Dobes Zone

 It's been a busy October and I'm realizing that I have not shared anything to my blog in a while. At a friend's suggestion, I'm cross-posting some of my letterboxd reviews of some of my favorite new watches as well as rewatches from this month. I watched in total, 42 feature length films and 5 short films , some on my own, some in streams I hosted or in streams hosted by others. Everything I watched this month was horror or a thriller dealing with horror themes.   Here's a couple of my favorite new watches from this month. It's not all of them, but these felt like the reviews most worth sharing.   Eyes of Fire (1983) A lovely dark fairy tale set in pre-revolutionary war colonial America. An arrogant preacher has seduced a married woman and when the townsfolk try to have him hanged for it, he and his followers set out into the woods to start a new settlement- which they are wholly unprepared for. Also to be fair, hanging a guy for witchcraft and devilry bec

 Content warning: discussions of rape and CSA. Also spoilers about the series and how it ends. If you don't care about spoilers, give it a read.        Where to begin, really? I finally finished my watch through of Banana Fish, a series I'd started on some years prior but hadn't watched in its entirety until recently. I'd also read through a good portion of the manga and it's interesting to note that the anime is fairly faithful in its adaptation- just updating the setting to the contemporary and swapping the Vietnam war for the gulf war in the backstory.     At its heart, Banana Fish is a tragic romance between two teen boys from vastly different worlds- Ash Lynx, a former child prostitute turned gang leader who'd been groomed by a mafia don to be a successor, and Eiji Okumura, a gentle Japanese boy accompanying a journalist as an assistant. They meet on a story focused on Ash's gang and their lives get turned upside down as Ash is caught up in a deadly con

       Wow! Honestly I love the way Castlevania wrapped up. For all its grimness and violence and tragedy, the series is ultimately quite hopeful- its characters have chances to grow and change, to think of themselves as their own people and not beholden to someone else's grand plan, instead moving towards ideas of building a kinder future for everyone. Isaac especially has a neat story arc and I love how it resolved. Alucard also gets a girlfriend who is bisexual and poly, good for him. All-in-all a fun watch, would recommend if you like horror, fantasy, and dynamic battle scenes. Playing the games is not necessary for you to enjoy or understand the series.   Moral of the story- just don't fucking kill Dracula's wife. Here's screencaps, though I didn't cap the last two eps because that felt spoiler-heavy.

 More screencaps of Castlevania. I'm still enjoying the series, though it's going darker as the story is expanding beyond the now deceased Dracula and into the worlds of other powerful vampires like Carmilla and as we follow the lives of the forgemasters Isaac and Hector. Sypha and Trevor also run into trouble with an insane Orthodox church that's turned to devil worship. I like how every form of the church in this series is shown in a terrible light.  We also get lots of sex and sexy betrayals in this season. It's a real shame that Alucard doesn't get to have a sexy polycule but oh well, it's nice to be thrown a bone once in a while. I do kind of wonder if this was a last minute writing decision because they just had no idea how to handle this dynamic, or they wanted a cheap bit of tragedy. It really didn't feel cohesive. On the plus side, we do get a lesbian vampire couple.  There's of course, also tons of monsters. My screencaps also decided to upload