I've discovered, other people's tastes (especially those of anybody under 25) really suck nowadays. If they're not e-begging for money to make more of their homemade zombie crap, they're writing ungrammatical gibberish on their clicky little phones, drinking hand sanitizer or eating each other. The whole world is going to Hell in a handcart and there's nothing I can do to stop it. What I have to say about an almost extinct genre of movies isn't really that important.

One thing I've noticed is that my "articles" and "off topic" posts get a lot more responses than my movie reviews. I don't think I write particularly bad movie reviews (at least not as bad as that slimy little Bulgarian fellow who still reviews like he's writing the promotional blurb for the back of the sleeve), but I think people skip over them in the same way that I skip over theirs too. There's only so much you can say about a film and so many different ways to say it especially when it's some 30 or 40 year old piece of nonsense which is long since past its watch by date.

I'm still going to write horror reviews because there's always a chance that I can lead somebody to something good or away from something awful. That's why I do it. It's a free service, if you like. I know you didn't ask for it but you're getting it anyway.

Nobody on the planet has watched every horror movie ever made but we're all giving it a damn good try. Some horror movies never made it to VHS, less made it to DVD, and the percentage of horror on Blu-ray is still ridiculously small. I'm lucky that I was there as most of the horror movies which are still being raved about came out theatrically. I'm also unlucky that I've seen the awful crap which straight-to-video horror has become. Swings and roundabouts, my friends, swings and roundabouts.

I will shamelessly promote the fact that I know a lot more about horror movies than 90% of the other horror bloggers just because I've watched so many of them. It's not this blog which is the "ultimate guide" anymore (nor has it ever really been), it's me! Yes, I am a big-headed, arrogant bugger but you have to be to do this every day.

Over 100 horror bloggers which I used to follow in the beginning have given up. A lot of them are now wasting their time writing never ending documents on Twitter, Reddit or whatever other FaceySpace clone is flavour of the month. It takes stamina and dedication to continue to blog and there's nothing quite like this system to separate the poseurs and wannabes from those with a genuine passion for the genre and this medium. I've seen hundreds of new bloggers start up, write a bit, get disillusioned that they didn't instantly have thousands of followers just because they typed a few paragraphs or leeched some pictures, and disappear again.

Will I still be doing this in another year? Maybe. Probably. Will I still be doing it in another 5 years? I sincerely hope not. Most horror movies are for teenagers now and it's been a very long time since I was a teenager. I'm finding it increasingly difficult to relate to the same formulas over and over again, I'm barely keeping up with all the new actors and actresses who are famous for 5 minutes and then disappear into obscurity just as quickly, and, to cut a long story short, I don't even care if I'm out of touch with any of that showbusiness malarky.

So what does the future hold for "Dr Blood's Video Vault"? More of the same; more rants, more reviews, more stuff about cats, and my battles with the latest technology. Yeah, nothing is really going to change except, hopefully, it will be better written.

Thanks for reading.

Horror bloggers who have disappeared

A small annoyance of mine is that the blogroll widget only allows me to display 300 of the 1000 or so blogs which I follow so sometimes a horror blogger quits the scene for months before I notice it.

I've often been criticised for following over 1000 blogs (and for writing half a dozen of them myself), but if I didn't do so then I wouldn't be able to write this post about them. The only drawback (even for someone as internet addicted as myself) is commenting everybody, but since I've lost another two followers this month because of the things I say online, perhaps that's a good thing.

Anyway, without further ado, here's a list of what appear to be dead horror blogs. What happened to these guys and ghouls?

80's Horror Movies
After Midnight, Behind the Closet Door
Deathtouch Horrors
Paracinematic Cinephile
Who Wants Taters???
Fright Club
Fan Fatales
Lavender Lair Of Horror
The Paradise of Horror
Deadly Serious
Pixie's Horror Galore
IGLOO OF THE UNCANNY
Ballistic Blood Bullets
Chicago Ghouls
Aditya's Movie Blog
Fears and Frights
Jonathan's Haunted House of Horror
Brutally Violent & Wonderful
The Haunted Drive-in
Sean Thomas Fisher's Blogwash
The Midnight Brood
Dead Of Night Radio
Scare Sarah
I Will Devour Your Content
Dr. Algernon Blacksteed's Good Times With Bad Movies
Monster Chiller Horror Theatre
DRACULAND: The Dracula´s Blog
Gore Gore Dancer Movie Reviews
Toolshed of Horror!
This girl digs horror
UNICORNBLUD'S HORROR REVIEWS
Horror Stuff Hunter
Horror Snark
Because I Saw The Film
Careful With That Blog, Eugene
Doctor Cyclops Horror
Found Horror
His Eyes Were Watching Movies
The Bleaux Leaux Reveaux
Ghouls Just Wanna Have Fun!
A Gory Place
Forgotten Horror Cinema
Grave of Horror Movies
The Universal Horror Archive
Killer Kittens From Beyond The Grave
The Angry Movie Lurker
Dr. Goremans Nightmare Emporium
Fetid Press
Zombie University
The Zombie Review
ALL THINGS HORROR
The House that Dripped Blog
B-Movie Holocaust!
The Last Site On The Left
Ghouls on Film
Chronicles of a Rambling Mind
Horror in Retrospect
Confessions of a Gore whore
HORROR HOUSE
Dead Derrick's Reviews
Bearded Weirdo Reviews
The Vault of Horror
I Spit on Your Gaze
Horrorland
Paracinema...The Blog
Horror is as Horror does...
Jesse's Little Shop of Horrors
Horror Magazines Hunter
Hack and Slash Horror Blog.
The Blood Shed

I don't know if, like me, they just had enough after Hallowe'en last year and the dearth of new horror movies which followed, if the writers themselves physically died, had their internet connection shut off, or if they've simply moved on to Facebook, Twitter or Wordpress (as Blogger tried to force a new dashboard interface onto us all).

I do know that blogging isn't for everyone and I also know how difficult it is to make a comeback after being away from it for a while, but even the worst of these bloggers had something to offer which will be missed.

I already miss their comments even though I've never had all that many from anybody. Sometimes there simply isn't a comment possible depending on what you write about.

If you wrote one of these blogs and you are still reading mine, let me know the reasons why you gave up.

Woohoo! 300 subscribers!

I wasn't going to say anything but since my nemesis on Blogger always posts something lame every time he gets another 50 followers, I thought I'd mark this milestone in the history of "Dr Blood's Video Vault" on Blogger too.

So, I now have 300 followers (or subscribers as I prefer to think of them). I have also written 630 blog posts and had 168,312 page views according to the Blogger stats. That's not bad considering that I moved everything here from my original website well under 2 years ago and didn't write anything at all for 4 months (at the end of last year to the beginning of this one).

I also have 860 followers on Twitter (which is great considering that I only follow 14 people back) and a few more people dotted around Facebook, MySpace, Networked Blogs and Bloglovin'.

Thank you all for subscribing, reading my poorly written posts, reviews, rants and raves, but, most of all, for commenting occasionally.

Yardsales, Blogger problems and a question resolved

I thought that I had set up a few "scheduled" posts for the last week due to getting ready for a two-day yardsale but obviously I didn't do it properly. I've now posted them manually.

I've also noticed that the Amazon Associates widget hasn't been working for the last week either so I Googled it and found that I'm not alone with this problem. It isn't Blogger's fault as it appears to be something that Amazon are messing around with. It's bloody annoying though as I use the widget to post pictures of the DVD sleeves when I do my reviews.

Anyway, I just thought that I'd mention it in case people thought that I had given up blogging or something ridiculous like that. A few blogs which I used to regularly visit seem to have disappeared in the last few days but I don't expect that I'll ever know the story behind that. Sometimes people just get fed-up with blogging, I suppose.

Just in case you are interested, I sold a load of DVDs and ended up with almost a dozen pairs of Bermuda shorts from the weekend yardsales. Nothing like being seasonal, eh?

Also, do you remember that there was a film that I couldn't remember the title of quite a while ago? http://www.drbloodsvideovault.com/2011/04/i-need-help-with-name-of-film.html



Well, I finally discovered that it was called "Stealing Candy" (2003). Basically, it had the same twist as "The Disappearance of Alice Creed" (2009).

Celebrating a Year on Blogger

It's actually been slightly over a year since I first moved my website over to Blogger and so I thought might as well write something about it.

"Dr Blood's Video Vault" has been in existence since 1994 when it was little more than a column in a once internationally famous vampire club's magazine. In 1997, after that magazine no longer existed, I moved everything to the internet using Microsoft Publisher 97 of all things. You can only imagine how bad it used to look but everyone thought it was great.

By around 1999, the website had outgrown the Publisher format and became completely HTML based using Bravenet as the host and FTP as a means to upload everything. I spent thousands of hours coding pages, promoting "Dr Blood's Video Vault" through banner exchanges, and, ultimately, made quite a lot of money selling horror videos through affiliate links.

All that changed once my main affiliate sold their business to someone else and so my site just plodded along with occasional movie reviews for a number of years until, in October 2006, CosmoGIRL decided to feature it as one of their "cool websites".

"In light of the horror season, we thought Dr Blood's Video Vault was another exciting time killer (hehe). This site is designed to pack you full of horror knowledge, including how to survive scary situations based on films. It offers film reviews, interviews and downloads, with a quiz to test how much you really know about scary movies. It also provides an A-Z list of the best-known horrors, so you'll know exactly what to rent for your scary sleepover."

From that moment on, I decided to hit the social networking scene and promote the hell out of "Dr Blood's Video Vault" and I had a lot of fun doing it. The internet paper trail that I left behind is the stuff of legend as I don't think that there is a single social networking site which I don't still have a profile on.

All this was great until Bravenet decided to reduce their free webspace to only 5 MB per person. I got away with it for a year by not uploading anything else but, when I did, the automated capping took effect and I lost most of my site. Thus began the MySpace blog incarnation of "Dr Blood's Video Vault" which would still be going today if the programmers there hadn't killed their site too. I used to have around 87,000 "friends" on MySpace and talked to all kinds of celebrities through it. I really miss MySpace but it's too slow and practically unusable now.

I obviously needed a new host and, after looking around, I realised that Blogger had everything that I needed to continue my mission of "watching the crappy ones so that you don't have to". It's so quick and easy that I wish I'd used Blogger to begin with. Who cares if it doesn't have quite the professional appeal of a "real website"? There's absolutely nothing you can't do on Blogger if you put enough time or creativity into it. My "monetising" now though is simply a token gesture which I only use to provide an image of the DVD sleeves when I write a review.

It's been different. I've met quite a few interesting people online, encountered haters, spammers and trolls like never before, and also made a few new friends in the horror blogging community.

One of the biggest distractions for me has been tweaking all the template settings and rearranging the widgets. To mark my year on Blogger, I've just wiped the blogroll and only added back the people who I know are following this blog. I was originally following around 800 people but now it's less than 250. A lot of the blogs I added to start with are dead now anyway which is a shame but at least my dashboard should load faster.

Anyway, thank you all for reading my blog, following it, and leaving comments. Keep coming back as there's a lot more horror to come.

A day without Blogger, a day with Roku

Since Blogger was unavailable all day yesterday and most of today (and it appears to have temporarily deleted my review of "Fright"), I watched a load of stuff through the streaming Netflix channel on my new Roku player.

For those who don't know what a Roku player is, check out their website at wwww.roku.com. I've wanted one for ages due to not being able to play Netflix streaming movies on my desktop computer but I was just waiting for a substantial number of horror movies which I'd never seen to become available. Having played with the Roku player for nearly two days now, it's the end of my cable TV subscription. No more annoying commercials for me.

Anyway, here's a quick recap of what I watched which may give you an insight into what happens when a horror movie addict like me first gets a Roku player. It may surprise you because I didn't just watch horror movies.

The Gates
I completely missed this TV series about a gated community of vampires, werewolves, witches and other monsters. Having read that it was cancelled after one season, I wasn't expecting it to be any good so I thought I'd just watch the pilot episode and move on. Unfortunately, it was really good and I ended up watching all the episodes one after another. I don't understand why it was cancelled but the same thing happened to "Firefly", "Farscape", "The Burning Zone", "Invasion" and "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" too and it's very annoying. Why great horror and sci-fi TV shows get axed while all those lame comedies about dopey husbands and nagging wives run for years must be an Illuminati conspiracy or something.

Harper's Island
I've only watched the first episode so far but it seems good in a gory Agatha Christie way.

Where's Jack? (1969)
An old film starring Tommy Steele based on the adventures of Jack Sheppard, the thief and jail-breaker who became a folk hero in 1720s London. I remembered it being better and less embarrassing than it actually was but I still enjoyed it.

High Lane (2009)
I switched this off after less than five minutes because I can't stand dubbed movies. Unfortunately a lot of foreign movies on Netflix are like this probably due to the subtitles not showing up so well with lower quality streams.

Devour (2005)
I've passed on this horror movie a number of times at Big Lots because I thought it was likely to be crap. It turned out to be quite enjoyable and had very good production values so it wasn't a turd at all even though the ending wasn't exactly brilliant.

Mutants (2009)
Surprisingly, this French rip-off of every other zombie/virus movie wasn't dubbed. I fast-forwarded through most of it because it dragged on too long and the lead actress was disappointingly plain. It was all very predictable, and I didn't enjoy any of it after the first couple of kills.

Bones
I hadn't watched any of the fifth season so I started playing catch-up especially now that it's reached its sixth.

Growing Op (2008)
I don't know why I started watching a Canadian comedy-drama about a home-schooled teenager who decided that he wanted to go to a normal high school instead of staying with his cannabis-growing parents, but I got into it because it wasn't too silly and ended up watching it all the way to its surprise ending. It was good, but I don't feel like I got anything out of the experience.

Summer Lovers (1982)
I have no idea what it was about as I skipped through it for the dirty parts and then rated it as 1 out of 5.

The Horseman (2008)
This was an exceptionally gory Australian revenge movie which I absolutely loved. A father goes after a gang of pornographers who drugged, raped and killed his daughter. Some of the action was a bit far-fetched, but it was all really gritty stuff and the torture scenes were very satisfying. I'm not sure what to classify this film as since it really ticked all the "torture porn" boxes. Probably the best way to describe it is as a far more violent and realistic version of "Death Wish". I rated it as 5 out of 5.

House of 9 (2005)
Although it was a little bit like "Cube" and lot like the more recent "Exam", I suppose it could be classed as a psychological horror (or a bit like "Saw 2" but without all the traps). I enjoyed it, but it was far from being the best of its kind. I rated it as 3 of 5 because it was quite good until the stupid ending.

From Paris with Love (2010)
I really had no interest in this light-hearted but nicely violent and low-brow action film, but I enjoyed it for what it was. It's a bit of a throwback to all those '80s buddy cop movies but with secret agents against terrorists. It was all pretty pointless and forgettable, but that can be said of most action films anyway. I gave it 3 out of 5.

En la Cama (2005)
I thought it would be filth but the stream was too fuzzy and the camerawork too annoying so it was another one that I skipped through in about five minutes.

Man, Woman and the Wall (2006)
This one was nothing but a softcore porno with a stupid story round it. I don't watch many Japanese films as it is and I can't say that I paid much attention to this one either. I thought it was going to be a psycho-stalker kind of film but it was a misguided love story as far as I could tell.

Driftwood (2006)
I'd seen this supernatural drama before but I'd forgotten most of what it was about so I watched it again. I suppose you could call it a ghost story, but it wasn't a scary one and some of the acting was really bad. It had that dweebie guy from "Sex and the City" (not that I'd ever admit to watching it) as a prison guard and he was probably the best actor in it. There was also yet another one of those wrestler-turned-actor types who should have stuck with his previous career. I didn't completely hate it even so. I gave it 2 out of 5.

So that's how I spent my time while I couldn't get into Blogger. How did you spend your Friday the 13th?