Woo hoo! I dare say my card game GIANT FIGHTING ROBOTS is ready for its alpha playtest!!

I could be finishing up work on my alpha playtest prototype…but after today, being whoally unproductive sounds a whole lot better.

Awesome!! Last night saw some pretty decent productivity. If I keep this up, I’ll have an alpha playtest ready for next week of GIANT FIGHTING ROBOTS for me and my friends to try out!!!

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Considering making a new blog JUST for movie reviews and other such film nerd stuff. I’m thinking of somethubg along the lines of an “after-the-fact, hype free” reviews which is basically what I’m doing now…

I mean, I only just saw AMAZING SPIDER-MAN last week?

Sinister was one of the few horror films I was excited to see. It looked interesting…different…but best of all, unsettling. Sadly, in reality it was only one of those things.

The movie gets credit for trying something new, a specific pagan deity as opposed to “oh the noes it’s a christian demon!!!” But while the concept is new, the end result is sadly ordinary…for the most part.

Everything about the setup, execution, characters, story arc (and I use that term loosely), and the scares are so damn cookie cutter it really is a damn shame. This movie could have been quite special. But at the same time, it’s not quite cookie cutter enough in places…there are very odd choices in the script that really don’t fit in with its familair , even clichéd, format.

There is no buildup to the ending…or rather, any real clues as such. Things just happen in this movie, not always having a reason. My friend Bill put it best. This movie was shot as an extended trailer. Nearly every other scene is framed, paced, and even written in trailer sound bytes. Even some of the visuals are exclusively for the trailer it seems, with no other purpose than “it’ll get people in the theaters.”

I know movies are a business, but you should NEVER do an editers job for them when it comes to trailers. Making trailers is an art form, there’s a a sort of magic to it. When you shoot things solely to put them in the trailer, it just seems fake…er…at least more fake from a movie standpoint.

There’s this whole thing where the son has night terrors…there’s no other plot element to it, no place for it in the story, hell, the character seems to drop out of the movie entirely after the first act…why? Because he was used for jump scares…that’s it. A wasted character and plot element for the sake of the trailer and worse yet…cheap scares.

Now, all that being said…

This movie is also one of the most unsettling films I’ve seen since I the last time I popped the original EVIL DEAD in my DVD player. Namely, the music score, and the super 8 film footage. These two things will leave you far more shaken than any jump scare. In fact, they are so unsettling, the movie is forced to lessen the blow with music stings at one point, get your adrenaline pumping before you can process what exactly you just saw.

This is commendable, considering the age we live in. Movies like SAW XXIII that have more gore than a Tom Savini convention don’t phase us. They aren’t real, they aren’t relatable…the combination of the fakeness of blocked, and professionally lit movies distance us from the situation, and when the killer is a monster or someone who makes traps that break all laws of physics distances us further.

What makes the super 8 footage so unnerving in Sinister is that they are none of these things. They look real, like if we took our camcorder out and shot on the fly…and the killer is worse than any monster…one of us. But the worse part? They are all silent…and thankfully the movie (mostly) realizes that silence is sometimes the scariest thing of all, and leaves us alone, in the dark, without a peep from our speakers, watching unspeakable horrors in the scope of reality.

For that alone, it’s worth seeing.