Blogs Against Humanity - Adventures in Sympathetic Misanthropy

  A 1979 TV movie about Vampires? Oh come on, that can't possibly be very scary...right? "You'll sleep with the dead, teacher."   Sometimes you get a little tired of soulful and seductive cinematic vampires and long to see a return to a more unsettling depiction where they are portrayed as ruthless, remorseless predators who seek out the blood of the living, both to feed their insatiable hunger, and to increase their own numbers. If that's the sort of vampire tale that gets your own blood pumping, then this is a film for you. A somewhat sad truth of horror-cinema is that flicks based off the works of Stephen King are something of a mixed-bag. You have the likes of ' Carrie ', ' Cujo ', ' Christine ', ' IT ', ' The Mist ', and ' Misery ', all of which are good adaptations, and also very good films in their own right. Then you have excellent non-horror adaptations in the form of ' The Green Mile ', ...

This cult-classic tale of a guy who has totally fallen head-over-heels for a hot alien lady who happens to be a Vampire from Space may count as a guilty-pleasure to some, but for me, it's an old favorite. “Don't worry. A naked girl is not going to get out of this complex.” - Dr. Hans Fallada Tobe Hooper and Dan O'Bannon's LIFEFORCE is a film I've liked ever since I first watched it on home-video when I was about 17 years old. Granted, at least 70% of why I enjoyed it at the time is directly attributable to the spectacular assets of the strikingly beautiful French-born actor Mathilda May, but I enjoyed it all the same.  Produced by the notorious B-movie factory Cannon Films (and arguably the best film the studio ever churned out), the movie bombed at the box-office, and most critics were none too kind, but it ended up becoming a cult-classic and did so on more than the inherent charms of May's pert physique. And sure enough, across the intervening 34-odd years ...

This, the third film-adaptation of Jack Finney's 1955 novel, "The Body Snatchers", does quite a lot of things right, but ultimately falls a bit short.  "They get you when you sleep." - Andy  This is going to get spoilery, so if you haven't watched this flick and don't like spoilers, then you may want to skip this review.  So, as I mentioned before, this is remake month, and as was the case with DRACULA (though not to the same extent), there are more than two film adaptations of Jack Finney's 1954 science fiction novel "The Body Snatchers" to choose from. So, before I hit this version, I watched both of the previous versions, titled INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS , from 1956 and 1978, respectively.   Those adaptations are widely considered to be absolute classics by movie-buffs and critics alike, so, when compared to its predecessors, BODY SNATCHERS has some very big shoes to fill. We have another new setting, this time out of an Army-base...

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...

Not-so-little observations , because sometimes I have a lot of words. Please forgive any changes from past to present tense, because sometimes I do that. Perhaps I was a time-traveler in a previous life? * After an adventure in 2005, its time to travel into the far, far future onto a hospitality satellite called Platform One. To be precise, the year five point five slash apple slash twenty six, 5 billion years into the future, to watch the Earth die. Gravity satellites have held back the long-delayed expansion of the sun into a red-giant, AND the host of this event, the so-called National Trust has even moved the continents back into their 20th/21st-century configuration, because that's supposedly the "classic Earth". Makes sense, because that's the configuration for the rise of Homo Sapiens and their various cultures. * Nice global-warming shout-out. Pity we've done so little about it in the 15 years since this episode aired. We suck. * No, the Platform attendant...

Okay folks, time to actually USE this thing on the regular, yeah? So, in addition to anything that just strikes my fancy to watch, I had the urge to re-watch something, and I finally settled on something long overdue for a re-watch. And here we go... Little observations: * After so many years in the wilderness, the first episode of "NuWho" goes so right where the 1996 Fox TV movie went so very wrong. It distills down the entire premise into something very simple and easily accessible. Russell T. Davies doesn't load us down with a truckload of nostalgia-driven continuity references, or a needless regeneration sequence. Nope, what we get is quick, simple, streamlined, and effective. The episode smartly focuses in on Rose Tyler herself, only introducing the Doctor himself a few minutes into the show when Rose is menaced by a classic-series enemy that we haven't seen in FOREVER: The Autons. Backing Rose into a corner and then bringing in the Doctor when, out of nowhere he...

Ahhhhh yes, THE INCREDIBLE MELTING MAN. It was one of those films I wanted to watch as a child, but wasn't able to do so during the time of its release. I vaguely remember coverage in FAMOUS MONSTERS at the time, not to mention some old video of Rick Baker showing a child around his workshop in the late 70's, which was very cool, footage which also featured the Melting-Man masks. All-in-all, it left a big impression on a young horror-fan like me, despite being unable to see the film itself. It was also a very formative time for me as well, for good and for ill. My parents got divorced, which was both good and bad. And on the brighter side, STAR WARS came out that same year, SUPERMAN would hit theaters the following year, and being a regular PBS viewer, I would soon discover DOCTOR WHO when one of the local PBS stations started airing the first bundle of Tom Baker serials in 1978. Heady stuff! It wasn't until I managed to spy a copy of this for rent at a small mom-and-pop v...