Monday, June 18, 2007

Summer's Here & Altered

Summer doesn't officially arrive for a few more days, but it's hot here this week. Not blistering, sweat-fountain, eyeball-melting hot, but hot enough early enough in the season to have me wondering if our recent string of relatively mild summers might be at an end. Time will tell.

In the meantime, go watch Altered.

I'm not usually one to push a movie on folks, but I've become downright evangelical about this flick, hawking it's virtues to all my genre-lovin' friends. Don't look for it in theaters, though; it went straight to DVD. And, apparently, that's a good sign these days, because Altered is light years better than most of the horror movies that have hit the big screen in the last few years.

Long story short, it's a horror/sci-fi hybrid about an alien encounter gone incredibly wrong...and incredibly strange. It's directed by Eduardo Sanchez, one of the creators of The Blair Witch Project, who amply proves he's got the chops to tell an actual story this time around. It's a smart, character driven piece that pulls no punches (and its not for the squeamish).


I spun a lengthier review for my buddy Chris Mill's DVD review website, DVD Late Show, and I'll be posting a link to it here just as soon as Chris gets the piece posted over there. (For now, feel free to check out Chris' bank of previous reviews of B movies and other genre fare; click on Guest Reviews to read some of my reviews.)

And, though, it's been quiet around here for a few weeks, I expect to be posting a bit more frequently, starting with a glimpse of the fantastic cover for The Dead Walk Again later this week...