Book Hype: Press Reset, Underexposed!: The 50 Greatest Movies Never Made, Fangs & Poison Flowers & Pandemonium

 By Jonathan Bilski

 

Who wasn't reading more during the pandemic? I know I grabbed everything I wanted to read off of Amazon. A few new titles just hit the shelves or are about too. And some came out you may have missed. I'm going over a few I just started reading and a few I just finished. 

 

Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry

by Jason Schreier

$15.49

 

Couldn't put this one down when I first got it, learning about the insider woes about making video games for the big studios or trying to make it as an indie. I saw an excerpt on Polygon and was hooked.
Jason Schreier breaks down a person's past, tells you how they got their dream gig working on or making a big game like Bioshock Infinite or Epic Mickey and than just slams the breaks as everything crashes to an inevitable end. You feel their despair, but luckily it's not you. I've only done four chapters so far, but each goes in length of the nightmares of people just trying to get funding or dealing with the corporate side of 2k and Disney. Treating people like cogs in a machine and not like people seems like a unending trend. Can't wait to finish and read even more depressing tales of woe on how some of my favorite video games were made and their awful sequels were churned out.

 

Underexposed!: The 50 Greatest Movies Never Made

by Josh Hull (Author), PosterSpy (Illustrator)

$29.99

Out May 25

 

Bite-sized un-made movie lore is like chocolate cupcakes to a cinephile like me. And this book has a sweet taste, though I thought it was gonna be more filling like a chocolate cake. Josh sets up what sounds like some sort of another timeline universe where theses movies would have come out, but then just clacks the clapperboard and literally puts ,"CUT!" in the book. Then you find out why the film couldn't get made. The stories are all a short enough read and not sorted by genre or year, so you can really just look up anything that floats your boat. Though it doesn't delve that deep, people have written entire books online about individual films in here and what happened, you get what you need and then perhaps a frown because it sounds like a fun idea. It's probably already made me want to watch even more movies from just what I've missed. And we get the treat of never-made movie posters from the art collective PosterSpy for each film. Ugh, I'm still pissed about the un-made Alien 5 from Neill Blomkamp. Prometheus has a lot to answer for.

Fangs

by Sarah Andersen

$11.46

For any horror fan a book about the burgeoning relationship between a vampire girl and werewolf guy might have never been as spoopy. And that means cute scary. These two monsters of the night are kind of like a young couple, though one is more than 300 years old. It's like a beautiful sitcom that never aired with many jokes based on all we fear and make fun of these monster tropes. And this vampire chick loves her doggy woggy boyfriend when he transforms. It's a series of black and white comics that have such a cute macabre feel that you can't pass them up.

 

 

 

Poison Flowers & Pandemonium

by Richard Sala R.I.P.

 

Not sure if this will be the last collection of Richard Sala's work or not, it was strange to see it came out earlier this month as Sala recently passed away in 2020. I know his work from multiple graphic novels releases over the years and when I was little from the pages of Nickelodeon Magazine. He loved drawing horror and sexy girls, a nice mix. His latest book is an odd mix, it's got four stories with not much in common and some I would say are just delightful gallery photos and not full fledged comics. First up is a story of a telekinetic girl and an insidious hero, turned villain with a creepy conspiracy. Second is a gallery of monster drawings with a nice little wrap-a-round story. Third is about a terrible time for some topless cave girls, which is less a comic and more a storybook. Finally, we end with a young woman fighting a stronghold of bad guys trying to get to the top. Each story shows off Sala's love for horror, sci-fi and fantasy and makes you think of how he was probably shaped by way too many genre movies and television. Here's hoping the rest of his work is collected in one final tomb.