The original version of Phantoms was written in 1983. I’ve read plenty of Koontz’ books, but the real fan when I was growing up was my sister, who read a ton of them. I’ve been challenged to write horror elements into a book and I’ve been doing research, including reading horror-esque books, in preparation.
Lots of people say Phantoms is the scariest book that Koontz ever wrote. He says he writes suspense, not horror, but this came highly recommended.
Sorry, I didn’t really like it. Here’s why.
I haven’t done this a lot, not sure how much I will in the future, but recently, I decided to get through the huge backlog of books that I’ve had sitting around. Mostly, that’s been done by cutting the majority of social media out of my life because it’s just crap, so I went back to reading for a couple of hours a day instead of staring at a screen. Best decision I’ve made recently. So I’ve made it through a bunch of books in the last couple of weeks, but this time, I wanted to talk about Starter Villain, a 2023 novel by John Scalzi. Was it any good? Let’s find out.
I just caught a video from Film Threat on AI and the death of Hollywood and while I usually like what Chris Gore has to say, this time I disagree. Granted, he depends on the survival of Hollywood for his livelihood and he doesn’t want things to change, but I’m not at all like that.
Let Hollywood die!
See you below the fold.
This one comes in a very roundabout way. Every year Joe Bob Briggs’ Last Drive-In does a Walking Dead special and someone, who knew I was a fan of the show, asked if I’d seen it. That’s the one thing that I skip every year because I really do not like the Walking Dead.
Here’s why.
Last night, my wife and I went to an actual theater and saw the Monty Python and the Holy Grail re-release. It was a really nice theater, with the really comfortable, reclining seats and there were maybe 20-25 people in the theater and everyone behaved themselves.
You know what? I still saw no reason to go to a theater. I’d have much rather sat at home and watched it there.
This is one of those things that kind of drives me crazy. Whenever a movie or TV adaptation comes on, based on a book or a video game or whatever, and people scream that “it isn’t accurate!”
Who cares? If you want accuracy, go read the book or play the video game. I want entertaining. I want something close enough that I can see the source, but that is it’s own thing and has value on its own.
Sadly, I seem to be largely alone in this.
I’ve been watching some videos from Sci-Fi Odyssey over on YouTube recently, not really because I find them to be great, but because I’ve been bored. That’s not to say that they’re bad, because certainly, they’re not, I just find his take on things to be “interesting”. I say it like that because I simply do not agree with some of his overarching ideas. He seems to think, again, from my limited exposure, that science fiction must, by necessity, be hard, meaning it’s got to be scientifically plausible to be worthwhile.
That’s not how it works, though.
I used to do a lot of movie and TV reviews but I don’t really engage very often these days. Mostly, it’s because there aren’t a lot of really good movies out there. I got really tired of explaining why movie X was bad, especially when lots of people out there happened to like it.
Therefore, today, I’m going to talk about a Netflix movie called Chupa. It was actually kind of cute.
I was poking around YouTube, as I often am, and saw this video with Chris Gore. Now I could say a lot about hate watching but I don’t engage in it, I wanted to say something about the other subject that he brings up in passing: reality TV.
I hate reality TV. Let’s get below the fold and I’ll explain why.
I haven’t read or collected comic books seriously for decades, I walked away from it for the last time, I think around 2013, when they stopped being fun and that predated the modern woke mess that we’re facing. However, I occasionally do watch a video or two on YouTube, I think because I was interested in seeing just how terrible the whole thing is.
Recently, it’s started to be suggested that Warner-Discovery CEO David Zaslav might just shut down DC Comics entirely and honestly, I think that might be a good idea, at least for a while. So let’s talk about it.
