Update

Hopefully the new blog & website will be up sometime within the next month. I’m still meticulously hand-coding all the old entries to be archived at the new website. It’s not particularly fun and I frequently question why I’m bothering to do it since I think my writing and focus has changed somewhat drastically in the past 2 years. I think once I’m done with 2007’s entries, I may fairly be in the clear, since I obviously didn’t update as much in 2008 and 2009.

If anyone would like to recommend any horror movies for me to watch in October, please do. I’ve been spending the summer mostly watching Marx Brothers and Pre-Code Hollywood films. I am not insanely psyched about anything out right now, nor anything in my Netflix queue.

Comments will be open until the spammers show up.

Toodles for now.

I will return to blogging eventually. I’m in the process of designing my own website that will have an embedded blog and where all previous blog entries from this blog and The Film School Dropout will be archived in a separate section. So archiving is/will be taking up the bulk of the conversion since I’ve already designed the website . At the absolute latest, the new site will be up by the Fall of this year. I’m taking classes over the summer, working a part-time job, taking care of a few things for this year’s Richmond Zine Fest and trying to start a 20-25 page paper that has to be submitted with my grad school applications to US’ three schools with a Film Preservation & Archiving MA program, since two of those schools have applications due in December.

Anything I write between now and then will premiere with the new website. I just don’t have the time or patience anymore to deal with the absurd amount of maintenance that keeping a blog is requiring as of late. It may be naive to hope that owning my own webspace will eliminate content stealers and Russian spammers, but I’m willing to give it a shot by placing some serious hurdles.

NoWo600Wo: Week 2 of modern horror with a CW actor vs. older, better horror

Week 2 of the ongoing Friday night series at my house: Crappy newer horror movie starring a current or former actors from the CW network vs. an older and surprisingly good horror/slasher film. I don’t know if I would call this a “series” in all honestly, just two weeks of coincidences.

Boogeyman (2005)

This was the second outing of Sam Raimi and Robert Tapert’s Ghost House Pictures after the wildly successful and fairly entertaining remake of The Grudge in late 2004. Boogeyman is the opposite of entertaining however. If anything, it’s proof that perhaps that Eric Kripke’s talent has improved over the past 4 or 5 years. He co-wrote Boogeyman and is the creator and frequent collaborator on Supernatural, a series that has gotten better over time. The Kripke motif’s displayed in Boogeyman are that the main character drives a classic car and has a doomed girlfriend named Jessica. Boogeyman is a dull film that uses flashy and stylish camera tricks just to wake you out of your boredom. The tale is pretty basic: a man (Barry Watson, formerly of 7th Heaven) who is haunted by a Boogeyman that apparently killed his father when he was 8 and tore apart his family returns to his still-haunted house after his mother’s death. There is no tension to be found in this movie, so it is really hard to care what happens. The final battle is so distractingly CGI and tips it’s hat so much to the final battle of Evil Dead 2 that all it makes you think is “You know what’s a good movie? Evil Dead 2.”

The House on Sorority Row (1983)

Out of the three slasher films I’ve seen that takes place in a sorority house, The House on Sorority Row ranks a solid #2 after the original Black Christmas. Sorority House Massacre would be third. The House on Sorority Row almost seems like a sequel to Black Christmas, since the killer also is hidden and resides in the attic of a house full of doomed sorority sisters. While the killer remains shrouded in mystery for much of the film, unlike Black Christmas, he is revealed at one point. A group of graduating sorority sisters decides to throw a party in their house, disobeying their troubled house mother. A prank on the housemother goes horribly awry, and the girls don’t particularly have fun at their party as a result. What’s kind of interesting about this movie is that the obvious final girl, Kate, has a blind date pursuing her thoughout the entire film, but she obviously doesn’t care about him because she has other, more important things on her mind, (like why her friends are disappearing), and there is no romantic angle to the story. He ends up drunk and sitting in his car, which is humorously realistic. Seriously, the romantic angle between Laurie Strode and that cute EMT guy who slips in a puddle of blood in Halloween 2 was more pursued (and abruptly dropped) than the story of Kate and the blind date.

Fun fact: Bad girl Vicki is played by soap opera stalwart Eileen Davidson.
Fun fact #2: The housemother in the upcoming remake will be played by Carrie Fisher. Even if I don’t totally see Carrie Fisher as a housemother type, she will likely be the best part of the movie.

They’ve Changed Faces (1971)

They’ve Changed Faces is an interesting take on the Dracula legend. The description that my boyfriend and I found originally called it a satire on capitalist culture, but there’s not much humor to be found in this movie. Nor is it a traditional horror film. There is little to no blood found in the movie. While the premise feels like a sci-fi movie of sorts, it’s not exactly that either, although it is somewhat similar to John Carpenter’s They Live, but pre-dates that film by 15 years.

The basic story is that a car designer at an auto company named Alberto is suddenly called to the CEO’s office one morning and told that the owner of the company would like to meet with him at his secluded villa. The designer has never heard of the owner, who goes by the name of “Engineer Nosferatu” (played by Adolfo Celi, the villain from Danger: Diabolik). The designer drives out to the villa, but gets lost along the way, and comes across a pretty, topless, free-spirited hitch-hiker named Laura. Once he arrives to Nosferatu’s villa, he ignores Laura’s pleas to not go in and to run away with her instead. What he finds is a large mansion where the inside is akin to a more spammy version of Bill Gates’ house. Everytime you sit on a piece of furniture, an ad over the loudspeakers plays. This even happens when our protagonist showers. He is seduced by Nosferatu’s assistant-in-a-terrible-wig Corinna. Much like vampire tradition, Nosferatu can only be seen in the evening. He tells Alberto that he controls basically everything in Italy, and would like to make Alberto a CEO. He allows Alberto time to mull it over, but as each day progresses, Alberto discovers more and more disturbing things about Nosferatu, including that Laura has disappeared from his car at the gates.

They’ve Changed Faces is a slow burn of a movie, but it is well paced at barely 90 minutes. There is a lot of ambiguity going on, it has a creepy atmosphere where modern technology and design meets the old world, and the ending is bleak. Since it does not really fall into one genre, the best I can describe it is how I heard Vanishing Point described the other day, “a movie about the death of the 1960’s”. Even in the early 1970’s, there was a dearth of movies discussing the evils of capitalism, or its far-reaching consequences. At times I felt this movie was an alternative answer to Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, like what if C.C. Baxter decided not to have a soul and go after Fran Kubelik and stayed Vice President at the company?

Relaunched

The blog is back up, complete with Creative Common and Copyscape logos on each post. Some new categories have been added, but for some reason is the category cloud is being buggy right now.

I’m still considering buying my own domain and webspace, but I haven’t figured out all the logistics just yet.

I will hopefully be posting some actual content within the next few days.