Happy pop culture new year everyone! – SparklyPrettyBriiiight

Here’s to more movies, books, songs, TV shows, cartoon and comic strips and so much more in 2019!

Halloween book review: The (Most Unusual) Haunting of Edgar Lovejoy by Roan Parrish

(courtesy Penguin Books Australia) If you’re someone who has grown up on the social margins, you will be ruefully well acquainted with how isolated and alone you can feel. While it feels like the entirety of the far more socially acceptable world, and yes, you will also wonder where those Continue Reading

Movie review: Wildwood

(courtesy IMP Awards) When you look at someone’s present-day life, it’s laughably easy to think that it arrived as some fully-formed agglomeration of past thoughts and deeds, feelings and mistakes and triumphs, all of them neatly woven together by the uncomplicated passage of time. But all of us know, at Continue Reading

Halloween book review: The Tinderbox by M. R. Carey

(courtesy Hachette Australia) We are so used to everything we consume these days delivering up instant gratification vibes that when it doesn’t, we are prone to simply to see it aside and find something else that will deliver the narrative sugar hit we have been conditioned to crave. Slow-burn anything Continue Reading

Not so scary after all … Grover discovers all kinds of courage in Sesame Street: The Monster at the end of your Story with Grover and Elmo

(courtesy Sesame Workshop) Ever since I was a kid, which let’s face it, was a good long while ago now, I have loved the character of Grover from Sesame Street – yes, yes I know you’re not supposed to have favourites (sorry Bert and Ernie, and Oscar the Grouch, and Continue Reading

Halloween book review: Angelika Frankenstein Makes her Match by Sally Thorne

(courtesy Hachette Australia) One enduring constant of life is that finding a perfect partner, or even a lovably imperfect one, is no easy thing. While Hollywood and Mills & Boon would have you believe that meet-cutes are strewn across the ground like confetti and your one and only is bound Continue Reading

Let’s get Halloween animated! Scooby-Doo! and the Curse of the 13th Ghost

(courtesy IMDb) I have been watching Scooby-Doo! cartoons in their multitudinous iterations since the 1970s – not that long after the franchise debited in 1969 so yes I am hauntingly old, thank you – and one thing that has struck all the way through is the way the show manages Continue Reading

Hoops & Yoyo’s Haunted #Halloween: A frightfully funny adventure (review)

What’s the number one certainty when it comes to big seasonal events? (Wells, besides calmly accepting that you will eat too much and that your calendar will never be big enough to accommodate all of them so FOMO is real, my friends, it is REAL). Why it’s that you don’t Continue Reading

Halloween TV review: Something’s in the Water … Thoughts on Below

(courtesy IMDb (c) Netflix) Is there anything even remotely connecting, in narrative spirit at least, the wild Atlantic shores of Newfoundland and the startlingly beautifully and empty desert landscapes of Arizona? You may not think so, but if you’ve watched both The Boroughs and Below on Netflix, you may have Continue Reading

New release October book review: Time Travel for Beginners by Jaclyn Moriarty

(courtesy Ultimo Press) Good lord but I love books which go deep and hard and yet which still manage to feel light and accessible too. There’s a real art to investing huge amounts of meaningful heart and drama into stories with a fantastical airy premise and it’s clear pretty much Continue Reading

Yummy baked scary delights … or are they? Is It Cake? Halloween 2026

(courtesy Showbiz Junkies (c) Netflix) Cake is something that you presume you will be far happier munching on than evaluating since surely all the pleasure is in the creamy, gnashy, fondanty taste and not the look, no matter how artistic and hyperealistic. But it turns out that watching people bake Continue Reading

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