RIG Monsters Online Reading Journal Spring 2021

                  This is my last post for the RIG Monsters class during this spring term. Thank you to everyone who  took the time to read my posts and to comment on them. I hope each one of you goes forward and  earns  smashing success with your stories and continued academic pursuits! About three or four years ago, I watched the first season of Stranger Things on Netflix. My daughter had recommended it. She had seen it when it aired originally. The purpose of this post is to critique the monsters. To do that, I could not rely on my memory. So I watched a few clips of the show on YouTube, read some info on the show, including the Wikipedia article, but most importantly consulted my daughter. I drove to her house, which isn’t far from my own, and she showed me some of the key episodes with monster appearances. We didn’t watch an entire episode except for the last episode of Season 3, “The Battle of Starcourt.” One of the things that became apparent from both watching the show and

Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child have characters play Russian roulette with reptilian and human genes, viruses, and addictive plant fibers, mixing them all into a literary blender, and spitting out a hugely entertaining genetic jam with their first novel, Relic , published twenty-six years ago. Thanks to their backgrounds and/or extensive research, they create a credible story that begins with the mythical monster of an extinct Brazilian indigenous tribe but ends as a scientific monstrosity. Or does it? The pair get an A+ for weaving together knowledge from discrete specialized fields, including physical anthropology, botany, genetics, evolution, computer science, public museum politics and administration, law enforcement, architecture, and medical forensics.  Preston and Child write in what I will call a third-person, omniscient point-of-view, but a very soft omniscience. The tale is not told from the perspective of one character, unless that person is in a scene by himself or hersel

The Blob was just plain horrible. The first half to two-thirds of the film threw silliness, cheap thrills, stinking dialogue meant to be witty, absurdities, and story discontinuities at the reasonably intelligent viewer, forcing him to feel astonishment, contempt, hilarity that induced laughter, and other such emotions . And yet The Blob had a few moments. They didn’t redeem the film, but they hinted at what might have been. Cheerleader Megan, played by acne-afflicted Shawnee Smith, went Ripley at the end of the film, blazing bullets and curses at the gelatinous blob, drawing its attention away from bad-boy Brian, and deftly planting an explosive a top a nitrous oxide-carrying truck. Her actions would end the giant bio-hazard’s absorbing roll through town. The movie offered mostly scareless, tension-deficient development, but the scene where Meg’s little brother’s jacket gets caught in the movie theater exit door pumped up the suspense and tension for me. It was one of the few, c