The 11th entry in our Conjuring/Blumhouse series’ reviews, Paranormal Activity 4 has something in common with Insidious 3: we’ve moved on to a whole new family. The question becomes: How do they handle it? Rather than focus on one movie, I’m going to review the last three movies in the series since we’re running out …
One thing that makes everything better is to appreciate stuff for what it is, and what it is trying to be. There’s no clearer and easier example of this than pop-entertainment, going all the way back to pulp novels and dime magazines, but including B-movies and disaster flicks. It can be applied in other areas …
How does it hold up without a large chunk of the cast? We’re back to “they didn’t make these in any sort of order” mode with this one. Like Paranormal Activity, the third part is a prequel-sequel of sorts. They did this because (in my opinion) they made the mistake of killing a central character …
I am mentally exhausted. Between deadlines, trying to keep pace writing (and failing!), and cracking down on my German/Duolingo… my brain is dry-firing at best right now.
We’re in a position where I have one non-Blumhouse movie left on the list of Blumhouse slash Conjuring universe films: The Nun. I’m going to save the last movie in that series for later, and instead hit up what might be my favorite Paranormal Activity movie: Paranormal Activity 3. This one is the second prequel-sequel. …
Despite not being Catholic, each year for the last several I have given something up for Lent. Sometimes more than one something lately. This year I plan to eclipse my previous attempts: in addition to going without alcohol or tobacco (the occasional cigar, as required of someone who writes noir-style hardboiled fiction), and giving up …
This is the sequel-prequel to the first Paranormal Activity. It takes place slightly before the first movie and also slightly after: you could do a cut of the two movies with most of the first one taking place before the closure to this movie. That’s both good (because it fills in some stuff) and bad …
If I hit just under 5,000 words tomorrow, I will have hit 50,000 words in just ten days of writing on a new story. That’s a pretty amazing pace — a large chunk of which was that one holiday where I got over 10,000 words out. My average on the remaining days was over 4,000 …
In my review of the Conjuring, I gushed about the cast and the way they seemed to gel. There was a chemistry there that I felt made the movie far better than it would have been without that chemistry — it didn’t necessarily make it scarier, but it made me care a lot more about …
Yesterday was a holiday, and I took full advantage of the day off. To the tune of writing over ten thousand words in one day. It wasn’t even a full day of writing, so I want to refer back to this whenever I have a slow day or a bad day, or I forget to …