A Far Out Fantastic Site

Credit: Pixabay I’m admitting it straight out: I hate John Carpenter’s “The Thing”. I always have. This remake of the 1950s original, which bears the slightly different title of “The Thing From Another World”, is based on John Campbell Jr.’s sci fi horror novella, “Who Goes There?” . Carpenter’s movie came across to me as more gore exploitation than anything. Regardless of that, I liked the movie’s promo poster.  I first saw this poster in the summer of 1982, when the movie released. I was 11-going-on-12 and with my parents and younger brother travelling around the Los Angeles area (we had just moved to Fresno). The poster depicted a monstrous, shadowed out, humanoid figure, beams of cold white light seeming to radiate from the center of its face, set against a dark arctic background. This poster was all over Los Angeles: on the benches of the bus stops, on the freeway billboards, and definitely on buildings throughout its place of production, Universal Studios (which my b...

Both the 1959 and the 2008 movies based on Jules Verne's novel, "Journey to the Center of the Earth", feature terrifying monsters such as the ones here in this illustration from an early edition of the book. Credit: Édouard Riou/ Wikimedia Commons   Warning: This review may contain spoilers. As I said last post , I’ve postponed the month’s Book-To-Movie review from last week to this week. For those of you who are just tuning into this blog, a Book-To-Movie is when we review a work of prose fiction and its movie adaptation. And this weekend’s review is of Jules Verne’s novel, “Journey to the Center of the Earth” and its movie adaptations. There have been several movies based on this novel that was originally published in Paris in 1864 (as “Voyage au Centre de la Terre”). However, most of them have been either made for TV or video. Because I believe movies are best when made for the big screen, I am going to review the theatrical films in which there have been two: the 195...

Credit: Pixabay 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 so...

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...

Credit: Pixabay 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...