A Halloween Puppy
by J. Brad Staal

A Halloween Puppy is a pleasant children’s movie directed by David DeCoteau and written by Andrew Helm with a new twist on an old movie trick.

Halloween has come around and horror movie buff Adam Wilder (Evan Crooks) is overjoyed as it is his favorite time of year. His plans are adding up and he’s excited to have a full night of spooks, thrills and candy. That is until his mother Linda (Kristine DeBell) has the idea to bond with her boyfriend Ted (Eric Roberts) and Adam on a trip to a cabin.
The night before the trip Adam and his friend Molly (Stephanie Shemanski) decide to fool around with her old spell book; never a good idea. One incantation from Molly and a night’s sleep later and the family find that Ted is missing, but a new, cute bulldog puppy has appeared in the house.

A few lessons in magic from spiritual Rachel (Olsen) may be their only hope in reversing the spell before All Hallows Eve ends and the spell remains forever. A couple of adventures and a few lessons in relationships later and the whole family has grown and happy again.

This is a fun kid’s movie to bring magic to the season and great for people that love puppies and especially bulldog lovers as there are plenty of shots of the very cute puppy. The performances by classic sitcom and cinema stars. Susan Olsen (THE BRADY BUNCH), Kristine DeBell (MEATBALLS) and Eric Roberts (THE DARK KNIGHT) help to punch up the action. Lucas Adams (DEXTER) and Ryan Greco (VICTORIOUS) co-star.

1 hour and 21 minutes from Phase 4 Films.

Chiller: The Complete TV Series
by CJ Henderson

As everyone knows, they do things differently on British television. Yes, this is the complete run of "Chiller." But, that only adds up to five episodes, or 265 minutes total. Still, the question is, are they 265 minutes that are worth your time, or aren't they? The answer is, could be.
If you are a fan of the British way of doing horror, the five episodes are a tribute to what can be done with a small budget. What one has to do, of course, is rely on story-telling rather than unlimited gore and special effects. CGIing everything in sight costs money. Telling a twisted, thought-provoking, ingenious tale only takes the effort involved in gathering up a good writer and director and turning them loose.

That was done here to quite remarkable effect, actually.

Also, "Chiller" is a rather recent production. The run was aired in the UK in 1995, and has never been seen in America before this release. This means not only original material one can almost be guaranteed of never having viewed previously, but more up-to-date subject matter as well. Now, granted, malevolent spirits, serial killers, evil children, haunted houses, et cetera, are not the most modern of subjects. I'm referring to the handling of the subjects.
All five episodes are both well thought out and intelligently presented. Unlike most modern American horror film makers, there is no wink-and-a-nod to the audience to let them "in on the joke." There is no joke here. The shows being presented are done in a serious, forthright manner, and the entire production benefits from the we're-taking-our-work-seriously-here attitude of the filmmakers involved.

The episodes also feature a number of top British players of the era, including Nigel Havers ("Chariots of Fire", "Coronation Street"), Martin Clunes (the UK's "Men Behaving Badly"), Sophie Ward ("Young Sherlock Holmes") and Kevin McNally (Disney's "Pirates of the Caribbean" series).

There is nothing too fantastic to report in areas such as cinematography, costuming, direction, and so forth. These have all been well-serviced, but at a solid workman level. For instance, since it's all modern day settings, costuming's main goal was too be both realistic and timeless enough so that people did not look too goofy a few years down the road. The camera people all do a fine job, but low budget's mean shooting in standing structures and not building endless sets.
Still, what one is left with are five solid segments of a well-made television series. Excellent writing, solid, well-paced direction, and all other bases covered by people who knew what they were doing. The production was a fine effort and one can see why Synapse Films went after it.
So far Synapse has done an excellent job finding and making available hard-to-obtain, or classic, horror materials. They've also been able to uncover some nifty gems for the extras sections of their releases (always a personal favorite of mine with any DvD). Not so this time.
Apparently there was nothing much to offer. The two discs are well-produced, but offer no extras whatsoever. And that, my children, is pretty much it this time around.

Our final word: 5 stars out of 5.

  Compared to his or her console gaming counterparts, the dedicated gamer on PCs has always been a tinkerer,looking for the CPU, graphics card, audio card, memory and peripherals that will produce a better overallgaming experience. The same trend has been true for mass storage of games, which has evolved from floppydiscs and CD-ROMs to DVDs and hard drives.

As awareness builds of the advantages of solid state drives (SSDs) over their rotating media predecessors, asthe proliferation of flash memory into mobile devices fosters expectations of instant-on consumer technologyproducts, and as the ultrabook category expands beyond Apple’s MacBook Air line of laptops, we expect more
gamers to seek out SSDs as part or all of their internal storage solution.
For this white paper, Hit Detection downloaded from Valve’s Steam retail store 25 PC games released withinthe past five years. Based on our comparison of PC games running off of the Samsung 830 SSD solid state driveand a traditional rotating media drive, we found:

• A 21 percent average improvement in load times when starting up a game, with a peak improvementof 55 percent.

• A 35 percent average improvement in load times when loading a game’s save file, with a peakimprovement of 63 percent.

• First-person perspective titles demonstrated the most consistent benefit with respect to game loadtimes, with three of four titles showing improvements of more than 30 percent.

• A 77 percent improvement in Windows 7 boot times

• Anecdotal improvements, including faster restarts from sleep mode, and less hitching at autosave checkpoints

Hit Detection also spoke with the vice presidents of technology at two prominent U.S. game publishers to get their take on the potential of this technology. They said:“We could have much more immersive worlds than we have right now, and larger worlds too.”

There is sufficient benefit from SSDs in terms of boot times and load times alone that from the perspective of performance, dedicated PC gamers should strongly consider SSDs as a viable option, whether they are upgrading an existing machine or purchasing a new one.

However, the main challenge that SSDs face from the consumer’s point of view is that the rate at which consumers are acquiring and generating new content—from music and Hollywood movies to multi-megapixel photos and high definition home videos—their desire for high-performance storage may be outstripped by their need for increasingly high-capacity storage. This in turn favors traditional rotating media drives because of their lower cost per gigabyte. Assuming that this situation will exist for the foreseeable future, we suggest that solid state drive
manufacturers like Samsung and PC manufacturers like Alienware encourage dedicated gamers to consider

RAID setups where an SSD is paired with a traditional rotating media drive for the dual benefits of increased performance (SSD) and largest possible capacity (rotating media).
They must also reach out to game developers, many of who have become active in social media, to help increase awareness of the advantages of SSDs among both the developer and gamer communities. Because while the basic benefits of SSDs—faster load times—do not require any optimization, it is the possibilities that come when developers build their games around the presence of flash-based storage that are truly exciting. More complex artificial intelligence (AI). More detailed animations. More realistic physics. More simulations running simultaneously. But for this to happen, console, PC and component manufacturers will have to come
to terms on a model that allows SSDs and flash storage to proliferate in these devices to the point where they are effectively a standard rather than an option.
As part of our research for this white paper, we interviewed the vice presidents of technology at two
prominent console and PC game publishers, both of whom agreed to speak with us on a not-for-attribution
basis.
Both men told us that that there would be several considerable benefits if consoles and or PCs were
standardized around solid state drives or flash memory. First, accessing data would be faster, both in terms of
streaming and accessing multiple files. As the VP of Company #1 told us, “It’s not just speed of data
streaming off the disc, it’s how quickly we can recover multiple files. And seeking around on the disc to find
the files is a lot faster too.”
Second, their respective companies’ games would not have to use RAM to cache textures and geometry.
Instead, they could free up that RAM for other game-related uses, because they could count on a flash drive
to quickly stream those textures and geometry as needed. As a result, the RAM they would free up could then
be devoted to the following purposes:
• More complex AI
• More detailed animations
• More realistic physics
• Additional simulations
In other words, SSDs and flash memory could clear the way for developers to bring their game worlds to life
more vividly than they can today. The VP of Company #2 distilled it this way: “We could have much more
immersive worlds than we have right now, and larger worlds too.”