28 Weeks Later Review

I won't go into a summary of what this is about. I think anyone who has seen "28 Days Later" has an inkling of what it revolves around. OK, I will give you a little bit. It's about people who are infected with the "rage" virus. It turns them into violent, fast killing machines and is so contagious that pretty much all of Britain has been destroyed.

What did I like: Mucho more gore than the first. Always a big plus in my book. Very apocalyptic and not as "Hollywood" as I thought they would go. Great handheld shots and timing/shutter effects similar to the first flick so you can practically see every little drop of blood in crystal clarity. The beginnings of a great flawed hero with an outstanding chance for a journey to redemption.

What I did not like: Though the gore was greater, the actual scare factor was significantly less. The first one had some intense scary moments. Granted the first 5 minutes of the second installment were really nail baiting, afterwards it was one big chase scene and the intensity left me numb. Maybe it wasn't as scary because those great handheld shots, timing/shutter effects I mentioned earlier were so quick, chaotic, and distracting that I could barely comprehend what was going on. Artistically I know where the director was going with this. That was obvious. But it lessened the entertainment value because the shots are so quick that I sometimes had a hard time following exactly where I was in a scene. Since I couldn't see anything for a period of time longer than a nanosecond the scare factor fell dramatically.

*********SPOILER BELOW*****************

The potential character arc of Robert Carlyle's character would have made for a superb flawed hero but that was snatched away 1/4 of the way through the flick when he became infected with "rage." Some may think he got his 'just desserts' for his actions earlier in the film, but what a great emotional hurdle to overcome and be eventually redeemed by at the end of the movie - if only they had given that specific plot a chance. Instead, the plot switched gears to the much less interesting children of Carlyle's character as we see them bumbling like dunder heads through a devastated London. Totally one-sided characters who I kept hoping would come to some untimely end while the minor actors out-shined them by a mile.

Oh well. It wasn't a bad movie. It wasn't that good either. I don't have a scale, but if I used Ebert & Robert's thumbs up/down test, "28 Weeks Later" would have only a moderate thumbs up.

In the Works: Fratricide Demo (EP) Part 4

Wow, time sure does fly. It's been a while since posting and I'm pretty sure the 2 fans I had who read this thing have gone on to greener pastures. They're cows you see. Ha! I'm funny.

Anyhoo, the Fratricide project marches onward. I just recently returned from Ohio last Monday (5/14) after spending 10 hours in the studio on Saturday and 12 hours Sunday.

Most of Saturday was spent with our session musicians laying down their tracks. Kellen did a great job with his drum tracks and we got through them rather quickly. I think the only annoying thing was that he didn't use a trigger system which would have made the drums sound even more thunderous and killer. Be that as it may, he's a great drummer and skilled up the wazoo. Curtis, our session guitarist, threw down his tracks as quick as he could. Unfortunately, I think we pushed through his tracks so quick that we missed a lot of mistakes that were not caught on the initial recording. Our engineer Dan Boyd helped immensely with patching up the holes where these mistakes were, but this was during the time I was laying down my guitar tracks. On hindsight, I probably should have just done all of the guitar tracks. I'm sure Rob (Hellfire) felt the same way. Saturday wrapped up with 3 songs almost complete rhythm wise which put us a bit ahead of schedule.

Sunday was crunch time. We started right off laying down the last guitar track for the last song (Attention to Orders). It took about 2 hours which was annoying as we were finding more mistakes made in the initial recording than any of the others we had completed. Before I could even lay down a decent rhythm track, we had to fix those things. Even now I can honestly say everything isn't perfect. But it's "good enough for government work." Next up was bass. I played on this sweet Fender solid body bass that was heavy as fuck but was absolutely the best bass I've ever played. It stayed in tune, had a thin neck, and the action was unbelievable. I pushed through the bass tracks very quick. Probably a total of 2 hours (if that). Sweating my balls off and needing to give my poor hands a rest before the lead guitar tracks, it was Rob's turn to shine in the vocal department. We spent several hours on vox as Rob's voice box slowly started turning to goo from all of the screams and growls he was doing. Normally vox would be recorded over several days, but we didn't have that luxury. He sounds great but him being his own worst critic, he may plan on rerecording some parts. The rest of the night consisted of laying down any lead tracks, beefing up some rhythm sections, inserting sound clips and whatnot, and finally trying to mix some tracks as best we could.

We did a good job for a 2 day rush studio and I'm looking forward to what the final mixdown sounds like. Wish we had more time but them's the breaks. A tentative release date is set for June 1, 2007. More later...