#this is how a gothic murder mystery sequel starts
Text
quarter three book favorites! (qts 1 & 2) once again, in the order in which i read them:
I'm gonna cheat and list three witch books I read in a row because they're all kinda linked in my head: The Change, about three women who gain magic powers after they go through menopause, The Witches of Moonshyne Manor about a coven of witches in their eighties who must protect their home, and The Rules of Magic, a prequel to Practical Magic- though I preferred the even farther reaching Magic Lessons.
The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin is a really hard book to describe haha but it is as great as everyone says it is.
Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson is a really fun, voicey mystery. A complicated family reunion at a ski lodge gets more complicated when people start dying.
Painted Devils by Margaret Owen is the sequel to one of my favorite fairy tale retellings, Little Thieves. I'll admit this one isn't nearly as good as the first, but still pretty great.
Sisters of the Lost Nation by Nick Medina is a mystery novel about an Indigenous teenager who dives into the mystery of the missing women on her reservation after her sister disappears. This is marketed as a horror and I think that's a bit of a mistake- the horror is in the epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women, and this book is not a fast-paced slasher or thriller. It is great though.
Northranger by Rey Terciero is a graphic novel, and it's a queer, modern retelling of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. So fun! Lots of discussion of horror media and how it both helps and hurts queer people.
Vampires of el Norte by Isabel Canas is a gothic historical romance set in Mexico, as vaqueros attempt to stop the invasion of the United States- and the vampires. Mostly a romance, but so delightful.
Better Living Through Birding by Christian Cooper was a fantastic memoir! Written by the Black man who was birding in Central Park when a white woman called the cops on him, this memoir is primarily about how much Cooper loves birds and what it was like for him to grow up gay, Black, and nerdy. Highly recommend the audiobook, which is read by Cooper and his passion comes through his voice so beautifully.
Carmilla by J Sheridan Le Fanu is a gothic classic that I'd never read, and I really enjoyed it! I love classic vampires.
The September House by Carissa Orlando is a delightful haunted house book about a woman who refuses to leave her haunted victorian manor. It has a turret, after all! She is annoyed when her adult daughter comes to investigate, because she knows that her daughter will just overreact to the bleeding walls. Fun and funny, with a lovely amount of depth about why families hide things from each other.
31 notes
·
View notes
Photo
In a brief biographical sketch, the crime writer Christopher Fowler, who has died aged 69, claimed he had achieved several of his “pathetic schoolboy fantasies”: releasing an “appalling” Christmas pop single; working as a male model; posing as the villain in a Batman graphic novel; running a Soho night club; appearing in The Pan Book of Horror series; and standing in for James Bond. Rather than examples of Fowler’s wicked sense of humour, all these claims were true. Time Out, meanwhile, called him “an award-winning novelist who would make a good serial killer”.
He was best known for his Bryant & May thrillers, featuring the elderly, venerable detectives Arthur Bryant and John May, who head up the Peculiar Crimes Unit, a department of the London police set up during the second world war to investigate cases that might cause a national scandal or public unrest. The pair had made appearances in some of Fowler’s early novels – Rune (1990), Darkest Day (1993) and Soho Black (1998) – before breaking out into their own long-running series, starting with Full Dark House in 2003.
Bryant, an irascible technophobe, and May, more accepting of the ways of modern life, have been partners for more than 60 years, having first teamed up in 1940 when they were 23 and 19 respectively. The first novel begins with the death by explosion of Bryant; while May investigates, he discovers connections with the pair’s very first case, the killing of a dancer during the blitz, which is told in flashback.
The Gothic air and clashing personalities continued into sequels, each intended to explore a different sub-genre of crime fiction, described by Fowler as “all the devices of classic murder mysteries, including disguised identities, locked room puzzles, surprise ending and nick-of-time rescues”.
The intended one-off novel became six books, then 12 and eventually 20, including two collections of short stories. Central to the series – and many of his other works – was Fowler’s love of London. He found the city endlessly fascinating and delighted in discovering its odder corners and the strangeness of its inhabitants, past and present. “The most bizarre facts in this book are the truest,” he noted in the acknowledgments of The Water Room, the second in the series, published in 2004.
Fowler began writing books alongside a career in the film industry, having co-founded the film promotion agency the Creative Partnership while in his 20s. This gave him the freedom to write what he liked, which made him a publisher’s nightmare: the unclassifiable author. After producing two novels that failed to launch and publishing two humorous titles, How to Impersonate Famous People (1984) and The Ultimate Party Book (1985), Fowler sold two collections of horror stories – City Jitters (1986) and More City Jitters (1988) – to the publisher of his near-neighbour, the novelist and playwright Clive Barker.
He followed this with Roofworld (1988), an urban fantasy novel about battling gangs and secret occult societies who use zipwires and bungee cords to travel above the city – inspired by the interconnected rooftops of London’s densely packed streets and his knowledge of how burglars would break into buildings through the top floor.
Roofworld established some of Fowler’s common themes – warfare between classes, battling evil corporations, and secret worlds existing within touching distance of unsuspecting Londoners – and introduced recurring characters, including DS Janice Longbright, who later served in the Peculiar Crimes Unit.
The real myths and mysteries of London held more interest to him than the supernatural horror of his earlier novels, although that did not stop him writing disturbing and blackly humorous takes on old themes: Rune’s subliminal messages echo MR James’ Casting the Runes; in Red Bride (1992) an ordinary man is seduced by a succubus; and in Spanky (1994) the hero engages in a Faustian pact with a demon.
The family at the heart of Psychoville (1995) are driven out of the suburbs by its change-resistant middle-class community; Disturbia (1996) has its hero uncover the machinations of a secret society; Hell Train (2011) is a homage to Hammer Films; Nyctophobia (2014) is a haunted house story; Little Boy Found (2017, as LK Fox) a psychological thriller; and Hot Water (2022) a murder mystery.
Fowler’s influences included Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy (which he called “powerful, black and funny”), John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man (“the ultimate in sleight-of-hand”) and JG Ballard (“his ‘five minutes into the future’ books were startling in their prescience”), the latter strongly influencing The Sand Men (2015).
His short story Left Hand Drive was filmed in 1993, and The Master Builder was made into the TV movie Through the Eyes of a Killer (1992), with Tippi Hedren. He won five British Fantasy awards, including for Full Dark House. Other Bryant & May novels won prizes and he was awarded the 2015 Crime Writers’ Association Dagger in the Library award for his body of work. His memoir Paperboy (2009) won the inaugural Green Carnation award.
Fowler was born in Greenwich, south-east London, the son of Lilian (nee Upton), a legal secretary, and William Fowler, a glass-blower and designer of scientific instruments with whom Fowler had a troubled relationship. He grew up reading fantasy, horror and science fiction, graduating from Superman comics to Tolkien and Ballard in his teens.
He was educated at Colfe’s grammar school in Lee before enrolling to study art at Goldsmiths College in 1972, although he left to take up work as a copywriter in various advertising agencies. At the age of 26 he set up the Creative Partnership with the producer Jim Sturgeon to market films, becoming a one-stop shop producing trailers, posters and commercials for radio and TV.
The company worked on campaigns for Bernardo Bertolucci, Peter Greenaway, Ridley Scott, Quentin Tarantino, David Cronenberg, Mike Leigh and many others, on movies ranging from Alien – they were paid £20 for the line “In space no one can hear you scream” – and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, to GoldenEye and Reservoir Dogs.
The Creative Partnership opened an office in Beverley Hills and Fowler spent the early 80s in the US, but could find only badly paid, uncreative work. With time on his hands he began writing, finding success after returning to London. He was able to maintain a steady output, including a graphic novel (Menz Insana, 1997), a stage play (Celebrity, produced at the Phoenix, London, in 2010), and the War of the Worlds video game (2011) for Paramount.
He also wrote a 319-episode series of short essays on forgotten authors for the Independent on Sunday, partly collected as Invisible Ink (2012) and The Book of Forgotten Authors (2017). Essay 319 featured Christopher Fowler, described as “a typical example of the late 20th-century midlist author ... [whose] ability of turning his hand to most literary forms granted him the honorary title of ‘Wordslut’”.
Fowler was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer in March 2020. He worked on his 20th Bryant & May novel, London Bridge is Falling Down (2021), while undergoing chemotherapy in hospital, and the following year published Bryant & May’s Peculiar London, in which his characters explore the true life eccentricities and elusive byways of the city. His third volume of memoirs, Word Monkey (following Paperboy and Film Freak, 2013), is due out in August.
Fowler formed a civil partnership in 2007 with the TV executive Peter Chapman, and 10 years later they married. Peter survives him, along with his younger brother, Steven.
🔔 Christopher Robert Fowler, author and screenwriter, born 26 March 1953; died 2 March 2023
Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com
14 notes
·
View notes
Text
Favorite Books 2023
I had a really good reading year in 2023, and was lucky enough to find some new favorites. I thought I’d share some recommendations here, and would love to hear some of yours! (If you are reading this, I mean you, specifically💛 )
The Postscript Murders (Elly Griffiths): This is the sequel to The Stranger Diaries, which was also one of my favorite books the year I first read it. Harbinder Kaur is a detective I could follow endlessly, the kind I seek to read mysteries about. She’s nuanced and clever and messy and deeply compassionate (even against her better judgement). Honestly, the character work throughout this book is excellent; the characters have such richly drawn personalities that feel fully developed, and the mystery is clever and well paced.
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (John Carreyrou): I watched the documentary on HBO (The Inventor - also fantastic) about Elizabeth Holmes and fell down a bit of a rabbit hole. It’s a bit terrifying to see how far someone could get on lies and connections to powerful people, but Carreyrou is also quick to point out all the people striving to do the right thing against all odds. There’s some fascinating discussions of science and technology, but the core always comes back to the people involved. This account manages to make this true story that feels larger than fiction grounded in individuals and their decisions; it’s well-researched, deliberately written, and absolutely engrossing.
The Sea of Tranquility (Emily St. John Mandel): Mandel’s writing constantly inspires me; there is a deep precision to her descriptions that manages to still feel like it’s gliding, and a moving amount of compassion for the characters who inhabit the story, however flawed they may be. This book combines different timelines, moving from perspective to perspective in a way that only truly makes sense when it all comes together (and it comes together with a gut punch).
What Moves the Dead (T. Kingfisher): A retelling of The Fall of the House of Usher with sinister fungi, I don’t think it’d be possible to make a better book for me on purpose. The writing is twisted, but lyrical, and the take on the story brings a powerful source of dread. Inter-spliced with this is a surprising and fascinating discussion of how culture and language shape ideas of gender. This is a contender for my favorite horror book of all time, and would highly recommend in particular to fans of Mexican Gothic.
Plain Bad Heroines (Emily M. Danforth): This is a gothic boarding school ghost story turned Hollywood satire that is, at its heart, a sapphic love story. With an omniscient narrator (a lá Lemony Snicket, dear readers) this book tells the complicated history of an all girls’ school, and the women, past and present connected to it. It’s dark and grotesque and moving and funny and I could not put it down once I started.
The House of Rust (Khadija Abdalla Bajabar): This is a magical realism coming-of-age story incorporating elements of diasporic Hadrami culture, following a girl’s quest to recover her father from the sea, who accidentally discovers herself along the way. The prose is gorgeous and even, making reading it feel like listening to a particularly well-told bedtime story. Aisha herself is a complicated and delightful character to follow, she’s allowed the messiness of adolescence and the way her journey ends is both surprising and necessary. We also get the perspectives of crows with their own social hierarchy and politics, and a talking cat for whom I’d lay down my life.
This World Does Not Belong to Us (Natalia García Friere, translated by Victor Meadowcroft): This is the kind of book you can’t annotate, because every single line would be highlighted. There is a delightful menage to the prose, to the garden which has a mind of its own, and to the slow and deliberate way the story begins to come together. This is a story about a lot of things, but primarily the dynamic between a father whose allowance of cruelty has made him cruel, and a son who cannot make allowances any more. It is poignant, and somehow both very simple and very deep.
Never The Wind (Francesco Dimitri): This is a gothic coming of age story set in southern Italy, and following a recently blind thirteen year old, who begins to suspect a creature is stalking the farmhouse his parents are renovating into a hotel. There are a lot of things to love about this book – the prose, the characters, the discussion of a layered family history where digging leaves you with more questions than answers – but the friendship that blossoms between the two leads is a highlight. There is something incredibly moving about the first person to fight for you against the world.
The Watcher in the Shadows (Carlos Ruiz Zafón): Zafón is perhaps my favorite writer of all time, and the fact that I’ve almost read through his entire backlog would be saddening if it didn’t mean I also got to read stories like this one. The Watcher in the Shadows is one of his young adult novels, following a girl who moves with her family to the coast of Normandy, where a reclusive toymaker builds a labyrinth of mechanical puppets in his mansion on the hill. It’s as twisted and terrifying as that premise would lead one to suspect, but also beautiful and lush and contemplative and quiet.
4 notes
·
View notes
Text
March Reading Wrap-Up
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Favorite Read of the Month:
A Skinful of Shadows by Frances Hardinge
Sometimes, when a person dies, their spirit goes looking for somewhere to hide. Some people have space within them, perfect for hiding. Twelve-year-old Makepeace has learned to defend herself from the ghosts which try to possess her in the night, but one day a dreadful event causes her to drop her guard.
This book was my favorite for March, mostly for the reason that it reminded me of fantasy books I loved to read when I was younger. It gave me a lot of the same feelings that I remember having the first time I read Garth Nix's Sabriel in middle school, and I knew that I'd have loved this book then. Not to say I didn't love this book NOW, but this was a timeless fantasy book that I felt you could enjoy at both 13 and 31, and that's honestly impressive.
-----------------------
Other Five Star Reads:
Immortality: A Love Story by Dana Schwartz (sequel)
Hazel Sinnett is alone and half convinced the events of the year before were a figment of her imagination. She doesn’t even know if Jack is alive or dead. All she can really do now is treat patients and maintain Hawthornden Castle as it starts to decay around her.
To be completely honest, Immortality was not as good as Anatomy to me, and there were a few decisions I didn't agree with. However, I loved Anatomy to bits so despite any issues in this book I forgave it because I still loved the characters and the world. It's historical fiction gothic romance between a woman wanting to be a surgeon and the resurrection man digging up the bodies for her to work on. I don't care what happens, I'm going to love that story! I do highly recommend Anatomy, but I wouldn't read Immortality unless you loved Anatomy.
-----------------------
The Foxglove King by Hannah Whitten
When Lore was thirteen, she escaped a cult in the catacombs beneath the city of Dellaire. And in the ten years since, she’s lived by one rule: don’t let them find you. Easier said than done, when her death magic ties her to the city.
DUDE I LOVE HANNAH WHITTEN. I WOULD READ ANYTHING SHE HAS EVER WRITTEN, EVER. This is her new trilogy of high fantasy court politics surrounded by a magic revolving death with lies and betrayal. If you love high court fantasies I HIGHLY recommend her new book. Hannah Whitten writes beautifully, and I have loved every single thing she has written, and I cannot recommend her as an author enough.
-----------------------
Murder your Employer by Rupert Holmes
The McMasters Conservatory for the Applied Arts, a luxurious, clandestine college dedicated to the fine art of murder where earnest students study how best to “delete” their most deserving victim.
Have you ever wanted to murder your boss? Of course you have! If you apply to McMasters you can learn how to efficiently murder (*ahem* I mean delete) your boss. It's a skill like any other that you can take schooling on to learn how to do it, and - more importantly - how to get away with it. And you better hope you do, because failing to graduate from this college ends in your own deletion.
This book is fun and campy, and I enjoyed it so much. If you like tongue-in-cheek horror, with humor and jokes about death, please read this book.
-----------------------
Rest of Books Read Under the Cut:
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Last Tale of the Flower Bride by Roshani Chokshi
Once upon a time, a man who believed in fairy tales married a beautiful, mysterious woman named Indigo Maxwell-Casteñada. They exchanged gifts and stories and believed they would live happily ever after—and in exchange for her love, Indigo extracted a promise: that her bridegroom would never pry into her past.
This book is written very lyrically, in the tone of being told a fairytale. It's very much a gender-swapped retelling of Bluebeard, but also not. I loved this book, it was entertaining, it was shocking, and I loved the idea that the main character loves fairytales - as he knows that prying into his wife's past can either succeed in them becoming closer than ever - or in his death.
-----------------------
The London Seance Society by Sarah Penner
Lenna Wickes has come to Paris to find answers about her sister’s death, but she must embrace the unknown by joining acclaimed spiritualist Vaudeline D’Allaire. As the women team up with the men of London’s exclusive Séance Society they begin to suspect that they are not merely out to solve a crime, but perhaps entangled in one themselves…
The Whispering Muse by Laura Purcell
The Mercury Theatre in London's West End, rumours are circulating of a curse that lead actress Lilith has made a pact with Melpomene, the tragic muse of Greek mythology, to become the greatest actress to grace the stage. Suspicious of Lilith, the jealous wife of the theatre owner sends dresser Jenny to spy on her.
Sister, Maiden, Monster by Lucy A. Snyder
A virus tears across the globe, transforming its victims in nightmarish ways. As the world collapses, dark forces pull a small group of women together.
This horror novel is very graphic and gory, and I really suggest you to not read this if you're not a fan of splatterpunk horror gore. If you enjoy graphic horror and gore this is a great book to read. I personally don't like how the book ends, as it kind of abruptly solves itself and I think it would have benefited with at least 50-100 pages more to fully solve the issue it's created.
-----------------------
Rating: ⭐
River Woman, River Demon by Jennifer Givhan (GR review)
When Eva's husband is arrested for the murder of a friend, she must confront her murky past and embrace her magick to find out what really happened that night on the river.
My review on GR already mentions a lot of this, but oh boy did I not like this book. The main character is the worst person ever, and she gets absolutely no consequences for her actions. I finished this book for spite. I needed to finish it so I could write a review, and I was desperately hoping for ANY consequences to occur.
-----------------------
Books read so far this year: 31
How I rate books.
1 note
·
View note
Text
Crimson Peak....Years Later
.
.
Just had to get this out of my head. I watched Crimson Peak recently and now Edith just lives in my head. Sorry, she solves mysteries now.
She wakes up with her fingers outstretched on the pillow next to her, searching for someone who isn’t there. She strokes the cool surface of the pillow thoughtfully. It has been years since the last time she found herself reaching out for him in her sleep. For a moment, she feels a cool breeze brush against her face with a wordless whisper disappearing instantly.
“He’s not here. He has gone.” She tells herself softly.
She is no stranger to ghosts. However, this one is but a trick of her memory. A lingering flash of sentiment, a stirring of her troubled past.
She sits up slowly, still partially entangled in her nightdress from the night’s restless sleep. She can feel her hair hanging down her neck, stuck with perspiration.
Carefully, she stands up from her large comfortable bed and makes her way over to the heavy drapery blocking the days light. She moves slowly wincing in pain and rubbing her bad leg. It aches with a throbbing ferociousness she has not felt in years. She sharply pulls the curtain to one side to look out onto the busy thoroughfare below.
It is later in the day than she is accustomed to. She must have slept longer than she thought. The sky hangs full of dark heavy clouds that loom above the figures on the street. The day feels ominous. The pain in her leg now seems like a warning.
At the far end of the street she sees a lone figure moving with brisk purpose. As it strides closer, she recognizes it and feels herself sigh in resignment. This would be no peaceful day.
Lost in thought, she moves back to her beside to ring the bell for her maid.
She must make herself ready to meet her old friend. She could not know what purpose might send him to her door in the middle of the day but she did not think it a social call.
#crimson peak#edith cushing#alan mcmichael#ficlet#drabble#had to get it out#this is how a gothic murder mystery sequel starts#starring edith and alan
34 notes
·
View notes
Text
Spring 2021 anime overview: Quick Takes
Now for my Spring 2021 anime thoughts! I’ve decided from now on if a season’s like, 20- to-24 episodes I’m just going to wait ‘til it’s done to review it unless I feels super passionately, so though I watched To Your Eternity (it’s good!) and MHA (eh), I’ll comment on them next time. Also, for the record, I watched the first eight eps of Joran: Princess and Snow of Blood but I dropped it because it had clearly crossed the line from entertainingly dumb to boring dumb.
I will probably give Supercub and some other stuff a shot later, this was a stacked season! May give updates on all that later, but this is what I have for now.
ODDTAXI
Quick Summary: A mild mannered middle-aged walrus taxi driver is drawn into a case involving a missing girl, yakuza, Youtube clout-chasers, manzai comedians and idols with big secrets.
It’s rare to walk away from media and be like “that is a singular experience I will definitely never see repeated again” but ODDTAXI is definitely one of those. A tense noir thriller murder mystery starring cartoon animals that spends an entire episode detailing the one (cat)man’s very fall into darkness triggered by addiction to gacha games and an online auction for a novelty eraser? Also there’s a porcupine Yakuza who speaks entirely in rap? Also there’s tons of meandering conversations about stuff like manzai comedy and the struggle to go viral on Twitter?
Admittedly, I had a hard time getting into the first episode, the dry meandering humor not being enough to hold my attention while I was sitting still, but once I watched this while I was working out at the end of the season, I found it an easy binge. A ton of characters with dark secrets or dangerous ambitions, each with their own part to play in a tableau of intersecting events- and it all actually comes together really well.(As for the female characters, it’s a pretty dude driven story, but they do get nuanced characterization and even some good heroic moments from one of them.)
It’s a great example of a carefully planned narrative paying off, with all the twists appropriately seeded and foreshadowed to reward viewers who paid attention. Even when it ended on a perfect “OH SHIT” moment and denied me closure, I couldn’t help but respect it. If you that all sounds interesting to you, definitely check out the first couple episodes and see if you like it- you’re likely to have a memorable, satisfying experience!
Shadows House
Quick Summary: Emilyko is a ‘living doll’ who’s told she was created to act as the ‘face’ of her shadow master, Kate. The shadows and their ‘dolls’ all reside on the mansion and are required to pass a ‘debut’ to prove they’re a good pairing. If they don’t pass, they might be disposed of. And so the mystery of the Shadow mansion grows...
This slice of gothic intrigue was my favorite of the season, tied with ODDTAXI. With an interesting premise, slightly tense undertones and a strong focus on character building and relationships, it kept me hooked the whole way through. And for any squeamish fans put off by the hype about it, don’t worry, while there are some suspenseful elements, I wouldn’t qualify it as horror. I thought the relationship between Kate and Emilyko might end up being a completely sinister one, but it’s thankfully a lot more complex than that and it’s really interesting to follow how both their characters and relationship grow. The focus of the show is, unsurprisingly, on the “dolls” slowly discovering their autonomy and personhood as they struggle under the rigid system imposed on them by the mysterious elders of this weird Victorian mansion. Can they develop a more equitable relationship with their shadow “masters” (who are also shown to suffer under this system)? There’s a lot to dig into there, and the show has the characters develop through learning to understand and appreciate each other, which is pretty heartwarming. Our hero, Emilyko, is the typical plucky ball of sunshine (they even nickname her sunshine), but she’s also shown to be clever in her own off-the-wall way and she bounces off the far more subdued and cynical Kate well, not to mention the other ‘dolls’ she ends up befriending.
What’s more, the show spends plenty of time to developing several other character pairings and combinations, and they all have their own interesting dynamic that makes you want to see more of them. Same-gender bonds are at the forefront of this show, and many of them are ripe for queer readings (I definitely appreciated the healthy helping of ladies carrying ladies), but even outside that it’s nice to see a show where a strong, complex bond between girls is at the forefront. My only real complaints about the show are the anime original ending is noticeably a bit rushed (though it’s not too bad, and leaves room for a season 2) and I wish the animation used the whole “shadow” theme more strikingly (like the opening and endings do)- instead the colors are a bit washed out which makes the shadows blend into the background sometimes. The “debut” arc also drags a bit in places, but it makes up for it by having a lot of good character integration.
I hope to check out the (full color)! manga soon and see more of this quirky, shadowy story. There’s some physical abuse depicted, sad things happening to characters and naturally the whole “oppressive familial system” thing, but otherwise not much I can think of to warn about. I give this one a big rec, especially If you’re a fan of gothic fairytales and stories of self discovery.
Zombie Land Saga Revenge
Quickest summary: In this sequel season, everyone’s favorite zombie idol group must claw their way back into prominence after a disastrous show- the fate of the Saga prefecture LITERALLY depends on it!
This was a fun follow-up to the first season- if you liked the first zombie-girl romp, you’ll probably enjoy this one. In fact, there were a couple areas it improved on- namely, Kotaro failed, ate crow and embarrassed himself a lot more this season, which made him more likeable (as did the fact the girls gained a lot of independence from him). This season also shed more light on what the ‘goal’ of this zombie raising project is and what kind of shit Kotaro got involved with to make this happen, and it’s appropriately off-the-wall and ridiculous. We finally got some backstory for Yugiri too! I wish it had focused on more of her interiority, but she got to be a badass in it, and it was a treat to see this zombie idol show turn into a period piece for a couple episodes (also her song ruled).
Tae also got a cute focus episode and there was a particular SMASHING performance early on! Also That revelation last season that had the potential to turn creepy hasn’t yet, and hopefully never will. The finale was heartwarming with big hints of more drama to come- I’m definitely down for more zombie hijinks!
Vivy: Flourite Eye’s Song
Quickest Summary: A songstress AI named DIVA (nicknamed Vivy) is approached by another AI named Matsumoto, who says he’s from the future and they must work together to prevent AI exterminating all of humankind 100 years from now.
This show is absolutely gorgeous visually with some really nice action scenes, but when it comes to the story my feelings basically amount to a shrug. It’s fine! I guess! Vivy starts out as an interesting layered character- and I guess still is by the end- with her stoic but stubborn determination bouncing off her fast-talking bossy partner Matsumoto well. She never listens to him, which is delightful. The way the show took place over the course of 100 years was an interesting conceit as well. However, it bought up a lot of themes and then sort of... dropped them. For instance, Vivy interprets her mission (PRIME DIRECTIVE if you will) as protecting humans at all costs, no matter how destructive said humans are or what their fate is supposed to be, and is perfectly willing to murder her fellow androids to do this, showing she inherently thinks of androids (herself and her own people!) as less worthy. Which is a little alarming! There’s a very dramatic point in the show where they bring this up as a potential conflict for her character but then it’s sort of...dropped. Pretty much.
Actually, despite the premise, the show doesn’t dip into the “AI rights” as much as you think it would with the main theme being more about Vivy’s search to find her own creativity and discover what it means to ‘pour your heart into something’. Vivy herself doesn’t actually care if she has rights or anything. Which is in some ways fine, because ‘AI as an oppressed class’ has been done to death, but IT’S ALSO KIND OF IN THE PREMISE, so that means that the show just shrugs really hard at a lot of the questions it brings up basically just going “humans and AI should work together probably” and that’s it. There’s a lot that feels underexplored. The antagonists in the show also either have motivations that don’t really make sense or have boring hackneyed motivations. In the finale in particular, it feels like a lot of things happen “just because” and it falls a little flat.
I also have to warn that one of the arcs focus on a robot ‘pairing’ where the dude-coded robots actions toward his partner are straight up awful and rob her of her autonomy, but it’s played like a tragic love story. I suppose you could read it differently too, but it definitely made me go ‘ew’ the story seemed to want me to sympathize with this robo dude,
Overall, I wouldn’t anti-recommend this show, it’s an all right little sci-fic romp (and definitely SUPER pretty). My favorite element was definitely the episodes where Vivy develops an entirely new (an loveable) personality, because it played with the idea of of an AI getting “rebooted” really well and interplay between her two “selves” was done really well. But there are a lot of other parts of the show that just feel...a little underexplored and empty, making me have an ‘eh’ feeling on the show overall. It’s definitely an ambitious project, and while it didn’t quite stick the landing, there’s something to be said for a show that shoots for the stars and falls short over a show that just languishes in mediocrity.
Fruits Basket The Final
Quick summary: The final season of that dramatic drama about that weird family with a zodiac curse and the girl who loves them.
It’s very weird that after not cutting a lot out, they kinda sped through some material for, you know, the finale. I guess they thought they couldn’t stretch this final arc to 26 episodes? Or weren’t cleared for another double cour? However, though there were a couple places that felt awkward, despite being a bit condensed it mostly held together pretty well for a D R A M A T I C and ultimately heartwarming conclusion. I was really disappointed they kept the part where Ritsu cut their hair for the ‘happy ending’, I thought their intro episode not showing them in men’s clothes meant the anime had decided their presentation didn’t need to be “fixed” but WELL I GUESS NOT. That was the only big upset for me though, otherwise the adaptation went about how I expected, sticking to the source material. Furuba has a lot of bumps, from weird age gap stuff to ...gender, but it also has a lot of important feels and great character arcs. It was a gateway shoujo for many and has its important place in animanga history, so I’m glad it finally got a shiny, full adaptation.
#anime overview#spring 2021 anime#shadows house#oddtaxi#zombie land saga#fruits basket#vivy: fluorite eye's song#zombie land saga revenge#fruits basket the final#anime#my reviews#long post
68 notes
·
View notes
Text
There is nothing quite like a good book...
I meant to update Saturday but it’s the 17th and I have officially finished 10 books and have three others in a partially completed status.
Books I’ve read so far in 2022 and what I rate them:
The Guest List
by Lucy Foley
4 stars. It had a good plot and a lot of great twists. As murder mysteries go, I really enjoyed it. However, it loses a star because of the constant POV shifts which made it really hard to keep track of all of the twists and turns.
The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy
by Mackenzi Lee
4 stars. I listened to this one on audio, so I do think I may have lost some of the nuance that listening causes (for me). I thoroughly enjoyed the sequel to Gentleman’s Guide of Vice and Virtue. It was fast-paced and energetic.
The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot
By Marianne Cronin
5 stars. A beautiful and emotional look at life, love, death, and the journeys we travel. I definitely recommend this one if you want an emotional read!
Kept
By Maya Banks
2.5 stars. And that’s generous. As far as mindless smut goes, this one actually had some semblence of a plot... it just wasn’t a great one. It gets this many stars because of how hilariously terrible the whole thing was. I actually enjoyed reading it, but it wasn’t good.
The Scottish Prisoner
By Diana Gabaldon
3 Stars - 4.5 stars with the alternate ending written by @iihappydaysiiand @mistresspandorawritesthings. I struggled to get into this one, even though I was really excited to read it. I loved getting a whole book of Jamie and John being a grumpy old married couple and Tom Byrd was the best part of the book. We stan the poor Wee Byrd. Finishing the book with Whatever It Costs (starting after Chapter 32 of TSP) was honestly utterly fantastic and I highly recommend you do the same!
If God Is Love, Don’t Be A Jerk
By John Pavlovitz
4.5 stars. It’s a niche read but it was a great philosophical look into the state of America and Christianity. A little too bible-y for me, but I do enjoy his blog posts so this was a great palette cleanser to transition into a new series.
The Day the World Came to Town
By Jim Defede
4 stars. This book is about Gander, Newfoundland and the events of welcoming in over 6,000 people who had their flights grounded on 9/11. For the source and story, I felt like it was a really great read and gave a lot of insight into the events and the way people came together. However, it was very matter-of-fact storytelling and it had the potential to be extremely emotional. Still a recommended read!
Bartholomew Nelson and the World of Zathya
By Antonio Gilyard
5 stars. I really enjoyed this book! It’s a YA Fantasy novel that has really awesome character development, magic, intrigue and lots of plot turns! A hidden gem I definitely recommend to anyone who enjoys fantasy worlds!
Locked in Time
By Lois Duncan
3 Stars. I used to love this novel as a young teen and so I picked it up again because I didn’t really remember the plot. As an adult it was easy to see the plot pockets and bad dialogue but the premise was still kind of neat. Gothic horror meets YA Fiction. Definitely a dated book.
The Selection
By Kiera Cass
3.5 stars. Lord this book. It was absolute trash with a problematic plot device but it was still a fun few-hour read. YA Romance? It has a caste system that feels a bit like the hunger games, meets the bachelor. If you want a guilty pleasure read with little substance, this is definitely the book for you. The white ass names in this book sent me into hysterics.
In Progress Reads:
Boyfriend Material
By Alexis Hall
First Impressions: This book is hysterical and campy. Very excited to see how it plays out. But so far, I think I’m going to really enjoy it!
The Weight of Ink
By Rachel Kadish
First Impressions: This is a dense book full of amazing history, mystery, and intrigue. I’m about 10% into it, and I’m very excited to see what happens next!
The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek
By Kim Richardson
First Impressions: I am really enjoying the story so far. It’s a little hard to get into for audio, so I’m working to borrow an e-book or print version to finish it. But the story is super captivating so far! Any recommendations that you would pass on? Please share them! I’m hoping to cross 100 books this year.
14 notes
·
View notes
Text
Mid Year Book Freak Out Tag
Stolen from @ninja-muse
How many books have you read so far?
81, including 5 rereads, and currently reading 2.
What genres have you read?
Fantasy (38), science fiction (15), historical (9), contemporary (8), nonfiction (6), mystery (5), horror (4), thriller (3) and magic realism (1)
Best books you’ve read so far in 2021:
Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir (lesbian necromancers in space, pov fuckery, memory wiping, self-styled God-Emperor quoting memes)
Deathless Divide by Justina Ireland (bisexual and aroace Black girls fighting zombies, becoming outlaws and adopting kids in the Old West)
Amari and the Night Brothers by B.B. Alston (12 year old recruited by Bureau of Supernatural Affairs, has delightful adventures, searches for missing brother)
The Route of Ice and Salt by José Luis Zárate (the tragic gay story of a background character from Dracula)
All the Girls I’ve Been by Tess Sharpe (unputdownable thriller, reformed teenage conartist channels all her skills to save girlfriend and ex-boyfriend from bank robbery gone wrong)
Space Opera by Catherine M. Valente (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy shaken vigorously, drenched in body glitter and shoved on stage for intergalactic Eurovision)
A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine (mind-sharing friends, first contact with aliens, learning/inventing a whole new form of communication in order to ask said aliens ‘please stop killing us’ before the military starts blowing up planets, political intrigue in space empire, cute lesbian romance with ‘will she ever really, truly see me as fully human and equal’ angst)
When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain by Nghi Vo (story about stories, clan of tiger shapeshifters are pissed off that humans are telling the story of the lady scholar who married the tiger queen all wrong, damn it)
The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells (grumpy, anxious cyborg learns what it means to have free will and be cared for)
Warrior Moon by K. Arsenault Rivera (third in trilogy about epic sapphic love reshaping the world in fantasy China/Japan/Mongolia)
I’m 2/3 through The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal but I’m already pretty sure it belongs on this list
Best sequel you’ve read so far in 2021:
A lot of the ones of my previous list - Harrow the Ninth, Deathless Divide, A Desolation Called Peace, When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain and Warrior Moon are sequels. Out of those, I think probably A Desolation Called Peace was the best book (it’s beautiful, though-provoking science fiction that I can’t wait to vote for in next year’s Hugo awards) and Harrow the Ninth was the best sequel (the way it interacts with the previous book, adshfk).
New release you haven’t read yet, but want to:
So many!
The River Has Teeth by Erica Waters (Southern gothic, angry sapphic witches, the mystery of a missing sister)
She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan (queer fantasy about the founding of the Ming dynasty, described as “Mulan meets The Song of Achilles”)
Six Crimson Cranes by Elizabeth Lim (retelling of The Swan Princes with a Chinese twist)
Eat Your Heart Out by Kelly deVos (zombies attack a weight loss camp, pissed off teens fight back, has snark, horror and body positivity)
A War of Swallowed Stars by Sangu Mandanna (third in a series about the Mahabarata in space)
The Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison (sequel to the lovely The Goblin Emperor, kindness and decency and solving murders)
The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri (princess and handmaiden/priestess holding knives to each other’s ribs, kissing under a waterfall and reshaping an empire)
The Queer Principles of Kit Webb by Cat Sebastian (former highwayman teaches a nobleman how to do a heist, with sexy results)
One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston (sapphic time travel romance)
Most anticipated release for the second half of the year:
The Sisters of Reckoning by Charlotte Nicole Davis (sequel to the story of indentured sex workers escaping the ‘welcome house’ and striking out across the desert to make a new life, I’m told the rivals-to-friends dynamic I adored is gonna add -to-lovers)
Redemptor by Jordan Ifueko (sequel to epic African fantasy about empires and free will and telepathic harems)
No Gods, No Monsters by Cadwell Turnbull (monsters reveal themselves to the world, chaos and hate crimes ensue)
The All Consuming World by Cassandra Khaw (all girl team of broken, bitter former criminals get back together for one last mission)
Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao (giant robots, mind melds and polyamory)
Noor by Nnedi Okorafor (disability, biotechnology, Nigerian science fiction)
Skin of the Sea by Natasha Bowen (The Little Mermaid story with West African mythology)
The Nobleman’s Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks by Mackenzi Lee (much-anticipated third in a trilogy about queer disaster siblings in slightly magical 18th century Europe)
Biggest disappointment:
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. A supposed classic that disgusted and infuriated me. I tried to read it for book club but rage quit 120 pages in, and reading up on the rest of the story made me so very glad I did.
Biggest surprise:
Daughters of Frankenstein: Lesbian Mad Scientists! by Steve Berman. A fantastic array of sapphic science fiction that gave me surprise after surprise as I encountered a Scooby Doo parody, a Jeeves and Wooster parody, a Pgymalion and Galatea love story between a scientist and her robot wife, psychological horror about wildly unethical experiments, lesbian outlaws building armoured getaway vehicles to rob banks, middle-aged wives fightng ice weasels and adopting a kid, chaotic genius invents hot new drug and accidentally starts the zombie apocalypse ...
Favorite new author (debut or new to you):
Martha Wells - I read the first five Murderbot books and fell head over heels in love
Underrated gems:
The Myriad Carnival by Matthew Bright (dark and delightful anthology of queer stories revolving around a magical carnival, has only 12 ratings on goodreads) and Stone and Steel by Eboni J. Dunbar (African fantasy novella with sapphic soldiers and queens that manages to feel both epic and satisfying despite being only 92 pages long, has only 100 ratings on goodreads)
Newest fictional crush:
Guet Imm from The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water by Zen Cho - a female Chirrut Imwe type who leaves her nunnery and cheerfully forces her way into a group of bandits. Sunnily chaotic weirdos are most definitely my type. Though considering the way she responded to a guy hitting on her with a pleasant “Oh, sure, we could sleep together, but I’m very religious so I’d have to make sacrifice after” (Tet Sang translates: “She’s not agreeing, you fool, she’s threatening you, when she says ‘make sacrifice’ she means ‘cut your dick off’”), perhaps it’s best to just Look Respectfully.
And perhaps also Iktan from Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse. Xe’s the spymaster, protector and ex-lover of one of the protagonists. Sure, xe may be ruthless, amoral and more than a little terrifying, but it’s in a really hot way.
Newest favorite characters:
Murderbot and all its friends
Book that made you cry:
None have actually made me cry (my tears are difficult to provoke, I can only name like five books that have ever had me actually crying), but the closest I came was probably The Old Lie by Claire G. Coleman. It’s science fiction where Earth gets caught up in a war between alien powers, and humans join the army to fight in a horrific war for a Federation that doesn’t even consider them citizens, get their children kidnapped to become servants and pets for wealthy alien families, and have their homes destroyed in weapons testing. All these things echo the real history of how white people have treated Indigenous Australians, and it both is and is not a metaphor, since the protagonists are all Aboriginal and very aware of the paralells.
Book that made you happy:
Amari and the Night Brothers is a warmhearted delight.
Most beautiful book cover of a book you’ve read so far this year:
Either The Winter Duke by Claire Eliza Bartlett or The Citadel of Weeping Pearls by Aliette de Bodard
How are you doing with your year’s goals?
81/100 books
going strong with ‘two authors of colour for each white author’
doing good with ‘read from a wider variety of contries’ (so far I’ve read authors from 20 different countries)
doing good with ‘I don’t want straight protagonists to be the majority’ (41 queer or indeterminate protagonists versus 31 straight ones)
doing OK with ‘include some translated books’ (6 books originally written in other languages)
could do better with ‘read some books that aren’t from the last two decades’ (I’ve read one from the 1990s, one from the 1970s and one from the 1960s, but that’s not a lot - I used to read books from centuries ago)
could do better with ‘more trans authors’ too - I’ve read three nonbinary authors and no binary trans folks so far, but I do have several on my to-read list
What books do you need to read by the end of the year?
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter and Love and Other Thought Experiments by Sophie Ward, because they’re my book club’s picks for August and September
Not tagging anyone because I wasn’t officially tagged myself, but if you see this and want to do it, go ahead, and tag me!
22 notes
·
View notes
Text
Streaming on Plex: Best Horror Movies and TV Shows You Can Watch for FREE in October
https://ift.tt/eA8V8J
This article is sponsored by Plex. You can download the Free Plex App now by clicking here!
When October hits, the folks at Den of Geek almost exclusively consume horror content. Any spooky story that has ghosts, ghouls, goblins, or any chill-inducing monster that doesn’t start with a G is fine with us. Whether it’s a campy B-movie or “prestige horror,” we embrace all horror subgenres and relax with old favorites and new cult classics in the making alike. Now that Spooky Season is in full force, we are grateful that Plex TV is here so we can stream all of the creepy content that our black hearts’ desire for free!
Plex is a globally available one-stop-shop streaming media service offering thousands of free movies and TV shows and hundreds of free-to-stream live TV channels, from the biggest names in entertainment, including Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM), Warner Bros. Domestic Television Distribution, Lionsgate, Legendary, AMC, A+E, Crackle, and Reuters. Plex is the only streaming service that lets users manage their personal media alongside a continuously growing library of free third-party entertainment spanning all genres, interests, and mediums including podcasts, music, and more. With a highly customizable interface and smart recommendations based on the media you enjoy, Plex brings its users the best media experience on the planet from any device, anywhere.
Plex releases brand new and beloved titles to its platform monthly and we’ll be here to help you identify the cream of the crop. This month, we’re keeping things strictly scary, but view Plex TV now for the best free entertainment streaming, regardless of genre, and check back each month for Den of Geek Critics’ picks!
DEN OF GEEK CRITICS’ PICKS
The Ninth Gate
Though director Roman Polanski is a horrific figure himself, this 1999 neo-noir horror film, The Ninth Gate is superb. Thirty years after Rosemary’s Baby, Polanski conjured the devil once again and injected it with some of the pulp from his noir classic Chinatown in a movie that finds Johnny Depp as a man in Satanic Detective mode. Depp is a classic book authenticator hired to authenticate De Umbrarum Regis Novum Portis (The Nine Doors To the Kingdom of Shadows), a book believed by cultists capable of raising Satan to Earth.
The Ninth Gate doesn’t provide cheap thrills; it tightens the suspense like a noose. Polanski subtly creates an uneasy atmosphere using minimal effects. The director knows where evil lives and lets the settings and sound make the invitations with subliminal references to recognizable horror and cinematic danger, using framing and music similarly to Stanley Kubrick. The Ninth Gate packages its scares with classy style that the characters deliver with sexily provocative intelligence. Dean Corso may be Johnny Depp’s greatest spiritual transformation, from odious to ultimate evil and the audience cheers on his descent, happy to ride with him straight to hell.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Perhaps the world’s first horror film and a go-to example of early German Expressionist filmmaking, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari has been unsettling audiences for over a century.
The film’s main story centers on two young friends, Francis and Alan (Friedrich Feher and Hans Heinrich von Twardowski), who, while jockeying for the affections of Jane (Lil Dagover), visit a local traveling carnival. There they take in the act of the mysterious, top-hatted and wild-haired Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss). As they watch, Caligari awakens his somnambulist subject, Cesare (the great Conrad Veidt), who under hypnosis answers questions from the audience. When Alan jokingly asks when he will die, Cesare responds “Before dawn.” We’ll let you guess the rest.
The film isn’t remembered much for its story, but for its arresting visual style, featuring painted backdrops that make the entire production feel like a fever dream. The painted townscape is filled with curved and pointed buildings teetering at dangerous angles, almost as if they were alive and shrieking. Roads twist and spiral to nowhere. The perspectives are deliberately mismatched and inconsistent, with the props and sets sometimes being too large for the characters, and others too small. The result is a transgressive, deeply influential film that has been unsettling audiences for over 100 years.
The Exorcist III
Based on his 1983 novel Legion, writer-director William Peter Blatty’s Exorcist III arrived 17 years after William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. Despite the still-looming pop culture presence of the original, The Exorcist III is sneakily the most interesting film in the series. Less a horror movie than a psychological thriller with supernatural and spiritual overtones, The Exorcist III takes place 17 years after the events of the first film, and with no reference whatsoever made to the events in the second. It finds Lt. Kinderman confronted with the apparent reappearance of two figures from his past who had supposedly died. The first is father Damien Karras (Jason Miller), who had died after bouncing down an endless flight of steps while performing an exorcism in the original movie, and the Gemini Killer, a serial killer loosely based on the Zodiac Killer that had been executed 17 years prior. However, there’s been a new string of murders around town carrying all the hallmarks of the Gemini.
While the studio famously mangled Blatty’s original cut of the film, there’s still a lot to like here, including a terrifying performance from Brad Dourif. Blatty is fantastic at creating dread-inducing atmosphere and has a keen attention to character and detail. It may not be as exciting as the original, but it’s a smart-slow burn film worthy of the Exorcist mantle.
cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });
The Devil’s Rejects
An homage to sleazy ‘70s C-movies, Rob Zombie’s sequel to House of 1,000 Corpses will leave you in the need of a shower, but it’s delightfully demented and the musician turned filmmaker’s finest effort. The shock-fest finds the Firefly clan, Otis (Bill Moseley), Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie) and Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig) – on the run from die-hard determined sheriff Wydell (William Forsythe). What unfolds is a nasty thrill ride full of twists, turns, and more gore than most audiences are comfortable with. How Zombie still manages to make such repulsive content entertaining, how he manages to get you to almost root for the despicable Firefly clan, is inexplicable magic trick, but indebted to Zombie’s use of black humor and deep knowledge of genre conventions that he sometimes subverts, but often gleefully leans into.
Train to Busan
The overused and increasingly predictable zombie genre got a shot in the arm with Train to Busan, a South Korean film from director Yeon Sang-ho about a young father desperately attempting to get his little daughter to her mother via train as a zombie pandemic breaks out all around them. Even if it veered close to outright sentimentality at times, Train to Busan differed from most of the films and TV shows we’ve seen in this genre due to its genuine bond of love between its main characters, and the flickers of empathy and humanity found therein.
And on a technical level, Yeon crafted his film with a kinetic energy that had been missing from the genre as of late. Train to Busan was not just a monster hit in its native land but amassed an international following as well, along with critical acclaim across the board. It’s easy to see why given the film’s well-drawn characters, subtle social commentary (some on the train feel they are more worthy of survival than others) and frightening action sequences that add up to a thrilling and emotionally powerful ride.
More Horror Films Available to Stream FREE on Plex TV
The Descent
Train To Busan
The Ninth Gate
Rec
Coherence
Night Of The Living Dead
The Host
Hannibal Rising
The Devil’s Rejects
Nosferatu
Monsters
I Spit On Your Grave
Eden Lake
Wolf Creek
Day Of The Dead
The Collector
The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari
Red Lights
The Wailing
Grave Encounters
Colonia
Scouts Guide To The Zombie Apocalypse
Diary Of The Dead
Black Death
Alone In The Dark
The Descent: Part 2
Maggie
Teeth
Ginger Snaps
After.Life
John Dies At The End
Black Christmas
The Last House On The Left
Nosferatu the Vampire
Splinter
The Void
Deep Red
P2
Phantasm
The Changeling
Feast
Hatchet
The Prophecy
Pulse
Fido
Open Grave
Cell
The Blob
The Exorcist III
Vanishing On 7th Street
House On Haunted Hill
Penomena
Eye See You
Cooties
The Werewolf
Pumpkinhead 4: Blood Feud
Messengers 2: The Scarecrow
Sugar and Fright Collection
Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies
All Cheerleaders Die
Another Evil
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
Bad Milo
Better Watch Out
Bitter Feast
Cooties
Corporate Animals
Crimewave
Dead Snot 2: Red vs. Dead
Deathgasm
Deep Murder
Drive Thru
Excision
Fear, Inc.
Feast
Fido
Ghost Killers vs. Bloody Mary
Hansel & Gretel Get Baked
Hatchet
Hell Baby
Hellboy Animated: Blood & Iron
Hellboy Animated: Sword of Storms
Hobo with a Shotgun
John Dies at the End
The Last Lovecraft: Relic of Cthulhu
Lesbian Vampire Killers
The Love Witch
Night of Something Strange
Nina Forever
Office Uprising
Shrooms
Snoop Dogg’s Hood of Horror
Stan Helsing
Stitches
Suburban Gothic
Survival of the Dead
Teeth
Turbo Kid
WolfCop
Yoga Hosers
The post Streaming on Plex: Best Horror Movies and TV Shows You Can Watch for FREE in October appeared first on Den of Geek.
from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3AiKhkI
3 notes
·
View notes
Text
2020 Gameological Awards
Over on the Gameological Discord, we have an annual tradition of writing up our games of the year not as a ranked list but rather as answers to a series of prompts. Here are my personal choices for the year that was 2020.
Favorite Game of the Year
I didn’t know what to expect when I walked into Paradise Killer. I knew that I liked the vaporwave resort aesthetic from the game’s trailer and figured I was in for a Danganronpa-style murder mystery visual novel with an open-ended murder mystery at its core. Those assumptions were… half-right? The game definitely plays out like the exploration bits of Danganronpa set on the island from Myst but with far simpler puzzles. What I didn’t expect was to fall so deeply in love with the environment—its nooks and crannies, its millennia of lore, its brutalist overlap of idol worship, consumerism, and mass slaughter. It makes sense that the world of Paradise Killer is its strongest feature, since the cast of NPCs don’t really move around, leaving you alone with the world for the overwhelming majority of your experience as you bounce back and forth between digging around for clues and interrogating potential witnesses. And despite what the promo materials indicated, there IS a definitive solution to the crimes you’re brought in to investigate, the game just lets you make judgment based on whatever evidence you have at the time you’re ready to call it a day, so if you’re missing crucial evidence you might just make a compelling enough case for the wrong person and condemn them to eternal nonexistence. Am I happy with the truth at the end of the day? No, and neither is anybody else I’ve spoken to who completed the game, but we all were also completely enthralled the entire time and our dissatisfaction has less to do with the game and more to do with the ugly reality of humanity. I’ve always been of the mindset that “spoilers” are absolute garbage and that a story should be just as good whether you know the twist or not and any story that relies on surprising the audience with an unexpected reveal is not actually that good a story, but Paradise Killer is a game about piecing together your own version of events so I feel that it’s vital to the gameplay experience that people go in knowing as little as possible and gush all about it afterwards. Just trust me, if the game looks even remotely intriguing to you, go for it. I’ve had just as much fun talking about the game after I finished it with friends just getting started as I did actually solving its mysteries myself.
Best Single Player Game
I honestly missed out on the buzz for In Other Waters at launch, so I’m happy I had friends online talking it up as Black Friday sales were coming along. The minimal aesthetic of his underwater exploration game allows the focus to shift more naturally to the game’s stellar writing as a lone scientist goes off in search of her mentor and the secrets they were hiding on an alien world. It only took a few hours for me to become completely absorbed in this narrative and keep pushing forward into increasingly dangerous waters. In Other Waters might just be the best sci-fi story I experienced all year and I’d highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys sci-fi novels, regardless of their experience with video games.
Best Multiplayer Game
Look, we all know this year sucked. 2020 will absolutely be chronicled in history books as a fascinating and deeply depressing time in modern history where we all stayed inside by ourselves and missed our friends and family. It was lonely and it was bleak. Which is why it made my heart glow so much more warmly every time I got a letter from an honest-to-goodness real-life friend in Animal Crossing New Horizons. Knowing that they were playing the same game I was and hearing about their experiences and sending each other wacky hats or furniture, it lightened the days and made us feel that little bit more connected. Sure, when the game first launched we would actually take the time to visit one another’s islands, hang out, chat in real-time, and exchange gifts, but we all eventually got busy with Zoom calls, sourdough starters, and watching Birds of Prey twenty-two times. Still, sending letters was enough. It was and still is a touching little way to show that we’re here for one another, if not at the exact same time.
Favorite Ongoing Game
Zach Gage is one of my favorite game designers right now, and when I heard he was releasing a game called Good Sudoku I was sold sight unseen. The game as released was… fine. It’s sudoku and it’s pleasant, but it was also buggy and overheated my phone in a way I hadn’t seen since Ridiculous Fishing (also by Zach Gage) seven years ago. Thankfully, the most glaring bugs have been fixed and I can now enjoy popping in every day for some quick logic puzzle goodness. Daily ranked leaderboards keep me coming back again and again, the steady ramp of difficulty in the arcade and eternal modes means I can always chase the next dopamine rush of solving increasingly complex puzzles. It’s not a traditional “ongoing” game the way, say, Fortnite and Destiny are, but I’m happy to come back every day for sudoku goodness.
Didn't Click For Me
With Fortnite progressively losing me over the course of 2020, finalizing with my wholesale “never again” stance after Epic boss Tim Sweeney compared Fortnite demanding more money from Apple to the American Civil Rights movement (no, absolutely not), I dipped my toe into a number of new “battle pass”-style online arena types of games, and while Genshin Impact eventually got its hooks into me, Spellbreak absolutely did not. With graphics straight out of The Dragon Prince and the promise of a wide variety of magic combat skills to make your character your own, the game seemed awfully tempting, but my first few experiences were aimless and joyless, with no moment of clarity to make me understand why I should keep coming back. Maybe they’ll finesse the game some more in 2021, or a bunch of my friends will get hooked and lure me back, but for now I am a-okay deleting this waste of space on my Switch and PC.
"Oh Yeah, I Did Play That Didn't I?"
I remember being really excited for Murder By Numbers. Ace Attorney-style crime scene investigation visual novel with Picross puzzles for the evidence, art by the creators of Hatoful Boyfriend, and music by the composer of Ace Attorney itself?! Sounds like a dream come true. But the pixel-hunt nature of the crime scene investigations was more frustrating than fun, the picross puzzles were not particularly great, and the game came out literally a week before the entire world went into lockdown which makes it feel more like seven years ago than just earlier this year. I remember being marginally charmed by the game once it was in my hands, but as soon as my mind shifted to long-term self care, Murder By Numbers went from hot topic to cold case.
Most Unexpected Joy
I was looking forward to Fuser all year. As a dyed-in-the-wool DropMix stan, the prospect of a spiritual sequel to DropMix on all major digital platforms without any of the analogue components was tremendously exciting, and I knew I’d have a lot of fun making mixes by myself and posting them online for the world to hear. What I didn’t expect, however, was the online co-op mode to be such a blast! Up to four players take turns making 32 bars of mashups, starting with whatever the player before handed them and adding their own fingerprints on top. It sounds like it should just be a mess of cacophony, but every session I’ve played so far has been just the best dance party I’ve had all year, and everyone not currently in control of the decks (including an audience of spectators) can make special requests for what the DJ should spin and tap along with the beat to great super-sized emoji to show how much they’re enjoying the mix. Literally the only times my Apple Watch has ever warned me of my heightened heart rate have been the times I was positively bouncing in place rocking out to co-op freestyle play in Fuser.
Best Music
youtube
Only one video game this year had tunes that were so bumpable they were upgraded to my general “2020 jams” playlist alongside Jeff Rosenstock, Run the Jewels, and Phoebe Bridgers, and that game was Paradise Killer. 70% lo-fi chill beats to study/interrogate demons to, 20% gothic atmospheric bangers, 10% high-energy pop jazz, this soundtrack was just an absolute joy to swim around in both in and out of gameplay.
Favorite Game Encounter
It’s wild that in a landscape where games let me live out my wildest fantasies, the single moment that lit me up in a way that stood out to me more than any other was serving Neil the right drink in Coffee Talk. Over the course of the game, you serve a variety of hot drinks to humans, werewolves, vampires, orcs, and more, all while chatting with your customers and learning more about their lives and relationships. The most mysterious customer, though, is an alien life form who adopts the name Neil. They do not know what they want to drink and claim it doesn’t make a difference because they cannot taste it. Everybody else wants *something*. Neil is just ordering for the sake of fitting in and exploring the Earth experience. It’s only in the second playthrough that attentive baristas will figure out what to serve Neil, unlocking the “true” ending in the process. Seeing the typically stoic Neil actually emote when they tasted their special order drink? What an absolute treat that was.
Best Free DLC of the Year
It’s still only a couple of days old at the time I’m writing this, but Marvel’s Avengers just added Kate Bishop, aka Hawkeye, and THANK GOODNESS. Almost every character in the game at launch just smashed the endless waves of robot baddies with their fists and that looks exhausting and uncomfortable. Hawkeye (the game calls her Kate Bishop, but come on, she’s been Hawkeye in the comics for over 14 years, let’s show her some respect) uses A SWORD. FINALLY! Aside from that, I’m just having a blast shooting arrows all over the place. She and Ms Marvel are the most likable characters in the game so far, so I hope they keep adding more of the Young Avengers and Champions to the game, and if the recently announced slate of Marvel movies and tv shows are any indication (with America Chavez, Cassie Lang, and Riri Williams all coming soon to the MCU), that seems to be what Marvel is pushing for across all media
Most Accessible Game
Nintendo is, first and foremost, a toy company. They got their start in toys and cards long before video games was a thing, and they still do more tests to ensure their video game hardware is childproof than anybody else in the industry (remember how they made Switch cartridges “taste bad” so kids wouldn’t eat them?). This year, Nintendo got to rekindle some of their throwback, simplistic, toys-and-cards energy with Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics, a Switch collection of timeless family-friendly games like Chess, Mancala, and Backgammon, along with “toy” versions of sports like baseball, boxing, and tennis for a virtual parlor room of pleasant time-wasters. The games were all presented with charming li’l explainers from anthropomorphic board game figurines, and the ability to play quick sessions of Spider Solitaire on the touch screen while I binged The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix made Clubhouse Games one of my most-played titles of the year. Plus, local play during socially-distant friend hangs was an excellent way to make us feel like we were much closer than we were physically allowed to be as friends knocked each other’s block off in the “toy boxing” version of Rock’em Sock’em Robots.
"Waiting for Game-dot"
I get that everyone loves Disco Elysium. I saw it on everyone’s year-end lists last year. I finally bought it with an Epic Games Store coupon this year. This year was a long enough slog of depressing post-apocalyptic drudgery, I didn’t want to explore a whole nother one in my leisure time. I’ll get to it… someday.
Game That Made Me Think
youtube
Holovista was an iPhone game I played over the course of two or three days based on the recommendation of some trusted colleagues on Twitter and oh my goodness was I glad that I played it. What starts as a chill vaporwave photography game steadily progresses into an exploration of psychological trauma, relationships with friends and family, and the baggage we carry with us from our pasts. In this exceptionally hard year, I badly needed this story about spending time alone with your personal demons and finding your way back to the people who love and support you. Just like with Journey and Gone Home, I walked away from Holovista feeling a rekindled appreciation for the people in my life.
#video games#holovista#paradise killer#animal crossing#animal crossing new horizons#spellbreak#good sudoku#fuser#dropmix#in other waters#marvel's avengers#avengers#clubhouse games#coffee talk#2020
11 notes
·
View notes
Note
Thanks for recommending Gideon the Ninth! It was so good! Do you have a book rec tag I could check out? :)
honestly i should, huh? i’ve read more books than probably ever before this year and i’ve talked about ‘em intermittently, but not with a consistent tag. i’ll recommend some right now, though, with a healthy dose of recency bias!
sf/f
the priory of the orange tree by samantha shannon - a truly epic fantasy novel with one of the most beautiful, satisfying f/f romances i’ve ever read. the novel takes account nearly everything i hate about fantasy as a genre (overwhelmingly straight, white, and male centric, bland medieval European settings, tired tropes) and subverts them. incredible world-building, diverse fantasy cultures, really cool arthrurian legend influence. one of my favorite books i’ve ever read tbh.
gideon the ninth by tamsyn muir - which you’ve read, obviously, but for posterity’s sake i’m keeping it here! sci-fi + murder mystery + gothic horror. genuinely funny while still having a super strong emotional core and more than enough gnarly necromantic to satisfy the horror nerd in me. makes use of some of my favorite tropes in fiction, namely the slowburn childhood enemies to reluctant allies to friends to ??? progression between gideon and harrow. absolutely frothing at the mouth for a sequel.
the broken earth trilogy by nk jemisin - really the first book that helped me realize i don’t hate fantasy, i just hate the mainstream ‘medieval europe but with magic’ version of fantasy that dominates the genre. EXTREMELY cool worldbuilding. i’ve definitely described it as like, a GOOD version of what the mage-vs-templar conflict in dragon age could have been, with a storyline particularly reminiscent of “what if someone got Anders right?”
this is how you lose the time war by amal el-mohtar and max gladstone - i’m not usually big on epistolary novels, but this one really worked for me. spy vs spy but it’s gay and takes place between time traveling agents of two opposing sides of a war. the letter writing format really plays to el-mohtar’s strengths as a poet, the unfolding love story is weird and beautiful. it’s a really quick read, too, if you’re short on time or attention.
empress of forever by max gladstone - i just finished this one this week! if you’re in the mood for a space opera, look no further. imagine if steve jobs was an asian lesbian and also like not a shitty person. this is where you start with vivian liao. you get the classic putting-the-band-together arc with beings from all across the universe, your romances and enemies-turned-friends and uneasy alliances all over the place. really satisfying character development and some extremely cool twists along the way. it’s just a fun good time.
the luminous dead by caitlin starling - this one rides the line of horror so it’s closest to that part of the list. it reminds me of the most inventive low budget horror/sci-fi films i’ve loved in the best way possible because it makes use of the barest narrative resources. it’s a book that takes place in one primary setting, featuring interactions between two characters that only meet each other face-to-face for the briefest period. the tension between the two characters is the most compelling part of the story, with competing and increasingly unreliable narratives and an eerie backdrop to ratchet things up even higher. the author described it as “queer trust kink” at one point which is, uh, super apt actually and totally my jam. the relationship at the center of the book is complicated to say the least, outright combative at points, but super compelling. plus there’s lost of gnarly sci-fi spelunking if you like stories about people wandering around in caves.
horror
the ballad of black tom by victor lavalle - we all agree that while lovecraft introduced/popularized some cool elements into horror and kind of defined what cosmic horror would come to mean, he was a racist sack of shit. which is why my favorite type of ‘lovecraftian horror’ is the type that openly challenges his abhorrent views. the ballad of black tom is a retelling of the horror at redhook that flips the narrative by centering the action around a black protagonist.
lovecraft country by matt ruff - more of what i just described. again, lovecraftian themes centered around black protagonists. this one’s especially cool because it’s a series of interconnected short stories following related characters. it’s getting a tv adaptation i believe, but the book is definitely not to be missed
rolling in the deep / into the drowning deep by mira grant - mermaids are real and they’re the ultimate deep sea predators! that’s really the whole premise. if for some reason that’s not enough for you, let me add this: diverse cast, a romance between a bi woman who’s not afraid to use the word and an autistic lesbian, really cool speculative science tangents about mermaid biology and myth.
the haunting of hill house by shirley jackson - it’s halloween month so i’m thinking about hill house again. one of the greatest american ghost stories ever written. especially worth the read if you follow it up w the 1964 film adaptation (the haunting) and then the 2018 netflix series.
the hunger by alma katsu - i’ve always been fascinated by the donner party even though we now know the popular narrative is largely falsehoods. still, this highly fictionalized version of events scratched an itch for me and ended up surprising me with its resistance from the most expected and toxic racist tropes associated with donner party myth.
wounds / north american lake monsters by nathan ballingrud - nathan ballingrud is my favorite horror writer of all time. one of my favorite writers period regardless of genre. in ballingrud’s work the horror is right in front of you. you can look directly at it, it’s right there. but what permeates it, what draws your attention instead, what makes it hurt is the brutally honest emotional core of everything surrounding the horror. the human tragedy that’s’ reflected by the more fantastic horror elements is the heart of his work. it’s always deeply, profoundly moving for me. both of these collections are technically short stories, but they’re in the horror section of the recs because delineations are totally arbitrary and made solely at my discretion.
short stories
her body and other parties by carmen maria machado - tbh i almost put this in w horror but there’s enough weird fiction here for me to be willing to straddle the line. it was really refreshing to read horror that centered queer women’s perspectives. the stories in this collection are really diverse and super powerful. there’s an incredible weird fiction piece that’s like prompt-based law and order svu micro fiction (go with me here) that ends up going to some incredible places. there’s the husband stitch, a story that devastated me in ways i’m still unraveling. the final story reminded me of a more contemporary haunting of hill house in the best way possible. machado is a writer i’m really excited about.
vampires in the lemon grove by karen russell - my friend zach recommended this to me when we were swapping book recs earlier this year and i went wild for it! mostly weird fiction, but i’m not really interested in getting hung up on genres. i don’t know what to say about this really other than i really loved it and it got me excited about reading in a way i haven’t been in a while.
the tenth of december by george saunders - i really like saunders’ work and i feel like the tenth of december is a great place to start reading him. quirky without being cloying, weird without being unrelatable.
misc
the seven husbands of evelyn hugo by taylor jenkins reid - there’s something really compelling to me about the glamour of old hollywood. this story is framed as a young journalist interviewing a famously reclusive former starlet at the end of her life. the story of how evelyn hugo goes from being the dirt-poor daughter of cuban immigrants to one of the biggest names in hollywood to an old woman facing the end of her life alone is by turns beautiful, inspiring, infuriating and desperately sad. by far the heart of the book is in evelyn finally coming out as bisexual, detailing her decades-long on/off relationship with celia st. james, another actress. evelyn’s life was turbulent, fraught with abuse and the kind of exploitation you can expect from the hollywood machine, but the story is compelling and engaging and i loved reading it.
smoke gets in your eyes by caitlin doughty - a memoir by caitlin doughty, the woman behind the popular ‘ask a mortician’ youtube series. it was a super insightful look into the american death industry and its many flaws as well as an interesting, often moving look at the human relationship with death through the eyes of someone touched by it early and deeply.
love and rockets by los bros hernandez (jaime and gilbert and mario) - this was a big alt comic in the 80s with some series within running on and off through the present. i’m not current, but this book was so important for me as a kid. in particular the locas series, which centered around two queer latina girls coming up in the punk scene in a fictional california town. the beginning starts of a little sci-fi-ish but over time becomes more concerned with slice-of-life personal dramas.
440 notes
·
View notes
Text
*snickers*
A post just reminded me about how my mother (who proclaims herself “moderate” but is really quite Generic Conservative^tm Christian about things that are relevant to me, particularly lgbtqia+ things) reacted when she saw me reading Gideon the Ninth.
I’d mentioned this series to her over text, because to be honest this series has defined my past, like... mONTH, so of course when she asked how I was and I told her I was getting really into these books, and she asked about it, I told her why. Talking about how it shatters genre boundaries, and the ending left SO MANY QUESTIONS, and it was a GLORIOUS tragedy, and the sequel left me with so many more questions than answers (I was in the middle of my first read HtN when we started talking about it so I didn’t understand SHIT), and how excited I was for the third book!
I fail spectacularly at summaries and apparently left out many key details.
She asked what I was reading at my niece’s little birthday shindig, and I quickly entered Hyperfixation Mode. Like, “That book series I’ve been raving about! I liked it so much and there was so much I didn’t understand the first time I read it that I decided to read it again as soon as I was finished to see what makes sense now that I know what’s happening, and...”
She looked at the cover and just read, with a million questions in her voice: “Lesbian... necromancers... explore a haunted Gothic mansion... in space?”
(She says “necromancers” like “knee-crow mancers”, which amused me greatly.)
But I was like. “Yeah. Yeah, it’s... I mean, it’s exactly what it says on the tin. Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted Gothic mansion in space. Also a murder mystery.”
And she just went, with a strongly unconvinced and noncommittal tone, “Okay.” And left with absolutely no warning.
#I'm not sure which interpretation amuses me more.#Mom giving up IMMEDIATELY after discovering the book had... GASP. Lesbians?!#Or the way she said necromancers which I completely did not expect and still lowkey baffles me.#or just the idea that she couldn't figure out how all of these Aspects could make One Coherent Story#and how UTTERLY COMPLETELY I failed at talking about it.#I didn't even mention swords! Not ONCE.#(Of course as a writer myself I'm way more enamored with things like Characterization and Escalation and Plot Twists#than the Aspects Themselves. Though the worldbuilding is great it's more the characters and plot structure that captured my heart.)#and also the sheer power of ''What the FUCK is GOING ON''#rhs tlt#rhs personal posts
1 note
·
View note
Text
Knives Out (2019)
Knives Out was released to theatres in late 2019, following the mixed reactions to writer/director Rian Johnson's 2017 The Last Jedi addition in the Star Wars sequel trilogy arc. While many hated The Last Jedi, and may have adopted less-than-favourable opinions on Rian Johnson because of it, I think we can all agree that Knives Out beyond redeems him.
Benoit Blanc: It's a weird case from the start. A case with a hole in the centre. A doughnut.
Knives Out opens with a surreal shot of two dogs running over a slight hill away from an outstanding house, which becomes known as the Thrombey Estate. Straight off the bat, the shots used throughout the film are outstanding, and paired with an eerie, intense, soundtrack of a string orchestra, the scenes are striking. Add that to the witty, culturally relevant one-liners and the hilariously blatant lies about the situation of the family members themselves, you get an incredible watch.
Benoit Blanc: Why is grief the providence of youth? I don't know. But I'd imagine that age deepens all feelings.
Cinematographer Steve Yedlin (The Last Jedi, Carrie, Looper) procured fantastic shots for Knives Out that gives it an enticing quality that makes each scene a work of art in its own.
The movie is listed on IMDb as a "Drama/Crime/Comedy", which shows the film's appeal to audiences from a variety of backgrounds: it suits drama lovers, mystery junkies, the almost effortlessly funny script draws in viewers from a large spectrum of senses of humour, and cinephiles will adore the visual aspect of the film, as well as the superb soundtrack composed by Nathan Johnson (Rian Johnson's cousin).
Following the murder investigation of 85 year-old mystery author Harlan Thrombey, his eccentric family faces questioning about the night of his death. Among those questioned are Linda Drysdale, the fabulous self-made head of a real estate firm and daughter of Harlan, her husband Richard Drysdale, son Walt Thrombey, the unsatisfied head of the Blood Like Wine publishing company for his father's books, Joni Thrombey, the widowed daughter-in-law with a quirky disposition that remains close to the family, and caregiver Marta Cabrera, a registered nurse for Harlan, and his friend.
[Marta and Harlan are playing "Go"]
Harlan Thrombey: I don't know how you beat me at this every time.
Marta Cabrera: I'm not trying to beat you. I'm creating a beautiful pattern.
Harlan Thrombey: That's elder abuse. I'm calling the AARP.
Marta Cabrera: Don’t make me get the belt.
And let's not forget an extraordinary performance by renowned actor Daniel Craig as Detective Benoit Blanc, with one of the strangest, but most endearing Southern accents I've heard.
Adding to this is an unexpected, but no less stellar, performance by known Marvel franchise actor Chris Evans, who portrays the troubled, but quite fashionable, Hugh Ransom Drysdale, who finds hilarity in his family’s shock at the changes his grandfather made to his will a week before his death. It is in contempt of the privileged, spoiled, Ransom, actually, that draws the frequently divided Thrombey family together.
A memorable performance by actress Ana De Armas (Marta Cabrera) brought a beautiful character to the front of the screen, with truly beautiful shots like the ones below:
Another phenomenal thing about the film is the colour palette used. It is a balance of warm, earthy tones, that give a sense of familiarity as well as of the comforts of home one would look for. This juxtaposes the intricacies of the death at hand, and serves to add to the feeling of discomfort and hostility, as the dark underlying mystery lurks within a beautifully furnished house and within a troubled, yet somehow sincere, family.
Below it all, the central message of Knives Out is one of kindness. This is handled expertly, as it does not come across as overbearing, nor cheesy. It is the story of an older man who finds comfort in a nurse, who is more of a friend, and how he makes the decision to leave his family out of his will, leaving everything to her. His family is a mess, yes, but it is the genuine kindness of Marta Cabrera that he finds happiness in, so he decides to leave her everything. From the beautiful heart that is Marta Cabrera, to the real reasons surrounding the death of the wealthy mystery author being to protect her and her family at the expense of his own, it is truly a heartwarming story.
When comparing sons Ransom (Richard’s disaster son) and Jacob (Walt’s Nazi child), and about Jacob’s whereabouts:
Walt Thrombey: He was in the bathroom
Richard Drysdale: Joylessly masturbating to pictures of dead deer.
Walt Thrombey: Ok, you wanna go?
ALSO a huge shout-out is in order for the set department. The set design, especially all of the subtle touches within the Thrombey house at 2 Deerborn Drive, is phenomenal, and really reinforces all that is happening in the foreground without being distracting. The Gothic touches in the architecture, the clever paintings on the walls, and the little statuettes flanking every hallway and surface bring the serious, but whimsical, manor alive. The Set Design was headed by David Schlesinger, who also worked on Twilight: Breaking Dawn parts 1 and 2, and John Wick chapters 2 and 3.
Can we take a minute to appreciate how beautiful that knife array is?
And even yet, there is still the multitude of current-day references: with the Nazi child (Jacob Thrombey, portrayed by Jaeden Martell), and the discussions held by Joni Thrombey and Richard Drysdale about the situation at America’s border, and the conflicts between the youngest generation: Meg Thrombey being quipped at by her cousins Ransom and Jacob for being liberal while the rest of the family seems to swing conservative. Even a reference to Hamilton made it to the script, which I had a good moment at, multiple references to Instagram and others that, while dating the film to 2019, made it especially enjoyable for younger audiences and moviegoers alike.
Marta Cabrera: I've never been to a will reading before.
Benoit Blanc: You'd think it'd be like a game show, but think of a community production of a tax return.
The costuming was also excellent, with memorable pieces being worn by Lisa Drysdale and Ransom Drysdale in particular, as well as the dashing Detective Blanc.
(The suit you wear to debate at your father’s memorial)
(The outfit you wear to the will-reading despite being gone for the funeral)
Benoit Blanc: But the complexity and the grey lie not in the truth but what you do with the truth once you have it.
And while the characters changed their clothes as the days passed in the film, the outfits they wore tended to fit their personalities, so even if you couldn’t remember names or faces, the outfits would clue you in to the character subtly, while giving many inspirations for their own day-to-day mystery aesthetics. Major props to Costume Designer Jenny Eagan for that.
Earning a respectable 8.0/10 on IMDb, Knives Out has already secured its spot in the minds of viewers and critics alike, despite only being out since November of 2019. If you haven’t seen it yet, I would highly recommend seeing it.
Final rating:
Cinematography: 90
Screenplay: 95
Delivery: 95
Average: 93.33%, A
#knives out#chris evans#ana de armas#daniel craig#drama crime comedy#movie#movies#movie reviews#movie critique#movie ratings#cinematography#cinema#soundtrack#Nathan Johnson#Rian Johnson#2019 movies#knives out 2019#mystery movies
53 notes
·
View notes
Text
5 (often smutty) AUs that exist in my head that I’m never going to write
There is 5 Karamel AUs that exist in my head, are fairly fleshed out there, that I haven’t written a single (in character) line on and and probably never will. Mostly because most of them would just be too long or challenging to write, I don’t think I could do them justice, I’m not good with really long stuff etc. Anyway, they are:
Male-Nurse!Mon-El and rude!injured!Athlete!Kara: Basically Kara is this former olympic level athlete (runner in my head) who was in a sort of accident and has since then been bed ridden and had to bury her career. Mon-El is his male nurse and/or physiotherapist who Kara sees during her checkups at the hospital and they are always hate-snark-flirting. This causes Alex to eventually offer Mon-El as a job as a live in nurse. Then it would kind of follow the “Secret Garden” template where Mon-El takes care of Kara but she is just the rudest, most obnoxious and resistant patient. But there’s also sexual tension and it’s kind of a side aspect of their relationship that Mon-El also provides sexual services to her, but there’s an almost combative and antagonistic undertone to it at the start. Anyway, Mon-El slowly falls in love with Kara, Kara starts getting over her fear of recovery, Mon-El angsts what will happen if Kara no longer needs him and he is sent away while she goes back to her life as a world famous athlete because he is scared that she doesn’t really care about him, etc.
Again in my head it has this real Secret Garden (novel) vibe where the Danvers live in like this huge kind of remote gothic mansion with large parks and Mon-El takes Kara to those parks in a wheelchair sometimes. (and just like in Secret Garden there are elements to how much of Kara’s condition are phyiscal versus psychological)
Sith!Kara and Alex: Basically a Star Wars AU set in the old republic times where both Kara and Alex are Sith appentices who have been given the task of hunting down the mysterious Darth Rhea (who is hiding a secret and trying to cover her tracks). They board the ship of sexy sultry smuggler ship captain Maggie Sawyer (with Winn and James as her crew). The story would be fairly adventure heavy and focus mostly on Alex POV as she struggles with her attraction for Maggie/relationships with Maggie and worrying about Kara and whether Kara is scary AF even by Sith standards. Would be heavily based on the “Only a Sith deals in absolutes” line from Revenge of the Sith. [and yes it would end with Kara switching to light side and for Alex to switch to neutral eventually] [and I also realize that that line about Siths and Absolutes might be one of the most nonsensical lines in Star Wars canon, but it sounds look]
The fic would go to some fairly dark places, where Kara was essentially abducted and tortured by the Sith to join them because they realize that great powers she had (Kara has her Kryptonian powers basically on top of her Sith powers). Kara at this point has already murdered her master. Alex was in a deeply questionable abuse of power type of sexual relationship with her female master who would be heavily modelled after Darth Zash from the SWTOR game.
Dune!AU: Kara would be sort of a mix between Leto and Paul. The house of El is on the verge of being given the commission to run Arakis. Kara is the heir of the house (Clark would stll be a little kid) Rhea is a Bene Gesserit and she sends her son Mon-El (in this universe either Rhea defied the Bene Gesserit by illegally having a son, but it is not a that big of a deal or male Bene Gesserit are more normal) to seduce Kara and prepare her for her future role in history.
Instead Mon-El falls for Kara and secretly plots of have sweet babies with her rather than convincing her to marry and have babies with a rival house. Plot would start on the El homeworld as Mon-El meets Kara and then would eventually move to Arakis, them having to fend off various plots against Kara’s life and trying to earn the respect of the Fremen and Mon-El struggling that he might eventually have to share Kara in the form of letting her enter some sort of political marriage and demoting himself to just being her lover.
Stressed!CollegeGirl!Kara and MaleProstitute!Mon-El: So basically Kara is this insanely stressed college girl who has trouble finishing her thesis and feels like she is failing her courses and is incapable of confiding in her family about it. Instead she scrounges up her money to hire male!prostitute!Mon-El who also provides BDSM services to deal with her guilt. Would basically follow Kara’s journey to deal with her insecurities, adoption angst, get her shit together and make up with her (totally loving) family.
Olympic!Gymnasts Kara and Mon-El: Kara and Mon-El are both immigrants and gymnasts, training for the olympics (Alex and J’onn are their trainers).They are under a lot of pressure to prove their values as immigrants and take home medals for the US. Also, they there is tension between them because their countries (who in my setting would be like somewhere in Europe) are at war and have been for a long time. Kara disapproves of Mon-El and thinks he is not taking training seriously enough because he parties so much. They end up making a sex bet where she dares him to not have any sex (inlcuding no masturbation) for a month and if he can do it she will sleep with him (she also joins in to prove how easy it is to do). Basically there is build up of mounting sexual frustration and that in the end explodes into copious amounts of highly ahtletic sex all over the training area.
(in the unlikely case that anybody wants to steal these, all my ideas are free for stealing. Just like all my fics are free if anybody wants to write a sequel or remix or anything like that. If you were to switch the ship, then maybe don’t tell me because then I would rather not know it exists)
7 notes
·
View notes
Text
What are some actually GOOD Sword and Sandal movies?
One of the bigger genres in Italy who’s popularity came and went in waves from the silent era to the present, Sword and Sandal (or Peplum) films are Italian movies about gladiators, musclemen, Ancient Greece and Rome, and who’s main characters include Hercules, Spartacus, Ursus, Maciste (a homegrown, semi-Marxist Hercules who fights the rich and decadent who is purely a creation of Italian cinema).
The genre started in 1912, with Cabiria, an ultra-early Italian feature that predated D.W. Griffith, featuring a muscular African slave named Maciste, and due to his muscles and screen presence, Bartolomeo Pagano may have been the first true movie star, making dozens of sequels. The popularity of these movies went into hibernation in Italy until 1959, when it got a huge resurgence when Steve Reeves starred as Hercules, and consequently became the highest paid star in Europe. Hercules (1959) caused literally hundreds of movies to be made, assembly line, in a burst of about 5 years. The genre burned itself out through repetition in only a half decade, only to be replaced by the Italian horror/slasher film and the Spaghetti Western. It was down for good, only to have something of a resurgence of popularity in Italy in the wake of the popularity of John Milius’s Conan the Barbarian in the early 1980s.
Sword and Sandal seems to be a genre where any given film picked at random could be a Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode. For the most part, Sword and Sandal movies are mostly known for being the training ground of people who showed their skills in other genres, like how Mario Bava became a horror director, or how Sergio Leone, a second unit director on a few, was best known later for Spaghetti Westerns. And there is certainly some truth to the idea that, if you have seen one, you’ve seen them all. But there are certainly some good examples of the genre that are worth seeing.
Goliath and the Dragon (1960)
Don’t be fooled, this is a Hercules movie, but they renamed it because of some begobbled distribution rights issue.
If you were a Greek mythology kid (and most nerdy kids went through a phase they were into sharks, dinosaurs, Greek mythology, AV/Radio, writing in Dwarf runes under your desk after reading Tolkien for the first time, and lego) you might remember reading about Hercules’s semi-tragic end, poisoned and killed by his own wife and a centaur. It was the most fascinating story, where Hercules’s great strength and courage was defeated by jealous and anxious little people who tore him down. Americans don’t have much of a taste for tragedy, so it’s very seldom been adapted for American audiences.
Goliath and the Dragon is that story. It literally starts with Hercules finishing his hardest heroic Labor, and retiring. However, his younger brother is jealous of him, and a conspiracy of schemers work to get rid of Hercules by manipulating envy. Along the way, Hercules feels abandoned by the gods and he turns against them in anguish after a lifetime of service. It has a dragon, and quests into the underworld, yes, but it is primarily not an adventure film, which is what makes it interesting.
It also stars Mark Forest, who might be the only one of the bodybuilders to play Hercules to have a legit screen presence. He later left movies to become an opera singer and voice coach.
Eric the Conqueror (1961)
This is one by Italian horror titan Mario Bava, and because it’s kind of a well known film, it actually has a half-decent transfer, including availability in the original language instead of a shoddy 70s dub - this is utterly, absolutely unheard of in this genre, where the copies of these movies on streaming (even on Amazon Prime!) are sometimes literally off VHS and have “snow lines” and other phenomenally half-assed signs of VHS transfer, like the original FBI WARNING stickers.
The film is about two Viking brothers, one of who is raised by Christians as a knight, the other of whom grows up the son of a pagan Viking warlord. It’s a film about the contrast between Christian and Pagan, and the one thing about it people remember is that it stars a pair of Playboy Playmate twins. Stylish and action-oriented with lots of red blood, it’s like a cool version of Disney’s “The Island at the Top of the World.”
Hercules in the Haunted World (1961)
Hercules vs. Christopher Lee –need I say more? Christopher Lee is a vampire who took over a kingdom and hypnotized Hercules’s true love, shrouding the land in eerie darkness…and so Hercules has to descend into the underworld. This is a case where the screenshots really tell the story, they get across the eerie, surreal Gothic ambiance of the film. It doesn’t actually feature Castle Greyskull, but it would perfectly fit in with the décor.
As far as I know, Hercules never actually encountered vampires in Greek folklore, but in Italian cinema, they seem to feel that the supreme challenge for the Son of Zeus is the undead (see also, Kobrak in Goliath and the Sins of Babylon).
I feel guilty having two Mario Bava movies on here. But of the two, this one feels the more…Mario Bava, in lighting, design, and ambiance, which is really the reason to see it. Essentially, it’s Hercules Goes to Hell, and it’s treated as more of a truly eerie horror movie, with weird lighting. The presence of Christopher Lee makes it feel like a bodybuilder accidentally wandered onto the set of a Hammer Horror film, with crumbling castles and she-vampires in negligees.
Maciste in Hell (1925)
Speaking of the essential plot of a muscleman going to hell, you wouldn’t think a movie of that kind would be whimsical, charming, imaginative, and creative, but it is. Satan tries to tempt Maciste, a pure in heart muscleman who represents the pure, incorruptible goodness and strength of the working class. Maciste movies, distinct from Hercules films, always had a strong Marxist undertone, with villains who were super-rich and decadent, all the while Maciste resisted their temptations and hung out with the lower classes and sponsored a revolution. The movie is full in intertitles like “the Dragon – Hell’s Aeroplane!” And the quest by female devils to turn Maciste into a demon himself with a kiss. Essentially, it’s a movie where if you’re pure in heart and have biceps of steel, there’s no problem you can’t bench press, grip, or grapple, even Satan.
According to his memoirs, this was the movie that made Fellini want to become a director.
Hercules and the Princess of Troy (1965)
Made at the absolute dying gasp of the genre, this one is essentially the “Enter the Dragon” of Sword and Sandal movies, in that it was a Hollywood/Italian co-production, much like how “Enter the Dragon” was the first Hollywood/Hong Kong co-production. It wasn’t a movie at all, but a pilot episode for a television show that never went to series…to everyone’s shame, because if it had been made, it would have been a crowd pleaser, if the pilot was anything to go by. I all but guarantee it would be a syndication favorite that would have turned everyone in it into a star, the kind that would be on Nick at Nite forever, or the earliest incarnation of F/X, where it was just a scrappy rerun network with a pre-Survivor Jeff Probst (I still remember the F/X house all the VJ like hosts lived in).
This one has Hercules (played by Tarzan Gordon Scott) as a sea captain and leader of a Greek ship named the Olympia, who is accompanied by two sidekicks, Ulysses (a young, clever Ulysses as Herc’s sidekick was also a trait of Paul Levine’s Hercules and Hercules Unchained), and Diogenes, Hercules’s smart friend, a medical doctor and proto-scientist who comes off as the project’s most interesting character, a Dr. McCoy like curmudgeon who adventures to stay away from his awful wife, who creates a chemical that burns on water and who uses the Socratic Method to solve a murder mystery. If this had gone to series, I can see him overshadowing the theoretical leading man in a similar way to Jonathan Harris as Dr. Smith overshadowing the Robinsons.
The pilot was great fun. It had mythological creatures like invulnerable horses and a terrifyingly unique sea monster, that was some of the earliest work by the now legendary Carlo Rambaldi (creator of E.T. and the Alien) that is light years ahead of the shag carpet dragons musclemen pretend to wrestle in movies like this. Not to mention a mystery, and Hercules facing intrigue that, as a trustworthy and direct man of action, he is incapable of dealing with (a trait of nearly every single interesting Hercules movie).
412 notes
·
View notes
Text
Books based on Jekyll and Hyde:
Jekyll and Heidi by R.L. Stine:
Heidi lives with her eccentric uncle Dr. Jekyll. The locals call him a mad scientist. Heidi thinks they're crazy--until she catches her uncle drinking a strange concoction and terrifying animal sounds rip through the night.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes by Loren D. Estleman
Accompanied by Dr. Watson, master sleuth Sherlock Holmes has already encountered the evil young hedonist Edward Hyde, and knew he was strangely conected with Henry Jekyll, the wealthy, respectable London doctor.
It was not until the Queen herself requested it, however, that Holmes was officially on the case of the savage murder of Sir Danvers Carew—the blackest mystery of his career! Although Robert Louis Stevenson published his tale of Jekyll and Hyde as fiction, the hideous facts were true, insofar as Stevenson knew them.
Here, then, is the entire firsthand account of that devilish crime as recorded by Dr. Watson, with an explanation of why Holmes's personal involvement had to be kept secret—until now...
Hyde by Daniel Levine:
Mr. Hyde is hiding, trapped in Dr. Jekyll's surgical cabinet, counting the hours until capture. As four days pass, he has the chance, finally, to tell the story of his brief, marvelous life.
We join Hyde, awakened after years of dormancy, in the mind he hesitantly shares with Jekyll. We spin with dizzy confusion as the potions take effect. We tromp through the dark streets of Victorian London. We watch Jekyll's high-class life at a remove, blurred by a membrane of consciousness. We feel the horror of lost time, the helplessness of knowing we are responsible for the actions of a body not entirely our own.
Girls have gone missing. Someone has been killed. The evidence points to Mr. Hyde. Someone is framing him, terrorizing him with cryptic notes and whisper campaigns. Who can it be? Even if these crimes weren't of his choosing, can they have been by his hand?
Though this classic has been often reinvented, no one ever imagined Hyde's perspective, or that he could be heroic. Daniel Levine changes that. A mesmerizing gothic, Hyde tells the fascinating story of an underexamined villain.
Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Seek by Anthony O'Neill:
Seven years after the death of Edward Hyde, a stylish gentleman shows up in foggy London claiming to be Dr Henry Jekyll. Only Mr Utterson, Jekyll’s faithful lawyer and confidant, knows that he must be an impostor – because Jekyll was Hyde.
But as the man goes about charming Jekyll’s friends and reclaiming the estate, and as the bodies of potential challengers start piling up, Utterson is left fearing for his life ... and questioning his own sanity.
From the internationally acclaimed Australian author Anthony O’Neill comes Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Seek, an ingenious, original sequel to Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
The Jekyll Legacy:
After arriving in England to claim her inheritance, Hester Jekyll, niece of Dr. Henry Jekyll, discovers she gets nothing, and suddenly her friends are untrustworthy and aloof. Hester becomes entangled in her uncle's mysterious past, and a series of brutal deaths cause her to wonder if London's seen the last of Dr. Jekyll--or Mr. Hyde.
A Method Actor's Guide to Jekyll and Hyde by Kevin MacNeil:
After a bike crash in a foggy Edinburgh, troubled young actor Robert Lewis wakes to find that life has changed for the darker. And the weirder. He's still a deceitful egoist but now life seems to be deceiving and manipulating him. Everything that can go wrong is going wrong. He's losing control of his love life, his starring role in a new adaptation of Jekyll and Hyde, and, quite possibly, his mind.
Another Jekyll, Another Hyde by Daniel and Dina Nayeri:
When his billionaire father marries French governess Nicola Vileroy, high society is all abuzz -- but Thomas, the most popular student at Marlowe, is just plain high. Ever since his girlfriend Belle dumped him, he's been spending less time with old friends and more time getting wasted at clubs. But after someone slips him a designer drug one night -- and his stepmother seems to know way too much about his private life -- things really start to get scary. As Thomas's blackouts give way to a sinister voice inside his head, and as news of a vicious hate crime has students on edge, Thomas comes to the sickening realization that Madame Vileroy has involved him in a horrifying supernatural plan. How can he muster the strength and will to stop it? The pulse-quickening climax revisits Jekyll and Hyde as a current-day cautionary tale laced with a heady dose of paranormal intrigue.
Mary Reilly by Valerie Martin:
Faithfully weaving in details from Robert Louis Stevenson's classic, Martin introduces an original and captivating character: Mary is a survivor-scarred but still strong-familiar with evil, yet brimming with devotion and love. As a bond grows between Mary and her tortured employer, she is sent on errands to unsavory districts of London and entrusted with secrets she would rather not know. Unable to confront her hideous suspicions about Dr. Jekyll, Mary ultimately proves the lengths to which she'll go to protect him. Through her astute reflections, we hear the rest of the classic Jekyll and Hyde story, and this familiar tale is made more terrifying than we remember it, more complex than we imagined possible.
The Jekyll Revelation by Robert Masello:
While on routine patrol in the tinder-dry Topanga Canyon, environmental scientist Rafael Salazar expects to find animal poachers, not a dilapidated antique steamer trunk. Inside the peculiar case, he discovers a journal, written by the renowned Robert Louis Stevenson, which divulges ominous particulars about his creation of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It also promises to reveal a terrible secret—the identity of Jack the Ripper.
Unfortunately, the journal—whose macabre tale unfolds in an alternating narrative with Rafe’s—isn’t the only relic in the trunk, and Rafe isn’t the only one to purloin a souvenir. A mysterious flask containing the last drops of the grisly potion that inspired Jekyll and Hyde and spawned London’s most infamous killer has gone missing. And it has definitely fallen into the wrong hands.
#jekyll and hyde#books#monsters#monster#r. l. stine#fanfic#Sherlock Holmes#mr utterson#gothic literature
48 notes
·
View notes
Last Seen Blogs
auraguardians
The Aura is With Me!
amputeewomen
amputeewomen
peachotomy
paige
ariesbilly
a burden on society
jasontoddslut
Untitled