October Horror 2013: 2 - The Uninvited

The Uninvited was originally from our Ghost Stories week.  I wasn't aware of it at the time but it's also an English language remake of the Korean ghost movie A Tale of Two Sisters, however it has several differences from that story and neither movie is particularly faithful to the folk story on which they're both based.

Anyway, The Uninvited is about Anna (played by Emily Browning) returning home after being institutionalized following an explosion at her home that killed her infirm mother.  Once there she has to contend with her rebellious sister and a strained relationship with her new step mother, who was previously her mom's home nurse.  It's an awkward situation, only made worse by her father's lack of engagement and the reappearance of the boy she used to mack it with.  Oh, and hallucinations.  She begins hallucinating at night, first an incredibly creepy version of her dead mother that slide and crawls stiffly along the floor and a pale red-haired girl who keeps jumping out and telling her she's next.

There's a lot of great surreal imagery like a falling glass of milk that turns into blood when it hits the floor.  It's got a pretty good creepy atmosphere but eventually it loses it to procedural mystery work, which was a bit disappointing.  I will say that I found it much less mind-bending that the Korean version, which I think at one point had 2 levels of hallucinations.  However the Korean movie had a much more darkly oppressive atmosphere while The Uninvited is set in absolutely beautiful places, which lend it a nice contrast when things go bump in the night.

The story is nicely coherent while still being interesting, though I think most audiences will figure out at least one of the twists way before the movie decides to reveal it.  It's definitely worth it for the hallucinations in the first half.  There was only one thing I really didn't like and a few minor disappointments.

Tomorrow's film is Secret Window, originally from Stephen King week.

--PXA

October Horror 2013: 1 - The House that Dripped Blood

The House that Dripped Blood, not to be confused with The House that Drips Blood On Alex, is a 1970 anthology film directed by Peter Duffell, who would become the 2nd unit director on Richard Donner's Superman, and written by Robert Bloch.  Bloch was probably most famous prior for penning Psycho and numerous other collaborations with Hitchcock, as well as Lovecraftian short stories.  The movie stars several well known actors including Denholm Elliot, John Pertwee, Christopher Lee, and Peter Cushing.

Framing Story:
Film star Paul Henderson (played by Pertwee in the 4th segment) has disappeared and a detective from Scotland Yard has arrived to investigate.  While interviewing the local police for background, Inspector Holloway is told repeatedly that there's something evil and wrong with the house.  He then interviews the landlord who owns the property and is told more stories about the horrible things that have happened there.

Method for Murder:
The first story concerns a horror novel writer (Denholm Elliot) who moves in to the house to focus and finish a novel concerning a strangler named Dominic.  He imagines his character coming to life and tormenting him and threatening his wife. Except he's not hallucinating, Dominic is real and strangles the author's psychologist after the wife suggests that he was strangling her when he saw Dominic doing it.  Except Dominic isn't Dominic, he's a failed actor the wife is having an affair with.  They planned to make the writer think he was insane and that his killed the psychologist, except Dominic has really gone mad and killed both of them, then strangles the wife.  It's pretty fun as a story and though I liked the idea of Dominic, he looked retarded.  The story worked really well in short format, while a longer movie would need to have a lot more superfluous elements to distract us from that the base story is a bit simplistic.

Waxworks:
An older gentleman played by Peter Cushing moves into the house next and spends his days listening to music and reading.  At one point he goes for a walk into town to find out if anything cool is there and discovers a wax museum.  He becomes transfixed by the wax sculpture of the museum curator's wife, who he's told is a murderer who was hanged.  A friend comes to visit and he also becomes transfixed by the figure.  It turns out the curator was the murderer and he kills the friend for coveting his wife, then when Peter's character comes to investigate what happened to his friend he finds the severed head on the platter the wife sculpture holds.  The curator then attacks him and we cut forward to someone else being transfixed by the wife sculpture that now holds a wax version of the head of Peter Cushing's character.  I thought this was the weakest, the killing took place outside of the house and the person who went mad had nothing to do with the house at all.  While the idea is nicely twisted the execution was lacking.

Sweets to the Sweet:
I wonder if the tagline to Candyman was a reference to this, or if it's just an older phrase?  Anyway, this segment concerns a widdower named John played by Christopher Lee who moves into the house with his awkward and withdrawn daughter.  Forbidding the daughter from entering local school, John hires a nanny/homeschool teacher for her.  The teacher and the daughter connect while John spends significant amounts of time being a complete bastard, at one point throwing a doll the teacher had bought for the girl into the fire.  The twist here is that both John's wife and daughter were powerful witches and he was fearful of them.  He restricted access to dolls and noneducational reading because he feared his daughter would construct a voodoo doll of him and use it to kill him.  Which she does using books on witchcraft from their private library and some candles.  This one was interesting initially because I was watching it just to understand why John was being such an asshole to his daughter, and then when the reveal happened it was over quickly enough and all the odd references earlier in the segment got nicely tied up that was a fun a tidy little segment.

The Cloak:
Famous actor Paul Henderson moves into the house where he will stay while filming a Hammer-style horror movie in which he plays a vampire.  He's a bit of a snobbish prick and after deciding that the cloak provided him by the wardrobe department won't do, he finds a business card for a local costume shop and then decides to check it out.  While there he buys a cloak the owner repeatedly tells him is "authentic" for his role as a vampire.  When puts on the cloak it legitimately turns him into a vampire, he no longer has reflection and despite being freaked out goes on to do the scene with his costar.  He bites her and she gets pissed at him.  As a way of making amends, he invites her over for dinner the next night and confesses he believes the cloak really turns you into a vampire.  He puts it on but it doesn't work, then it's revealed she's slipped him the prop cloak and already believes in the real one.  She puts it on, becomes a vampire, and attacks him.  This was probably the most fun to watch, although the premise was quite silly.  The acting is pretty tight, especially in the film-within-the-film where they're playing bad actors acting.  But the faces Pertwee makes are so freaking stupid looking they're hilarious.

Framing story wrap-up:
Deciding he's heard enough, Inspector Holloway enters the house to investigate, against everyone's advice.  He enters the basement and discovers a coffin containing a vampiric Paul Henderson, who turns into a bat and attacks him.  The landlord appears to give a "Spooooooky" sales pitch about the house needing a tenant, perhaps it could be you? Roll credits.

While not bad, this movie feels very shlockey and not particularly creepy, I don't know if the original reaction was to take it more seriously but I don't feel like it aged well.  Admittedly my modern sensibilities skew me into thinking that saying AN AXE MURDER HAPPENS does not do much to shock me, so for an audience not so well conditioned it may have been more visceral.  However I will give it that the stories were well constructed, if not having aged well and the camera work was good as far as I can tell.  The title is ironic because there's actually no blood in the movie, though it may just be "Dripping blood" in the sense that it has a very death-filled history.

And that's our first movie of the season.  Tomorrow we cover more tales from lists past with The Uninvited.

--PXA

October Horror 2013: Plans and movie list

And we're here again, and I'm listing out the movies in this horror season's marathon list.  This year we're doing another 4x7 split, leaving 3 days at the end for catchup and other entries.

Without further ado, the categories and films this year are:

Shit we missed:
At last, a chance to make up for past digressions and grab some of the movies we never quite made it to in previous years.

1. The House that Dripped Blood (1971) - Originally on 2012's Anthology week
2. The Uninvited (2009) - Originally on 2010's Ghost Stories week
3. Secret Window (2004) - Originally on 2012's Stephen King week
4. The Others (2001) - Originally on 2010's Ghost Stories week
5. The Shining (1980) - Originally on 2012's Stephen King week
6. Campfire Tales (1991) - Originally on 2012's Anthology week
7. Misery (1990) - Originally on 2012's Stephen King week

Bloody Disgusting:
This list derives from a list found here.  Apparently when I originally compiled that list into a Google doc for my own use (checking things off) I misattributed it to bloodydisgusting.com, hence the name.  In an effort to view many missed classics from this list, we've included it as a category this year and cherry-picked 7 films that either one of us hasn't watched.

1. The Mummy (1932) - #100
2. Ju-On (2000) - #15
3. Don't Look Now (1973) - #52
4. The Frighteners (1996) - #71
5. Scream (1996) - #98
6. The Legend of Hellhouse (1973) - #79
7. Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) - #37

Horror TV Shows:
Horror TV has become quite a bit more popular lately, and there are some shows we'd like to check out, so this week will involve 2-3 episodes from that night's show.

1. Harper's Island
2. Sleepy Hollow
3. Fear Itself
4. American Horror Story: Asylum
5. Hannibal
6. Hemlock Grove
7. Masters of Horror

Comedy Horror:
It's got zombies! And it's funny! How novel!

1. Toxic Avenger
2. 100 Bloody Acres
3. Idle Hands
4. Bubba Ho-Tep
5. I Sell the Dead
6. Fido
7. The Stuff

And there we are, folks.  Reviews will come in as I have the energy to write them.  Also scheduled to appear this month will be haunted attraction tours, as this has become a large part of our October traditions.

Currently we are planning on visiting:

• Ghoulie Manor (Taunton, MA)
• Lakeville Haunted House (Lakeville, MA)
• Screamer's Hollow (Sterling, NY)
• Sylvan Beach Halloweekends (Sylvan Beach, NY)
• Witch's Woods (Westford, MA)
• Spooky World + Spooky World lights out night (Litchfield, NH)
• Barrett's Haunted Mansion (Abington, MA)
• Spooky Acres (Millbury, MA)
• Fright Kingdom (Nashua, NH)
• Haunting of Barrett Park (Leominster, MA)

--PXA

Wearable Computing, why I don't think Apple is making an iWatch

Here's some barely edited, off the cuff IT speculation for you:


So wearable computing has been getting some press recently and of course people are coming out of the woodwork to say that in a year or two Apple will release their wearable device and the market will take off.  While this is probably valid and it fits Apple's M.O. to wait for smaller companies to setup a space and make some gaffes, most of the speculation has been that Apple will enter the smartwatch space based on patent applications and  acqui-hires by the rounded-corners giant.  Recently some people have been reporting that Apple's interest may have waned due to consumers not buying into smart watches at all.  The space remains pretty stagnant and it's likely that the gaffe right now is to even get into it.

However I can't imagine why a company like Apple would go into smart watches to begin with, even if the market for them was thriving.

Put simply, the other half of Apple's mostly winning strategy the past decade and a half or so is to distill the experience of whatever product down to a few of the most useful and simple features, and them package that up in a way that's tightly integrated with the rest of Apple's offerings.  The key common ground with all their devices has been the iTunes platform, where they've spent massive amounts of money on development and licenses for music, movies, newspapers, books, games, etc.  The iPod started as a music player, and iTunes sold music.  Then they added pictures, and then stepped to video.  And then iTunes sold movies and TV shows.  With the iPhone the iTunes application became a sync hub for that media plus an address book backup and a mobile app store.  I think iTunes got into books a bit before the iPad came out, but it's pretty clear that a major use case for the iPad was as an eBook reader.  This has all made sense, but the idea of them making a watch does not.  Listening to music on your watch is no good.  You'd be running a headphone cable to your wrist, and you use your hands and arms a lot during the day.  It's clumsy.  The screen is too small for movie watching to say anything of reading a book.  You probably couldn't play games on it either.  So why would they abandon everything they've done and make a watch that doesn't play to their strength of an integrated ecosystem?

My theory is that if Apple does enter wearable computing it will be with a Glass-like device.  It makes more sense.  It's something that they can make look good, as a major criticism of Glass has been that you look like a doofus while wearing it.  They could let it bluetooth pair with your iPhone to access its media.  It's a superb platform for listing to music and I bet it'd be a pretty good reader too.  They could integrate it with Apple maps to provide a HUD.  Probably a dozen other things I can't think of.  It'll be the iEyes or i^2 or something.  This is of course providing they're even thinking about it, but they may just see wearables as a fad for now.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

--PXA

Horror Pre-Season: The Conjuring & Insidious 2

Alright, so I'm a bit late to the plate this year with the pre-season, but I have been watching movies.  While I anxiously await Ti West's newest endeavor, James Wan has proven he's one of the genre's best directors.


The Conjuring came out in July and I saw a lot of similarity between it and what Wan was trying to do with Insidious.  They're both stories about average families that move into a new house and begin experiencing a series of terrifying supernatural events they're unprepared for until in a last-ditch effort they call on the services of a paranormal investigator.  However The Conjuring remains much more rooted in reality than Insidious did, and by doing so avoids repeating many of the issues I had with the original Insidious.


The Insidious franchise deals with evil spirits that exist in a supernatural realm called the "Further" who aim to possess the living.  In its world there are mediums who can communicate across the veil and astral projectors who can send their spirits into the Further and directly interact with the spirits therein.  In The Conjuring there is no spirit realm and so the ghosts in its story are just behind our reality, sometimes manifesting in the darkness and gaining strength to affect our world by the fear of their victims.

So The Conjuring is the story of the Perron family played by Ron Livingston and Lili Taylor who move into a new house in the country.  Immediately after moving in the family is plagued by night terrors, the wife wakes up with odd bruises, things rattle, pictures fall, the family dog refuses to enter the house and is killed.  Until the family contacts Ed and Lorraine Warren played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga.  The two are noted paranormal investigators and conclude the house is haunted.  They discover historical records about a witch who attempted to sacrifice her children to the devil and then killed herself on the property, which has now been divided up into several plots which have all been haunted.  The witch possesses each family's wife and drives them to kill their own children, leading to the plethora of tortured spirits which haunt the house.

The movie is absolutely top-notch and very frightening.  Some of the most effective scary scenes being carried on the performances of actors freaking out at literally darkness with nothing in it at all.  The pacing is pretty good and Wan does a pretty great job balancing the haunting story with the possession plot and extra setting when some of the haunting begins to affect the Warren's home.  The only thing I can really think of that plays against the movie's favor is one or two moments of feel-goody "love and happy memories save all" stuff and a few instances where it was hard to grasp the internal layout of the house due to the heavy use of tunnels behind the walls in the climax.  But aside from that it's pretty damn great movie.  When I watched it the first time I had thought that it was pretty much another crack at the same basic thing as Insidious, just with a more Catholic and 70's angle, and on that note I found it pretty successful.

But then they actually made more Insidious.  Chapter 2 starts off probably a few hours after the original ended and goes from there.  Off the bat I'll disclose that out of both Insidious movies and The Conjuring this is probably my least favorite.  While it was fun to watch and had some good scares some of it just felt a bit flatter and already-trod.  Which I suppose is the issue with horror franchises, once you reveal what's going on your sequel either needs to provide something new or MOAR!  To its credit Insidious 2 doesn't try to pad around pretending there's still a mystery as to what's going on and it's story is much more of a continuation of the original than another Insidious.  However the tone never quite seems to match up, while Insidious and The Conjuring had great natural peaks and valleys to the tension Insidious 2 seems to be permanently ratcheted about halfway up, in this perpetual slightly strange haze.  The Conjuring had a similar sense of muted colors that I recall but for Insidious to adopt it after the original was so visually striking seems like an odd move. 

It also seemed like a lot of the makeup on the iconic characters from the first movie was somewhat lacking.  The guy with the slicked back hair was really imposing in the original but when he shows up here he just seems like a sickly dude.  This may be hinting that the characters are perceiving him differently since they know a lot more about the supernatural elements so he's not as threatening anymore.  The elephant in the room both makeup wise and story wise is the old woman that's taken possession of Josh's body at the end of the original Insidious and is now wandering around in a Patrick Wilson suit.  Without going too into detail on the twisted origin story of this installment's big bad, it's a bit trite.  I've seen the twist a few times before this and probably the only time it was really well done was the first time I saw it, which is unlikely to have been the first time it was done in horror/mystery.  There are definitely more interesting things they could have done with their setup, which was actually pretty good.  Also compared to the crazy chase through the Further in the original, the climax of this one is a  bit of a letdown.  It's over just a few minutes after they realize what needs to happen and it's decidedly un-supernatural.

All that said I wouldn't say it was bad.  The performances were decent and it was an entertaining movie, still better than the vast majority of the horror I watch.  Just comparatively it falls flat against its predecessor and The Conjuring feels much more like a spiritual sequel to Insidious.

The Beerening: Bagel Beer thoughts and tasting notes

However, I got a bad cold afterwards and didn't want to wait so long to get a tasting notes video up.

Tasting Notes:

 Bagels were very good.  Not having any real basis for comparison between homemade bagels, I would say they were very nice.  Slightly sweet, not too doughy.  Not dense but not exactly fluffy, the inside seemed to rip more like pretzel than bread.  Also chewy but not too much so.  One interesting thing I noticed was spots of the outside where hot break material got stuck to the bagels didn't cook like the rest of the outside and make the shell you'd expect.  It didn't effect the inside or have much of a noticeable flavor.

 To the beer: As I mentioned in the video, I went a bit off style with the inclusion of the roasted barley.  It's just a bit past the dark end of what the BJCP called ESB, maybe more into Brown ale territory.  As I said though, I don't mind the color too much.  I like ESB more when it's toward the darker end and a bit chewier, which is what I was hoping to get with the roast barley and oats.

It's slightly cloudy and brown (though not quite as dark as my Brown Ale), and forms a nice white head.  However the head retention hasn't been very good for a beer with a pound of oats, though it may just be an effect of being under-carbonated.  I'm still dialing in the PSI and had it too low for a while so it might just be pouring aggressively and off-gassing instead of more natural head.  Though maybe this is a side effect of using the wort for bagels?  Jury's out, which means both this bitter and bagel making need to be done again.  In the name of the scientific method.

There's a lot of chocolatey flavor from the roast malt in there, which I was expecting, but it is much more dominant than I wanted.  I was hoping that it would be there but with some sweetness and caramel behind it as well, which is lacking.  Overall, it is a very nice beer that has a clean flavor and is quite easy drinking and I am powering through the pints.

Notes for the future:

The bagels were delicious, but as you can see in the video they fell apart.  I need to investigate alternate methods of forming the ring shape.  2 of the 6 bagels held together very well, and I think those were done by working water into the ends of the joint before working it together and smoothing the outside of it very well.  I was worried they were too wet, but that may just be what's required.  Another idea is to form balls and then poke a hole through and stretch the dough.  Again, I'll just need to make more bagels.

I'm enjoying the beer but I think it can get closer to my original intent with a few small changes.  Dropping the roast barley to even less should tone down the chocolate to a more manageable level and increasing the range of crystal malts and mashing higher should help raise the Final Gravity.  I'm beginning to think I measured wrong when I was at the store and bought half a pound of it.  I'll still use less next time I brew this, but it's amazing that at only 2% of my total grain bill a heavily roasted grain had such a profound impact on my beer.

Anyway, I may re-iterate this later in another tasting video.

Cheers!

--PXA

Boomshine et all location update AGAIN

So, such is my luck that just a few weeks after I posted the previous HTML5 experiment location update my VPS provider decided to pull out of the data center my VPS was located in due to shoddy maintenance on the physical hosts.  Coming August 1st that VPS will go offline.  I've been moving my data from that machine to a new one in another data center, so from now on the HTML5 code including Boomshine will be available at:
http://172.246.127.134/html5/

And the existing location mentioned in the last post will go offline on August 1st.

I had no idea it was coming, but hopefully this is the last one for a while and it's stable now.

...I should just get a domain name already, anyone know of a reasonably priced registrar that won't hold my domains hostage (I'm looking at you, ENOM)?

--PXA