A Far Out Fantastic Site

I know, it’s the third Saturday of the month when we’re supposed to have a Book-To-Movie review but I am going to have to postpone it until next weekend. The county I live in is still sheltering in place and so the DVD of the movie I’ve been wanting to review along with its book, “The Invisible Man”, is stuck inside my local library which is closed. I requested it through interlibrary loan but when it came, back in mid-March, the shelter-in-place mandate was just beginning. I was going to review another book and its movie adaptations this evening but the only place I know of where I can rent the movie at this time is Amazon’s IMDB TV platform. By the time I was able to figure out last night how Amazon wanted me to log into IMDB TV it was already late. The movie was 2008’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth” based on the book by the same name, written by Jules Verne. So, it looks like that will be next weekend’s postponed Book-To-Movie.
In this weekend’s post I have some Lightning News…

It’s the first Wednesday of the month and so it’s time for another Insecure Writers Support Group (IWSG) post! In an IWSG post, we writers bring our writing challenges and problems out into the open to share with each other and try to offer solutions. The IWSG question for the month: Do you have any rituals that you use when you need help getting into the ZONE? My answer is that I have two types of rituals to get me into my “twilight zone”. One is for my general writing activity and the other is specifically for when I write a new fiction story.

For my general writing session, my ritual is taking a meditative walk of a sort. Before I work on any kind of writing task, whether it’s the writing process itself or writing-related activities such as searching the publishers’ markets to submit stories to, walk through my house for a minute or two praying and meditating over the upcoming session of work. This helps me to clear my mind and focus on the upcoming work and so I can see what it i…

The closest I’ve come to reading Stephen King’s early novel, “Salem’s Lot”, was the short story prequel called “Jerusalem’s Lot”. I read it in his collection, “Night Shift”. However, I’ve always wanted to read his novel about a vampire-infested New England town but have not been able to find an edition that I cared to purchase. (Yes, I’m picky when it comes to editions of certain books, mostly due to their cover illustrations.) But now that a big screen movie adaptation of “Salem’s Lot” is in the works, I feel more eager to read any edition I can get my hands on. A TV series of the prequel short story is also in the plan.

'Salem’s Lot': The Movie Gary Dauberman has been chosen to direct the new “Salem’s Lot” movie. Prior to that, he had already written a draft of the screenplay, according to “Science Fiction”. “Science Fiction” also says he will serve as executive producer too. Dauberman has written screenplays for many of the “The Conjuring” movies, particularly the “Annabel…

For almost a year, Netflix has streamed Disney’s 2012 movie, ‘John Carter’. However, the movie, based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “A Princess of Mars” of his Barsoom series of novels, will be leaving Netflix and moving to Disney+ on May 2. Because this is a Disney movie it should be expected that the Disney Company would want it on its new streaming television platform that went live in November of last year. After all, Disney’s been buying up so many un-Disney properties, so why would it leave one of its own movies behind? This regardless of “John Carter” being one of its biggest flops? 
While the movie did poorly at the box office, it’s one of Disney’s most underrated films. It had a lot of good things that went into it such as its creature designs, cinematography and special effects. Eric Francisco says in his article at Inverse that “the movie is colorful in ways so few modern blockbusters are . . .”

So if you’re like me, and have Netflix but not Disney+ in your package of streaming…

Credit: Pixabay
Warning: This review may contain spoilers

It’s the third weekend of the month and so it’s time for another Book-To-Movie! In a Book-To-Movie, we review a work of prose fiction and its movie adaptation.

Ever since 1979’s “Alien”, movie fans have been obsessed with body horror. Body horror and cosmic horror are two subgenres that are the hottest in horror trends right now. And Richard Stanley’s “Color Out of Space”, the 2019 movie adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s short story of only a slightly different name, “The Colour Out of Space” (emphases mine), is one half cosmic horror and one half body horror. Body horror deals with radical, often torturous, body transformations or assault to one’s body by biological causes. Parasitic monsters busting out of their human hosts’ torsos like in the “Alien” films is body horror. The often slow, graphic metamorphosis of a man into a werewolf is body horror. It’s even been argued that Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” is body horror because …

Needless to say, the Covid-19 pandemic has made these past three months one of the scariest moments in history. It’s as if we are living in an apocalyptic sci fi, in some respects even a post-apocalyptic one! Even during this time of spring and new life the streets are dead. Things appear to be really down. So, now is a great time for us sci fi and fantasy fans to read some inspirational stories. The problem with much of today’s speculative fiction, however, is that most of it seems to be on the dark side of life.

So as not to sound like a hypocrite, I’ll admit that I’m a writer of dark fiction myself. However, as a reader of science fiction and fantasy, I like to read a fair share of optimistic stories. Even when I write dark fiction I try to work some comic relief into it, something that I personally believe all fiction should have to some extent so as not to traumatise our reading experience. So, I’d like to complement, if you will, the list of post-apocalyptic fiction from a few …