Review – Forbidden Empire

I’m in awe of this movie’s stubborn refusal to make any kind of sense. There are some good visuals here and there, and if you like the vaguely brain damaged humor of Russian horror fantasies you will find yourself well served. Beyond that, Russia’s number one box office hit of 2014 left me wondering how bad the rest of the country’s cinematic output must have been that year. Mildly amusing

Review – House of Darkness

Justin Long seems to have a particular talent for taking uncomfortably awkward social situations and making them infinitely worse, a gift that gets free rein in this relentless tale of a date gone horrifically wrong. Except for a pause in the middle and a brief moment of actual action at the end, the whole production is like reading texts from a douchebro trying to get laid. So In the Company of Men with vampires, a combination nobody asked for. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Blood and Snow

This is what John Carpenter’s The Thing would have been if everyone involved had been terrible at their jobs. Though there’s plenty of blame to go around, the leading culprit is the script. Other than brief monster moments here and there, the vast majority of the running time is given over to pointless bickering, much of which is difficult to follow let alone care about. The only thing I found even vaguely intriguing about this experience was speculation about what sort of abandoned building it was filmed in. Shopping mall? Hospital? It’s a mystery on par with how anyone managed to scrape together a budget for something this awful. Wish I’d skipped it

Book Review – Breaking Cat News

Breaking Cat News: Cats Reporting on the News that Matters to Cats by Georgia Dunn
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This review covers not only this book but also the rest of the series up through It’s Showtime, Sophie. Georgia Dunn brings clever illustrations and an excellent sense of humor to the tales of three cats (and their many friends) running a broadcast news operation that covers their daily apartment-dwelling lives. The storytelling is at its best when narratives run for a single page or maybe three or four pages. The longer arcs that crop up in later volumes often involve cats in peril, and those are hard to enjoy even when they have happy endings. But when the focus is on cats being cats with a twist of journalism, the series is highly entertaining.

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