Black Gate

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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As we have observed for many years now, what’s old is new again: for movies, TV and most assuredly for Mr. Stephen King.

King is enjoying a massive renaissance that started with his first post-addiction novel Doctor Sleep in 2013 then juggernauted straight into his detective novels (The Bill Hodges Trilogy) and seems to have culminated in King now taking over both the big and small screens.

The elder statesman of horror is back with a serious vengeance.

In the wake of IT floating into theaters this summer, interest began swirling around reimaging almost all of King’s novels for the screen, but specifically around refreshing his 1983 novel Pet Sematary, previously adapted by Mary Lambert in 1989. We learned this week from Deadline that Dennis Widmyer and Kevin Kolsch, the writing/directing duo behind 2014’s fantasy-horror flick Starry Eyes, have been tapped to bring Pet Sematary back to life in theaters.

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