Agents of SHIELD Season 1 Blu-ray

Well it took some time, it took a real long time but I finally finished the first season of Agents of SHIELD.

Like many people I saw the first couple of episodes of the show and thought it sucked so I stopped watching, other people I knew however kept watching and they assured me the show got better and that I should give it another try and sure enough that episode would also be terrible and I'd stop watching again, this process would repeat itself over several months and eventually I got through the 6 or 7 really bad episodes that started the series off and the show seemed to quickly improve.

Over the last couple of week I've watched the remaining 15 or so episodes and enjoyed them, it's impressive how much the show has improved during it's first season, for me at least it's not essential viewing but it is enjoyable viewing and I believe the season 2 Blu-ray set is being released soon and I now find myself curious as to where the show will go from here.

For anyone who hasn't seen season 1 the first several episodes are pretty bad but it gets better.

The Poltergeist Trilogy

Over the last week I've rewatched The Poltergeist Trilogy on Blu-ray, my memory of the films was that I enjoyed the first film, the second was ok and the third was a cheap and nasty piece of crap.

I still really enjoy the original Poltergeist, it's an entertaining film that has a well told story and for the time is technically well executed.

Poltergeist 2 is a decent movie until it reaches its climax and then it just seems like the people making the movie just didn't know how to end it so they threw some special effects at it and hoped no-one noticed it didn't make any sense.

Poltergeist 3 wasn't in fact a cheap and nasty movie, sure it only had half the budget of Poltergeist 2 but it was made for only a little less than the budget of the original film, I suppose it was because the movie featured so little location shooting and was largely studio bound ( or that's how it seems anyway ), one of the things that really hurt the film was the score Joe Renzetti, it is a genuine shame the producers couldn't get Jerry Goldsmith to return to score the third film.

I wouldn't go so far as to say Poltergeist 3 was a bad movie but it's not as bad as I thought I remembered it being but I also didn't think Poltergeist 2 was as good as I remembered either, Poltergeist however is lots of fun.

Robocop ( 2014 )

I remember when I heard that there was to be a remake of Robocop, I was a huge fan of the original film but I thought OK this could be really good or it'll really stink.

Time passes as time often does and the remake is finished and I saw it in the cinema with one other person, that was it, there was two of us in the cinema and this was during the movie's opening week so I assumed the movie was really bad even before it had started.

The end credits roll and I walked out of the cinema and I didn't hate the movie but I wasn't impressed either, honestly I thought it could have been much worse, later the movie was released on Blu-ray and I picked it up on sale being obsessive when it come to movies and such, even though I didn't love the movie I still wanted to own it just so I could say I had all the movies, I eventually rewatched the Blu-ray and I thought it was better than I remembered, nothing special but better than I remembered the movie being when I saw it at the cinema.

Today I happened to see the movie again and I found myself thinking it was actually a pretty decent movie, of course it doesn't measure up to the original movie but it's a decent reasonably entertaining movie.

It only took me three viewings to come to the conclusion the remake of Robocop is actually a decent movie.

Finders Keepers

I used to be an avid reader of Stephen King's book, as soon as he released something new I had have it as soon as possible but at some point something changed and there were three or four books in a row I didn't really enjoy all that much, they weren't awful but they weren't really fun so like when all things stop being enjoyable I stopped reading them.

Years passed by and many a new Stephen King novel came and went and I found no real desire to read any of them, I would occasionally think I should pick up some new book of his out of curiosity but it just never happened, well until recently anyway.

I was talking to a friend of mine sometime ago about the television mini-series based on The Stand, personally I didn't care for it but think afterwards it might be fun to revisit the book at some point or maybe some of King's other books I had enjoyed but for some reason or another I just never got around to it, finally I decided I would go pick up a copy of The Stand but no bookshop I visited had a copy in stock and few of them had much of King's earlier work in stock either, what they did all have was copies of the recently released Finders Keepers so I took a chance and bought that instead.

Finders Keepers wasn't exactly what I expected but I found I rather enjoyed it, at times the book referred to events that had happened to characters previously and after doing a bit of research online I found that it was the second book in a series but all the information the reader need to know was contained in the book so there wasn't any risk of not understanding what was going on, I guess what surprised me a little was that there were only minimal elements of the supernatural in the story ( although I suspect that is going to change in book three ) but instead Finders Keepers was a well written thriller and having completed it I was more than happy to purchase the first book in the series Mr Mercedes which I am currently reading and also enjoying it immensely.

I don't know what it was about those few Stephen King books I read that I didn't like now, I can tell you that Gerald's Game and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon were tow of them, maybe I just didn't enjoy the subject matter, I guess it really doesn't matter now but I can say Finders Keepers was well worth the read and Mr Mercedes is shaping up to be the same, the plus side of all of this is even though I am somewhat behind the times there are a whole bunch of Stephen King books out there I haven't read and I'd like to think at least some if not all of them will be pretty damn good reading.

The Multimedia Chronicles

I was looking for a video review of a recently released Doctor Who Blu-ray boxset, as I suspected YouTube was littered with them, most of them well, they weren't horrible as such but they weren't interesting either.

As a result I stumbled across The Multimedia Chronicles which is a video podcast that pretty much covers all forms of media, basically it's a guy talking to camera about stuff he likes and he would seem to like a lot of the same things I do.

If you are a fan of comics, books, video games, movies and television shows it may be worth a look when you have a moment to spare but be warned there are an awful lot of episodes covering a lot of different subjects, more than any new viewer could reasonably hope to get through.

OK so when did that happen ?

Perhaps the more appropriate question might be OK so why did that happen ?

I've been pretty quiet on the blog front for a while now, life just gets busy sometimes but weirdly that's when my page views spiked, when I wasn't writing anything, perhaps the internet is trying to tell me something.

I don't usually check blog statistics but I got a notification of something that needed my attention and while I was attending to it I noticed an increase in viewing figures, not an Earth shattering increase but for a while there the numbers were higher than I ever would have expected to see.

No doubt it's all down to web-bots, web-bots and Space 1999 fans apparently.

Hawk the Slayer ( Blu-ray )

If I can say one thing in the defence of Hawk the Slayer it's that you can see the people are genuinely trying to make a good movie and sometimes despite a low budget and lack of production values cast and crew rally together to make a movie that is greater than the sum of it's parts, sadly in the case of Hawk the Slayer that didn't happen.

Most of the performances given by cast members were wooden to say the least with the exception of Jack Palance and I honestly don't know how to describe his work on the movie but I can truly say it was a unique performance and seldom have I seen anything ti rival it in modern cinema.

Hawk the Slayer has reputation for being a terrible movie but I don't think that is entirely fair, it's certainly not a good movie but it is strangely entertaining.

I have seen a couple of different DVD releases of the movie and I think it would be fair to say the new Blu-ray release is the best looking version I have seen, it seems like no restoration work has been done on the movie and in this case that adds to it's charm.

Hawk the Slayer isn't for everyone but I enjoy it, perhaps I enjoy it for the wrong reasons but it make me laugh.