Black Gate

David Tennant and Michael Sheen as lead characters of Crowley and Aziraphale

A little over a year ago I brought you the nice and accurate prophecy that Amazon was adapting one of my favorite books of all time, Good Omens, into a mini-series.

Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s novel stands as the only book that ever made me laugh out loud the first time I read it, and still gets me every time. I only recently delved into the audio book narrated by Martin Javis, and nearly drove off the road when I snorted my coffee out of my nose.

In my humble opinion, the story is sheer genius.

Good Omens takes place when the Apocalypse is near and Final Judgment is set to descend upon humanity. The armies of Good and Evil are amassing, Atlantis is rising, and tempers are flaring. Everything appears to be going according to Divine Plan — except a somewhat fussy angel, and a fast-living demon are not looking forward to the coming war, and someone seems to have misplaced the Antichrist.

This week we have new casting news in addition to Michael Sheen and David Tennant playing the lead characters Aziraphale (the angel) and Crowley (the demon) respectively, and John Hamm as Aziraphale’s jerk of a boss, the angel Gabriel. Plus we have some new production stills to share.

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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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