Halloween Ain't For The Old UPDATED

Pumpkin party went okay. It was cold, and had to deal with the father-in-law following us around and telling crazy stories.

Look how happy Stewie was to be carving a pumpkin:

I tried to use a template and failed, turned the pumpkin and tried again, failed, and finally turned it to another side and just did the pumpkin I always carve. It's on the right here. The kids had already taken their pumpkins and gone home by the time I took pics, so it's just the last couple left.

Zig and Anne get the loser prizes for showing up and not carving a pumpkin, even though they both had them. We'll see if they get invited back next year...

Here's some video I took. Nothing like trying to keep focus with a DSLR at night in the dark.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRT379Yq9_c

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpH4vXfcgw4

And here's a pic of the kids with pumpkins from my wife's camera:

Anyway, had to work early in the morning. Kept my sunglasses on the whole time but got through it.


Came home and laid down, figuring the wife would come home and wake me up, and we'd get ready to go out. Only, I woke up and it was dark out. I walk out and it's already 7:30pm and the wife is sleeping on the couch.

We chat it over and decide, for the first time since we've been together, to skip going out for the Halloween weekend. That's right, for the first time in like twenty years I'm not going out in costume and getting drunk. Yep, another sign of getting old.

We went out to dinner and came home. I made her watch Halloween III which she's never seen. Not sure she liked it. Looks great on Blu though.

Also in the past couple of days I put away:

• The Collection - mediocre. Suffers from the same unbelievable stuff the first one did, but it had some cool stuff to it.
• Bay of Blood - Don't think I ever caught this Bava one, but it's not one of his better ones IMO. The dude was D.O.P., which I'm not sure was the norm, and he is just insane with the zooms. Zoom in as a guy pays for gas, then zoom back out as he drives off. Pretty pointless. That shit ain't making the scene any more exciting, Mario buddy.
• My Amityville Horror - Couldn't get past the 15 minute mark. BORING.
• Maniac remake - not bad. Pretty sleazy, well done, but ultimately not the kind of horror I'm into. However, there's one spectacular shot toward the end that I have no idea how they did. Gotta be some sort of CGI trick, but it's awesome.
• Grave Encounters 2 - more of the same as GE1, but it's not bad. If you like found footage, there's definitely worse out there.
• The Last Man - not horror, but I'm a sucker for post-apocalyptic movies. It was okay. More of a character study/drama than anything, but Jeri Ryan is pretty hot(pre-Star Trek).
• Tank - Was on Netflix and I vaguely remember seeing it. Still a pretty fun flick.

A local theater has a 35mm print of Evil Dead 2 to show on Monday, so am thinking about going.

Also, I have been amazingly lax about that Halloween script I started last year. Tis the season to write it. Soon as Xmas gets here I am done doing Halloween things, and my writing process stops on them.

I cranked out ten pages, but the last two don't feel right. I think I'm going in the wrong direction. May have to back it up a bit.

The Angry Eye

So last weekend I woke up and my eye was being shredded with glass. That's what it felt like. I couldn't even open it, it was watering so bad.

It was agony. I texted my doctor and asked him what to do. He said wash it with warm water and go to the emergency room if it was real bad.

It was real bad, but not as bad as a bill from the emergency room, even with insurance. I started hitting it with the steroid drops I had when this happened to my other eye, and it got a little better.

Then it got worse. So finally on Monday I made an emergency appointment with a new eye doctor. Went in.

The lady doctor, who's pretty hot, took and look and winced. That's always a good sign, right? She says "Man, that's one angry eye, huh?" I said yeah. I could barely keep it open long enough for her to look at it.

She tells me it's uveitis. That's what I had. It's what I had last time, and apparently it's what I'll have again as it's a great perk of my disease.

She says I should have gone to the emergency room. She tries to dilate my eyes--three times--and nothing's doing. She asks if the muscles of my eye hurt and I say HELL YES. Like behind my eye. She says it's because the eye is trying to dilate but the pupil(or whatever part she said) that is trying to dilate is stuck to my eye with white blood cells. So the muscles keep trying but nothing's happening, which is causing the ache.

She prescribes me super steroid drops. I have to take them--get this--once an hour. Even when I'm sleeping. I have to set an alarm and get up every hour to put a drop in. She wants me to come back the next day.

This is what my eye looked like that night.

Anyway, went back and it's better she says(but my vision is even worse in that eye). I have to go back today(Friday) for a follow up. They let me do the drops 1-per-hour but I can actually sleep now. It really really feels like Chinese Water torture.

At least my vision seems to be the slightest bit better. But I have an auction tomorrow--looks like I'm going to be one-eyed trying to work the computer.

Erik delivered the FOC2 one-sheet cover. I'll put it up soon. Here's sort of the evolution of the cover though.

This is a comparison with the original one-sheet versus the new, final cover.

Anyway, pumpkin party tonight. Most of the family isn't coming like they normally do--previous plans. My brother normally is the pumpkin dude, so I might have to carve a pumpkin tonight.

Prince of Scriptness

Went over and watched the new UFC fights tonight. After that we watched the new Prince of Darkness blu ray from Shout Factory. It's one of my favorite Carpenter movies and, as expected, looks gorgeous in another Shout Factory triumph. The sound has also never sounded better.

In between those two, however, we found something cool.

I never enter script contests anymore, because I usually am writing down to my budget level, which typically doesn't translate into a competition-winning script. But there's a contest called Just Fucking Entertain Me only the F-word is not spelled out. (I omit it so a search won't find me)

Anyway, I had mentioned the competition to my writing buddy Luke and said I bet the "bunker" script we did might do well in that contest. Heck, if we can place high enough then maybe we can get somebody to come in and put in the missing money so we can finally shoot it.

Well apparently they recently announced quarterfinalists. The blog said they got nearly 3000 entries, but guess who made the top 50? Yeah, it's kind of cool. You can see us on this list:
http://www.justeffing.com/2013-competition-winners/

Fingers crossed, maybe we'll make the semi-finalist list...

On the bad news, my eye completely blew up this weekend. Felt like glass was in it. The steroid drops I had from last time helped yesterday, but today they did nothing. I was in agony for about 4 hours. Made an appointment with an optometrist.

Also on Friday saw Escape Plan with Stallone and Schwarzenneggar. Pretty fun movie. Much more fun than it should have been, and Arnold actually looked pretty good.

Gotta start putting away some more horror flicks. We watched Joy Ride at Zig's Friday night, and you wouldn't believe it but one of the alternate "endings" is actually like an alternate third. It's like an hour of different material. I'm not sure why they had to go back and reshoot/re-write that much of the movie, but it's insane...

Still a pretty entertaining movie, and an early JJ ABrams script a lot of people don't know about.

Also, saw this online and it's pretty funny:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTXfAtckS3g&feature=youtu.be

Every Month

Me and some Dolphin cheerleaders during my trip to Florida.

Every month I sell between 1-10 copies of FOC2 between my web site and Amazon. I think the average is like 3, plus some streaming views through Amazon.

Not a lot of money but it adds up in the end. Direct deposit every month.

Every month EXCEPT October. I don't know what it is, but the month I'd expect to sell more is the month I never sell any. Every year, October has a big zero in the column. It's weird...

Anyway, been watching some of my favorite Halloween episodes of TV shows, as well as some others that were recommended on sites.

Watched Quantum Leap "The Boogieman" episode, which I distinctly remember first seeing on TV with my mom as I sat with a TV tray in front of me working on my latest text adventure game for the Atari.

Watched The Office episodes. Watched The Freaks and Geeks episode. Am saving the Buffy ones for when it's closer.

Wanna see something cool? Erik's been working on the modified cover for the FOC2 blu ray and sent me this. Pretty bad ass, I think. He didn't want me to show anybody yet, so we'll just keep it between us.

UPDATE: Pretty funny--as soon as I post this blog I get an order through the web site. Coincidence...OR NOT?

October's Here

Michael Whelan's Elric

Jesus, almost halfway in and I haven't really even started the horror movie watching.

So tonight I gave Curse of Chucky and Apollo 18 a chance. Curse of Chucky's not half bad. Second best Chucky movie if you ask me. They went sort of old school--lot of suspense, with Chucky doing a lot of creeepy things before you actually see him run around.

Didn't particularly dig the way they made the doll a little more round-faced, but the actual animatronic they used is probably even better than the one used in the first movie.

Apollo 18's pretty meh. Truth to tell, I'm watching it while I write this. It's barely keeping my attention.

But it did remind me that I used to love a book cover of my dad's. He had a box of sci-fi/fantasy books that I used to read when I was like 9 or 10. The book cover had some astronauts on a planet/moon, and they were looking at a skeleton in a space suit. It was a cool fucking cover that I just loved to stare at.

I went google looking for it. I found this, but I don't think this is it(though this is also a book my dad had).

I'll keep looking. There's a chance my dad still has the book.

But I stumbled across this web site, which is pretty funny. It's like those movie title posters where they give you what the movie SHOULD be called. This is what the fantasy books should be called, and you won't get it unless you've read most of these(which I have).

http://mightygodking.com/2008/10/20/mgk-versus-his-adolescent-reading-habits/

Also saw lots of other book covers, like the Michael Whelan Elric image above. Whelan was pretty much the king of fantasy covers for books when I was growing up. The best were always him and Frazetta.

This was the exact edition of this book that I had--loved that series, even if it was a bit depressing.

Didn't like the book nearly as much as the cover

Awesome.

Man, seeing these images takes me back to my D&D days, and the days of playing

any kind of sword & sorcery game I could on the Atari or Commodore computer...

Anyway, gotta start watching some more horror flicks! I've gotten no response from the lady whose kid was supposed to send me an audition, so that's looking like a no-go.

I don't wanna talk about the FOC2 blu ray that has turned out to be a monumental amount of work. Monumental.

Back From Vacation

Into this amazingly-shitty weather. Rainy and cold. I left Florida for this?

This is what I left...

btw: Never saw a ghost, though the hotel's hall was so long that it looked like a mirror you were walking toward. Here's a pic:

And here's the stadium when we arrived. It was so godawful hot I was half glad when we missed that last kick and it didn't go to overtime...

And finally, here's the view from the restaurant we ate at three times while we were there. Might be the best fish I ever had.

Anyway, am back.

Still no audition video from the kid. Not looking good on the short front. Hell, sounds like a lot of work anyway. I'm not completely disappointed.

Back to the FOC2 blu. I can show you this image, which Erik sent. He's working on an updated blu cover, I think I mentioned, and this was a little teaser he sent.

Posting while on vacation

I'm in Florida right now until Tuesday. I'm only posting right now because I'm waiting for the Lunesta to kick in.

At home work continues on the FOC2 blu. There was a minor issue that Zig--damn his soul--pointed out at his house, so I can't just say "It's fine". I gotta fix it, and to fix it right means going through every scene of the movie and re-exporting.

So that's what I was doing right before I left. Got most of the way through(I think there's like 10 scenes left), and while I'm there I'm fixing some other minor issues that nobody would notice.

Can't bring that inner half-ass out, no matter how much I try.

Weather in Florida's nice. We're  right on a boardwalk in, oddly enough, Hollywood Florida. At a haunted hotel on the haunted floor and I haven't seen a thing. I'm not a believer, so they're leaving me alone.

Tomorrow's the reason I came here--Baltimore's football team is playing Miami's football team. I'm a Miami fan, but came down with around 80 Baltimore fans. I haven't worn my jersey yet, but it comes out tomorrow. Man it will be great if Miami wins, but it's pretty much a toss up.

The movie Zig wrote/edited and I helped on some post issues just got its premiere date. Weird thing is, that's news to Zig. I don't know how you start making those kinds of plans without consulting your editor. You know, for questions like, "Hey, you done yet?" or "Hey, can you be done by this date so we can premiere this?"

Other than that, not much more to report. We're up to about 11 clown costumes we've picked up pretty cheap. We'll design clown makeups to the color schemes and possible beef up the costumes depending on the look we want.

Crazy

Driving home tonight I almost hit a deer.

I was going like 60 in a 40mph zone. All of a sudden I see this deer strolling into my lane. I stomped the brake and swerved into the other lane since no other cars were coming. It was pretty close.

So I drove around it and all of a sudden I get a weird headache. I have the sudden feeling like I actually hit the deer and am unconscious, and the headache I have now is because I'm hurt bad, probably hit my head on the steering wheel during the collision.

It was pretty surreal. Also, right after that my check engine light came on. I have no explanation for that.

Anyway, past couple of nights have watched:
Scream 4--wanted to give it a second chance. It's still pretty bad. The script has character's making ridiculous choices all over the place, and the ending is ludicrous
My Idiot Brother -- slightly amusing, harmless, but predictable and forgettable. Nice cast.
Ffolkes -- I used to watch this as a kid, and I laughed when I saw it on Netflix streaming. It was okay, but I'm not sure how I made it through as a kid. It's pretty slow.
Cop Land - had only seen it once. It's decent, if a bit slow.
House at the End of the Street - I watched this and did a review for a buddy who asked some of his friends to do reviews for a web site. I'll post the address when it goes up.

Netflix added a bunch of stuff, so I got on tap: Aftershock, Parker, The Octagon, Forbidden World, Apollo 18, the original House on Haunted Hill and more.