Still nothing good to review

Every so often I think about reviewing something again, but unfortunately, there's been nothing worth watching this year. The quality (and quantity) of new horror movies is even worse than last year, and the year before, and the year before that. There are lots of reasons for this, but the blame mostly lies with lack of talent and new ideas. It doesn't help that the various nepotistic cliques of niche reviewers keep praising utter shit (when they aren't writing lazy nostalgia pieces) because it's all they have left to talk about.

The only "Summer movie" I watched.

Yes, we've had "The Conjuring 2" which deserves some kind of mention for trying to match its sets to how things looked in the Enfield poltergeist haunting videos on YouTube. I noticed the pop posters and had a bit of fun trying to identify the ones which were obviously different or in the wrong places. The Bay City Rollers, David Soul, and Joanna Lumley posters were close, but I don't remember The Kinks pullout poster from Jackie magazine actually being one of the girls' decorations. I also have some concerns over the family owning 1960s-style telephones (especially the wall-mounted kitchen phone) rather than trimphones from the late 1970s, but I can let that pass as "good enough". British telecommunications were not this movie's focus or forte. As for jump-scares, yeah, the nun-demon got me, and old Reg had a good moment.

Some people remarked how "The Conjuring 2" felt like more of a Christmas movie than anything else (duh, because it's set at Christmas), and I have nothing else to add to that uber "insightful" (oh God, that awful low-brow word overused by sheep across the internet!) observation. It's not Christmassy like "Gremlins", but the seasonal trappings are there in the background if you bother to look for them.

Maybe I should congratulate James Wan on trying his hardest to make heroes out of a pair of known charlatans. I'd never even heard of the Warrens before "The Conjuring", mainly because I don't really "do" paranormal investigation bullshit, and of course, I'm not American. According to ghosthunter Harry Price, the Warrens only turned up once, very briefly, and weren't big players in the Enfield poltergeist investigation at all. Patrick Wilson singing an Elvis song as Ed Warren is also a bit weird, out of place, but probably kind of nice for the ladies. So kudos for having very little historical accuracy then. But hey, the whole thing was a hoax anyway, so who even cares?

Not the worst thing I've ever seen but damned close.

I've also watched some horrid Kevin Bacon movie called "The Darkness". It's filled with clichés and the usual predictable possession guff, albeit with a couple of seemingly original "native American" touches which fall flat. Typical Blumhouse shit and as worthless and instantly forgettable as everything else they churn out. I think they tried to make it controversial by having an autistic kid in it and making him even more evil than autistic kids usually are in movies, but it didn't work out too well. Most "reviewers" simply saw Kevin Bacon attached, exclaimed "Doesn't he look old now?", and that was the highlight for them. "The Darkness" was rendered virtually unwatchable, however, by being filmed with a handycam with its very noticeable quivers and judders. Could nobody afford a tripod? Perhaps they spent all the budget on advertising their website. I don't know and don't care.

From other genres, "Green Room" bored me rigid. American Nazis (for lack of a better term) imprison a punk band in their backwoods concert hall and much merriment fails to ensue. I couldn't understand what that Yeltsin guy (who died by running himself over this year) said in any of his mumbled lines, and the namby-pamby feebleness of the instantly unlikable characters frustrated me. A couple of gunshot effects were undoubtedly cool near the end, but "Romper Stomper" is still the go-to movie if you like this kind of thing.

Fuck me, I liked something!

The biggest theatrical release for me was "Gods of Egypt". I actually enjoyed "Gods of Egypt" to the extent that I got threatened with physical assault on Facebook (and one person blocked me) because I dared to like something. The fucked-up-ness of that whole situation is quite hilarious. I've seen people getting all bent out of shape because I didn't like something but never the opposite. Even my infamous and blatant love for the "Twilight" movies never went that far. To this day, people still bitch about how I liked an incredibly successful franchise which they consider to be "non-horror" even though it had vampires and werewolves in it, while at the same time, they rave about their shitty horror-comedies which are even less worthy of being part of the genre. Some people, as we know, are just nuts.

Don't get me wrong, "Gods of Egypt" isn't a great movie, but it's easily as good as "Clash of the Titans" or any of those other adventures meant for little kids. It looks fantastic, the story is okay-ish, and it certainly didn't wreck Egyptian mythology as much as "Immortals" shat all over the ancient Greek legends a few years ago. I saw some SJW bullshit about "whitewashing" with the casting, but since those comments came from people who have no education or faintest idea about the diverse ethnicity in Ancient Egypt, I can laugh that off. There's no point arguing online with liberals, SJWs, or any other brainwashed "causers" because their combined IQs are less than a tin of pilchards. They clearly didn't watch the movie anyway, because if they had, they would have realised that there are more black characters than any other race portrayed. It may be one actor (Chadwick Boseman playing Thoth) repeated hundreds of times, but it still counts!

Starring lots of beautiful actresses whose names I can't remember.

Lastly, as far as new movies go, I watched "The Huntsman: Winter's War" and almost loved it. Again, nothing all that new, and no Kristen Stewart in it, but it has some nice bawdy British humour and a little bit of visual subtext which reduces the current "gender wars" (which really only exist in fake realities such as American college campuses or online, you know) into the minuscule kerfuffle that they truly are. If you don't pick up on it, you aren't good at reading images and certainly shouldn't review movies.

Among many things I've boycotted, I obviously haven't watched the remake/re-imagining/reboot/sequel of "Ghostbusters" because I don't like horror-comedies and didn't ever like the original or its sequel. The original failed at everything I call entertaining, apart from the one scene with the old woman/librarian ghost, and is just too sickeningly "American" for my taste. In other words, its comedy is fucking lame. Big deal that they changed all the genders, I couldn't care less if they replaced the characters with talking bags of shit. I doubt that anyone would notice the difference, but it's possible that I'd be more inclined to watch it if they had. Replace the cast with cats though, and I'd definitely watch the next one.

Please don't make any more of these!

Thanks to Amazon Prime (and a mixture of curiosity and boredom), I suffered through the three "Divergent" movies. I had no idea what to expect, and now wish I hadn't wasted my time. They are full of "pretty" talent, owe a lot to "Starship Troopers", and have some decent eyecandy here and there, but sci-fi blows anyway, and this is particularly shit sci-fi at that. When the kids all celebrated one of their minor victories by self-harming with tattoos, that was enough for me. I'm not the target audience for this crap, and even if I was, such trendy teen sci-fi has really gone downhill since "The Hunger Games" ripped off "Battle Royale".

In other news, I may start a new blog eventually about computer games. Aside from making cat videos and intentionally awful 5-hour podcasts, I've been playing computer games more than watching movies this year because, as I said at the start, this has already been a truly shit year for movies, and it isn't going to get any better.

Should I start doing interviews again?

I'm not sure if I ever posted a link to DrunkethWizerd's interview with me over at "Horror Movies and Beer" last year, but if I did and you missed it, here's the URL again:

http://eerieeriksreviews.blogspot.com/2012/12/an-interview-with-dr-blood-death-of.html

As you will see, it was just a bit of fun from December, 2012, when none of us had anything better to write about, and pretty much cemented my position as one of the grumpiest horror bloggers in the world. Meh. I have discernment. I am what I am.

Over half a year on, none of my opinions have changed although I have been getting more introspective lately. As my Twitter followers already know, I'm constantly torn about packing-up the whole "blogging thing" and moving on. I've had more backlashes than Spartacus from things I've written including threats, jealousy, stalkers, and more insults than most human beings ever encounter in a lifetime. Behind the scenes of the comments approval list is a daily shitstorm of hate (and spam) which makes me despair of humankind. Thus, when I say "moving on", I actually mean deleting everything and never looking back, but for some reason I feel that would be rather wasteful. So what if people don't like me? I don't like most people, so it's just tit-for-tat.

I've written some good stuff over the years, and a lot of atrocious stuff with commas and tenses scattered so randomly that you'd never believe I spent the best part of my life at University, but that's just what happens when you treat Blogger as a MySpace replacement. I'm not the best writer in the world, but I never tried to be. I was taught one way of doing things in school only to find that a lot of the rules have changed from one English language speaking country to another, and I now spend more time second-guessing myself grammatically than saying things how I want to. If people realised how much time could be wasted on chopping and changing a blog post, they'd never do this as a hobby, and certainly wouldn't do it as a business venture. I swear I don't know why I still do this other than being a glutton for punishment.

The thing is, even though it would be hilarious for me to be interviewed by you to give you something else to post, I'm not famous in any way nor do I have any desire to be. Like everyone, I wouldn't mind having more money, but fame isn't something that I'm chasing. I'm not yearning to write for one of the big name horror sites or a horror magazine, to write a book, or to do anything with my writing at all except just to do it for the sake of doing something other than collecting my own toenail clippings in a jar. I've already done three out of the achievements that I've listed anyway (for no pay whatsoever!), and I'm already on my fourth jar.

Interviews are all well and good as long as the interviewee gives you some promotion for your own site on their blog and vice versa. More traffic is always nice no matter what causes it. In many ways, interviews with other bloggers are little more than a banner exchange-style "shout out". Unless you have a current product or service to promote, it's mostly redundant, but I've noticed that a lot more people are doing it again now. It's trendy, so I kind of want in on the action.

Maybe it's because a certain blogger who shall remain nameless (but I can barely read because of his constantly centred text and childish appreciation of little toys) announced on one his "How to be a Blogger" posts that "movie reviews are boring". The "Horror Lamers" clique then took that great authoritarian on all things "Blogger" to heart and started writing anything but movie reviews. As you may have guessed, that lost them my subscriptions immediately. I may not read many reviews, but I have absolutely no interest in cupcakes made to look like zombies or how to knit your own fangs on a supposedly "horror" blog. As for crappy cartoons about "The Addams Family" or Winona Ryder's wardrobe in "Beetlejuice", well, I think there may be something a teeny bit wrong with you upstairs if that floats your boat or it's all you've ever had to offer other people to read about.

I actually wrote a sarcastic "How to be a Successful Horror Blogger" guide myself which, considering the nature of last week's inter-species drama, turned out to be quite prophetic. I never imagined that anyone would have the balls (metaphorically speaking) to really do such a thing, but she did. I scare myself sometimes with my qualities as a visionary!

Getting back to the subject, on the flip-side of the interview thing, does anyone want me to interview them? I'll gladly do it. Truly successful blogging is all about the content, and lately, there's been precious little of it written by me or anyone else.

If you're interested, I'm offering you a chance for five minutes of "fame" on my blog. Bear in mind that you must be reasonably interesting to my other readers, not be trying to promote some lame hobby horror movie that you made yourself, nor tailor your answers into a socio-political rant which will get us both dragged off to Federal ass-pounding jail. Apart from those rules (and my hypocritically enforced PG-13 language rating to attract more pageviews), anything goes.

I've interviewed some "celebrities" in the past which a few people liked, but it's been years since I last did one. It's just like riding a bicycle (so I'm told), so don't be put off. Let's face it, writing questions and answers is easy. Transcribing audio is much worse, but I can't be bothered to do that. If I wanted to go that route I'd work out how to record Skype for yet another podcast which nobody ever listens to. There are only about a million of those to compete with.

Since I subscribe to a more global version of Alfred Hitchcock's controversial view that "all actors are cattle", I've never cared unduly about film credits or who does what behind the scenes. I'm all about the story being told and how well it's being told rather than anyone being famous for being in that story. Other than knowing the names of the most obvious talents and mechanics, it may disappoint you that I don't have an up-to-date encyclopedic knowledge of all members of the horror genre. I wouldn't know who to contact or who really falls into the "horror celebrity" category now that so many lines have been blurred by age, careers ending, and social networking. We all go to the toilet, so nobody is that special just because they have more money or fame than someone else. I'll talk to anyone no matter how big or small they think they are.

I'm therefore leaving this offer open to ANYONE (apart from my boggle-eyed, goggle-eyed stalker) who wishes to be either an interviewer or an interviewee. Of course, because no payment is being asked for or offered, this may not come to anything at all. It all depends on you. The ball, as they say, is in in your court. Leave a comment below or feel free to talk to me about it on Twitter.

Is there anything worth watching in the Redbox kiosk?

Last night I went out shopping and, for the first time in months, I had a quick look through what was new in the Redbox kiosk at my local grocery store. I'm sad to say that I was very disappointed by what I found. I've already reviewed the better known movies so there was only a 50/50 chance that I would find something to justify wasting even a dollar on anyway.

Since I'm not one of those people with a super-duper smartphone, I had no internet access available to me and just had to judge the titles by what their artwork looked like rather than the description available online. We've all been burnt by lurid cover art which promises more from a movie than it could ever deliver, but when it looks as generic as the current offerings, it's also a sure sign that the movie will be exactly what it claims to be.

Thanks Tardar Sauce, you took the words right out of my mouth.

Call it instinct or discernment, but I'm really glad that I had to wait until I got home and could compare http://www.redbox.com/browse/horror-movies#format=dvd with their low ratings on the IMDb before parting with my money. It's not that I usually trust the IMDb anyway when it comes to the higher scores (which have been boosted by shills and 12 year olds who shouldn't be allowed internet access until they turn 30), but because these were all so low, I'm inclined to believe them. The days of trusting to luck with a new horror movie are long since over for any of us.

I'm not going to go through all the Redbox horror movies as you are quite capable of doing that for yourself, but I will say something about a few which caught my eye and almost caused me to swipe my credit card through the slot.


The Millennium Bug (2011)

Apparently, the big selling point is that no CGI was used in this movie, but I'm not interested in bugs, hillbillies, B-movies or anything about it whatsoever. I've never heard of anyone in it or associated with it so I'm never going to watch it. The IMDb rating is only 5.1 right now, but I'm sure it will drop even further.

Hayride (2012)

Just from the artwork, it looks like a "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" clone so I'll pass. The IMDb rates it as 3.6.

The Dead Reborn (?)

This doesn't even exist on the IMDb because it's some kind of cobbled together anthology made out of three old movies by Full Moon. Without even seeing it, I can easily rate it as a 0 out of 10 and stand by that no matter what happens. The picture of a pram on the cover put me off straight away.

Home Sweet Home (2013)

Let's see now, it's a psychological thriller not a horror movie. It stars nobody I've ever heard of, and it's an independent film. Nope. Nothing for me here.

House Hunting (2013)

This one tempted me the most because it looks like a haunted house movie of some kind. The IMDb gives it 4.7 and the reviews suggest that this is a "Dead End" clone with a similar twist. So why bother? It's got Marc Singer in it who was TV famous in the '80s for "V", but that's about all.

Night of the Living Dead: Resurrection (2012)

Wait... "Resurrection"??? Oh, how cunning. Not Romero. Set in Wales. No, thank you. The IMDb gives it 3.0.


I could go on, but really what's the point? Apart from a load of Full Moon and The Asylum junk, there's nothing but more zombies, slashers/home invasions, apocalyptic viruses, and a couple of antichrist movies all made by nobodies with no budget and no talent.

Tomorrow, if I get bored enough, I'll start reviewing all the multipacks that I've bought but never watched.

Feel free to let me know if there's anything in the Redbox kiosks which you've took a chance on and found to be good.

Ecphrasis, Synopsis or Review?

Yesterday was supposed to be the day of my second podcast entitled "The Bloody Podcast Rises!" I had everything in place, two people were going to join me on it, and I went for a late afternoon nap quite excited about creating another hour of entertainment.

Of course, since you are now reading this rather than listening to that podcast, it never happened. One of my guests dropped out not so much at the last minute but two hours before, and it was impossible to find a replacement in the time left. I would be lying if I was to say that I wasn't very disappointed. I went back to bed early because I simply had nothing left to do at that point and was completely disheartened by the dropout's flakiness. There are cultural reasons for how that person is which I still haven't learnt to anticipate, so it didn't make things any easier.

Suffice it to say that the idea behind the show was to select a few "Horrible Movie Bloggers" and tear their work apart to make points about how not to write or broadcast reviews. While none of us are perfect and most of us recognise our limitations, there are others who blatantly don't care about what they are doing and make things horrible for the rest.

I'm not talking about the haters, trolls, and thread-crappers who get their fun from the comments sections on various websites. Some of them are actually funny. No, what I'm talking about are the people who seemingly have no right to their apparent success.

Take, for example, Harry Knowles. Allegedly, he started posting reviews in 1996 and, thus, has been doing so for a year longer than I've been online. I don't remember him being popular back then, but, given the nature of the internet with most people getting online through AOL/Compuserve and dial-up connections, that's not very surprising. Google didn't exist and most people used Yahoo, Lycos or multi-search tools made up of hundreds of smaller search engines to find anything.

The first incarnation of my own site, "Dr Blood's Video Vault", wasn't online until the middle of 1997 and I had trouble finding even another six horror sites to swap banner links with. Back then even I (with my website created with MS Publisher) was considered a big player and, through affiliates, I made a load of money which I'm not ashamed to boast about. Of course my site was rather sparse, but the rule was to get everything loading in less than 44k or nobody would wait long enough to see it. As bandwidth increased, pages got bigger. I'm still not sure that it was quite such a good thing to abandon the 44k rule either.

The only alternatives to the independent movie review sites in 1997 were Microsoft's "Cinemania", and the IMDb had yet to take up the position of prominence which it has today. As I saw the IMDb get created and grow, I truly thought that it was one of the greatest things which anyone has ever thought of. All that was due to change unfortunately.

Going back to Harry Knowles, he's a reviewer and a critic so he should be used to criticism. I have nothing personal against him, but I can't bear reading his reviews. I had never even heard of him until I came to America, but I made up for my ignorance quite quickly. Most people say that his writing hasn't developed in 16 years, and, as we all joke about but sadly know to be the truth, he loves just about everything as long as there's a free ticket, DVD, or financial kickback involved. Basically, you can't trust his reviews to be objective, but why should you? His written style is little different to that of a 14 year old schoolboy and, from the comments on his site, that is his target audience. He's been successful, put a lot of work into selling things, made a ton of money, but do any of us actually read his reviews? No. He's a sell-out with no credibility left. Even so, I can't help but admire the barefaced cheek of Harry Knowles to play the system at its own game and become a success from it.

There are far more "Horrible Movie Bloggers" around than Harry Knowles though. In the early to mid 2000s, I watched the rise of "Bloody-Disgusting", "Dread Central" and even "ShockTillYouDrop" as they populated their forums with their "friends" from MySpace, built-up their databases full of free reviews from people who only wanted the glory of posting them somewhere, and, after monetising the Hell out of themselves, eventually sold their sites to the highest bidders. None of these sites are what they used to be, strings are being pulled behind the scenes, and you can be sure that if they've been financially rewarded, they'll all play salesman when it comes to promoting any new horror movie rather than being honest about its content. I'm sure that there are thousands of non-horror movie review sites which are just as guilty, but I wouldn't know who they were to list them. That's why I needed a team effort for the podcast.

But that's enough about the big boys. There are "Horrible Movie Bloggers" among the lesser ranks of Blogger, Wordpress, YouTube, and whichever other social networking platform you can think of. Although they probably aren't making any money from their work, they are doing enough to really damage those who should be.

That brings me to the title of this post: "Ecphrasis, Synopsis or Review". Some people don't know the difference and their ignorance is destroying the credibility of all independent movie reviewers. It's certainly destroyed the reviews sections of the IMDb, but that whole site is a cesspit of haters and trolls on all the "Message Boards" anyway.

Are the IMDb movie ratings from millions of unsupervised click-happy 5 year olds reliable? No. The whole site is a parody of what it once was. As for the "actors" with IMDb profiles, I'm surprised that I haven't got my name on there. Like several million others who do indeed have their names on the IMDb, I haven't actually been in a movie either. But I digressed. Bitching about the IMDb would need a podcast all to itself and would be several days long. Yes, it counts as a "Horrible Movie Blog", but it's more of a forum than anything else, the reviews are limited in length, and they all suck (especially the ones with a URL at the end which invite you to go and read more of the same). I can only read a plot synopsis so many times before my brain shuts down.

Ask yourself how many blogs you've been to where the review is little more than a retelling of the entire plot of a movie with maybe one line at the end saying, "I liked it". Are these people serious? Admittedly, in some very rare cases, the "review" is actually a thirty page ecphrasis of every single aspect of the movie designed to convey what was seen in one medium into another for those who have no other way of appreciating it. I'm not talking about movie reviews for the blind or the deaf when I point out these "Horrible Movie Bloggers". The ones I can't stand are the uneducated who think that this is what a movie review really should be like no matter who the intended audience is.

These "synopsis" writers don't even get that simply rewriting the movie's plot in their own words is not a review. I know what happened. Back in the day, when their teachers told them to write essays "as if you are explaining to someone who doesn't know", they did exactly that and carried it with them until the chance to write blogs came along. I have had arguments with so many people who sent me a link to their "New Review" which turned out to be a synopsis of the movie that it's not even funny anymore.

I'm not going to be a hypocrite about it. I've done it too and I've even done it when writing essays during my incarceration at University. Of course, those essays came back with lots of red ink all over them and some quite acidic comments in some cases which made me pull myself together. A movie review or a "critique" is something entirely different to a synopsis.

A movie review should be about how the movie made you feel, what the performances of the actors were like, a scene which really stood out, if the story was interesting, or any of the thousands of other technical aspects of drama or movie production which you recognised when you willingly suspended your disbelief to entertain yourself.

When I read a movie review, I want to know all these things and I like to read how the movie affected the reviewer on a personal level. Whether it made them remember something else, an incident in their lives, or if the whole occasion was something special for them, these are the things which should be included. I don't care if the writer has gone off on a tangent from the movie itself, it's their "review". It's a personal and honest thing. As long as they never write "in and of itself", describe the direction as "helming", the camerawork as "lensing", or commit atrocious uses of adjectives such as "lugubrious set decoration" or "glorious acting ability" then it's all good.

Those people who just list every single plot point in their spoiler laden synopses are truly "Horrible Movie Bloggers", but, you know, there are even worse than them out there.

I may not write the best movie reviews myself, If I've ever said I did, you can be sure that I meant it humourously as I am well aware of my own shortcomings. The two things which I cannot abide more than any others are sycophants and reviews full of multisyllabic hyperbole.

There is one reviewer in particular (who I won't name, but we joke about all the time on Twitter) who writes every review as a sales pitch no matter how bad the movie actually is. There are monetised YouTube partners who do the same thing for financial rewards so you can see why they do it, but this guy claims to be an "aspiring movie reviewer". It's sad really because it's never going to happen for him even if Harry Knowles is so obviously his role model. His sycophancy, his gaggle of equally creepy friends who comment two or three times each on every post he writes to make him look popular, his recent overuse of "ain't" and "Hon" when he isn't even an American, and his tendency towards hyperbole and nonsensical periphrasis make such a "Horrible Movie Blogger" a figure of fun for the rest of us who are trying to improve our own writing.

There is yet another contrarian who I can't even bear to read because he writes like he swallowed a lexicon and seems unable to write the simplest of sentences without at least three four-syllable words in them which he thinks will make him appear more erudite. I could write like that too if I wanted, but I like to think that I understand my target audience and what they like to read. I also know that this "Horrible Movie Blogger" doesn't entirely understand the words he's using in the first place. Plain speech is always better. That's why I have 10 times the amount of subscribers that he does even though I'm far from being one of the most popular bloggers myself. There are fashion bloggers who post nothing but pictures and have over 100,000 GFC followers so I know my place all right.

Anyway, that's probably what "The Bloody Podcast" would have been about if we'd made it. It definitely would have been something a little bit more educational than the average podcast and funny as well, but, alas, now we'll never know. As someone who has only made 37c so far from monetising my own blog to the hilt, there would have been lots of self-deprecating humour which I know everybody loves otherwise iJustine and Shane Dawson wouldn't have become so successful for acting like idiots. Yes, they are acting. You don't honestly believe that they could be like that in real life, do you? Look into their eyes and see how they aren't quite as dumb as they want you to believe they are.

I'm not going to dwell on this podcast failure. Like most things, if you want to do something well, you have to do it yourself, and you should never rely on other people. I'll find another subject to podcast about on my own and it'll be even better.