Above Average Joe Blogs

So the blog posts kinda got a bit quiet in the last 2 months. I think I'd only seen two movies in that time and they weren't particularly interesting, or easily bloggable movies. The first was Thor: Ragnarok, the second The Disaster Artist. For Thor, my thoughts amounted to "eh, its another Marvel movie, too long, too much humour, lacklustre villain." My review would have been, do you like Marvel movies? You'll like this. If not, this won't win you over. The Disaster Artist on the other hand, was a trickier film for me to blog about through its subject matter: a film about the making of the the best worst film ever made, The Room. I'm not a huge comedy movie fan but this film had me in stitches time and time again. Plus, I'm no Francophile (great pun, google it), but he gave a spot on performance of the alien-like Tommy Wiseau. If I had to give any critiques it is that it would not work for anyone who has not seen The Room but really, why haven...

Blade Runner: 2049 and Cinema Etiquette  Cinema Etiquette  Misophonia. The hatred of sound. I, and I imagine a fairly large number of readers will have this to some degree for certain sounds. Classic examples would be burping, lip smacking, snorting, gulping that sort of thing. Well now imagine you are in a cinema trying to watch Blade Runner: 2049 when the stranger next to you decides to do all of these tics every 15 minutes throughout the film. It was enough to drive me  out of the screening for a few minutes as any longer and the only noise people would hate would be me gently simmering in repressed British rage. If cinema etiquette was graded, the selfish bastard next to me would've been expelled post haste. Although having said that, I am somewhat of a cinema etiquette Nazi when it comes to this. And so, I've made a simple list of rules to ensure optimum film satisfaction. 1. No late entry. You know what time the film starts. You can get your ticket ...

I had a bit of a bumper week for films the past week, knocking off Darren Aronofsky's Mother! (! is part of the title for reasons unknown) and then Matthew Vaughn's sequel to Kingsman, subtitled The Golden Circle. Before diving into these reviews I'd like to talk a bit about the problems with trailers. Both the trailer for Mother! and The Golden Circle raise two different problems with modern trailers which are almost impossible to avoid if you are seeing movies in the cinema and therefore having to watch trailers before the actual film. Mother! and a Misleading Trailer First, Mother!'s (this is never going to be an easy film to properly punctuate) problem relates to the potential for miss-selling the movie in question. The trailers for Mother! suggested that the film was going to be a psychological horror movie that was going to go further than any other movie before in terms of shock value. That isn't me hyperbolising, one trailer for the films come replete w...

Cannily enough, the last time Stephen King's mammoth sized horror epic It got an adaptation it was 1990. Then It was adapted into a tv-movie starring the inimitable, sinister voiced, Tim Curry. Now 27 years later, just like the titular monster's feeding cycle, It is back, and ready to feast on the fears of children. And unfortunately, that's about the only peer group I suspect will find this, whilst wonderfully made bit of 80s retro kids on bikes adventuring throwback, scary. But before we dive deep into that tautologically turgid claim a few side notes. First, I'm not a mega Stephen King fan. That isn't saying I dislike him but I've only read a handful of his books, although considering how vast his body of work is maybe that isn't too bad. The first King book I read was Cell, which I read in high school. That was a twist on the zombie apocalypse genre, where all the mobile phones in the world suddenly let out a phone call which, if answered, turns th...

Okay so you may have noticed a slight change in title and layout (I couldn't quite get rid of the spooky theme for the blog so that'll stay) but now my blog is open to pretty much anything I watch, read or play. Horror is still a big focus for me but truth be told I can go on and on and on about pretty much anything I watch so it felt needlessly restricting to keep it locked down on horror. I had been thinking about kicking open the doors to all of the above for a while but only when I hit upon the "brilliant" (quote by me) title for the new blog of "Joe Blogs" did I go for it. Unfortunately, that name was taken. As was "Average Joe Blogs." So you lucky fellows have now got "Above Average Joe Blogs." And that's all I promise, above average blogging by me, Joe. And first up for some above average blogging is Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan's latest film. Okay, three big disclaimers up front. First, I'm no historian. Yes, I...

In August 2015 the TV series Hannibal came to an abrupt end as its third series concluded with the mother of all cliffhangers that somehow functioned equally well as a jumping off point for another series or a true final bow for the show. Now, two years later, series creator Bryan Fuller (of Pushing Daisies, and American Gods fame) has reignited talks for continuing on the story at a later date. As with all shows canned before their time, the fan fervour for a renewal often outshines the actual quality of the show, (sorry Browncoats, I'm looking at you Firefly [in short I thought it was average, great movie though]) I will, with no sense of irony, now continue to wax lyrical about how much this show means to me and why it deserves a 4th course. When Hannibal was first announced way back in 2011 I was, as I imagine most people, somewhat sceptical. The Hannibal franchise had been through multiple adaptations, including what critics considered to be the definitive take on the ...

By the time I'd sprinted to the end of Outlast 2's lean campaign of around 6 hours the opening tension had long since died out to be replaced by utter confusion, bewilderment, and jaded cynicism at the amount of violence, only punctuated with the occasional creepy image. Australia's Funniest Home Videos got dark. That isn't to say Outlast 2 is a bad game, far from it, but in terms of horror it is decidedly average, too eager to the throw gore and obscenities on top of gore and obscenities, when a quiet lull and sinister shadow would have made you tremble from head to toe. I think the intensity of my negativity above stems from the fact that the game has at its core an interesting premise. Much like the original Outlast your character is in the reporter/journalist school of archetypes, which serves as the reasoning for why he insists on filming everything. That's right, for the uninitiated the Outlast series focuses on first person horror with the option of...