1980s movies

-
A couple of days ago I saw a couple of things up for sale - a 4 DVD box set of the Critters movies and the DVD of John Carpenter's The Thing. Well I grew up in the 1970s and 80s, they are films I saw when I was a kid and they were cheap.

The one thing I've noticed about them when compared to modern movies is pace. Having rewatched The Thing and the first Critters movie they start a great deal slower than more recent films. If these were remade now I can pretty much guarantee that the first five moinutes would have plenty of gore - after all they have to get the interest of the attention-deficit world we've become...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review of Ray Garton - Bestial

-
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 ...
Read more

Review of Bill Bryson - Shakespeare: The World as a Stage

-
Although best known for his travel books this is far from Bryson's first venture into other fields. He has written the obligatory (for a writer) book of personal memoirs ("The Life and Time of the Thunderbolt Kid"), a book or two on the English language ("Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words") and even one on the sum total of human knowledge ("A Short History of Nearly Everything"). And now he has turned his hand to biography with this book on the greatest of all authors. This feels remarkably well researched - despite being such a short book he lists three and a half pages of selected bibliography. This amount of available research material does not mean, however, that much is actually known about Shakespeare life - far from it. Bryson even makes fun of this fact throughout the book. The book explains the few known facts of Shakespeare's life and how they are known - his birth (or rather his baptism, the exact date of his birth being infe...
Read more

A long time passed

-
I've not posted on here for quite some time - a little over a year. In truth I was not sure I was ever going to post on this blog again. As anyone knows who read my post from April last year I was diagnosed with depression and my personality changed a little. I stopped reading completely and cut back severely on my watching sf or horror. I just didn't have the interest. Well it's now more than 16 months since my diagnosis and I've still not read any fiction. I did start reading again although it's been non-fiction only. I've read my way through a number of science books including a great biography of Joseph Priestley, a fair few history books with the current one being a general all-encompassing history of Germany. Oh, and two great books by Simon Winchester. Screenwise I've watched little sf/horror, although seem to be working my way through Nordic Noir - a list of Crime films / TV series made in Scandanavia. (By the way, anyone who enjoys a goo...
Read more