Halloween 2010: September 27

Another Halloween tradition around these parts, for me anyway, is the Yearly Consuming of the Monster Cereals. I'm not a cereal eater, generally speaking, and the sugary content of most modern kid's cereals (Cause who eats grown-up cereals?) actually hurt my teeth and coat my mouth with some sort of weird layer.

But I make an exception for the General Mills monster cereals, even if they are even more sugary then most other kid's cereals. The Monster Kid in me can't help but love them simply for their premise. Once upon a time, you could actually find Count Chocula year round and around October, Frankenberry and Boo Berry were both very easy to find. These days, you can find just one on Halloween week if your lucky. Last year I didn't even find a box of Frankenberry anywhere in the tristate area.

This year I got lucky. My local Target had a huge display up, containing all three brands, each one decked out with a fancy new box designs. I stocked up, and actually acquired multiple boxes of Boo Berry, it being my favorite. Sadly, I come home and discover I'm out of milk. But, soon... Soon, my friends.





I'm also extremely curious about Fruit Brute and Yummy Mummy. Fruit Brute was phased out years before I came along and my mom never allowed me to eat any of these cereals as a kid, due to their ridiculous sugar content. Thus, I missed Yummy Mummy as well. So if you see some freak buying twenty year old boxes of stale obscure children cereals off of eBay, you know who that freak is.

Anyway, what the hell am I talking about? Here's some Mini-Reviews:


Bloodstone: Subspecies II (1993)
Much more polished then the first film. The movie looks nicer, the direction is nicer, the atmosphere is thicker, and the story is better written and paced. The lead character of Michelle actually has a pretty solid character arc and the series starts to build up its own mythology. A superior sequel in pretty much every way. (7/10)

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941)
A direct remake of the 1931 version and wholly unnecessary. Spencer Tracer is completely miscasted. His Jekyll is neither repressed nor frustrated while his Hyde comes off as more of a leering mischief maker then a true threat. (The low key make-up doesn’t help any.) Ingrid Bergman is slightly better but she lacks the raw sexuality and the vulnerable of Miriam Hopkins’ Ivy. The surreal transformation sequences feature lots of heavy handed Freudian symbolism and come off as pretty corny today. There’s only real reason to see this one is as a point of comparison with the vastly superior 1931 take. (5/10)

Do You Like Hitchcock? (2005)
A decent little thriller that mostly comes off as a lark more then anything else. It says a lot about what Argento’s career is like these days that a movie this minor is actually something of a return to form. (6/10)

Triangle (2009)
I can’t decide if Melissa George’s performance is overdone, inconsistent, or just right. The “characters stuck in a time loop” premise is interesting, even if we the viewer can quickly see where this is going to end up. Even if this one doesn’t totally come together, Christopher Smith continues to be one of the more interesting young directors working in the horror genre. (6/10)