Yeah, he was in a few episodes of that and Hercules, but not too many. And frankly, I can't stand Xena. I didn't even like Hercules much, but Xena really felt like scraping the bottom of the barrel. The acting in that show is just atrocius, and most scripts feel like fanfics written by 12 year olds.

I actually have a laptop it runs on (which is why I didn't bother with support or a refund). It's just that playing it on that is not quite a comfortable, I'd have to hook it up to my computer's monitor and keyboard and mouse, and since I usually play games in rather short sessions there would be a lot of pluging in and out. If I can't get it to run otherwise I'll eventually do that, but I'm leaving it at the bottom of my backlog.

Terraria goes Halloween in six days.

The new DVD collection that just came out, actually! It's good, and a decent price too. Much better than having to buy 3 and 4 separately.

Well, the classic Universal ones are good. A lot of the sequels are basically the same movie, but they're still fun. The '99 one, despite being a modern action/adventure flick, has some decently spooky moments in there too, and is pretty good in general, if you can stomach it I'd actually recommend it too. Other than that though, I've seen a few mummy movies and they're not great. The Pyramid has some bits, but it's not particularly great, and there's a number of trash mummy movies out there. Prisoners of the Sun is the only one that comes to mind, but I know I've seen more. I've not seen the Hammer Mummy films, but I've heard good things, I've been trying to come up with the best way to watch the Hammer movies without spending too much.

Edit: Tale of the Mummy is probably one of the better ones, unfortunately.

I thought it was pretty good. It's not much of a remake, you could probably slot in into a timeline of the original series if you want. Way better than the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake or, God forbid, the absolutely execrable Nightmare on Elm Street remake. Didn't they have to rework the game since the first trailer was so Twin Peaks that they realised "there's no way we can release this without getting our asses super sued"?

Ugh... I've seen that recently. It's absolutely horrid. With such a cast and director I was expecting somethign at least entertaining, but it was almost unwatchable. Weak story, laughably terrible CG, no tension or memorable mood and most of the great cast is gone almost immediately.

This year i try something new, i recently saw that 18 new Bootlegger's Drive in Saturday Night shows
had been uploaded to archive.org.
Like back in the days Double Feature Films with intermissions.
And today i start with Werewolf in Washington & Grave of the Vampire.

As for games i have already installed some of the mentioned games like
Scratches and Clive Barkers Undying additionaly Pathology Classic HD and Nosferatu Wrath on Malachi.

So let the spook commence

Yeah. I had briefly played it a couple of times beforehand, but this is the first time I've been making an effort to really play through it. It's pretty good so far!
My favorite mummy film is the original from 1932 with Boris Karloff. Some people think it's kind of boring but I think it's really good, and it's one of the most visually striking horror films of its era. The Hammer version from the 50s, with Christopher Lee as the mummy is also very good.

We watched Friday the 13th part 3 yesterday. Seemed appropriate considering the date. I had forgotten it was originally filmed in 3D, which is why it has so many awkwardly placed shots of stuff jutting at the camera. It's not particularly good - the cast is really bland, and the portrayal of Jason doesn't seem to jibe with the backwoods feral kid of the second movie. This Jason comes across more as just a regular weirdo who happens to mindlessly kill anyone he stumbles across. He even knows how to expertly operate a harpoon gun - can't imagine he had too many of those growing up in the woods. This movie does highlight one of the problems with slasher movie franchises in that the threat of the villain will always be watered down over time. You can only see a big scary guy get his ass kicked by a petite co-ed so many times before you start to think he's really kind of a wuss.

Watched Human Lanterns. A Shaw Brothers martial arts/horror movie, it's... strange, as you'd probably expect from seeing "Shaw Brothers martial arts/horror movie." I dug this film quite a bit! I quite liked the mix of wuxia action and horror exploitation. If that sounds intriguing to you too, I highly recommend checking it out. I found the music very interesting, reminding me an awful lot of the music from the Blind Dead films, so that was neat too.

Hah hah, it's a bit of a guilty pleasure. I have fond memories of watching those shows back in the day, and have one of the Hercules seasons on DVD, but I realize it can be rather cheesy. Then again, that could probably be said about most projects Bruce Campbell has been involved in. Seems like most of his roles were in humorous, limited budget productions. Has he been in any "serious" film releases?

I take it the new one also has Phantasm V on it? I have the old 4 disc collection ( plus one bonus disc ), with the holographic Tall Man cover image.

I think I'll check it out, then. Hm, maybe I'll try to get my hands on one or two of the old ones first. And I agree about the Nightmare on Elm Street remake. Nothing against the actor -- I really liked him in Watchmen -- but the film feels utterly pointless and brings nothing new to the table, or at least nothing good. All they did is replace the creative FX of the original with generic CGI, but worse yet, it seems the people in charge of the remake completely failed to understand the appeal of the original Nightmare films, and their main antagonist Freddy.

Hah hah, could be! As far as I know they did make major changes to the game, during its development. It was originally going to be more of a detective mystery story, and apparently many of the Action and Horror sequences were only added at the publisher's request. It definitely feels like a Frankenstein's monster of a game, with many different game styles patched together. But maybe that's part of its appeal.
Heh heh, have fun! I really enjoyed Undying, back when I played it a few years back. Have you played through it before?

I think Eternal Darkness is probably one of the best and most creative Horror games out there, despite its age. All the more surprising that it was ( and is, except for emulation ) a Nintendo exclusive. It's also arguably one of the best Lovecraft inspired games. Too bad that its spiritual successor seems to be stuck in development limbo.

I didn't know Christopher Lee played the mummy! Guess he did it all at some point, Horror-wise. I still have a few old and new-ish Christopher Lee film DVDs sitting around here, which I plan to watch later this month or next month.

Yeah, but Xena really is crap even by those standards. Like I said, I'm a huge Bruce fan, but that show... yeah, it makes even Hercules look good. It's like making Zena all effort was entirely abandoned in favor of "we have Lucy Lawless' boob in the intro now, everyone will watch it anyway". Then again, it was not actually the bottom of the barrel - after all there was Young Hercules and New Adventures of Robin Hood and god, Hercules really started a whole avalanche of really terrible fantasy shows in the 90s, didn't it?

And no, I can't think of any serious dramatic work by Bruce, which is a shame, really. He's an honest to god good actor. I'm 100& serious when I say I'm sure he could do Shakespear and be awesome.

Yep, it came out like, a month ago, it's a pretty great collection.

Yeah, I thought Jackie Earl Haley did a good job, but there was just so many problems. It failed when it tried to redo the original, I mean, just look at that scene where Freddy presses through the wall and how it looks a thousand times worse than the original, and then they come up with some interesting original ideas and then just... dump them. I know some people didn't like it, but I thought the idea the Freddy was actually innocent was a great one, and let us make a connection to the '80's Satanic Panic and how that destroyed innocent lives. And then they toss it like, ten minutes later. Why even have fucking bothered.

Here's another short review, this time of one of the Horror games I've played this month:

-- The Last Door ( Season 1 ) -- ( Point & Click Adventure; DRM-free; available on GOG )

When I first saw this one I gave it a miss because of the excessively low-res graphics. I mean, I realize this whole retro thing is popular, and I even like 2D pixel art games when done well, but there's a point at which it just feels silly. But as the game received so much praise, I decided to pick it up during some promo, and finally played it earlier this month. What can I say -- I still think the graphics suck. Don't get me wrong, the environments are generally well designed and creepy, but the resolution is so low, that half of the time you can't tell if there's any kind of interesting object in front of you, much less what kind of object it's supposed to be, until you hover your cursor over it. Furthermore, like many Indie devs, they didn't keep the retro style consistent but instead mixed in higher res graphics, smooth color transitions/glow etc. And there's one more thing which bothered me: Normally retro graphics are supposed to be clean and crisp, but it seems they saved many of the backgrounds in a compressed format ( JPEG? ), which causes them to look blurry and they have some noticeable compression artifacts.

But enough about the graphics -- I have to say, once you get over those and focus on the actual game, it turns out to be an enjoyable and fairly creepy experience. I really liked the soundtrack, which is probably the game's strongest asset. I think the sound design was nice as well, so unlike most other games, this is primarily an audio experience, while your own imagination is required to fill in most of the visual detail. The story was solid, and the puzzle design fairly logical. I only got stuck for a moment once or twice and managed to complete the game without any online guides. That means P&C veterans might find it too easy, but I enjoyed the pacing and challenge level. Oh, before I forget, even though it's a Horror themed game, I don't recall any action sequences or anything like that. It is very much a slow-paced, traditional P&C Adventure game.

Overall, I don't regret buying and playing it, but the visuals, some crashes during Episode 3 & 4 ( temporarily switching into windowed mode seems to help stability ), and the fact that it ends rather abruptly ( there's another season/sequel, which I didn't realize at the time ), had a negative impact on my experience and thus on my final rating of the game. Overall I'd rate it at 6.5/10.

And now you have me wondering if they created any good Fantasy series back then. I can't think of much, so I guess non of them were particularly good.

Tons of decent Action and Sci-Fi series, though. I think Sliders was pretty fun, and then there are all those Space Sci-Fi series.

Good Horror and Mystery themed shows, as well. X-Files, obviously, and I bought a box of "Poltergeist - The Legacy" a while back, which is surprisingly creepy and well made for an old TV series.

And yeah, it's always nice when actors are given the chance to surprise the audience, and pull off a role no one would have expected. Just take Bryan Cranston -- he used to be known primarily for Malcolm in the Middle, the old comedy series, but nowadays everyone recognizes him as the lead actor of Breaking Bad, two vastly different series and roles.

I know this may just be personal preference, but I strongly prefer traditional FX over modern CGI. Probably one of the reasons why I watch so many old ( Horror ) movies, instead of modern ones. When you look at those effect scenes in the old films, it makes you wonder how they managed to do it. Often the solutions are really clever, or in some cases surprisingly simple. Can be fun to watch making-of videos or audio commentary, to learn more about how they shot certain scenes. In comparison, CGI seems awfully bland, once you understand the basics of it. Besides, often traditional FX actually look better, especially when compared to low-budget CGI ( which is often used in the Horror genre ).

As for the Nightmare remake, what was up with that "Freddy was a pedo" plot twist anyway? Was that ever a thing in any of the many old Freddy movies? Deranged, demonic killer, sure; but even in the remake he never tries to "rape" or even kill any children, he always goes for teenagers/(young) adults. It really doesn't make sense, no idea what they were going for with that. Besides, the creators of the remake somehow failed to understand the antagonists are the real heroes of these ongoing Horror franchises. If people go to watch a new Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday 13th, Halloween or Phantasm film etc., they do it primarily because they want to see the villains, because they are the primary reoccurring characters, not the random teenagers which probably won't survive till the end of the film. And well, if they had any plans to create further sequels of the new Nightmare reboot, it may not be wise to portray your main character as a pedo. I hear that's not really popular.