Black Gate

Having taken a rather long hiatus from reading Stephen King novels, I tentatively put a big toe in back in 2013, due to my love for The Shining.

Doctor Sleep is King’s sequel to The Shining and as you may know from my past posts, I loved it, which is saying a lot. However, what wasn’t much of a shocker was that King almost immediately sold the movie rights to Warner Brothers, and that Academy Award-winning screenwriter Akiva Goldsman stepped up to adapt Doctor Sleep. After all, Goldsman has had plenty of experience adapting other high-profile books such as The Da Vinci Code, The Divergent Series: Insurgent, and The 5th Wave, though those last two were meh…

However, we’ve now learned that following out-sized grosses on last summer’s movie adaptation of It, WB has put Doctor Sleep on the fast track. Mike Flanagan is set to direct the story, which picks up the life of tortured kid Danny Torrance (“Redrum!!”) now in his 40s and struggling with the same demons of anger and alcoholism that plagued his father and still haunted by the ghosts of the Overlook Hotel. Flanagan’s producing partner Trevor Macy will produce, along with Vertigo Entertainment’s Jon Berg.

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Contrary to what you may have heard from my fellow Black Gate staffers, I really was pretty good last year. I give Santa a lot of credit for ignoring the fake news which came out of our Chicago office about me hanging little bat skulls on the company tree and spray-painting all the candy canes black. Instead he decided to grant my two biggest wishes: for an HTC Vive virtual reality headset and the latest release of Planet Coaster to go with it.

Anyone who knows me knows I am absolutely mad for roller coasters and the game Planet Coaster by Frontier is, in my opinion, the quintessential environment for building the most extreme coasters and then watching with sadistic glee while your guests line up to ride it and promptly get sick afterwards. However, with the addition of the Vive VR, you can now personally line up to ride it and then get sick afterwards.

In other words, it rocks utterly.

Having spent more hours than I can to count immersed in Planet Coaster since its first release in 2016, I consider myself pretty adept at creating fanciful yet heart stopping coasters in the virtual world. But today, I must bow to the guru, the sensei, the ultimate Jedi Master of Planet Coaster, super-fan Hin Nya.

Nya has utilized Planet Coaster to create Aliens: The Ride, a 15-minute experience that takes you on a virtual trip through the scariest theme park attraction (n)ever made.

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From the amount of feedback I received, I found out last week that I’m far from alone in my fearful appreciation of gigantic monstrosities as horror movie fodder. From sharks to grizzly bears (the 70’s even gifted us with The Giant Spider Invasion in 1975) we all seem to agree that if there’s going to be a freak of nature involved, why not go ahead and supersize it?

In fact, one of my favorite “too big to be allowed” monsters was glimpsed far too briefly in the movie Cloverfield (2008), and it is about this that I have news.

(Spoiler alert)

If you recall, Cloverfield ended with an impossibly huge something, laying waste to New York city and then having a nuke dropped on it effectively wiping out Manhattan. Eight years later, via the pseudo-sequel 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016), we found out that the nuke didn’t solve the problem and the earth was essentially overrun – or at least the part of it we saw in the film.

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Does anyone but me remember the movie Grizzly?

It was originally released in 1976 and takes its place among a specific genre of horror movies that followed Jaws (1975), which focused on too-big-to-be-allowed animals on eating rampages. For whatever reason, I am especially partial to the Grizzly tagline:

18 feet of gut-crunching, man-eating terror!

For me, there’s always been something particularly creepy about anything “nightmare sized.”

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As much as I’m willing to suspend my disbelief for love of the Jurassic Park franchise, at some point you’d think someone in that universe would just up and decide that resurrecting dinosaurs is simply a bad idea all around. And now that we’ve all gotten a look at the trailer for Jurassic World 2: Fallen Kingdom I have some news to indicate the perpetual voice of reason when it comes to dinos, may be making an appearance to do just that.

It’s been known for a while now that Jurassic World 2 would bring back Jeff Goldblum to reprise his fan favorite role of Dr. Ian Malcolm, and Goldblum is seen prominently in the trailer.

But wait, there’s more…

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