Halloween Review (Film, 2018)

Halloween Review (Film, 2018)

Robert J Gannon
Film, Reviews

It’s been 40 years since Michael Myers escaped from a mental hospital for a killing spree on Halloween night. Laurie Strode, the young woman who survived, has spent every day since then preparing for his return to Haddonfield. She sacrificed her money, her social life, and even her family to set up a defensive fortress deep in the woods stocked with every kind of artillery and security feature you can imagine. No one else believes that Myers could ever return, but no one else actually witnessed with Myers is capable of. It’s the night before Halloween and Myers is going to be transferred from one facility to another. Never give Michael Myers an out; he never misses an out.

Call of Cthulhu Review (Game, 2018)

Call of Cthulhu Review (Game, 2018)

Robert J Gannon
Games, Reviews

Call of Cthulhu is an adventure game with RPG elements based on the Call of Cthulhu tabletop RPG from Chaosium Inc. The Call of Cthulhu universe is inspired by the work of HP Lovecraft, one of the most influential and problematic weird fiction authors of all time. He created this vast universe of monstrous beings from another realm that consume you with madness until you destroy everyone and everything around you. He was also an incredibly paranoid man who wrote extremely harmful things thanks to his xenophobia and a legitimate hatred and fear of anyone not like the people he grew up around in his hometown. The pop culture understanding and enduring legacy of Lovecraft is not based on what he actually wrote but on the ideas he wrote and permitted other writers to expand upon in their own stories. Call of Cthulhu finds a way to confront the darker side of Lovecraft’s legacy head-on through context and perspective.

#31DaysofHorror: A Recap

#31DaysofHorror: A Recap

Robert J Gannon
Event

Sometimes, you just need to challenge yourself. I’ve been slowly pulling my life back together after giving up full time teaching. Returning to Sketchy Details was a huge part of that. It’s just running a media criticism site exercises very different parts of the brain than teaching did. I’ve written often enough throughout my life to regain my footing again, but the rigidity of a schedule makes things quite a bit different overall.

Antibirth Review (Film, 2016) #31DaysofHorror

Antibirth Review (Film, 2016) #31DaysofHorror

Robert J Gannon
Film, Event, Reviews

Content warning: the foundation of Afterbirth is sexual assault implied but not shown at the start of the film.

Antibirth is modern weird fiction. There’s really no other way to describe it. It’s a modern psychedelic horror film with a very loose plot connecting a lot of strange imagery meant to scare the audience. The time period is ambiguously modern—the characters talk like they’re current but the town they live in is behind the times, complete with wood panel tube tubes—and there’s not much logic to the story. The film gets away with it, too, since writer/director Danny Perez sets his protagonist as a drug addict and an alcoholic.

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