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Well, 2005 has come to an end and it’s time for my very first “year in review” article. These type of articles seem to be a required feature for many B-Movie sites, and since I have unabashedly “borrowed” so many elements from others sites already, why stop now? To be completely honest, this site actually went online on October 27, 2004…but I figured I’d wait until now to write this piece. Two months isn’t that long of a stretch and doing a recap at the end of the calendar year makes more sense. Plus, I’m lazy and didn’t want to do it back in October.

I got the first inclination to create this site during the summer of 2004. On one of those uneventful Sunday afternoons in June, I was surfing the web and came across the Stomp Tokyo site. I subsequently spent several hours pouring through the many reviews there and laughing at the humor instilled in each one. Soon afterwards I came across Andrew Borntreger’s Bad Movies site and spent many more hours enjoying his reviews and watching his video clips. Thanks to the links on these sites, I soon discovered many others, including 3-B Theater, Jabootu's Bad Movie Dimension, 1,000 Misspent Hours and Counting and several others. By mid summer I was toying with the idea of creating a B-movie site myself. After all, my writing skills had always been moderately decent and numerous people had the gall to label me as “witty” and “funny,” so I thought I was a natural for such a job. To be fair, many of those same people were looking to borrow some money, so…nevermind. Having garnered a few appreciative laughs and thumbs up for my writing elsewhere, I figured it couldn’t hurt to give it a shot, yet I chose to wait a while longer as all the ideas for such a site were still gestating in my head (ok, that sounded gross).

So as the summer progressed, I slowly made my way through dozens of B-movie sites. The one element that I noticed was that the only place I found that featured video clips from the films being discussed was Andrew Borntreger’s site. I thought that was a really spiffy idea and was saddened to see no other sites featuring them. Then one day I ran a Google search for information on the 1967 movie Night Fright and came across Duane Martin’s B-Movie Central. At last! Another site that featured video clips! I spent another whole day reading his work and watching his clips. Perusing his site I also came to learn about the Rogue Reviewers, and thought that joining such a group would be pretty “neat.” The problem was, I had no site.

I then sat down and made up a list of all the different things I had seen on various movie sites and which ones I liked enough to incorporate into my own site. Having video clips was at the top of the list and I quickly set about determining if I had the hardware and software to capture them. It turns out that I did, and after a few days of experimenting and learning (and swearing and much hair pulling), I figured out how to do it. I also devised a somewhat roundabout way of acquiring the sound clips. Screen captures were the easy part and the rest of my format gradually fell into place. Next I had to decide what was going to be my first movie. I eventually settled on Snowbeast and began work on the review, which took me a couple of weeks to complete. Since I wanted to have the site premiere with at least three films completed, I went on to write up reviews for Dead-Alive and The Alligator People over the next few weeks. Finally by early October I was finished and turned my attention to designing the look of the site.

Since I know zilch about HTML, and not much more on how to use HTML editors, I turned to The Other Half for help. She had experience with an editor and helped construct the pages that I had sketched out on paper (to this day, after I have written everything up and uploaded all the various files, she is still the one to take it all and construct each film’s individual page…although I have gotten much better with Dreamweaver and can do a lot of it myself if need be). So now, armed with three reviews and a few basic site pages, I emailed Duane from B-Movie Central and told him how much I loved his site (which I did) and how he was an inspiration to me (he was) and asked for advice on starting my own site. He responded and I showed him what I had assembled so far. He offered his thoughts and eventually extended an invitation to join the Rogue Reviewers once I went online. Sucker! If only he knew that joining the Rogues was one of my main goals all along! Mwah ha ha hah! On October 27th, the site went online, but as a subdomain of Lower Decks, a Star Trek/Science Fiction themed news site and BBS that I have worked at for years. I realized I couldn’t keep it there for long, and knowing that I would have to change an untold number of links if I waited too long, I moved the site to it’s own domain a short time later. The rest as they say, is history.

The most ironic thing about the last fourteen months is that back in October of 2004, when thinking ahead to the time when I’d been at it for a year, I really expected to have many more reviews completed. There are twenty-two finished right now, but I really did think that number would be two or three times as high. Alas, I wasn’t fully prepared for what I was getting myself into and did not realize just how much work was going to be involved in maintaining a site such as this. A large reason for that is the format for my reviews. You may have noticed that they are pretty lengthy, with numerous sections that need to be filled. Getting screencaps, which includes resizing them, cropping them and adjusting them for brightness takes quite a bit of time as well. Then there are the sound clips and the video clip(s). More time. The writing itself takes forever, as I am not one that can just pound out the words – though I’m sure my lack if finesse and habit to run roughshod over the tenets of grammar and syntax would make that seem otherwise. So, even before I uploaded a single kilobyte, I had chosen a format for myself that seemed a disaster in the making.

As mentioned earlier, back in early October of 2004, I presented everything I had put together to Duane Martin from B-Move Central. Duane was a great source for inspiration, encouragement as well as much needed help. I must give him a big Thank You for helping out a newbie such as myself with all the things that made my head spin (htaccess file? WTF is that?). Anyway, one of the first things he commented on after seeing the mess I had thrown his way was my review format. He thought that I would burn out really quick with such a style and fully expected me to change it in time. Well, not only have I not changed it…I’ve added more sections and features since I started! I just don’t know when to quit! Now, to be totally honest, there was ONE time that I was somewhat burned out and gave some thought to shortening my format. Then I remembered all of the things I loved about each section and realized there was no way in hell that I could do it. I’m just not capable of it. In all honesty, I am one of those “all or nothing” type of persons, and much like the way The Borg from Star Trek were described as not doing anything “piecemeal,” I do not undertake any project unless I can do it in a big way. That may be why I have accomplished so little in my life - LOL. So my review format, for better or worse, is here to stay.

Despite such a lengthy format, for some reason - which at this time I can only attribute to some type of temporary insanity or dementia, I thought that I could complete two reviews a week. Pardon me a second while I….HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Ok, then felt better. I suppose what made me believe such a breakneck pace could not only be met, but maintained was the fact that when the site first went online with it’s initial three reviews, that trio of reviews had been written over the course of the previous eight weeks. I took my time writing them, fine tuning various elements and moving things around until I was satisfied. Having spread the work out over several weeks, I really did not grasp how much effort it had been, and drew up a schedule that would have me completing two reviews a week with every third week being a single-review week. Well, needless to say…that schedule got tossed out the window the very first week after the site went online. After getting through another review or two and realizing how much work was involved in each one, I then decided to go for one review each week, with every third week off. Again, that schedule was dropped by the end of 2004 because I was unable to adhere to it. Oh, I could probably maintain that pace, but there are these other little things that require time…like eating, sleeping, working, reading books, watching DVDs, playing with the dog and spending time with The Other Half before she has to hit me in order to get my attention. So I just decided to work on each review when I had the chance and let them pace themselves. As of this writing, it takes me about two weeks to start and complete a review. I usually take a week off in between reviews, so that adds to the time. Plus, there are the films that are more difficult to get into that others, sicknesses, holidays, and a zillion other things that can extend the time it takes to finish a review. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that it will be a while before this site has as many reviews as other sites, but oh well. I simply refuse to shorten my format.

The site saw a slight re-design back in June, and still I must resist the urge to tinker constantly with the way it looks. I’m still not one hundred percent happy with things as they are now and will most likely work on the design a bit more down the line, but that won’t be for some time yet. There are other things I would like to add in the mean time and I’ve been putting off all of them for months, but will try to get to some in the next couple months…which will only add to the time it will take for the next review to be completed. Thankfully, the site has seen a steady increase in traffic over the last year and hopefully it continues to do that. I would like to think that I have one or two loyal readers out there that enjoy the place, but it’s hard to tell, as I get almost ZERO feedback in any form – only a handful of emails. So if ya like the place, let me know! Email me or sign the Guestbook.

On a more personal note, this past year was slightly chaotic. In May I had finally gotten sick and tired of the situation with my job. I worked for a Petroleum supplier and drove a variety of big trucks as well as overseeing a small warehouse. When I first began working for them, I lived at the halfway point between the two cities where their warehouses were located – the main facility being twenty miles to my south and the small satellite store twenty miles to my North. I was trained at the main location but was hired in order to eventually work out of the “new” satellite store, which I did after a few months. The commute was the same for me, as I was at the halfway point between the two. After working in the smaller location for about a year, I sold my house and bought another one about a five minute drive from where I worked. It was really nice as I could sleep in later before going in and be home awfully quick at the end of the day.

Then the bastards closed the warehouse where I worked in the fall of 2004. They said it was only temporary until they could hire some salesmen and build up the business in the area, but for the time being all my deliveries would be dispatched from the main warehouse - a brand new facility even farther away from me than the old “main” location. This forced me to now drive 60 miles to work each day (and another 60 miles home). From the time I awoke each day to the time I got home was about twelve hours – half the day. Remember that I also had to sleep and you’ll see why I had almost zero time to do anything. I even traded in my truck for a more economical vehicle as the cost of gas was killing me. I kept asking when the company was going to re-open my warehouse but got the usual shoulder shrugging each time. A change in management didn’t help matters. In a shift of duties, one of the owners took over managing the warehouse and drivers. I’ll be blunt: this guy was a fucking prick. Never in my life have I met anyone so incapable of supervising people or interacting with them in even the most fundamentally tactful manner. This guy was rude, arrogant, condescending, petty minded and just a general asswipe. The kind that has to remind people every chance he has that he is the boss and expects employees to fall all over each other trying to prostrate themselves before him and thank him for putting food on their table. His whole shtick was “what the company did for the workers” and never once did he seem to stop and consider where the company would be without those workers, treating them like disposable machinery parts. I had zero respect for the man and could not garner any with the way he treated the workers. To this day, just thinking about him and his snide remarks is enough to make my blood boil. Finally, after one incident where I nearly choked the life out of the asshole when he got on my case for the time it took me to make a delivery (a delivery to another state I might add), coupled with the glaring fact that the company was not going to be opening my warehouse again any time soon…I gave them my two weeks.

That was in May and I quickly went to work through a temp agency as a driver for a company that supplied industrial gases (a job I had done waaaay back in the 90’s). That job was ok, but the temp agency lied to me about the pay and in August, after being transferred by that company to their medical gas division, I could see that the future there was looking very grim. So I quit, which scared the hell out of The Other Half. She was certain that we were going to loose the house and end up on skid row. Being so scared, she got on the phone and called all the local petroleum suppliers and asked if they needed a driver. As luck would have it, one did and a short time later, I went to work for them. I really like this job and the people there, who are not egotistical asswipes and who are much more efficient than anyone I worked with at that other petroleum supplier. The commute is only twenty minutes and the hours are good. As I am once again the low man on the totem pole, the pay isn’t quite as good as I had before, which means I get to buy less DVDs, but I am happy enough here to be patient and work my way back to that pay level.

Other than that, the past year saw the same old things for me: I’m still a giant misanthrope who hates most people and prefers the company of dogs, we still choose to not have children because both I and The Other Half detest the little hellspawn rats, I spend as much time as I can indulging my love for all things scifi, fantasy and horror…and life goes on. I actually have it pretty good. We own our own house, all the vehicles are paid off, we have zero credit card debt and are able to afford a decent lifestyle, so I really have no complaints. So, bring on 2006!

-Shadow
January 1st, 2006