Fright Fest 2011: Writing Hurdle

Up till now, it's been smooth sailing. The writing is done for The Fog, Christine, and The Thing. The Fog has already been formatted, for Facebook's pleasure, and only awaits Saturday to be published. Last week, I watched Prince of Darkness. This is the first of two Carpenter movies I'm gonna cover, yet have never seen before. My hurdle started earlier today when I restarted the movie and took fingers to keyboard to type out a draft.

The format of my writeups are recap the movie as I watch it. Following that is the review section. Nothing crazy deep. Just what I like, don't like, improvements, etc. The first three writeups came in around 5 pages. The Prince of Darkness note is currently at 5 pages and I've only covered the first 40 minutes of the movie! Being a new movie to me, I suppose I find myself commenting more on some of the little things.

Anyway, I stopped myself at the 40 minute mark because I didn't like what I was writing by that point. I'll have to re-read it later, but it felt as if I was antagonizing the movie. Having watched the movie, I certainly think it deserves a little tough love, but that's for the review section. For the movie viewer summary part, I just want the reader to follow along with me as I experience this movie. Good. Bad. Crazy. Goofy. Whatever. No thoughts beyond seeing what's around the next corner and having a little fun while doing it.

For Prince of Darkness, once developments started to get revealed, I began to butt heads with the movie. Or at least, again, it felt that way. Evil being legitimized with science is the main focus of the movie. In fact, it's the main motivation for all the characters in the movie aside from not getting dead. So when the movie starts to push some hokey ideas, it's hard, as a reasonable-educated adult, to not call out the shit. Worse is when the movie begins to contradict itself with its own revealed facts. Numbers stated earlier don't match match number or statements presented later. And no character acknowledges the change. The various changing facts can make the movie hard to follow. Hell, even now, I'm not sure I understand fully what's going on.

Thinking back, I don't believe I'll have to scrap the whole note. Just some of the parts close to where I stopped when the "evil grounded in science" starts to get explained. The challenge is keeping the fun tone of the note going when the movie dips into "kinda dumb" territory.

I'll let this movie rest a bit. Got a date Saturday, so I'll try again Sunday before heading off to watch the Hell in a Cell PPV at BWW with Tommy.