Wafflings of a Cozmonaught

Game-to-Movie adaptations are having a moment.  After decades of mediocrity, studios are opening their wallets to capitalize on this new trend. You've got Minecraft . Super Mario Bros . Sonic the Hedgehog . Five Nights at Freddy's .  A live-action Resident Evil also just dropped. I hear it's pretty good. But those are gaming titans everyone knows. What happens when you do the same with a more obscure title: Until Dawn ? For those that don't know, Until Dawn is a 2015 game developed by Supermassive Games. It made a splash as a "playable movie." Essentially, Supermassive poached the structure popularized by Telltale Games and Quantic Dream and took it to its logical conclusion. You watch a movie. Press some timed buttons. Make some story choices. And voila. Hopefully your party survives the night. Game over. It also starred the late Hayden Panettiere as a badass final girl. Rip.  Until Dawn : The Video Game was massively successful.  I've watched near a ...

This is an incredibly lazy novel. I'm not saying the author is lazy or that his process was. But the book itself is. Holes follows the story of teenage boy Stanley. Wrongfully convicted of shoe thievery, Stanley is sentenced to dig holes at Camp Green Lake, a juvenile corrections facility in drought-ridden, bum-fuck-nowhere Texas. There our hero meets a cast of characters including dried-up teenagers and dried-up adults that walk and talk like they're constipated 24/7. Little does Stanley know, there's an ancient family treasure littered somewhere among the holes. Let's get to the most obvious part. Digging holes is not interesting. In fact, it's straight-up boring. The author even admits this in his postscript note. But that's not lazy. The characters are inconsistent. They will be established as being one way then do something completely not in line with their character.  But that's not lazy. It's also superficial and saccharine. Sure racism and "...

What is this? A movie from the current year on my retro review blog!? Yes indeed. I'm finally getting to the Backrooms by Mr. Kane Parsons. This review was supposed to be published two months ago according to my log, but life happens. You know how it is. Admittedly, while I'm a creepypasta fan boi, I stopped watching Kane Parson's original Backrooms web series  around the third episode. Not because it was bad. In fact, it was incredible. Especially compared to other productions in the online horror space at the time *cough* Mandela Catalogue *cough*. I was amazed at the product this young indie director created. However, something about it never connected with me. Maybe it's because I'm a diehard contrarian that lost interest once it became super popular. Or maybe it's because MatPat stopped doing Backrooms analysis videos on GTLive. Dunno. Crazily enough, that was years ago. I was eager to see how our young creepypasta idol had developed his craft and how he...

"Want to fuck?" What an amazing line. I first read this story in 2018. At the time, I remember thinking it was just OK. And yet, something about this short story continues to eat away at me nearly a decade on.  There's something distinct here. Something so strange. So disturbing. So disgusting. I can't put my finger on it. In the Hills, the Cities  follows Mick and Judd, two gay English boy toys traveling around the Yugoslav countryside. As they wind through dirt roads, past farms and cottages, they come across a startling discovery. A battlefield. Not of armies, but of colossuses. Two giants made of thousands of humans. Men, women, and children strapped and harnessed together in a feat of grotesque engineering. Stephen King famously categorizes horror into three buckets.  Terror. The psychological. Horror. The shocking. Gross-out. The repulsive. On the surface, In the Hills, the Cities  falls distinctly into that last category. That's hardly surprising. But there...

   I had reserved this slot for Leviticus by Adrian Chiarella, but that plan fell through. Also I got sick so this is a month late. Whoops.  Today we are taking a look at a 2019 Canadian horror thriller  named Spiral that  I pulled straight from  Wikipedia's hairy behind . And, oh boy,  I got bad vibes in the first five minutes.  "This is one of them insufferably pinky-out films for Disney Adults, isn't it?" Mhmm. Yes. Let's continually spout platitudes about how society is scared of differences. " But don't be afraid to be yourself! The bravest thing you can do is live out and proud!" All that same, tired old shit that your lefty aunt shares on Facebook before stumbling into yet another flamewar with your righty grandpappy. Lord have mercy.  I think I gotta take the old man's side on this one, Auntie.  This movie f eels very much like a product of the mid-to-late 2010s. Like it was dreamed up by an upper-class white woman focus gro...