Blogs Against Humanity - Adventures in Sympathetic Misanthropy

  The perfect antidote to the tiresome early-aughts teen comedy "So what was all that about enlarged holes and tight cracks?"   These days, GHOST WORLD rarely gets a mention when most people discuss the best cinematic comic-book adaptations of all time. This is something of a crime, because 25 years later, it remains exactly that: a phenomenal adaptation of a highly-regarded comic series.    This is somewhat understandable when you consider the fact that Daniel Clowes' critically-acclaimed 8-issue series doesn't feature superheroes in tights, but rather a pair of sardonic 18 year-old girls who have just graduated High School and who find themselves on increasingly divergent paths in their road to adulthood. The screenplay was written in a collaboration between Clowes, and director Terry Zwigoff, and while the film was a critical success, it didn't make much of an impact at the box office and remains something of a cult film. And coming in on the heels of a decade...

"Look, we've only just met. I'm not really ready for the sort of commitment that holding-hands entails!"   Want to know something that I find just a touch odd? I can't really remember which horror-film I saw first as a child. I find it strange because I can recall snippets of going to the movies with my mom and dad, and seeing 1973's THE GOLDEN VOYAGE OF SINBAD, and THE TOWERING INFERNO in 1974, something which inspired four-year-old me to draw a hi-rise fire the very next day, and to briefly dream of becoming a firefighter when I grew up.  But my initial dabbling in what ended up becoming my favorite film genre? I 'm really not sure which film that was. It was definitely on television, because my first trip to see a fright-flick in the theater wouldn't happen until 1979 (more on that later), and by that point I was already a minor horror veteran.  What I do recall very well is that the very first horror-character to make a lasting impression on me as ...

Netflix and chill? Try True-Crime and Snuff. "We see you. And you are obscene." Damn. My roommate had already seen this one, and didn't consider it a horror film. But she's quite wrong about that, because RED ROOMS absolutely IS a horror film. It's not a slasher. It's not supernatural. It's not even a Giallo.  It's not horror by any standard of measurement that most people would use, but it's a horror film all the same. Deeply psychological, and deeply riveting, it's very rare that a horror film reaches out, grabs me, draws me in and holds me there the way RED ROOMS did. Sure, I wasn't frightened in the way that I was when I watched Steven Soderbergh's 2018 thriller UNSANE a few marathons back. No, that one managed to shake me because of the 1-2 punch of it's very immersive presentation, and the fact that I didn't realize that I had a fear of involuntary commitment until I watched it. I didn't realize that until I noticed...

  Just a very quick-and-dirty post that I will no doubt tweak, but I wanted to give everyone who pays no heed to this infrequently updated blog a heads-up that it's that time again, for the 9th consecutive year! Here's this year's lineup, updated as of August the 26th: Angst (1983) Bad Moon (1996) Cooties (2014) Dawn Breaks Behind the Eyes (2021) Dead Mail (2024) Depraved (2019) Doctor X (1932) Evil Dead (2013) Fortress (1985) Hellbender (2021) Island of Lost Souls (1932) Jacob's Ladder (1990) Lair of the White Worm (1988) The Legend of Hell House (1973) The Long Walk (2025)  Malignant (2021) The Monkey (2025) The Mothman Prophecies (2002) Night of the Devils (1972) Night of the Reaper (2025) Nightbeast (1982) Nightmare (1981) Oddity (2024) Onibaba (1964) Red Rooms (2023) Red Snow (2021) The Savage Hunt of King Stakh (1979) Seeds (2024) Sinners (2025) Slumber Party Massacre (2021) Splinter (2008) Stage Fright (1987) Stopmotion (2023) Strange Harvest (2...

  With Zuck tucking-tail and deciding to improve Facebook by transforming it from a "frustrating social-media platform" to "a wretched hive of scum and villainy" I've decided to move my usual posting shenanigans to Bluesky, and to make more frequent use of this blog and make it something other than a repository of long-form thoughts on horror-flicks. We'll see how that turns out, but in the meantime, have something new and non-horror related. So, I've been a fan of Superman (and comics in general) since I was a young child. I've also drawn since I could hold a pencil in my hand, and I'm mostly self-taught.  However, I've been dealing with slowly worsening Carpal Tunnel Syndrome over the past 15 years or so, which has made drawing a tiring experience. And even before that years of chronic depression slowly but surely chipped away at my desire to draw at all, but I managed to refocus my creative energies into Transformers customizin...

Go rafting, he said. It'll be fun, he said. Well, now he's DEAD, and I'm not having fun at all. "If you people want to survive, you better start looking and thinking like the forest." Filmed in 1981 (save for the tacked-on prologue that was shot almost 2 years later), this flick sat on the shelf until finally earning a theatrical release in 1983, which was after Daryl Hannah and Adrian Zmed had gone on to make names for themselves elsewhere. Elsewhere being 'Blade Runner' and 'T.J. Hooker' respectively.  Yes, I said Daryl Hannah . And yes, I alluded to William Shatner.  Directed by Andrew Davis, who would later go on to direct the likes of 'Under Siege' , 'The Fugitive' and 'Holes' , 'THE FINAL TERROR' didn't make much of a splash at the Box Office and the critics were less than kind, but the advent of the home video era made it a stalwart shelf-warmer of Mom-and-Pop video stores across the nation, and anothe...