2014 Academy Awards Predictions

85th Annual Academy Awards Live BlogCan you believe the Academy Awards are finally happening on Sunday? We’re almost a quarter of the way into the new year and we get to find out what Hollywood thinks the best films of the 2013 are.

We’re keeping it simple at Sketchy Details this year. Who will win? Who should win? And who did they miss? I will, for fairness sake, remove films from consideration that did not qualify for the Academy Awards. Just assume American Mary would be on more “Missed” lists than nots had it been eligible.

Full predictions after the jump.

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The Haunting Ground 2.02: Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe (The Haunting Ground 2.02)

I don’t know about you, but in NJ, it’s still a little too…covered in snow and ice to be outside actively building for the 2014 haunt season. That’s why The Haunting Ground continues with another inspiration video. Edgar Allan Poe didn’t just write great stories and poems. He wrote moments of horror so defined by simple, iconic imagery that they translate well to a darker haunted house concept.

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Horror Thursday: High Lane

Horror Thursday: High Lane

Horror Thursdsay: High LaneI was really in the mood for some of that new French brutality this week. I was craving a Frontier(s) or High Tension, but Netflix was not delivering. The closest I could find was High Lane, a little indie horror about five friends getting stuck on a closed mountain climbing course. Sadly, it played more like The Descent than Martyrs, but that turned out to be a good thing. I can deal with a first time feature film director clearly copying the beats and editing of The Descent for a sky-high horror film.

Horror Thursday: High Lane

Play It 2.02: Thomas Was Alone Part 1: Meet Thomas

Thomas Was Alone Part 1: Meet Thomas (Play It 2.02)

I’ve started my first official let’s play run over at Play It, my bimonthly video game show on Sketchy Details @YouTube. The game is Thomas Was Alone, because of course I’m going to let’s play a quirky indie platformer.

I cannot stress how much I love this game. If you don’t have it, you should get it. It’s easily one of the best indie platformers, right up there with Super Meat Boy and Fez. Only driven by a really beautiful, heart felt, funny, charming, and engaging story about rectanglular glitches randomly produced in a computer operating system.

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6.01 RuPaul's Drag Race

Ranking RuPaul’s Drag Race (6.01)

Forever and a day ago, I did elaborate, photo-driven, cartoon-styled recaps of RuPaul’s Drag Race. I really enjoyed the result, but it was very labor intensive. It required watching the episodes multiple times each just in the hopes that the buffer for HD would load in time for a clear screen grab to work from. Doing those recaps meant less time writing, more time screaming that everything wasn’t going right.

This season, I’m covering the show again, though I’m doing it in a different way. I toyed with a Project Runway recap a couple seasons ago that just didn’t go anywhere. However, the format was good: a quick recap of the episode, followed by a ranked list of the contestants’ performance on the show. That’ll work much better on a show where you can still care about who is competing.

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The 10 Best Horror Films

The 10 Best Horror Films

I did a list a while back that I found to be a really rewarding exercise. This is finally a continuation of what could, and should, be a series of such lists. It was not an easy task to boil down the fantasy genre to 10 films, but I thought long and hard about it and came up with a list I felt comfortable defending.

Today, I present an even harder task. I’ve seen hundreds upon hundreds of horror films in my life. I’d say it’s pretty safe to say I’ve seen more horror in my life than most people see films, total, in their lives. It’s a lifelong obsession. I used to go to the local Suncoast Video Store and pick up the totally age inappropriate 10/20/50 movies for 5/8/15 dollar collections and watch them like someone in 2014 will watch a TV series: marathoned back to back with questionable quality due to the limits of technology and care. I try not to pass up any free horror film screening I can get to (no matter how bad), even if I’ve already seen the film at home. Like I said, I’m obsessed.

Narrowing that many films down to 10 is not easy. My initial brainstorm had close to 100 films to choose from. But now, I’m left with a ranked list of 10 that make me happy. I feel these are the 10 best horror films ever made while writing this, but the list would change if you asked me to do a final pass in an hour, let alone a day, a week, a month, or a year.

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