Happy Halloween!

If I were less boring and lazy and all of that, I would have planned something in advance for Halloween so I'd have something more interesting than just "Happy Halloween" to say today.  I AM WHAT I AM.  So there.  All I know is, I'm watching silly horror movies on Netflix Instant all weekend cuz  I couldn't take today and tomorrow off from work.  I've got a bunch queued all up in there and I'm not gonna think too hard about it, just gonna press "play" and watch 'em up!  Anything that doesn't grab me within 30 minutes, is dunzo.  I will move on and feel no guilt!!

At some point I'll probably watch the original, the best, Halloween movie and see if it still scares me. 

He's in broad daylight!!  This is one of the scariest scenes in the movie, when Laurie and Annie are walking towards him and he just moves out of sight and they keep walking and OMGHFDOFJISOFJDS!!!  Freaky!! 

Halloween 2013: All the Boys Love Mandy Lane

All the Boys Love Mandy Lane was originally made in 2006, but due to complications with its distributor, it didn't get a U.S. release until just this year.  I don't remember when I first heard about it, but I'd been anticipating its release ever since because everyone was raving over it.  Owing to its limited release this year, I actually somehow avoided knowing anything about it, which is kind of nice.  I was able to watch it without ever really being sure what was going on and what I should be expecting.

In case you didn't know, Mandy Lane is a horror movie.  Amber Heard plays the titular character, a gorgeous virginal blonde who is indeed lusted after by all the boys at her high school.  She is invited to a get-together at a friend's parent's cattle ranch where all the boys are each hoping to get it on with her.  And I'll leave it at that.  If you like horror movies, especially slasher movies, you don't need much more than that and I'd rather not say anything else.  This isn't an especially scary movie, although YMMV. 

Now, did I like the movie?  Was it worth the wait?  Well...I dunno about that.  I was mostly enjoying it until a certain point, and even though the characters weren't particularly likable, I was curious about where it was going, and what was going to happen.  But then when it all became clear, it really wasn't that clear, and I felt a bit let down.  I don't mind movies that don't have clear answers.  A great example is Black Christmas, where you never really learn why the guy in the house is killing everyone.  That's okay.  But this one, I felt a bit cheated.  I think part of the buildup to this movie was that I got the idea it was some kind of female empowerment something-or-other, and I'm not sure that it was. 

I gave this one three stars.  Like Final Destination 5, if I had stopped the movie before the letdown, it might have gotten three and a half.  I'd recommend it to slasher movie fans, especially those who like something a little different.

Netflix is weird

As I was doing breakfasty things in the kitchen this morning, I happened to notice a Netflix thingie, one of many that pile up on the table because hubbie and I are SLOBS.  Oh, what's a Netflix thingie, you might ask?  Well.  If you've never received discs through the mail, here's what they look like:

The sheet on the left side is essentially an ad for Netflix.  You tear that sheet off and throw it away.  Or leave it sitting on your table, along with junk mail, until you get sick of it, and THEN throw it away.  ANYWAY.  I happened to notice the most recent one sitting on the table, and it was basically a reminder that Netflix has zombie movies for you to choose from, since it's almost Halloween.  And then it had four DVD covers.  I'm guessing this is what they would consider the cream of the crop?  The quintessential entries in the genre?  Well.  Here are the four movies they chose:

Zombieland.  Shaun of the Dead.  World War Z.  AND...  AND....  Young Frankenstein.

"One of these things is not like the other..."

Um.  I have ISSUES.  The most obvious is that Young Frankenstein is NOT A ZOMBIE MOVIE.  Yes, Frankenstein's monster is a reanimated corpse, but he is not a zombie.  Not in the classic sense of what I consider to be a zombie.  Zombies are reanimated corpses who then eat other people and pass on their zombieness.  Ol' Frankie could eat people, but he wouldn't pass anything on.  The only way Young Frankenstein fits is that it's a horror comedy, and in that sense, it can go fine alongside Zombieland and Shaun of the Dead.  Which means World War Z then doesn't belong, because as far as I know, it's a serious zombie movie.  But it's a zombie movie and therefore belongs.  Dagnabbit!!

The other issue is simply that I wouldn't have put both Zombieland and Shaun of the Dead on the list.  They are both excellent zombie movies, but they are outliers of sorts, since they're comedies.  I also wouldn't necessarily have put Return of the Living Dead on there, either.  Now, if the fourth movie had been Night of the Living Dead, or Dawn of the Dead, I probably wouldn't have given the thingie a second glance.  I might have wondered a bit why they'd chosen both Zombieland and Shaun, but I wouldn't be ranting about it.

HOWEVER.  I think, in part, what frustrates me about the choice of these four movies is that they're not zombie gore-fests.  Yes, there is some gore in both Zombieland and Shaun, but my sister watched them and liked them both.  And girlfriend does NOT like horror.  Does not like gore.  I guarantee she wouldn't like Dawn of the Dead, which to me is THE zombie movie.  And from what I've heard and read about World War Z is that it is not a gore-fest.  It's more mainstream.  AND it's PG-13.  The only horror movie I've seen recently that was PG-13 and still good was Drag Me to Hell.  PG-13 and zombies just don't go together.  We go see zombie movies to see body parts ripped off and eaten.  Blood, gore and intestines, oh my!!

None of which is to denigrate Zombieland or Shaun AT ALL.  They're just the kind of movies that non-gorehounds would choose if you asked them to pick a good zombie movie.  I shouldn't be surprised by this, but ya know.  I can be naïve sometimes. 
 
EDITED TO ADD PHOTO EVIDENCE:

That there is the tear-away sheet from a Netflix envelope, inviting the consumer to "add these flesh-eating zombies to your queue."  Frankenstein's monster does not eat flesh!!!  Jeebus Creezypants!!

Blergh

I have 33 horror movies queued up in my Netflix to watch next weekend.  I don't think I'm gonna get them all watched in one day!  Oh noes!!  I might watch a few this weekend if I don't get stuck doing what I always do on weekends.  Which is: doing online jigsaw puzzles while I listen to podcasts.  I am so boring!!  The last time I watched a bunch of movies on Halloween I think I only watched 6?  So, yeah. 

The annoying thing about Halloween this year is that I now have a job where I actually have a specific thing I have to do on the first of every month.  I'd like to take next Thursday and Friday off, but then I'd have to postpone this specific thing to Monday, but I don't know if my boss would go for it.  And I don't really mind having my horror movie marathon on the weekend.  I was gonna start on Friday night and watch stuff all weekend long.  I dunno.  Maybe I'll still run it by the boss and see if I can take next Friday off.

I just wanna go home and watch horror movies NOW!!!!!  Go buy some beer and pizza and turn all the lights out.

Halloween 2013: Final Destination 5

Quick thoughts:  Final Destination 5 is a good example of why I will mostly likely watch Paranormal Activity 5.  Because sometimes a sequel is damn good.  I had kinda given up on the FD series after 4 (mostly because 3 and 4 were boring and I actually keep forgetting I even watched 4), but then someone on a podcast said 5 was actually pretty fun, so I said, what the hey.  I AM a completist, after all.  Now that most, if not all, I haven't actually checked, of the Hellraiser movies are on Netflix Instant, I'll probably make my way through those.  YES.  I will regret it, and I know this already.  But I will do it.

ANYHOODLE.  Final Destination 5.  Again, like PA 5, this series has a conceit that definitely wears thin.  Hence the badness of 3 and 4.  But I dunno, 5 was just fun.  The kill sequences were awesome, and the opening made me giggle numerous times.  Ultimately, I only gave this movie 3 stars, though, mostly cuz the ending was majorly lame.  Unlike 3 and 4, though, I'll watch this one again.  I'd totally do a marathon and skip 3 and 4.  I think Dick Casablancas may have been in 3, though, so maybe I'd watch it again.  *skitters off to check interwebs*  WRONG, it was Nick Zano I was thinking of, not Ryan Hansen, and it was 4.  See, I still don't remember 4 at all!!

So, the FD films in order of awesomeness: 2, 1, 5, 3.  That's it, right?  I'm not missing something??  Nah.

Halloween 2013: Paranormal Activity 4

I'm just a sucker for these movies.  I don't LOVE them, but they're good for a decent scare or two.  The real problem with them is the movie around the scares.  Characters you kind of want to slap so they'll shut up already and get to the scares.  And there's definitely a problem of diminishing returns.  By the fourth movie, it's like, "oh, a door opening by itself AGAIN.  I'm SO scared."  For the most part, it's just the same tricks over and over and this movie definitely didn't scare me very much.  Some good eerie moments but not real scares.  But I'll probably watch the fifth one when it gets put up on Netflix instant streaming.  Cuz you never know!  Some sequels are actually fun.

I think the main problem with this one is that they've stretched the found footage conceit almost to the breaking point.  I can buy people who think their house is haunted, so they put up cameras all around the house and check them periodically.  Yeah, it stretches credibility, but if it's fun and scary, I don't mind.  This one, though, just, I dunno.  Mostly we get the stoopid teenage main character chatting with her boyfriend online, so we have to look at her dumb face A LOT.  And her dumb boyfriend is even worse.  And spoiler alert, I guess?  So, psycho Aunt Katie kidnapped her nephew Hunter after killing off the rest of the family, and then she shows up across the street from the people in this movie, with a kid she's calling Robbie.  So I assumed Robbie was Hunter.  But then it seems like later they're trying to say the boy in the other family is actually Hunter??  So then who the fuck is Robbie??  Things like this bug me and take me out of the movie.  They make me all stabby and psycho-facey.

So I wouldn't recommend this movie unless you saw and didn't hate the other three.  Otherwise the whole thing wouldn't make ANY sense, probably.

Review: Star Trek Into Darkness

Yeah, I never saw this in the theater.  I really hate leaving the house on weekends and I don't like to go out after work, and I dunno, if it weren't for work I might never leave the house.  I get panic attacks sometimes in large groups of people and sometimes I just can't deal, so I don't see that many movies in the theater.  I dunno.  Maybe I would have liked it better if I'd seen it in the theater.

I enjoyed it for the most part until it started getting all cutesy and up its own ass with the referential crap.  A tribble for no reason, and then the whole reversal of Kirk and Spock at the end of Wrath of Khan, and then suddenly Spock is yelling "KHAAAAAN!!!!" and I'm annoyed.  I love a good wink at the audience if it's done right, but too much and it's just fucking lazy.  And it just made me want to rewatch Wrath of Khan, cuz that's a good movie.  And I love Cumberbatch, but I kept trying to wonder what it would sound like if he said "fine Corinthian  leather..."

Halloween 2013: Cronenberg

David Cronenberg directed one of my very favorite horror movies, the remake of The Fly.  There's a part in it where Goldblum vomits up his food at the table and just says something like "oh, that was gross," that just kills me.  It's gory, gross, funny, and that means it's My Kinda Movie.  Also fitting nicely into that category is The Brood -- awesome and creepy and I love it.  Others of his that I'd seen are The Dead Zone, Dead Ringers, Existenz, A History of Violence, and Eastern Promises.  All of which I liked except for Existenz, which for some reason I violently hated.  But everything else is excellent, although Dead Ringers suffers a bit in comparison to the rest.  Anyway, since I got back on the Netflix DVD train, I decided to catch up on a few I hadn't seen.

First was Scanners, which I gave 3 1/2 stars.  Not sure why, in retrospect I'd probably give it just 3.  It was a decent movie but suffered a bit when I realized the big iconic scene (the head exploding) occurred in the first 20 or so minutes, maybe sooner.  After that I was kind of waiting for something even more awesome to happen and it didn't.  But Michael Ironside was really good.  I think that's the best thing about it (besides the 'splodey head, which I howled at).

Next was Videodrome, which I  also gave 3 1/2 stars, and I'll stick with that.  Now when someone says "Long live the new flesh" I have a frame of reference for it.  (cuz it happens SO OFTEN).  This is one of those movies that challenges the viewer a little, at least those of us who enjoy horror.  And at the same time gives us perverts exactly what we want.  I've always liked James Woods, and I enjoyed his performance in the movie.  Also:  Debbie Harry!!  Her acting was not so great, but still.  I think she'd be fun to have a drink with.  Unlike Scanners, I can see myself watching this more than once.  Good flick.

Last was Rabid, which I gave 3 stars.  Creepy, gory, but ultimately, I dunno, somehow not very memorable?  Except maybe for the fact that Marilyn Chambers is in this and is of course as nekkid as she can be.  Maybe if they'd cast a better actress I could've sympathized with her character, but as it was, again, I dunno, I wasn't left with very much of anything when it was over.

Pilot Watch: Witches of East End

If Sarah D. Bunting hadn't mentioned this show favorably in a blog post, I would likely have never watched it.  It's on the Lifetime network.  THE LIFETIME NETWORK.  Anything that bills itself as the "network for women" is not going to be for me.  Yes, I'm a woman.  I got the tits and hooha to prove it.  But...I'm not a girly girl.  I don't usually like girly things.  I do like some rom-coms, but usually I only like romance if there are vampires or something like that in the mix.  Straight romance, not really my kinda thing.  Happy crappy romantic movies are the anti-Sandisan.  Gimme a dick flick, something with a Statham or a Willis, lots of action and some tits and I'll be happy.  So, yeah.  Lifetime Network: Not For Me.  (my love of Sex and the City does not negate any of what I've just said, BTW)

BUT.  I do like shows about witches.  I like shows about sisters.  And this show has Witch Sisters!!  Yay!!  Unfortunately, it has Ms. Channing Tatum, who despite having fantastic tits and doesn't mind wearing shirts that show them off, is quite a bad actress.  She's not embarrassingly bad, she's just not...good.  Plus, she gets to see Channing nekkid whenever she wants, and well, he gets to see her nekkid whenever he wants, which makes me not like him all of a sudden, and well, confusing.  ANYWAY.  She's probably the worst part of the show, and really, she's not that bad.  Besides, Madchen Amick!!  Shelley from Twin Peaks!!!  She's looking good, and she's really funny and I love her.

The show itself is a lot like Charmed, which, yes Witch Sisters and I watched ALL OF IT.  Hot Witch Sisters, to boot.  Especially Holly Marie Combs, who was one of my first female crushes, back when I didn't really know what that meant.  Anyway, there's some silly romantic stuff, Jenna Dewan-Tatum's fiancé is named DASH (ugh), but I can ignore it if the focus stays on the witchy parts.  I was actually surprised by how much I liked this show.

Pilot Watch: The Tomorrow People

I like The CW Network.  I will watch almost any new scripted genre show that they air.  An exception is Beauty and the Beast, mostly because I heard a lot of bad things about it, and still do.  I also only watched one episode of Nikita, despite it being pretty much right up my alley.  Blame it on having too many other shows to watch.  Likely, Nikita is something I will marathon on Netflix once the whole series is up.  So even something as kinda silly-looking as The Tomorrow People, I'm gonna watch at least once.  Plus, the lead actor (Robbie Amell) is brother to the lead in Arrow (Stephen Amell) and hello, HOTNESS.  Yeah, I'm gonna give it a go.

One of the hardest parts about making a pilot can be the setup, the introduction to a realized world.  Usually the introduction will come via someone new to the world: a new recruit for a secret agency, for example.  If done well, this won't seem too clunky or exposition-y.  If not done well, it'll be...clunky and exposition-y.  For me, if the show can give me some characters I'm willing to watch a second episode for, I'm not too concerned with how clunky the intro is.  Not all pilots are great, not all shows start out fully realized and awesome.  The Tomorrow People handles all of this by kinda speeding through the exposition while giving the viewer some interesting characters and situations.

Basically, there are non-humans who have three special abilities: Teleportation, Telepathy, and Telekinesis.  These people, umm, mutants?  I'll call them the TPs, the Tomorrow Peeps, are hiding from an organization called Ultra, the head of which wants to capture the TPs and eliminate their powers.  Stephen (Robbie Amell) begins exhibiting some of these powers and is brought into this secret world.

This has potential.  I liked the characters, although it strains even more credulity than usual that Stephen is in high school when he looks to be about 23.  (He's actually 25)  I can live with this as long as we don't get a lot of school scenes, which I don't think we will.  Also, one of the things set up is whether or not Stephen's dad is dead or not, and judging by the fact that when said father showed up via recorded message, I yelled "Hot daddy!!", I do hope they find him.  I'll likely keep watching this one.

For Tylia

YUM:

 

via

On Notice: Sons of Anarchy

I've been watching Sons of Anarchy almost since the beginning.  It's a loud, crass, casually misogynistic, violent show, and I really loved it.  Despite the casual misogyny, there were good female characters on display, even if the men around them sometimes treated them like crap.  There seemed to be a heart at the core, a moral center of sorts, even if it was a crude, bloody heart.  From the beginning, it's straddled a line for me between what's watchable and what isn't.  Occasionally the show could be a little more exploitative than I liked, but it always seemed to have a point to it.  And since some of the exploitation came at the expense of showing off Charlie Hunnam's excellent tushie, I figured it all balanced out somewhat.

But recently it's just been dragging on me.  I've been putting off watching the week's episode, partly because I'm getting tired of it and partly because F/X has decided to fellate Kurt Sutter by letting him have regular 90-minute episodes that just DRAG and have no reason to be extra-long.  And this week I actually may have hit the breaking point.  A subplot so demoralizing and above all, embarrassing, that I don't know how much longer I can watch.  And by embarrassing, I mean the fact that these fine actors had to act out this scene and someone actually wrote the scene in the first place, it's just sad. 

Basically, Gemma has gone to visit Clay in prison, a nominative conjugal visit, even though the only point of the meeting is for Clay to pass information to Gemma (for which service the guards accept $500, I think).  Once the information has been passed, and Gemma is about to take her leave, the guards decide they want the conjugal to actually take place so they can watch.  (Clay and Gemma are still legally married but they're estranged, and well, it's complicated.  Basically, there's no way on Earth Gemma wants to fuck Clay.)  And yeah, that's icky.  But I still could have lived with it had Clay beat them up, or Gemma, or something, anything so the scene didn't take place.  But it did.  They cut away, so we didn't actually have to see the ickiness, but it still happened.  And why?  There seems no narrative purpose to this at all.  It's not like there's a dearth of plot to this show.  I don't usually think Sutter does things just to shock and be "badass" but this really crossed the line for me.  And I'm not a prude.  I just don't see any reason to have this humiliating scene on this show.  I actually fast-forwarded through it, and I never do that. 

I almost gave up on this show last season and then was glad I didn't because it got interesting, but this may be it for me. 

Halloween 2013: Four Flies on Grey Velvet

I realized after I reviewed The Bird with the Crystal Plumage that I still needed to see a few more of Argento's early films.  Bird was his first movie, and Four Flies was his second.  And for once I'm going to review something that I JUST saw, which means I'll actually remember the dang plot.

Robert is a musician who thinks someone is following him.  After following the stalker and confronting him, Robert accidentally kills the man.  While this is happening, someone is taking photos of the murder.  Shortly after, Robert begins to receive these photos in the mail and hidden around his apartment.  Who is sending these photos and why?  Will the answer make a ton of sense?? 

Well, watch and you'll find out who was sending the photos.  You'll also get to see Argento in the early stages of what would become his signature style.  There isn't a ton of gore in this movie, but there are quite a few excellent set pieces and while it's not a great movie, it does have a lot to recommend it if you like Italian horror.  If you've seen more than a few Argento movies, it'll be kind of obvious who the killer is, but I don't know that the mystery is the point of watching an Argento movie. 

Cute Elena is Cute

Halloween 2013: A Smattering of Movies

I watched a few movies this year that aren't technically horror movies, but have some element of psychologically scary stuff, so here's a few with brief reviews.

Martha Marcy May Marlene (3 1/2 stars)
I was fascinated by the book Helter Skelter when I was a teen, and this movie kind of reminded me of that.  Elizabeth Olsen was fabulous and it was well worth watching.

Red Riding: 1974 (3 stars); Red Riding: 1980 (3 stars); Red Riding: 1983 (3 1/2 stars)
These three British movies (also known as the Red Riding Trilogy) all tell a complete story, but were directed by three different directors.  They're not really scary but they are about a serial killer.  I guess I particularly liked the third one.  I watched them in two days; I think I watched the first movie and the next day I watched the second and third.  They're fairly grim in tone, so I don't know if I'd recommend a marathon of all three.

We Need to Talk About Kevin (3 stars)
I can't exactly say I enjoyed this movie.  It was hard to watch at times, even though there's not a lot of actual violence in it.  But Tilda Swinton is a Goddess.  And the actor who plays Kevin?  Wow.  I had seen him not long before in The Perks of Being a Wallflower (which I loved), and he was such a joy in that one, but he was also totally believable as a young psychopath.

M (5 stars)
LOVE this movie.  I had never seen it before, but I know I'll be watching it again.  The end scene where Peter Lorre is surrounded by people who want to kill him (for good reason) stuck with me for quite a while after watching it.  He's a pedophile and a child-killer, but is it his fault?  Does he deserve mercy, considering he didn't choose this way of being?  I was frankly rooting for them to kill him, but I wasn't doing it gleefully, and it made me question how I really feel about such things.

Stoker (4 stars)
I love Chan-wook Park.  He directed my beloved Oldboy, a movie that is so gorgeous and so heartbreaking.  I didn't really love his last movie, Thirst, so I was a little apprehensive, but I really enjoyed this movie.  And I recently watched Shadow of a Doubt for the first time and couldn't help but see some similarities in the relationships between uncle and niece in both movies (just add incest!).

Halloween 2013: The Bird with the Crystal Plumage

I saw Dario Argento's arguably greatest movie, Suspiria, for the first time about three years ago.  I didn't like it.  The music annoyed me, the plot was incomprehensible, and I think I gave it two stars.  But for some reason, it stuck with me, and I dunno, I decided to watch it again and suddenly, it spoke to me.  The music: awesome.  The plot?  Well, still incomprehensible, but who cares?  Anyway, now I love this movie and I have been going through the rest of Argento's movies.  I first watched the other movies in the "three mothers" trilogy (Inferno and Mother of Tears) and then moved on to others such as Phenomena and Deep Red.  I love all of them.  Mother of Tears is a later movie, and it isn't as good as the others, but I still mostly enjoyed it.

It took me a while, but I finally decided to go to the beginning and watch his first movie, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.  Here's the summary from the Netflix page: "Witnessing a brutal attack on a woman but unable to help her, Sam, an American traveling in Rome, soon finds himself the target of an elusive killer. The deeper Sam delves into the mystery, the more at risk he becomes."  I had to go find the summary because I honestly couldn't remember the plot.  And something to say about these movies: plot?  Doesn't really so much matter.  The mood, the atmosphere, is much more important.  And once I went to google some images, I remembered the movie.  I liked it a lot.  That said, I have a swiss cheese memory (unless you need the lyrics to random songs from the '80's) so trying to review a movie three months later is really difficult for me.  Basically, if you like Argento, you'll probably like this one.  Yeah, I know, this review is pretty lame, but I'm making myself write anyway. 

I gave this movie 3 1/2 stars.

Pilot Watch: Masters of Sex

I meant to write about this way earlier in the week, but um, Lazy.  All I'll say at this point is that I really, really enjoyed this show.  In case you don't know, it's about Masters and Johnson and the groundbreaking sex research they did in the 1950's.  The casting is great and I love Lizzy Kaplan getting regular work.  They also did a really good job of not seeming prurient about the amount of sex in the show.  I mean, if you're gonna do a show about sex research, well, there's gonna be a lot of sex.  And there is, but it doesn't feel gratuitous, and I like that.  I can deal with gratuitous sex on something like Strike Back, cuz that's the genre and it's kind of funny, but a serious show about sex needs to be more careful and they did a good job in the pilot.  I'll keep watching this one.

Pilot Watch: The Originals

As a die-hard fan of The Vampire Diaries I was quite intrigued by the back-door pilot they aired last season, which featured the "original" vampires from the TVD universe.  There's Klaus (who is actually a wolf-vampire hybrid), Elijah (who is YUMMY), Rebekah, and two other brothers who were boring and I think are actually dead.  There's this whole thing about how since they're the original vampires, they're actually immortal (as opposed to the limited immortality of regular vampires -- they're immortal until you kill them), meaning they can't be killed at all, except oh, there's this white oak stake that can kill them permanently, and I believe these two brothers were indeed staked with the white oak.  I THINK.

Anyway, something something about Klaus going to New Orleans and meeting up with one of his um, sirees?  Children?  Spawn?  I dunno what they call them on this show, but Klaus is his sire, meaning he made him into a vampire.  Marcel is the dude's name and MAN.  He is HOT.  He's also kinda evil and he's got this large gang of vamps and they're basically making life hell for all the witches in NOLA.  And it should be said, Klaus is also pretty evil and there's really no good vamps except maybe Rebekah.  Elijah is less evil than Klaus, but he's still kinda evil and arrogant. 

So, the episode itself wasn't really all that great.  It did a lot of rehashing of the back-door pilot aired last season, plus there was a lot of clunky exposition so any noobs would be able to understand some of the relationships and whatnot.  Which is fine, but it was kinda boring.  I'm presuming it will get better, though, and will keep watching for the forseeable future.

Halloween 2013: The Woman in Black

I love horror movies.  And I love Halloween.  I'm not sure why.  I don't dress up, I don't give out candy to children, I don't decorate.  I don't even change my Twitter avatar or anything.  I guess I just like October.  It starts out with my seester's birthday and ends in Halloween. 

Anyway, I've been netflixing a lot of horror movies this year, and I meant to give little reviews of them, but ya know something?  I'm LAZY.  And I always worry I'll sound stoopid and I don't know how to do screen grabs of movies and my blog looks stoopid, and BLAH BLAH BLAH.  Well, I decided to just throw caution to the wind this month and try to put up at least one post per day.  And today it occurred to me I could go back and review some of those horror movies since it is Halloween month.  Shocktober!  These are definitely going to vary in length, quality and coherence, but what is new? 

So, I went back through the movies I've watched this year, and the first horror movie I watched was in May???  The Woman in Black is on there, right before Behind the Candelabra, which aired at the end of May, so there we go. 

Broody Harry Potter.

The Woman in Black stars Daniel Radcliffe as a lawyer who goes to a spooky house to do some, um, legal things.  I don't remember exactly, and it doesn't matter, it's just an excuse to get him to the spooky house and the spooky villagers and all that jazz.  It's a ghost story, and it does have its share of cheesy jump scares, but it's also legitimately creepy.  Daniel Radcliffe is a decent actor and I thought it was a good horror movie, albeit with a silly ending.  But it wasn't a BAD ending, and that's about the best you can hope for in a horror movie.  It's hard to stick the landing, and as long as I don't feel like the ending ruined everything that came before it, I'm okay with it. 

I gave this one 3 1/2 stars.  It was better than I expected it would be, and I would watch it again.

ONE WEEK

American Horror Story: Coven begins next week.  The first episode is called "Bitchcraft."

OMG

DED

SO FUCKING EXCITED

Jessica knows what I'm talking about.

Happy Birthday to my SEESTER!!!

Dearest Jan,

I wish you the most happiest of birthdays.  May your beauty and grace only grow as the years go by.  I'm sorry I can't be there to share this happy day with you, but know that I am thinking of you.

Yours always,
Robert