The Lick Ness Life

Well, here we go.  The final post on the ol' blog.  I have to be honest with all of the kind folks who have read this over the years and state that I'm actually a little nervous as I type this.  Call it the weight that comes with volume, because we're definitely talking a lot of volume here.  There's no need to sugarcoat it: it's been a long road with a lot of work put into it, my friends.  Nine years, 375 posts, and a regular schedule of a single entry per week since Halloween season of 2013.  There have been times where I've hated writing this blog, there have been times where I've loved it, and then there are times where I never want to look at my keyboard again after getting done with a particularly long post.

When I perused through my history in preparation for writing this here post, I actually kinda smiled at how much it's evolved over the years.  Variety is the spice of life, after all.  It goes without saying that movie reviews were my bread and butter, but I've also done my fair share of articles and lists.  Those lists are pretty fun, both because they tend to promote discussion and because they're really easy to write.  I can be a lazy fuck.  No matter what I wrote, though, it was all about one thing: promoting horror films to people who might not have been into them before.  No exaggeration, this has been my dream for a long time, because I genuinely think that watching horror movies is such an awesome experience that I wish more people would share it. And I still do.  With 10 subscribers and enough page views to yield me 75 bucks in almost a decade...I think it's pretty safe to say that I've failed in that mission.

It all started with one idea in the fall of 2007, just a few weeks after the death of my older brother, when  my franchise reviews started cropping up on various message boards.  Those eventually turned over into slightly deeper reviews via the Flixter app on Facebook.  'Memba that?  A few people on social media liked those reviews enough that I kept doing them, and at this time I was only reviewing the cream of the crop that horror had to offer.  This was my first idea - a sort of Horror Hall of Fame, because surely that hadn't been tried before.  In time I had enough of these reviews to create this here blog site in January of 2010 and throw everything I'd written on Facebook.  It consisted of reviews of a lot of my favorite and/or classic horror movies along with a brand-new franchise review of the Friday the 13th series.  The reviews got re-christened as the International Horror Registry, and I would do 50 of these.  Yeah, in those early days of the blog, I was only reviewing films that I enjoyed.  This includes Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, a movie that is awful by any standard but should be required viewing for everyone on the planet.

After a brief break in the middle of 2011, I was ready for a fresh paint of coat, and the blog was re-christened as "Blood, Guts and Tears."  Why?  Who knows.  It sounded cool at the time.  The Registry was retired, and I was ready to start promoting horror in a different way - articles.  That trend lasted all of three weeks before I missed reviewing movies, but it was time for the horizons to broaden.  Horror fans can't just take in the good, because that's where this genre is different from anything else out there.  The quality-to-crap ratio isn't good, but when it's good, boy is it good.  But we as horror fans need to know how to separate the good from the bad while also still enjoying the bad, and now I was taking on every movie that came my way.  This resulted in the big dividend that is Basket Case, a movie that I hated upon first watching it back when I was in high school and was ready to give another chance.  To this day, I consider this to be my best review.  I dug deeper into the story, cracked some serviceable jokes, and even gave a halfway-decent analysis of why this movie is unforgettable.  A lot of my reviews after this one tried to emulate it as the posts turned MASSIVE.  This was the XXL Era, and it was not for the faint of heart.

From that point on my involvement started to get more sporadic.  There was a lot going on in the Lick Ness Life at this time.  Buying a house and moving came first.  Then came writing an actual BOOK that still sits on my laptop because it isn't any good at all.  Somewhere in the middle of all that, I cranked out my review of The Shining, the film that I consider to be the single scariest thing ever committed to celluloid.  For six months, the blog went dark.  Then came the AFOREMENTIONED (yes! one final time!) October of 2013, where I was ready for my big comeback.  And it was a comeback that LL Cool J himself would be damn proud of.  I now had a much better name for the place, I had a bunch of new DVDs on reserve, and Lick Ness Monster's Horror Movie Mayhem was born.  And it didn't stop for the next half-decade.  Unfortunately, I tinkered with the format again and started writing these weird reviews where I gave out "tiered" ratings in different categories, and yeah, that experiment was bad.  Don't read the reviews from the relaunch through June of 2014, because they SUCK.

But you can't say that I wasn't consistent.  My goal was one a week.  And I kept at it for an entire year.  And then another year.  And another.  The number kept piling up, and once I decided to start writing reviews like a normal human being again they actually started to get good.  Bro.  One thing that I'll carry with pride going on in life is that I genuinely do believe that I've done my best stuff since last summer.  All it took was to finally get a good review formula (eight paragraphs, boys and girls - that's the key) down pat and to start picking out interesting themes to give me several weeks' worth of material.  From my recent run, the reviews that I'm most proud of are Crawlspace from my Halloween Empire-a-Thon and Track of the Moon Beast from this year's MST3K March.  The reason?  Both are films that I'm positive the VAST majority of non-horror aficionados have never heard of, and I did my best to make them sound entertaining and watchable.  Gotta love that Johnny Longbow.  But as the weeks kept coming and I spent every Saturday morning churning out another post with a two-week lead time, it gradually became clear that my heart wasn't in it anymore.  I had said everything that I needed to say, and there was only so many more ways of stating it.  Does anyone else want to hear another Jon Lickness rant about how soulless action and superhero movies are in the present day?  Didn't think so.

Looking back, there are definitely some reviews that I disagree with in hindsight.  For starters, I now consider Basket Case to be a true underrated gem and I would bump up my rating another half-star to a full *** 1/2.  The sequels, though...yeah, they're not so good.  I definitely think I overrated them due to the fact that I was able to procure some rare VHS copies, so they would get knocked down to ** and * 1/2 for the second and third films, respectively.  Oh, and Piranha 2010?  Wow, what was I thinking?  That movie was HORRIBLE, and I gave it four stars!  I was truly wrapped up in the hype of that one.  Since I'm a slasher fan first and foremost, I've grown to like Night School more with subsequent viewings and it's now a solid *** 1/2 from me.  Lastly, I think I was too kind to some of the lesser Empire Pictures movies.  Don't get me wrong, I still love Charles Band and his first foray into running a movie studio, but Troll and TerrorVision aren't getting nearly as much praise from me these days.  Both are hovering around the ** range.

Horror movies and scary stories in general have always been a huge part of my life.  This goes back to being in grade school reading R.L. Stine books to discovering J-Horror as an adult.  I wouldn't even want to see the sum total of every dollar that I've spent surrounding myself with this stuff over the years, but the most important expense that comes in life is the expense of time.  Each one of us only has so many days to walk around, age, and perish, and I choose to do it watching monstrous killers in hockey masks and vengeful long-haired ghosts wreak havoc on the screen.  I enjoy being scared, and deep down I'm convinced that most people share this sentiment.  Being scared is fun, because it's a reminder that each one of us is truly alive.  This is what the horror genre and horror movies in particular are all about, and if I've helped just a few people along the way see the merit in something with the power to make you jump and scream, it's been worth it.  Thank you for reading, keep the adrenaline racing, and long live horror!