Sinister Simian

Welcome to Sinister Simian. That title follows a line of screen-names I've been using starting with Jacques the Monkey (thank you Peter Gabriel) which became Simian Jack (a nod to Genndy Tartakovsky). More directly it is in homage to Sinister Cinema, a hosted horror program that ran every Saturday night on KATU in Portland, Oregon. Much loved and fondly remembered, Sinister Cinema is also the namesake of a home video retailer in Medford, Oregon.

If you're looking in during the early days of this blog, you're finding a glut of reviews on Dracula movies and the works of Shinya Tsukamoto. I'll be moving on from there, but I do have a ton of Dracula reviews to go – sorry. This began as a  thread on a BB elsewhere in which I intended to watch each film in quick succession and just toss out whatever random thoughts came to mind, and somehow I got stuck attempting full write-ups instead. As for Tsukamoto, he's a fave director whose work I find captivating. He's mostly known for his breakout cyberpunk hit Tetsuo, and I'd like to change that. It's worthy as a visionary piece but the director has done work since that is more profound, more beautiful, more accomplished in craft, art, and humanism.

Very few of these will be proper analyses. Two reasons for that, one is that I hope to entice readers to check out films they may not have seen, and that means trying to avoid spoilers.  I won't always do that. The other reason is, well...I'm just a casual viewer with a pedestrian background, not a film scholar. I like my summer blockbusters and pop entertainment, and while I do have a taste for things eclectic my familiarity with them remains...ummm, aspirational.  I do this for fun.

Please feel free to comment, disagreement and differences of opinion are welcome as long as they are kept civil – this isn't IMDb or AICN. We may be seeing the same movies but we aren't going to be seeing the same things in them. This isn't learned stuff, just personal reactions. I'm a cinephage: I eat up movies.

About the screencaps? Quality and availability are gonna vary. I'm trying to get them straight from my own discs but many of them I'm having to grab images off trailers on You Tube. Working to improve the situation.

One of my reasons for launching this blog is pretty oblique. I want to be known for the things I value, and this is just about the best way I can think of to show who I am.   It's a personal thing  Communication is one of the things that matter to me.  There's someone in particular out there I want to reach. 

That said, I hope you enjoy the blog.  Go watch a movie.