Graphic Novel Determination: Pretty Deadly Volumes I (2014) and II (2016)

So, this is a new thing that I'm doing here. Pretty Deadly is a graphic novel series, or a collection of comic books- whatever you feel like calling it. It is a single story over a period of time that was in comic book format at one time, but the way I read it was in the two collections that bound together comics 1-5 and 6-10 respectively. So, I'm considering it a graphic novel and reviewing it as such.

I guess this will be similar to my "Manga Judgment" series, but with "western" comics. I have a few of these graphic novels to explore, but this one will be the first I touch upon.

Pretty Deadly is by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Emma Rios, and it is apparently the third comic that they have collaborated on together. This is a good thing. They work well together matching the story and visuals to bring together a very elegant Neil Gaiman-esque story together. While I do have some complaints about certain story paths, the comics themselves are incredible to behold. I bought the first volume based off of a random recommendation of the story and art. And it took me a while to actually read it after I had bought it.

But when I did read it I was enthralled. When the second volume became available more recently, I bought it as soon as it was out. The series had drawn me in completely, and I was powerless to resist. The art and the characters remain the strong points of the comic, but the overarching ideas are quite something as well.

The basic premise is that Death (or some personification of Death) wants a little girl dead and gone for unknown reasons. The little girl's protector, an old man blinded by a terrible injury, tries to get her to realize her full potential. He does this while they are both being pursued by some pretty rough-and-tumble Wild West bounty hunter things sent by Death himself. And that's only the premise of the first few issues!

The comics themselves blend together The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, American Gods, and an artistic and surreal horror story about a child chosen for great and terrible things. I guess not everybody will find the first volume horrific. The pursuit has its moments of terror, but, for me, most of the real horror came from the second volume, which takes place during World War I and deals with some personification of War.

I'm not going to get into the story in a heavy way. I think the art and the writing speak better for themselves than I will. And spoiling the story seems like it would be in bad taste considering the fact that the comic is not extremely widely known. To put it mildly, it is very similar to American Gods, as I mentioned before, except make those gods more personifications of certain attributes associated with humanity, and you kind of have the basic premise. Now, set it in the old American West, and you essentially have it.

While I'm not going to go into the plot, I am going to go into some of my criticisms of the series as it stands after the first two volumes. I will state my recommendation for the series right now before I go into it though. The art and style, story and writing, and characters and dialogue are all good enough to try this one out if you want a new graphic novel to read. But, my recommendation comes with a single caveat: read the comic in a vacuum. Don't try to find more about the way it is classified, or what people try to describe it as. Those are my biggest annoyances about the comic, and they literally have nothing to do with what is in the comic proper. So, stop reading here if you've never read the comic and/or don't want more ranting than you should ever read. Because I have a lot to rant about, and almost none of it actually has to do with the comic as it is written.

Anyway: criticisms.

First is that the art and lack of dialogue or narration at times can make the story very hard to follow. It has a confusing and flowing nature to it that makes it sometimes very hard to figure out what is actually going on, especially in the second volume's fight scenes. I have to imagine this is what is meant to be conveyed, but I think it is a misstep. The story is already dealing with personifications as often as it deals with real people. Why be even more confusing to the readers when they're already having to focus on a lofty story? Why obscure details in the art?

It is a minor gripe for me at best, but some people will be really turned off by the focus of ART and STYLE over being able to tell what is going on in certain panels.

Secondly, the story of Volume I itself is a bit of a slow burn with good reason. It takes its time to build up its characters, plot, and setting. Everything flows very nicely over the course of the early parts of the comic. And then- and this is where my problem starts- the story climaxes suddenly and brutally, with very little lead-up, set-up, or difficulty for the main characters to overcome. They are thrown into the climactic battle with barely having a first battle to their names. The story effectively ends there in a way that takes one aback. It's not badly done, per se, but it is really quite jarring.

I guess my problem with all of that is that the pacing, which I feel is very consistent and slow (again, for good reason) over the first part of Volume I, races at a break-neck speed to finish the story off. The consistency of pace kind of goes out the window, and this is probably my biggest complaint about the first volume.

Pace is also my biggest complaint about Volume II, but my complaint is literally the exact opposite for the second volume. I feel that the climax is long, drawn out, and confusing, while the set-up is very fast and brutal with very little characterization of the characters that headline Volume II. It very much expects the background from Volume I to transition into Volume II, but it doesn't, in my opinion, and the pacing is a bit of a mess because of it.

Pace in stories, is incredibly important to me. And I kind definitely understand somebody being turned off of the comic because of it. That being stated, I think the story is told well enough to be able to overcome these flaws, but that doesn't mean I can't complain about them.

The rest of my complaints are not really about the comic itself, but rather about what I've heard about the comic. Some of the words that I've heard thrown around about Pretty Deadly don't seem to actually fit what I've read or seen within it. I don't know who said these things about the comic, if it were the publishers who were trying to fit it into a genre, the authors who were trying to sell the comic to a certain demographic, or people who were reading something in the comic that I just didn't. I have no idea. But in reading these descriptions of the comic, I expected some things that were simply never realized. This is both good and bad. It's good because I read a story that I simply was not expecting, and I liked it a great deal better than what I was expecting. It's bad because somebody is not explaining the comic correctly, and I can see that really hurting the audience.

So, the first thing that I've seen and heard about the comic is that it is very heavily feminist in nature. Now, a feminist comic is absolutely fine. I have no problem with that (case in point another comic I'll be reviewing later this month that is 100% a feminist comic). I simply do not see this comic as one that is "feminist" intrinsically. I guess the male-to-female character ratio is roughly equal, but is that all it takes to have the comic be feminist in nature? Because that's all there is from where I stand. Nothing else about the comic implies a heavy sway into feminism. While, yes, some of the main cast are definitely women in some way or another, some of the main cast are definitely male.

I have to assume the "feminist" nature of the comic has to do with the creators being feminists themselves. Or maybe that the comic is written and illustrated by women? I don't see either of those really being a reason as to why the comic is feminist in nature though. As read, if I had no foreknowledge of the creators (and I really don't beyond vague Wikipedia entries and my own personal knowledge that Kelly Sue DeConnick is also a creator of Bitch Planet, which I would consider feminist in nature) I would have never read it as a feminist comic. It would have simply been a comic with both men and women in it.

I know I'm getting into semantics here, and I tend to in these cases, but I don't understand how it can be classified in this way as it is presented. I think it is misrepresenting itself ultimately. And that actually does the story disservice. I went into the story expecting a feminist comic. I came out of it feeling baffled as to why it wasn't that at all. And maybe the vague equality in the comic is the point, but why call it feminist when it seems to have no hard line in the sand about the nature of itself in that regard? It's like saying a movie that has half of its cast female is feminist simply because of the tautology that half of its cast is female. That doesn't define that movie as feminist in nature. It defines it as having half of its cast as female.

Anyway, coming off the rant of the year there-

The next thing that I don't understand about this comic's classification is that I had thought that the genre of the comic was "superhero" in nature. That's what I had been told by a few different sources. And it is completely and utterly untrue. While the comic is difficult to classify in genre, "superhero" is probably the classification I would least like to give it. It has no superheroes in it. None.

I mean, I guess if you consider American Gods a superhero story, you could also call this one the same. But nobody that I know of has ever considered American Gods a superhero story, and for the same reason this comic is certainly not a superhero story (as it stands now). Maybe it being a superhero comic lets it sell more copies? I have no idea. My opinion is that calling itself simply a story of superheroes is lessening the impact of the story and characters upon the world. They are forces of nature, personifications of human nature- not Iron Man, not Captain America, and certainly not Batman. The story is much more nuanced than a superhero story, and anybody who thinks that it is that, is oversimplifying and dumbing down a very complex story.

Okay, last thought and then this long rant that is going on forever will be over. This one will have me talking about one of the characters in a slight way. Everywhere I see the main character of this series being Ginny, the daughter of Death and a mortal. While Ginny has a great character design, I could not consider her the main character of the story as it stands now.

The cast of the story is an ensemble one. While some characters are certainly more of a side variety, there are possibly five or six that could be considered main characters at any given time. And not a single one of them overtakes the story in a way that would make me consider them the lead over all of the others.

And yet all I ever see is that Ginny is the main character by a landslide. While she is important and pretty well-realized, other characters have a central role as well. Alice, Sissy, Fox, Johnny, Sarah, and even Death are all decent candidates for pieces of an ensemble cast that each have as much characterization and page time as Ginny does. And maybe it's because the creators have a special liking for Ginny, but it doesn't work well here. It's like saying there is a main character is The Lord of the Rings, which is much more an ensemble cast than it will ever be about a single character. This is no Harry Potter where we only ever see one character's perspective for the most part.

Anyway, thus ends my rant. The story is really good. The horror is well done. The characters are well realized. And the art is superb. If you go into reading the comic with literally never seeing anything about it online, you'll never get annoyed at how it classifies itself or how other people(?) classify it. So, I recommend that.

Movie Appraisal: Oculus (2013)

It is late at night, and I just finished this movie. And I don't know what to do. I'm not alone in my apartment. I shouldn't feel this nameless fear striking me in the gut. My fiancee, who does not like horror movies, is asleep in the bedroom as I write this review. She did not watch the movie either. She probably does not even know that I watched it.

I only say that because I am not even alone here, and yet I feel more alone after watching this movie than I have in a very long time. I have, for the past two years, done as little as possible with the horror genre. Sure, I've watched a few movies that I've definitely watched and reviewed on this blog before, And I've played a few horror video games as well. But for the most part my life has been devoid of horror because I like saying my thoughts on this blog about horror movies, and couldn't bring myself to watch them without being able to write a review up. It's my own failing really. I could have watched them and not had my life of loving horror movies on pause, but I felt that the new horror movies I would watch should have a fresh experience of review, rather than a review of someone who has definitely seen it more than once.

I'm explaining myself too much. Suffice it to say, I was thoroughly terrified by this movie.

It succeeded in being both very scary and extremely unsettling. I'm not sure if I'll be able to sleep tonight. And that's great because I love great and scary horror movies. It's also terrible because I have work tomorrow and my fragile mind should not have to deal with this much psychological horror all at once.

I guess I should get started with my extremely positive review of this film. Oculus is brilliant. This is exactly the type of movie I search for, especially in the more "mainstream" horror movies. It's exactly the type of movie I spend my waking hours seeking. The whole "very old object" horror works so well. It is almost Lovecraftian in nature, something beyond the scope of human ken. And that's a huge reason why this movie works so well for me.

Oculus is directed by Mike Flanagan, the man who also directed Absentia, a movie I look back on a lot more fondly than my review does, I'll say that much. It could be that I think better of it because Doug Jones himself commented on a blog post I had written up for the movie, or maybe I just have a very fond memory of the tunnel idea itself. I still do not think it is a wonderful movie, but time has been kind in my mind to it. So, seeing another movie by the same director was exciting for me. It's seeing how somebody has grown and developed over time.

And grow Mike Flanagan did. His directing chops are really quite something to behold. And so is this film.

The word "oculus" is Latin, It usually means "orb" or "eye." But it can also mean "eyesight" and a couple of other less relevant things. I'm kind of a Latin nerd. Sorry. But I find it fascinating that they focused on a word that means "eye" as the title of the film. I think it might be one of the most telling parts of the movie itself.

Anyway, the plot revolves around a brother and sister, whose parents were both killed when the siblings were younger. Their mother was "tortured" and killed by their father, and their father was killed by the brother, Tim. Tim is put into a mental hospital, which he stays until eleven years later on his twenty-first birthday as the film begins. The sister, Kaylie (played by a manic Karen Gillan), believes that she has all the answers to what happened all those years ago, and she recruits her brother to help her citing the promise they made to one another years before of destroying the evil that plagued their family.

And there's the premise. The thing that Kaylie blames for all their troubles is a very old antique mirror that her parents had purchased and put into her father's study. And the mirror is the true source of "evil" or malignancy or whatever you want to call it. It makes both parents go mad in different ways, but the children don't seem to go mad, not until they have become adults and try to best the mirror themselves.

The film blends both past and present together seamlessly. It is a wonderful mixing of time periods into this terrifying story. It messes with one's own perceptions when watching the film. I love the psychology that has been taken into account in the movie, talking about fuzzy memories  and blocks in the mind. The mirror uses weaknesses and strengths against the siblings and all whom it comes into contact. And that is truly terrifying.

Oculus is a cross between 1408 and Sinister or maybe Insidious or something. That sounds like a vague comparison to make, but there are a great deal of these movies that have come out recently that have very similar design and conceptual qualities to them. It is definitely mainstream-ish 2010s horror is my ultimate point here. I hope that doesn't sound like an insult. While current horror is not my favorite horror to watch, there really have been some amazing gems that have come out in well-known movies. It just so happens that a lot of these movies, if popular, get endless sequels that beat the premise into the ground like a hammer to a stake.

And that is the real problem of these well made and original horror movies. Sequels will ruin the novelty and brilliance of these ideas if given the chance. But, I will say that I am glad that I have avoided most of the 2010s horror sequel craze. So, there's that, at least.

Anyway,  I have to say that this movie was something I wasn't expecting, I can't even deal with the ending right now after just watching it. I won't spoil it here. But having it comparable to 1408 was not a bad thing to me. It just happened to be a lot worse in the end. Maybe. It's hard to say.

I have a few more musings before I wrap up. Obviously, because I liked it, I really don't want to spoil it for anybody. I had heard nothing but recommendations for this movie. And that's all I really have to say about it. The film is really excellent at getting its points across, and while it gets really heavy-handed with some of its ideas, it also is very subtle in its approach of character building, especially if you consider the mirror one of the characters.

Anyway, random musings time. There was a reference to a "South Windham Whale" in the movie as Kaylie is listing the history of the mirror. This reference is an oddity for me specifically. I know the majority of the readers here will literally not think twice about the reference as anything but a one-off joke. But I grew up in a town right next to South Windham, Connecticut. I know that town like the back of my hand. So, it's weird to hear it mentioned in a pretty major horror movie motion picture thing. It doesn't happen very often, and it made me regard the movie with a bit more interest.

It is terrifying and so well put together as a movie. I haven't seen a new horror movie this good in quite the long time, probably three or four years at the least. Holy hell is it good though. I loved this movie from every angle. It is superb storytelling. It gets you involved, . The movement between the past and the present is seamless, and I can't state that enough.

Anyway, it is a strong recommendation. If you are sensitive to gore, realize that, while there isn't a ton, there definitely is some vicious moments of it in passing. But beyond that, I can't say enough good things about it.

Movie Appraisal: The Collective (2008) (2006?)

"Evil is not traced back to the individual...
But to the collective behavior of humanity."
- Niebuhr

The Collective is yet another odd indie horror film. I say "odd" but what I truly mean is that it is a bit obscure. I say that because I cannot find the exact year it was released. I believe it was released in 2008, but a few websites place it as being released in 2006. It could be that it was shown at some film festival before 2008. I'm not sure. If I get any more research done on this movie before I post this review, I'll update my knowledge.

That being said, it's a bit of a crawl of a movie at times. I won't say it's boring, but it moves very slow with a great deal of tension. I have to say that I enjoyed that aspect of the film. I watched with rapt attention through the front half of the movie, as the lead character Tyler (played by Kelly Overton) tries to find her sister, Jessica, through a network of contacts that Jessica had had in the weeks leading up to Tyler coming to find her and that she has subsequently dropped out of her life.

The camera work in the movie is absolutely great. I have to point that out first. The directors (Kelly Overton and Judson Pearce Morgan certainly knows how to use a camera correctly. It has a very artistic feeling without being pretentious, which I appreciate. The acting in the movie is also quite good. I love these indie ventures because sometimes the acting just feels like regular people interacting, which is what I love in these movies.

BUT! And I hate to be the harbinger of bad news, BUT while the front half of the film is tense and extremely good, once the mystery is out, the film takes a dramatic turn into the mediocre lane. It becomes a case of New York City is too small. The antagonists are around every corner even though there are only four of them searching for the two sisters once they meet up and decide to split the group that's holding Jessica.

I don't want to be a jerk here. The first half of the movie with its intrigue, questions, and ultimate mystery is extremely well done. The feeling of not being able to trust anybody and being paranoid constantly are so well put together. Tyler's first meeting with Jessica is also really well portrayed and acted, showing tension that I wasn't expecting.

But once the story is all put out there, it is much less interesting and much less horrific than it starts out being. I figured the whole cult-group had undergone some kind of "groupthink" thing, hence The Collective, but that wasn't true at all. It's just some shitty name for a group of thirty-somethings who meet up at a random man's cathedral and play-worship and take drugs. And that disappointed me. Why set up everything so nicely only to have it be the simplest and most boring explanation? There is no horror there and the tension only just exists at all.

And when I say that, I mean that because the movie makes NYC into this small place, there is more tension than there would be if NYC had been treated as how it actually is. I live very close to NYC. I'm in the city about once a month or so. It's BIG. If you've never been there, it is so much bigger than you expect it to be, what with the subway tunnels, the vertical building littered constantly all over the city, and mostly the amount of people that exist. NYC is extremely populous. If you dive into a large group of people, you are EXTREMELY LIKELY to not be found. And somebody showing up on the same subway you're taking accidentally is almost beyond the realm of reason.

This is something to focus on because it is a flaw. These four people who are going after our protagonists are not omnipotent. They shouldn't be able to find the girls as easily as they continue to in the last ten minutes of the movie or so. It breaks me right out of the movie and frustrates me completely. They had a perfectly good beginning of a plot, and they ruined it by using the most boring and laziest conclusion possible.

Eh. I don't have much else to say. I wouldn't recommend watching beyond the halfway point of the movie. The front half is really good, but the back half will just make you angry.

Oh, but I do have to admit that I think this is the only movie I've ever seen that portrays the Metro North in a positive light. I love that simply because I used to use the Metro North every once in a while when I lived in Connecticut. So, it's great to see that hope resides in some of the shittiest cities in Connecticut, if only for my own personal amusement.

Movie Appraisal: Butterfly Dreaming (2008)

"Ordinary representation of stable thoughts"

So, first of all, I couldn't even find the picture of my DVD box cover art anywhere online. I wanted to include the specific art for my version of the film, but I must own the only copy of it or something. Very weird. Anyway, getting that odd bit of trivia out of the way, let's get this movie started.  I'm hoping for a trippy and creepy movie with some psychological twists. But let's see...

Butterfly Dreaming  is directed, written, and produced by Rufus Williams, who only has one other credit to his name as far as I can tell. I kept thinking that this movie has another name somewhere along the line, that the version I have is named Butterfly Dreaming, but the "real name" of the movie was Man Who Falls Down Stairs  Amusingly or Chickens: You Can't Keep 'Em Caged. But no, this is the only title of the movie I can find.

I'm being a bit silly with my last sentence, but I'm having a very hard time finding anything out about this movie. I've seen two reviews online. One is glowing. The other is extremely negative. And nothing else at all. This is weird. Reviews of movies exist everywhere. And this being an American movie, I would have thought somebody who reviews indie horror films would have scooped this up and talked about it, especially owing to how readily available I thought it was.

My inability to find all that much about the movie really makes me that much more interested in the film itself. Why is nobody talking about it? I found it easily (and cheaply) enough. Why does it have fewer reviews than tiny budgeted obscure Japanese horror movies that nobody but like five people in the US has even heard of? I don't have answers, but my questions will linger.

I brought up the DVD box art before because my specific copy of the movie says on the cover: "For fans of Memento and Mulholland Dr." These two movies are extremely different types of films with only pieces of the filming style being even somewhat similar. Memento (which is an okay, but extremely over-hyped noir-ish thriller movie) and Mulholland Drive (which is nothing like Memento with more of a psychological mystery feel, with it being David Lynch and everything) are weird movies to have people be huge fans of. This whole thing intrigues me though. How does a movie hit a middle ground between those two very different films?

We'll see if it does, I suppose.

The movie starts off with some mediocre music over an interesting credit sequence. Not a terrible start. And then the movie itself hits. My first thought is, "Was this actually made in 2008? It looks like an early 1990s film." I'm not sure if this is a good or bad start. And this will be a theme going forward.

The movie stars Andrew Bowen as Rob Pollack. He is our main character whether we like him or not. I'm still unsure of what to think about his performance. It lies somewhere between extremely subtle and over the top. But the character of Rob is a good one. While not a character one can relate to, the performance is extremely genuine. I'm just unsure if that is a good thing or a bad thing.

The movie skips around a greta deal of the time. We skip from one time period to another with no real moment in between. Flashbacks happen throughout scenes. And some scenes go right from reality to dreams or vice versa. By the end of the film reality and fiction have blended together to the point that there is no longer a dividing line anymore. I have no idea what ended up true and what ended up completely made up dream reality.

My personal interpretation is one that requires the end of the movie to explain. So, if you don't want spoilers, don't read on.

I think that the whole movie was an amalgamation dream after Rob got into a car crash. I think the passenger was obscured and never truly shown at the end of the movie because the movie itself wanted to be vague about just how much of the movie did or did not happen. I found the move somewhat clever, and I hope I'm not just missing something obvious in the meanwhile, reading deeply into pieces of the film that just aren't there.

Officer Lowry appearing multiple times in the film before he is "formally" introduced in the ending, kind of helps me with my interpretation, but that's about it. If I'm reading the movie correctly, it would be similar to Stay and Jacob's Ladder, but is probably most similar to something somewhere between Memento and Mulholland Drive-





-well, fuck-

Rufus Williams pulled it off, didn't he? This movie is the perfect weird blend of those movies. It never gets as noir-y as Memento, nor as logical. And it certainly never gets as weird and depressing as Mulholland Drive. But it does a good job at walking a tight middle road between the two. I'm impressed for the most part. I was not expecting that.

Anyway, the movie is about a man (Rob) whose wife has just died in a car accident. He is deeply in debt, cheating on his wife, and is losing track of reality with some severe memory issues. The whole movie kind of plays out as a psychological way of interpreting his life and his relationship with his wife. He has deep-seeded guilt that has left him both emotionally stunted and absolutely paranoid for no reason.

The emotionally-stunted comment comes from the death of the chicken. He never truly grieves for his wife. There are no tears shed, no true sadness over the death of someone he promised to love. Instead everything about his wife Katrina is shown and interpreted through his guilty conscience. He doesn't want Katrina's things moved (as shown with her toothbrush). He wants to blame himself for her death (even though he was nowhere close to her when she died). His debt and cheating cost them their relationship, but it also seems to have cost him his own mind.

Most of the movie is just that, collections of scenes that don't always make sense together (especially in the beginning of the movie) that all add up to a single revelation that we never really see as a viewing audience. Now, I like movies like this, but I can definitely understand when somebody doesn't. It makes the whole movie into this weird otherworldly story, which, in the end, may have very little to do with anything.

So, that's about it with the plot. The only other thing that I enjoyed was the main character of Rob starts running down a variety of stairs towards the end of the movie, Eventually he falls down one of these stairs. The main character running and falling down stairs may be the best part of this movie. It's just humorous in a very stupid way. Even though him falling down is supposed to be handled seriously, it just looks so silly. But that's just my opinion. I'm probably being mean.

Dr. Timothy Baldrica played by James McDaniel is a highlight of the movie. The rest of the actors vary only a small amount in how well they act in any given scene. I suppose you can say that I wasn't impressed with the rest of the actors at all. But none of them were terrible either. James McDaniel did a good job at both being very slightly antagonistic while being amusing and a bit of a straight man all at the same time. It was pretty good in general.

Okay, I think the last thing I have to mention is that this movie, at times, feels very similar to Secret Window, the Johnny Depp movie based on a Stephen King novella. I think it's mostly Lowry that gives me that impression. His odd words and personality, as well as the main character focusing his annoyance at this character kind of hits the same beats as Secret Window. But maybe I'm the crazy one here.

I wouldn't call this a horror movie per se. It's more psychological with some heavy mystery vibes thrown into the mix. But it does have a few somewhat unsettling moments, mostly involving Rob staring. Would I recommend it? Eh. It's better than its budget and resources should have allowed it to be. It can be compared to gaints while not being a giant at all itself. That's not a terrible thing.

It's a movie that plays around its limited budget in clever ways. Even the acting, which isn't always great, works well for the film's dreamlike quality at times. Hell, I liked it all right. While not a perfect movie, what with the hilarity of Andrew Bowen running down stairs like a madman, cinematography that looks like it happened twenty-five years ago, and odd acting from some of the actors, it still is pretty solid. I would say I recommend it with a caveat. If you do not like some of the movies I've mentioned earlier in this review, you should probably stay far away from this one. Other than that, try it out. It's a decent indie film that plays with reality in an interesting way.

October Nights Reborn

Hello there, everybody who might actually see this!

It's been a while- about a year since my last review and almost two since I really took this whole review blog seriously. There have been a bunch of issues that have prevented me from really keeping up the blog. And it basically comes down to that I've been focusing on jobs/moving around/life for the last two years.

That's about it.

But I really enjoy writing down my bad opinions about fiction and trying to justify myself. So, I'm going to continue in this tradition and finally make some content for this near-dead blog. I'm out of practice- so, I might be a little rusty. I seriously have barely watched a horror movie in the last two years because of the fact that I knew I didn't have the time or energy to review it. I should be coming into this year from a fairly new perspective.

I wouldn't be writing reviews again if I wasn't truly looking forward to doing this. I might be going for easier choices than previous years, but that isn't to say I won't touch upon some obscure choices as well. I will say that most of the movies I plan on reviewing this month I don't expect on giving bad reviews- although that is often true. We'll see what tat actually means.

Tonight the first October Nights review of 2016 will be posted. I'm excited to get back into the game of review.

Welcome to the Saquarry Analyses, and my October Nights!