45 Days of Halloween Movies, Books, and Music - Masters of Horror: The V Word (2006)

Masters of Horror: The V Word (2006) – One of the entries in season 2 of the cable TV series where famous horror directors produce an hour long entry. Ernest Dickerson directs in this case – a famous master horror director? At this point in his career he had directed Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight (hardly the Citizen Kane of horror movies). He would later go on to direct many episodes of The Walking Dead and become a respectable horror director, so I am being too harsh here, but only to say that in 2006 he was hardly yet to the level of Master of Horror.


It wasn’t a bad show, again, more on adventure and less on dread – which I like. Not much to it – two teens break into a funeral home after hours. Okay, pretty weak intro. I’ve done some crazy things as a youth, but entering a funeral home was not my idea of fun. Back home it was against the law to enter a cemetery after dark. We scaled graveyard fences after midnight on many occasions. And guess what? We never saw ghosts, never were chased by vampires, I never once had a fight with crazed serial killers or mad scientists robbing graves. They were just boring places with a lot of things to trip over in the dark.

The teens soon find the entire staff of the funeral home dead. They are attacked by a man named Mr. Chaney, who is a vampire. One of the boys is bitten on the neck. The two boys escape from Mr. Chaney, but Kerry, the boy who has been bitten, is dealing with the fact that he is going to become a vampire and a series of cat and mouse games between Mr. Chaney and the boys.

Following the ham handed opening and obvious eye-rolling reference in the title to the L-Word cable series about lesbians that I never watched (in which he directed one episode, a really obscure wink at his own resume perhaps, if I hadn’t of looked it up, it would have been lost on me). This episode pays off pretty well with a vicious vampire chasing the hapless, stupid protagonists around in the dark. Escapist fun.

Ratings:
Me: 3.0 out of 5.0

45 Days of Halloween Movies, Books, and Music - The Scrubs by Simon Janus

The Scrubs – Simon Janus


I found this quick little Novella pick-up for my Kindle for 0.99. I’m trying to write shorter works these days in addition to my diet of my two novels that I’m publishing in this blog. So when I find novellas or short stories at my fingertips in Kindle, I try to consume them as well.

This story takes place in London at Wormwood Scrubs Prison. The prison administration finds themselves in possession of an inmate with a powerful sixth sense. They open a project called the “North Wing Project” that pumps this prisoner full of hallucinogens where he creates an alternative world called the Rift where the souls of his victims live. People are able to enter this prisoner’s world through a computer link, and other prisoners are offered pardons for doing so. The prison warden believes he has a gold mine with this inmate, if he can only control the world.

The story is a bizarre story to say the least. It immediately challenges the reader’s ability to not only suspend their disbelief, but throw it out the window. If you had a hard time accepting the premise of Christopher Nolan’s Inception, where it spent two and a half hours convincing you of a person’s ability to do it naturally, then The Scrubs will be a little hard to accept that a computer can do it.

I was able to set aside that disbelief, and accept the strangeness of the world inside the prisoner’s mind. It was an odd place, but not as strange as I felt it could have been. There felt to be a very strong tether to the real world and I never felt too far away (as I did watching The Cell). To my surprise, I found myself liking the criminal they sent in better than the non-criminals that were running the project. I didn’t expect that to happen, I was anticipating an HBO-style story where I wouldn’t like anyone, but the author delivered, and I liked that. The criminal was regretful of his crimes, and made to relive and face what he did in the Rift world. The author threw a pretty cool twist at the end, and I appreciate that.

Ratings:
4.0 out of 5.0

45 Days of Halloween Movies, Books, and Music - Silver Bullet (1985)

After taking a holiday from my two web fiction series - The Fenian Avengers and The Franklin Castle - which are starting back up this week - I am also jumping back into the saddle with a little series I'm calling 45 Days of Halloween Movies, Books, and Music. In this series over the next 45 days, I do a quick summary on thoughts of Halloween themed books, movies, and music that I experience between now and Halloween. Perhaps I will do a quick summary every day, maybe not.

Silver Bullet (1985) – (Television version) – I loved this movie when I was younger. It’s also Stephen King (story and screenplay) and is more adventure story, which fits my style of horror story. I don’t always care for what has become the contemporary horror movie, all gore. I like a sense of fear, but I really like a sense of adventure. We learn quickly that the monster is a werewolf, and see the skinny, awkward limbs associated with the monster pretty early on. If you know Stephen King and the type of person he often has it out for, there should be little surprise as to the identity of the werewolf. This is my first time watching the program in twenty years, and the first time watching with my children. We did go for the sanitized television version that I DVR’d last year.

Ratings:

Me: 3.5

Devin: 4.0

Lexi: 4.5

Ava: too scary, would not finish watching