By Roy Mathur, on 2021-09-23, at 00:14:11--00:40:50, for Captain Roy's Rocket Radio Show, Listen
...I am just about producing two shows a week.
This horror movie about teens summoning up the titular monster based on the Reddit creepy pasta horror is utterly boring. I couldn't watch over than about 30 minutes without giving up.
While the subject matter has the potential of being scary, the acting, script, and the pacing are off.
Neither is it atmospheric and the camera work draws attention to itself, rather than transparently involve you in the film.
The film-within-the-film footage of previous victims is even worse. The director, I bet, would say this is intentional, I don;t believe that.
It is not frightening, it is banal and I didn't care for it.
I guessed the IMDB rating to be about 3, and I was not far wrong. IMDB rate this at 3.2. (I didn't know IMDB had decimals. Not important).
The Stephen King's The Dark Half rip-off? That's what I was expecting from the trailer and that's what I got, albeit an amped version of that.
In the film, abused wife has an episode that ends with the death of husband and the beginning of threatening calls from an unknown and menacing voice.
I liked the way the creature moved, but I did not like the costume (goth/death metal leather trench coat, really?) or it's really awful sub-par 80s creature design.
The acting was hammy and terrible except for the star, Annabelle Wallis, who should be lauded for taking the script seriously and bringing some credibility to an other stupid film.
The surprise happy ending, was er---surprising too.
Other than those three things, the movie was a heap of stinking garbage.
What is surprising, is that James Wan is not always a terrible filmmaker. He directed the first two Saw films and Aquaman. The least I can say about him is that he doesn't do things by half. His movies are either monumental successes or awful failures. There's something heroic about that.
According to Friday's i newspaper Sir Clive Sinclair died, aged 81, on the morning of Thursday 16 September.
Sir Clive Sinclair's company, Sinclair Research Ltd. in Cambridge, arguably kick-started the computer revolution the UK with his series of budget microcomputers based around the Californian company Zilog's Z80 CPU. In 1980 the ZX80 was launched at GBP 99.95. It's affordability led to an explosion in computer ownership and games development.
I was too young to be a speccy kid. By the time I was in my tweens even the Commodore 64 was on its last legs. However, much much later, and even today, the Z80 is still found in many embedded systems. One such use was in the Alphasmart 2000 keyboard. I know this because I disassembled the machine and found the chip on a PCB (that also included a smiley face; what a nice touch).
I remember the first person I met who was really into the Z80. Years after it had declined in popularity, my school friend Jignesh Patel still had a soft spot for the machine. You've heard of him before. He's the one who built a porn alarm circuit into his stairs. The simple pressure switch (a piece of kitchen paper) would depress when someone (his mum) came up the stairs, allowing him to hide his stash.
When you become a podcaster, you will almost immediately start to think of everyone around you as people worthy only of employment as demolition experts, car horn testers, or, may the gods help us all, brass band musicians. Traffic will sound like talks charging trenches in World War I and footfall like charging elephants. You will, in short, become a git.