darkadaptedeyeblog

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Post No. 250: The Collector's edition addition addiction

Some people collect stamps, some baseball cards. Some people collect porcelain figurines, some shot glasses. My mother used to collect horses and elephants, albeit ceramic ones at 1/50th actual scale and thus more practical to set grazing. This guy I knew in college once cheekily proclaimed that he collected parking tickets, that is until I assume his unconventional hobby became cost prohibitive.…

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The 31 DAEs of Halloween 2023: Deep-Dive Dispatch #4

31 days, 31 movies…or so the story goes. Your light reading recap CONCLUDES below:Continue reading Untitled

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The 31 DAEs of Halloween 2023: Deep-Dive Dispatch #3

31 days, 31 movies…or so the story goes. Your light reading recap continues below:Continue reading Untitled

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The 31 DAEs of Halloween 2023: Deep-Dive Dispatch #2

31 days, 31 movies…or so the story goes. Your light reading recap continues below: Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981 – Blu-Ray) – Considering how many pixels this site has pushed in its direction over the years – first in a multi-part breakdown/ analysis and then a pseudo-live blog watch-along – I can’t pretend to have much new to say about Friday the 13th Part 2 here, and so my approach for this…

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The 31 DAEs of Halloween 2023: Deep-Dive Dispatch #1

Last October marked the happy procession from conceptual daydream to reality of my personally curated month-long horror movie festival, “The 31 DAEs of Halloween”. 31 days, 31 movies, or so the theory goes. A heady mix of old and new, gristle and goo.I had such a blast with the whole thing, even during some particularly trying personal times, that I resolved then and there that the fest should…

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The 31 daes of halloween 2022: a recap

The 31 daes of halloween 2022: a recap

This Halloween hangover has got legs, I can already tell. How is it that the spooky season has once again slipped through my fingers? Fake blood was spilled by the barrel. Vampires fed and the virginal shed, copious amounts in both cases. Every moon was just as full as your kid’s goody bag. And what a costume they’re wearing, might I say! Verily, I applaud you for raising your children right.…

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Movie Review: "Watcher" (2022)

Movie Review: “Watcher” (2022)

“Have you noticed anyone watching you in your apartment?” “No. But maybe I’ve gotten used to having eyes on me.” “Do I just sound paranoid?” “Let’s just hope you never find out. The best outcome might be having to live with the uncertainty. Better than getting raped and strangled with the words, ‘I told you so’ on your lips, right?” In the days before the proliferation/ubiquity of social…

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Steelers Thoughts #20 (11/25/21): Wish You were(n't) here

Steelers Thoughts #20 (11/25/21): Wish You were(n’t) here

Pittsburgh Steelers single-game tickets went on sale some time back in May – I refuse to research the exact date, but it was, at any rate, a different time/world – right around the time Americans everywhere were predictably overreacting to the news that widespread vaccine distribution was primed to deliver unto us something approaching normalcy after well over a year of communal plague. We now…

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Movie review: "Halloween Kills" (2021)

Movie review: “Halloween Kills” (2021)

“Let him burn! Let him burn!”Anyone using “Evil Dies Tonight” as a trigger for the Halloween Kills drinking game will either end their evening in a coma or the local morgue. This has been a public service message…How quickly we forget the unassuming, self-contained majesty of John Carpenter’s Halloween – its brutal simplicity; its penetrating suspense; its authenticity of time, place, and,…

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Movie post: "Glengarry Glen Ross" (1992)

Movie post: “Glengarry Glen Ross” (1992)

“I’ll cut you in on the $82,000 sale I just made!” “Bruce and Harriet Nyborg? You want to see the memos? They’re nuts. They used to call in every week when I was with Webb and we were selling Arizona. Did you see how they were living? How can you delude yourself?” “I got their check!” “Yeah? Well, forget it. Frame it. It’s worthless.” “The check is no good?” “Yeah. If you want to wait…

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The Wrestling Gods watch on with Amusement, Incredulity, Popcorn

The Wrestling Gods watch on with Amusement, Incredulity, Popcorn

Long term prognostication in the arena of professional wrestling is the ultimate fool’s errand, not least because of the speed, shock, and sense of thudding finality with which change tends to happen on the ground. I grew up on WWF Tuesday Night Titans and WCW Saturday Night throughout the 1980s and early ‘90s, and came of age as a fan during the legendary pre-millennium “Monday Night Wars”…

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The Excesses of Whiplash Normalcy

The Excesses of Whiplash Normalcy

Overcorrection is a peculiarly human characteristic. As a strategy, or at least a physiological response, it is baked into our DNA, and, however technically unintentional it almost always is, a predictable hallmark of most all human endeavor. When a rotted tree falls across a stream in the woods and crushes a tragically mislaid beaver dam, aggrieved beavers don’t generally arise en masse and…

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Movie review: "Flash Gordon" (1980)

Movie review: “Flash Gordon” (1980)

“Who are you?” “Flash Gordon! Quarterback, New York Jets!” “Dale Arden…Your Highness. Live and let live…that’s my motto!” “My name is Hans Zarkov. I kidnapped them both here to save our planet, Earth.” (To Ming) “An obscure body in the S-K system; the satellite that has provided you so much amusement…recently.” Arguably the quintessential cult movie of the 1980s, the Dino De Laurentiis…

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Mixinformation #1 (5/9/21): AgainstZapZepRollTayTesting+...

Mixinformation #1 (5/9/21): AgainstZapZepRollTayTesting+…

Yet another attempt at launching a recurring DAE series, “Mixinformation” gathers for comment and inevitable digression eleven songs plucked on shuffle from my gargantuan greater playlist that provided the strange and lively partial soundtrack to my most recent road trip from the flats of Central Ohio to the hills of East Tennessee. Some 5,000 songs can’t fill or fit comfortably into any journey…

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Armchair quarterbacking the "Temptation Island 3" homestretch

Armchair quarterbacking the “Temptation Island 3” homestretch

Prolonged pandemic living has doubtless unleashed a litany of subtle, insidious changes to our collective brain chemistry. I await the scientific journal data once this 118-year collective pause/home invasion of our national psyche is definitively behind us. I’ve noticed some personal differences manifesting both significant and miniscule, and sitting alone in ye olde bunker lo these many months…

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Movie review: "Possessor" (2020)

Movie review: “Possessor” (2020)

“I want to show you some photographs we retained from your work on the Holly Bergman job. (slide changes, filling the projection screen with indistinct red) Why stab Elio Mazza? You were provided with a pistol.” “Well, maybe it just seemed more in character.” “Whose character?” The young woman regards herself in the hotel room mirror dispassionately, as if she and her reflection have only ever…

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The Limits of Reduced Capacity

The Limits of Reduced Capacity

In the fall of 1999, I traveled from my East Tennessee home base to visit friends and see a concert in Columbus, Ohio, the third and final such journey I would make before moving in earnest in the handful of days between Christmas and Y2K. Nothing I encountered during any of those various excursions to the biggest city I’d yet visited gave me trepidation about making the arrangement permanent.…