Friday Fright-Night

Yesterday, while recovering from the stomach flu (damn you, stomach flu!), I watched:


And it rocked my proverbial effing socks off. If you haven't seen it, you need to. Like right now. Go on. Scoot.

That is all.*

*wait...not really all. I have big plans. BIG PLANS. But I'm not sharing.

Yet.

Two AM Logic

As a writer (hack, if you will), I know suspension of disbelief is vital if I'm going to take the reader on any kind of a journey. When I wear my "reader" costume, I've been known to put a book/story/what-have-you down when the writer violated that sacred trust.

Okay, so here are the problems my brain cooks up at two in the morning (insomnia, anyone?):

1. Why don't zombies eat each other? They obviously don't care that much about sanitation (just look at them) and are pretty indiscriminate about what they put in their mouths. I'm sure somebody has cooked up the "virus doesn't taste good" or "don't eat their own kind" argument, but that's just lame. In the real world, the whole zombie problem would probably be over in a few hours after the outbreak, just after they devour each other. The National Guard can wait around and pick off remainders.

2. Vampires. The whole "handsome, super strong, nearly invincible" thing. These are the living dead, folks. Only a few notches above aforementioned zombies on the food chain. How/why they became the fodder for paranormal romance (shudders) instead of the thinly-veiled metaphor for venereal disease they once were, I will never know. Look, at a minimum, their breath has to reek. And super-strength? Have you tried to subsist on a diet of blood? I couldn't even play a decent game of tennis when I...er, never mind.

I could go on, but I think I may have revealed a little too much about how my brain works at two AM. I love zombies...I don't want them to eat each other because it's much more fun when they try to eat us. Vampires? Meh. I prefer the nasty, monstrous type. Good old Vlad the Impaler type. You can take Fabio the Bloodsucker and launch his sorry butt into space with all the other debris.

Update: Catherine J. Gardner is our guessing-game victor! Huzzah!

More tomorrow.

I Am Legend (Ruined...again)

Ok. I Am Legend, a seminal work in the speculative fiction field. A weird tale for the ages, bits and pieces of science fiction, horror, fantasy, and just plain oddness wrapped tightly in a nice little ironic package by the master Richard Matheson.

Then Hollywood digs its gnarly hands into the story and destroys it. I had high hopes--Will Smith aside--that this incarnation of the classic novella would come close to the original, that feeling of "ohhhhh..." that hit when reading the last page.

Nope. Hollywood intervenes with another martyr/cowboy ending, and Robert Neville goes out in a blaze of glory. No irony. No thought. No "ah-ha" moment for the hungry Matheson fan.

I'm tired of Hollywood selling us the same "good guys win in the end" story and pretending it's something new.

Oh...by the way...spoiler alert. I guess that should have gone first--just like somebody should have warned me about the movie...