All posts by correia45

On B-Movie Goodness – Review of Necroville

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So what makes a good B Movie?

It certainly isn’t the awesome special effects, which usually consists of a bunch of colored corn syrup and a chainsaw with the blade removed,  or the acting, because just because your cousin will work for free, and owns his own cape (for some unknown reason), doesn’t mean he makes a convincing vampire.

Good B-movies have heart. 

So here comes my first movie review on my new blog.  Necroville.  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1105289/

It isn’t out yet.  I got to go to a special, invite-only, pre-release VIP screening.  As in, I’m buddies with the executive producer, and he brought a copy by as he passed through Salt Lake, and we ate Papa Murphy’s Chicago Style pizza with fresh smoked New Mexico chili peppers, and watched the DVD.  But I do have a relatively big TV, so it still counts.

Necroville is a cross between a slacker comedy and a monster movie.  That’s the best way I can describe it.  In a town that is infested with zombies, vampires, werewolves, and goth kids, two guys that are too inept to work at the video store end up killing pesky monsters for a living. 

Now, like I said, a good B-movie has heart, they don’t have production values.  But Necroville still managed to look really good.  Having the producer there is also nice, as you get your own personalized commentary track, like “this is why we went over budget, because they messed up my truck.”  Or  “man, that piano was really heavy.” 

Like a lot of B-movies, the acting varied greatly from person to person.  I will say this though, Billy Garberina, the lead, is actually a pretty darn good actor.   If you’re a monster movie geek like me, you’ve seen him since he’s the cameraman on Feeding the Masses.   The rest of the performances were a little more hit or miss, but once again, that’s why I love this stuff.   The lead villain hammed it up, and did an excellent job. 

Mostly, I laughed my butt off.  There are some truly great lines, funny scenes, and laugh out loud stupid moments.  Even my wife, who prefers movies staring lots of British people with accents that I can’t understand, and names like Lord Devonshire Clevon-Smythe presents Jayne Austin’s Masterpiece Theater of Great British Angst and Scones, thought it was really fun. 

Basically, Necroville has heart.  It is the kind of movie that reminds me why I love this stuff.

So when this movie reaches distribution, throw it in your Blockbuster Que.  Trust me, any movie that does something so horribly unspeakable with a twisty straw gets major bonus points. 

http://www.necroville.com/home.html

So it begins…

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I’ve never blogged before.  Sure, I’ve screwed around on the internet a lot, but I’ve never had one of these before.  I started Monster Hunter Nation for a couple of reasons. 

  1. I have written a novel which will be published later this year.  I wanted a place to put up samples of my writing, as well as other online fiction projects.  
  2. I like to randomly complain about stuff. 

My name is Larry Correia.  I live in the suburbs outside of Salt Lake City, Utah.  I’m a California refugee.  Somehow I tricked a wonderful woman into marrying me, having my kids, and sticking around for the last ten years.

Not counting my families, I have two great loves in life, guns and monster movies. 

I’m one of the owners of a gun store in Draper, Utah, called FBMG.  We’re an NFA dealer, which means that in addition to regular guns, we specialize in machine guns, suppressors (silencers is what most of you would call them), and other cool stuff like that.  FBMG actually stands for Fuzzy Bunny Movie Guns.  No, really.  I’m not making that up.  Everybody else in this business is Elite Tactical Ninja Systems Force Alpha, or some crap like that, and we wanted to be different.  Besides, who could hate fuzzy bunnies? 

For the last four years, I have been a certified firearms instructor.  Primarily I teach the class for the Utah Concealed Firearms permit, but through my company, I get to do lots of other things as well.  I’ve got to admit that I love teaching people to defend themselves.  Nothing warms my heart quite like seeing an otherwise defenseless person learning to take on the responsibility to defend themselves. 

So basically, I hang out with my kind of people all day, play with guns, and get to shoot stuff.  Yes, life is hard.  I know. 

On the other love, I’m a B movie geek.  Show me a movie with a budget larger than the Apollo moon landings, Oscar winning actors, and a whole bunch of hype, and I won’t really care.  Show me a movie made by a bunch of college students, with a budget smaller than the big movies’ doughnut fund, where the actors were literally paid in beer, and I’m so there.  Bonus points if the monster is actually a guy in a gorilla suit.  

I’m a writer.  I’ve been published a few times.  My first novel, Monster Hunter International, will be coming out in the next few months, and I’ll be posting the first portion on this blog shortly.  I’ve also done a few successful online fiction serials, and I’ll be posting those here as well. 

So this is it.  I can’t promise anything, but at least I’m going to have fun.