previewmonkey.com

Dear PreviewMonkey.com readers

I am Walrus (not to be confused with I am Weasel or The Walrus) and will be filling in for Monkey for the foreseeable future. My first order of business is to apologise for the lack of posts of late and offer an explanation for this sad, sorry state of affairs.

I will also like to reaffirm this website’s commitment to providing timely box-office information as well as the occasional movie and DVD review. But right now let us see what has happened to Monkey…

Monkey has gone missing.

While the life of a small-time review-website writer is nowhere near as stressful as that of Roger Ebert or Richard Roeper (or to put it in a South African context: Leon van Nierop or Barry Ronge,) it still manages to take its toll.

We started seeing signs of distress after Monkey came back from watching Hellboy II sporting red skin and an enlarged right hand. We all thought he had sunburn and writer’s claw, but it turns out he had dipped himself in red paint and injected his hand with collagen to better emulate the title character of that film.

For days all he could talk about to anyone who would listen was the phenomenon he called George Lucasing. For readers unaware of the term – it is when a director, based on praise for previous works develops a god complex and then proceeds to go completely and utterly batshit (term used scientifically) in subsequent endeavours. In his lead-addled mind, Monkey would go an about how Guillermo del Toro had Lucased and ruined everything Monkey had ever loved.

Once Monkey had recovered his sanity we thought it would be safe to have him do a simple DVD review. So we chose something good and tasteful and put him in a comfortable chair and left him to his devices. Sadly, after watching The Diving Bell and The Butterfly the little idiot spent the best part of a week trying to communicate just by blinking.

In our best effort to punish the incorrigible buffoon we sent him to watch something completely awful: Bangkok Dangerous. The psychotic fool came back having cut his Monkey locks into a Nicolas Cage mullet. He then spent the rest of the week alternately learning sign language swearwords, reciting the four commandments of a hit man and hiding under his desk in the perverse belief that Nicolas Cage was out to get him.

In an effort to return some sanity and perspective to the little bugger, and seeing as he was now exhibiting the emotional maturity of a teenager (a late bloomer at that…) we thought it only fitting that he go and review High School Musical 3. He never returned. Apparently this was the one film so abysmally devoid of soul and substance so as to rob our demented little Monkey of his last shred of dignity.

We will try and discover the whereabouts of Monkey, but until then, stay tuned for more box office roundups, movie reviews and DVD review goodness.

Walrus.

(The photo used as Walrus‘ avatar was obtained from the flickr photo stream of unforth and is available here.)