Sorry for the Absence (Apologies to all 3 of you)

I'm back, after a long absence due to musical side stepping, various school and job disruptions, not to mention I forgot my bloody password (and I'm not telling what it is, I have it written down as 2hip4l!fe... oops!), I return with a bunch of subsequent thoughts. So, let's not waste time, let's dive right in.

This past year of 2010 came and went, and I enjoyed most of the movies I went to see. The horror films I saw were few because there wasn't really much that interested me. Wolfman came early on in the year, and I enjoyed it for it's acting, atmosphere, and the rampages, but it didn't scare me, which is a bit of a bummer. The Last Exorcism came out half way through everything, and I chose it all because Bloody-Disgusting.com is a bunch of independent film whores. I'm honestly not joking when the review for the film came out and said "Don't read this until you see the movie". Right there I should have known better, but no, I was taken in by the trailer. My main problem was that it was too holy of a story, and not as in god holy, I mean look how holy this Swiss cheese is after I put it through a hole punch a few hundred times. The plot revolved around the authorities not seizing this film by the end, due to the fact that it shows people being murdered as well as leave you with the question, "If the film makers are dead, who pieced this together?" To put it short, the film just left me with too many questions. And Black Swan ended my year in horror, and I was so happy to see it. I've not really been a fan of Darren Aronofsky, his only films I can really say I've seen so far have been The Wrestler and Requiem for a Dream, and while I'm happy The Wrestler brought back Mickey Rourke Requiem for a Dream was something that didn't make sense to me, but then again I don't do drugs. Black Swan was a fantastic film with Natalie Portman as Nina, a ballerina dancer dealing with the pressures of playing a dual role in Swan Lake, her over bearing mother trying to live her life through Nina, and a rival ballerina dancer who can dance as well as she can with more emotion put into everything, played by Mila Kunis. I'm hoping this film gets a lot Oscar appraisal as it deserves it.

While I did catch those films in theatres, I skipped over a couple due to budget restraints, which would include Piranha 3-D, Paranormal Activity 2 and Let Me In. I should mention I skipped over these select films for reasons other than financial restraint. Piranha 3-D came across as a reboot since there's already been a film series about piranha's made back in the 80's and I wasn't going to spend money on seeing it in 3-D, I already filled my 3-D quota this past year with Clash of the Titans (it was my birthday, my dad thought it'd be a fun movie to see, which it was, just not 3-D fun), Jackass 3-D (scarily enough, had the best 3-D), and Resident Evil: Afterlife (Second favorite of the series so far, first favorite being Apocalypse). Paranormal Activity 2 because I figure the best way to get scares out of it would be to see it by myself in my dark room in the basement of my home, like with the first one. And Let Me In I skipped over because it was a bloody remake, and I don't care how many times you tell me it was good, I and a mass part of the public don't care, we don't want a remake of a movie that came out with in the past 2 years. You can tell me a computer is good at playing a game of chess against you, but I'll take an actual board with pieces and a person to play against because it's what was there before the computer and still functions better than the computer.

I also started taking more of an interest in script writing this past year. I mainly started started writing again because I had motivation after seeing some truly bad movies from SyFy. One I started working on was about a woman who inherits her great aunt and uncles mansion, and eventually starts to deal with a subtle haunting at first, but quickly escalates to frantic nightmarish images that nearly drive her insane. It's in the vein of The Shining, Rosemary's Baby, and Suspiria, taking from the isolation of The Shining, a twist of Rosemary's Baby and some of the shock of Suspiria. In the lead role I thought Gemima Rooper, most known for her role as Thelma on the short lived T.V. show Hex, would be excellent, she has had my attention since I first saw her in the before mentioned series, and I feel she has potential for the role. The other project I began work on is a Frankenstein like film. It's about a girl in high school who is pretty much a big nerd, and she builds herself a boyfriend to keep herself company as well as to try and write a thesis on the creation of life. It has a lot of depth to it, the creation trying to comprehend why it is the way it is, the girl coming to realize what she's done is horrible and should not have even been attempted. The role of the girl could be played by anyone really, though I'd probably choose a plain looking girl, try to make it realistic, make the monster to be like someone who's like the modern equivalent of Emilio Estevez or even Michael C Hall, just have them scarred up on the face and not really give them too many lines. There was an idea of having B.J.C. from the Blog Day of the Woman as the school counsellor who confronts the girl about her activities, only to later have her eyes gouged out by the creation and somehow killed from there, maybe fall down a flight of stairs and break her neck with the blindness she's dealing with. It's still got a lot to go through, but I'm working on it every chance I get. Some of you might say "Hey, that sounds like that god awful horror movie Lady Frankenstein!" Well, yes, that would be close to what it is, but it's more like Buffy, if Buffy got away with people getting their eyes gouged out with bloody effects.

I would also like to announce I'm now in a band. The name of this band is Dumpster Mummy. I've been switched from a guitarist to a bassist for the band as they were short a bassist and I picked it right up the first day of practise. I really can't put enough of a plug in for this band, it's like New Wave American Heavy Metal crossed over with Grunge (we do a cover of Nirvana's Tourette's), and we already have enough songs written for a full album, 15 songs that have been written and are ready to be played live. I should also mention who else is in this band, there's also my good friend Willie on vocals, and he's got one hell of a scream, he can honestly scream over our instruments during practise. There's Shawn on drums, who's the brother of a friend I had back in high school, and he's just bad-ass on the drums, playing like a young Sean Reinhert. And then there's Brad, our guitarist, and holy crap, this guy could replace Mark Morton from Lamb of God and no one would know the difference. Craziest thing about this band is that I had never played a bass before in my life, and yet it's been three weeks and I have the songs that were written before I got involved down to a perfection, and have even contributed writing to some of our brand new selection, so far a grand 7 songs in total. It feels great to be performing in an actual band now, so I can't wait to do some form of touring in the summer.

Anyway, this has been what it's like for me over the past... 6 MONTHS!!! Holy crap, I got some blogs to be posting. In the mean time, I'll hopefully remember my password in future and I'll tell about more of the movie and music ideas I have to share.

Hasta La Vista!

Piranha 3-D looks like a waste of time.

For those of you fortunate enough to not know about Piranha 3-D. Stop reading this and keep it that way. For those of you who do and are actually looking forward to this, go ahead and waste your money. I just can't get my head around the slasher genre these days. I used to love watching these awesome horror films like Friday the 13th and Black Christmas; these films were what I craved when I was blood thirsty and getting through high school. I couldn't stand a weekend with out a relentless killer being let on the loose on a group of hapless teenagers looking for sex and inebriation from various drugs and alcohol. Now, that seems to have changed. I look at todays slasher films, and they're either to over the top in violence or they're just to lame for me to take seriously. Piranha 3-D is a little bit of both mixed together, with a major dollop of 'WHY?!' tossed in. The reason 'WHY?!' is thrown in there is because of this, Why do we need a remake of an already crappy horror film? Why can't we make it less like Jaws if it was released for exploitation cinema and more like an original concept? And why is Bloody-Disgusting so pumped about this movie when The Last Exorcism is coming out a week after this movie? The answers are all simple.

Money for the first 2, and because they don't know any better. If anything has taught me about remakes is that most of these films that are remade never have the same quality from the original; examples include Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and anything else that Michael Bay has touched. While, remakes like Halloween and Friday the 13th I do mildly enjoy because they can technically be considered sequels, they still don't hold a candle to the originals and what they did for the industry. The real exceptions I make to the 'remakes suck' argument are a few from the 80's, namely The Blob, The Fly and The Thing, but even these are being considered for reboots. What it all comes down to though, it's always about the money. If stupid kids will flock to a movie filled with tits and violence, then it'll make at least a couple million.

Though I still wonder why there hasn't been anything really new for a while now. It seems that we've run out of creativity for movies these days, and while yes some could stand to be remade (I'm still waiting for my Metropolis and London After Midnight thank you very much), the ones they are remaking aren't that old. Movies like My Bloody Valentine, Evil Dead and even something about a Scream remake (that would just be META, maybe they should put in rules about how to survive a remake). These movies aren't even that old, Scream came out less than 20 years ago and you just can't recapture the same feeling from My Bloody Valentine, particularly in 3-D.

And with Bloody-Disgusting, I'm not going to lie, this year has been a little slow on the horror films. Last year we had great horror movie after great horror movie, with The Orphan coming out in the summer, Halloween 2 closing out the summer (it's a sequel, it doesn't follow the ways of the original Halloween 2), Zombieland and Paranormal Activity both coming out strong in October taking over Saw (at least I think they did) and the release of the great Halloween anthology Trick R' Treat. This year though, we've had The Wolfman... and that's it so far. We have The Last Exorcism to look forward to, and the 'final' Saw movie which is going to be shown in 3-D. But we've also had those craptastic Twilight movies coming out and being labelled as horror (please, if that's horror then Casablanca is really Lolita), that hasn't really helped out with the name of horror in my opinion. But none the less, Bloody-Disgusting should recognize a crap movie when they see one, considering they did a list of movie from this past decade that completely sucked, and a good amount of them they were ranting and raving about with pictures from the sets and exclusive footage and what not. That said, Bloody-Disgusting is actually quite split in it's personality over movies.

So while yes, this may seem a little contrived of me to harp on bad remakes of bad horror films, as well as the sites that promote them, this is just me making my opinion vocalized. If you really feel that a movie like Piranha 3-D is worth seeing, go do it. I've done just as bad things before (Prom Night, why is that a movie about killing teens gets a lower rating than a movie that shows people smoking pot) and I'll probably do similar again. I'm just trying to warn some of this trend that can be seen from a mile away and get them to stick to original films, maybe then we can try and send a message to the sparkling city and see no more remakes for a while now.

And for those that are curious about my dislike towards the film, there's a 9 minute clip of badly recorded film from a screening up on Bloody-Disgusting. Here is the link so you can see it for yourself.

http://www.bloody-disgusting.com/news/21121

Welcome, to my very first Blog!

What to say in my first Blog? Well, why don't I start out with introductions. My name is Gilbert. I'm a Canadian script writer. I write alot of scripts and stories pertaining to horror, but I have been branch out a little bit with some different genres, including fantasy and dramatic. Here is where I plan on posting short stories and beginnings to scripts I have written so far, I just want my work to be evaluated by the public and get a perception of what people think of it so far. Over the next week I'll be posting little bits and peices of stuff I've written and even put up some concepts I have, just to see what people think of my ideas. I also like to play alot of music, and I'm currently trying to compose my own songs, so once I figure out to record some demos and publish them onto here, I'll add some other things I'd like to get some feedback on. The last thing this blog is for is a spot where I can discuss my view on cinema. I might be a bit heavy on horror due to the fact that it's the only thing I really stay up to date with, but I will make attempts to talk about other things. Anyway, I hope that things go over well with this new Blog here. Until the future, take care y'all!