Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 2 (Suspiria)

Oh thank God. That's more fucking like it. I knew practically nothing about Suspiria or Dario Argento's filmography going into this. I expected something fucked up and sufficiently spooky, but what form would it take? Would it be a straight slasher-esque thing or something far more psychological and dreamlike? The film certainly has elements of both, but it's not exactly either of them. It's far more evocative and stranger than that, in ways that I can only try to talk about. This is a film that's better experienced than discussed, if that makes any sense. That may sound like me trying to cop out of talking about it, but I do have things I can praise. They're just things that will have a far stronger experience on you if you turn off the lights and let the film wash over you instead of hearing my descriptors. So, if you can handle the movie, please do that... but I will try to explain.

Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 1 (V/H/S)

(TW: sexual assault)

ooooOOOOoooo!!!! Welcome, one and all, to Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween! It is October now, except it's not. I have to write this a few days before because I'm not going to be at home on October 1st. For you, then, uncovering this post is rather like finding a cursed VHS tape that displays a spooky short story filmed with someone's handheld camera. But I may be getting ahead of myself. Yes, kicking off the marathon is this film, V/H/S. The concept of this excited me, and it seemed to do well enough that there are five more of them. You get the horror subgenre of found footage, and you mix it with the lo-fi aesthetic of the VHS tape? As someone who watched all of Symphogear on tape, I was extremely interested in marinating in this mix of aesthetics.

Coming Soon: Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween

ooooOOOOoooo THAT'S RIGHT WE HAVE ARRIVED AT THE FALL! It is a time of year that usually has me running around like a headless chicken, between trips and this and NaNoWriMo and all sorts of other things. I just took a trip to the capital city and went to some amazing places. Like the one you're seeing on the right here, a very interesting Newfoundland town. I refuse to elaborate further. If you know, you know. Instead I'll elaborate on what sort of time of year we've come to again. Yes, in October it will once again be time for a spooky media marathon, as Sixteen Screams For Halloween comes back for the third time. If you're new here, that means that every other day for the month of October, I'll have a quick writeup on some piece of spooky media. There are a few things I want to do, but honestly I haven't sat down and hashed out a big list yet. That's where you come in! 

Frezno's Criterion Challenge: August 2023 Trip Report

Holy hell, with this installment of the Criterion Challenge, I've crossed the 2/3rds mark. 8 months of this. Absolutely wild. I have enjoyed myself so far, and hope I will continue to enjoy myself. Certainly, I have some enjoyable films to talk about here, and so I will do that right about now. Honestly, it's hard to bullshit enough to get an opening paragraph before talking about these, but... actually, I lied, it's really easy to bullshit enough words to get a paragraph filled. I'm literally doing it right now, and now I pretty much have enough. It's the oldest trick in the rambling raving rants book, and now that the trick is done... Kino.

A Post In Solidarity With The Strikes

Well, this isn't exactly how I intended to return to the blog after the big 10th anniversary fete. Even so, things are how they are, and so I'm here to explain the situation and how things are going to go around here for the rest of 2023 and beyond. I'll try to use some of that 2023 brevity to explain, and really I've just done so to stretch this out to a paragraph or so. Wait, that's the opposite of brevity. Damn it, get with the program. Okay.

You are likely aware of the current strike going on in America, with both the Writer's Guild and Screen Actors Guild Of America currently on the picket line for a better deal with the big studios. They are standing up for their right to fair compensation for their work, and naturally I agree and stand in solidarity with them. Where this goes from just a moral stance to actually affecting my hobby here is when this deals with the notion of promoting struck work. I came across a video from Youtuber Council Of Geeks, explaining how she would not be covering anything Doctor Who-related due to the strike once a statement was released from them clarifying that Doctor Who did indeed fall under the strike order. As someone who's part of a weekly Doctor Who podcast, I was also concerned at the thought that we'd been crossing the picket line, and so I made this video aware to my cohosts. We thus decided that it was only right to stand in solidarity with the strikers and put any Doctor Who related talk on hold until such time as the strike resolved.

The Frezno's Raving Rants Tenth Anniversary Retrospective

Welcome, friends and lovelies, to the festivities. If I've timed things correctly it is August 16th, 2023. Ten years ago today, this blog was created out of the spark of an idea. Ten years. Think of it. A child born when I first crafted those words is now old enough to be in the fifth grade. Ten years. A not-insignificant fraction of a human life. Ten goddamn years. Over that time, this blog has shifted in its mission statement and what it has talked about. To wit, I myself have also shifted and changed in those ten years. I often speak of my internal landscape, and this space represents a decade-long road map of it. Our party, then, is a metatextual retracing of my steps. We're going to go over a brief history of Frezno's Raving Rants. What inspired the posts, what led me to do and say the things I did back then, and what led me to the me I am today.

Whether you've been a constant companion on this trip, or you've somehow just stumbled upon this party, you are welcome to accompany me on this adventure down my metaphorical memory lane. It's alright. I've done this introspective song and dance before. I've never done it quite so thoroughly down my own timeline, but it's a party and one can be indulgent. Take my hand, if you so please, and come along with me. Let us celebrate and discover what made this blog tick, and how it grew and changed as I so did. Let the Frezno festivities... begin.

My Summer Of Symphogear

Alright, so what in the fuck are we doing back here of all places? The astute among you will remember a long-running series on this blog, from 2020 and 2021, where I wrote basically a fucking novel about this dumb show. There are things about it that I'm fond of, and things about it I'm not fond of, but that's basically the kind of creator I am: in my head my writings have the shelf life of milk, and anything past six months I look back at and go "oh my god this stinks, what was I doing?". To wit, then: I was successfully able to express my thoughts and emotions about what the show meant to me. I kind of wish I was able to do it without bloating the word count by giving lengthy plot summaries of what happened in the show. It makes me feel like an out-of-touch Internet reviewer when I do that shit, a Doug Walker or a Quinton Reviews. I don't like it, but the words on Symphogear are out there and are like that and I just have to deal with that regret. These words are not a replacement for them.

We're back here because of my own absolutely ridiculous aesthetic chasing. There's no easy way to admit what I did, so let's just say it outright. One day in the spring, I was fooling around with things in my basement when I got an idea. My PS3 had the option for AV cables, and could play Blu-Rays. What would happen if I were able to hook it into my old VCR via those cables? What sort of things that came out on Blu-Ray, years after the VHS format faded away, could be retroactively ported over to tape? The hookup worked, and then I got a further idea. A VHS tape on SLP mode can hold 6 hours of video, at fuzzy lower quality. The runtime of a season of Symphogear on Blu-Ray is just over 5 hours. The result?