Lessons Not Learned - The Horror Hiatus of the 1930s

It's long past overdue, but I think now's the time for another instalment in my Zero Punctuation inspired looks at notable disasters, mess ups, and embarrassments from the history of motion pictures, to see what could have been learned from these... and what decidedly wasn't.  This time, it's not a film itself we're looking at, it's something that happened to almost an entire genre.  Over the years, the horror film has had its ups and downs, including some dry spells; I know for a fact that a few fans in particular do not look at the Nineties terribly kindly at all, bar perhaps Scream.  I don't think that's fair; for a start there were at least horror films being made then, unlike the time we're going to discuss, when after defining what a monster movie was, Hollywood straight up gave up on them for a while..

This is the story of how the above film was the triumphant return for the whole genre!

Lessons Not Learned - The Room

 So The Room, it's not very good, isn't it?  It's pretty terrible, and not just in a filmmaking manner, it has a lot of really ugly, deeply mysogynistic baggage in it's story which I'm saddened that we don't really discuss more.  However, in a way we should have seen this as a warning for what was to come, how Tommy Wiseau's... bafflepiece was in a way a precursor to what another director called Tom would do, only instead of risking his own money, he did it with a big studio's...

Lessons Not Learned - The Fall of the Studio System

Hey, I know, long time, no see.  Well, that's what comes from starting a new job, and then a whole mess of terror about an apocalyptic global event getting in the way, sorry.  Still, I think I have some new things to say on here.

Now I'm not a very big player of video games, but I am interested in them, and seeing what the games industry has been going through recently has been fascinating, if a bit saddening.  Major issues of systematic harassment, exploitation of staff, corruption, and still making utterly obscene profits on top of predatory business practices.  With recent legal interventions on some of these points occurring, as well as a few other recent things which I'll mention in a moment, it suddenly hit me that where the Triple-AAA games publishers are these days is very similar to where The Big Five Studios used to be before a slow-motion trainwreck of their own creation mangled them across the 1940s and 50s.  So it's time to also dust off my "Lessons Not Learned" title, for not a look at a film going wrong, but close to the entire US film industry going wrong, and how we can see a few parallels with things happening in the games industry today.

Best way I could think of illustrating old cinema and modern video games at the same time.

Lessons not Learned - Exorcist II: The Heretic

Here’s a little something new for on here; I thought I’d take inspiration from Yahtzee’s little irregular column and every so often have a look at particular cases of a film crashing and burning, to see what could be learned from the mess, and evidence that it wasn’t.  I’m not going to do a full evisceration of a review of these films, as plenty of other smarter folks than I have done that.  No, I’m purely going to focus on cases where there were only one or two obvious factors behind the failure, and see if those crop up again with any subsequent major flops.  With this in mind, let’s start with one of the most notorious cases of sequelisation ever… John Boorman’s Exorcist II: The Heretic.

Yeah, this fits the tone the first one established.