This is exactly the sort of mood I'm in...

gimme...

Taken from a messenger conversation earlier tonight:



that film could have been made for me, tons of monsters with tentacles and a big old soppy demon who smokes all the time and says 'oh crap' alot



In case you are unfamiliar with the above image, or your not sure what 'big old soppy demon' I'm talking about I've been watching the new region 1 Hellboy DVD.



It's fantastic, right up there with X-men and Spiderman in the comic book adaption stakes. For the uninitiated Hellboy tells the story of a demon inadvertently summoned to our world through a Nazi ritual at the end of World War II, the ritual is disrupted by American troops who find Hellboy and raise him to be part of a shadowy government agency called the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defence. Sort of like the x-files but with a big red demon instead of Mulder, whose best friend is a fish... oh, and he has a thing for a pyrokinetic girl... and there is a clockwork Nazi... and Rasputin is in there too.



It's really difficult to describe to someone who hasn't read the books, without sounding like I'm making it up! Still, I loved it, the main characters are spot on, all the monsters are straight out of the big bumper book of H P Lovecraft nightmares, and Ron Perlman does a brilliant job in the Hellboy makeup managing to actually be quite touching in places.



For the life of me I can't understand why it's taking so long to be shown in the cinemas over here.

If this post had a soundtrack then I think the first song would be Dismantle Me by The Distillers as frankly my body seems to have given up with me. It clearly needs to be taken apart and given a good service by a team of qualified mechanics before being put back together.



Anyway, getting ahead of myself again. Went to the Staines Regatta yesterday, which I have to say was a very pleasant way to spend a Saturday Afternoon, helped some what by the weather being really good. I did start getting 'beer envy' halfway through the afternoon (as yours truly was driving), but soon made up for that when we got back to Woking - hence my current physical state.



I managed a few pictures by the river, but no pictures whilst in Woking - far too busy catching up it would seem.

Couple of gigs I'm going to which may be of interest:



Sonic Youth, 2nd September at the Brixton Academy. Tickets are available here.



!!!, 13th October at the Astoria. Tickets for that one are here.

Mid-afternoon film review time, as staring at database tables is driving me fiucking insane...



Spiderman 2

Obviously brilliant: a bit darker than the original film as Peter Parker starts to question whether he can handle the responsibility of being Spiderman and hence let's things around him slide a bit. Dr Ock was an awesome villain even if he did go a bit wet at the end. Best bit's: anything involving a fight between Spidey and Dr Ock, and any scene with Jonah Jameson (Peter Parker's editor). Worst bit's: not much really: the web-swinging CGI Spidey still looks a bit fake to me, and maybe he spent a little too much time with his mask off.



Around the world in 80 days

Not as bad as I thought it was going to be, they've basically turned it into a fairly jolly Jackie Chan action film, so there are plenty of stunts to enjoy if you get bored of the fairly lightweight story.



Walking Tall

Story is as follows: The Rock comes back to his hometown to find it full of drugs and questionable characters, The Rock gets his ass kicked in a casino, The Rock kicks ass back, the film ends. Slightly more entertaining than watching the Sunday afternoon Eastender's omnbus.

If you have been near a PC recently and have a healthy interest in computer games you may have heard of a fairly obscure little game called Doom 3 ;-)



Well, the official requirements have been released, what you'll need is:



1.5Ghz P4 chip or AMD Athlon 1500

384Mb of RAM

2Gb of hard drive space.

An nVidia GeForce 3 or ATI 8500 graphics card



Which basically means my un-upgradable laptop can (allegedly) run it - although having said that I don't think that the PC needed to run it with all the graphical goodies turned on has been built yet...



Still, nice to know that I now have the option of buying the PC version.