Freaky is a comedy slasher film that explores the body swapping gag in a new way. It is a Blumhouse Production directed by Christopher Landon, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Michael Kennedy. Vince Vaughn stars alongside Kathryn Newton, Katie Finneran, and Alan Ruck.

Vince Vaughn plays the Blissfield Butcher who wanders around town on the hunt for teen-agers to kill. After adding to his body count, he makes off with an ancient dagger with some strange powers. When the Butcher sets his sights on a shy, bullied girl named Millie, played by Newton, his plans go awry when the dagger casts a spell which has the air switch bodies. Millie has only twenty-four hours to retrieve the dagger from the police evidence locker, find the Butcher who has adapted to using his new disguise to add a few more notches to the aforementioned body count.

So once again, the body swapping plot device is in play, which usually is handled rather clumsily. This particular idea was actually rather amusing in an expectedly grotesque sort of way. Newton’s shift to the Butcher persona was rather compelling. Vince Vaughn acting like a teen-age girl could be rather hilarious. The weak moments in his performance have more to do with the writing than his effort. The rest of the cast was fine. Newton and Vaughn do pretty well carrying the heavy load of this film.

Yeah, the film is rather stupid in many ways, however it still manages to avoid being irredeemably bad. If one is in the mood of some entertaining, gruesome absurdity, this one delivers.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage is the latest Marvel film which brings back Tom Hardy as Eddie Brock/Venom. Kelly Marcel wrote the screenplay with Andy Serkis taking up the director’s mantle. The cast also includes Michelle Williams, Woody Harrelson, Naomie Harris, and Stephen Graham.

So this one is chock full of unrequited love. Eddie Brock is working as a reporter and is still missing his girlfriend, Anne Weying, played by Williams, who is now engaged to someone else. His relationship with his symbiote, Venom is on the rocks. Psychotic killer, Cletus Kasady, is missing his childhood love, Frances, while facing execution. Frances has an unusually piercing scream which has her incarcerated in an institution reserved for dangerous mutants, and she is not happy to be so separated from her favorite lunatic. No one seems to be able to sort out their love lives here. Brock pays Harrelson’s Cletus a little visit. That meeting gets a little tense when Cletus gets a little taste of Venom. Of course, we know what’s next. Venom’s little spot of blood mutates inside Cletus, transforming him into Carnage, who just wants to find his lost love so he is not alone in his indulging his bloodlust.

Harrelson takes on the role of Carnage and is reliably creepy and unhinged. Harris does fine as Frances, who has her own issues. Frances is also known as Shriek. Hardy’s performance is quite good in spite of some weak dialogue. The special effects and the fight scenes are done well enough to make this just entertaining enough. Venom’s single-mindedness when it comes to eating bad guys is supposed to be amusing in some gallows sort of way, but I was finding it somewhat annoying. So this is a comic book movie, so there needs to be grace extended when it comes to expecting a lot of coherence. I get that, but somehow I felt that some opportunities were missed to really elicit some laughs. Of course, the humor would be quite dark and disturbing, but I don’t shy away from that.

Basically, this is another film that left me a little cold. I shouldn’t be disappointed since this is a comic book film. but somehow this ended up being more of a letdown than I anticipated. The only really impressive aspect was the effects, but that is even not all that notable considerable most movies in this genre can at least get the special effects right. It’s not the worst film I have seen, but it is one of a big blob of unremarkable cinematic offerings. This is still rather annoying because I seem to be saying much of the same thing about the recent films I have endured, which makes this latest blog feel rather unremarkable. Better luck next time, Marvel.

A Bright Ray of Darkness is a novel written by Ethan Hawke. Hawke is of course better known as an actor, but he apparently likes to throw out a book every not and then.

The tale is told in the first person from the perspective of actor William Harding, who is the midst of a public scandal after he is caught cheating on his wife. Young William has joined the cast of a stage play.in the hopes of of some kind of redemption. He has tried to drown out his regret with booze and sex, but he is merely making his situation worse. Anyway, the catch is that an actual Hollywood figure is giving a fictional inside look of the profession.

So, this isn’t my usual mode of literary diversion, and I doubt I will be revisiting this one anytime soon. Harding is a little hard for me to find much sympathy for. Toward the end of the novel, Harding gets some advice from his fellow cast members and the director that sort of resonated with me. Unfortunately, it isn’t until that moment that I saw Harding as another shallow Hollywood airhead. Hawke’s writing isn’t that bad though. I didn’t find it to be uniquely compelling, but I have read worse. I suspect my reservations about this novel is inspired by my overall cynicism of Hollywood airheads. Through much of the novel, he makes most of the boneheaded decisions I would expect. There is some payoff toward the end, but this one tested my patience overall.

Now that is over, time to immerse my imagination in 1940’s Los Angeles with James Ellroy’s This Storm.

The Sleeping City is a Doctor Who audio adventure from Big Finish Productions from The Companion Chronicles range. Lisa Bowerman directs the piece that is written by Ian Potter. William Russell reprises his role of Ian Chesterton as well as stands in for the late William Hartnell as the Doctor. John Banks serves as the guest actor playing a character named Gerrard and providing a few other voices as well.

Ian Chesterton is being questioned about his absence from London presumably after he has returned with Barbara Wright from their travels through time and space with the Doctor. Ian then relates a story of a city on another world. The city is known as Hisk, and beings who feast on the dreams and nightmares of the depressed and dispossessed have new targets in the form of the Doctor, Ian, Barbara, and Vicki. Is Ian telling his story to someone who they say they are, or is this another dream?

I ended up enjoying this episode. but it took a bit to get there. Russell’s performance is as compelling as ever. He is about 90 years old at the time of the recording, which makes his participation even more impressive. Banks is quite a frequent performer for Big Finish, and his addition here continues to prove that he is a sold casting choice. There is a pretty good plot twist toward the end. Although the plot seems to have a slow start, it does pick up an acceptable amount of steam as it progresses.

Out Of Time 2: The Gates of Hell is a Doctor Who audio play from our friends at Big Finish Productions. David Llewellyn is the author of this tale which brings the Tenth Doctor, played by David Tennant, alongside Peter Davison’s Fifth Doctor. Ken Bentley serves as director of this particular tale. Nicolas Briggs returns to voice the impassive yet obsessive Cybermen. Mark Gatiss, Shelley Conn, and Glen McCready make up the rest of this relatively small guest cast.

The Fifth Doctor is taking a tour of the Catacombs in Paris in 1809 when he encounters a time agent named Tina Drake and then finds an army of Cybermen tucked away. It seems that they have been waiting for the Time Lord and keep in stasis for a time until his tenth incarnation finds him in 1944. The meeting of the two Doctors brings about a temporal catastrophe that must be rectified. At the center of the Cybermen’s plan to invade the Earth and the galaxy, or whatever they want, is a misguided French guy who is in their power.

In real life, Tennant is actually married to Davison’s daughter, so this is quite the family bonding time. They worked together in a television mini-episode called Time Crash several years ago. They still work well together. I thought Llewellyn came up with a clever script. Everyone in the cast seemed to hold up their end quite well. The sound design is as convincing as ever. The humor was nicely delivered, and the Doctors seemed to be having a ball in the performance. This did seem a little too familiar considering these two incarnations have already been seen together onscreen, so there was a slight since of “been there, done that”, however it was still an enjoyable episode. I actually prefer the Cybermen over the Daleks when it comes to the Doctor’s adversaries. I think this is a very well-chosen addition to my massive Big Finish collection.

Later is a supernatural thriller written by Stephen King and is published by Hard Case Crime. Jamie Conklin is the son of a struggling single mother and has the fairly common rare gift of being able to see people who have recently died. His mother has a girlfriend who works as a police detective in New York. She pulls Jamie into a desperate investigation where he needs to communicate with a dead psychopath who left a bomb as a parting gift. Although that is a major plot point, King also creates some complicated relationships and characters.

This novel has several strong points that showcase King’s talent for creating compelling characters and a flow of thought that seems rather genuine. The novel is written in first person from Jamie’s point of view, and I grew to like the kid. King’s trademark dark humor helps ease the tension in the right places.

The novel is enjoyable enough, however I would hesitate to consider it a future classic. Also, young kids being able to communicate with the dead seems to be common literary backdrop. It was an interesting story but some major aspects do seem a little too familiar. King doesn’t quite hit it out of the park here, but he certainly gets a good piece of the ball.

So the next reading indulgence is A Bright Ray of Darkness by Ethan Hawke.

The Inheritance is a low budget supernatural horror film that takes place in Ukraine. It is written and directed by Chad Barager and Kevin Speckmaier. The small cast is led by Natalia Ryumina and Nick Wittman.

It’s a somewhat typical haunted house story. A young woman inherits a big, foreboding house in Ukraine from her estranged grandfather. She and her husband fly out to handle the property and get it ready to sell. However, there are strange whispers and shouts with various bangs thrown in that keeps Sasha awake. The husband starts acting oddly because he is apparently keeping his own secrets. Sasha learns of some family history along the way that could explain the restless spirits. We’ve seen this play out before in every other film of this genre.

Although there is not much that I would call original and groundbreaking, there are some moments that provide a few appropriate shivers. I did watch this alone in my house on a Friday night, so I had the right atmosphere to make this a bit more compelling. The performances aren’t too bad. The dialogue was not glaringly unrealistic for a ghost story anyway.

The story did have one or two little somewhat unexpected moments, but not enough to stand up and applaud the filmmakers for any sort of cinematic ingenuity. Overall, the movie works well enough for me to not be overwhelmed with regret over the time spent watching it, however it’s nothing I can recommend with enthusiasm either.

Scratchman is a Doctor Who novel written by the man himself, Tom Baker. He is of course best known as playing the Doctor’s fourth incarnation on the telly. So this has an interesting history. Baker and his co-star, Ian Marter, had proposed an idea for a Doctor Who film in which the Time Lord take on the Devil, or some being very much like him.

This little adventure starts off with the TARDIS bringing the Doctor, Sarah Jane Smith, and Harry Sullivan to a SCottish village where they are soon besieged by walking scarecrows, Cybermen, and all kinds of horrors. Then the Doctor brought into another realm with a flying castle where he faces a bargain with Scratchman. The Doctor will have to face his fears and rescue his friends from a true master of evil.

Baker really unleashes his imagination here. Much of this is enjoyably absurd, although it is sometimes hard to picture in the mind’s eye. The examination of what motivates this particular Doctor ends up being pretty compelling. This Doctor still faces the daunting challenges with much of his usual glib, wry observations. however there is something deeper explored here. The novel ends up being a little better than I expected, and I am not just saying that because the author is my favorite Doctor.

Well, I am still breathing so that means I keep reading. Now, it’s time for Later by Stephen King.

Slipback is a Doctor Who radio play that was first broadcast by BBC in 1985. Eric Saward is the writer. Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant star with the aid of a guest cast which includes Valentine Dyall, Jon Glover. and Jane Carr.

The Doctor and Peri arrive aboard a huge spacecraft where experiments with Time are being conducted. Of course, the Doctor is not too pleased to find this dangerous intrusion taking place.

This was something I have never heard before, although I knew of its existence and I do have the novelization. It’s actually pretty good with solid performances from both Baker and Bryant. The story may not have the most original premise for this series, but it works well. I have said that Colin Baker’s version of the Doctor was rehabbed by Big Finish Productions, but BBC Radio may have actually accomplished that first.

Anyway, this turned out to be a pretty enjoyable addition to the ever expanding Doctor Who collection.

The Ghosts of N-Space is a Doctor Who radio play that was first broadcast on BBC Radio in 1996. The story was written by Barry Letts an directed by Phil Clarke. Jon Pertwee returns to the role of the Third Doctor and is reunited with Elisabeth Sladen and Nicholas Courtney as Sarah Jane Smith and Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart. respectively. Richard Pearce, Stephen Thorne, and Sandra Dickinson are included in the guest cast.

The Brigadier is on holiday in Sicily visiting a great-uncle. The uncle has some trouble with a local mobster and some spectral intruders. The Doctor is asked to come out for a little investigation where he diagnoses the ghosts as being left behind due to a breach in something called the N-Barrier. The problem gets a rather more alarming due to the monsters from that realm gathering to invade our plane of existence. The Doctor has to travel back to two different past centuries to get a handle on this looming catastrophe. Fortunately, Sarah is on hand to help out in spite the clumsy assistance of her colleague Jeremy Fotzoliver.

As much fun as it was to experience a Third Doctor adventure I had not heard before, the story is a bit of a mess. The sound effects were not entirely convincing. It seems to go on a little longer than necessary. Pertwee sounded great as did his co-stars, but I had a hard time staying with this particular adventure. I have the novelization, so I may need to revisit that as well. In spite of the mild disappointment, I was still glad that I finally got to hear this bit of Doctor Who history.