A Far Out Fantastic Site

Actor Boris Karloff,  23  November 1887 - 2 February 1969  Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons Earlier on this Saturday that I’m actually writing this post for the Monday I will have released it, I was going to concentrate more on writing and revising stories for " Bad Apps ", my upcoming book of short science fiction horror stories. However, my desktop has been running so slow during the past two weeks that it’s been slowing down the writing that I do on it, including my story revisions for “Bad Apps”. So, I decided to uninstall several apps that I never use because they’re probably what was causing the computer to process so slowly. Because doing that took so long, I'm keeping this post short. I thought I should talk a little about actor Boris Karloff, since the Saturday that I'm writing this is his 138th birthday! (His posthumous birthday, of course.)  Karloff played some big roles in movie adaptations of books by famous authors of horror. The most notable of these is...

Credit: Wikimedia Commons Due to yesterday’s Memorial Day holiday here in the U.S., I decided to move this week’s post to today. The Book-To-Movie (BTM) review  series is going to be on hiatus a little while longer. I'm still gathering more stories and films in my library of  “To Read” and “To Watch” so I can make a lineup. Also, I'm trying to play catchup on my two latest books which I'll talk some about later. First, I want to commemorate Roger Corman who died earlier this month, May 9th. He was 98. Because he directed several movie adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, I’ve provided a list of those movies below.  Corman was one of my favourite filmmakers of science fiction and horror. Known by many as the "King of Cult" movies, he was a leader in directing and producing B-rated movies, many of which were horror, science fiction, action/adventure and crime. Among his horror films, and the best in my opinion, were his adaptations of Poe's works. In a big ...

Credit: Pixabay Well already Halloween is a week and a half behind us and before we know it, here in the United States, Thanksgiving (or "Fangsgiving", as author Ethan Long might call it), will be upon us! Yet, in my ancestries, we still celebrate our own versions of Halloween the whole month of November (All Souls’ Month, or Days of the Dead) as we invite our dead relatives and ancestors to haunt our homes, to put it a certain way. However, that's a little more of a, uh, mellowed down celebration. So, I decided to share with you a few other events: a talk by a paranormal fiction writer and a psychic that I attended last month; a psychic search engine in one of my stories; and something interesting that I learned about an Edgar Allan Poe quote used in episode 2 of "Wednesday", Netflix's "Addams Family" spinoff. Psychics in Sac, Fiction and Search Engines? Paranormal Romance author Danna Wilberg and psychic Linda Schooler, both local to my home a...

Credit: Wikimedia Commons It's another fourth Monday of the month and so that means it's time for another Book-To-Movie review! In a Book-To-Movie (BTM), we review a work of prose fiction and its movie adaptation. A few years back, we had a BTM for Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Black Cat" and its movie adaptation. However, the movie we reviewed was actually a segment in Roger Corman’s anthology film, "Tales of Terror", which features three of Poe's short stories, including "Black Cat". And I'll tell you now, I liked that version far more than the version that we're going to review today which is the 1934 Universal adaptation starring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. I like Corman's version better mostly because it stays more faithful to the original short story than Universal's does. However, even though Universal's "Black Cat", directed by Edgar Ulmer, strays (excuse the pun) far from Poe's short stor...

Credit: Pixabay It's the fourth Monday of the month and so time for another Book-To-Movie review! In a Book-To-Movie (BTM), we review a work of prose fiction and its movie adaptation. This is our first BTM since our new post day began two weeks ago ! A couple years back, we did a Book-To-Movie Review of Edgar Allen Poe's short story, "The Pit and the Pendulum". The story’s movie adaptation we went over was the 1961 version directed by Roger Corman and starring Vincent Price. In this post’s BTM, we're going to review the 1991 adaptation directed by Stuart Gordon ("Re-Animator", a movie that’s also based on another famous horror writer's work). Gordon's movie adaptation of "The Pit and the Pendulum" does a good job with the setting and creature effects but lacks the horror element.  I won't talk about Edgar Allen Poe's short story as much here since I do that in detail in the J anuary 2021 Book-To-Movie which you can check out ...

Photo Credit: the blogger. Book and Illustration Credit: Wilfried Satty.  Last Thursday January 19th was the 214th birthday of Edgar Allan Poe, the Father of American horror fiction. To celebrate, I thought it would be neat to do a book review but not of one of his short stories. Instead, I want to review a collection of them, but not one that was put together by publishers or editors of Poe’s time. The book that I want to review here wasn’t even put together by an editor after his time. It was put together in the 1970s by an artist. Wilfried Satty was a collage artist, who selected several of Poe’s stories and made the illustrations for them in the book, "The Illustrated Edgar Allan Poe". Satty's art in this collection enhances the nightmarish situations of the stories.  Published in 1976 by Clarkson N. Potter, Satty’s “Illustrated Edgar Allan Poe” opens with a very informative introduction by “San Francisco Chronicle” art critic Thomas Albright. The hardcopy I own has a...

Credit: Wikimedia Commons Warning: May contain spoilers. It's the fourth weekend of the month and so time for another Book-To-Movie review! In a Book-To-Movie, we review a work of prose fiction and its movie adaptation. Last Wednesday, January 19th, was the 213th birthday of Edgar Allan Poe, and so I have another review of one of his stories and its cinematic adaptation. And yes, the movie is another one from American International Pictures' (AIP) series of Vincent Price-Edgar Allan Poe movies. Am I too addicted to films based on Poe’s work and starring Vincent Price? Maybe, but that’s not the reason why I chose this version. The reason I chose it was because it’s the only one I know of that exists. As we've seen in past Book-To-Movies, AIP's Poe film adaptations mostly stay faithful to the original work even though, naturally, the story is expanded in order to fit an hour-and-a-half-long film. Well, that’s hardly the case with 1969’s "The Oblong Box". Yet, a...

Credit: Pixabay I’m doing the Book-To-Movie a week earlier than I normally do each month because next weekend is Christmas and many of us will be busy celebrating with our families and friends. Since this is a Holiday post, we are reviewing a Christmas poem and its movie adaptation. We’re reviewing Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” and the 1963 Roger Corman movie adaptation. Normally we review a book or short story in a Book-To Movie and then compare it with its film adaptation. However, this poem can be considered a short story of a sort since it's a narrative poem. Now, you’re probably saying that "The Raven” isn't a Christmas poem. Okay, it isn’t, strictly speaking, but it does take place during the month of December and because it's a gothic story it can be considered having a tinge of a black Christmas theme. It even has angels in it! There’ve been several film versions of "The Raven", including the 1935 Bela Lugosi version and the more recent 2012 version ...

Credit: Wikimedia Commons Well, finally, I'm back from that hiatus that I had said I was going to take. With the nice help of family, I got my bedroom cleaned of the paper clutter that dominated it. But that wasn't the only thing I was busy with that kept me from my regular writing schedule. I was in the hospital for three weeks, a follow-up from the last time I was there. The doctors had to remove the benign tumor they had found in me the time before. They had to take me apart, limbs, head and torso, and stitch me back together again like Frankenstein's monster. Okay, I'm exaggerating. Like really exaggerating. They only had to make one incision that they had to stitch up (with staples). The surgery lasted one day but the recovery lasted three weeks. I still have to limit my activity here at home, but I've been feeling well and enthused enough to at least give you this Book-To-Movie review for the month!  I decided to take a deviation from our usual Book-To-Movie...

  Credit: Wikimedia Commons   /Arthur Rackham Warning: This review may contain spoilers.   It’s time for our monthly Book-To-Movie! 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. Normally, we do a Book-To-Movie every fourth weekend of the month. However, because it was necessary for me to make a sudden change of story and movie for review, I had to postpone this month’s post in the series to this fifth weekend. My apologies. This month’s book and movie review is Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, “The Pit and the Pendulum” and the 1961 movie adaptation directed by Roger Corman and starring Vincent Price. I truly believe that no one can adapt any of Poe’s gothic horror stories to film in a way that does those stories justice. However, many of Corman’s films come close to doing so. One of his best adaptations of Poe’s short stories is “The Pit and the Pendulum”. Why this movie adapt...

Credit: Pixabay We all know that this Halloween will be unlike any other we’ve experienced. This year many of us will be required to wear masks. Many of us already are. At least in public, that is. Needless to say, the pandemic has made it necessary. Things are going to be very isolated compared to other years. Fewer trick-or-treaters in the streets, at the malls and downtown commercial areas. There will be fewer parties, or at least fewer guests at them. But it doesn’t mean that the fun has to end. There are always alternatives. One is: buy candy and other treats from the store, stay in with your family and eat them (the treats that is, not your family!) while watching scary movies, playing Halloween related games, or/and reading/telling scary stories. Make it a party inside your house limited to your loved ones and keep the plague out! Which this month’s Book-To-Movie review is exactly about that: keeping the plague out. We are reviewing Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, “The Masque of ...

Credit: Pixabay.com I apologise for having skipped one more week than I had said in my last post . Last weekend a situation came up that held me back. That said, I also apologise for posting this Book-To-Movie so late in the month. For any of you who are new to my blog, the Book-To-Movie  normally occurs every third weekend, this month of February excepted. A Book-To-Movie is a review of a work of prose fiction and its movie adaptation. This month we are reviewing Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The Premature Burial” and the Roger Corman movie adaptation of it, both of which intentionally plays with the borderline between reality and fantasy. Roger Corman was one of the most dedicated directors of Edgar Allan Poe movies in the 1960s as well as all time. Within a 10-year span, he produced nine movie adaptions of some of Edgar Allen Poe’s most famous works. Even though many of these movies went far from the original stories, Corman often did at least one thing that Poe did: ...

It’s time for another Insecure Writers Support Group (IWSG)  post! Every first Wednesday of the month we writers bring our writing challenges and problems out into the open to share with each other and try to come up with solutions. Plus, I have some Lightning News Flashes  for you, including news on a new Edgar Allen Poe Funko Pop figure! IWSG For this month’s IWSG, I’m going to start out by responding to the question of the month with a straight answer then respond with an inverted answer. You’ll see what I mean by the latter when we get to it. So, the question of the month: Has a single photo or work of art ever inspired a story? What was it and did you finish it? My first answer: I often don’t write stories based on photo graphs or works of art. Normally when I write my fiction it's based on ideas that randomly come to my mind inspired by specific experiences I’ll encounter or that others have encountered. I’ll record these inspirations as notes in my journal fir...