Tuesday, Aug 5 2025
A movie review, an excerpt, and some other random bits
Here's my review of Together, a nice, fun body horror movie that would have made David Cronenberg cheer, had it not wiffed it in the end.
Okay, so how do you rate a movie where the majority of the movie is really good, great even, and then the last say, five or ten minutes, especially the last shot, just completely derailed it for me.
I want to like this movie. I did like this movie. It's solid, entertaining, scary, gross body horror. It's the kind of movie that would make David Cronenberg proud.
But that last shot man... it was like... what the fuck are you doing? Stop it. You're embarrassing me. I like Alison Brie, even though her voice is always just Trudy Campbell's voice to me. I think Dave Franco is fine. The story was good. The horror was good. It didn't make a whole lot of sense, but that's okay.
I dunno y'all. Three I guess. It would have been four, but no. They BLEW IT.
So on Bluesky and Instagram, I've been doing little excerpts from my writing on the WIPsnips hashtag. I don't always just post excerpts from my Work in Progress, though, because my WIP is an erotica story, and it's not as easy to share from that publicly. So I share from my older stuff as well.
In this snip, Charlie and Caroline are vampires living in Flagstaff, Arizona in the 1970s. To stave off boredom, they take turns "killing" themselves in more and more elaborate ways, for their own amusement.
Charlie has just been run over by Caroline's car, and was mangled. Caroline put her back together and Charlie has just come out of death and has asked for a mirror.
“Are you sure about that? You still look pretty banged up,” Caroline said, tilting Charlie's head to the side by the chin, examining her face.
“Yeah, lemme see.”
Caroline nodded and took a little round make-up mirror from the shelf behind the toilet and held it out to Charlie. When she went to reach for it, Charlie found that her arms weren't up to the task. Caroline positioned the mirror so she could see.
The skin on her face was healed and clean, but the bones that made up her skull were clearly still broken and figuring out where they belonged. Charlie guessed that Caroline had done what she could to push them into roughly the right place, but it left her face looking lumpy and pulled at odd angles. The hair on the left side of her head was mostly gone. Judging from the patch of smooth, pink skin, she guessed her scalp was torn off in that spot. She'd have to wear a hat for a little while.
“Did I lose my eye?” Charlie asked, turning her head in the mirror, trying to see the red and black lump that was sitting in the hole where her eye was supposed to be.
“Yes, and your foot,” Caroline said, putting the mirror back.
“My foot? Did it grow back?” Charlie asked. She'd never lost a limb before. Caroline had told her that limbs grew back, but it took longer. It was the one thing about The Death Game that truly scared her.
“Nope, I sewed it back on. Frankenstein'd you right up!” Caroline said, beaming. Charlie gave a grotesque, twisted grin. With one side of her head nearly bald and the disjointed bones in her face, she looked a bit like the Frankenstein monster. “I had to superglue the bones,” Caroline said, looking proud of herself.
“Fucking boss!”
“I thought so,” Caroline said, holding the sippy cup out for Charlie again. Looking at Caroline in her Donna Reed dress, Charlie was sure that the centenarian never thought of anything as 'boss’, but she appreciated the effort. Charlie tilted her head back and sucked at the lip of the cup and sank back into that saline warmth of the blood, nearly falling asleep again.
I've been drawing in Clip Studio Paint lately, and I'm really enjoying it. Thought I'd share a few of my recent drawings.
Well, that's Tuesday!
I hope you're having a great week so far, and I'll be back in a couple of days!