The Fringe Season 4 finale had no shortage of striking images (The unsettling googly eyes of a dead redhead brought back to life, the show’s leading lady taking a bullet right in the thinker), but none was more striking than the image of Walter Bishop with blood on his hands.

Walter, like a certain chair-flipping Avenger, has gobs of red on his ledger. It’s gushing red. The shot of his bloody hands near the end of this episode served as a piercing reminder that the terrible things we were watching unfold were all his fault. Read the rest of my Fringe episode review @ Badass Digest.

For those of you who thought all this blogging about comic books and Star Trek and nerdy movies and TV shows was done by a lady, well, sorry to disappoint you. I am indeed a guy. With balls. And facial/nose hair. I perspire, pee standing up, and I FUCKING HATE THE MOVE GREASE!

So seeing as I’m a dude and a writer, I’m happy to announce I’ve started writing for one of the best sites on the web for dudes, GuySpeed. You can find posts written by yours truly daily on GuySpeed, and be sure to catch my new weekly column, “Check it or Chuck It,” in which I recommend five cool things to check out and five horrible things to avoid for the week. Bro.

There was a lot to love about Friday’s tense and surprising episode of Fringe. “Brave New World, Part 1″ delivered the stuff Fringe fans have been looking forward to seeing since Season One – Peter and Olivia gettin’ all cozy and planning a future together, Olivia using her Cortexi-powers like a badass superhero and Walter working at the height of his confidence. This was a fun and dark episode that moved at a rapid clip and seemed to pile on new and intriguing layers every few minutes. Read the rest of my Fringe episode review @ Badass Digest.

Austin’s Kiyanna Project has posted a new session with Royal Canoe performing “Bathtubs.” This is my favorite Kiyanna video so far. Stream it below and visit KP’s site.

Mourning the loss of a great character is never easy, but how do you mourn the loss of an entire universe?

On Friday’s episode of Fringe, “Worlds Apart,” the show asked us to wave goodbye to our beloved Fringies from Over There. Like Walter, who revealed his strong attachment to the Earth 2 folks and their world at the end of the episode, I’m going to miss the Alt-set even more than I could have imagined. I know the Earth 2 folks aren’t exactly dead, but they are gone, and they took Lincoln Lee with them. It’s likely we’ll see them again before the series ends (I hope), but I don’t expect to see Peter and Olivia universe-hopping any time soon. The bridge is closed, the link is severed and our focus is now on Earth1 and the race to capture David Robert Jones.

Read the rest of my Fringe episode review @ Badass Digest.

Super-talented hyphenate Chelsea Peretti arrived in Austin this week to perform at the Moontower Comedy and Oddity Fest. I chatted with Peretti about her upcoming stand-up shows, her writing gig on NBC’s Parks and Recreation, and her work with other comedians, like Louis C.K. and Todd Glass. Here’s a bit from the interview:

How important is Twitter in your life? What has that medium really done for comedians?

Well, I’ve always felt very indebted to the Internet, even though it’s a stressful place. It can feel like the center of the universe, when it’s really hopefully not. But I used to have a blog, it’s still there, I have a blog. I had a web series, I had these videos we made, and I’ve been able to gain a following or a group of people who I can have access to that I wouldn’t have before, and I’m thankful for that. Twitter has been cool. For some reason, I think Twitter has been even better for me than blogging was, because the shorter format works well for me for some reason. It’s really cool. I guess the next thing that everyone is doing is podcasts. I try to hold off on technologies as long as I can because I’m so addictive. So, obviously Twitter is incredibly consuming in my mental space, which I don’t always love, but it’s pretty rewarding too. I like the immediacy of it, to be able to do something and then instantly see if people find it funny or not. It’s kind of a useful tool.

Read the full interview @ Austinist.

My first post for Austinist went live earlier today. It’s an interview with comedian and renowned stoner Ari Shaffir, who I spoke with on 4/20. You may know Shaffir from his polarizing Amazing Racist videos or from Joe Rogan’s podcast. Shaffir is heading to Austin this weekend to perform stand-up comedy jokes at the Moontower Comedy Fest. I encourage everyone to check out his show, especially if you like jokes about anal sex and racism! Here’s a snippet from the interview:

Some people might feel that your act is offensive just for the sake of being offensive or that you say controversial or vulgar things just to upset the audience. What you say to those people?

I do not say those things to upset the audience. I get it if you’re conservative, but I’m more casual about things like sex and race, so I just sort of take it casually. I just want to tell the joke, but the joke happens to be about doing anal with somebody or whatever. I’m not trying to be offensive, I’m trying to tell stories about human behavior, and a lot of them are fucking filthy.

Read the rest @ Austinist.

Fringe dove head first into the deep end on Friday and asked us to tag along. We ended up in the year 2036 – more than twenty years after The Observers invaded the planet, murdered people in the streets and enslaved humanity. Yeah, that happened. It was weird. Check out the rest of my episode review @ Badass Digest.

The Cabin in the Woods isn’t your typical hack-and-slash horror flick, but you probably already know that by now. There are twists and turns, surprising reveals and shocking moments, and horror tropes are applauded, audited, and turned inside out. It’s pretty damn clever, and I’m happy to learn that a movie this good (and this strange) is doing reasonably well at the box office. But here’s the thing I loved best about Cabin in the Woods: It kept me engaged from start to finish. I was never bored, I was never able to guess what would happen next, and I genuinely cared about the characters and their connection to the strange goings on at the heart of the movie.

There aren’t many movies like Cabin in the Woods. Actually, it’s probably more accurate to say there aren’t any movies like Cabin in the Woods. It’s a unique film with many layers and big, bold ideas, and it kept me intrigued right up to its shocking and hilarious conclusion. Not everything works, but most of it does. And even the few missteps are fun to watch. Director Drew Goddard and writer Joss Whedon (who collaborated on Whedon’s groundbreaking genre TV shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel) have made a fun, engrossing and suspenseful horror flick that dubs as a smart commentary and celebration of the horror genre (and the horror movie audience). The movie works on several levels, delivering almost everything you’d expect to see in a teen horror movie while subverting the expectations of both gore hounds and casual moviegoers.

I love it when a movie defies my expectations. I usually go to the movies looking for surprises. I want movies to take me to places I’ve never been before. I want to see strange new ideas make their way onscreen, and I want to see movies that challenge me and keep me on the edge wondering, “What the hell is gonna happen next?” I also want to see movies that make me laugh. Cabin in the Woods fulfilled all of these wants without skimping out on the great exploitative stuff I love about horror movies – stylized scenes of ultraviolence, wise-cracking characters, suspense and scares, and a “big bad” that’s one of the biggest and baddest of them all.

I don’t want to spoil too much here for those who haven’t seen it. It’s extremely difficult to write about the movie without giving too much away. I’ll just say that Cabin is definitely worth watching in a first-run theater. This is a smart, often hilarious movie that cinemaphiles and average movie lovers can enjoy together. The Cabin in the Woods is a rare example of a Hollywood studio allowing a boldly innovative creative team to express its unique, untested (and un-franchised) vision in theaters across the country. Judging by the critical raves and the decent opening weekend box office tally, it looks like the gamble has paid off.

Now’s a pretty good time to be a Ghostbusters fan. Every episode of The Real Ghostbusters cartoon series is available on DVD, both movies are streaming on Netflix, the video games are still regarded as big hits, and the amount of Ghostbusters merchandise now available seems to be at an all-time high (Exhibit A). Oh, and Dan Aykroyd is still threatening to make that third movie (Although, to paraphrase Egon Spengler, the more I read about that project, the more I’m convinced it’s part of a bizarre ritual to bring about the end of the world). But with the third movie in development hell, there’s only one place where fans can go to find new Ghostbusters stories – the comic book shop!

Last September, IDW kicked off a new monthly Ghostbusters comic book series. I’ve read a lot of good stuff about the series, and my comic book illustrator pal, Nate (who would walk around with an unlicensed nuclear accelerator on his back every day if he could), recommended I check it out. So I did! I picked up a copy of the latest issue, Ghostbusters #8, today.

I’m a huge Ghostbusters fan. I’ve seen both movies at least 100 times each, I quote Peter Venkman in my daily life, and I collected all the Real Ghostbsusters toys when I was a kid (Yes, even the Screaming Heroes figures). I even collected every issue of The Real Ghostbusters Starring in Ghostbusters II comic, which blew my mind when I was ten years old (Actually it still kind of blows my mind now, I mean LOOK AT IT!). So it was only a matter of time until I started reading the IDW series.

Ghostbusters #8 is billed as a standalone story, or a one-off, and it comes on the heels of a multi-part adventure, which I haven’t read. Luckily, there’s enough clever exposition layered throughout the issue to bring new readers up to speed with the goings on at the firehouse and the hotbed of supernatural activity that is New York City. The issue centers on Egon and his obsessive quest to find out why the PKE (psychokinetic energy) rate has spiked in the city. The PKE spike is making life difficult for the boys by giving the ghosts around town a spooky power boost. What used to be run of the mill zap-and-trap jobs have now turned very, very dangerous, as we see in the opening panels.

This is a great nerdy setup for a Ghostbusters story. It’s rooted in the cool spectral science and mythology the franchise has built since the original movie, and it focuses on Egon, even delving into his past a bit. (It’s always fun to learn about the boys’ lives before they became professional paranormal investigators.) The dialogue is snappy and streamlined, which is good for a sci-fi comedy comic, and there are plenty of clever Venkman one-liners packed into the short story. The tone is spot on – the book feels less realistic than the movies, but not as cartoony as the animated series, which I appreciated. The artwork is highly stylized and very cartoony, which younger readers will probably enjoy, but the dialogue and the jokes are sophisticated enough to keep adult readers engaged and entertained.

This issue, as far as I can tell, is the first part of a new story arc that we’ll see play out over the next few months. Since issue #8 is mostly setup, it’s not all that exciting. All of the action is relegated to the first few pages, and the rest of the issue is mostly devoted to Egon’s solo quest to solve the big mystery of the surge in PKE activity. The other characters – Venkman, Ray, Winston and Janine – don’t do much but stand around and comment on Egon’s obsessive behavior (And Slimer is nowhere to be seen). The mystery is intriguing, though, and the ending of the issue sets up what could be a great multi-episode arc; Egon’s investigation leads him to reconnect with an old friend who he thought was long dead. The friend tells a wonderfully strange and twisted story that explains why he’s still alive and, possibly, why the PKE levels in NYC are burying the scale.

This wasn’t the OMG THIS IS SO AWESOME I CANNOT WAIT FOR THE NEXT ONE start I was hoping for, but I’m looking forward to the next entry in the new IDW series, penned by Eric Burnham with art by Dan Schoening. These books could easily get by on nostalgia and repeat the same old stories and jokes from the movies and TV show, but that’s not what this series is about. I love that IDW and the book’s creators seem interested in telling new Ghostbusters stories and exploring the ongoing relationships and the history of the sci-fi team I became obsessed with back in 1984.

Check out some panels from Ghostbusters #8 here.