Blogs Against Humanity - Adventures in Sympathetic Misanthropy

Yes, my friends, it is indeed almost that time again! I'll be starting my annual marathon of horrors with a week-long pre-show on August the 25th .  This is the sixth year that I've done this, and generally I just post about it on Facebook. I'll be doing that this year too, although I'm paring back the FB coverage this time out because, well, screw Zuckerberg, and screw Facebook. While I'll post notifications about what and when I'm watching on FB, my reviews will no longer be posted there. Instead, I'll be posting them right here, where they belong. So, for this year's pre-show, I have 10 films lined up. The theme is pandemics (naturally): Children Of Men (2006) 12 Monkeys (1995) Blindness (2008) Maggie (2015) REC (2007) Contagion (2011) The Seventh Seal (1957) Right At Your Door (2006) Zombieland - Double-Tap (2019) Pontypool (2008) Out of these, I've seen Pontypool and 12 Monkeys . I saw the former about 9 years ago, and the latter I proba...

The team is held hostage, but looks bored. I feel ya, ladies. Oh man, if only this flick was as entertaining as its poster and promo images lead you to believe its going to be.  GIRLS WITH BALLS is a French/Belgian sports-themed horror-comedy, directed by Olivier Afonso, that simply manages to lose track of what sort of film it wishes to be, and flounders its way to an unsatisfactory ending. To be honest, I should have known from the start that the tone-deaf vagabond-cowboy-bard narrator with a penchant for spoilers was a bad sign. Unfunny singing-narrator aside, the first act does its job well, and establishes the characters in rip-roaring fashion, via a Volleyball cup-match, and subsequent character-interaction inside the team's RV once the game is won. Schlocky, silly, and sophomoric, it manages to be a lot of goofy fun for the first 15 minutes. When the team gets lost and detoured towards a backwoods hostel populated by inbred, cannibal-hicks, the bad-guys are established, an...

So, that promised BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER rewatch? Yeah, that's on hold, and I apologize.  Why is that? To be honest, I may be going about it the wrong way. I had decided to do a very in-depth deep-dive style of review, and that's what I was working on as I watched Welcome To The Hellmouth , but in the end, I may have waded into deeper waters than I have the energy to navigate. The review I was writing got so long and involved, it frankly became a slog. And why? Why should I turn something like that into a slog? There are Buffy deep-dives aplenty out there, and have been since the very start. I really don't know if I can say anything new about the show with an in-depth approach, and honestly, I just don't have the background in things like philosophy and film-studies to justify it, I'd just be building off the work that others has done before, and done better. So, I'm going to hang back, and take a more relaxed approach to it, and see what develops. Rather th...