In horror movie-land sequels are pretty much a par for the course. You make a good horror film, it seems it only makes sense to go back and milk the idea a second time. In the world of horror books (note - not dark fantasy or paranormal romance, I mean HORROR) this has been less common. I'm not saying they don't exist - Graham Masterton's Manitou and James Herbert's Rats both started series - and sure you get books set in a repeated environs - take Gary Braunbeck's Cedar Hill short stories and novels, and Stephen King's version of Maine. But straight sequels, picking up the action from the end of the prior book or soon after, haven't filled the shelves in bookstores. I guess part of the reason for this is the rather final end that most horror books have. Zombies are destroyed, vampires staked, demons exorcised, witches burned etc, etc. Okay, Dracula can be resurrected over and over but mostly you get to the end and that's it. Recently though this seems ...
Okay, it's been a while since my last post. I could claim one excuse or another for not posting to this blog more often. And in reality the reasons I would give are not just excuses but true. I mentioned in an earlier post my mother dying over Christmas. This has left a lot of processing - sorting out her house, funerals, cancelling paper deliveries, chaning utilities etc. And then there's the emptying of her house... On top of all this there is the flu that has been plaguing my life since Christmas Day, one week of feeling really ill then lurking in the background with occasional ickiness repeats. And then there's the fact I've been trying to concentrate on writing a novel, which isn't going too badly - up to 14,500 words and an aim to get over 80,000 by the end of March - yeah I know it's tight but I need to set deadlines so I will get on with it. But some things have been happening I wanted to post. Firstly there's some news on my reviews being released/p...
I had absolutely no idea what this film would be like when I popped it into the DVD player. I'd never heard of it before I saw it on the shelf in the video store. I find that's often the best way. I've seen far too many films with pre-conceptions they just didn't live up to. Long Distance centres on a young woman called Nicole who one night dials a wrong number. Sounds innocent and safe enough, except the man that answers calls her back repeatedly. The following day she finds out he was calling from the house of a woman he'd just murdered. And now it seems she's the target of a killer's obsession. This is not a bad film at all. It manages to build a pretty decent level of suspense. Decent plotting, good direction and fair acting. But it does rather have a telegraphed ending. I'd imagine they were going for a serious twist here, one that might grip the viewer. The only problem I had was this "twist" was pretty obvious - which meant the ending wa...
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