Yule-ish, Very Yule-ish!

I’m just getting into the Festive Mood by watching my favourite Christmas themed horror movie (the only one that really springs to mind), Black Christmas. I wish all visitors will have a very special time of the year and good wishes for the new one. See you all again soon!

Tom xoxo

I’m full of artificial sweetener, My heart’s been deceitful

First of all, site updates! Two new Mash Ups over at My Music – one for Christmas, and one sampling the 80s (my second trip back to my decade for a mash up). As for what’s to come, a few more mash ups hopefully, and something spectacular as a little dedication to my old website Amanda Bynes UK, which went offline a few months ago due to Orange being a super-beeyotch and deleting their free members only FTP service (whatever, their loss, we’re getting Virgin broadband now). Intrigued? Come back December 31st to find out what it is! Oh, and do you like my new favicon? WordPress updated their features! The only good thing about Orange closing down it’s service was that I found this place!

Now serious stuff: I had a nosebleed! It’s been so long since my last one it took my three attempts to spell it right! Back then I decided to take a stand. I was having a lot of them, so something must have been causing it. I cut out caffeine and more importantly – Cola! Following on from that, I specifically targeted artificial sweeteners as the source of my bleeds. Aspartame and Phenylalanine were my enemies! I found them in nearly every “sugar free” chewing gum, and unfortunately Sweet Chili flavoured Sensations Crisps. Since that cold and dreary day some 18 months ago, I’ve reintroduced the odd caffeine boost in the form of my beloved instant cappuccinos and Lucozade and things seemed fine. During my research on artificial sweeteners I discovered Pepsi were marketing a new “natural” alternative to Pepsi called Raw. Despite being available in Leeds, I had never seen it… until last night! I was so excited, for the first time in what felt like forever I was going to be able to have cola! It was nice… really nice… but about an hour after polishing off my second bottle, the disaster struck!

Okay so it was only a bit blood – but still! It’s more the fact I thought I’d been smart and health conscious, but the science of sugars is confusing! Oh, and I cannot just put it down to a freaky coincidence… despite the fact that if anyone in the world were to have a freaky coincidence like this – it’d me! It has to be that whatever used to cause my nosebleeds that was in regular, crap-filled Pepsi is still in their “natural” Pepsi… The only suspect ingredient I noticed was Xanthan Gum, so I guess I’ll be keeping an eye out for that now! Unless of course this is all just psychosomatic and I’m going crazy (pfft, going).

Make Your Own Kind of Music

For a while now I’ve been mentioning the fact I joined a band. This isn’t just your usual friends-get-bored-and-decide-to-play-instruments-and-write-songs-together band, this was brought together by Cat and Dave at Jimmy’s for patients and ex-patients. We had 5 people, but now we’re down to 3… technically I didn’t want to be in the band, but I made the mistake of opening my mouth to sing, and unless we find someone else who’s better (or if I have my say, ANYONE else regardless), it looks like I’m going to be in the band. We don’t have a name yet, but we started working on our first song – written by me! It is called “You and I”, but I’ve been toying with the idea of changing the title to “U+I”. As always with today’s technology, I recorded the playback on my mobile phone so forgive the quality, but here it is…

It’s a work in progress. If I can instigate it, I want the song to have more of a… what did someone call it… Avril Lavigne meets Green Day type sound to it!

Return of the Dead

I know I said I’d have reviews of these 4 horror films up yesterday, but I forgot about Band Practice and my lack of being able to stay awake during the day! So here’s a brief overlook of the highlights and lowlights!

Dance of the Dead: 4/5 – The plot was probably my favourite of the night. But it just came off a little too condensed, it would have been great had it explained why the dead came back to life, rather than just keep on pointing to the Chemical Plant and blaming that (the most it went to explain was when three of the characters ducked out of the carnage into the sewers and saw everything covered in green slime).
Tokyo Gore Police: 5/5 – Fabulous look; fabulous sound; classic revenge plot; gore overload; plenty of WTF?! moments. I honestly cannot wait for the sequel and I hope to get my hands on the soundtrack soon. If you liked Battle Royale or Kill Bill Vol. 1, but thought they weren’t gory enough, you will LOVE this.
Deadgirl: 2/5 – No light aspect, everyone in it seemed to have no conscience and was constantly horny. The website says “a depraved journey into the psyche of two disaffected teens,” the only problem is we see nothing in the plot as to why these “two” (it’s more like 5) teens got like this. In that area, it left a little too much to the imagination, and in a film like this that’s a bad thing. I feel a bit bad for saying this, cos it’s a great plot, and I’ve seen I got some hits yesterday from people searching for Deadgirl reviews.
My Name Is Bruce: 5/5 – Best film overall of the night! Sounded great, used the Psycho theme with a jaunty twist!!! The b-movie plot meets spoof/reality plot should NOT have worked but it did. In the beginning it relied a little too much on slapstick, and took for granted everyone seeing it knew who Bruce Campell (I know who is, but past the first Evil Dead that’s really all I’ve seen of his work), but after about an hour the plot kicked in and I could easily forgive it. Not disappointed to hear that a sequel is in the works, I hope the original gets a wider release.

That’s it for my journey into the Leeds Film Festival, but I’ll definitely be back next year!