Dobes Zone

       I realized, to my slight shame, that I never finished writing this review for The Island of Dr. Moreau, a book that I read months ago for the first ever assignment for the book club I'm running. So far we've also read Watership Down , Under the Skin, The Lives of the Monster Dogs, and now Cycle of the Werewolf! I'll have to write my reviews for the other books as well, but one step at a time I suppose.     I'd read a fair bit of H. G. Wells as a kid, being a huge sci-fi fiend and also a precocious early reader that got into a lot of heavier adult books while my peers were still on middle grade or YA books. I'd dug into War of the Worlds and The Time Machine but somehow had missed The Island of Doctor Moreau the first time around. If you've seen any of the movie adaptations, you might be lulled into the idea that you already know the story, but the book offers a lot more complexity and nuance than a lot of film adaptations are able to accommodate...

      I'm dusting the cobwebs off my blog, realizing that I had a couple unfinished book reviews waiting for me, I still have a couple on the backburner and yet here I am working on a new review. I'd previously reread A Clockwork Orange and also read Phantom of the Opera as well as The Island of Doctor Moreau for the first time. For the book club I'm running myself, we just wrapped up Watership Down by Richard Adams. This was a reread for me and also was a childhood favorite. It's the kind of book that a kid with a certain type of brain gets sucked into. Admittedly Watership Down was an obsession for me for a while. I read this wonderful illustrated edition of Watership Down which includes paintings by Aldo Galli in glossy inserts. Good stuff.       Revisiting as an adult, I can really appreciate why this particular book has had such staying power. Along with being just a fantastic and epic tale, Watership Down is also impeccably researched both f...

  From the late 90s on, werewolf movies have definitely gone down in quality with regards to practical effects, with CGI taking a center stage- some of it decent, some of it very bad. There's also a higher volume of movies, due to digital film-making lowering the barrier to access, which has led to some really interesting indie films and a lot of extraordinarily cheap and boring ones. Here I'll be attempting to catalogue what I can, as long as there's a werewolf on screen in the film and the design isn't just a pre-fab Halloween mask or just a guy with minimal make-up. I'm also skipping over a lot of CGI-only efforts, though exceptions will be made for CGI that had maquettes/models to start the process (such as Van Helsing). The 2000s, despite a lot of cheap z-movies and more movies relying on CGI, did end up having some  really spectacular practical effects-heavy films, some of which I'd consider to be some of the most iconic and "classic" were...