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Month: January 2020

Movie Review: SWEET, SWEET LONELY GIRL

Movie Review: SWEET, SWEET LONELY GIRL

Published by Johnny Compton on January 29, 2020

There’s a brand of horror I’ve grown fond of lately; a throwback, smoldering gothic type of tale that feels like it’s about 90% build and 10% payoff. Sometimes that payoff makes a pretty big swing for the fences (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), but more often it just reveals some simple, fundamental horror (The Innkeepers, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House). If reading any one of those titles made you roll your eyes it might be likely that reading all three made you groan. If you found any or all of them boring, I can’t blame you, though I don’t share that opinion of those movies. Still, I get it. These movies might not be your speed; paced as they are to (deliberately?) test one’s patience. If they manage to draw you in, however, they can reward your patience pretty well. READ MORE

My Most Anticipated Horror Books of 2020

Published by Johnny Compton on January 11, 2020

Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre

World War Z inspired multiple, similar efforts through the years, trading zombies for some other brand of monster or threat. Robopocalypse and its sequel took the “oral history of humanity’s brush with genre-inspired Armageddon” approach into the realm of science-fiction horror. 2018’s A People’s History of the Vampire Uprising is essentially World War V. At least the pretty cleverly named Sleep Over (I’m a sucker for a quality pun) did something different with the format and made the immediate threat something passive that can’t be shot, hacked up, bombed out or set aflame: mass insomnia. READ MORE

A QUIET PLACE II Impressed and Underwhelmed Me in One Trailer

Published by Johnny Compton on January 2, 2020

Beginning with the positive, that opening scene from inside the car is very good, maybe even terrific. Cutting the moment just after the shot of the alien’s long arm clawing through the bus’s front windshield is such a great touch. In less than a minute, I was ready to amend my Most Anticipated Horror Movies of 2020 list to include this sequel, which I had previously felt somewhat apathetic towards. I though the first film was good, but didn’t see how the second film could do anything all that interesting with it. Somehow, the prospect of it revisiting the initial chaos brought about by the arrival of the alien attackers never occurred to me. Even if confined to occasional flashbacks, this idea intrigued me. Unfortunately, 90 seconds later, the trailer had once again rendered me less enthused about A Quiet Place II than I could be. READ MORE