Matthew Jon Smith

2/23/2025 2:33 PM CST Dear Reader, I have all the same blogs brewing on the back burner that I have promised before. But this week we get a review of Osgood Perkins’s The Monkey , a reimagining of the Stephen King short story of the same name. Enjoy! The Monkey is a Campy Final Destination with a Family Curse The Monkey (2025) Written and Directed by Osgood Perkins My Verdict: Over the top, campy fun, Mixed tone doesn’t always land The monkey looks almost exactly like I imagined. After what felt like an hour of studio logos, The Monkey ’s opening scene wasted no time setting the tone. Adam Scott is devilish in his cameo as Petey Shelburn, airline pilot and the deadbeat dad extraordinaire, who is trying to get rid of the titular monkey at a pawn shop. Scott’s character explains the premise, what the monkey is, and what it does. The pawn shop owner does not believe him, and then we get an immediate payoff to prove said premise. It was extremely gruesome. To the point that I...

  2/16/2025 5:06 PM CST Dear Reader, This week we are doing another book review. This one is a doozy. In the meantime just know that I still have my two mammoth blogs in the works, one about Street Fighter, and one about David Lynch’s film INLAND EMPIRE. (The INLAND EMPIRE essay is promising to be so long that people are urging me to publish it as its own stand alone work. We will see. I have to finish it first.) I already have my next review lined up because I read a wonderful short story called, “Lucifer Rising” by Torres Cascado and I would love to tell you more about that. Today, it is my treat to tell you about one of the nastiest stories I have ever read. Without further ado:   A Relentless Story of Madness, Sickness, and Disgust Review: Piñata – Tory Favro My Verdict: Utter Madness. Not for the Faint of Heart. Nasty Good Time. A short, brutal read. Yet again, I want to talk to you all about a book I found through Books of Horror (the wonderful Facebook...

  2/9/2025 8:33 PM CST Dear Reader, I don’t know why I am starting this so late. Probably because I started to feel guilty that I was going to skip my blog this week like I did last week. I know the informal promise is down to a blog three Sundays out of every month, but I wasn’t even going to do that. I must be honest, social media has been a total party ever since I met a bunch of other David Lynch fans, and it has been hell trying to tear me away from anything that isn’t in some way tacitly David Lynch related. I feel I owe you a blog. I am working on two huge blogs in the background: my Street Fighter blog and my INLAND EMPIRE blog. (Hell, there is one cooking on The Killing of a Sacred Deer as well, and that one is going to be controversial.) So today, tonight (What time is it?), I am going to do a little compromise with myself and try to keep it brief with a little blog that is inspired by a question from a scene in David Lynch’s The Return ( Twin Peaks Season 3). ...