A Trip to the Adult Nookstore

As a completely unexpected and wonderful surprise, Mrs. Leaux recently bought me a Nook ("a kept man" she said, shaking her head as we left Barnes & Noble- but hey- as long as the swag is this nice I suppose I can put up with that sort of comment). The Nook works largely on the same instant gratification principal as devices like the iPod. Users can access a massive online library, and when a specific title catches your eye, click- it’s yours.  In order to help lure newbies, there are a number of titles available for free. Granted, your not going to find any bestsellers in this category, but come on…can anyone really resist a free Nook book with a title like Bubba and the Dead Woman?

“Bubba is a good old boy with lots of problems. His ex-fiancée is deader than a door nail and everyone thinks he dun did it. His house is haunted. His mother is running an illegal gambling ring. His dog likes to bite people too much. And he's got to find out who really did it before the sheriff throws him in jail...again."

 

Don’t even try and tell me that doesn’t sound awesome.

Encouraged by this early find, I continued perusing by category, then filtering by price, which I have to admit is easier than walking up and down the isles with my head cocked at a 45 degree angle so I can read the spines. of books I'll never pick up. Not long after I found Bubba, I came across another interesting title: Not Just an Orgy. One can only guess at the context:

“Hey, hon, what’s going on this weekend?”

“Nothing much. I think the Harrises are hosting another orgy, but that’s about it.”

“Well...hold on a sec. It’s not just an orgy, you know. There’s a lot more to it than that.”

 

Anyway, it would appear from the sheer number of, um, descriptive titles that lit-porn is quite the popular genre: The Best Roomate (a bit vague, but the cover hints at what makes her “the best”)… Fingering Rachel (for the crime, of course) ...My Trailer Trash Girlfriend and Her Family (presumably a tale of seething class conflict)...and that timeless American classic, I Can’t Help It That I’m A Slut (which we can only assume chronicles our heroine’s fight against the oppressive social stigma brought on by her slutty-ness). All of these seemed fairly upbeat and chipper compared to some of the more lurid looking entries, of which thankfully there were few (I mean, Malcolm and the Rent Boy..!? Really? WTF?).

In all fairness, there’s a lot of great non-porny material available in the Nook store, and I’ve just begun to skim the surface. Although I fell strongly that there’s still value to be had in actually holding a tome in your hands and turning pages (coffee table books, for example, do not translate well to the Nook), I’m really kind of taken with the idea that I can store my own personal library online, rather than taking up space I don’t have with books I’ll probably never read again but can’t seem to let go of. At the moment, I’m thoroughly enjoying my first download, Sex on the Moon- which is not about people having sex on the moon, so get your mind out of the gutter.

End of the Begining: The Reveaux Redux

Okay, time for some changes around here.

Horror movies are great and all, but all horror all the time is a bit of a drag. All anything all the time is a bit of drag, actually- not to mention boring to write about. Not that I was ever Mr. Prolific, but I’ve been doing this horror blogging thing for a couple of years now, and it’s pretty well played out for me. So basically that leaves this blog  at a crossroads. I figure I’ve got three choices here: shut down the Reveux and start a new blog; hang up the blogger thing altogether and do something more productive with my time; or retrofit this space entirely. I’ve decided to go with that last option- first, because at the end of the day I seem incapable of shutting my trap completely, and second, because I’m too lazy to start over from scratch. So starting pronto, I’m switching over to a free-form, shoot-from-the-hip format.

So…what does that mean, exactly? Well, first and foremost it doesn’t mean the horror movie stuff is necessarily going anywhere. I’d still rather watch a good horror film than just about anything else, and I’m rarely without an opinion on the state of the genre, so it’s pretty much status quo as far as that aspect of the blog goes. (actually, I'm hopeful writing about other things will make me more enthusiastic about my horror-related posts) I guess what it does mean is that if I wake up tomorrow and want to write about plastic cutlery, or why Kurt Cobain’s suicide was the best thing ever to happen to Nirvana, or why I hate going up into my attic, well, that’s what’s going up.  

I realize this approach is likely to kill some (most? all?) interest in this place. Most of the regulars here are devoted members of Blogger’s horror blogging community and (understandably) do not give a rat’s ass about my thoughts on microbrews, the Allman Brothers or the NFL lockout. I promise not to take it personally if you scratch the Reveaux from your feed, guys. You signed up for a horror blog, not a bunch of random unhinged nonsense. At the same time, I’m hopeful someone, somewhere, will enjoy listening to me run my mouth about other things- there are all sorts of disturbed people in the world, after all.

Which brings me to the somewhat touchy subject of Blogger “followers”. For the most part, I’ve always followed what seems to be the generally accepted etiquette of “You follow me, I follow you.”  This practice made sense, at least initially- a sort of co-op approach that offers participants some exposure within their particular Blogger niche (and anyone who says they aren’t looking for at least some exposure is full of it- why else are you posting your thoughts online for everyone to read?). However, this like-for-like approach leads to a couple of related things happening over time, neither of them good. One, you end up with a certain percentage of followers who actually could care less about your blog. You never hear from them after that initial visit; they’re just fishing for the reciprocal “follow” in order to run up their own follower count, the way some people collect absurd numbers of Facebook friends (I mean, come on… you have eight hundred “friends”? Really?). Two, you inevitably wind up cluttering your feed with a whole bunch of blogs that you never actually read (either because of a lack of time or because you never really liked them that much to begin with). So I’m putting an end to this cycle of lunacy and gradually cleaning out my follow list. Here’s the deal: if the blog is one I comment on or visit regularly (or semi-regularly), it stays. If I rarely or never visit, it goes, whether its author follows me or not. Again, it's nothing personal; just a little common sense housecleaning. 

So that’s where I’m at. I haven’t worked out all the details yet, but I’m looking forward to doing something different in this space.  

Insidious Works (Most of the Time)

 

It’s easy to look at Insidious and make a big deal out of its shortcomings. That’s usually the case when a movie drives all the way to the goal line of greatness, then fumbles instead of punching it in. But while some of that criticism is valid, I’m getting a little sick of all the bitching and moaning about how this or that aspect “ruined” the movie. Horseshit, I say. While it's not quite the film it could have been, Insidious is still a very good…ghost story? Haunted house story? Hybrid? Whatever the case, it works far more often than not, even if it comes perilously close to coming off the rails down the stretch.
 

I'm a firm believer that horror movies don't have to be original to be good, and Insidious is a classic example. In fact, it's at its best during the first two thirds, when it frequently acts as an homage to several of the most notable horror films of the last thirty years, including the film it borrows most heavily from, Poltergeist (see, when good movies lift scnes and ideas, it's called an "homage"; when bad movies do it, it's a "cheap rip-off"). So yeah, you've heard it before: a little boy (Ty Simpkins) slips into a coma after an encounter with some unseen terror; weird and scary stuff begins to happen in the house; the initially skeptical parents (Rose Byrne and Patrick Wilson) eventually feel threatened enough to call in the local psychic cavalry (Lin Shaye). Formula to be sure, but it's all so well assembled that I didn't even mind the liberal use of jump-scares, something I normally deduct points for. They're all well set up and make perfect sense in the context of what's happening, and you never feel like you're being clubbed to death by having every trick in the book thrown at you at once. Plus points here.

It's actually only when Insidious deviates from the formula that things get a bit lost, with a somewhat fuzzy stretch run that seems to meander a bit when compared to the tightness of the first hour. It's not enough to spoil the experience, but it does point back to the idea that the film walks right up to the brink of being a classic, only to back off at the last minute.


(One minor production note: there's been a bit of fuss about the a fact that a key apparition looks a bit too much like Darth Maul from Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. And...he does, actually. Not sure what the makeup people were thinking here. Still, his first appearance will definitely make you jump.)

Insidious does plenty of cribbing, but with style

I’m still having a hard time getting over the fact that this film is the work of director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannel, the perpetrators behind the original Saw, a film which I probably loathe more for the insipid franchise it spawned that for its own obnoxiousness (Dead Silence, the duo's other collaboration, was marginally better). Maybe these two copped a page from bluesman Robert Johnson’s book and made a Faustian bargain for more talent or something. In any event, Insidious is a colossal upgrade for the team, trading in the brain-dead R-rated splatter for a cool, well constructed story that feels a lot more edgy than its PG-13 rating might suggest (I know I’ve said before that I don’t have any problem with violence and gore when they’re used smartly, but seriously- this idea that horror has to be rated R to be effective is way past its due date and needs to be shot and buried in the desert once and for all).


Hardcore devotees of gore-fests, torture porn and other and "extreme" horror will likely have little use for Insidious other than to ridicule it, but even with its obvious flaws and shameless cribbing, it's strong enough to have an appeal slightly beyond the borders of the horror genre. For anyone looking for a solid tale of the supernatural, I can easily recommend it.

Stake Land Is Dead On

Although I really didn't know anything about it going in, on the surface Stake Land seemed to promise a familiar ride. A mysterious, stoic traveler and his teenage protege wage a bloody fight for survival while traveling through a post-apocalyptic American landscape infested with vampires. *yawn* Nothing wrong with a little riffing on the classic I Am Legend premise, mind you, but let's face it: this is territory that's been covered ad nauseam in the last decade. Just minutes in,  I could see what was coming: swap the vampires for zombies and Stake Land was going to be Zombieland, minus that film's big budget, big names, and frat house sense of humor.

Shows what I know.

 (Insert obvious pain-in-the-neck joke here)

Turns out, Stake Land is very much its own film and what's more, it's damn good- even great in spots. In fact, I was kind of floored by how much i enjoyed it. Jim Mickle's screenplay may not be anything to write home about in the originality department, but as a director he clearly knows how to get maximum value out of a scene. Because so much essential information is conveyed from that actions of the characters, Stake Land manages to avoid slipping in to the tar put of unnecessary exposition (a trap especially common to the apoco-horror sub genre). I've never seen Mickle's other full length feature, Mulberry St (from After Dark's 2007 batch), but I definitely plan on hunting it down soon.

 Kelly McGillis hasn't aged a..well, she's still cool, anyway.

By the same taken, I was largely unfamiliar with the cast here (and considering this is a horror movie blog, shouldn't I know this shit?), but they all turn in understated and effective performances. The badass antihero, referred to only as Mister, is conveyed with considerable menace by Nick Damici (and don't try and act all cool like you know who he is, unless you actually do, in which case my hat's off to you). His teen sidekick, Martin, is played by some kid named Connor Paolo, who I apparently would have recognized if I watched Gossip Girl, which I don't. But you know who's hanging around here that I do recognize? Kelly Friggin' McGillis, that's who! I hadn't seen her anything in forever, and even though she's changed quite a bit and doesn't have a whole lot to do here, just seeing her on the screen again gave me a brief nostalgia buzz  (I mean, damn: Witness, Top Gun, The Accused...the lady was on a serious roll in the 80s).

So...what were we talking about? Right. Stake Land is a definite recommendation here. It may look like same ol' same ol', but trust me: everything about it is a cut above. And speaking of cutting, there's some good stuff going on with these vampires. If you're as sick of the over-stylized metrosexual weenie sacks that pass for vampires in things like True Blood (yeah, I was gonna say Twilight, but that horse has been dead for a while), you'll love these nasty...uh...things. Taking a que from films like 28 Days Later and 30 Days of Night, the vamps of Stake Land creep around at night in a sort of ravenous delirium. They cannot be bargained or reasoned with. It's either you or them, which is exactly as it should be.