Hey-

This is a quick note before I do a few other things over the next few weeks in my blog (like a new part of my senior thesis...the best movies I saw for the first time in 2008, etc.)  Last summer, I presented the Fear Itself liveblog, giving my honest opinions of the 8 episodes of Fear Itself that I saw.  The show was put on hiatus for the Olympics.  Then for the political conventions.  Then it vanished completely.  No one at NBC would say it was cancelled or that it wasn't coming back.  It just....*poof*...much to my deep annoyance, since 5 eps never aired.  Well now, thanks to discussions with Orlandofan, I can say what's happened for now to the show.  Right now, through mid-January, all 8 aired eps of Fear Itself have reached what seems to have become our genre's mistreated project dumping ground, FearNet (who also, around Halloween, streamed criminally studio-mistreated Midnight Meat Train for free on their site).  It's unclear if any unaired eps will make it there (i'm leaning toward the no because their current schedule of release stops in mid January after all 8 aired episodes are shown.)  Yet another thing to add to my list of annoyance at the mainstream tv mistreatment of our genre today (besides the probable impending shutdown of Monsters HD for me and my continued annoyance at Sci-fi channel's criminally small season of the entertaining "Estate of Panic" game show).  Still at least it gets seen.

Maybe this Wednesday I'll watch 13: Fear Is Real on CW and do a liveblog on that.  I don't know though. At least with CW, they don't have much else to replace stuff with so they generally don't kill shows in midseason UNLIKE SOME CHANNELS!

Happy New Year Everyone.

This is a quick note to clarify something in the last update I did on the status of Fear Itself and, by extension, my liveblogging of it.  In it, I mentioned Fearnet has a hold of all the aired episodes and has them for streaming on their site and cable service.  This is still true.  However, the removal of Fearnet from Brighthouse and Time Warner has had an unintended benefit for me.  When they announced the push to get it reinstated, they included a list of things they're planning to spotlight in the coming weeks and months.  Notice the first thing on the list:

5 Never-Before-Seen Episodes of ‘Fear Itself'
Hostel
Hostel 2
Army Of Darkness
Clive Barker's The Midnight Meat Train (Director's Cut)
Bug
Boogeyman
Resident Evil
Candyman
Darkman
Christine
Vacancy 2
Frontier (s)
Phantasm
Captivity
Child's Play
I Know Who Killed Me, starring Lindsay Lohan
Darkman
Snoop Dogg's Hood of Horror

So, this is just to mention, that when Fear Itself's final unaired eps go live on Fearnet, I will be there doing the same old liveblogging of them all.  Fear Itself lives on!

So, I've been pushing that supposedly FearNet was going to be showcasing unaired eps of Fear Itself.  But, that's the last I'd heard.  I even saw on wikipedia recently that AIRDATES had apppeared in June.  Those dates passed, I saw nothing.  Also, way back when I first started doing this, I mentioned that LionsGate had promised that when it hit dvd, they were going to included extended cuts (this was before it got cancelled so your guess was as good as mine as to whether they were going to keep that promise).

But as we all know, Lionsgate and tv companies do funny things.  The five missing unaired eps have actually aired....in Canada and Latin America I believe.  SO people have seen these, they exist....

AND NOW YOU CAN TOO!

(I think it'd be better for all of us if we just ignored that thing on the left.)

Announced this past week and seen on Fangoria in multiple places:  Lionsgate presents FEAR ITSELF:  The Complete First Season in a collector's edition four-disc set with skeleton-tombstone case.  Street date will be September 15, MSRP is 30 dollars (so itll probably be on sale for 20 or 24).  Each ep will have a behind the scenes featurette with interviews.  The collection will also include EVERY episode, including the 5 unaired, all in 16X9 widescreen.  And most importantly:  The following 4 episodes will be presented in "Director's Cut" format with new footage not aired on tv:

• Stuart Gordon's "Eater"
• Darren Lynn Bousman's "New Year's Day"
• Larry Fessenden's "Skin and Bones"
• Rupert Wainwright's "Echoes" (which was unaired anyway...SO IT'S ALL NEW TO YOU!)

Once I've gotten my hands on the dvd, I'll probably do a variant on the liveblogging I used to do with this (no ads after all), but yes IT'S DEFINITELY COMING.