Not Fuzz

Simon Pegg fails to thrill in this thoroughly unfunny pastiche of cop films. Pegg delivers a film overloaded with famous British actors and gratuitous and pointless violence. This film was a sad reminder for me of the sorry state of British society.

I once rated Simon Pegg very highly as a comic writer - the series Spaced was original and extremely funny. It seems though, that he has gained stardom and lost the comic plot. He may be hob nobbing with the likes of Tom Cruise but he seems to have forgotoon the ingredients of a good, intelligent comedy. The intentions in Hot Fuzz are good, it gives a nod to several genres of film - most notably cop and Hammer Horror, but sadly fails to deliver the laughs. In a cinema three quaters full there were only one or two laughs and those were from teenagers.

Simon needs to get back to his comic roots and rediscover intelligence and subtlety.

What is Scary?

Thanks Richm for the idea of a horror party. I will bear that in mind. This week I have to write a ghost story. I haven't read many ghost stories for years. I was an avid fan of the genre as a teenager and had loads of anthologies of ghost stories. I can remember being really spooked by some of them.

These days there aren't many things that really scare me in a book. Maybe the age of cinema has hardened us up so that we harder to scare. We are certainly exposed to copious amounts of tension and violence via the cinema and tv. A friend of mine said that she finds ghost stories scarier if they are true tales - an interesting point.

The stories I find scariest are post apocolyptic tales where you can almost imagine they are real or could happen - in books this is things like "Day of the Triffids", Douglas Coupland's "Girlfriend in a Coma" and Peter Dicksons Changes trilogy, in film it is things like "Children of Men" and Quatermass. Somehow these strike me as being far more chilling than something about monsters or ghosts.