Here’s my belated review of my evening at the Kinetik Festival in Montreal. In all honesty, I can only account for the Saturday Night events as I did not attend the other days. I attended Phase 3: Noise.

Well I’ve seen Doomsday last night and if you want an honest account of it’s worth, you’ve come to the right place.
This movie FUCKING ROCKS! It isn’t quite what I expected but the surprise was very well received. The premise is classic, a virus has wiped out a huge chunk of the population and this is the tale of its survivors. I’m not giving anything away by telling you that the folks who have been sealed into Scotland have regressed to primitive states, some along the lines of Mad Max 3 or my very own Cannibal Raiders while others have gone completely medieval. The sets alone are impressive, much like I Am Legend. And speaking of which, some have compared these movies. They’re silly. The only similarities are the population destroying virus and ruined cities. This movie rather reminded me of Escape From New York/L.A., with a population abandonned, forgotten and sealed inside a no man’s land, left to their own wars and depravities. Cannibalism! Torture! Arena fights! Spiked Junk Cars! Explosions! Maimings! Beheadings! Blood blood and more blood! This is pure feverish fun, and the ending is wide open for a sequel :)

I’ve been buying my regular comics from a friend for 15 years now. While I pick up new stuff in comic shops once in a while, this guy goes ahead and orders all the full series i’m into for me. He also picks up stuff he thinks I will like. One such series was 30 Days Of Night, from IDW Publishing. At first I wasn’t sure I liked this. I was into zombies, not vampires. I never told him to stop picking up those books for me though, and lately I’ve been rewarded with a storyline I truly enjoyed. I don’t know why, but the artwork and writing on the Spreading The Desease mini-series finally truly caught my interest in the 30 Days Of Night universe. I’ll keep my eyes open, I might end up liking vampire stories afterall. Let’s hope the 30 Days Of Night movie lives up to everyone’s expectations…

As I walked by the Spectrum last evening, after a trip at an electronics store for a new computer hard drive, my girlfriend noticed Skinny Puppy were doing their show in a few hours! I had wanted to go but forgot about it until then. We just went inside, bought tickets and had a great time. The opening acts were heavy and filling and Skinny Puppy delivered a decent show. We managed to grab a table close to the stage as we didn’t feel like standing around in the pit, so we had a great view. They mostly performed tracks from the new album but kept everyone happy by including classics, such as the mighty Warlock song! Covered in blood, wires sticking out everywhere, Ogre did his usual shtick, to the delight of everyone. The obligatory encores brought them back on stage twice with their new material. We saw a few friends there but didn’t stick around. We went out for a poutine and then to sleep.

I finally went out to see the Ghost Rider movie last night. It was alright I suppose, the Ghost Rider did look pretty cool and they handled the origin with Mephisto pretty well (nice touch having Fonda as the devil…From Easy Rider to Ghost Rider!). The scene where we see the cowboy Ghost Rider riding alongside the modern one was very nice, and the scene where the modern one rides up the side of the building is one of my favorite parts. Here’s what I did NOT like:

1. 1.The humour was a bit out of place, this wasn’t as “serious” as the Punisher movie, as I would have liked.
2. 2.The vilains. Most fans of the comics probably went WTF? When I look at comic based movies nowadays, I try to look at them both from the comic book perspective and the point of view of someone who never read the books, and in this case, I figured the vilain might have seemed out of place. For comic fans, who do you think would have been a better choice? I suppose Blackout might not have been a better choice afterall.
3. 3.The part where the old Rider rides one last time. Please tell me what was the point of “riding for one last time” if it wasn’t to help the new Ghost Rider fight Blackheart? He just rides away…what the hell?

This being said, it’s still worth seeing on the big screen, I think they managed to pull it off rather well.

People who know me personally , know that I love comics and that I buy them on a regular basis. But few people, except my girlfriend and the guy I order the books from (thanks Mike!), know what those books actually are.
Like most people my age who still buy comics, I’ve been through a superhero comic phase in highschool and into college. My interest in superheroes steadily dwindled into nothingness by the time I was about 22 though. I was still picking up issues of Wolverine and Ghost Rider and outright cancelled these. I had every single issue of the former until that point. That’s not to say I haven’t kept these. I never got rid of any comics since I started buying them about 18 years ago. Most of them are conserved inside a defunct freezer at my folk’s house. All the comics I came to love, the indies, undergrounds, horror and sci-fi titles, are at my place, neatly categorized behind glass doors in my studio.

From my old days of Infinity Gauntlet, the Image comics genesis, the chromium covers and arrogant comic shop clerks, my tastes have shifted to b&w anthologies, splatter comics and old undergrounds, but here’s what I’m into these days and what I actually buy on a regular basis, series-wise (please note that this is a short list: I simply cannot afford indulging in much more than this at this point!)