Photo Diary : Winter Sun

Photo Diary : Christmas 2011

Photo Diary : Perfecting the Fedora Fling™

Step 1: First choose a hat. I've gone for the straw fedora because it makes me look proper tourist. Once you've chosen your target take some time to calculate distances, throwing angles, wind resistance and potential for damage to the villa owner's property. Loose fitting clothing is also suggested - as you can see i've gone for the Robot/PJ combo.

Step 2: Adopt the throwing stance and if possible pull a ridiculous horse face. Empty your mind and try to forget that you've already been explicitly told by your mum not to throw hats at the villa owner's creepy possessions.

Step 3: Success! You have hit your target. Celebrate by necking a glass of €3 Cava and run around the room making Zoidberg noises.

Photo Diary : Date Set, Invites Sent

After 8 years of being engaged we've set a date for the wedding. On October 8th 2011 we'll have an intimate (i.e. small) gathering and tie the knot. And I couldn't be happier.

Photo Diary : Geocaching around Blackbrook Reservoir

Geocaching we found another awesome site a few miles away from our house - Blackbrook Reservoir. The reservoir was constructed in 1976 to feed the local Charnwood Forest Canal. It's now a Site of Special Interest as fossils discovered there were the first to be identified as 'macroscopic remains of Precambrian life', what ever that means (GC10GBA).

Photo Diary : Geocaching around Whitwick Quarry

This is a slightly obscured view of Whitwick Quarry, the water more blue than any other lake i've seen in England. It's also only a short walk from the hidden gem that is Mount Saint Bernard Abbey. We're really lucky to live so close to these picturesque views. Photo taken from near cache GC1CJD3.

Video Nasty #41 : Don't Go In The Woods

Synopsis: Two teenage couples are hiking through a beautiful wooded mountain range whilst, unbeknownst to them, everyone within a five mile radius are being killed in horrible and contrived ways by a grizzly survivalist. When the mad man finally catches up with our heros they must fight for their lives.

If I was pushed to say something positive about Dont' Go In The Woods, it's this backhanded compliment - like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, it's proof that you can't boil a genre down to its basic components, repeat them ad-nauseum and expect to make a good film. The director of DGITW decided that as long as a slasher flick had as many ludicrous and violent deaths as possible it was a guaranteed hit. This film has 13 deaths, all evenly spread across a short running time of 82 minutes (that's one death every 7 minutes, maths fans). And yet, like Michael Bay's literally action-packed Transformers movie, it's just a shallow, boring mess. It has taken me a 4 weeks to get through this movie. And during that time I had a week off work.

Not that the deaths aren't fun, in isolation. The Crazy Frog was mildly amusing the first time you heard it, right? Bear Traps are an underused if slightly preposterous weapon (the exception being Andy Nyman's brilliant amputation in Severance), and nothing is more preposterous than seeing a bear trap very slowly swinging from a tree towards a redshirt so terrified he can do nothing but keep his head perfectly still and aligned with the oncoming jaws. Whilst our killer isn't setting up ridiculous traps he keeps himself busy, be it rolling an inhabited VW campervan down a hill (which inexplicably explodes), hanging an inhabited tent from a tree and beating it like a blood filled Piñata, throwing an elderly lady off a cliff, or in my favourite scene, decapitating a man who's sitting in a wheel chair admiring the sunset. The fact that we've previously watched this victim struggle to ascend the hill against all odds only adds to the tragic humour.

What are ostensibly the main characters are lost in the murder mélange; it's difficult to connect with any character when most are slaughtered mere minutes after their introduction. Once i'd figured out who the main characters were (i.e. the ones that weren't dead yet), it was really hard to care, especially as they were particularly dumb. Running away from a ruthless serial killer with super-human strength? Why not light a big fire and have a kip or, even better, take shelter in the murderer's corpse filled nutty room. The killer himself is similarly underwritten. Normally the monster being ruthless without an explanation or motive can make them even more terrifying, but when some beardy local suddenly starts killing sort of explanation would be useful. Instead, all we get is a a man wailing his way around a forest looking like a klingon obsessive who finally flipped because he didn't get in line early enough to see the Star Trek panel at Comicon.

The final word on the film should really go to film2000, the movie's UK distributor. I'm not saying they haven't watched the film, but it's telling that the back-cover has the synopsis and endorsements for a completely different film ('Creepier than the Blair Witch Project'). The annoying thing is, that mis-googled film, In the Woods, actually sounds far more entertaining than this cack.