A Way-Too-Early Halloween at Shangrila Towers, Part 4 - Halloween Horror Nights 35

Spooky Season seems to come around sooner and sooner each year, and I am leaning into the madness with a series of Halloween-themed blog posts well in advance of the big night. Let's cap this early celebration of All Hallows' Eve off with a September trip to Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights:

I heard good things about HHN this year, so the guys and I schlepped off to Universal Studios Orlando for another trek into the night:

There wasn't much of an overarching theme for HHN 35, but there were some houses that are unlikely to ever be repeated. Ozzy Osbourne: Prince of Darkness is a tribute to the late rocker filled with scenes inspired by his songs (yes, there is a "crazy train") - if any HHN house could be called "touching," this one would be it.  Other probable one-offs include Sinners, based on Ryan Coogler's hit 2025 movie, and Evil Dead Burn, which began development before the movie even started filming, thanks to some help from Warner Bros.  My favorite of the night was actually the Hellraiser house, which did a fine job of realizing Clive Barker's nightmarish vision.

Aside from the houses, this year's live show (Nightmare Fuel: Blood Noir) was pretty good, with more plot than usual and fewer momentum-killing interludes for vaudeville illusions (there was still a sword swallower, though). The scarezones were largely misses, sadly - while I liked the Killer Klowns from Outer Space elements in Downtown Clowntown, let's hope the hamhanded attempt to appeal to the young'uns with Fornitemares is not the start of a trend. 

As usual, we finished the evening with a quick trip to the merch store, and so ended another Halloween Horror Nights...

A Way-Too-Early Halloween at Shangrila Towers, Part 3 - Incidents Around the House

Spooky Season seems to come around sooner and sooner each year, and I am leaning into the madness with a series of Halloween-themed blog posts well in advance of the big night. Today, let's look at a horror novel by Josh Malerman, author of Bird Box:

Malerman gives himself a very tough assignment in Incidents Around the House: the entire story is told from the first-person perspective of an 8-year old girl named Bela, as she and her family are haunted by a mysterious entity. Malerman's perspective experiment has problems (Bela's voice sometimes feels younger or older than she is, and her parents inexplicably start monologuing to her whenever they think she is asleep), but it's certainly the most clever thing about the book, which is otherwise a prototypical haunted house/boogeyman tale. 

There are some great jump scares, and Michigan is always a creepy place to be followed by a supernatural entity, but the book is about 100 pages too long.  By the third or fourth time Bela's family flees to a place of seeming safety, only to be scared away by some horrible incident, you'll start hoping the entity just finishes the job so you can read something else. I hope that the upcoming film adaptation Other Mommy cuts some of the narrative fat out.

A Way-Too-Early Halloween at Shangrila Towers, Part 2 - Hellraiser Trilogy retrospective

Spooky Season seems to come around sooner and sooner each year, and I am leaning into the madness with a series of Halloween-themed blog posts well in advance of the big night. 

In the run-up to Halloween Horror Nights, I decided to bone up on the media that the HHN houses were based on: I listened to some Ozzy Osbourne, watched Evil Dead Burn, and rewatched the first three Hellraiser movies (sorta - the third one wasn't readily available and isn't very good, see below)...

Hellraiser

Hellraiser's creator, Clive Barker, is one of the greatest horror writers of all time, and he also did a fine job directing the first entry in the long-running series:

Coming in at a lean 93 minutes, Hellraiser is the most focused and grounded of the movies. The plot centers around the Cotton family, including the perverted Frank, his wicked sister-in-law/lover Julia, and the final girl, Kirsty. While the film has a pretty loose plot, its visual design, especially that of the Cenobites, holds up well - even in a sea of '80s slasher villains, the iconic Hell Priest (a/k/a "Pinhead," a nickname Barker hates) stands out, although the real monsters of the story are the black-hearted human antagonists.

Rating: 8/10

Hellbound: Hellraiser II

The first sequel, and the last "good" Hellraiser movie, has a lot of similarities with A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors: a mental hospital setting, expanded lore, and a new deuteragonist that the original final girl assists.

The plot (never a strong point in the Hellraiser series) gets even messier here.  The second half of the movie sees the characters wander a dreamlike maze featuring all manner of barely connected vignettes, including a brief battle between the Cenobites and the true villain of the movie. The oddity wears a little thin after awhile, but if you want strange, unforgettable images, Hellrasier II delivers.

Rating: 7/10

Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth

This is the first of the movies filmed outside the UK, and it waters down the concept into something almost unrecognizable. I guess the mandate was to turn Pinhead into the next Jason or Freddy, because in this one, he starts to murder people indiscriminately.  Combine that with more comic creature design (the infamous CD Cenobite) and you have the beginning of a long, slow decline in quality.

Rating: 5/10

A Way-Too-Early Halloween at Shangrila Towers, Part 1 - Resident Evil (2026)

Spooky Season seems to come around sooner and sooner each year, and I am leaning into the madness with a series of Halloween-themed blog posts well in advance of the big night.  Today's entry is a review of Resident Evil, a high-profile horror movie that would normally release in October, but instead just released in theaters last weekend.

Zach Cregger's take on "Resident Evil" was controversial from the start.  When word got out that the film wouldn't use any of the characters or storylines from the long-running video game series, fans were rightfully skeptical of the whole project.  Was this just a Zach Cregger zombie movie with the "Resident Evil" name slapped on?

In some ways, the answer is no - Cregger's Resident Evil is perhaps the most faithful adaptation of the series ever, at least in terms of conveying what it's like to play a survival horror game.  The protagonist is a hapless everyman thrust into one gory predicament after another, and he struggles with all of the tropes of the series: limited ammunition, enemies that frustratingly won't stay down, and even a final act that takes place in a bioweapons lab and features a giant mutated monster.  It's a well-made, slick piece of entertainment that moves along briskly and features the gruesome creature design the series is known for.

It's a shame, then, that Resident Evil so often undermines its horror with humor.  I saw this same thing happen in Cregger's other big films, Barbarian and Weapons, and I was hoping he could tone it down given that he's adapting the OG horror videogame.  Comparing this to Resident Evil Requiem is like comparing an SNL parody to the real thing.

Rating: 6/10

Books: Gut

 

In Gut, Dr. Giulia Enders takes the reader on a whimsical tour of the human digestive system, all the way from stem to (ahem) stern. The original German title of the book was Darm mit Charme ("Charming Bowles"), and "charming" is a fitting adjective for the childlike fascination Dr. Enders brings to parts of the body that are usually unmentionable in polite conversation. Combine the playful prose with cartoonish illustrations by Dr. Enders's sister, and even gross topics like fecal transplants and gut microbiota become fun. 

You can get a sense of what the book covers from this TED talk Dr. Enders delivered back in 2017:

Music: Let's Roll

I know I said I love you, I know you know it's true

I've got to put the phone down and do what we got to do

One's standing in the aisleway, two more at the door

We've got to get inside there before they kill some more

Time is running out

Let's roll

Time is running out

Let's roll

Music: "Let It Be" (feat. Paul McCartney & Ringo Starr)

Dolly Parton's death last week fittingly set off a wave of memorials and tributes, but while she was world famous for her outsized personal style and Appalachian philanthropy, her musical talent remains her greatest legacy.  Dolly's stellar songwriting and bright warbling soprano meant that in her decades-long career, it seemed like every musician in America worked with her at one point or another.

Dolly's last full-length studio album, "Rockstar," featured collaborations with some great musicians, including Sting, Peter Frampton, Elton John, and the surviving two members of the Beatles for her wistful cover of "Let It Be":

Guns: S&W K-22 Masterpiece review

Introduction

There are some guns that you hope to pass on to your heirs, and Smith & Wesson's K-22 Masterpiece is certainly one of them.  This fine .22 LR revolver was first introduced during the Great Depression as a target and hunting piece (S&W called it the "Outdoorsman").  Both demand and production ramped up after WWII, and my example came from the early post-war era, around 1947.  How can you tell? Well, the gun doesn't have the old pencil barrel or blended rear sight, but it does have a "five-screw" frame (with screws in the top of the sideplate and the front of the trigger guard).  

At the time it came out, the K-22 Masterpiece was considered the best production .22 revolver in the world. But how does the 80-year-old K-22 stack up against modern guns? Let's find out.

Sights, Action, and Grips

As with most firearms back then, the K-22 Masterpiece came with simple black patridge sights, with a square pinned front sight and an adjustable rear sight.  They're pretty small (again, very common for a gun from the 1940s), but they are precise, and it's easy to get a clean sight picture.

After several previous owners and probably thousands of rounds, the blued finish on my gun is worn but the serrated double-action trigger is smooth, with a crisp and light single-action pull - maybe around 2 or 3 pounds.

My K-22 looks like it wears the original Circassian diamond magna grips with a target style square butt.  The grips provide a surprising amount of traction given how old and worn they are, and the gun remained very stable in hand in both double and single action fire.

Range Report

The K-22 is probably the best handgun around for training people who have never held a gun before. It's very easy to load and unload, and when shot in single-action, the light trigger makes getting good hits easy.  The full-size steel frame is a little heavy for smaller people, but it also makes .22 cartridges recoil like an air gun. Overall, the gun is so pleasant that I taught Mom to shoot with it about ten years ago:

Is the K-22 quite as accurate as modern semiautomatic handguns? Perhaps not, but it's accurate enough for my purposes.

12 rounds of Federal AutoMatch (the cheap stuff) at 20 yards:

18 rounds of Federal HV Match at 20 yards:

24 rounds of Winchester 222 bulk pack (40 gr.) at 20 yards: 

12 rounds of Remington Golden Bullet at 15 yards:

Functionally, the gun worked great, except for a few failures to fire (light strikes) when shooting in double action.  I attribute these occasional malfunctions to the 80-year old lockwork (I have no idea if the springs have ever been replaced).  Since I don't plan on using this gun for self-defense anytime soon, it's not that big a deal.

Conclusion

If you're tired of the quality control issues with the revolvers put out by Smith & Wesson (and every other manufacturer) nowadays, the K-22 Masterpiece is for you.  It hails from a time when it was commercially feasible to sell a full-size all-steel .22 revolver that required large amounts of hand fitting and polishing.  Those days may be gone now, but at least the guns remain...

Miscellany: TRUE Fitness Rō indoor rowing machine review

Our HOA finally renovated the community gym (just took them a few decades), so we've got a whole new set of equipment from TRUE Fitness: treadmills, stationary bikes, weights, elliptical machines, a stair climber, and, most critically, a rowing machine:

The gold standard of indoor rowers is the Concept2 RowErg, to the point where "erg" has become a generic shorthand for rowing machines. But the TRUE Fitness model one-ups Concept2 with some innovative features, including a magnetic brake/flywheel combo for wider variations in resistance levels, a convenient central pedal switch to change resistance levels on the fly, and a multipurpose handle that can be used like a traditional indoor rower, or swiveled hand-over-hand for a kayaking or canoeing motion.

Downsides? Well, there are still some question marks as to long-term durability (the TRUE Fitness rower uses a nylon belt instead of a chain drive like on the RowErg), and the foot pedal position doesn't seem as natural as other rowing machines.  Still, the machine is plenty good enough to allow me to row as a cross-training workout - maybe I can finally beat that half-marathon PR this winter.

Movies Leo Woodall Double Feature

We recently watched a couple of films starring English actor Leo Woodall, and we were quite impressed with the "rizz" he displayed onscreen.  Based on the strong performances in these movies, my guess is Woodall's career will break out like that of a fellow Londoner, Tom Hardy:

Tuner

This one has a lot of similarities to Edgar Wright's Baby Driver: a soft-spoken young man with hearing problems, a love of music, and a unique talent gets sucked into the criminal underworld by a semi-malevolent kingpin, with his civilian love interest caught in the crossfire.  Woodall shines here as the titular piano tuner-turned-safecracker, and he more than holds his own with the likes of Dustin Hoffman and Jean Reno.

Rating: 8/10

Tony

A biopic of Anthony Bourdain's formative teen years might seem like a bad idea, but Tony, directed by Matt Johnson (BlackBerry), is better than expected, thanks to the luminous Cape Cod setting, some slightly self-aware nods (there is a discussion of the proper pronunciation of bildungsroman), and Antonio Banderas's best performance in years.  The title role is played by a game Dominic Sessa (The Holdovers), but Woodall steals every scene he's in with his turn as a charming, roguish line cook.

Rating: 7/10