My Blog In the Middle of Your Net

There’s a uniqueness to a David Cronenberg movie that doesn’t exist in the movies of any other director.   It’s an underlying normality and emotional core that gets surrounded by the strange and surreal plot unfolding before your eyes.   This exact combination isn’t provided by any other director.   Scanners falls right into this description. Scanners was a 1981 movie about one telepath sent out to stop another telepath from doing telepathic things.   That is the best way that I know how to summarize the movie.   It’s part science fiction, part action, and part body horror.   That’s a common mixture for a Cronenberg movie, I think. I don’t remember any of the actors’ names except for Michael Ironside.   Michael Ironside was great as the antagonist of the movie.   Then again, Michael Ironside is great in pretty much anything he does.   He’s great in Starship Troopers.   He’s great in Total Recall.   He’s great in Scanner...

Wow.   Time really flies when you fill your life up with movies, work, and podcasts.   It seems like just yesterday that I hosted a Movie Talk on Sunday special about movies involving the news.   In reality, it’s been three months.   How has everyone been?   No answers.   You’re probably only here to read the questions.   The problem with that is that I have a few other things to go on about first. If you want a rundown of the history of #MTOS, I’m not going to give it to you this time.   You might be asking “Why?” right now.   Here’s why.   I gave a brief history last time I hosted.   Not much has changed since then.   We’re still chugging along, meeting new people on Twitter, talking about movies.   If you want a history, you can go HERE or HERE or maybe HERE .   I don’t need to go over what’s already been gone over. Now is the tricky part: the rules.   At 8pm GMT one question will go up pertaini...

Ginger Snaps: Unleashed tells the continuing story of the two sisters from the first film, though the events of the predecessor are still in place.   It builds on what happens to the other sister (not Ginger) following the end of the first film.   It went places I wasn’t expecting, while being quite predictable.   The reason I didn’t expect it to go certain places?   I didn’t know what the movie was about.   I only knew it was a sequel and that it had werewolves. I didn’t like this movie as much as I hoped I would.   The acting is okay, but that’s at best.   Other acting I found to be dull, boring, and bad.   Nobody gave a performance that I could walk away from the movie excited about.   There was no performance of that caliber.   Everybody was serviceable, but only serviceable. The overall story was alright.   It took elements from a few classic films and created its own story out of those elements.   The combina...

Imagine if you woke up in a foreign place.   You don’t know where you are.   You don’t know why you are there.   You don’t know how you got there.   It’s a mysterious place.   You are in shock and awe when you open your eyes and look around. There are four walls and a ceiling.   There is also a floor.   It is built into an exact cube.   There is some white light glowing from each surface of the cube.   In the exact center of each cube is a door.   On each door is a handle.   You reach for the handle and spin it around.   The door comes out of the wall and slides down.   You can see another room almost identical to the one you are in.   The only difference is that this second room glows blue. That’s when you hear the sound of another door opening.   It’s coming from the opposite side of the room you are in.   There is another person climbing through the hole.   They are wearing clothes almos...

Within the genre of horror, there are many, many subgenres.   They range from slasher to ghost stories to haunted houses to body horror.   Within those subgenres there are other, smaller subgenres.   Take haunted houses, for example.   There are two main types of haunted house movies that I’m going to get into further detail about. Before I get into that, I’m going to quickly discuss the movie that brings this topic up.   The Changeling is from 1980 and stars George C. Scott.   The main character moves into a house and begins noticing strange things.   Doors slam closed.   He gets weird feelings.   A children’s toy mysteriously shows up.   It turns out, the house is haunted.   More stuff happens.   That’s the story of The Changeling, without giving any spoilers away. The Changeling falls into the first category of haunted house movies.   This category is where, yes, the house is haunted.   Something bad h...