zombie

In this third and last post of my unofficial "Jaws in June" series, I'll be reviewing Amity 6 to Base: A Jaws Ride History (a.k.a. The Sharks are Not Working) by Mick Jones. This is the only book to date that's completely devoted to the theme park side of the Jaws franchise--namely, the Jaws Ride in the Universal Studios Theme Park in Orlando, Florida that recently closed in 2012. Read on for my complete review. Jones organizes his book in a way that gives readers a contextual perspective of the Florida Jaws Ride. He opens with a brief history of Universal providing backlot tours to visitors as far back as 1915, followed by the arrival of Jaws-themed stop on the official Universal Studios Tour in 1975. He then chronicles the troubled opening of the Universal Studios Theme Park in Florida in 1990, along with an overview of the original version of that park's Jaws Ride and its propensity for malfunctions. The rest of the book focuses on the second version of the Fl...

As I've said before on this blog, I consider myself to be very fortunate to have lived through the early years of video games. I remember a time when the distribution cycle of a video game title would begin in coin-op arcades and continue through ports to PCs and home consoles. Now, the Internet, PCs, home consoles and portable media devices rule most of the video game world, while the few surviving coin-op arcades feature titles that will (probably) never appear in any other medium. The same is true about how the video games appear: Most current games are so beautifully designed that they largely sell themselves through clips of game play footage. Yet when video games had nothing but blocky graphics and clunky sounds to offer, they needed a little extra help to convince people to play them. In honor of the artwork produced during early years of video game advertising, Dynamite Entertainment is publishing The Art of Atari by Robert V. Conte and Tim Lapetino. According to the boo...

Fantasy, horror and sci-fi fans are known for the many, many things they use to show their appreciation of the franchises they love: cosplay, fan films, collectible collections, websites, and so on. Yet it's a rare situation when fans take the initiative to research and document the behind-the-scene details of the more obscure and less glamorous aspects of their favorite films and TV shows. Such is the case of Jaws 2: The Making of The Hollywood Sequel , which was written by Louis R. Pisano and Michael A. Smith and published by BearManor Media. Read on for my complete review of this long overdue treat for Jaws franchise fans. It's no secret among Jaws fans that the production of Jaws 2 was a troubled one, that it went through two directors (first John Hancock, then Jeannot Szwarc), multiple screenwriters, cast changes and script rewrites before finally arriving on the silver screen in 1978. Pisano and Smith’s book lays out in detail exactly how tumultuous the production reall...

Anyone who is a horror fan knows that there's much, much more to it that just reading novels or watching films. A genuine fan life is filled with collectibles, comic books, fanzines, posters, and a selection of oddities with an appeal that would baffle outsiders. The publishers of We Belong Dead magazine understand fan life very well, and they have just published a book that is completely devoted to horror fandom from a particular decade: 70s Monster Memories . 70s Monster Memories is a full-color, soft-cover book with 400 pages worth of essays about various aspects of horror fan life during the '70s. The essays cover just about everything that was unique to that era, from Aurora model kits to poster magazines to noteworthy horror movies that were produced exclusively for broadcast television. Since this was the last decade before cable TV channels found their footing and VHS rentals became a blockbuster business, some essays cover super 8 films (the only way to watch horror ...

Jaws fans, rejoice! BearManor Media is taking orders for Jaws 2: The Making of The Hollywood Sequel by Louis R. Pisano and Michael A. Smith. Available in both hardcover and softcover editions, this book takes readers on an in-depth journey into the troubled production of the 1978 sequel to Steven Spielberg's hit movie. Jaws 2 was the first blockbuster sequel to the film that is credited with kicking off the summer blockbuster era, thus making it the sequel (as alluded to in the book's subtitle) that proved how lucrative blockbuster movie sequels can be. In fact, Jaws 2 remained the high-grossing sequel to a summer blockbuster until the sequel of another summer blockbuster film, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back , took the honor in 1980. There have been plenty of books written about Jaws , but the same amount of detailed information about any of its sequels is almost impossible to find. So far, the only materials that focused their attention on the first sequel were The Jaw...