Flavours of the Month: January 2018...

Tech-savvy portmanteau tales, numerous shades of horror, and Hollywood tell-alls are just some of what's been setting the tone of my January 2018...

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Snuffles: The Screenplay...

A while back I accidentally wrote a novella called "How Mr Snuffles III and Others Met Their Maker". I say accidentally because it had started out as a short story which then grew into a novella on-the-fly. I found myself hopping back and forth inserting new passages and ideas and it was one of the most 'free-wheeling' instances of writing that I have experienced thus far.

It is a black comedy about an orphaned pet therapist/serial killer aficionado who teams up with a gifted taxidermist to explore the limits of love, death, and psychopathy ... so yeah, the jettest of jet black comedies.

A nearly complete version of the layout/guide.

There's nothing quite like a good old corkboard with actual, physical index cards and pins.

Anyway, a while after writing the novella I had the idea of converting it into a script, but various other things I wanted to write slid in first until now, a couple of years down the line. I've returned to it for a little bit of creative writing fun to kick off 2018. With a fair bit of groundwork already done in writing the novella, I figured this would be a project I could hammer out efficiently...

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Francesca (Luciano Onetti, 2015) DVD Review

Find more giallo reviews here.

“Through me you pass into the city of woe, through me you pass into eternal pain.” In recent years the 'neo-giallo' movement has grown, moving hand-in-hand with the re-evaluation of gialli from the 1960s, 70s, 80s, as well as the few that were released in the 1990s. Through DVD and now Blu-Ray – distributed by high quality and dedicated labels such as Arrow Video, 88 Films, Shameless Screen Entertainment (plus many more in various markets around the globe) – the genre has gained a whole new audience, with the films afforded lavish restoration and supplemental packages for unparallelled home viewing experiences. With the love spreading for these movies – made by filmmakers such as Dario Argento, Mario Bava, and Sergio Martino (among many others) – it was only natural that new examples of the genre would begin to appear. Masks, Amer, The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears, and Yellow are all examples of this 'new old school' of highly stylised murder mystery – and the Argentinian Francesca (from the director of Sonno Profondo) is perhaps the one which nails the classic style closest of all...

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