A few reviews and musings.

It has been a bit of a slow summer for me. My schedule has gone like this for the most part:

1 - Wake up
2 - Take a shower
3 - Start writing
4 - Play video games when writing is done
5 - Get bored of playing video games
6 - Think about writing
7 - Watch a movie

Somewhere in there is dinner and lunch. Occasionally, I'll go out for a beer or do something with my lovely wife. Every other week, I get out and play some basketball, though I did jack up my back pretty good last week, which made me even more bored.

So here are some reviews.

Books:
Ship of the Dead by John L. Campbell - Campbell's Omega Day series is awesome. For those of you waiting for the last part of my This Rotten World trilogy, this is a good series to fill the wait. Campbell's series resembles my own series in that it is about a group of survivors that are trying to survive the zombie apocalypse. It takes place in San Francisco.

It's an enjoyable read filled with plenty of gore and depravity. It might be my favorite zombie series. The only real drawbacks I can see are that the timeline is a little wonky. You're never quite sure of how long it's been since the end of the world happened. Sometimes it seems like only yesterday, and others it feels like these characters have been surviving in this world for months.

The other issue is that the characters just don't feel all that great. There's no one I'm really rooting for in the story, and they all seem rather two-dimensional. Campbell loves his characters though, so much that he randomly introduces other, smaller characters so he can kill people off. This leads to moments where Campbell might say something like, "Joe was a tough guy with a ponytail. He used to be a mail carrier." Then that character will die a couple of paragraphs/pages later.

I want to know these characters more, but I get the necessity of it. The end result is that the Omega Days series feels like an action movie with zombies. There's not a lot of depth, but if you love explosions and flesh-eating zombies, it's got all the goods you need. Not a big fan of one moment at the end of Ship of the Dead, but I enjoyed the hell out of the rest of it. 7/10

Finders Keepers by Stephen King - I thoroughly enjoyed Stephen King's first novel in this trilogy. It was a solid effort for sure. Mr. Mercedes was an awesome book. Bill Hodges makes for a great hard-boiled detective, and the ending was a satisfying as anything King has ever written.

The sequel... eh, not so much. I think the problem is that Mr. Mercedes/Brady Hartsfield was such an interesting antagonist. The antagonist in Finders Keepers, well... he's just kind of lame. Morris Bellamy can't hold a candle to Brady Hartsfield.

The good news is that the novels are connected and Bill Hodges is back with his buddy/weirdo Holly helping him out. These two characters are the best part of the novel. Unfortunately, they are such a small part of the novel in the grand scheme of things, that Finders Keepers suffers because of it.

It's still an enjoyable read, but it's not my favorite story from Stephen King. I give it a 6/10. It's worth reading, but only to get to the final novel of the trilogy... which I'm currently reading. I'll review that one when I'm done.

Movies:
Jeepers Creepers 2 - Scream Factory Collector's Edition - I hated this film the first time I saw it. I'm still wondering how it wound up getting a Scream Factory release. I'm glad that it did though. The film has aged well, and Scream Factory, as always, has only managed to augment the film.

The best part of the Blu-Ray is are all the featurettes and commentaries, which are pretty fun. The only problem is you'll have to listen to Victor Salva, and occasionally see him. He's pretty rough to look at, even more so if you know anything about the man. Still, I enjoyed watching all these character die, and the Creeper was awesome.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers - Scream Factory Collector's Edition - What a great movie. This movie is amazing. If you've never seen this iteration of the Body Snatchers film, you don't know what you're missing. Seriously outstanding stuff here.

Lots of great special features, but the film is the highlight. Donald Sutherland and Jeff Goldblum tear it up. If you like sci-fi/horror, you should definitely pick this one up. Don't bother with the film historian commentary. It's brutal to listen to as the dude pretty much just read something he had written for the whole time. The info isn't anything that you wouldn't find on wikipedia. But I guess if you like to nerd out, go for it.

TV:
Stranger Things - I grew up in the '80s. I get this show. But, I have to say, I'm surprised people are all about this damn thing. It's fairly generic and doesn't push any boundaries or do anything all that new. The characters were annoying after a while, and honestly, I kept waiting for something great to happen. It never does.

8 episodes in, I was pretty bored with it and only finished it out of duty. I love the music and the score... but the characters and the story itself are generic and mediocre. Nostalgia alone doesn't make something good. 5/10

11.22.63 - Another bit of Stephen King work here. I liked this better than Stranger Things. It had some great production design, and I felt like I was really back in the '60s. James Franco was awesome, as was the woman that played his love interest.

The story was interesting, and the journey was worthwhile. It's the ending that made it for me though. It left me feeling hollow and melancholy inside. An actual emotional reaction to a TV show? I'll take it. It was a little slow in spots, and should have probably been cut down to 7 episodes, but it worked. 8/10

That's it for now... until later.