Monthly Archives: January 2026

Vicious Fun

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A difference between the movies of the 1980s and the movies of the 2020s is that, for the most part, we have a more enlightened view of the way people ought to behave. For example, if you were a judgmental nerd with a crazy hot roommate in 1983, the arc of your story would be to win the roommate as a prize for your many inappropriate behaviours, such as berating her for wanting to watch Falcon Crest with her friends, or tailing her (admittedly scuzzball) date to a Chinese restaurant on the edge of town and inserting yourself into his life.

Whereas in the 2020s when you are that same loser character in 1983 under the same circumstances, and you take all of the same actions… you know, ultimately what I did not like about this movie is that he was still the protagonist at all. So be prepared for that, even if his end state isn’t quite as thoroughly rewarded as it once would have been.

The plot twist is that, after getting way too sorry for himself drunk and passing out in a supply closet of said Chinese restaurant, he wakes up to a small motivational self-help group in the main room of the now closed location. Before very long at all, he deduces that they’re not alcoholics so much as they are serial killers, and he’d better hope he can blend in if he wants to survive the night, much less get back to winning the heart of his roommate.

The other thing that would have made me like the movie more [aside from the aforementioned more sympathetic protagonist] is if I had not just seen the same overall plot play out across season one of the Dexter revival. Which is in no way their fault, since the movie predates the TV season by five years. Anyway, Vicious Fun was maybe sufficiently vicious, but definitely not sufficiently fun. I wanted more comedy out of my horror comedy than I actually received. Alas.

Wake Me after the Apocalypse

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Some books have hooks that just get me, or maybe Amazon is good at advertising. Whatever. Anyway, this book‘s hook is that Joanna the protagonist wakes up from cryosleep after 200 years only to find that there’s been a cave-in, and she alone has survived out of her group of a thousand people. The backstory, doled out in alternating chapters, is that a comet was about to hit the earth, but with enough warning that lots of bunkers of 1,000 people each were set up throughout America to allow humanity to survive the darkness and the desolation, via centuries of sleep thanks to recently successful cryonics technology.

I mean, Joanna’s personal backstory is also doled out through those alternating chapters, but that’s the gist of it. Cryosleep to avoid disaster, wake up to completely different disaster. So… obviously she’s going to meet other survivors. For one thing, there’s no reason to believe all the bunkers were destroyed just because hers was. But, insofar as this is the first book in a series, I was looking for less exposition and relationships and stuff, more raw survival and maybe mystery solving.[1]

What I got was… about half a book of those alternating backstory chapters, enough to get me well and truly tired of them. Then, just as the book I was looking for got started, the back 40% of it was instead chock full of people again, already. Ugh. It’s not that the story Rivet wrote was bad, it just was not at all what I wanted. Put a different way [that overstates the case of what this book actually is], I’d like to read these YA books and have them be less about Team Jacob versus Team Edward and more about Team Bella.

Anyway, if the second book is available at the Kindle lending library, I’ll borrow it eventually as I did this one. If it is not, I’m pretty sure I will neither buy nor download it. So… yeah.

[1] After all, just because the scientists believed it would be an extinction level event doesn’t mean it definitely would be. 99.999% death rate, we’d still bounce back[2].
[2] …well, maybe not bounce.