http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0996979/

Now this is how a low budget movie should be made. Alien Raiders was absolutely great.

A supermarket in a small Arizona town is taken over by a bunch of gunmen. A hostage situation results, only the gunmen aren’t there to rob the place, they’re hunting space aliens. 

Shot entirely in one location, a grocery store, and populated by a bunch of actors you’ve never seen before, with a really basic plot, you wouldn’t expect much from this flick, but it takes that one location, and absolutely milks it. It takes that basic plot and uses a bunch of little touches to make it memorable and smart. The acting was pretty dang good, across the board.

Okay, I take it back about actors you’ve never seen before. I just checked IMDB. I’ve just never followed 24 or Prison Break. I’ve seen probably five episodes of 24 over 7 years, and I’ve never actually watched Prison Break, so I guess that there are some actors that have done stuff.

The end is a little predictable, but it doesn’t matter, because the ride to get there was worth it.  The mutated alien isn’t anything special, but they use effective shakey cam and lighting to keep the alien menacing.

It was really the little thoughtful touches that made this movie great. I don’t want to give anything away, but it is what they do for the people after their alien test that is my favorite part, because you might as well be nice and professional to the people you’re having to torment.  The ice buckets and the medic’s hand are just good writing.

Go get it. This is the best B Movie I’ve seen lately.

There are three Feast movies. The first one was one of the most interesting, original, and just plain enjoyable monster movies I’ve ever seen.

Then came Feast II. I had high hopes. Instead it was probably one of the worst movies ever, and longtime readers know the kind of crap that I seek out. It lacked the original’s humor and scares, and instead tried to replace it with just being obnoxiously gross. And instead it was just plain stupid.

I read an interview with the director where he blamed the audience for not being ‘man’ enough to get his awesome vision, because he was so hardcore. It was like reading an interview from L.H. Franzibald, and I was waiting for him to start whipping the reporter from Fangoria.

Sorry, as an artist, if the audience doesn’t get your art, that’s your fault, not the audience. That lame college art department BS doesn’t fly in real life. I’ve watched probably 1,000 horror, monster, or low budget movies at this point of my life, and even I thought it sucked.

Feast III just came out, and I wasn’t even going to rent it because of the sheer awfulness that was II. But a reviewer that I normally trust said that it redeemed the franchise, and that it was as good as the first one. (thanks a lot, Bloody Disgusting) So I watched it last night.

Okay, III was far better than II, which is strange since they were filmed at the same time. It has moments of real brilliance, like the strobe/stop motion scenes. Gulager still likes to think he’s really clever by randomly killing people, a schitck that gets old after awhile. But overall it is better than II in almost every way, and just when you get to the end, and you think that ‘woo hoo! All right, this series has been redeemed’—

SPOILER ALERT

The last few characters are stepped on by a giant robot. A giant friggin’ robot… And no, there were no robots in this series at all up to that point. Then a mariachi shows up and sings.

That’s it. No resolution. No story. No plot. No anything that makes sense. This was even more insulting than Werewolf: The Devil’s Hound when random space aliens show up at the end.

That’s just lazy writing.  

Apparently as payback for the passage of California’s Prop 8, homosexual protestors are going to harrass the bi-annual LDS general conference in Salt Lake City. The gay rights people are saying that they’re going to bring 200,000 people, which means they’ll get a couple thousand that the national news will then turn into 200,000. Kind of like the five thousand mom= Million Mom March.

The SLCPD is going through extra riot training. They’re really excited about having the opportunity to baton some drag queens. If we’re really lucky, the professional protestor class from Seattle will show up and start tossing Molotovs. Ironically though, this is Utah, not Hippieland, so that should prove really interesting. 

I could really care less about anyone’s sexual orientation, man, women, sheep, invertibras, farm machinery, whatever, but when you start harrassing people in my hometown, then that just ain’t cool.

I heard they’re going to be bussing militant homosexuals from the San Francisco area out to SLC.  I think this is an awsome idea. I know my father in law reads this blog, so I’ve got a suggestion. He lives out in the San Fran area. I think you and the MIL should jump on a Big Gay Protest Bus and get a free ride out here for conference weekend. Think of the money you could save on gas!

EDIT: I have no idea if this story is even true. I got this second hand.

I went shooting with Nightcrawler on Friday. I’ve got two guns that I’m reviewing for SWAT. One I just picked up, the other I’ve been playing with for awhile. I’m about done with the DSA AR, and just need to get a few more detail shots. It is one nice gun. This was the first time I got to really play with the GP6, and holy crap it is fast. It has the best factory production trigger of any double action I have ever felt, period, and that is on a $600 polymer gun. I’ve felt better double action triggers on tuned customs, like Ernie Langdon Sigs, things like that, but on a production polymer gun? This thing is amazing.

Mike takes great photos too. Check out how pretty Utah is. The 16″ is the DSA. I’ve got a Millet 1-4X on it.

The big AR in the glamour shot is my DMR/coyote gun. It is an old Rock River 20″, from back when they gave a damn. It is also the single most accurate gun I own.  

I went to the writing conference yesterday. It was pretty awesome.

I was on one panel. The topic was World Building, what every beginning writer needs to know about creating their world. And somehow I became the moderator. I think it was because I was the first in alphabetical order. It was a packed room, with at least a hundred people in it, but I think I did okay.

Except for that one part where I used the word ‘damn’. Keep in mind that this is BYU. So I just told them that I went to Utah State, then I said “GO AGGIES!” and threw up the Horns. Dan Willis, author of The Survivors, from the Dragonlance series had my back, so he cussed too. Take that BYU, that’s for your lack of caffeinated beverages in the food court!  He also had the single funniest line of the conference when an editor from TOR pointed out that they were tired of stories with traditional LOTR elves, and Dan said no more Elvish Impersonators. Oh, man, that was good.

I was told by a few people that my panel had been the funniest. (not the most helpful, or most educational, but we had a lot of fun). Plus I closed it by thanking everybody for coming, thanking BYU, thanking the panel, and then saying that all our books were for sale on Amazon.com, so go buy stuff.  Yep, I’ve not written 6 NYT bestsellers like some of these other writers, so I need to sell me some books! 

Seriously though, it was an awesome conference. I was able to meet Tracy Hickman. He did a great presention, and afterward I was able to get him to sign my original 198os copies of the Dragonlance Chronicles. I was probably 12 when I first read those books. They were some of the things that inspired me to actually want to be a writer to begin with.  Tracy was really nice in person, and we traded autographed books.  http://www.trhickman.com/

Some of the other authors that I know were there. Brandon Sanderson is the author of Mistborn and Elantris, and is the guy that was picked to finish Robert Jordan’s epic Wheel Of Time series. (750,000 words for the final book and counting, so the word Epic is appropriate). Brandon has been really helpful to me since I’ve stumbled into being a professional author type person. He’s a great writer, and a good dude to have giving you business advice. http://www.brandonsanderson.com

He’s also just started MHI and has read the first 4 chapters. Knowing that that was heading into the slowest part of the book (character building and the training bits) Isaid, “Don’t worry, it’ll speed up.” He just looked at me like I was stupid, and said that in the first chapter the narrator almost gets eaten by a werewolf and then beats it to death. “Yeah, like I said, don’t worry, it’ll speed up.”  I guess that my idea of slow paced is a bit different than most folks.

I met Lee Modesit. I’ve not read any of his works, but my wife has read like 20 of his books. (keep in mind that Mrs. Correia is one of those folks that plows through novels and picks them up from the library, 20 at a time).  He seems like a contrarian kind of guy, and I can really respect that. (for some odd reason)

Paul Genesse was there. We were on panels at MountainCon together. He’s just finished his second book, sequel to The Golden Cord. I recently read his first book, and I rather enjoyed it. He’s a really nice guy. http://paulgenesse.blogspot.com/

Eric James Stone is the author of a bunch of really good short stories. In the last Orson Scott Card compendium of Sci-Fi, was one of the most enjoyable shorts that I had ever read. It was the story of a tabloid reporter who won a lottery to be the only reporter on the first intersteller voyage. It wasn’t until after MountainCon that I put two and two together and realized that I had just met the author, so I had to give him my compliments at LTUE.  Keep an eye on Eric, as I expect to see some really good stuff coming from him. http://www.ericjamesstone.com/blog/home/

There were a ton of other authors, most of whom I did not get to meet. I don’t know who she is, but major kudos to the author of The Princess and The Hound, because she had to guts to say (during a panel) that she thought Steven King was really overrated, and that most of his books weren’t really very good. Boo Yah!  No doubt King has written some excellent books, but he’s also written some real stinkers, and the hero worship where he can do no wrong gets really old. (not that my crowd would know, since most of my friends are soldiers, and as King so sagely pointed out, most of them are illiterate anyway).

There was a lot of Stephanie Meyers hate. I’m not a fan, as I don’t think vampires should ever ‘glisten’ and they can’t ‘sparkle’ unless they’re on fire. But you’ve got a room full of writers and people who want to be writers, all of who are trying really hard to be good, and most of them can tell that she just isn’t that good but somehow she sells millions of books. Go figure.

I love stuff like this. I enjoy the panels, I like meeting other writers. Next year I’ll try to catch more than one day of LTUE. (and I’ll smuggle in my own Vanilla Coke!)