Three days of spring break are gone and I have not so much as opened the file for The Girls Nobody Wanted to Date. My goal of finishing it during the break is looking out of reach. However, as soon as this blog is posted I’m going to get back to work on that one. It’s like a thorn in my side now. I want it done and out of the way.

Until yesterday I’d completely forgotten about The Fetch, which is finished and just needs editing. Somehow it just dropped out of my thoughts. Senility? Maybe. But, it’s not like there’s a publisher waiting on it.

I watched a couple of movies over the past weekend. A friend recommended Idiocracy again so I rented it. I liked it, but it seemed like it could have been a lot better. I mean, I think it could have been on a level with Dogma, but it fell pretty well short of that. Great concept, though, and you can certainly see that the idiots of the world are out-breeding the smart people. I did what I could by having four smart ones, but, you know … Anyway, it was a decent movie and well worth the dollar I paid to rent it. I just wish it had been more fully developed.

I also watched The Orphanage (or El Orfanato) from first-time director Juan Antonio Bayona and producer Guillermo Del Toro (if you haven’t seen Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth you need to get it NOW). It’s a Spanish movie that apparently was released this past January, but I’d never heard of it. I just happened to see it on the shelf at the video store. The back cover sounded good, so I rented it. It is in Spanish, so I had to read subtitles, which is a bit distracting, but this was one of the best ghost stories — no, one of the best horror movies — I’ve seen in a good long time. Not a remake, not somebody chopping sombody up, not some half-nekkid teenagers in danger from their cell phone, digital camera or computer printer. This is an excellent film and I highly recommend it.

Why are Spanish horror movies suddenly so much better than the American drivel? How bad is the situation here? I saw some clip where somebody was interviewing Wes Craven at the opening of the new The Last House on the Left and he was talking about “originiality” as if that film was offering something new. WTF? Of course, I’ve never been a Craven fan, so I’m not surprised. I swear, though, with most of the mainstream American horror movies being remakes, poor sequels or just lame trash made for teenagers on dates, I may have to accept the subtitles and start looking at more foreign movies.