31 Nights of Frights #1: Lake Mungo

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Australia: 2008

“Alice kept secrets. She kept the fact that she kept secrets a secret.”

In the wake of The Blair Witch Project there were an immediate glut of releases (Some of which will be coming up I’m sure) that cashed in on the ‘found footage’ craze. While it wasn’t the first film to use that conceit, it’s not hard to argue the case that BWP, as the hip kids called it, effectively gave birth to the genre or at least the genre as it exists today.

These range from good ([Rec]) to mediocre (The St. Francisville Experiment) or just so bad they remain unreleased (The Poughkeepsie Tapes).

So which is Lake Mungo?

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Announcing: 31 Nights of Frights

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Ok friends lets put aside things like lack of updates and instead focus on what will be coming. Those of you with a calender have probably noticed that today is October 1st, and as has become tradition around these parts, October 1st generally means 31 Nights of Frights. What is it? Well it’s a horror film a day, sometimes more, and all sorts of scary content to get you in the mood for the best time of the year.

I’m going to try and avoid any repeats of previous years, though that’s getting a little harder these days. The first review will be up later today.

P.S. Given the heat in the UK right now, this does not feel like a time to be spooky at all.

The game that came in from the cold: Thoughts about ‘Duke Nukem Forever’.

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1997 . It was this year that Princess Diana was killed, James Cameron released Titanic and recent internet laughing stock Rebecca Black was born. It was April that year when 3D Realms announced a follow up to their hit Duke Nukem 3D, a game titled Duke Nukem Forever. It was predicted the game would come out in time for Christmas 1998  and in May of ’98 the game was shown off at Video Game convention E3. The game was built using the Quake II engine, which at the time was the most cutting edge game engine available….at least until a few months later when the Unreal engine was released. Despite showing off the game to journalists and proclaiming their delight with how the game was going, 3D Realms made the sudden announcement that they would be switching to the Unreal engine, effectively starting the game again from scratch.

Then, 14 years later, the game was released.

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Some thoughts on X-Men: First Class

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Not just one of the best films of the Summer, but the best films of the year; X-Men: First Class offers smart thrills for most of it’s running time, with just a few unfortunate caveats which we’ll get into soon enough. Rest assured though that Matthew Vaughn has created a film that not only distances itself from some unfortunate entries that came before it, but leaves you hungry for more.

I’ll try and keep my views as spoiler-free as possible, but those of you who like knowing nothing about a film might need to skip this entry.

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To guide or to censor…

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When The Human Centipede was released last year it caused just the right amount of furore that a film about linking people up by their ass and mouth should cause. The director, Tom Six, perhaps sensing that the film wasn’t actually as graphic or as vile as it was made out to be, made the proclamation that the sequel would make the original look like My Little Pony.

Well it seems he was successful as this week the BBFC announced they will not be classifying the film, as no amount of cuts would make it releasable, thus basically banning the film.

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Can I just borrow this?

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Creating something is hard. There’s a quote from German writer Thomas Mann; “A Writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people” which I think sums up not just the act of writing, but any form of artistry. The quote could easily apply to a musician or a painter. A blogger reveals a lot – some would say too much – about themselves in the things that they write, similarly a comic strip writer tends to reveal a lot about themselves in the strips they create.

So what do you do when someone steals it?

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The day I knew I was part of the family.

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It was on a night like any other. I was casually sitting back in my chair watching TV, perhaps it was Jersey Shore or it could’ve just been something a little more highbrow, like CSI (Vegas). I was engaged in conversation via text with a friend of mine. I don’t really recall what the conversation was about now, but I know that I managed to spell something incorrectly. The reply that came back was the same word, with a couple of question marks at the end. Clearly what I had said made no sense and in my effort to explain myself I dropped this line:

“Oh that’s my iPhone, damn autocorrect”

Little did I know what I had started.

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When winning isn’t…

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Some days I think I wouldn’t wish celebrity on my worst enemy. It’s hard to feel sympathy for someone like Jordan for instance, a person who strives to remain relevant long after any discernible ‘talent’ has dried up. That’s not to pick on Jordan of course, that statement can probably be applied to any number of models, reality stars, singers and actors. But the rule still applies to her. If you court the limelight the way some ‘celebs’ do then it makes it hard to turn around and claim an intrusion of privacy, not least when you’re actively calling around and arranging a time and place where you can ‘accidently’ be caught stumbling out of a nightclub.

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Why do I write?

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Writing is hard. Really I mean it. Just getting that bit out was tough enough, and now as a writer even as I’m typing this I’m already critiquing it. I’m thinking about how this opening looks to the reader and I’m already trying to re-edit this whole piece as I’m writing it. Now at this point I’m worried what the reaction is to calling myself a writer without really having the work handily available for you to read over and nod in agreement. Now I’m thinking of ways to make that sentence shorter.

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