Dobes Zone

House is an interesting film that I'd seen before but had not revisited in a while. Now that the film is on Blu Ray it felt like a good time to rewatch and take some screen caps of the paintings that feature in the film- some of which give little plot hints about the weird goings-on in the haunted house (though they're largely in the background for ambience more so than plot!) I'd always liked the weird surreal paintings and wanted to get a good look at them again. Roger Cobb is a Vietnam veteran and a horror novelist whose son went missing, causing his divorce. When the aunt who raised him commits suicide in her eerie old house, he returns to stay there and attempts to write a book recounting his experience in Vietnam. As we find out, the house itself and his past may have had a role in the disappearance of his son as strange creatures and phenomena appear. The film has a somewhat silly tone that cuts through the sadness of Roger's ordeal. We get a sense of his trauma ...

  I watched this film recently and wanted to write a small review and share some screencaps of the film.     The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020) is an interesting and at times darkly funny film. A recovering alcoholic cop with severe anger issues has to keep himself together while investigating a horrifying string of murders that seem to be perpetrated by a supernatural killer. He very much does not keep his shit together as more and more evidence seems to point towards a werewolf being the killer.     I really enjoyed how all the characters felt like real and flawed people. What I find especially done well is that our victims aren't just nameless one notes either, the film makes sure to give us little vignettes of who they are before they meet their gruesome end. It's not something I see often and it helps heighten this feeling of what's at stake and how it's affecting everyone around them. Not that I mind, of course, an exciting creature feature or slashe...

      I'll be reviewing films I watched (like I do on my letterboxd occasionally) but I primarily want to share some pretty screenshots.      Around 2001 I saw the trailer for Brotherhood of the Wolf and being a child who was very much smitten with cool martial arts and action I asked my parents to see it. They deemed the movie too scary and violent and chose not to let me watch. I'd seen Alien, Species, Jaws, and Pitch Black by that point but it is likely that child me would have found this film tedious to sit through. It's slow and luscious in parts and quite an expansive story. Just as well I watched the film 20 years later.      In a lot of ways Brotherhood of the Wolf is very much its time period- it's a mashup of period piece, fantasy, and martial arts with the lusciousness of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992). Two men, a knighted naturalist and his Iroquois companion, arrive in the province of Gevaudan with orders from the king t...

 It's been a moment since I updated and also a moment since I finished reading a book- having been side-tracked with projects and other life matters. But as promised, I'm writing up a little review of Michael Peak's Catamount- a loose sequel to his first novel Cat House which I wrote about previously .                       My copy of Catamount, with another lovely cover illustrated by Dan Craig       Catamount picks up with Sarena, the mountain lion from Cat House who allied herself with the housecat protagonists of the first novel, and with reporter Laura Kay. The book follows Sarena and Laura as they both follow independent but interconnected paths. Sarena is looking for more mountain lions and befriends an equally lonely bald eagle. Laura is following both a story on a proposed mountain lion hunt put forth by the game commission and a story about some vicious guard dogs that escaped. It is also...

       Something I've been mulling on for a while is how a certain flavor of online media analysis has shaped how people engage with art- be it visual art, writing, film, etc- and it's seriously lowering the bar of discussion. Largely this type of discussion revolves around negative reactions to media without taking an in-depth look at themes or context and it is very arbitrary. In simple terms, a lot of this discussion comes to us in the format of "snark", a style of catty review that was popularized in the internet of the 00's and generally focuses on elements being inaccurate or just not up to the author's personal standards. While "snark" can be funny to some, it is a shallow way of approaching media and bases itself mostly on kneejerk off-the-cuff reactions. It adds very little to a person's understanding or appreciation of art.      The next evolution of the "snark" style is the YouTube phenomenon of "reaction" videos, w...

 I've been carrying around far too many science fiction and fantasy paperbacks for decades and that's a problem I'm not aiming to change any time soon. As usual, I'm also a sucker for talking animal fiction, especially when it's aimed at adult audiences. Not too long ago I learned about the novel Cat House (1989) from a friend, who mentioned the plot and it sounded weird enough to compel me to dig up a copy for myself. I also grabbed its sequel Catamount. More about that later. My copy of Cat House. Beautiful cover by illustrator Dan Craig     The hook of Cat House is a plot about bored spayed house-cats starting a cat brothel so they can mate with tomcats who aren't interested in having kittens. The females take prey animals as payment but that's more for fun than anything else, since they're all well-fed house-cats. This ends up angering some of the unfixed cats, who consider the whole thing unnatural. The broader story is about the conflict of human d...

       Well, it feels funny to be back at an older sort of place like this. After deleting tumblr (rip) when its algorithms started flagging anything mildly peach-colored as "adult content", there wasn't really a space for me to blog. Instagram is nice in some ways, but it's more about pictures than words and has an algorithm that tends to favor frequent posting and especially videos. Twitter allows me to post some little blurbs and I do share my work and some hobby things there, but frankly the less time spent scrolling a timeline the better. Twitter is no longer really a space where I keep up with friends and see what they're doing, it's more an onslaught of news where everyone discusses the trending topic(s) of the day. There's staying informed and then there's whatever the hell Twitter is- a form of self harm, I think.     So I find myself returning to something more insular and traditional because I really missed having a space to talk about thing...