blogtoberfest – Page 7

Blogtoberfest – Vampire Sangria

Hello again! So glad to see y’all along with me for the ride of 31 days of Halloween blogging, or, as I call it……BLOGTOBERFEST……..

Today’s recipe is not a mocktail, but a straight up liquor fest. It was a choice between this and chocolate martinis. I chose this because it looks like fruit punch. (What, me drinking? Nah, this is fruit punch.) And I love sangria.

You can find the basic recipe here, but I added my own twists.

Prep Time: 5 minutes

Total Time: 5 minutes

Ingredients:

1 (750 ml bottle of red wine (Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Rioja reds, Zinfandel, Shiraz)
1 Lemon cut into wedges
1 Orange cut into wedges
Strawberry or Kiwi slices
3 Tbsp sugar
2 shots brandy
1 shot gin
2 cups ginger ale or club soda

Preparation:

Pour wine in the pitcher and squeeze the juice wedges from the lemon and orange into the wine. Toss in the fruit wedges (leaving out seeds if possible) and add sugar and brandy. Chill overnight. Add ginger ale or club soda just before serving.

If you’d like to serve right away, use chilled red wine and serve over lots of ice.

Five Scary Movies – Sy Shanti

As a fun part of Blogtoberfest, I asked my artist friends to send me their top five scary movies. The results were varied and interesting.

According to Sy Shanti:

My top five scary movies are:

1. Nightmare On Elm Street
2. The Grudge
3. The Ring
4. The 7th Sign
5. Dawn Of The Dead (Both)

Bio: Sy Shanti is a being who uses many different channels to express a creativity deep rooted in his two first loves as a child, Alchemy, and Horror .

VisitL https://www.facebook.com/grimehthers

Five Scary Books – Kenya Moss Dyme

As a fun part of Blogtoberfest, I asked my artist friends to send me their top five scary movies or top five scary books. The results were varied and interesting.

According to Kenya Moss Dyme:

My top five scary books are:

1. The Light at the End, John Skipp/Craig Spector

2. They Thirst, Robert McCammon

3. Storm of the Century, Stephen King

4. The Amulet, Michael McDowell

5. Whispers, Dean Koontz

Bio: Kenya Moss-Dyme began writing short-form horror in her teens and won several scholastic writing awards for her creative work. Prey for Me, the hard-hitting story of a monstrous child-abusing preacher, was her first published work, followed by the dark romance, A Good Wife. A lifelong fan of the macabre, she is now focused on publishing her nightmares and creating new ones. “Even as a child, I was never into princesses and cute kitten-y things; I’ve always found the witches and monsters more interesting because they have layers. There’s no layers to goodness and light.”

Site: http://www.kenyamossdyme.com/

Want in on this? Send me your bio, your site and your top five scary movies or top five scary books!

Five Scary Movies – Eden Royce

As a fun part of Blogtoberfest, I asked my artist friends to send me their top five scary movies. The results were varied and interesting.

Here’s Eden Royce’s list:

My top five scary movies are:

The Thing

PsychoJ.D.’s Revenge

Army of Darkness

Ganja and Hess

Bio:
Eden Royce is descended from women who practiced root, a type of conjure magic in her native Charleston, South Carolina. She’s been a bridal consultant, reptile handler, and stockbroker, but now writes dark fiction about the American South from her home in the English countryside.

She is the author of Spook Lights: Southern Gothic Horror, a short story collection that features the language and traditions of the Gullah-Geechee people, descendants of the first slaves brought to the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. She also conceived and edited The Grotesquerie, an anthology of twenty-one horror short stories written by women.

Eden writes for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Graveyard Shift Sisters, a site dedicated to purging the black female horror fan from the margins and Dirge, the premier dark culture magazine, covering counterculture arts and entertainment, lifestyle, and editorials.

Website: edenroyce.com

Horror Movie Review – The Ouija Experiment

Title: The Ouija Experiment, aka The Realm
Genre: Horror, Found Footage-ish
Director: Israel Luna
Writers: Israel LUna
IMDB Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2364842/

NO SPOILERS

This was a movie that I stumbled upon perusing some streaming service or another. I suppose if you run a search for the title, it will tell you where it’s playing or where you can get it. Honestly, even though IMDB gives it a 3.4 out of 10, I actually enjoyed the movie. I’d even watch it again!

Here’s the setup. There’s a film student (already annoying, lol) who plays with a Ouija board with his four friends. Why? They want to solve the mystery of a drowned girl that happened some time ago. I’m really fuzzy on the details because, well, it just didn’t matter to me after a while.

Let me say upfront…it’s not scary. The acting is bad and the found footage-ish way of filming can by annoying at times. I don’t know if it was the mood I was in, but I thought the film was rather cute. I liked the dynamic of some of the actors, and the self-aware of “I’m a black person in a horror movie” of the black actress was pretty funny at times.

I felt the first hour was quite strong in the way it set up the story. The actors did a pretty good job for a low budget movie that looks like it was filmed in somebody’s house on the fly. In addition, trivia for the movie suggests the actors’ lines were mostly improvised during this first hour. They didn’t do a half-bad job!

As I noted above, when the scary stuff starts, the black actress is the best. She really made me laugh.

A note on the dialogue: this was the best part of the movie. The conversations and rapid exchanges seem real and unrehearsed. Also, the actors have such a good sense of timing, they did not stumble over each other’s lines as is often the case in the found footage movies where the lines are improvised. I just liked hearing the characters chit chat with each other.

Otherwise, the film and its eventual reveal of the long-ago murder was rather flat and boring. Do not watch this movie if you are looking to be frightened. It won’t happen. If you watch it at all, watch it for the actors’ performances and how they interact.

Film Grade: D

Actors Grade: B for snappy dialogue.