31FoT2: Judgment Day

Welcome back, Friends of the Flavors!

It’s been a long off-season but I’ve been training hard, I’m back and I’m raring to go. (That’s a funny word, raring. Does anyone ever rare to do anything but go? Think on that, IF YOU DARE.)

The deal remains the same: in the month of October I’ll watch 31 Halloween-appropriate movies I’ve never seen before and beam one Flavorful review a day straight into your greedy little eyeholes. They won’t all be horror movies. In fact, some of them won’t even be scary. The common theme is movies that get you into the spirit of the spookiest holiday season of the year. (No disrespect to the creepy ass Easter Bunny or serial home invader Santa.)

So what’s new this year? Well, we’ve got a bunch of cool theatricals coming out, including the long-awaited prequel to my favorite movie of all time, The Thing. I’m planning to do one of those every week, starting with the limited release premiere of Tucker & Dale vs Evil tomorrow.

Also new this year, I’ll be posting regularly about TV shows. Two new sepulchral small screeners, Bedlam (BBC America) and American Horror Story (FX), drop this month; I’ll be recapping new episodes as they air. (Death Valley and Paranormal Witness started in September so they don’t make the cut, although I might drop a line here or there if they take an unexpected turn for the awesome.) I’ll also recap new episodes of season two of The Walking Dead, which will hopefully improve on a solid but dramatically flawed inaugural season.

Perhaps the biggest change for 2011: I’m taking a far less arbitrary approach to my movie selections. Instead of blindly grabbing whatever crap appeals to my goofy tastes, I’m aiming only for movies that I think have a chance to be excellent. Doesn’t mean they’ll all be Rosemary’s Baby or Halloween, but they’ll all at least have the potential to be surprisingly good in some way. Of course, I’ll still include a handful of unqualified stinkers to lighten the mood (though it’s hard to imagine anything topping the mighty Sharktopus in that regard). My hope is that everyone who reads this (both of you) will come away with a few new esoteric scares on the ol’ Netflix queue. Or Qwikster or whatever the fuck it’s about to become. Don’t get me started.

So sit back! Relax! Grab your special cup and raise it up: it’s Flavor time.