Blogvember 5 - In Dreams Are Monsters

 Well, Halloween is over, it's 'Splodey Night tonight in the UK, guess it's time to put away scary st-hmm, what's that BFI?  A horror season lasting a quarter of the year?  Oh, you know how to treat me properly!

Blogvember 4 - Trailer of the Week Returns: The Company of Wolves

Yay, we're doing this again!  I am going to start seeking out weird old trailers to talk about, and I have found a few new sources for these; there are a couple of channels uploading a whole bunch of proper scans of old film reels, so I'll be using a few of those over the course of this month.  Now for today, since we lost this year a couple of favourite actors of mine, I thought I'd include a trailer featuring the two of them together, as a sort of combined mini tribute.  So in loving memory of David Warner and Angela Lansbury, this is 1984's The Company of Wolves.

Blogvember 3 - October Horror Movie Challenge Awards 2022

So this is All Hallows, and what have you done?  Another challenge over, and a new one... to begin next September- yeah, this John Lennon tribute doesn't really work.  Anyhoo, that's another October Horror Movie Challenge wrapped up, and it's been an interesting one this year.  Whilst I have to say I didn't have a lot of luck with the random draw this time around, I did find some real gems, some potential future favourites I'll talk about in a moment.  Also, very successful year's fundraising, a total of over £436 (if we include gift aid) for Crisis, mainly down to some extremely generous donators, we salute you!  I'll leave the page open for a bit, I'll only close donations on there when it's time to sort out next year.  As for the end of this year's challenge, we still have a little more to do, partially in terms of closing things down, partially for following up on a few things.  I polished off Inhumanoids yesterday, and theres's something else I promised to watch if funding got to a certain amount, but I figured I'd save it for this month, for reasons I'll explain later.  For today, let's have the traditional round-up and awards for what I watched...

Blogvember Post 2 - Inhumanoids

First of my bit of housekeeping after my October Horror Movie Challenge; I covered the "movie" for the challenge, so I decided to watch the other episodes for this, and give my thoughts.  Now this isn't one of the action figure based cartoons I saw as a kid, partially as it was a bit before my time, partially because, from what I could tell, it wasn't that big in the UK.  That means I don't really have a lot of nostalgia for this one, I'm not going in with anything clouding my judgment like that.   Speaking of nostalgia, for many years this DVD set was going for a stupid amount on eBay and the like, as it was out of print.  I can only assume that the recent drop in price is because more people finally watched it, and realised that, as John Nathan-Turner once said, the Memory Cheats. 

Blogvember '22 - Post 1: What the Heck is Blogvember?

 Hey folks, so I want to keep in good creative writing habits, but I have quite done the prep time National Novel Writing Month really requires.  Therefore, I've decided to do a Blogvember, a whole month of blog posts on all manner of weirdness and wonder, get a solid word count for each day.  It's basically another attempt to make sure I stay regular on here, and to hone my skills somewhat.  So let's start with a little discussion on how I intend to do so.  As I have tried and failed to do this sort of thing in the past, down to a long suspected yet currently undiagnosed neurodivergence, I think I have learned a few things about how to stay motivated, how to stick to a goal, and how to avoid falling into certain traps, so I thought I'd start with a few tips.  I've made these mistakes, so you don't have to, all of these can be helpful in working on your own hobbies.

October Horror Movie Challenge 2022 - Fundraising Begins

 Yep, it’s that time again; cue the music!

Another Spoopy Season approaches, so it’s time for me once again to prepare to face that thing from the IMDB message boards that just will not die, The October Horror Movie Challenge. The rules as always are simple; 31 Days in October, at least 31 Horror and/or Monster Movies, at least half (so 16 or more) must be ones you’re seeing for the first time, NO EXCUSES!!! I'll be going for a many as possible, raising money as always for those fine folks at Crisis, and you can donate to it here.

Just One More Thing: Barbara and Kara Deserve Better

 Well, I'm slowly getting back into the writing game, so let's have a good ol'fashioned RANT!  Warner Bros had a merger with Discovery, after their previous one with AT&T had gone… not so well.  The new executives in charge, most notably the new CEO David Zaslav promised some big things, and they delivered… the axe to a whole lot of stuff.  Now a lot has been affected here, including stuff disappearing from HBO Max, but the most egregious things were the shelving of both the almost complete sequel to Scoob!, and the much anticipated Batgirl movie starring Leslie Grace for tax purposes.  And not long afterward we got the news that the proposed new Supergirl movie, starring Sasha Calle who was to make her debut as the character in The Flash, was probably not going to move ahead.  To sum up my feelings in short… 

Thanks Fawful!

First Impressions: The Sandman

 Dusting off this again for a new little project.  So I have this month paid my membership dues to the BFI again.  As a champion member I get first dibs on all tickets, and I've been using it to get tickets to some TV previews in the coming months.  So I thought, since many aren't on Letterboxd and I can't talk about them there, I'd do some little reviews of them.  Now as the title suggests, it's only a first impression, as obviously I can only talk about the episodes I actually see. Still, I think in most of these that will be a good indicator of if it's worth catching and sticking with these shows when it’s time for their full releases.  Also, I'll be keeping things as spoiler-light as I can, however in order to get deep into if/why something works/doesn't work, I might have to hint at a few things, so I'll always give fair warning of that.

So, to kick us off, let's look at something that has been in the pipeline for a live-action adaptation for a VERY long time, Neil Gaiman's The Sandman.  It's funny how many of Gaiman's works have shifted from medium to medium, from Neverwhere to Good Omens, and now the series that really made his name and cemented his reputation is coming to Netflix.  Well, now it’s coming after A LOT of attempts of making a film exploded before getting to the launchpad… and given the stories of some of these, probably for the best they did.  (One was by producer Jon Peters… yes he did try to put a giant spider in there.)  Now it’s being done in a very faithful form by Netflix, developed by Gaiman himself, David S. Goyer, and Allan Heinberg, and I was one of the lucky ones to get to see the first two episodes on the big screen.  So, was this a dream come true?  (Sorry, couldn’t resist!)